Quote

We need the compassion and the courage to change the conditions that support our suffering. Those conditions are things like ignorance, bitterness, negligence, clinging, and holding on.

Sharon Salzberg

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Sharon Salzberg
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: August 5
Author
Writer
New York City
New York
Support
Negligence
Suffering
Clinging
Change
Bitterness
Need
Holding
Needs
Ignorance
Things
Compassion
Like
Courage
Conditions

More quotes by Sharon Salzberg

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When we are devoted to the development of kindness, it becomes our ready response, so that reacting from compassion, from caring, is not a question of giving ourselves a lecture: 'I don't really feel like it, but I'd better be helpful, or what would people think?'
Sharon Salzberg
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Mindfulness isn't difficult, we just need to remember to do it.
Sharon Salzberg
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Throughout our lives we long to love ourselves more deeply and to feel connected with others. Instead, we often contract, fear intimacy, and suffer a bewildering sense of separation. We crave love, and yet we are lonely. Our delusion of being separate from one another, of being apart from all that is around us, gives rise to all of this pain.
Sharon Salzberg
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My experience working with lots of creative people is that they don't lose their artistic edge when they lose a fierce level of anguish. They just create from a different place.
Sharon Salzberg
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We need the courage to learn from our past and not live in it.
Sharon Salzberg
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Voting is like alchemy - taking an abstract value and breathing life into it.
Sharon Salzberg
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An ordinary favor we do for someone or any compassionate reaching out may seem to be going nowhere at first, but may be planting a seed we can't see right now. Sometimes we need to just do the best we can and then trust in an unfolding we can't design or ordain.
Sharon Salzberg
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It's a rare and precious thing to be close to suffering because our society - in many ways - tells us that suffering is wrong. If it's our own suffering, we try to hide it or isolate ourselves. If others are suffering, we're taught to put them away somewhere so we don't have to see it.
Sharon Salzberg
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Dedicating some time to meditation is a meaningful expression of caring for yourself that can help you move through the mire of feeling unworthy of recovery. As your mind grows quieter and more spacious, you can begin to see self-defeating thought patterns for what they are, and open up to other, more positive options.
Sharon Salzberg
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As we work to reweave the strands of connection, we can be supported by the wisdom and lovingkindness of others.
Sharon Salzberg
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We can learn the art of fierce compassion - redefining strength, deconstructing isolation and renewing a sense of community, practicing letting go of rigid us-vs.-them thinking - while cultivating power and clarity in response to difficult situations.
Sharon Salzberg
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Seeking is endless. It never comes to a state of rest it never ceases.
Sharon Salzberg
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What comes up is not nearly as important as how you relate to what comes up.
Sharon Salzberg
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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
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Mindfulness, also called wise attention, helps us see what we’re adding to our experiences, not only during meditation sessions but also elsewhere.
Sharon Salzberg
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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.
Sharon Salzberg
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In a single moment we can understand we are not just facing a knee pain, or our discouragement and our wishing the sitting would end, but that right in the moment of seeing that knee pain, we're able to explore the teachings of the Buddha. What does it mean to have a painful experience? What does it mean to hate it, and to fear it?
Sharon Salzberg
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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
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The Buddha said that no true spiritual life is possible without a generous heart. . . . Generosity allies itself with an inner feeling of abundance - the feeling that we have enough to share.
Sharon Salzberg
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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
Sharon Salzberg