Sharon Salzberg

b. 1952 · American meditation teacher & author

Sharon Salzberg is an American Buddhist teacher and a co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. She is best known for popularizing metta (lovingkindness) practice in the West, above all through her 1995 book Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness, where this now-famous phrasing was presented as words of the Buddha. She studied under Burmese teachers including Mahasi Sayadaw, whose 1983 rendering of the Udāna using the word “deserves” appears to be the seed of the modern wording.

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“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection”

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