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Coming up next on Passion Struck.
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I think we actually do make change moment by moment.
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And sometimes when we look at the bigger problem, it s too much.
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You just think I can t deal.
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That s overwhelming.
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But this moment we can respond in a certain way.
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And then we forget and we lapse.
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We fall down.
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We can pick ourselves up.
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And then this moment.
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We can be different.
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And that s how I think genuine change actually happens.
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It s like taking that aspiration to be different, perhaps to be more loving in every encounter, for example.
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And then we ve just lost our temper or something has happened.
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Do we have some capacity to begin again and to, in effect, have resilience and say, OK, that was bad.
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Now is now.
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Because that s the way progress, I think, actually happens.
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It s not through lamenting for a year and a half.
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Oh, I blew it.
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I had it really bad.
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When we see there was a problem, and we re not denying that, but self-castigation and just endless self-laceration, it s not going to do anything.
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And so learning that ability to begin again, which is intrinsic to meditation practice, I think is really important.
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And also it s looking ahead at the issue, whatever it might be, and realizing, okay, in this moment, this is what I can try to do.
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Or in this moment, if I listen, or in this moment, if I try to be more balanced, that s how it actually happens.
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Welcome to Passion Struck.
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Hi, I m your host, Jon R. Miles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world s most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.
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Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.
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If you re new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.
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We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes.
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Now, let s go out there and become Passion Struck.
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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Episode 430 of Passion Struck, the number one alternative health podcast.
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A heartfelt thank you to each and every one of you who return to the show every week, eager to listen, learn and discover new ways to live better, be better and make a meaningful impact in the world.
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If you re new to the show, thank you so much for being here.
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Or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member.
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And we so appreciate it when you do that.
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We have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans favorite episodes that we organize into convenient topics that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show.
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Either go to spotify or passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started.
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Are you curious to find out where you stand on the path to becoming passionstruck?
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If so, dive into our engaging passionstruck quiz crafted to reflect the core principles shared in my latest book.
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This quiz offers you a dynamic way to gauge your progress on the passionstruck continuum.
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Just head over to PassionStruck.com to embark on this insightful journey.
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With just 20 questions and roughly 10 minutes of your time, don t miss this chance to gain valuable insights into your PassionStruck journey.
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Take the quiz today.
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And in case you missed it, earlier this week, I interviewed Dr. Casey Means, the leading voice in the movement for personalized health.
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Dr. Means brings her expertise in functional medicine to the forefront, discussing innovative ways to decode your body signals, transform your health, and master your metabolism.
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And if you liked that episode with Cassie Means or today s, we would so appreciate you giving it a five star rating and review.
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They go such a long way in strengthening the passion struck community where we can help more people live an intentional life.
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And I know we and our guests love to hear your feedback.
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Today s conversation promises to be nothing short of extraordinary as I sit down with none other than Sharon Salzberg, a true trailblazer whose name has become synonymous with meditation, compassion, and the art of mindful living.
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For over five decades, she s been a beacon of wisdom guiding countless individuals towards greater self-awareness and inner peace.
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She s a meditation pioneer, a world-renowned teacher, a New York Times best-selling author whose work has touched the lives of literally millions around the globe.
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Her journey began with a profound longing for an understanding and a deep-seated desire to alleviate suffering.
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not just her own, but that of humanity as a whole.
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From the bustling streets of New York City to the tranquil landscapes of India, she embarked on a transformative quest that would shape her life s work and inspire generations to come.
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Throughout her illustrious career, she s co-founded renowned meditation centers, authored numerous best-selling books, and shared her insights on platforms.
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ranging from podcasts like this one to international conferences.
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In today s conversation, we ll explore the nuances of mindfulness and meditation, the profound impact of compassion and self-love, and the power of intentional living in shaping our destinies.
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Through her unique perspective and wealth of experience, we ll uncover timeless truths and practical wisdom to empower us on our own journey to become Passion Struck.
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Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.
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Now, let that journey begin.
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I am absolutely honored and thrilled today to have Sharon Salzberg on PassionStruck.
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Welcome, Sharon.
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Thank you so much.
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Sharon, you ve been a pioneer in bringing mindfulness and loving kindness meditation to the mainstream American culture for over five decades now.
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What initially drew you to meditation and how have you seen the landscape of mindfulness evolve over those five decades?
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That s the second part is a very long answer.
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I went to India as a college student.
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I was 18 years old.
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It was my junior year.
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because I went to college early.
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And in my sophomore year, I d done an Asian philosophy course.
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Really, honestly, as far back as I can recollect, it was happenstance.
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I had a philosophy requirement.
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I looked at the schedule.
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I thought, oh, that s on Tuesday.
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How convenient.
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That ll fit in.
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And the course totally changed my life.
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And it was in the context of that course that I heard much more deeply about meditation, that methods, techniques,
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existed that if you undertook them, you could potentially be a whole lot happier.
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And I was not a very happy person.
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I had a very traumatic childhood, as many people do.
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And I was going to college in Buffalo, New York, so I looked around Buffalo, because I really wanted the practical how to, like, how do I experiment with this stuff?
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And I couldn t find it anywhere.
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So I created an independent study project and said, I want to go to India and study meditation.
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And the university accepted that and off I went.
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So that was my junior year abroad, basically.
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And I look back at that moment so often.
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I d grown up in New York City.
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I was going to college in Buffalo.
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I d never even been to California before.
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And I was a very frightened person.
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I was a very fragmented person.
