Sharon Salzberg Quotes

I meditate twice a day. I chant. I lean more towards Buddhist practices.

Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life - perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody, that is the beauty of it.

Definitely, I think it's much more acceptable, the idea of meditation or yoga. The idea of God trying to contact the soul within ourselves. Back in the 60s it was a bit like, you know , the hippies or the philosophers were the only people.

Take an hour every day at dawn and give it to your Self. Meet your Self there, in the holy moment. Then go about your day. You will be a different person.

For me, first, it's finding quiet in my life - and I do that through yoga and meditation. It's also been a matter of changing the way I eat, because I think what we eat can inform who we are; food is a chemical and a drug to a certain extent.

So I started chanting when I was nineteen, which was about twelve years ago, and it really had a huge impact on my outlook, happiness, and general creativity.

I was about twenty and the Beatles were meditating and I heard about it and they had a center in New York and I came to the center and I learned about it.

I loved science, and when I discovered Buddhist meditative practices and martial arts, I was able to bridge those ways of knowing the world into my own unique way. From that grew the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, which became my karmic assignment.

I meditate and I also think about meditation. Which is funny. I think about Maharishi, about just the idea of meditating. It gives me something.

Meditation, then, is not so much a part of this or that particular religion, but rather part of the universal spiritual culture of all humankind--an effort to bring awareness to bear on all aspects of life. It is, in other words, part of what has been called the perennial philosophy.

My meditation techniques ARE dangerous. In fact there cannot be any meditation techniques which are not dangerous. If they are not dangerous, they are not meditation techniques, they are tricks. Just like Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. They are mental tricks. Just consolatory. No danger. At the most they can give you good sleep, that's all. If you miss, you don't miss anything, you remain the same. If you attain, you attain to good sleep, that's all. No danger involved.

You cannot force meditation, you can only create the situation. And if the situation is created rightly, then meditation happens automatically.

Meditation will change your life for the better, enhance your physical health, improve your sleep, and help you achieve your goals, both material and spiritual.

Millions of people have tried meditation and dropped out of it because they took it very seriously. Religion has been thought to be a very serious affair - it is not. One has to understand - at least those who are with me - that religion is a playfulness, a laughter. Take it easy; then things blossom without any tension. You are not taking it easy, you are making it difficult.

[T]hat is the true function of meditation: to create a space in you where you can be rich, infinitely rich, utterly peaceful, absolutely ecstatic.

I was doing a lot of yoga and learning to meditate, and I found that extremely helpful, and still do and hopefully always will.

Meditation does not mean you have to grin every moment of your life, but to learn to let your bones smile.

Meditation is culture.

You give up not meditating. It's called meditation action. There's no way out of it. Meditation means to be constantly extricating yourself from the clinging of mind.

What is meditation? Meditation is our conscious awareness of something vast and infinite within us. Meditation grants us Peace, Light and Bliss.

Meditation is not to get out of society, to escape from society, but to prepare for a reentery into society.

Meditation is valuable for all of humanity because it involves looking inward. People don't have to be religious to look inside themselves more carefully. It is constructive and worthwhile to analyze our emotions, including compassion and our sense of caring, so that we can become more calm and happy.

Meditation means a state of unconditioned mind. Meditation is the process of undoing the harm that every society goes on doing to every individual - communist or Catholic, Jaina or Jew, it does not matter. I am not talking about any particular conditioning that is wrong; I am saying conditioning AS SUCH is wrong.

Meditation simplifies our outer life and energizes our inner life. Meditation gives us a natural and spontaneous life, a life that becomes so natural and spontaneous that we cannot breathe without being conscious of our own divinity.