Sharon Salzberg

You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection,You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.

If you’re reading these words, perhaps it’s because something has kicked open the door for you, and you’re ready to embrace change. It isn’t enough to appreciate change from afar, or only in the abstract, or as something that can happen to other people but not to you. We need to create change for ourselves, in a workable way, as part of our everyday lives.

Smiling at someone can have significant health consequences.

Seeking happiness is not the problem. The problem is that we often do not know where and how to find genuine happiness and so make the mistakes that cause suffering for ourselves & others.

When you recognize and reflect on even one good thing about yourself, you are building a bridge to a place of kindness and caring.

Never feel ashamed of your longing for happiness.

Clinging to our ideas of perfection isolates us from life and is a barrier.

For any marginalized group to change the story that society tells about them takes courage and perseverance.

The idea that traumatic residues—or unresolved stories—can be inherited is groundbreaking.

The unconscious mind is a vast repository of experiences and associations that sorts things out much faster than the slow-moving conscious mind.

The practice of sympathetic joy is rooted in inner development. It’s not a matter of learning techniques to “make friends and influence people. ” Instead, we build the foundations of our own happiness. When our own cup is full, we more easily share it with others.

Sometimes people in abusive situations think they’re responsible for the other person’s happiness or that they’re going to fix them and make them feel better. The practice of equanimity teaches that it’s not all up to you to make someone else happy.

Buddhism has a term for the happiness we feel at someone else’s success or good fortune. Sympathetic joy, as it is known, invites us to celebrate for others.

Even as we recognize our resentment, bitterness, or jealousy, we can also honor our own wish to be happy, to feel free.

The more we identify and acknowledge moments when we’re unable to share in someone else’s pleasure and ask ourselves whether another person’s happiness truly jeopardizes our own, the more we pave the way for experiencing sympathetic joy,The more we practice sympathetic joy, the more we come to realize that the happiness we share with others is inseparable from our own happiness.

It is awareness of both our shared pain and our longing for happiness that links us to other people and helps us to turn toward them with compassion.

The difference between a life laced through with frustration and one sustained by happiness depends on whether it is motivated by self-hatred or by real love for oneself.

When we can step back even briefly from our hurt, sorrow, and anger, when we put our faith in the possibility of change, we create the possibility for non-judgmental inquiry that aims for healing rather than victory.

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.

Mindfulness helps us get better at seeing the difference between what’s happening and the stories we tell ourselves about what’s happening, stories that get in the way of direct experience. Often such stories treat a fleeting state of mind as if it were our entire and permanent self.

Mindfulness, also called wise attention, helps us see what we’re adding to our experiences, not only during meditation sessions but also elsewhere.

People turn to meditation because they want to make good decisions, break bad habits & bounce back better from disappointments.

Meditation is essentially training our attention so that we can be more aware— not only of our own inner workings but also of what’s happening around us in the here & now.

Because the development of inner calm & energy happens completely within & 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.

Cultivation of positive emotions, including self-love and self-respect, strengthens our inner resources and opens us to a broader range of thoughts and actions.

Genuine awe connects us with the world in a new way.

Real love allows for failure and suffering.

The starting place for radical re-imagining of love is mindfulness.

The costs of keeping secrets include our growing isolation due to fear of detection and the ways we shut down inside to avoid feeling the effects of our behavior. We can never afford to be truly seen and known—even by ourselves.

A key barometer to help us weigh the rightness of our actions is self-respect.

As we explore new ways of thinking, we need to be willing to investigate, experiment, take some risks with our attention, and stretch.

The wholesome pursuit of excellence feels quite different from perfectionism.

We need the courage to learn from our past and not live in it.

Forgiveness can be bittersweet. It contains the sweetness of the release of a story that has caused us pain, but also the poignant reminder that even our dearest relationships change over the course of a lifetime.

When we respond to our pain and suffering with love, understanding, and acceptance—for ourselves, as well as others— over time, we can let go of our anger, even when we’ve been hurt to the core. But that doesn’t mean we ever forget.

We cannot simply forgive and forget, nor should we.