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And suddenly I m thinking, I m going to go to India.
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And I did it, which was really an amazing moment.
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And I stayed a little longer than my year.
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not to be honest, came back, finished school, went back to India, and finally was coming back in 1974 for what I thought was going to be a short trip back before I went back to India for the rest of my life.
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And it ended up being the rest of my life with just some relatively briefer visits to India or Burma or other countries to study.
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So when I first got back,
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I d be at a party or some such situation.
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I wasn t teaching by then because one of my teachers had told me to teach.
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when I got back, so I d be introduced or people would say, what do you do?
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Which is the thing we tend to say.
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And I say, I teach meditation.
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And people would often kind of go, oh, that s weird.
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Or sometimes they d say to me, did you meet the Beatles over there?
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And I d say, no, sadly, they went when I was in high school.
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But of course, I ve seen an enormous change.
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And the word mindfulness back in the day was never used except in a very
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particular, almost like scholarly context.
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If you were looking at things like Buddhism, but now you see mindfulness everywhere.
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And the idea of the practices, the techniques as separate from a belief system, I think has really taken root, which is great.
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And there s research, there s science, which never used to exist, which I also think is great.
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And so it s really everywhere.
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It absolutely is everywhere.
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And I remember being first exposed to it in the most unrealistic place I ever thought I would get exposed to it.
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And that was, I was stationed with a Navy SEAL team, Navy special warfare unit 10.
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And I found that they were using yoga and mindfulness to help them get into their inner self so that they would have calmness when they went into combat like situations.
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But I have to tell you, when I first started to practice it, I thought meditation was a bunch of horse crap.
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And it was very difficult for me because when I first started, I sat in the cross like those and
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just found myself mindlessly wandering all the time.
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And I guess I realized that was part of the path to learning how to meditate because recognizing that your mind is wandering is the first step to bringing it back.
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But for those who might be listening to us today, who aren t really that exposed to meditation, I think there s a common misconception
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said, this is a challenging practice that s reserved for the few.
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How is mindfulness and meditation available to everyone?
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Well, I think there are a couple of ways.
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I think we can talk about meditation as a dedicated period, which you can do in any posture, sitting, standing, walking, lying down.
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where your intention for that period is to see if you can cultivate qualities like awareness and balance, compassion or kindness.
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And you re not sitting down to also think, let me figure out my vacation plan or what about my strategic plan for the company?
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And those things may come up, but that s not your goal.
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So it s a very dedicated period.
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And that period actually doesn t need to last that long.
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I have a friend
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Amishi Jha, who s a neuroscientist at the University of Miami who studies meditation in high-stress professions, military, high-performance athletes, first responders.
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And what her lab has found is that 12 minutes a day of this kind of dedicated practice, three to five times a week, will actually make a difference in people s lives.
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And I always tease her.
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I say, first of all,
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I don t know if it s that healthy to go for the bare minimum.
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And also, for me as an individual, three to five times a week doesn t really work.
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Because if it was me, it d be Monday and I ll think, I ll start on Wednesday.
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And then it d be Wednesday, I ll think, I ll do it three times on Saturday.
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And I d never do it.
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But every day is every day.
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And that s easier for me.
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So with some self-knowledge, one can set up a structure to make the experiment.
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It s not eight hours a day.
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You don t have to, in fact, sit in a pretzel-like pose and be in pain.
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Any posture would do.
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And if you re sitting, you can sit comfortably.
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And it s also important to have, I think, a strong understanding, because people also enter meditation thinking, I m good at it.
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I ll know I m good at it when I have no thoughts at all.
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when I have only beautiful thoughts, when my mind is totally blank and they never get there.
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Because the goal is really not to annihilate parts of our experience.
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It s to be with any experience, beautiful and wondrous or painful and difficult in a different way.
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And that s the skill we actually learn to be more present, more balanced.
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kinder, whatever is going on.
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And then aside from those dedicated periods, however you might choose to experiment with them, there s just life and bringing mindfulness into life.
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We tend as a culture to constantly pretty much be multitasking.
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And it s like you say to yourself, just for a little bit of time,
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not enough to blow up my to-do list, but a little bit of time.
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Let me just drink this cup of tea or coffee and not also be checking my email and also on Zoom and also doing this.
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Let me feel the warmth of the cup, smell the tea, taste the tea or whatever.
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And it s just sprinkling these moments.
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Or maybe the most famous recommendation came from the Vietnamese teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, who said,
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Don t pick up your phone on the first ring.
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Let it ring three times and breathe.
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Then you pick it up.
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So I once gave that piece of advice.
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I was teaching in a financial firm in New York City.
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And I looked up and I saw the complete panic on everyone s faces.
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And I said, OK, for you, maybe just twice.
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Just let it ring twice.
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Even once.
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But it s just that pause, that moment.
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when we come back to ourselves, and then we can respond differently to what s going on.
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And those moments make a difference too.
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Yeah, I know for me, I find that my most comfortable time to practice is very early in the morning.
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I m an early riser, not because it became easy, but because it s the one time I feel like I can give myself the self-care that I need.
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But I do it on a walk with my dog, and I really like it at five o clock in the morning, because what enables me to get in the state is I listen to everything that s around me, that the universe
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is creating and through hearing the birds or the crickets or just looking up at the heavens, I am able to internalize what s going on.
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And I like to do a gratitude practice and then set intentions for the day.
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And that seems to work well for me because I gotten myself into this discipline state of doing it, but I agree with you.
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It doesn t have to necessarily be that long.
