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" Even on the spiritual path, we have things we'll tend to cover up or be in denial about. "

Sharon Salzberg

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

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" The meditation traditions I started and have continued practicing have all emphasized inclusivity: anyone can do this who is interested. "

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" My earliest experiences in meditation were in a context of intensive retreats. "

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" I think the associations people have with kindness are often things like meekness and sweetness and maybe sickly sweetness; whereas I do think of kindness as a force, as a power. "

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" We need the compassion and the courage to change the conditions that support our suffering. Those conditions are things like ignorance, bitterness, negligence, clinging, and holding on. "

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" Faith is not a commodity that you either have or don't have enough of, or the right kind of. It's an ongoing process. The opposite of faith is despair. "

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" We need to redefine community and find a variety of ways of coming together and helping each other. "

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" What is important is not getting intoxicated with a good feeling or getting intoxicated even with an insight. These take many forms in our practice. We go through times of great release, where there has been physical holding for what feels like forever, and something opens up and releases. "

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" From the Buddhist point of view, it is true that emptiness is a characteristic of all of life - if we look carefully at any experience we will find transparency, insubstantiality, with no solid, unchanging core to our experience. But that does not mean that nothing matters. "

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" We think of ourselves as our titles or our jobs or our position in a family. We depend on being praised by others. But something happens when that praise is undermined. "

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" Sometimes people don't trust the force of kindness. They think love or compassion or kindness will make you weak and kind of stupid and people will take advantage of you; you won't stand up for other people. "

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" Meditation is not the construction of something foreign, it is not an effort to attain and then hold on to a particular experience. We may have a secret desire that through meditation we will accumulate a stockpile of magical experiences, or at least a mystical trophy or two, and then we will be able to proudly display them for others to see. "

Sharon Salzberg

" Love and compassion don't at all have to make us weak, or lead us to losing discernment and vision. We just have to learn how to find them. And see, in truth, what they bring us. "

Sharon Salzberg

" As we work to reweave the strands of connection, we can be supported by the wisdom and lovingkindness of others. "

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" As we look around, it's very clear that in this world people do outrageous things to one another all of the time. It's not that these qualities or actions make us bad people, but they bring tremendous suffering if we don't know how to work with them. "

Sharon Salzberg

" We apply our effort to be mindful, to be aware in this very moment, right here and now, and we bring a very wholehearted effort to it. This brings concentration. It is this power of concentration that we use to cut through the world of surface appearances to get to a much deeper reality. "

Sharon Salzberg

" I've always said that lovingkindness and compassion are inevitably woven throughout meditation practice even if the words are never used or implied, no matter what technique or method we are using. "

Sharon Salzberg

" It's difficult to admit to ourselves that we suffer. We feel humiliated, like we should have been able to control our pain. If someone else is suffering, we like to tuck them away, out of sight. It's a cruel, cruel conditioning. There is no controlling the unfolding of life. "

Sharon Salzberg

" I had a very turbulent and painful childhood, like many people. I left for college when I was 16 years old and up until that point I'd lived in five different family configurations. Each one ended or changed through a death or some terrible loss. "

Sharon Salzberg

" If you go deeper and deeper into your own heart, you'll be living in a world with less fear, isolation and loneliness. "

Sharon Salzberg

" There are many different ways to practice meditation; it's good to experiment until you find one that seems to suit you. "

Sharon Salzberg

" When we see the relatedness of ourselves to the universe, that we do not live as isolated entities, untouched by what is going on around us, not affecting what is going on around us, when we see through that, that we are interrelated, then we can see that to protect others is to protect ourselves, and to protect ourselves is to protect others. "

Sharon Salzberg

" Things don't just happen in this world of arising and passing away. We don't live in some kind of crazy, accidental universe. Things happen according to certain laws, laws of nature. Laws such as the law of karma, which teaches us that as a certain seed gets planted, so will that fruit be. "

Sharon Salzberg

" There's no commodity we can take with us. There is only our lives, whether we live them wisely or whether we live them in ignorance. And this is everything. "

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" We come to meditation to learn how not to act out the habitual tendencies we generally live by - those actions that create suffering for ourselves and others, and get us into so much trouble. "

Sharon Salzberg

" You don't have to believe anything, adopt a dogma in order to learn how to meditate. "

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" The middle way is a view of life that avoids the extreme of misguided grasping born of believing there is something we can find, or buy, or cling to that will not change. And it avoids the despair and nihilism born from the mistaken belief that nothing matters, that all is meaningless. "

Sharon Salzberg

" It's interesting that people bring different things to oppressive and difficult situations, when they're reduced to the barest terms of survival. That's what provides tension in a lot of films. "

Sharon Salzberg

" We can learn the art of fierce compassion - redefining strength, deconstructing isolation and renewing a sense of community, practicing letting go of rigid us-vs.-them thinking - while cultivating power and clarity in response to difficult situations. "

Sharon Salzberg

" Dedicating some time to meditation is a meaningful expression of caring for yourself that can help you move through the mire of feeling unworthy of recovery. As your mind grows quieter and more spacious, you can begin to see self-defeating thought patterns for what they are, and open up to other, more positive options. "

Sharon Salzberg