Someone who has experienced trauma also has gifts to offer all of us – in their depth, their knowledge of our universal vulnerability, and their experience of the power of compassion. – 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
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
We all want to be happy. We need to expand the notion of what that means, to make it bigger and wiser. – 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
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 sometimes difficult to view compassion and loving kindness as the strengths they are. – 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
We need to redefine community and find a variety of ways of coming together and helping each other. – Sharon Salzberg
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
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
What you learn about pain in formal meditation can help you relate to it in your daily life. – Sharon Salzberg
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. – Sharon Salzberg
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
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
We like things to manifest right away, and they may not. Many times, we’re just planting a seed and we don’t know exactly how it is going to come to fruition. It’s hard for us to realize that what we see in front of us might not be the end of the story. – Sharon Salzberg
Compassion isn’t morose; it’s something replenishing and opening; that’s why it makes us happy. – Sharon Salzberg
Even on the spiritual path, we have things we’ll tend to cover up or be in denial about. – Sharon Salzberg
In our own lives and in our communities, we need to find a way to include others rather than exclude them. We need to find a way to allow our pain and suffering, individually and collectively. – 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