Sharon Salzberg

Expansiveness helps broaden our perspective, so we can think more flexibly and with a more open mind. We become better able to focus on the big picture and not feel so discouraged by the constant array of ups and downs we experience every day. When faced with adversity, we can generate more solutions. Expansiveness invites experimentation and imagination. We’re more willing to pour ourselves fully into life’s pursuits. It is the freedom of letting down the burden we have been carrying. It leaves room for our fundamentally loving hearts to uncoil, and lead us onward.

You are a person worthy of love. You don’t have to do anything to prove that. You don’t have to climb Mt. Everest, write a catchy tune that goes viral on YouTube, or be the CEO of a tech start-up who cooks every meal from scratch using ingredients plucked from your organic garden. If you’ve never received an award and there are no plaques proclaiming your exceptional gifts hanging on your walls, you still deserve all the love in the world. Y

The main function of mindfulness is to be the platform for insight or understanding—it's changing our relationship to everything so we can see deeply what our experience actually is, who we actually are, and where happiness actually comes from. Mindfulness is a quality of attention where our perception of what's happening is not so distorted by bias—we don't have so many assumptions running or a big agenda going—and we're not so guided by what we hope or fear. We can see things more clearly, because even if those veils arise, we don't have to get caught in them. We see them, and we can relinquish them more easily and come back to the moment.