Sharon Salzberg: The Teacher of Lovingkindness

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 13 August 2026 · Updated 14 September 2026

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Sharon Salzberg (born 1952) is an American meditation teacher and author, a co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society, and — more than anyone else in the West — the teacher who brought lovingkindness (mettā) meditation into the mainstream.

For five decades she has taught insight and lovingkindness and written a shelf of widely read books, making the deliberate cultivation of goodwill a central practice for modern practitioners. She is one of the most beloved teachers of Western Buddhism.

To India, at eighteen

Salzberg’s path began early and far from home. Born in New York City in 1952, she had, by her own account, a childhood marked by loss and instability — an experience that later gave her teaching much of its warmth and its understanding of the wounded heart. She met Buddhism first in a classroom: an Asian philosophy course at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1969, at the university from which she would graduate summa cum laude in 1972. It sent her to India in 1970 on an independent-study programme, carrying, in her own words, “an intuition that the methods of meditation would bring me some clarity and peace.” By January 1971 she was in Bodh Gaya — the very place of the Buddha’s awakening — sitting her first intensive meditation course: a ten-day retreat with the teacher S. N. Goenka. She was eighteen. The practice took hold, and she stayed in Asia for several years to deepen it.

Her teachers

Over those years Salzberg studied with a remarkable series of teachers, and her own account of what each gave her is more particular than the usual list of names. S. N. Goenka — an Indian businessman who had come to meditation to cure his migraines, and who ran ten-day intensives in which lay people lived like monastics — taught her, she writes, “pure, impersonal love”: it was plain that he wanted nothing from her. The gentle Indian master Anagarika Munindra, who dressed in white and taught that every action can be meditation, said something to her early on that she has been repeating ever since: “The Buddha’s enlightenment solved the Buddha’s problem, now you solve yours.” Visiting the Bengali laywoman Dipa Ma meant climbing four flights to a nearly bare room in Calcutta, where, in Salzberg’s telling, she would take her visitor’s head in her hands and then, over tea, push her past her self-imposed limits — “You can do it.” “Sit longer.” “Be more diligent.” And the exacting Burmese master Sayadaw U Pandita, who came to Barre to teach a three-month retreat, met her carefully written notes on her sitting and walking practice with a question about something else entirely: “Tell me everything you noticed when you put on your shoes.” The next day it was washing her face. Soon, she writes, she was practising mindfulness in everything she did.

The Tibetan half of her training

It is easy to assume that the founders of American insight meditation were formed by Theravāda teachers alone. Salzberg’s own list of influences says otherwise. Alongside her Burmese and Indian teachers she names four Tibetan masters — Kalu Rinpoche, with whom she studied near Darjeeling while living in a hut with no solid roof or walls; Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, whom she went to Nepal to find in 1991; Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche; and Tsoknyi Rinpoche — as well as the Dalai Lama, whom she first met in India in 1970 and whose teachings she has attended ever since. Her home is the Theravāda insight tradition, and her mettā teaching rests on the Pāli sources; but the people who formed her reach well into Tibetan Buddhism.

Founding the Insight Meditation Society

Back in the United States, Salzberg joined Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, and Jacqueline Schwartz (later Jacqueline Mandell) to co-found the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Barre, Massachusetts, in 1975 — its retreat centre opening in 1976. IMS became the great East Coast home of American vipassanā, and Salzberg has taught there ever since. In 1990 she and Goldstein went on to co-found the neighbouring Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, devoted to study and scholarship alongside practice. (The dates deserve a note. IMS’s own history says that in 1975 Goldstein, Salzberg and Kornfield decided to start a retreat centre and that it opened on 14 February 1976; her biography dates the founding to 1976, the year it opened. For the Barre Center the two accounts genuinely differ: the centre’s own about page says it was founded in 1990, her biography says 1989. We give both rather than quietly pick one.)

The art of lovingkindness

Salzberg’s distinctive contribution is lovingkindness (mettā) — the systematic cultivation of goodwill, first toward oneself and then, in widening circles, toward friends, strangers, difficult people, and all beings. It is an ancient Buddhist practice, rooted in discourses such as the Mettā Sutta; what Salzberg did was to bring it from the edges of Western practice to its centre, and to show, with unusual tenderness, how it heals.

Her own route into it was slow. She learned mindfulness meditation in 1971 and, by her account, did “bits of lovingkindness meditation for years” before going to Burma in 1985 and immersing herself in it completely — the training that stands behind the book she published ten years later. What drew her, she has written, was the claim that the Buddha taught lovingkindness as the direct antidote to fear, “and I knew I had fear aplenty.” She has described much of her life’s work as an inquiry into how those two practices meet: “The quality of lovingkindness is the secret sauce in mindfulness meditation.”

She is careful — and it is worth being careful with her — to say that she did not invent lovingkindness meditation; it is as old as the tradition. Her gift was to make it usable: to teach, from her own hard-won experience, that a mind trained in goodwill is not naïve but strong, and that genuine happiness is a skill that can be practised. Alongside mettā she teaches the other “divine abodes” — compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity — and, in recent years, has brought meditation to secular audiences in workplaces and public life.

