Quotes from Sharon Salzberg

Connecting to your breath when thoughts or images arise is like spotting a friend in a crowd: you don't have to shove everyone else aside or order them to go away; you just direct your attention, your enthusiasm, your interest toward your friend. 'Oh,' you think, 'there's my friend in that crowd. Oh, there's my breath, among those thoughts and feelings and sensations.

We so often in our lives serve as mirrors for one another. We look to others to find out if we ourselves are lovable; we look to others to find out if we are capable of feeling love; we look to others for a reflection of our innate radiance.

Meditation trains the mind the way physical exercise strengthens the body.

Stealth Meditation If you start to feel overwhelmed, take a quick, centering moment—as short as following three breaths—to connect with a deeper sense of yourself.

As a friend of mine told me about Real Happiness: you wrote this one in American.

Can we allow the lives of others to be different from ours and feel happy for them? Can we rejoice for them as their happiness grows, in whatever way that is happening?

The Buddha taught that we can feel pleasure fully, yet without craving or clinging, without defining it as our ultimate happiness. We can feel pain fully without condemning or hating it. And we can experience neutral events by being fully present, so that they are not just fill-in times until something more exciting comes along.

The more we practice sympathetic joy, the more we come to realize that the happiness we share with others is inseparable from our own happiness.

We can always begin again. No matter what happens, no matter how long its been, no matter how far from our aspirations we may have strayed, we can always always begin again.

To sense which gifts to accept & which to leave behind is our path to discovering freedom.

Meditation is a cyclical process that defies analysis, but demands acceptance.

The skills available to us through mindfulness make it possible to bring love to our connections with others.

What we learn in meditation, we can apply to all other realms of our lives.

We cannot instantaneously force ourselves to forgive—and forgiveness happens at a different pace for everyone and is dependent on the particulars of any given situation.

There are an incalculable—even infinite—number of situations in which we can practice forgiveness. Expecting it to be a singular action—motivated by the sheer imperative to move on and forget—can be more damaging than the original feelings of anger. Accepting forgiveness as pluralistic and as an ongoing, individualized process opens us up to realize the role that our own needs play in conflict resolution.

Anger often makes us hurt ourselves more than any enemy.

We have one impermanent experience, and, unable to be at peace as it passes, we reach out and grab for another, The Tibetan Buddhist tradition defines renunciation as accepting what comes into our lives and letting go of what leaves our lives. To renounce in this sense is to come to a state of simple being.

The practice of loving-kindness is about cultivating love as a trans-formative strength

Loving kindness is the practice of offering to oneself and others wishes to be happy, peaceful, healthy, strong

When we learn to respond to disappointments with acceptance, we give ourselves the space to realize that all our experiences—good and bad alike—are opportunities to learn and grow. This itself is an act of love.

Ultimately, we forgive others in order to free ourselves.

Equanimity's strength derives from a combination of understanding and trust. It is based on understanding that the conflict and frustration we feel when we can't control the world doesn't come from our inability to do so but rather from the fact that we are trying to control the uncontrollable.

What happens in our hearts is our field of freedom. As long as we carry old wounds and anger in our hearts, we continue to suffer. Forgiveness allows us to move on.

Through meditation we come to know that we are dying & being reborn in every moment.