To forgive, we may need to open our minds to a fuller exploration of the context in which the events occurred, and feel compassion for the circumstances and everyone involved, starting with ourselves.

Ultimately, we forgive others in order to free ourselves.

Real forgiveness in close relationships is never easy. It can’t be rushed or engineered.

We nurture our sense of connection with the larger whole, noticing that the whole is only as healthy as its smallest part.

A relationship is the union of two psychological systems.

When we set an intention to explore our emotional hot spots, we create a pathway to real love.

Often in close relationships, the subject being discussed is not the subject at all.

When we develop our ability to love in one realm, we simultaneously nourish our ability in others, as long as we remain open to the flow of insight and compassion.

So often we operate from ideas of love that don’t fit our reality.

Feelings of apathy as they relate to our relationships often stem from insufficiently paying attention to those around us.

Only when we start to distinguish reality from fantasy that we can humbly, with eyes wide open, forge loving and sustainable connections with others.

What makes awe such a powerful call to love is that it’s disruptive. It sneaks up on us. It doesn’t ask our permission to wow us; it just does. Awe can arise from a single glance, a sound, a gesture.

One foundation of loving relationships is curiosity, keeping open to the idea that we have much to learn even about those we have been close to for decades.

When we don’t tell those we love about what’s really going on or listen carefully to what they have to say, we tend to fill in the blanks with stories.

Although much of the work we do in committed relationships we do with our partners, sometimes it’s necessary to start with ourselves.

With our close friends, family members, and lovers, we hope to create a special world, one in which we can expect to be treated fairly, with care, tenderness, and compassion.

Be open to the possibility that there are other paths available to you in relating to yourself and to another.

Without equanimity, we might give love to others only in an effort to bridge the inevitable and healthy space that always exists between two people.

Whether we fear the existence of boundaries with others or crave more of them, there’s no denying that individuation and separation are inevitable parts of loving relationships that become the site of tension.

We have to know ourselves to know where we end and another person begins, and we have to develop the skills to navigate the space between us. Or else we will seek wholeness through false means that honor neither us nor those we love.

How we traverse the space between us when conflict arises has a profound effect on the health and longevity of our relationships.

A particularly difficult line to navigate is the one between fear and love, especially for parents, who want more than anything to protect their children from suffering.

The paradigm for our relationships is formed from our earliest experiences and is actually hardwired into our neurological and emotional network.

Letting go of the belief that we’re powerless to help relieve our own suffering enhances our ability not only to heal but also to genuinely love and receive the love of others.

The key in letting go is practice. Each time we let go, we disentangle ourselves from our expectations and begin to experience things as they are.

Mindfulness won’t ensure you’ll win an argument with your sister. Mindfulness won’t enable you to bypass your feelings of anger or hurt either. But it may help you see the conflict in a new way, one that allows you to break through old patterns.

We learn from conflicts only when we are willing to do so.

To truly love ourselves, we must challenge our beliefs that we need to be different or better.

As soon as we ask whether or not a story is true in the present moment, we empower ourselves to re-frame it.

Maybe what we really need is to change our relationship to what is, to see who we are with the strength of a generous spirit & a wise heart.

Until we begin to question our basic assumptions about ourselves and view them as fluid, not fixed, it’s easy to repeat established patterns and, out of habit, reenact old stories that limit our ability to live and love ourselves with an open heart.

Living in a story of a limited self—to any degree—is not love.

Identifying the source of our personal narratives helps us to release its negative aspects and re-frame it in ways that promote wholeness.

Cultivating loving kindness for ourselves is the foundation of real love for our friends and family, for new people we encounter in our daily lives, for all beings and for life itself.

When we experience inner impoverishment, love for another too easily becomes hunger: for reassurance, for acclaim, for affirmation of our worth.

Love is a living capacity within us that is always present, even when we don’t sense it.

Sanskrit has different words to describe love for a brother or sister, love for a teacher, love for a partner, love for one’s friends, love of nature, and so on. English has only one word, which leads to never-ending confusion.