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I ve learned.
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I can.
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elongate it the more I ve practiced it.
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But I think the thing I found, like anything, is it just takes repetition and practice to continually evolve.
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I think that s true.
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And I think a really key component when one is practicing with intention, like a gratitude practice, which I think is very beautiful and very healing, is that it s not forced and it s not coerced.
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It s not something violent.
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It s really, for many of us, it s like saying, I think I ll give a little air time to something that is true, but often overlooked by me.
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And gratitude would be a good example of that.
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Many people will say that.
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If you just write down three things, for example, at the end of the day that you re grateful for from the day, or you could, I m not a morning person, so it s inconceivable to me to practice that early in the morning, but if you want to, that s fine, whenever.
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And it s just having some, and I also say for me, genuinely so, that doesn t come naturally.
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I m so much more conditioned.
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Maybe at the end of the day to think about what disappointed me that day, what I can complain about and how I didn t show up maybe the way I wanted to or someone else didn t.
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Or when I was traveling a lot, there was always an airline.
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These days, there s always some technology thing.
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And that s just where my attention goes.
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It s just conditioning.
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And so I almost have to ask myself, anything else happened today?
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anything good and it can be lighthearted and fun and it just opens up a sense of connection to that which I tend to overlook.
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Yeah, I m going to double down on intentionality because it s something you ve mentioned now a few times and in my work on this podcast and my book, I emphasize the importance of living intentionally rather than allowing life to push us around like we re a pinball.
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Could you elaborate on what living intentionally means to you and how individuals can create a greater sense of purpose and direction in their lives?
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Well, I think of it often in terms of a bigger sense.
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It s having a North Star.
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It s having a greater aspiration for one s life.
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May I be a vehicle for loving kindness in this world.
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And if that is your North Star, if that s really how you want to guide your life,
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then maybe your job in particular is not very fulfilling in terms of the job description, but you have the opportunity, every conversation, every encounter, every meeting, to see if you can bring forth that deep intention from within you.
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And so there s a larger picture of what can guide our life
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And that s a real salvation.
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Otherwise we do just flounder around.
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We have so many ups and downs any single day.
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And so much not having, you know, not working exactly as what we would want it to.
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And so we can feel either we re sleepwalking through life or we re just even bitter and disappointed.
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And instead we can bring to life what we really care about.
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And we forget it, of course.
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And yet we can return.
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And again, touching on that deeper sense of meaning.
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And then there s the immediate, I think, function of intention, which I also find very compelling for me.
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Maybe before a meeting, before a major phone call, if I m teaching in an organization, I would suggest, well, why don t you stop for a moment and ask yourself, what do I really want to see most come out of this experience?
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Do I want to be seen as right?
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Do I want a resolution?
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Do I want to grind someone into dust?
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Do I want to help mentor them and point out a way to be better?
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And just returning to that so that we re not just buffeted around by circumstance and we can bring forth the kind of in the moment sense of direction and meaning.
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Well, Sharon, thank you for sharing that.
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And there s a quote that I love by you that I m going to read and I m hoping you can comment a little bit on it.
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You say that there s no commodity we can take with us.
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There s only our lives and whether we live them wisely or whether we live them in ignorance.
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And this is everything.
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Yeah.
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I mean, isn t it so life is so fleeting and often dreamlike and speaking to you on Valentine s day.
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of 2024 and Valentine s Day of 1976 is when we
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I opened the retreat center.
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I co-founded the Insight Meditation Society.
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So today s our anniversary.
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And I m looking back over a lot of years.
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I think, where did they go?
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And I think about the meeting and the not knowing and so many missteps.
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But then we just went on and corrected them.
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There s so much, but underneath all of that, there were some things that are enduring.
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The connections with one another, the real care that we have for one another, the sense of wonder, like watch what has happened.
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We opened this retreat center back in the day when
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We thought, is anybody going to want to come and meditate in a place that used to be a novitiate when we bought it?
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And it just seems gigantic to us.
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It sleeps a hundred people.
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And we thought, how will we ever fill it?
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What if no one here wants to learn how to meditate?
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And watching from those days, and we only had a car because somebody s dad gave them a car.
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And so we had a car.
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We couldn t get a mortgage from the bank to buy the place.
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And so three people went off and got personal loans to help us open.
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And our mantra, our saying every, all day, every year was, for a number of years was, you can always close it down.
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Just close it down.
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If no one wants to come, we ll close it down.
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And sort of watching what has evolved, it s really, life is so fast in some ways.
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And so what endures?
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What are we counting on?
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What sustains?
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It s not the stuff and it s not even the up and down of, I got my way in the meeting or I didn t, that didn t work out that well.
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It s really something else and it has a lot to do with that feeling of connecting to one another and connecting to a bigger picture of life.
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I remember interviewing Hindu priest Dandapani and he made the statement that life isn t short, life is finite.
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And I think it s a really important distinction for us to have to what you just said.
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Well, Sharon, something I want to ask you about, and I m going to be referencing several of your books today.
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This is one of my favorite ones, Loving Kindness, which is really at the core of everything you teach.
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I have been looking at a lot of different research over the past few years, and there s some startling things out there.
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Gallup is reporting that there are 900 million people in 142 countries who feel unfulfilled.
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I was looking at work from Tom Gilovich or at Cornell university, and he examined thousands of people who were nearing death and asked them what their greatest regret in life was.
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And surprisingly, 76% of them came back with the same answer.
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It wasn t the mistakes in life.
