Sharon Salzberg Quotes

Mindfulness won’t ensure you’ll win an argument with your sister. Mindfulness won’t enable you to bypass your feelings of anger or hurt either. But it may help you see the conflict in a new way, one that allows you to break through old patterns.

Kindness is really at the core of what it means to be and feel alive.

The difference between a life laced through with frustration and one sustained by happiness depends on whether it is motivated by self-hatred or by real love for oneself.

Forgiveness can be bittersweet. It contains the sweetness of the release of a story that has caused us pain, but also the poignant reminder that even our dearest relationships change over the course of a lifetime.

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?

In one of the verses of Lal Ded, or Lalla, a fourteenth-century mystic from Kashmir, Lalla says: “At the end of a crazy-moon night the love of God rose. I said “It’s me, Lalla.”
“It’s me, Lalla,” becomes “It’s me…whoever you are,” proclaiming that we no longer stand on the sidelines but are leaping directly into the center of our lives, our truth, our full potential. No one can take that leap for us; and no one has to. This is our journey of faith.

When we bring deep awareness to whatever's bothering us, the same things might be happening, but we are able to relate to them differently.

Mindfulness is the agent of our freedom. Through mindfulness we arrive at faith we grow in wisdom & we attain equanimity.

Generosity has such power because it is characterized by the inner quality of letting go or relinquishing.

Seeing the goodness in someone does not imply ignoring their difficult qualities or unskillful actions. Rather, we can fully acknowledge these difficulties, while at the same time we choose to focus on the positive. If we focus on the negative, we will naturally feel anger, resentment or disappointment. If we focus on the positive, we will forge a connection to the person. Then as we look at their negative traits or actions, we do it as their friend. If two friends are looking at such difficult things, they do so standing side by side.
This mirroring quality, whereby we 'reteach a thing it's 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.

While happiness is an end in itself, it is also the state of mind we can have right now.

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.