Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" We need to redefine community and find a variety of ways of coming together and helping each other. "
Sharon Salzberg
Together
Variety
Find
Related Quotes:
" In a single moment we can understand we are not just facing a knee pain, or our discouragement and our wishing the sitting would end, but that right in the moment of seeing that knee pain, we're able to explore the teachings of the Buddha. What does it mean to have a painful experience? What does it mean to hate it, and to fear it? "
Sharon Salzberg
Moment
Hate
Experience
" 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
Time
World
People
" Some people have a mistaken idea that all thoughts disappear through meditation and we enter a state of blankness. There certainly are times of great tranquility when concentration is strong and we have few, if any, thoughts. But other times, we can be flooded with memories, plans or random thinking. It's important not to blame yourself. "
Sharon Salzberg
Great
Memories
Thoughts
" If we have a very strong commitment, so that we can trust ourselves and be beacons of trust for others no matter what the circumstance, then we're protected from suffering the consequences of many actions. We can be protected from that pain. "
Sharon Salzberg
Suffering
Then
Pain
" 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
Practice
Compassion
Meditation
" Protection, as we use the word in Buddhism, is actually wisdom, it's insight. Protection is seeing and knowing deeply that all things in our experience arise due to causes, due to conditions coming together in a certain way. "
Sharon Salzberg
Experience
Together
Seeing
" 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. "
Sharon Salzberg
Chance
Judging
Practice
" 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
Moment
Future
Training
" 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
Enough
Great
Happiness
" 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
Change
Life
Born
" 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
Forgiveness
Compassion
Mistake
" 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
Truth
Vision
Losing
" 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
Doing
Habit
Feelings
" Once in a while, you have to let your mind just go. "
Sharon Salzberg
Your
Mind
Once
" Chanting is a simple practice. When you notice you are thinking about something else during the chant, let go of the thought and come back home, to the chant, to that place where we are expressing our inner purity. "
Sharon Salzberg
Place
Practice
Simple
" Voting is like alchemy - taking an abstract value and breathing life into it. "
Sharon Salzberg
Voting
Value
Life
" Everyone loses touch with their aspiration, and we need the heart to return to what we really care about. All of this is based on developing greater lovingkindness and compassion. "
Sharon Salzberg
Need
Touch
Heart
" 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
Practice
Good
Great
" What you learn about pain in formal meditation can help you relate to it in your daily life. "
Sharon Salzberg
You
Help
Daily Life
" 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
Think
Environment
Powerful
" 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
Construction
Experience
Effort
" Even on the spiritual path, we have things we'll tend to cover up or be in denial about. "
Sharon Salzberg
Spiritual
Path
Denial
" 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
See
Someone
Spirit
" 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
Consequences
Self
Violence
" 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
Life
Look
True
" 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
World
Effort
Moment
" 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. "
Sharon Salzberg
Courage
Meaning
Know
" Patience doesn't mean making a pact with the devil of denial, ignoring our emotions and aspirations. It means being wholeheartedly engaged in the process that's unfolding, rather than ripping open a budding flower or demanding a caterpillar hurry up and get that chrysalis stage over with. "
Sharon Salzberg
Stage
Patience
Flower
" Voting is the expression of our commitment to ourselves, one another, this country and this world. "
Sharon Salzberg
World
Commitment
Country
" It is sometimes difficult to view compassion and loving kindness as the strengths they are. "
Sharon Salzberg
Compassion
View
Kindness