Real Happiness Quotes

“How many pleasures escape our notice because we think we need big, dramatic sensations to feel alive? Mindfulness can allow us to experience fully the moment in front of us - what Thoreau calls 'the bloom of the present ' - and to wake up from neutral so we don't miss the small, rich moments that add up to a dimensional life.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation

“When we can't let the moment in front of us be what it is (because we're afraid that if it's good, it'll end too soon; if it's bad, it'll go on forever; and if it's neutral, it'll bore us to tears), we're out of balance. Mindfulness restores that balance; we catch our habitual reactions of clinging, condemning, and zoning out, and let them go.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation

“Continuous Partial Attention involves an artificial sense of constant crisis, of living in a 24/7, always-on world. It contributes to feeling stressed, overwhelmed, overstimulated, and unfulfilled; it compromises our ability to reflect, to make decisions, and to think creatively.” Not”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness

“May my practice be dedicated to your well-being.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program, Regular Version

“relaxed perseverance.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation

“I need to start over. I can’t just stay stuck in this place.” This is a wonderful skill to bring to your life.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation

“You could search the whole world over and never find anyone as deserving of your love as yourself.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation

“What’s really transformative is our willingness to keep going, our openness to possibility, our patience, our effort, our humor, our growing self-knowledge, and the strength that we gain as we keep going.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness

“How many pleasures escape our notice because we think we need big, dramatic sensations to feel alive? Mindfulness can allow us to experience fully the moment in front of us—what Thoreau calls “the bloom of the present”—and to wake up from”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: A 28-Day Program to Realize the Power of Meditation, Enhanced Version

“We cultivate mindfulness to help us distinguish the actual experience from the story we tell ourselves.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: A 28-Day Program to Realize the Power of Meditation, Enhanced Version

“A grandfather (occasionally it’s a grandmother) imparting a life lesson to his grandson tells him, “I have two wolves fighting in my heart. One wolf is vengeful, fearful, envious, resentful, deceitful. The other wolf is loving, compassionate, generous, truthful, and serene.” The grandson asks which wolf will win the fight. The grandfather answers, “The one I feed.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program, Regular Version

“I have two wolves fighting in my heart. One wolf is vengeful, fearful, envious, resentful, deceitful. The other wolf is loving, compassionate, generous, truthful, and serene.” The grandson asks which wolf will win the fight. The grandfather answers, “The one I feed.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness

“and”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness

“You can access the forces of mindfulness and lovingkindness at any moment, without anyone knowing you’re doing it. You don’t have to walk excruciatingly slowly down the streets of a major metropolis alarming everyone around you (in fact, please don’t);”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program, Regular Version

“The mind is like the ocean ... no matter what the surface conditions are like, whether it’s smooth or choppy ... deep in the ocean it’s tranquil and serene. From the depth of the ocean, you can look toward the surface and simply notice the activities there, just as from the depth of the mind you can look upward toward ... all that activity of mind—the thoughts, feelings, sensations, and memories.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness

“IMAGINE RECLAIMING ALL THE ENERGY that could be available to us but isn’t because we scatter it, squandering it on endlessly regretting the past, worrying about the future, berating ourselves, blaming others, checking Facebook yet again, throwing ourselves into serial snacking, workaholism, recreational shopping, recreational drugs.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation

“carrying on a conversation at dinner and texting under the table.... Continuous Partial Attention involves an artificial sense of constant crisis, of living in a 24/7, always-on world. It contributes to feeling stressed, overwhelmed, overstimulated, and unfulfilled; it compromises our ability to reflect, to make decisions, and to think creatively.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation

“Thich Nhat Hanh: “To dwell in the here and now does not mean you never think about the past or responsibly plan for the future,” he says. “The idea is simply not to allow yourself to get lost in regrets about the past or worries about the future.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation

“Assumptions block direct experience and prevent us from gathering information that could bring us comfort and relief, or information that, though saddening and painful, will allow us to make better decisions.”
― Sharon Salzberg, The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Programme for Real Happiness

