“Life is like an ever-shifting kaleidoscope – a slight change, and all patterns alter.”
“It doesn’t matter how long we may have been stuck in a sense of our limitations. If we go into a darkened room and turn on the light, it doesn’t matter if the room has been dark for a day, a week, or ten thousand years — we turn on the light and it is illuminated. “
These quotes are from Sharon Salzberg, a best-selling author and teacher of Buddhism (of the Theravada tradition). Her writing and instruction on meditation focuses upon loving-kindness, metta, and insight, vispassana, meditation. She has been leading meditation retreats around the world for over the last three decades of her life, and her books include Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness, A Heart as Wide as the World, and Real Happiness – The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program.
Her work is a powerful resource for anyone living with pain.
She has lent a lot of her recent time and attention on addressing the experience and needs of care-providers. Sharon believes that care-providing with compassion and resilience depends upon
” …..choosing to inhabit a world where we treat ourselves with love, where we know deeply and truly that compassion for ourselves is not weak or self-defeating or an excuse for surrender or passivity. Rather, it is a force that opens the door to a completely different way of relating to others and to our own experience so we constantly grow and change, and continue to serve”