When our focus is on seeking, perfecting, or clinging to romance, the charge is often generated by instability, rather than by an authentic connection with another person.

Real Love may run on a lower voltage, but it’s also more grounded & sustainable.

From our first breath to our last, we’re presented again and again with the opportunity to experience deep, lasting, and trans-formative connection with other beings: to love them and be loved by them; to show them our true natures and to recognize theirs.

Buddhist teachings discourage us from clinging and grasping to those we hold dear, and from trying to control the people or the relationship. What’s more, we’re encouraged to accept the impermanence of all things: the flower that blooms today will be gone tomorrow, the objects we possess will break or fade or lose their utility, our relationships will change, life will end.

Whatever language we use use to describe healthy relationships, when we’re in them, we feel nourished by them, in body as well as mind.

When we constantly hear that we should be smarter, better connected, more productive, wealthier—it takes real courage to claim the time and space to follow the currents of our talents, our aspirations, and our hearts, which may lead in a very different direction.

Intellectually, we may appreciate that loving ourselves would give us a firm foundation but for most of us this is a leap of logic, not a leap of the heart.

Though it may seem counter intuitive to our inner perfectionist, recognizing our mistakes as valuable lessons (not failures) helps us lay the groundwork for later success.

We long for permanence but everything in the known universe is transient. That’s a fact but one we fight.

Science tells us that love not only diminishes the experience of physical pain but can make us—and our beloveds—healthier.

Evolutionary biologists tell us we have a “negativity bias” that makes our brains remember negative events more strongly than positive ones. So when we’re feeling lost or discouraged, it can be very hard to conjure up memories and feelings of happiness and ease.

When we pay attention to sensations in our bodies, we can feel that love is the energetic opposite of fear.

Love seems to open and expand us right down to the cellular level, while fear causes us to contract and withdraw into ourselves.

There is a sentiment common among most of us when it comes to love—letting go can feel scary.

There are an incalculable—even infinite—number of situations in which we can practice forgiveness. Expecting it to be a singular action—motivated by the sheer imperative to move on and forget—can be more damaging than the original feelings of anger. Accepting forgiveness as pluralistic and as an ongoing, individualized process opens us up to realize the role that our own needs play in conflict resolution.

Loving kindness is the practice of offering to oneself and others wishes to be happy, peaceful, healthy, strong,We begin to cultivate real love for ourselves when we treat ourselves with compassion.

A lack of real love for ourselves is one of the most constricting, painful conditions we can know.

Forgiveness is a personal process that doesn’t depend on us having direct contact with the people who have hurt us.

When we forgive someone, we don’t pretend that the harm didn’t happen or cause us pain. We see it clearly for what it was, but we also come to see that fixating on the memory of harm generates anger and sadness.

When we truly allow ourselves to feel our own pain, over time it comes to seem less personal. We start to recognize that what we’ve perceived as our pain is, at a deeper level, the pain inherent in human existence.

Forgiveness is the way we break the grip that long-held resentments have on our hearts.

Healing comes in many ways, and no one formula fits all.

Letting go is an inside job, something only we can do for ourselves.

Taking responsibility for oneself is by definition an act of kindness.

Equanimity can be hard to talk about.

Our can-do culture has made many of us believe that we should always be self-sufficient. Somewhere along the way, we also got the message that asking for help is a sign of weakness. We often forget that we’re interdependent creatures whose very existence depends on the kindness of others, including—with a bow to Tennessee Williams—strangers.

When we are willing to explore our own experiences, we open the doorway to deeper connection and intimacy.

In more ways than any of us can name, love is wrapped up with the idea of expectation.

Letting go is actually a healthy foundation upon which we can open up to real love—to giving, receiving, and experiencing it authentically and organically.

Mindfulness may help you gain insight into your role in conflicts with others, it won’t single-highhandedly help you resolve them.

The heart is a generous muscle.

These are times when sympathetic joy comes naturally, but in a complex relationship the heart may not leap up so easily.

Laughing at your pettiness probably works better than scolding yourself for it.

