Quotes from Sharon Salzberg

These are times when sympathetic joy comes naturally, but in a complex relationship the heart may not leap up so easily.

We truly can reconfigure how we see ourselves and reclaim the love for ourselves that we're innately capable of.

Be open to the possibility that there are other paths available to you in relating to yourself and to another.

Laughing at your pettiness probably works better than scolding yourself for it.

The more we identify and acknowledge moments when we're unable to share in someone else's pleasure and ask ourselves whether another person's happiness truly jeopardizes our own, the more we pave the way for experiencing sympathetic joy

Although love is often depicted as starry-eyed and sweet, love for the self is made of tougher stuff.

All bodies are part of matter, created at the big bang, 10 billion years before the earth appeared. Yes, your overall body is composed of about 7 octillion venerable atoms (that's a 7 with twenty-seven zeros after it), mostly produced by exploding stars. You are literally stardust; so is everything around you.

Love can uproot fear or anger or guilt, because it is a greater power.

Sympathetic joy is a practice. It takes time and effort to free ourselves of the scarcity story that most of us have learned along the way, the idea that happiness is a competition, and that someone else is grabbing all the joy.

Real love allows for failure and suffering.

We also try not to harm others verbally, seeing that our speech has tremendous power. Words do not just leave our mouths and disappear; they have great effects in this world.

IMAGINE RECLAIMING ALL THE ENERGY that could be available to us but isn't because we scatter it, squandering it on endlessly regretting the past, worrying about the future, berating ourselves, blaming others, checking Facebook yet again, throwing ourselves into serial snacking, workaholism, recreational shopping, recreational drugs.

Several performers have told me that they do the following brief lovingkindness meditation if they have stage fright: Standing in front of an audience, before they start acting, playing music, or reciting a poem, they send out wishes for the well-being of everyone in the room. 'When I do that,' one singer told me, 'I no longer have a sense of the audience as a group of hostile people out there waiting to judge me. I feel, okay, here we all are together.

We begin to cultivate real love for ourselves when we treat ourselves with compassion.

With bright faith we act on our potential to transform our suffering and live in a different way.

If we hold beliefs skillfully, we will not get entangled in them, but will see them as the mental constructs they are. When we claim our right to question everything, including our beliefs, we can unhook from our dependence on what is familiar and let in the heartfelt, open, fresh quality of faith.

But if people are genuinely happy in their choice of action or lifestyle, we do not need to impose our standards. If they are not harming themselves, if they are not harming others, can we be generous enough to feel joy for them? That is the practice of mudita.

The practice of sympathetic joy is rooted in inner development. It's not a matter of learning techniques to "make friends and influence people." Instead, we build the foundations of our own happiness. When our own cup is full, we more easily share it with others.

What you learn about pain in formal meditation can help you relate to it in your daily life.

Meditation is a tool for helping us accept the profound fact that everything changes all the time.

The moment that we realize our attention has wandered is the magic moment of the practice, because that's the moment we have the chance to be really different. Instead of judging ourselves, and berating ourselves, and condemning ourselves, we can be gentle with ourselves.

I think we spend so much of our lives trying to pretend that we know what's going to happen next. In fact we don't. To recognize that we don't know even what will happen this afternoon and yet having the courage to move forward - that's one meaning of faith.

Voting is the expression of our commitment to ourselves, one another, this country and this world.

Everyone's mind wanders, without doubt, and we always have to start over. Everyone resists or dislikes the thought of or is too tired to meditate at times, and we have to be able to begin again.