Reducing Reactivity (Without Becoming a Doormat) with Sharon Salzberg

Hello and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the podcast, thanks for listening today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. I'm joined today by two very special guests. First, clinical psychologist Rick Hansen. So dad, how are you doing today? I'm great and I'm psyched. And before we go further, I want to say that I consider Sharon, our guest, to be a personal teacher of mine, someone I hold in tremendous esteem. And resting in that feeling is actually, I think, a really important thing for people in general, period, even if it somewhat goes against my aging hippie egalitarian nature. Well, as you just said, Dad, we are here with the co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society, a truly world-renowned teacher, and the author of 14 books, Sharon Salzberg. Sharon was one of the first people to bring mindfulness and meditation to the mainstream American culture over 50 years ago, and her books include her seminal work, Love and Kindness. But she was very young then. You can see pictures of her. She was a little, little cherub. So young, so young. So young, so young. And also her first children's book, which just came out, Kind Carl, A Little Crocodile with Big Feelings. And this was co-authored with, I hope I say this correctly, Jason Grew. So Sharon, thanks for joining us today. How are you doing? I'm doing really well. I'm actually in Barry, Massachusetts, next door to the Insight Meditation Society, which is going to turn 50 since we started it. All of us were really children, you know, at the time. So you guys have known each other, as you just alluded to there, for quite a while at this point. And I'm wondering not to put you on the spot or anything, but do you happen to remember when and where you met? Where did we meet? Well, first off, if you could do this for us in the Patreon account, I don't know, it's Spirit Rock Meditation. Center, the sister center to IMS there in Berry, Massachusetts, at Spirit Rock in a hut. It's called the Gratitude Hut. There are these various photographs. And one of them is of Sharon. I think you were maybe 19 or 22 or some really young age at the time with, I believe, Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield and another young woman whose name escapes me. If we could find that photograph or if you could share it. It would just be- Oh, hunted down online. Super cool. If I can find it all, you can put it in the video of this podcast. We'll just have it as a little pop-up up here. Sure. It was Jacqueline Mandel Schwartz or Schwartz Mandel, I guess is the right order. And I was 23. Yeah. I think I might've interviewed you. I reached out to you if I could interview for some program I was doing maybe. And I was very nervous because you're, of course, up there, the Pantheon. And you can really feel when someone's treating you like a thou to their I, rather than one person to smile at and quickly move on. And I always felt like a thou to your I. Well, thank you. It's really beautiful. Because that's you. You, thou, all beings. You treat them as a thou. And your children's book's marvelous, too. We're going to get into that. And I thought one of the sweetest parts of Carl's journey, it's not just Carl working with his own reactions. is Carl learning to thou all the other beings in his world, to treat them as a thou to his eye. For me, one of the things that I was sort of taking in as I was reading through this, it's a picture book for kids, and it's very easy to kind of frame it in that way. But I actually think that kids' books are a great way into thinking about ideas in kind of a fresh way. And also when you're writing for kids, you have to make choices about how deep into a topic do I want to go? What do I want to emphasize? You know, I'm dealing with only so much text on the page. And so you have to make choices about what am I going to emphasize in this very limited amount of space that I have. And I'm wondering of all the places that you could have started or all the ideas you could have emphasized, why did you choose the ones that you put in this book? Well, I was actually approached by Shambhala publications to write the book or co-author the book. It was really fascinating for me because what I saw was that everything I was used to talking about, like loving kindness meditation or the development of compassion, had to become really concrete and appropriate. And so for example, in loving kindness meditation, kind of classically, one way of doing it and the way I was taught it was to silently repeat certain phrases as a kind of gift or offering to oneself and to others, like may you be safe, may you be happy. And so we started out with, well, what does it feel like to be safe? You know, when I was writing this thing for kids, like if you're about to cross a really crazy, busy street, someone takes your hand because they want to help you. That's safe. That's what safe feels like. And it's that feeling that we are offering. to others were wishing, oh, may you have this. And it was really fun, you know, starting with somebody you really like, and then maybe a kid you're mad at right now, but you usually like them. And then, you know, just sort of trying to enter that world of a child. I've worked with a lot of children. I'm a child therapist, I have a lot of background there. One of the very first things you start with is Carl noticing what he's experiencing. Carl is initially hijacked by his reactivity. He's just swept away. And step one is for him to be able to notice it, to be able to recognize it. And again, that's such an important