Tami Simon: You’re Listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, My Guest Is Sharon Salzberg. Sharon Is a Beloved Meditation Teacher and a New York Times Bestselling author. She’s the co-founder of the Insight Meditati

Then, of course, there’s a lot of what I might call misconception about love that weakens you. It means you’re just approving. You’re not taking a stand. I don’t think it means any of that. But it can feel that way. So then, there’s a lot of fear and a lot of division. But when I get there, it’s just like, “All right, this is right.” And it doesn’t cost anything. That’s why I said that about generosity. It’s not like I’m left with less.

TS: I noticed, as you described that giving over of our whole heart as a kind of alignment, I sat up straight; I started feeling really good. And all that happened was I sort of took in what you were saying. I’m going to move on to the third theme that I’d like to pull out and highlight from Real Change, which is moving from grief to resilience. And in reading Real Change, I learned a lot more about you, Sharon, and your early life than I knew previously.

I didn’t know how much suffering was part of your early life. I wonder if you would be willing to share a little bit about that. And if you would, how grief in some ways formed you as a young person and even continues to inform your teaching.

SS: Yes. Well, actually, it’s interesting you say that, because Faith, of course, the book is like my autobiography. And so, it’s the most explicit and detailed rendition of my early life. And the audio is only available in Sounds True. So, that was really interesting.

Yes. I mean, the greatest sorrows of my life were in my childhood when my parents split up. They got divorced when I was four. My father disappeared. I lived with my mother. She died when I was nine. I went to live with my father’s parents, whom I hardly knew.

My grandfather died when I was 11. My father came back. You see, he hadn’t come back even when I went to live with his parents. He was really troubled and really out of it by then. And he took an overdose of sleeping pills maybe six weeks into that visit when I was 11, after his father died. And disappeared of mental health system where he lived for probably another 20 years whether in a nursing home or a hospital or VA hospital or something like that.

My family, being who they were—of course, I was told it was an accident: “He forgot he had already taken the pills. He took another pill.” Then when I was in college, all those years later, then I thought, “Wait a minute. You don’t sort of accidentally have a mishap with medication and end up in a psychiatric hospital, do you?”

I went to college when I was 16. I went to New York when I was 18. So, you can see the direct line. I was actually in my Asian philosophy courses as sophomore in college, where they were talking about the Buddha and they’re talking about, of course, his tremendous emphasis on suffering, the suffering in life. For me, it translated into, “You’re not so weird, you’re not so different. You actually belong. This is a part of life. It’s not just you.” So, it was like the most liberating thing I’d ever heard.

Then I heard that there were methods or techniques or practices you could do to be a lot happier. And I was going to college in Buffalo, New York. I looked around Buffalo, I did not see it anywhere. And the university had an independent study program. If you created a project they liked, you could go anywhere in the world theoretically for a year. And I created a project. I said, “I want to go to India to study meditation.” And they said, “OK.”

So, off I went. I left in 1970, the beginning of the fall semester. I began meditating in January of 1971. And that sense of belonging through the acknowledgement of suffering has been a theme of my life ever since because I see it everywhere, that we meet on a certain level. But it’s actually at that level spoken or unspoken that we really find one another.

Of course, Dipa Ma, who was my teacher who told me to teach—and that was in 1974, when I went to visit her in Kolkata, because I was coming back to the states for what I was convinced was going to be this very short visit before I went back to India for the rest of my life. She said, “When you go back, you’ll be teaching.” And I said, “No, I won’t.” And she said, “Yes, you will.” I said “No, I won’t.” And she said, “Yes, you will.” I said, “No, I won’t. That’s ridiculous. I can’t teach.” And then she said, “You really understand suffering. That’s why you should teach.”

That was my blessing. And, of course, the funny part is, looking back she didn’t say, “Your realization is so vast, you should teach, or your scholarship was so extraordinary.” It was like, “You really understand suffering, that’s why you should teach.”

TS: OK. Let me ask you a couple questions first just quickly here. You went to college when you were 16, is that because you were like a super smarty pants or something?

SS: I was smart, I was determined, and also, I was in the New York City public school system where they did tend to have people skip grades.

TS: OK. So, here, Dipa Ma says, “You’re going to teach because you understand suffering.” And I’m going to ask you just a really basic 101 question here, Sharon, Buddhism 101. Somebody who says, “Of course I’ve heard people say the Buddha said, ‘All life is suffering.’ I don’t get it. I mean, sure, they’re suffering, but there’s a lot of things that aren’t suffering. I don’t get it. Why say all life is suffering? I don’t get that.”

