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We often get caught up in our own reactions and forget the vulnerability of the person in front of us.

Sharon Salzberg

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Sharon Salzberg
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: August 5
Author
Writer
New York City
New York
Often
Persons
Person
Vulnerability
Reactions
Caught
Fronts
Front
Forget

More quotes by Sharon Salzberg

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Some people have a mistaken idea that all thoughts disappear through meditation and we enter a state of blankness. There certainly are times of great tranquility when concentration is strong and we have few, if any, thoughts. But other times, we can be flooded with memories, plans or random thinking. It's important not to blame yourself.
Sharon Salzberg
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I will love myself as long as I never make a mistake.
Sharon Salzberg
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As an ability, love is always there as a potential, ready to flourish and help our lives flourish. As we go up and down in life, as we acquire or lose, as we are showered with praise or unfairly blamed, always within there is the ability of love, recognized or not, given life or not.
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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Every day seems to reveal a new piece of research about meditation, or new clinical applications of mindfulness or compassion practice, or new corporations or foundations or non-profits bringing mindfulness to work.
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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Once someone appears to us primarily as an object, kindness has no place to root.
Sharon Salzberg
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The meditation traditions I started and have continued practicing have all emphasized inclusivity: anyone can do this who is interested.
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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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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The cultivation of generosity is the beginning of spiritual awakening. Generosity has tremendous force because it arises from an inner quality of letting go. Being able to let go, to give up, to renounce, and to give generously all spring from the same source, and when we practice generosity ... we open up these qualities within ourselves.
Sharon Salzberg
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I've spent quite a bit of my life as a meditation teacher and writer commending the strengths of love and compassion.
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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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.
Sharon Salzberg
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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
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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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In those moments when we realize how much we cannot control, we can learn to let go.
Sharon Salzberg
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Because the development of inner calm and energy happens completely within and isn't dependent on another person or a particular situation, we begin to feel a resourcefulness and independence that is quite beautiful - and a huge relief.
Sharon Salzberg
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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
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To relinquish the futile effort to control change is one of the strengthening forces of true detachment & thus true love.
Sharon Salzberg