foundational step, as you well know, of course, in our own adult journey. So I just kind of wonder if you could just say more about the importance of that first step of being able to recognize or step back a little bit from your own experiences? Well, actually, one of my favorite definitions of mindfulness came from an article I read like a really long time ago in the New York Times. It was about one of the first pilot programs bringing mindfulness into the classroom. So this was a fourth grade classroom in Oakland, California. And so the kids are like eight or nine years old. And the journalist asked one of the kids, what is mindfulness? What is mindfulness? And the kid replied, mindfulness means not hitting someone in the mouth. That's what mindfulness means. And I thought, that's a great definition of mindfulness, because what does it imply? The first thing which you're describing, we know what we're feeling as we're beginning to feel it, not after it's accelerated, not after we've sent off that email, not after we've lashed out at somebody, but we're feeling, we're aware of what's cooking, you know, as it happens. It also implies a certain balanced relationship, say, to that anger or irritation, because if we just get completely swept up in the emotion of the moment and consumed by it, we're likely to hit a lot of people in the mouth because life can be really frustrating. But on the other hand, if we hate what we're feeling and we're ashamed of it and we try to stuff it down, repress it, we get tighter and tighter and tighter and we'll explode. So mindfulness has, we say, both those components. We're aware of what we're feeling and we're not freaked out about it. You know, there's a kind of balanced relationship there. And that creates, and we see this in Carl the Crocodile too, it creates a kind of space. And in that space, we might see options we hadn't seen before. We might see creative responses to the situation. So I like to think of that kid thinking, hit someone in the mouth last week, didn't work out that well. Maybe I'll try my words or whatever. I'll try to shift things around. So it's not like a passive quality, you know, where we just sort of grin and bear it, but we're not sort of driven by the habits of old. What helps people in general get more space around that experience? And I talk to people sometimes who feel really hijacked by the feelings that they're having or they have an interaction with a friend, a partner who just says something, really hits them the wrong way and their mouth is moving before they feel like their brains had time to catch up. I'm wondering what do you think helps somebody? Well, there's so many kind of methods, you know. For me, a lot of them are encapsulated in meditation. So even something simple as naming the feeling, you know, which we do as a sort of meditative technique of mental noting. And I was once, I was actually, I was online listening to someone's memorial service. And part of the memorial service, they played some recordings of him, you know, in his voice. And one of the things he said was, I'm a meditator. And the technique that I use is called mental noting. And with mental noting, you want to name your emotion before it names you. In other words, before it overtakes you and consumes you, you think, oh, there's anger. Not like I'm such an angry person and I always will be. So we learn, that's another thing, we learn to make a distinction between what we're feeling and everything we add to it. Like next year, you know, it's going to be even worse. Or I'm the only one, whoever feels this. And, you know, for me, my path is so much about meditation. It doesn't have to be meditation, clearly, you know, to develop those skills. But for me, meditation was a very direct avenue to doing just that. So the essence of it is there's a kind of observing of the experience. There's an awareness of the experience. even as one feels it. So when it's not becoming divided away from experiences, we're fully feeling them. I think sometimes people misunderstand that about mindfulness. You're still really feeling it. It's there for you. But there's a spaciousness around it, a certain disidentification from it. Okay. A lot of that, I think, for many people certainly, is not very verbal. It's somatic. They're in touch with themselves. There's an in-touchness. There's an awareness. But noting, trying to label the complex subtlety of what you're feeling in your belly when you're around an authority figure, it goes way beyond the word fear, right? You know, just the word alone, I think sometimes people get caught up in noting, like it becomes almost robotic. and I just wondered if you could say more about mindful self-awareness that's not necessarily verbalized. Even if it is verbalized, it points us back to our direct experience. You know, so if I'm feeling that kind of anger and I leap into, I'm such a terrible person, I shouldn't have this, but after all, I do have it and I just, you know, I deserve to be treated better and next year I'm going to, you know, that's very different than simply applying the word anger. which can be the pointer of like, what are you feeling right now? Yeah. What does it feel like in your body? What's the kind of anger movie? Because as you know, we look at any of these feelings, they're very complex. Within that anger, we may see sadness, we may see fear, we may see guilt, we may see grief, and we see change. You know, this thing that arises that seems so permanent forever, who we really are, when we really look at it, It's moving, it's changing because it's live. You know, and you're right, of course, that so many people find a tremendous