Quotes from Sharon Salzberg

What's really transformative is our willingness to keep going, our openness to possibility, our patience, our effort, our humor, our growing self-knowledge, and the strength that we gain as we keep going.

This mirroring quality, whereby we "reteach a thing its loveliness," is one of the greatest attributes of metta. The power of metta enables us to look at people and affirm the rightness of their wish to be happy; it affirms our oneness with them. The power of love reflects both to ourselves and others the manifold possibilities available in each moment.

Why be unhappy about something if you can do something about it? If you can't do anything about it, why be unhappy about it?

Looking at people and communicating that they can be loved, and that they can love in return, is giving them a tremendous gift. It is also a gift to ourselves. We see that we are one with the fabric of life. This is the power of metta: to teach ourselves and our world this inherent loveliness.

To truly love ourselves, we must challenge our beliefs that we need to be different or better.

When we believe a wounding story, our whole world is diminished.

I see real love as the most fundamental of our innate capacities, never destroyed no matter what we might have gone through or might yet go through.

Mindfulness helps us see the addictive aspect of self-criticism— a repetitive cycle of flaying ourselves again and again, feeling the pain anew.

Mindfulness is so much wiser and more robust than our inner critic.

Learning to treat ourselves lovingly may at first feel like a dangerous experiment.

When we direct a lot of hostile energy toward the inner critic, we enter into a losing battle.

Seeking happiness is not the problem. The problem is that we often do not know where and how to find genuine happiness and so make the mistakes that cause suffering for ourselves & others.

Hatred does not help us alleviate our pain even in the slightest.

Embracing what is We're conditioned to believe that painful feelings are "bad" and that pleasurable ones are "good." It's often easier—though not healthier—for us to avoid grief and sorrow, while only embracing sensations like happiness, confidence, and love.

Loving ourselves calls us to give up the illusion that we can control everything and focuses us on building our inner resource of resilience.

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well," Václav Havel, the Czech dissident, writer, and statesman, said, "but the certainty that it is worth doing no matter how it turns out.

I need to start over. I can't just stay stuck in this place." This is a wonderful skill to bring to your life.

relaxed perseverance.

When our focus is on seeking, perfecting, or clinging to romance, the charge is often generated by instability, rather than by an authentic connection with another person.

No connection is always easy or free of strife, no matter how many minutes a day we meditate. It's how we relate to conflict, as well as to our differing needs and expectations, that makes our relationships sustainable.

When we set an intention to explore our emotional hot spots, we create a pathway to real love.

Genuine awe connects us with the world in a new way.

The good news is that opportunities for love enter our lives unpredictably, whether or not we've perfected self-compassion or befriended our inner critic.

Equanimity can be hard to talk about.