Sharon Salzberg

Healing, Health, Hope: Being Still

I used to think that being “successful” in meditation meant clearing the mind of every scrap of thought, sitting still and motionless, the mind as pristine and empty as a cloudless blue sky on a summer’s day.

“You’ll never be any good at that,” I told myself. As an over-thinking Enneagram 6, my mind revs as fast as the engine on my husband’s high-powered sports car. I feel like it’s perpetually “pedal to the metal” in there, even in the middle of the night.

And yet I kept feeling a deep hunger to quiet my mind, to shut down the engines of anxiety and worry, to silence the incessant odometer of things-I-need-to do that clicks off like the miles on a cross-country trip.


Healing, Health, Hope: Happiness is Contagious

For most of my life I’ve rushed headlong into things. I’ve hurried and flurried about, trying to do all things for all people all the time. I say “Yes” far too often without considering all the ramifications of what I’ve just agreed to, and then sink into a pool of regret a moment later. I get swept up in feelings, most of them negative – anxiety, loss, sadness, insecurity. I busy myself trying to make everything perfect and make everyone around me happy all the time and mostly make myself unhappy in the process. I overreact to emotional situations and then resort to numbing behaviors to calm myself down.

How has it taken me 65 years of life on earth to figure out there might be a better way to live?