SS: Right. Well, in that sense, in that quotation, it doesn’t mean suffering as dreadful pain or trauma or the ways we might use the word. I mean, that is a part of life. And that is something we experience in different degrees. But there’s also a kind of suffering that’s not so intense and immediate. It’s almost kind of like poignancy. It’s like, “I don’t know how this happened. I am asked to enter my year of birth online and I have to scroll for an hour and a half. And don’t understand—where did my life go?”

And there’s even a more subtle level where it’s sort of like, you have a friend and you do anything to have them suffer less. And you can’t make it so. No one’s invented the chip where we can implant it in someone else’s brain while we’re holding the remote control. And we can say, “Cheer up, or stop drinking.” Life’s not like that. And so, the kind of layers and layers and layers of subtlety to it.

TS: So, I’ve heard this distinction between you could say avoidable suffering, suffering we don’t really have to be having and suffering that’s unavoidable. And I’m curious what you think of that distinction and how we know in any moment in our experience. Is this avoidable? Could I avoid this? Is his secondary suffering or is this just pure real suffering?

SS: Well, they’re all real, I think, unfortunately. They all are. But I think, yes, I think we can know. I mean, people struggle, I struggle, everyone struggles with the words trying to figure it all out. Some people, I think it was probably Stephen Levine originally who said, “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional,” or it depends on how you’re using the words.

And sometimes I call it as the suffering happens, it’s like we feel what we feel. Or one of my favorite sayings is, “Somethings just hurt.” They hurt. It’s not because you have a bad attitude. It’s not because you need to elevate your thinking and it’s not because you’re resistant. Something’s hurt. But what we don’t need is extra suffering. I think we can tell the difference. I can tell the difference.

TS: That’s my question. How can you tell what’s extra suffering?

SS: Well, I sort of know my patterns so well. It’s like when I have the thought, I’m the only one who ever experiences this in whatever form, maybe not so elemental, but it’s there. I feel isolated. I feel I’m the only one. “No one can ever understand this. No one could ever conceive of what I’m going through.” That’s an add on. That’s an old, old tape or a kind of shame. “I should have been able to stop this. I’ve been meditating for an hour. I’ve been meditating for three weeks. I’ve been meditating for 50 goddamn years. Why is this still arising?” Which is also forgetting where our power really lies, which is not in the question of whether something comes up or not. It’s a question of how we deal with it.

There are certain things that can just recognize that or something great happens, the wonders, beautiful, fantastic thing happens and that voice that arises in me, they’ll say, “Something is going to happen again.” Or “It can’t be real,” or whatever it is, to diminish the experience.

A question of skill is really how you relate to that voice. That’s the years of training. It’s like, if you say that’s your inner critic, sometimes we say give it a voice, give it a wardrobe, give it a persona, give it a name, and then see how you relate to it because the relationship is everything. So, if you’re that voice that says, “It’s never going to happen again,” can you say, “Have a seat, have a cup of tea, chill. Just don’t work so hard, you crazy critic, just like, be at ease.”

TS: I want to dig in here a little bit and I don’t want to get too bogged down in the language. However, I have worked with different teachers at Sounds True, who are very much like the point of the path is the end of suffering. And that is possible. It is possible to live without suffering at a certain point. And yet, when I hear you talk about some things just hurt, once again, I mean, maybe there’s no way to avoid getting into the language of it all. Maybe what that teacher is trying to point to is, yes, there’s pain, but […] you just let the heart be there. How do you see it, Sharon?

SS: Well, I think it’s so different when we’re not lost in those add-ons, that you could, I think, genuinely say it’s a completely different experience, even though it’s not meant or a little tinge of bitterness or something may arise, but you’re not invested in it. You’re not lost in it. You’re not taking it to heart. It’s not consuming you. That’s a very different experience.

But I really take a stand on some things just hurt, because I’ve seen the opposite so much where people are confounded. “I’ve been meditating all this time.” And then they tell you some horrible thing that happened. And then, “I don’t understand why I’m not calmer because that was horrible.” You have been through a genuine tragedy. And why are you blaming yourself for feeling something about it? I’ve seen a lot of that, too.

TS: Yes. OK. So, I have two more themes I want to touch on and then a very important topic I want to cover too. So, I’m going to keep this train, this train, choo-chooing here, which is allowing joy. This really spoke to me on the path of being a real change maker. You write about how if we titrate, if we don’t just stay with what’s hard, that it enables us to persevere. So, I wonder if you can speak more about that and the role of joy.

SS: Well, I think titrating, interestingly enough, is also an element in things like trauma therapy. It’s realizing that it’s almost like saying, energy is a genuine commodity or resource, and that if you sort of stay with what’s hard endlessly, you’re going to get exhausted. And it’s just not going to be the optimum environment in which to learn something or move on or develop a different relationship.