awkwardness in that particular technique of mental noting, but it's just an example. And you could say a symbolic example, if you choose not to do it precisely, of a relationship. How am I relating to this thing that I'm feeling? You know, am I grabbing onto it? Am I taking it to heart? am I feeling burdened by it? Do I hate it? Or am I just aware of it? As somebody's general reactivity goes down, maybe because they've adopted some of these practices, they're doing a noting practice, they've got a little practice with mindfulness in general, getting some space around reactivity, whatever it is for them. I think that from the outside, it's easy to think that what's happened is they just don't feel things as strongly as they used to. they've developed this like perfect Teflon Buddha equanimity things just you know slide right off and all of that my experience with even very advanced meditators and people who do a lot of practice like you guys do is that this isn't really the case you know maybe there's some more equanimity sure that comes along that's one of the benefits of practice but really it's that reactivity has gone down not that the initial like sensory experience that you're having has gotten so much more calmed out or you're just not feeling it anymore. And I would actually love to hear both of you guys talk about that a little bit. What's your experience with that then? I think that's right. Even if you go back to the classical teachings where the Buddha said, we experience the world in every moment in one of six ways, seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, or through the mind door, through mind objects, thoughts, cognition, emotion, and so on. And he said that we feel every one of those moments to be pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. And that's not kind of a fixed characteristic. If you didn't get any sleep last night, that same comment may seem really unpleasant, whereas the other day it was just neutral or even amusing or something. But even if it's not fixed and rigid, there will be that component of the feeling tone of pleasantness, unpleasantness, or neutrality. Now, a lot of people think, and maybe this is part of your question, that if they practice really a lot, and they get to be great meditators, everything becomes neutral. Yeah, totally. Or pleasant. You know, it's just sort of like this blob, you know, this grayness. And some people long for that, and some people dread it, but it's not what happens anyway. We feel the pleasantness, We feel the pain of things. We feel or we recognize neutrality, but we are different with it. You know, if you look at pleasant sight, pleasant sound, the kind of classical comment is that we get lost in craving. I've got to keep this. I've got to keep it from changing. I've got to keep that person from changing. You know, so I always have this pleasant feeling. I've got to. And, you know, if we really look, and I think contemporary understanding will expand that. there are plenty of people, and I'm sure Rick could speak to this much better than I can professionally, there are plenty of people who can't allow pleasure, right, who reject it. I think it was from you, Rick, I heard first about savoring, you know, things like that, you know, so one way or another, we can have a very distorted kind of relationship to pleasure, and certainly with pain, you know, if you look at American society, it's like so extremely phobic, about painful experience. I was talking to somebody the other day and I said, I am old enough and also grew up in part with my grandparents who were Eastern European immigrants and had certain cultural biases. And I said, I'm old enough so that I don't remember as a child ever hearing the word cancer spoken out loud if somebody was going to be described as having cancer. You know, everyone whispered it Like it was this terrible secret, you know? And there's so many threads of that in this society anyway. You know, whatever one's personal conditioning is. But we can be different with painful feeling. And that's a little bit what Carl the Crocanzile learns, you know? It's like things can be really painful, you know, or even just difficult. And we can be kinder to ourselves and to others. We can have more balance. We don't have to throw an eraser is what he did, you know, with the blackboard. And then I'm also really interested in neutral experience because there's so much in our day that's just kind of neutral. You know, it's not really pleasant. It's not really unpleasant. And we just numb out and we sort of go to sleep. We wait for something better to happen in order to feel alive. And that is the definition of mindfulness, is having a different relationship to what's pleasant, what's painful, and what's neutral. And that also means that from the vantage point of mindfulness, it doesn't matter what our experience is. You know we like to think that maybe meditation a little difficult in the beginning but then we going to enter this realm where it like so lovely and placid and blissful and peaceful And maybe it's not, but that's okay, truly. You know, not just a solace or comfort from the point of view of wisdom and insight and compassion and so on. It's actually okay. It's a really deep question for us that you're asking. I think Sharon will be familiar with this metaphor of the notion that the path has two tracks. And it's like, as we engage our own path, it's like being in a wagon with two wheels following two tracks. And one is the track of true nature already. The idea that deep down in every person, underneath it all, is a kind of wellspring that's wakeful, benevolent, deeper than