Sharon Salzberg Quotes

You're only as sick as your secrets.

We are all human beings, immigrant or non-immigrant. We all feel fear. We all love and become confused when we don't act as well as we would like to. We all get depressed and have feelings of uselessness. All of these things are true and have always been true.

It's a rare and precious thing to be close to suffering because our society - in many ways - tells us that suffering is wrong. If it's our own suffering, we try to hide it or isolate ourselves. If others are suffering, we're taught to put them away somewhere so we don't have to see it.

There is so much shame and guilt in our society, and I think it has deprived a lot of people from living fully. We are all facing battles... We've all had someone who has hurt us. So let's talk about it.

So many people have really wanted to die. They seem ashamed to say so. I think it would help if they would say so.

People have a lot of shame and suffering around it and I felt that the best thing I could do was to share my experiences, which I have been doing for a long time, and let people know that of all the things that I've endured.

Every little girl knows about love. It is only her capacity to suffer because of it that increases.

My definition of a friend is somebody who adores you even though they know the things you're most ashamed of.

I would hate to think I'm promoting sadness as an aesthetic. But I grew up in not just a family but a town and a culture where sadness is something you're taught to feel shame about. You end up chronically desiring what can be a very sentimental idea of love and connection. A lot of my work has been about trying to make a space for sadness.

We live in an emotionally fragile culture. We are in touch with every hurt past, present, and perceived. We are the walking wounded, and we want everyone to know.

The truth is that we all have lives that are complicated. We all get hurt by people we love sometimes. It's laughable to believe that anyone is immune. The important thing is how you behave.

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you're a human being, you feel, you suffer. You're gay, you're sick, you're nervous or whatever.

I am human, and, yeah, I have very bad days.

I don't need to manufacture trauma in my life to be creative. I have a big enough reservoir of sadness or emotional trauma to last me.

Everyone is different. We all suffer from the disease of being human. There are a thousand cures but no antidotes.

I guess I feel so tortured most of the time, when I see someone else feeling tortured, I get a little perverse glee out of it.

Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ.

I was afraid people wouldn't take me seriously, or would stop respecting me, if I talked about how bad I was feeling. The only people I talked openly about it with was my business partner, Dave Jilk, and my girlfriend - now wife - Amy Batchelor. They were amazingly supportive, but even then, I was deeply ashamed about my weaknesses.

They say that love is blind, but it's trauma that's blind. Love sees what is.

My mother's face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me.

Many women are so wounded that they can't love another person.

It's hard to talk about childhood trauma. It's hard to talk about depression. It's hard to talk about anxiety. And we thought - I wonder if we just open up our subconscious and the things that we think about and hide from people every day and just let them come out in some of these lyrics.

One of the reasons we stay so alone in our lives is because we're ashamed to talk about the hard stuff. It's as simple as that. We're all in pain in different ways, and we don't get the help we need because we're too ashamed to talk about the pain.

This tendency to avoid problems and the emotional suffering inherent in them is the primary basis of all human mental illness

I do believe you're only as sick as your secrets.