Sympathetic joy is a practice. It takes time and effort to free ourselves of the scarcity story that most of us have learned along the way, the idea that happiness is a competition, and that someone else is grabbing all the joy.

By experimenting with sympathetic joy, we break from the constricted world of individual struggle and see that joy exists in more places than we have yet imagined.

To celebrate someone else’s life, we need to find a way to look at it straight on, not from above with judgment or from below with envy.

There is no conflict between loving others deeply and living mindfully.

Even when we do our very best to treat those close to us with utmost respect and understanding, conflict happens. That’s life. That’s human nature.

No connection is always easy or free of strife, no matter how many minutes a day we meditate. It’s how we relate to conflict, as well as to our differing needs and expectations, that makes our relationships sustainable.

Love is defined by difficult acts of human compassion & generosity.

As we explore new ways of loving and being loved by others, we need to equip ourselves with open, pliant minds; we need to be willing to investigate, experiment, and evaluate as we approach a topic we thought we knew so much about.

Love simply, perpetually exists and that it’s a matter of psychic housekeeping to make room for it.

Everyone we interact with has the capacity to surprise us in an infinite number of ways. What can first open us up to each of our innate capacities for love is merely to recognize that.

When we identify the thoughts that keep us from seeing others as they truly are we prepare the ground for real love.

Setting the intention to practice kindness toward one’s partner or family members or friends does not preclude getting angry or upset.

We exercise kindness in any moment when we recognize our shared humanity—with all the hopes, dreams, joys, disappointments, vulnerability, and suffering that implies.

All of our actions can signify self-love or self-sabotage,We are born ready to love and be loved. It is our birthright.

With a clear intention and a willing spirit, sooner or later we experience the joy and freedom that arises when we recognize our common humanity with others and see that real love excludes no one.

What happens in our hearts is our field of freedom. As long as we carry old wounds and anger in our hearts, we continue to suffer. Forgiveness allows us to move on.

Though it may sound paradoxical, identifying our thoughts, emotions, and habitual patterns of behavior is the key to freedom & transformation.

No matter what we think we should do, I don’t think you can coerce yourself into loving your neighbor—or your boss—when you can’t stand him. But if you try to understand your feelings of dislike with mindfulness and compassion, being sure not to forget self-compassion, you create the possibility for change.

Awareness levels the playing field. We are all humans doing the best we can.

If we stretch ourselves to open our minds, to see our shared humanity with others, we allow ourselves to see the existence of community and generosity in unexpected places.

By practicing meditation we establish love, compassion, sympathetic joy & equanimity as our home.

Once we are honest about our feelings, we can invite ourselves to consider alternative modes of viewing our pain and can see that releasing our grip on anger and resentment can actually be an act of self-compassion.

When we open our hearts to the breadth of our experiences, we learn to tune into our needs, unique perceptions, thoughts & feelings,You are a person worthy of love. You don’t have to do anything to prove that.

In order to free ourselves from our assumptions about love, we must ask ourselves what long-held, often buried assumptions are and then face them, which takes courage, humility, and kindness.

It takes a special courage to challenge the rigid confines of our accustomed story. It’s not easy to radically alter our views about where happiness comes from but it’s eminently possible.

Taking in another’s criticism, even when it’s offered out of love, requires courage.

At times, reality is love’s great challenge. When our old stories and dreams are shattered, our first instinct may be to resist, deny, or cling to the way things were. But if we loosen our grip, often what fills the space is a tender forgiveness and the potential for a new and different kind of love.

In reality, love is fluid; it’s a verb, not a noun.

The simple act of being completely attentive & present to another person is an act of love, and it fosters unshakeable well-being.

The good news is that opportunities for love enter our lives unpredictably, whether or not we’ve perfected self-compassion or befriended our inner critic.

Our practice rather than being about killing the ego is about simply discovering our true nature.

All beings want to be happy, yet so very few know how. It is out of ignorance that any of us cause suffering, for ourselves or for others,Like water poured from one vessel to another, metta flows freely, taking the shape of each situation without changing its essence.

We can understand the inherent radiance & purity of our minds by understanding metta. Like the mind, metta is not distorted by what it encounters.

