Sharon Salzberg

You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection

Asking questions is an opportunity for creativity and personal expression, both for the person asking and the person answering.

When we learn to respond to disappointments with acceptance, we give ourselves the space to realize that all our experiences__ood and bad alike__re 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__ear, a sense of deficiency, alienation, loneliness.

Kindness is not a fixed trait that we either have or lack, but more like a muscle that can be developed and strengthened.

The practice of loving-kindness is about cultivating love as a trans-formative strength,

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

When emotions are long held and extremely complex, it sometimes takes years for them to enter fully into awareness.

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

Like water poured from one vessel to another, metta _ws freely, taking the shape of each situation without changing its essence.

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

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

Mindfulness isn't difficult, we just need to remember to do it.

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__e perfected self-compassion or befriended our inner critic.

At times, reality is love__ 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__ a verb, not a noun.