Sharon Salzberg

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

What we learn in meditation, we can apply to all other realms of our lives.

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

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

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

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

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.