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It was the what-ifs, the should-haves, the pursuit of becoming their ideal self.
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I think I personally found myself in this situation when I was younger where I was living very inauthentically.
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And I found that it was almost as if my days had become a masquerade and I was wearing this mask of pretense that was really hiding who I was because I was trying to show up in the way that society wanted me to.
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And I feel right now that many people around the world, 900 million or more, are living in a state that Henry David Thoreau called quiet desperation.
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They re grappling with intimacy, authenticity, and a feeling of disconnection, all things you explore in your book.
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From your perspective, what are the underlying factors that you think are contributing to this widespread experience?
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And we keep hearing about like an epidemic of loneliness, not only in the U.S., but in other cultures.
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And even before the isolation of the pandemic, I would read about the role of social connection and different healing modalities for different clinical conditions and how important it was.
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And I kept thinking, it can t just be a numbers game.
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I only have two friends and eat eight.
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It must be some inner sense of connection of belonging.
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belonging to a bigger picture, belonging to one another, moving from that kind of really rigid self and other and us and them to a sense more of we.
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And because we all know, you know, certainly I know people who are not massive extroverts, they re not going to a party every week or every night at all, or even every year sometimes, but they have an inner sense of such caring and connection.
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with others, and that I think is fractured for many of us.
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We, you know, people tell me, for example, in New York City, that they really miss just the random conversations they would have with a stranger, because everyone s now on their phone.
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in these little silos.
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They said, I used to just talk to the person sitting next to me on the bus or waiting in line at the grocery store or something like that.
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And it was always so interesting, if you re really listening, because then we find ourselves in one another and we re open to surprises and so on.
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And we re afraid and we re polarized and there s so much happening that is having us live in this sense of fragmented reality.
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And it s very sad because it s not going to be resolved by going to five parties a week.
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It really isn t.
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Or endless accumulation of stuff, which we are taught will keep us safe in some way.
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We re secure.
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It s a very deep change around what actually brings us happiness and fulfillment.
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And we can make that change, but it takes intentionality and willingness to check out other ways of being in some way.
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One of the things I have really been honing in on is I received this message or calling or this voice about 15 years ago now was the first time I saw it, which was calling me to help the lonely, the battered, the hopeless, the beaten, the bored of the world.
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And I had no idea what I was being asked to do because it was so foreign to what I was doing at that time.
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But as I spent years of introspection and trying to figure out what was at the heart of this.
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have a profound sense of unmattering.
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They feel like they re waking up in the morning and they re just going through the motions and that nothing holds significance.
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And it s interesting, Sharon, because I ve interviewed over 40 behavior scientists on the show.
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Everyone from Angela Duckworth to Cass Sunstein, Hal Hirschfeld, Ethan Cross, Don Moore.
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I mean, you name it.
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And I asked him who was doing behavioral science research on the topic of mattering.
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And Ethan cross pointed me to the work on self-determination theory, which is a portion of it.
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But what I found is that there was no one until I talked to a professor.
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in England named Thomas Coran, who talks about perfectionism.
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And he said, you need to look at the work that Gordon Flett has been doing at the university of York and Toronto.
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And Gordon was the first person I saw that had been studying mattering.
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And now I just learned talking to Angela Duckworth a couple of weeks ago that Marty Seligman has made it the last portion of his life to study this because he thinks it s so profound.
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But my question for you is I think
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At the core of many of these things that we re seeing around the world, mental health issues and this loneliness and hopelessness, I think it is this mattering or lack thereof that is somehow at the root of this.
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Do you see any correlation to that?
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I completely agree, and it s beautifully put.
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Listening to you and thinking about this other book I wrote called Real Change, which came out right in the middle of the pandemic.
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And I was talking about not only meditation practice and the tools of meditation, but also people who were working, who had a kind of calling for social change in this world, whether they were actually meditators or not, in the kind of strict sense of it.
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And what I found was really at the core of that ability to stand up and take a stand and try to make a difference in the world from a positive place, not from just hatred or fear, was very much the sense of mattering.
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I remember talking to a woman who was one of the leaders of the Striking Fast food worker movement, and I got to meet with several
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of those people who were striking for minimum wage of, I don t know, I think it was like $15 an hour and the right to unionize.
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And these were people who were working in the places that we know of and working 40 hours a week, couldn t afford a house.
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They were often living in shelters and things like that, often weren t paid rightfully.
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And several of them would say, no one I knew wanted me to try to make a difference.
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My family would say to me,
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You have almost nothing right now.
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If you make waves, you will really have nothing.
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Don t fight.
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Don t strike.
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And he said, but I had to do it because I deserve better treatment.
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And not only that, people like me matter.
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I look at the younger generation coming up, and I don t want them to feel hopeless.
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I don t want them to feel that they can t grow and change and get ahead.
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And so I have to stand up and take that risk and do that.
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And that kind of feeling of I matter, you know, and it s not in a divisive way.
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I matter more than anybody.
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I certainly matter more than you. 
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And it s not in a way that was putting anybody down, even people who were in charge of their work environment.
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But it was saying, you know what?
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I can love myself enough or care for myself enough that I can say, this should change.
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And it was so beautiful for me to see that seemed to me to be really at the core of their ability to really be courageous.
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Well, thank you for sharing that and for going into it.
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And I wanted to expand on that because your latest book, Real Life, delves into the intersection of mindfulness and everyday experiences.
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How do you believe cultivating mindfulness can empower individuals on their journey to becoming their ideal selves?
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I think it happens in a number of different ways.