“Continuous Partial Attention involves an artificial sense of constant crisis, of living in a 24/7, always-on world. It contributes to feeling stressed, overwhelmed, overstimulated, and unfulfilled; it compromises our ability to reflect, to make decisions, and to think creatively.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation

“Pain is tough, but it’s going to leave us. Pleasure is wonderful, but it’s going to leave us. You can’t hang on to pleasure; you can’t stop pain from coming; you can be aware.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation

“I once complained to my teacher Munindra-Ji about being unable to maintain a regular practice. 'When I sit at home and meditate and it feels good, I'm exhilarated, and I have faith and I know that it's the most important thing in my life,' I said. 'But as soon as it feels bad, I stop. I'm disheartened and discouraged so I just give up.' He gave me quite a wonderful piece of advice. 'Just put your body there, ' he said. 'That's what you have to do. Just put your body there. Your mind will do different things all of the time, but you just put your body there. Because that's the expression of commitment, and the rest will follow from that.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation

“Robert Thurman, professor of Buddhist studies at Columbia University, often uses an amusing and powerful image to describe what living compassionately, with lovingkindness, could look like: 'Imagine you're on the New York City subway,' he begins, 'and these extraterrestrials come and zap the subway car so that all of you in it are going to be together...forever.' What do we do? If someone is hungry, we feed them. If someone is freaking out, we try to calm them down. We might not like everybody, or approve of them - but we're going to be together forever, so we need to get along, take care of one another, and acknowledge that our lives are linked. Isn't living on planet Earth like being in that subway car? We're all together forever; our lives are linked.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation

“Several performers have told me that they do the following brief lovingkindness meditation if they have stage fright: Standing in front of an audience, before they start acting, playing music, or reciting a poem, they send out wishes for the well-being of everyone in the room. 'When I do that,' one singer told me, 'I no longer have a sense of the audience as a group of hostile people out there waiting to judge me. I feel, okay, here we all are together.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation

“Being mindful of the moment doesn't mean that we give up savoring memories or setting goals. I like to quote Thich Nhat Hanh: 'To dwell in the here and now does not mean you never think about the past or responsibly plan for the future,' he says. 'The idea is simply not to allow yourself to get lost in regrets about the past or worries about the future. If you are firmly grounded in the present moment, the past can be an object of inquiry, the object of your mindfulness and concentration. You can attain many insights by looking into the past. But you are still grounded in the present moment.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation

“[Meditation] trains us to be with a painful experience in the moment, without adding imagined distress and difficulty. If we look closely at it, the pain is bound to change, and that's as true of a headache as it is of a heartache: the discomfort oscillates; there are beats of rest between moments of unpleasantness. When we discover firsthand that pain isn't static, that it's a living, changing system, it doesn't seem as solid or insurmountable as it did at first.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation

“That’s life: starting over, one breath at a time.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness

“May the actions that I take toward the good, toward understanding myself, toward being more peaceful be of benefit to all beings everywhere. And”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program, Regular Version

“At Bob Dylan’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, Bruce Springsteen described hearing Dylan’s music for the very first time. Springsteen was fifteen, he said, riding in the car with his mother, idly listening to the radio, when “Like a Rolling Stone” came on. It was as though, Springsteen recalled, “somebody took his boot and kicked open the door to your mind.” His mother’s verdict: “That man can’t sing.” Mrs. Springsteen’s response reminds us that we don’t all react the same way to the same experience—and her son’s reminds us that life holds moments when our perspective dramatically shifts, when our assumptions are deeply challenged, when we see new possibilities or sense for the first time that whatever has been holding us back from freedom or creativity or new ventures might actually be overcome. There”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program, Regular Version

“Famed basketball coach Phil Jackson, a meditator himself, arranged to have his players—first the Chicago Bulls, and then the L.A. Lakers—learn meditation as a way to improve their focus and teamwork. Jackson finds that mindfulness assists players in paying attention to what’s happening on the court moment by moment. Such precise training in attention has paid off during tense playoffs; Jackson has led more teams to championships than any coach in NBA history. Meditation”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program, Regular Version