This goes back to kind of an understanding from the Buddhist teaching where he said that suffering itself is not the point. Suffering isn’t redemptive. Suffering is not grace in that system. But how we relate to suffering could be and are we with what’s hurting, with compassion for ourselves, for example, rather than judgment or criticism.

We need energy to do that. If you’re exhausted, you’re not going to get there. And so, we have to sort of balance ourselves to the best of our ability all along. And that’s really important. And part of that is taking in the joy—and anybody who knows activists knows how hard it is or even caregivers, the ones who care for others to sort of receive is not that easy and to sort of feel the abundance of life and the joy that’s available. But if we don’t do that, then it is exhausting. I mean, the day is exhausting, between everything we need to do then and the ways we kind of get beaten down and frustrated and we need some balance.

TS: Do you have a practice yourself that’s like Sharon Salzberg’s “I’m going to open to joy” practice?

SS: Oh, to joy?

TS: Yes.

SS: Well, I mean, both from the Buddhist point of view and being a New Yorker, it starts with what’s looking at what’s holding me back. “This isn’t as good as it was last year,” or whatever the thought is. “Or this could be better,” or “I wish I had more time to look at the sunset, it’s not fair,” and being able to release those thoughts and remind myself just be here with what is good.

A lot of it has to do with simple things like sunsets or the sky, something that evokes a sense of space, not being amused by people because we’re also kind of funny. Taking satisfaction, something like writing. “Wow, I wrote that. Look at that.” Because we get so afraid—me too—like, “Oh, that’s boastful or that’s egoic or that’s going to strengthen my ego or something like that.” It’s just like, relax. Enjoy it.

TS: Yes. OK. The fifth theme, living by the truth of interconnection. And what I wanted to ask you about with this point in terms of Real Change is that it feels to me that it’s not that hard to intuit, to see, to appreciate our interconnection. It’s not that hard.

TS: You use the example of looking at a tree and seeing the sky and the roots. I think it’s easy to get it, let alone if you’ve taken some kind of hallucinogen or something. This web of life, we’re all connected. People get it. But actually living by it, translating that, especially into the structural systems that we live in and all of the lack of equity that is part of the structures of our society, this is where I’m trying to understand for you how you bring it down to the earth of how you actually live your life, not as a philosophical intuition.

SS: Well, that’s why you and I ,when we’ve talked about the workplace, I’ve said that my favorite question in going to teach in the workplace is, how many other people need to be doing their jobs well for you to do your job well? Because really, if it were not for the engineers, or the house cleaners, or whatever it is, our lives would not happen in such a smooth fashion.

Maybe for me, some of that came also from the work with caregivers, because they’re often hidden. They’re like the hidden heroes. I would look at those women—often women, not exclusively, but largely women—working in the domestic violence shelters and think, “Boy, if they weren’t doing their job, this whole society would fall down.” But nobody thinks about them or pays them enough or appreciates them.

I make it a point to do that reflection. Like with Thich Nhat Hanh. Every time I saw him, I think he held up some object in the air and would do this exercise, like he would hold up a piece of paper and say, “Now see the cloud.” Because as you trace back, what makes this paper? It’s the elements that go into it.

Or the last time I saw him, he held up a sunflower. This was in New York City. And he said, “Now, see all the non-sunflower elements of the sunflower.” Once he held up a string bean, and you sort of imagine the farmers planting the seed and the creatures who live in the soil and who harvested the crop, who transported it, who sold it. Suddenly you look at that string bean, it’s like, half the earth is there.

I’ve kind of learned to actually do that as a reflection, do that as an exercise. Especially in a non-equitable society, talking to people who are maintaining the infrastructure that I am counting on but I never think about really—unless (and this is all a long time ago, because I haven’t been anywhere in two years) I’m on a train and suddenly, it gets stuck between DC and New York, and suddenly, the people who do the road repair and the train repair and they’re very important to me, but otherwise, it’s like, they’re invisible.

And so, both through lovingkindness toward neutral people, and just that reflection, I really tried to remember how intricate this world is and how many people I’m counting on for my happiness, for my well-being.

TS: OK. Now, you mentioned in the very beginning of our conversation that you wrote Real Change for two types of people: the caregivers; and then the second type, just a general person, that kind of person who after doing compassion practice walks out, sees a homeless person, and traditionally would have just given a dollar. Now, looks them in the eye but then has a set of questions that says, “Wait a second, I’m going back to my, I don’t know, my really nice New York City expensive apartment, and this person isn’t. And I just spent an hour meditating on our interrelatedness and our interconnection, and now, I don’t know what to do with myself exactly. I think I’m going to read Sharon’s book.” OK. But what’s the deeper, structural, real-change process that this individual could start embarking on, or at least looking into inquiring? How do you see that?