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I think there is a sense of we compared to self and other and us and them in a kind of ossified form, which we tend to live in, that just develops naturally.
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I mean, I ve had countless students, for example, say to me, I was taking a walk and somebody came up to me and asked me for a dollar.
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And I gave him a dollar because that is my habit, to give him a dollar.
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But this was the first time I ever looked that person in the eye and realized that s a human being.
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And so many of those experiences are available to us because we are all human beings with hopes and dreams and frailties and efforts and all of that.
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And so it s not like we enter some fog of delusion like everything s fine because it s not all fine and everyone s behavior is fine because that s not all fine either.
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But we can have a sense of kind of cherishing the humanity of us all, including ourselves, and wishing well for those who are suffering and those who are causing suffering.
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May they come out of it.
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May they see more clearly in some way.
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And that s available to us.
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And I ve seen that over and over again.
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That s just a natural unfolding.
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There s also a sense of curiosity.
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that can develop.
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We learn it in the internal work.
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We develop an interest in our experience instead of fighting it or being lost in it in some way.
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And we can take that interest and curiosity right into our relationships, our encounters, our situations.
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And it totally enriches our lives because we re always learning and getting new perspectives on things and things like that.
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We
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I think of the stress dynamic, which is a dynamic, and there s the pressure or circumstance or incident that s happening, and there s the resource with which it s met.
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So that resource is both our inner strengths and sense of community, not feeling so alone.
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And it makes a difference.
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We know that from ordinary life.
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Maybe you didn t sleep last night.
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And you go to work, and you overhear a comment, and you just take it to heart.
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That s the most terrible thing.
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And in contrast to, you had a beautiful night s sleep and a breakfast with loving friends, and you feel on top of the world, and you go to work, and you hear the comment, and you think, person s having a really bad day.
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It s just different.
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And some of these people hear that and they think it means, oh, I m not going to do anything to try to change the circumstance, which is not true.
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But why try to seek change from maximum depletion and exhaustion and overwhelm?
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Why not build that sense of resource and then go on from there?
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I like that you went there because to me, if we want to change, I think change starts with the choices that we end up making in our life.
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And it s interesting because on this show, I didn t want to be one of those self-improvement podcasts that just gave people advice and had none of it backed up.
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by anything.
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So I ve specifically tried to bring on people like you, like Jeff Walker, like behavior scientists and doctors to explain why these things are true.
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But as I ve examined many of the thoughts of these behavior scientists, they really come back to the profound impact of our choices on our lives.
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And given, I just interviewed Cass Sunstein who wrote Nudge and really talked about choice architecture.
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How do you think
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That choice architecture impacts our environment, our habits, our mindset, and affects our journey towards where we want to go in life.
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Well, I think we actually do make change moment by moment.
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And sometimes when we look at the bigger problem, it s too much.
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You just think, I can t deal.
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That s overwhelming.
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But this moment, we can respond in a certain way.
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And then we forget, and we elapse, we fall down.
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We can pick ourselves up and then this moment we can be different.
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And that s how I think genuine change actually happens.
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It s like taking that aspiration to be different, perhaps to be more loving in every encounter, for example.
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And then we ve just lost our temper or something has happened.
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Do we have some capacity to begin again?
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And to in effect, have resilience and say, okay.
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That was bad.
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Now is now.
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Because that s the way progress, I think, actually happens.
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It s not through lamenting for a year and a half.
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Oh, I blew it.
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I had a really bad issue.
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And we see there was a problem, and we re not denying that.
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self castigation and just endless self laceration, it s not going to do anything.
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And so learning that ability to begin again, which is intrinsic to meditation practice, I think is really important.
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And also, it s looking ahead at the issue, whatever it might be, and realizing, okay, this in this moment,
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this is what I can try to do, or in this moment, if I listen, or in this moment, if I try to be more balanced, that s how it actually happens.
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It s interesting because when I think of what you re talking about, I think about Jeff Walker s work on systems change.
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And when you think about the world of systems change, he s trying to solve huge issues such as famine in Africa or water shortages throughout the world or climate change.
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And these things seem like they re so colossal and almost impossible to solve.
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But I think the same thing you can equate to the change in your own life from wherever you are if you re in that state of quiet desperation to the opposite that you want to become and I think what causes people to fall out of their New Year s resolutions and so many other things.
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is to the point you just made.
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They try to do too many things at once.
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They try to do this big bang.
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And I think it all comes with a series of these tiny actions that you take because what got you there in the beginning took a lot of tiny actions to get, and you re not going to just break out of it by
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doing the sweeping motion, it s going to take the same resolve.
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And I think the same thing happens when you think of these systems changes, it s got to be a collective group effort of making choices towards solving these issues.
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Is that how you think about it too?
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I do.
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And I think I m also listening to and reminded of this time when I was teaching next door at the Insight Meditation Society and my colleague,
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was giving the evening talk and she was talking about the time when she began meditating for the very first time and I was one of her teachers and that had been maybe 20 years before and so she said to the group, 20 years ago I did my first retreat and one day I was so restless
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I thought I was going to just jump out of my skin.
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And I went to see Sharon and I said, has anyone ever died of restlessness from doing meditation?
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And she said, so naturally I was very interested.
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What did I say 20 years before?
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And she went on to say, not from just one moment at a time of it.
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And I thought, that was a really good answer.
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I m glad I knew that 20 years ago, because that s the truth.
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I m so restless.
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I can t do this.
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Everyone else can do it.