When we practice metta, we open continuously to the truth of our actual experience, changing our relationship to life.

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.

Meditation is the ultimate mobile device; you can use it anywhere, anytime, unobtrusively.

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.

Let the breath lead the way.

Meditation is a microcosm, a model, a mirror. The skills we practice when we sit are transferable to the rest of our lives.

We use mindfulness to observe the way we cling to pleasant experiences & push away unpleasant ones.

Effort is the unconstrained willingness to persevere through difficulty.

Metta sees truly that our integrity is inviolate, no matter what our life situation may be. We do not need to fear anything. We are whole: our deepest happiness is intrinsic to the nature of our minds, and it is not damaged through uncertainty and change.

Meditation may be done in silence & stillness, by using voice & sound, or by engaging the body in movement. All forms emphasize the training of attention.

With the practice of meditation we can develop this ability to more fully love ourselves and to more consistently love others.

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 can open to everything with the healing force of love. When we feel love, our mind is expansive and open enough to include the entirety of life in full awareness, both its pleasures and its pains, we feel neither betrayed by pain or overcome by it, and thus we can contact that which is undamaged within us regardless of the situation. Metta sees truly that our integrity is inviolate, no matter what our life situation may be.

Buddha first taught metta meditation as an antidote: as a way of surmounting terrible fear when it arises.

To relinquish the futile effort to control change is one of the strengthening forces of true detachment & thus true love.

With attachment all that seems to exist is just me & that object I desire.

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.

Any time we find ourselves relying on the ideas of an absolute, frozen state of right and wrong—or fairness versus unfairness—that we are used to, we can compare the habit to distraction during meditation.

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.

Learning to treat ourselves lovingly may at first feel like a dangerous experiment.

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 direct a lot of hostile energy toward the inner critic, we enter into a losing battle.

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 relate to ourselves with loving kindness, perfectionism naturally drops away.

Wholehearted acceptance is a basic element of love, starting with love for ourselves, and a gateway to joy. Through the practices of loving kindness and self-compassion, we can learn to love our flawed and imperfect selves. And in those moments of vulnerability, we open our hearts to connect with each other, as well. We are not perfect, but we are enough.

When we contemplate the miracle of embodied life, we begin to partner with our bodies in a kinder way.

Wherever the responsibility lies, shame creates a solid and terrible feeling of unworthiness that resides in our bodies: the storehouse of the memories of our acts, real or imagined, and the secrets we keep about them.

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.

If we harm someone else, we’re inevitably also hurting ourselves. Some quality of sensitivity and awareness has to shut down for us to be able to objectify someone else, to deny them as a living, feeling being—someone who wants to be happy, just as we do.

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.

I believe that there is only one kind of love—real love—trying to come alive in us despite our limiting assumptions, the distortions of our culture, and the habits of fear, self-condemnation, and isolation that we tend to acquire just by living a life.

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?,Meditation can be a refuge, but it is not a practice in which real life is ever excluded. The strength of mindfulness is that it enables us to hold difficult thoughts and feelings in a different way—with awareness, balance, and love,Mindfulness is so much wiser and more robust than our inner critic.

Compassion is born out of lovingkindness. It is born of knowing our oneness, not just thinking about it or wishing it were so. It is born out of the wisdom of seeing things exactly as they are.

The manifestation of the free mind is said to be lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.

Love exists in itself, not relying on owning or being owned.

When we don’t allow setbacks to defeat us, they become opportunities for learning, acceptance, flexibility, and patience.

Each opportunity to interrupt the onslaught of thoughts and return to the object of meditation is, in fact, a moment of enlightenment,Every time we forget to breathe or our minds wander or we’re hijacked by feelings or sensations, we gently bring ourselves back to the breath, again and again.

We live in a network of inter connectivity.

Meditation trains the mind the way physical exercise strengthens the body.

In order to do anything about the suffering of the world we must have the strength to face it without turning away.

Vulnerability in the face of constant change is what we share, whatever our present condition.

