Quotes about real-love-quotes
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Many strong emotions are actually intricate tapestries woven of various strands.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Even as we live with the knowledge that each day might be our last, we don’t want to believe it.
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah -
deep inside the eyes of a true lover lies the heart of a true lover.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
The combination of realizing our distinctiveness along with our unity is seeing interdependence.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
The overarching practice of letting go is also one of gaining resilience and insight.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
The secure attachment of Western psychology is actually akin to Buddhist non-attachment avoid-ant attachment is the inverse of being mindful and present and anxious attachment aligns with Buddhist notions of clinging and grasping.
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah -
Without commitment and real selflessness, real love shall always be like a sea without fish; a forest without the sweet harmonious chorus of the birds and a stomach without food
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Perfection is fragile interacting with something that seems perfect puts it in peril.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
The first step toward feeling compassion for others is to set the intention to try it out.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
In reality, love is fluid; it’s a verb, not a noun.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Asking questions is an opportunity for creativity and personal expression, both for the person asking and the person answering.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Forgiveness is a process, an admittedly difficult one that often can feel like a rigorous spiritual practice.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Telling the story, acknowledging what has happened and how you feel, is often a necessary part of forgiveness.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Loving ourselves calls us to give up the illusion that we can control everything and focuses us on building our inner resource of resilience.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
There’s no denying that it takes effort to set the intention to see our fundamental connected-ness with others.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
If we truly loved ourselves, we’d never harm another. That is a truly revolutionary, celebratory mode of self-care.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
The more we practice mindfulness, the more alert we become to the cost of keeping secrets.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
We’re capable of much more than mediocrity, much more than merely getting by in this world.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Our minds tend to race ahead into the future or replay the past, but our bodies are always in the present moment.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
The skills available to us through mindfulness make it possible to bring love to our connections with others.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
What we learn in meditation, we can apply to all other realms of our lives.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Keeping secrets is a consequential act for all involved.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
So often, fear keeps us from being able to say yes to love—perhaps our greatest challenge as human beings.
Sharon Salzberg -
Learning to treat ourselves lovingly may at first feel like a dangerous experiment.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
By accepting and learning to embrace the inevitable sorrows of life, we realize that we can experience a more enduring sense of happiness.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
The journey to loving ourselves doesn’t mean we like everything.
Sharon Salzberg -
When we direct a lot of hostile energy toward the inner critic, we enter into a losing battle.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
When we approach the journey acknowledging what we do not know and what we can’t control, we maintain our energy for the quest.
Sharon Salzberg -
When we relate to ourselves with loving kindness, perfectionism naturally drops away.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
When we contemplate the miracle of embodied life, we begin to partner with our bodies in a kinder way.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
The heart contracts when our bodies are overcome by shame.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
To imagine the way we think is the singular causative agent of all we go through is to practice cruelty toward ourselves.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
It’s affirming that we can look at any experience from the fullness of our being and get past the shame we carry.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
We can use meditation as a way to experiment with new ways of relating to ourselves, even our uncomfortable thoughts.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Paying attention to the ethical implications of our choices has never been more pressing—or more complicated—than it is today.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Causing harm is never just a one-way street.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Mindfulness is so much wiser and more robust than our inner critic.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Ahimsa Murfi -
Dear men, I’ll make it clear to you. Those who tell you that ‘true love’ is never giving up someone you are in love with are insecure and competitive. Their description on love is based on their needs. Selfish needs. While women who are confident, their spirits fulfilled by themselves know that a 'good bye’ doesn’t mean they never loved you. They realizes that letting you go is what God needs them to do, because both happiness: yours and your lover require taking different journey for spiritual
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Healing comes in many ways, and no one formula fits all.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
In more ways than any of us can name, love is wrapped up with the idea of expectation.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
The heart is a generous muscle.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
These are times when sympathetic joy comes naturally, but in a complex relationship the heart may not leap up so easily.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Laughing at your pettiness probably works better than scolding yourself for it.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
There is no conflict between loving others deeply and living mindfully.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Love is defined by difficult acts of human compassion & generosity.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Love simply, perpetually exists and that it’s a matter of psychic housekeeping to make room for it.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
When we identify the thoughts that keep us from seeing others as they truly are we prepare the ground for real love.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Science tells us that love not only diminishes the experience of physical pain but can make us—and our beloveds—healthier.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Though it may sound paradoxical, identifying our thoughts, emotions, and habitual patterns of behavior is the key to freedom & transformation.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Genuine awe connects us with the world in a new way.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
A key barometer to help us weigh the rightness of our actions is self-respect.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Love seems to open and expand us right down to the cellular level, while fear causes us to contract and withdraw into ourselves.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
The wholesome pursuit of excellence feels quite different from perfectionism.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
We nurture our sense of connection with the larger whole, noticing that the whole is only as healthy as its smallest part.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
You don't have to love yourself unconditionally before you can give or receive real love.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Feelings of apathy as they relate to our relationships often stem from insufficiently paying attention to those around us.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Only when we start to distinguish reality from fantasy that we can humbly, with eyes wide open, forge loving and sustainable connections with others.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Be open to the possibility that there are other paths available to you in relating to yourself and to another.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
How we traverse the space between us when conflict arises has a profound effect on the health and longevity of our relationships.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
The paradigm for our relationships is formed from our earliest experiences and is actually hardwired into our neurological and emotional network.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
We learn from conflicts only when we are willing to do so.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Love is a living capacity within us that is always present, even when we don’t sense it.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
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.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Real Love may run on a lower voltage, but it’s also more grounded & sustainable.