Mettā is not niceness

The commonest misreading of lovingkindness is that it means acquiescence — that a person full of goodwill must let others do as they like with them. Salzberg met that head-on in Lovingkindness with a story against herself. Riding a hand-drawn rickshaw through the back alleys of Calcutta, she was stopped by a very large man who grabbed her and tried to pull her off it; the friend riding with her pushed him away and they escaped to the station. Shaken, she reached Bodh Gaya and told Munindra what had happened.

Reviewing the book when it appeared, Catherine Ingram called the acceptance it teaches “not the acceptance of resignation” but “an empowered and practical understanding.” That is the distinction Salzberg’s readers most often need: mettā is a stance of the heart, not a rule about what your hands may do.

Why she begins with the self

Mettā is traditionally developed in widening circles that begin with oneself — and for Western practitioners that first circle is reliably the hardest. Why Salzberg holds them to it anyway goes back, in part, to a conversation she had in 1990, at a small Mind & Life Institute conference in India. She asked the Dalai Lama what he thought about self-hatred. He looked confused, she writes, and asked back: “What’s that?” When she explained — “the cycle of self-judgment, guilt, unproductive thought patterns” — he asked her, “How could you think of yourself that way?”, and said that we all have “Buddha nature.”

She tells that story carefully, and her caution belongs with it: “I don’t want to deify Asian culture, or Tibetan people, or Buddhist thought,” she writes. “There are problems in every society, group, and philosophical school.” One teacher’s astonishment is not evidence that self-judgment is unknown in Asia. What it showed her was that the self-hatred she had carried to the cushion at eighteen was not a fixed feature of the human mind — and so was not something a practice had to work around. She had already found she could not meditate from that place at all; only by challenging her own self-judgment, she writes, did anything begin to shift.

That is why the self comes first in her teaching — though not, she is careful to say, because self-love is a prerequisite for loving anyone else. The goal, she writes, is “to cultivate a sense of balance, resilience, spaciousness, and comfort in the idea of unity.” The first circle comes first because it is where the obstruction is. And when a practice collapses she offers the phrase she had from Dipa Ma, who said it to a retreatant who had slipped off to a motel to watch football and was dreading having to tell her: “Now you can begin again.” The method itself — the phrases, the circles, the cautions — is set out on our page on loving-kindness meditation. Her own wording moves about: the four lines along the foot of her website are “may you be safe,” “may you be happy,” “may you be healthy,” “may you live with ease,” while the column she wrote for On Being anchors the practice with “May I be happy. May I be peaceful. May I be strong. May I live with ease.”

Her books

Salzberg’s landmark book is Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness (Shambhala, 1995). Catherine Ingram’s verdict on publication: “The first exhaustive description of the various practices of metta published in the western world.” Her later bestseller Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation (Workman, 2010; a second edition followed in 2019) offers a practical, four-week program that has started many thousands of people meditating. In all she has written fourteen books, which her own biography lists as:

• Lovingkindness — Shambhala, 1995
• A Heart as Wide as the World — Shambhala, 1997
• Voices of Insight — Shambhala, 1999 (as editor)
• Faith — Riverhead Books, 2002
• The Force of Kindness — Sounds True, 2005
• The Kindness Handbook — Sounds True, 2008
• Real Happiness — Workman, 2010 and 2019
• Love Your Enemies, with Robert Thurman — Hay House, 2013 and 2023
• Real Happiness at Work — Workman, 2013
• Real Love — Flatiron, 2017
• Real Change — Flatiron, 2021
• Real Life — Flatiron, 2023
• Finding Your Way — Workman, 2023
• Kind Karl, with Jason Gruhl — Shambhala, 2025, her first children’s book

Where to find her teaching

Salzberg still teaches at IMS in Barre, where she sits on the guiding teachers’ Founders Council, and online. Her podcast, The Metta Hour, has passed eight million downloads and carries hundreds of interviews with figures from inside Buddhism and far outside it — Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach, Jon Kabat-Zinn, the Dalai Lama, Ram Dass, bell hooks. She wrote a weekly column for On Being from 2015 to 2018, and her Street Lovingkindness videos, released from August 2015 into 2016 — filmed in Grand Central Station, standing in line, stuck in traffic — take mettā, in the series’ own words, “off the cushion and into your life.”

Much of her teaching has gone to people who will never sit a three-month retreat: she has worked with 9/11 first responders and with domestic violence shelter workers, spoken alongside the Dalai Lama and at the State of the World Forum, and offers non-sectarian retreats aimed particularly at those who face oppression and injustice.

Legacy

Sharon Salzberg took a practice that could have remained a specialist’s technique and made it a gift for everyone — teaching a generation of Western practitioners that the heart, like the mind, can be trained, and that goodwill is the ground of a genuinely happy life. Her work is woven through the whole story of Buddhism in the West.

For the teacher whose depth so influenced her, see Dipa Ma; for her fellow IMS founders, Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein; and for the practice she is known for, lovingkindness meditation.