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
Training our mind through meditation does not mean forcibly subjugating it or beating it into shape.
You cannot fail at meditation.
For all of us, love can be the natural state of our own being; naturally at peace, naturally connected, because this becomes the reflection of who we simply are.
Compassion isn't morose; it's something replenishing and opening; that's why it makes us happy.
Mindfulness helps us to set boundaries by revealing what makes us unhappy & what brings us peace.
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.
If we fall, we don't need self-recrimination or blame or anger - we need a reawakening of our intention and a willingness to re-commit, to be whole-hearted once again.
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.
I have seen that there are a number of people who benefit from doing loving kindness meditation, either prior to or along with mindfulness meditation. It varies from person to person of course, but for many, their practice of mindfulness will bring along old habits of self-judgment and ruthless criticism, so it is not actually mindfulness.
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.
The most common response I hear when I tell people I teach meditation is, "I'm so stressed out. I could use some of that!" A response I also sometimes hear, which amuses me a lot is, "My partner should really meet you!"
We spend our lives searching for something we think we don't have, something that will make us happy. But the key to our deepest happiness lies in changing our vision of where to seek it.