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But in this moment, can I be with the restlessness in a different way?
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Can I give myself a break and have some kindness or try this to bring some more balance?
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But just this moment and just this moment and this moment of grief or this moment of sorrow, this moment of disappointment, even this moment of joy, because we tend to overlook it.
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We may have a very weird, many people do, relationship to pleasure and joy.
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I don t deserve it.
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I m not going to let it in.
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I m too busy, whatever it might be.
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And to actually stop and say, okay, for this moment, I m going to take it in.
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I m just going to actually let myself experience.
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it in this moment.
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It s a different life.
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One of the things I ve really tried to explore on the show is self-actualization.
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I ve had David Vago, who you might know, David Yadin.
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I ve had Dr. Judd on the show.
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I ve had Dan Harris looking at this, Scott Berry Kaufman.
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What do you think are the magic ingredients when it comes to trying to pursue our self-realized self?
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Yeah, I know many of those people, of course, quite well.
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And I think one of the things I learned from Scott, Barry Kaufman, was really self-actualization is not linear.
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It just is really a path to realization.
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And so the Buddhist context is not actually linear.
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We hear the word path, and we think, oh, I did those beginning stages.
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They re done.
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I m never going back there.
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But really, it s more cyclical.
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onward leading in that way.
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And so I think really not having that kind of model of perfection really
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disdaining your experience in some way because it feels like you should have been done with that already.
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I don t think life s like that.
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I don t think evolution is like that.
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And so I feel like for me, looking back over all these years of meditation, many ways I ve learned some of the same things on again and again and again, but in hopefully an ever deeper way.
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So it s been important, new ground in some way, even though it s the same kind of basic lesson.
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Like don t judge your experience, try to be with it differently.
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It would be one major one.
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And I can look back at this teacher suggesting that in 1972 and this other teacher suggesting it in 1975.
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And then it obviously was a theme in my own experience.
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And yet each time was deeper and different and more kind of influential in terms of my everyday life.
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SPEAKER_00
Sharon, for some of the listeners who might not be familiar with some of the things that you cover, one of the topics is equanimity.
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And I was hoping you might be able to explain this because it s not a word that many people use in daily life.
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Yeah, it is Devaga.
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It s a specialty in research.
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It is a word that is unusual.
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My first meditation teacher way back in India in 1971, January of 1971,
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was a man named SN Goenka who had just left Burma for India and was teaching these intensive 10 day retreats.
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And he would often say, be equanimous, be equanimous, be equanimous.
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And we used to whisper to one another, is that a word?
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What does that mean?
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I never heard that before.
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And of course, it s a strange form of the word, but even the word equanimity can mean to us, it can imply indifference or coldness or kind of sullen withdrawal from life.
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It s a little bit like that stereotype of a teenager, whatever, but it s really not that at all.
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It literally, certainly within the British psychology, means balance.
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And it s the balance that, say, is born of wisdom.
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It s the balance, say, if you re in a helping relationship with a friend and the deepest place in you wants to know that they can change, they can make a difference, that you can help them.
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And wisdom also says, maybe yes, maybe no, but there are limits.
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that in fact we re not in charge of the universe.
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I once said that to a group of people.
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I said, I feel like if I was in charge of the universe, it would be a lot better world.
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And someone in the group challenged me and they said, are you sure?
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And I thought about it and I said, I am really sure.
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It would be a lot better, but guess what?
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It s not like that.
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Life isn t like that.
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So that understanding doesn t actually diminish our compassion or our efforts to try to make a difference.
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It enhances it, because then we don t have the frustration and the impatience and the demand.
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We have wisdom.
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We have perspective.
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I will do everything I can and.
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In the end, it may not be up to me.
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So that s one meaning of equanimity.
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Another meaning is being able to hold many things at once.
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This is also, as well as being today, the anniversary of the founding of the Insight Meditation Society.
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It s the anniversary of the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
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And I went down there to teach.
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pretty soon after the shooting and taught this day with a lot of different attendees.
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And one of the women, who I now quote a lot in my books, who was attending was a young woman, fairly recent graduate of the high school, whose mother is a teacher there.
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And she stood up, her name is Samantha, and she stood up and she said, I m having this really weird experience because this is a tremendous day and I m learning so much and it s a great experience.
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And I know the only reason it s happening is because that terrible thing happened.
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And I don t know how to get over that to appreciate this.
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And I said, I don t know if we ever get over it so much as we learned to hold them both at once.
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And in Buddhist psychology, we d call that equanimity.
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We talked about the yin yang symbol where there s like a light squiggly part and in the center of it, there s a dark circle.
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Then there s a dark squiggly part in the center of it, there s a light circle.
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And I didn t see Samantha again for some months.
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And then I ran into her and I said, Hey, Samantha, remember that conversation we had about equanimity?
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And she said, not only do I remember it, should I think about it every single day of my life?
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She said, that is my North star now to have a mind and heart big enough to take it all in and hold it all.
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So it s that kind of balance as well.
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And that is sorely lacking as far as I can tell in this world right now.
4
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Well, it definitely is.
4
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And I want to come back to that in just a second.
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I first wanted to ask this question.
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If you re a person who s facing an extreme challenge, like a chronic illness, what s your advice to that person on how they practice equanimity?
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Well, moment by moment, for sure.
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What we do often in mindfulness training, and remember, equanimity doesn t mean indifference, and it doesn t mean you don t care.
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It means there s some balance or there s some perspective, which will only help us.