SS: Well, I do think it’s a question of inquiry. It’s like learning, I want to set out to learn. I don’t know anything about the housing policy of my city. I don’t know anything about what happened with deinstitutionalization of mental health facilities, which used to be very big thing in my life. How many resources were ever allocated for people to live in a community as opposed to just closing down the hospital putting them on the streets?

I don’t know anything about this history. You think, “I want to find out. I just want to learn what is going on here. Where are my tax dollars going? Who’s making these decisions? How many people vote in those elections for these local governance roles?” Then see where your heart leads you or see if there’s something that you do want to participate in, but it starts with even caring to know and not having it stop. It’s just the level of the human-to-human connection, because that is extraordinary and it’s very important. But in some ways, it’s almost like the beginning.

TS: That caring to know, and then it seems like taking actions and engaging our analytical capacities, […] it’s work. It’s real work what you’re describing.

SS: Yes. But it’s almost just go deeper, look for causes and conditions to the degree you can discern them, you can find them out. One of the stories I tell in the book, it’s about this conference I was at where somebody was talking about teaching literacy in Texas, in prisons, and it was like noble and amazing. These places, I mean, I’ve been teaching occasionally in prison; it’s not an easy place to be.

On one level, it was all great and it was all very noble. Then somebody in the audience stood up and said, “I don’t know how you can be doing that in Texas, and not in any way confronting the racism that’s at the core of the criminal justice system there.” And there was a moment that was like, “Oh,” because of course, that was also true. And we want solutions. And I’m not putting down the efforts of the people teaching literacy because I think that was extremely good and hard to do. But if we actually want solutions, we have to look deeper. We have to look into causes and conditions. Otherwise, we’re just going to go round, and round, and round, and round.

TS: OK. The last thing I wanted to ask you about is something you already touched on, and it was when you were talking about joy and talking about what you might need to let go of. I’m wondering, in general, to be a real change maker, what your thoughts are about what we might need to let go of.

SS: Oh, well, isolation. I think a certain kind of certainty as well. I think that the spirit of inquiry is really important, and we see so much positionality. […] I think we need to let go of some extremes and understand a place in the middle. So, when I say let go of positionality, I don’t mean let go of principle and a sense of right and wrong, because I think there is right and wrong. You don’t have to be highly judgmental about it or consider yourself always right and the other people always wrong.

But I think there is. There are actions. There are beliefs. There are ways of being extremely harmful and damaging. And I think that my goal is not to give credence to them as though, well, all beliefs are just beliefs; but, at the same time, to understand causes and conditions that people come to understandings in different ways and that it sort of comes back to me some nice this quotation from Maya Angelou, who said something like “When you know better, you do better.” And that it’s kind of understandable how each of us in different times, in different ways, gets stuck, and that we need to know better in order to do better.

TS: Now, Sharon, just to conclude, I hear you’re working on a new book from Real Change, your previous book to a new book called, Real Life. Can you give us just a brief preview, what’s Real Life going to be about?

SS: Real Life. Real Life is about moving from contraction, narrowness, to expansion or openness and is based in lockdown. I watched this program called Saturday Night Seder, which I absolutely love. I don’t know if it’s still up on YouTube or not. But it was my Seder of the year because I wasn’t going anywhere. And it reminded me that if you take all of that symbolically and not in terms of geopolitics or anything like that, the word that is translated as “Egypt” actually means “a narrow place.” So, the whole Seder is symbolic from moving from being locked in and constrained and narrow to being open and free. And so, it’s all about that. I always see that that progression, it starts and ends with the Seder.

TS: Beautiful.

SS: Thank you.

TS: Well, we’ll talk again about Real Life in a couple years, God willing.

SS: Yes.

TS: Yes. I’ve been speaking with Sharon Salzberg. We’ve been talking about Real Change. She’s written a book with that title, Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves in the World with Sounds True. Sharon’s also written a book on the force of kindness about lovingkindness meditation. She’s created several audio programs with us, including the audio book of her book Faith, an online course with Joseph Goldstein on insight meditation, and she’s also one of the wisdom teachers participating in Sounds True’s Inner MBA program, teaching on lovingkindness at work. Sharon, always great to be with you. You increase my IQ—know better to do better. Thank you. Thank you so much.

SS: It’s always great to be with you, truly.

TS: Thank you for listening to Insights at the Edge. You can read a full transcript of today’s interview at SoundsTrue.com/podcast. If you’re interested, hit the Subscribe button in your podcast app. And also, if you feel inspired, head to iTunes and leave Insights at the Edge a review. I love getting your feedback, being in connection with you and learning how we can continue to evolve and improve our program. Working together, I believe we can create a kinder and wiser world, SoundsTrue.com: waking up the world.