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
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.
We don’t need any sort of religious orientation to lead a life that is ethical, compassionate & kind.
We all want to be happy. We need to expand the notion of what that means, to make it bigger and wiser.
Metta is the ability to embrace all parts of ourselves, as well as all parts of the world. Practicing metta illuminates our inner integrity because it relieves us of the need to deny different aspects of ourselves.
We need the courage to learn from our past and not live in it.
Once in a while, you have to let your mind just go.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At times when I am myself sitting at a retreat, and at the end I get into my car to drive away, I watch my hand move forward to turn on the radio. When I can be mindful, I notice the fact that I actually don't want in that moment to listen to the news or hear some music.
There's no commodity we can take with us. There is only our lives, whether we live them wisely or whether we live them in ignorance. And this is everything.
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.
We think of ourselves as our titles or our jobs or our position in a family. We depend on being praised by others. But something happens when that praise is undermined.