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And so some things we do in mindfulness training are try to make it distinguishing between what s happening
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genuinely, even if it s very difficult, and everything we tend to add to it just by force of habit.
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So maybe we have physical pain, and that s hard to bear.
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But on top of that, we have perhaps, this is the only thing I will ever feel for the rest of my life, or I blew it 15 years ago, this is all my fault, I m a horrible person, or I m the only one.
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whoever experiences such distress, such pain.
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And so we ve started with a difficult situation, then we ve piled on all this other stuff.
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And then we ve got this complex greater difficulty.
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And so somebody is much greater difficulty.
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And we try to peel some of that away.
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And if we re left with the physical sensation, which was painful to begin with, it s different.
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than pain plus all that extra suffering and distress.
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And so if we can be with the pain, we have the opportunity to explore it a little bit.
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Actually, it sounds strange, I know, but not to hate it so much or be afraid of it, but what is this?
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And we see that maybe it s a moment of burning and a moment of pressure and a moment of this and a moment of that.
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And as one friend said to me, who had a very severe chronic pain condition, she said, I found the space within the pain.
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It actually is an alive system.
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It s not this inert thing that s taken over our body or neck or our back or something like that.
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And once we see change in that way, we see life.
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And again, we re reunited with that sense of being more fully alive.
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Of course, chronic illness is very difficult.
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Not only is there physical pain, perhaps, but there s a big change in ability.
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But there s always the possibility of learning.
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Here, I also think of
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my late friend Ram Dass, who was at my first retreat in January of 1971 in India as a student.
4
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And we were friends ever since.
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And he, of course, had a very severe stroke later in life and lived the rest of his life in a wheelchair with pretty significant aphasia.
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Given that he was a public speaker, it was marked when it really affected his life in some ways, but he went out there and taught anyway.
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And he was once teaching in Hawaii, which is where he went to live for the last years of his life.
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And I was sitting in the room, way in the back of the room, behind 300 people.
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And he was saying, the hardest thing about having the stroke was not the physical pain.
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It was not the difference in my ability to speak.
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It actually was in allowing people to help me.
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And I knew it was true because I d known him all these years and he was a giver.
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He was the one who would help others.
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He was the first person I knew who worked with dying people, worked with prisoners, and he was always kind of out there trying to make a difference.
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And yet he had a very difficult time.
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You couldn t really give like a birthday present or compliment.
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It was very difficult.
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for him to receive, so he said, I had to learn to receive and that, he said, it was the hardest thing and the most liberating.
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He said, one of my famous books was called, How Can I Help?
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Now I feel like writing a book called, How Can You Help Me?
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And knowing him as long as I had and as well as I did, I knew it was really true that he was the giver.
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And that once it was almost like there was a barrier inside of him and the love could go in one direction.
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It wasn t that easy to let it in.
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And once he had to.
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It was like that barrier dissolved and then there was just this free flow.
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And I think everyone who knew him would say the last years of his life, he was the most luminous, even living in a wheelchair, even with the difficulties and manifesting as he once had.
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And the path of growth may not be exactly what we project.
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It may be in learning how to receive and also offering.
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giving, not being completely self-preoccupied with our own situation.
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Yeah, I couldn t agree more with you on your sentiments there.
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And I m going to come back to the other form of equanimity that you were talking about.
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Through this lens, I think a lot of what you were just talking about is self-compassion.
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And I think
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Often today, we look at things too linear.
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It s like either or, and that s how so much of us in the Western world have brought up where I think the Buddhist teachings and most of Asian culture teaches us to look at things as both, and such as we can be self-critical and have self-compassion.
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We can focus on things that are good for our mind and our body, et cetera.
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And when you were talking about this and you were talking before about how the world is missing so much equanimity in it right now, it leads me down this whole path of compassion because I was having an interesting discussion with Dacher Keltner.
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And what brought this to my mind is he was talking about prisoners and Sam Quentin, where he was volunteering and he was telling me about awe.
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And that you would think these people on death row would be the last place in the world that you would ever see kindness, awe, compassion.
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And yet he said, I saw it more in them than I almost did in anyone.
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And what I realized is that the easiest way we can feel awe in our lives is by either ourselves doing gifts of compassion or kindness to others or observing others do those to other people.
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Yet, I think we re living in a world right now
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where we re being more and more removed by this practice of compassion.
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And with all these political and other rifts that we have, how do we navigate the complexities of extending this compassion?
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Because I think it all starts with, if you re going to be compassionate to someone else, you ve got to be compassionate to yourself first.
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I wrote some about awe in real life and it was before Decker s book came out on awe.
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And I realized in researching it that I made a mistake.
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I had a misunderstanding because all the research I had read early on about awe was like people going off to the Redwood forest and the majestic trees and they d feel awe.
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And it was only later that I discovered that actually more people tend to feel awe at looking at other people.
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than the majesty of the natural world, even the goodness of other people, the way they can survive sometimes, the way they care about others.
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And that s when we tend to feel it most.
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And that brought me back to the sense of compassion.
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The problem for many people is that, well, it s twofold.
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One is we can think of compassion as a weakness.
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It s sloppy, it s sentimental, it s gonna mean you re taken advantage of.
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You re going to lose all discriminating understanding.
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You re going to give up principles of right and wrong.
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You get stupid, basically, is what people think sometimes.
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And the other part is that even if you honor the sense of compassion, it s a very Western idea that it can t be developed, it can t be trained.
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And I don t know if we tend to think of it as a gift and you either have it or you don t.
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If you don t, you re out of luck.
