Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art Of Mindful Connection Quotes
When emotions are long held and extremely complex, it sometimes takes years for them to enter fully into awareness.
The practice of loving-kindness is about cultivating love as a trans-formative strength,
Kindness is not a fixed trait that we either have or lack, but more like a muscle that can be developed and strengthened.
When we learn to respond to disappointments with acceptance, we give ourselves the space to realize that all our experiences—good and bad alike—are opportunities to learn and grow.
Loving ourselves calls us to give up the illusion that we can control everything and focuses us on building our inner resource of resilience.
Loving-kindness challenges those states that tend to arise when we think of ourselves as isolated from everyone else—fear, a sense of deficiency, alienation, loneliness.
Asking questions is an opportunity for creativity and personal expression, both for the person asking and the person answering.
There’s no denying that it takes effort to set the intention to see our fundamental connected-ness with others.
If we have nothing material to give, we can offer our attention, our energy, our appreciation. The world needs us. It doesn’t deplete us to give.
We’re in charge of our own forgiveness, and the process takes time, patience, and intention.
Kindness is really at the core of what it means to be and feel alive.
If we truly loved ourselves, we’d never harm another. That is a truly revolutionary, celebratory mode of self-care.
The more we practice mindfulness, the more alert we become to the cost of keeping secrets.
We’re capable of much more than mediocrity, much more than merely getting by in this world.
As human beings, we’re capable of greatness of spirit, an ability to go beyond the circumstances we find ourselves in, to experience a vast sense of connection to all of life.
Our minds tend to race ahead into the future or replay the past, but our bodies are always in the present moment.
The skills available to us through mindfulness make it possible to bring love to our connections with others.
What we learn in meditation, we can apply to all other realms of our lives.
Keeping secrets is a consequential act for all involved.
The environment we create can help heal us or fracture us. This is true not just for buildings and landscapes but also for interactions and relationships.
So often, fear keeps us from being able to say yes to love—perhaps our greatest challenge as human beings.
By accepting and learning to embrace the inevitable sorrows of life, we realize that we can experience a more enduring sense of happiness.
The journey to loving ourselves doesn’t mean we like everything.
When we approach the journey acknowledging what we do not know and what we can’t control, we maintain our energy for the quest.
When we contemplate the miracle of embodied life, we begin to partner with our bodies in a kinder way.
The heart contracts when our bodies are overcome by shame.
Shame weakens us. It can make us frightened to take on something new. We start to withdraw from whatever might give us pleasure, self-esteem, or a sense of our value.
To imagine the way we think is the singular causative agent of all we go through is to practice cruelty toward ourselves.
It’s affirming that we can look at any experience from the fullness of our being and get past the shame we carry.
Mindfulness allows us to shift the angle on our story and to remember that we have the capacity to learn and change in ways that are productive, not self-defeating.
We can use meditation as a way to experiment with new ways of relating to ourselves, even our uncomfortable thoughts.
if we really look at our actions with eyes of love, we see that our lives can be more straightforward, simpler, less sculpted by regret and fear, more in alignment with our deepest values.
Paying attention to the ethical implications of our choices has never been more pressing—or more complicated—than it is today.
Causing harm is never just a one-way street.
When we do our best to treat others with kindness, it’s often a struggle to determine which actions best express our love and care for ourselves.
When we feel conflicted about a particular decision or action, our bodies often hold the answer—if we take the time to stop and tune in.
You can see your thoughts and emotions arise & create space for them even if they are uncomfortable.
The breath is the first tool for opening the space between the story you tell yourself about love.
I see real love as the most fundamental of our innate capacities, never destroyed no matter what we might have gone through or might yet go through.
Mindfulness practice helps create space between our actual experiences and the reflexive stories we tend to tell about them.
Loving kindness practice helps us move out of the terrain of our default narratives if they tend to be based on fear or disconnection. We become authors of brand-new stories about love.
Our senses are often the gateway to our stories.
If we define ourselves by each of the ever-changing feelings that cascade through us, how will we ever feel at home in our own bodies and minds?
Mindfulness is so much wiser and more robust than our inner critic.
Just as a prism refracts light differently when you change its angle, each experience of love illuminates love in new ways, drawing from an infinite palette of patterns and hues.
The causes of familial discord and distance are countless, but the results are often the same: secrecy, blame, sadness, hurt, confusion, and feelings of loss and grief.
Forgiveness is a process, an admittedly difficult one that often can feel like a rigorous spiritual practice.
We cannot instantaneously force ourselves to forgive—and forgiveness happens at a different pace for everyone and is dependent on the particulars of any given situation.
Telling the story, acknowledging what has happened and how you feel, is often a necessary part of forgiveness.
Grief helps us to relinquish the illusion that the past could be different from what it was.
