Sharon Salzberg

All of our actions can signify self-love or self-sabotage

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

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.

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.

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__e interdependent creatures whose very existence depends on the kindness of others, including__ith a bow to Tennessee Williams__trangers.

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.

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

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

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

The heart is a generous muscle.

We are born ready to love and be loved. It is our birthright.

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

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

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

Equanimity can be hard to talk about.

It's tough to have an authentic relationship with awe in the age of awesome, a word that has become so overused as to be drained of its meaning.

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__e perceived as our pain is, at a deeper level, the pain inherent in human existence.

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