Our path, our sense of spirituality demands great earnestness, dedication, sincerity & continuity.

Every single moment is expressive of the truth of our lives when we know how to look.

Through meditation we come to know that we are dying & being reborn in every moment.

Meditation is a cyclical process that defies analysis, but demands acceptance.

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.

We can free ourselves from the old stories that have reduced us & allow real love for ourselves to blossom.

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

We don’t need any sort of religious orientation to lead a life that is ethical, compassionate & kind.

We find greater lightness & ease in our lives as we increasingly care for ourselves & other beings.

Once someone appears to us primarily as an object, kindness has no place to root.

The embodiment of kindness is often made difficult by our long ingrained patternsof fear & jealousy.

With mindfulness, loving kindness, and self-compassion, we can begin to let go of our expectations about how life and those we love should be.

Compassion has more to do with the attitude we bring to our encounters with other people than with any quantifiable metric of giving.

The first step toward feeling compassion for others is to set the intention to try it out.

Self-compassion is like a muscle. The more we practice flexing it, especially when life doesn’t go exactly according to plan (a frequent scenario for most of us), the stronger and more resilient our compassion muscle becomes.

We have the power to improve our work lives immeasurably through awareness, compassion, patience & ingenuity.

Not everyone wants to take up meditation, but most people can feel an alignment with values like mutual respect, insightful investigation, listening to one another. Meditation is a way to help those values become real in day-to-day life, helping people to understand themselves more and more and have a way to not get lost in old patterns.

Mindfulness helps us to set boundaries by revealing what makes us unhappy & what brings us peace.

Being happy at work is possible for all of us, anytime & anywhere, with open eyes and a caring heart,Distraction wastes our energy, concentration restores it.

When we experience dissatisfaction at work, which everyone does we can use our disappointment as fuel to wake up.

Forgiveness that is insincere, forced or premature can be more psychologically damaging than authentic bitterness & rage.

To sense which gifts to accept & which to leave behind is our path to discovering freedom.

Sometimes kindness is stepping aside, letting go of our need to be right & just being happy for someone.

The key to cultivating confidence in ourselves is understanding our right to make the truth our own.

While happiness is an end in itself, it is also the state of mind we can have right now.

Mindfulness is the agent of our freedom. Through mindfulness we arrive at faith we grow in wisdom & we attain equanimity.

Thinking we are only supposed to have loving & compassionate feelings can be a terrible obstacle to spiritual practice.

Compassion grows in us when we know how the energy of love is available all around us.

We can discover the capacity of the mind to be aware, to love, to begin again,Integration arises from intimacy with our emotions and our bodies, as well as with our thoughts.

The notion of loving oneself has gotten an undeservedly bad rap, which goes something like this: self-love is narcissistic, selfish, self-indulgent, the supreme delusion of a runaway ego looking out for “number one. ” In fact, just the opposite is true.

Pain & suffering requires time, awareness, and an intentional practice of self-love to disentangle.

Self-love is an unfolding process that gains strength over time, not a goal with a fixed end point.

We truly can reconfigure how we see ourselves and reclaim the love for ourselves that we’re innately capable of.

Although love is often depicted as starry-eyed and sweet, love for the self is made of tougher stuff.

When we believe a wounding story, our whole world is diminished.

Consider how the sky is unharmed by the clouds that pass through it, whether they are light and fluffy-looking or dark and formidable. A mountain is not moved by the winds blowing over it, whether gentle or fierce. The ocean is not destroyed by the waves moving on its surface, whether high or low. In just that way, no matter what we experience, some aspect of ourselves remains unharmed. This is the innate happiness of awareness.

Anger often makes us hurt ourselves more than any enemy.

