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

Sharon Salzberg

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" It is sometimes difficult to view compassion and loving kindness as the strengths they are. "

Sharon Salzberg

" 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. "

Sharon Salzberg

" It's a rare and precious thing to be close to suffering because our society - in many ways - tells us that suffering is wrong. If it's our own suffering, we try to hide it or isolate ourselves. If others are suffering, we're taught to put them away somewhere so we don't have to see it. "

Sharon Salzberg

" Compassion isn't morose; it's something replenishing and opening; that's why it makes us happy. "

Sharon Salzberg

" We are taught that revenge is strong and compassion is weak. We are taught that power is more important than love. "

Sharon Salzberg

" We can't give the truth to someone as an object, we can only point to it, inviting inspection. It is in that spirit that we can hear or read a teaching and then look at our own lives, at our own experiences to see whether anything might have been revealed about them. "

Sharon Salzberg

" 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. "

Sharon Salzberg

" We can always begin again. "

Sharon Salzberg

" We all want to be happy. We need to expand the notion of what that means, to make it bigger and wiser. "

Sharon Salzberg

" 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. "

Sharon Salzberg

" We live in this world of great promise, where everything seems to offer an unchanging final happiness, if we can only get enough of it. It is very intoxicating. "

Sharon Salzberg

" 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

" My ideal registration system would be an opt-out one, where every single person is registered once they turn 18. In Australia, I'm told, everyone is registered to vote and you pay a fine if you don't vote. "

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

" 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. "

Sharon Salzberg

" Once in a while, you have to let your mind just go. "

Sharon Salzberg

" As we hone the ability to let go of distraction, to begin again without rancor or judgment, we are deepening forgiveness and compassion for ourselves. And in life, we find we might make a mistake, and more easily begin again, or stray from our chosen course and begin again. "

Sharon Salzberg

" While you are meditating, if your mind wanders, gently bring it back to the present moment. "

Sharon Salzberg

" At times when I am myself sitting at a retreat, and at the end I get into my car to drive away, I watch my hand move forward to turn on the radio. When I can be mindful, I notice the fact that I actually don't want in that moment to listen to the news or hear some music. "

Sharon Salzberg

" I think so many people tend to think of faith as blind adherence to a dogma or unquestioned surrender to an authority figure, and the result is losing self-respect and losing our own sense of what is true. And I don't think of faith in those terms at all. "

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

" 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

" In Buddhist teaching, ignorance is considered the fundamental cause of violence - ignorance... about the separation of self and other... about the consequences of our actions. "

Sharon Salzberg

" We can have skills training in mindfulness so that we are using our attention to perceive something in the present moment. This perception is not so latent by fears or projections into the future, or old habits, and then I can actually stir loving-kindness or compassion in skills training too, which can be sort of provocative, I found. "

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

" 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

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

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

" Doing nothing means unplugging from the compulsion to always keep ourselves busy, the habit of shielding ourselves from certain feelings, the tension of trying to manipulate our experience before we even fully acknowledge what that experience is. "

Sharon Salzberg

" It is so powerful when we can leave behind our ordinary identities, no longer think of ourselves primarily as a conductor, or writer, or salesclerk, and go to a supportive environment to deeply immerse in meditation practice. "

Sharon Salzberg