Sharon Salzberg: The Teacher of Lovingkindness

By Tim Yu · Updated 2026-08-13

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. As a college student she travelled to India, and in 1971, in Bodh Gaya — the very place of the Buddha’s awakening — she sat her first meditation retreat: a ten-day course 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. After Goenka, she learned from the gentle Indian master Anagarika Munindra; from the extraordinary Bengali laywoman Dipa Ma — a widow and mother who reached great depths of practice and became a teacher of several of the Western founders; and from the rigorous Burmese master Sayadaw U Pandita. Between them they gave her both the precision of insight meditation and the heart-practices of lovingkindness that would become her life’s subject.

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 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.

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.

Her books

Salzberg’s landmark book is Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness (1995), which introduced metta meditation to a broad Western readership and remains a classic of the subject. Her later bestseller Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation (2010) offers a practical, four-week program that has started many thousands of people meditating. She has written many further books, on faith, on lovingkindness, and on bringing practice into ordinary life.

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. Unfamiliar terms are in the glossary.