Sharon Salzberg
Sharon Salzberg
Sharon Salzbergis a New York Times Best selling author and teacher of Buddhist meditation practices in the West. In 1974, she co-founded the Insight Meditation Society at Barre, Massachusetts with Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein. Her emphasis is on vipassanāand mettāmethods, and has been leading meditation retreats around the world for over three decades. All of these methods have their origins in the Theravada Buddhist tradition. Her books include Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness, A Heart as Wide as...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
CountryUnited States of America
Mindfulness helps us get better at seeing the difference between what’s happening and the stories we tell ourselves about what’s happening, stories that get in the way of direct experience. Often such stories treat a fleeting state of mind as if it were our entire and permanent self.
All beings want to be happy, yet so very few know how. It is out of ignorance that any of us cause suffering, for ourselves or for others
If you’re reading these words, perhaps it’s because something has kicked open the door for you, and you’re ready to embrace change. It isn’t enough to appreciate change from afar, or only in the abstract, or as something that can happen to other people but not to you. We need to create change for ourselves, in a workable way, as part of our everyday lives.
What unites us as human beings is an urge for happiness which at heart is a yearning for union.
We need the courage to learn from our past and not live in it.
Develop a mind so filled with love that it resembles space.
By engaging in a delusive quest for happiness, we bring only suffering upon ourselves. In our frantic search for something to quench our thirst, we overlook the water all around us and drive ourselves into exile from our own lives.
We are all too often told by someone that we are too old, too young, too different, too much the same, and those comments can be devastating.
Compassion allows us to use our own pain and the pain of others as a vehicle for connection. This is a delicate and profound path. We may be adverse to seeing our own suffering because it tends to ignite a blaze of self-blame and regret. And we may be adverse to seeing suffering in others because we find it unbearable or distasteful, or we find it threatening to our own happiness. All of these possible reactions to the suffering in the word make us want to turn away from life.
Find a gap between a trigger event and our usual conditioned response to it and by using that pause to collect ourselves and shift our response
Mindfulness helps us to set boundaries by revealing what makes us unhappy & what brings us peace.
Compassion isn't morose; it's something replenishing and opening; that's why it makes us happy.
In order to do anything about the suffering of the world we must have the strength to face it without turning away.
Resilience is based on compassion for ourselves as well as compassion for others