If we look at the force of anger, we can, in fact, discover many positive aspects in it. Anger is not a passive, complacent state. It has incredible energy. Anger can impel us to let go of ways we may be inappropriately defined by the needs of others; it can teach us to say no. In this way it also serves our integrity, because anger can motivate us to turn from the demands of the outer world to the nascent voice of our inner world. It is a way to set boundaries and to challenge injustice at every level. Anger will not take things for granted or simply accept them mindlessly. Anger also has the ability to cut through surface appearances; it does not just stay on a superficial level. It is very critical; it is very demanding. Anger has the power to pierce through the obvious to things that are more hidden. This is why anger may be transmuted to wisdom. By nature, anger has characteristics in common with wisdom. Nevertheless, the unskillful aspects of anger are immense, and they far outweigh the positive aspects.

Hatred does not help us alleviate our pain even in the slightest.

Concepts such as loving kindness should never be used as weapons against our real feelings.

In one of the verses of Lal Ded, or Lalla, a fourteenth-century mystic from Kashmir, Lalla says: “At the end of a crazy-moon night the love of God rose. I said “It’s me, Lalla. ”“It’s me, Lalla,” becomes “It’s me…whoever you are,” proclaiming that we no longer stand on the sidelines but are leaping directly into the center of our lives, our truth, our full potential. No one can take that leap for us; and no one has to. This is our journey of faith.

The combination of realizing our distinctiveness along with our unity is seeing interdependence.

Respecting differences while gaining insight into our essential connected-ness, we can free ourselves from the impulse to rigidly categorize the world in terms of narrow boundaries and labels.

Our ability to connect with others is innate, wired into our nervous systems, and we need connection as much as we need physical nourishment.

To reteach a thing its loveliness is the nature of metta. Through lovingkindness, everyone & everything can flower again from within.

If we turn away from our own pain, we may find ourselves projecting this aversion onto others, seeing them as somehow inadequate for being in a troubled situation.

The overarching practice of letting go is also one of gaining resilience and insight.

Mindfulness helps us see the addictive aspect of self-criticism— a repetitive cycle of flaying ourselves again and again, feeling the pain anew.

Rather than trying to control what can never be controlled, we can find a sense of security in being able to meet what is actually happening. This is allowing for the mystery of things: not judging but rather cultivating a balance of mind that can receive what is happening, whatever it is. This acceptance is the source of our safety and confidence. When we feel unhappiness or pain, it is not a sign that things have gone terribly wrong or that we have done something wrong by not being able to control the circumstances. Pain and pleasure are constantly coming and going, and yet we can be happy. When we allow for the mystery , sometimes we can discover that right in the heart of a very difficult time, right in the midst of a painful situation, there is freedom. In those moments when we realize how much we cannot control, we can learn to let go. As we begin to understand this, we move from a mode of struggling to control what comes into our lives into a mode of simply wishing to truly connect with what is. This is a radical shift in worldview.

Our vision becomes very narrow when we need things to be a certain way and cannot accept things the way they actually are.

As a friend of mine told me about Real Happiness: you wrote this one in American.

In Buddhism there is one word for mind & heart: chitta. Chitta refers not just to thoughts and emotions in the narrow sense of arising from the brain, but also to the whole range of consciousness, vast & unimpeded.

Fearful of wasting a second, we hoard time as if it were money.

In those moments when we realize how much we cannot control, we can learn to let go.

Real Love for ourselves by definition includes every aspect of our lives—the good, the bad, the difficult, the challenging past, the uncertain future, as well as all the shameful, upsetting experiences and encounters we’d just as soon forget.

Trying to impose our personal agenda on someone else’s experience is the shadow side of love, while real love recognizes that life unfolds at its own pace.

Many strong emotions are actually intricate tapestries woven of various strands.

Even as we live with the knowledge that each day might be our last, we don’t want to believe it.

It is a state of peace to be able to accept things as they are. This is to be at home in our own lives. We see that this universe is much too big to hold on to, but it is the perfect size for letting go. Our hearts and minds become that big, and we can actually let go. This is the gift of equanimity.

I call myself a meditation teacher rather than a spiritual teacher.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As we hone the ability to let go of distraction, to begin again without rancor or judgment, we are deepening forgiveness and compassion for ourselves. And in life, we find we might make a mistake, and more easily begin again, or stray from our chosen course and begin again.

As we work to reweave the strands of connection, we can be supported by the wisdom and lovingkindness of others. .