Home › Magazine › Spring 2009 › A Quiver of the Heart

A Quiver of the Heart

SHARON SALZBERG offers a lesson in compassion.

Sharon Salzberg

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Compassion is known in Buddhist teaching as the quivering of the heart in response to pain or suffering. Finding the right relationship to pain, both ours and that of others, is very complex, because pain can be a tremendously powerful teacher and an opening. It can also be the cause of terrible anger and separation. We can be filled with loneliness and resentment because we’re in pain; we can feel very isolated because we’re in pain; we can feel a lot of guilt in a state of grief, blaming ourselves for something we did or something we didn’t do or something we didn’t say. We can blame ourselves for seemingly being ineffectual in a world that needs so much help.

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