personality, deeper than gender socialization, kind of a well of being. And even arguably deeper than that, perhaps, is an ultimately unconditioned ground of all. And the process there is recognizing true nature and becoming more and more permeable to it and rested in it and removing the obscurations to it. Okay. Then the other track is one of gradual development, which includes both gradually releasing habit patterns and tendencies and moods and afflictions and hindrances that occupy us, and also gradually cultivating positive qualities, skillfulness, emotional intelligence, secure attachment, healthy self-worth, factors of awakening, tranquility, investigation, and mindfulness itself as a kind of inner muscle that we acquire over time. So I would say definitely what's available to people in general, and I think certainly in the path laid out by the Buddha, early Buddhism, this process of gradual development, which also includes not just changing the interior landscape in general, and also very much what Sharon's been talking about, shifting our relationship to it. So for me, it would be both and, that there is a process in which people become often less reactive, less prickly. We see this for Carl. Carl becomes happier while also really shifting his relationship to his own mind stream. I wonder about, because the book is so much about reactivity. It's really the focus of it. How do we deal with these unpleasant experiences that we have and get to something else? where some kind of better behavior can come out of this unpleasant feeling. I feel something bad. I don't like that I feel it. Now what? You guys are so much more familiar with this than I am, but my general understanding is that one of the big things that gets explored in aspects of Buddhist practice is the relationship between anger and fear and how anger and fear are somewhat similar in their qualities. Anger often emerges out of different kinds of fear. I think about Carl's behavior. He's afraid that the other kids don't like him. He's afraid that he is a certain kind of way, that his self-concept is like, I am this snappy crocodile. What if I am just this thing? It's kind of like implicit underneath some of the things that he's communicating. And I think about life in the world, in America or in other places in the world more broadly these days, so much of our frustration with other people is driven by a kind of fear of them. And so I think this just takes me to thinking about the functions of anger and how appreciating those functions can help us form a different kind of relationship to it. In certain schools of Buddhism, it's not even so much that anger comes out of fear. It's the same mind state. It's just two different forms, anger being the expressive, energized, outflowing form and fear being the held in, kind of frozen, imploding form of striking out against what's happening, wanting to declare it to be untrue, wanting to separate from it one way or the other. sort of the same thing, you know, in those certain schools. And that was really where I was trained. So it's a little bit funny sometimes because, of course, all these things are translations into English, which in some ways is sort of an awkward vehicle for nuance of the mind. It's like, you know, a very classic one is in Asian languages, heart and mind are the same word, you know, and not so in English with very different implications in English. And I've heard many Western students ask a Burmese or Tibetan teacher, how do I not be so much in my mind and get into my heart? And the teacher always looks very puzzled because you've just asked them, how do I get out of my heart mind to get into my heart mind? You know, it doesn't make any sense. So it's a little bit like that. So you could say from that point of view, anger has many forms, one of which is that kind of repulsion, you know, like pulling in and being so afraid. And in both manifestations, it's a very powerful force and worth looking at. So another way you can think of mindfulness is a willingness to explore, you know, instead of denouncing what you're feeling or freaking out about it or diving into it and letting it rule the day. Like, what is this? You know, what's this made of? How's it behaving? How's it making me feel? And that's really a fascinating journey. So anger in the Buddhist psychology is, and this doesn't mean feeling anger, that's another important distinction. It means sort of being overwhelmed by anger, and especially when it becomes our motivation to act. They would say anger, you know, in that kind of involvement is likened to a forest fire, which burns up its own support, which means it damages the host, which is us, right? It's our nervous system. It's our relationships, our families sometimes, our bodies, you know, our health. And like a forest fire, it might burn to leave us very far from where we want to be. And so developing, like the positive part of anger is the energy. So developing a relationship where we can actually take the energy of it, you know, not be complacent and have boundaries and, you know, a sense of integrity and being able to say no and things like that without getting lost in it and overwhelmed by it and the burning is the task, you know, and you can say it's not easy, but, and it's not easy, but being lost in it is so painful when we are paying attention. And it's also so distorting. I mean, this is something that Carl the Crocodile discovers when he's really angry at himself. You know, he makes a mistake in spelling and freaks out. He throws the eraser at the board, goes running, and then he's sitting at home and he's having all these thoughts, like, I have no friends, I'm