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But as you say, the Asian idea, the Eastern idea is very much
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that we can develop it because it also depends on how we pay attention.
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Do we only pay attention to the mistakes we made or can we look at what we have to be grateful for?
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Can we connect to one another in a different way so that when we make a mistake, we realize this is part of the human condition.
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People fall down.
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And in fact, we can get up again.
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And can we look at the problems we have as states that come and go in a way, rather than a kind of fixed character flaw that will never be able to be changed.
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So how we pay attention, how we look at things, ourselves and others, is really going to make a difference.
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And that s how the compassion develops and grows, not through forcing ourselves to try to feel.
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You encounter both those things a lot if you re counseling a compassionate perspective.
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And certainly in terms of the first, I ve had countless people say to me, well, that s stupid.
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That s just being lazy.
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That s saying, all right, I made a mistake.
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Who cares?
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I ll forgive myself.
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I ll make another mistake in two seconds.
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Who cares?
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But it s not like that at all.
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It s like we can honestly recognize that s a problem.
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I said that.
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It was reckless.
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I did that.
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I held back from saying anything.
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And maybe we need to make amends or maybe it s lessons learned.
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But we go on in a different way rather than just being stuck.
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I, in a global sense, am so bad rather than, ooh, that was a mistake.
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I, altogether, am a loser.
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And it s never going to change.
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And I think going right toward those misunderstandings is really key.
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Well, I think ultimately it s about our inherent worthiness, regardless of our perceived flaws or shortcomings.
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Well, Sharon, we ve discussed a lot today.
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I covered a lot of ground.
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Is there one thing that you would like to leave the audience with one bit of advice?
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I have a request for you is that you send me the research on worthiness because it s really fascinating.
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And I think that is crucial.
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I think that is the key.
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And what I ve learned in my own situation through my practice, and it doesn t have to be formal meditation, it could be another form of introspection.
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It can be another way of trying to relate differently.
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to the pleasure and pain that naturally accompanies everything in life.
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But these situations that we think are irredeemable, they re workable, in fact, and that we can make a difference in our own lives and ultimately in how we relate to the world.
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And then the last thing I just wanted to ask you is, could you tell the audience a little bit about your podcast?
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And when I was on your website, I saw that you have a number of speaking opportunities coming up.
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So I thought maybe you can share those in case people would like to check the podcast out or go to see you speak live.
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In terms of speaking, the best thing is to go to my website, which is SharonSalzberg.com, and look at the schedule, which is evolving.
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I m doing an evening, for example, in April with Scott Barry Kaufman, because the book Real Life is coming out of paperback, and there are many opportunities that
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come up that are really exciting for me to join with others and learn and just contribute what I can.
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So that would be the website and I do have a podcast it s called Meta, our M-E-T-A which means loving kindness and it s on the Be Here Now Network which was founded honoring Ram Dass.
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And it gives me the opportunity again to come together with people and to experience what they have to say about life and growth and human potential that exists as well.
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Well, Sharon, it was such an honor to have you today.
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And I just wanted to thank you for just the work that you ve done throughout your whole life and how many
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many people you have touched with your inspiration.
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So thank you so much.
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Well, thank you.
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What an incredible honor that was to have Sharon Salzberg on Passionstruck.
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And I wanted to thank Sharon, Jerry Colonna, Dan Harris, and Jeff Walker for the honor and privilege of having Sharon appear on today s show.
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Links to all things Sharon will be in the show notes of passionstruck.com.
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Please use our website links to purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show.
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Videos are on YouTube at both our main channel at John R. Miles and our Clips channel at PassionStruckClips.
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Please go check them both out and subscribe.
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Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals.
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Please consider supporting those who support the show.
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You can find me on all the social platforms where I post daily at John R. Miles.
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You can also get your weekly dose of inspiration
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In our newsletter, which has over 30,000 Passionstruck enthusiasts subscribing to, sign up at passionstruck.com.
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And each week we give wisdom and challenges to help you on your journey of becoming Passionstruck.
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You re about to hear a preview of the Passionstruck podcast interview that I did with Dr. Steven Cabral, who is the author of the groundbreaking book, The Rain Barrel Effect.
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In our interview,
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Cabral offers common sense approaches for our overall well-being, breaking it down into key areas such as sleep, exercise, stress reduction, managing painful emotions, and removing toxins from our life.
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He provides simple steps to optimize your health, which are often neglected in our daily lives.
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So the only reason that we are not at our peak state is we have some type of toxicity or we have some type of deficiency.
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Because we don t necessarily control our bodies.
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We control what we put into them, give them the raw material, and then our body in its innate wisdom knows what to do.
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So I always say that there is no doctor in the world that heals you.
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Your body heals itself.
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A doctor or integrative health practitioner will help you put your body in position to heal.
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I call it the big rocks theory.
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I m sure you ve heard of this before.
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So big rocks theory is like, how do we get better?
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Well, you ve got big rocks, small rocks, pebbles, and sand.
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If you want to fill a barrel, almost like the reverse rain barrel, and you want to get the 80% of the results with 20% of the work, you need to hit the heavy hitters.
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fix the nutrition, fix the sleep, and work on the stress, and these types of things.
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They take good nutritional supplements just to fill up your deficiencies.
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Remember that we rise by lifting others, so share the show with those that you love and care about.
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And if you found today s episode with Sharon Salzberg useful, then definitely share it with someone who can use her advice that we gave here on today s program.
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In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen.
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Until next time, go out there and become a passion striker.