stupid. You know, crocodiles can't learn, something like that. and then because he's practicing awareness of what he's feeling, he sees, oh, those thoughts are actually not reflecting the truth. Three people came to my birthday party and I'm not stupid. You know, I just made a mistake. And then he learns, which is one of my favorite parts of the book, he learns to put those particularly harsh thoughts in these clouds and has them float away. and then he resolves to be kinder to himself and notices how that feels. And that becomes the basis for wanting to be kind to others. So it's not that we look at anger and say it's wrong and I'm a terrible person, but we do want to explore that different relationship to it so that we have some options. You know, we're not so driven into action. And fear is another one. I think I've spent quite a bit of time looking at my own fear. And one of the things I've seen is that despite the world's pronouncement that we're afraid of the unknown, which of course is also true. I get really afraid when I think I do know and it's going to be really bad. And it's all the stories that I tell myself, that's when I really get going. And that was a really useful insight because even when I'm not sitting on a cushion just in life, when I see that arc beginning, I remind myself, you know what? You don't know. And I relax. Then things open up, then there's space. We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors. You might not know this about me, but the YouTube videos that I watch most frequently aren't about psychology or mental health. They're about cooking. I love cooking, and I do a lot of it, so I'm pretty picky about cookware. When you're touching an object every day, you want it to feel nice and perform well. Caraway sent us their 12-piece ceramic non-stick set in the marigold color, and Elizabeth and I have loved them. The color is great. I think they're really beautiful, and I've used this 10.5-inch ceramic coated fry pan literally every day since I got it. It heats up really nicely. 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A lot of people are grappling with that in the world these days. Moral anger, outrage. How can we use anger rather than letting it use us? Well, that's the skill, right? And I think the hardest thing in some ways is wanting that to happen. I kind of learned that most from talking to activists. I was once in a panel with this friend now that I didn't know her then, that I now quote a lot, Malika Dutt, who was, we were just on this panel together. And she was saying she had, she's Indian and American. And she was in India and a friend of hers was in, I think, a really bad car accident. so she was in the hospital and the system, at least in those days, in Indian hospitals was that your family and friends really had to come in and help take care of you. And the only place in the hospital, the only empty bed for her friend was on the burn unit, even though that wasn't her situation. So Malika was there visiting her friend, taking care of her friend on the burn unit, and she saw many, many women who, you know, had been burned by their mother-in-law, by their husband, some horrible, horrible suffering. And Malika, who was an attorney, resolved to really try to make a change. And so she formed this organization called Breakthrough, working against violence against women. So then we're on the panel. And so Malika's talking about the outrage that she felt at everything she was seeing. And then she said, but you know, I don't know how to dial it down. And she said, you see it throughout my organization. the backbiting and the ways people treat each other. So that is being overcome by anger. Even if you generated it initially in a kind of almost like wise response to something as a state, it can be so sticky and so overwhelming. That's the task, you know, and it never works to say, I shouldn't feel what I'm feeling. we feel what we feel, which apparently is one of my great or often used sayings. I don't know if it's great, but when I was teaching incessantly during the pandemic online, apparently I was saying the same thing over and over again. So people started sending me mugs with those sayings on it. And one of them was, we feel what we feel. You know, we have to allow the kind of dignity of every feeling, but that doesn't mean we want to take every feeling to heart and let it overcome us and let it make decisions for us. So we're talking here about kind of forms of appropriate anger. And clearly there are times in life where it makes sense to express yourself to other people. You know, you don't want a bottle. You don't want to be a doormat. All of those different things that people talk about when you start mentioning loving kindness practice or amount of practice or whatever else to somebody, you know, all the kind of classic, classic oppositions to it. Also, we want to be thoughtful about how we express anger to other people. And we don't want to be consumed by it. And also I feel like there is this way where anger can become a habit for people. Anger was kind of a habit for Carl. And I can think of people, myself when I was a teenager, I was this way at least a little bit, where you just kind of snap as a response because you're used to snapping, as Carl said, something along those lines. You know, crocodiles snap, that's just the way they are. And I'm wondering what you think helps people separate out these different things. Appropriate anger, maybe on the one hand, from more the habit of anger or this kind of habitual response to just stimuli in general on the other. Like what helps people think, okay, this is a moment where this is a tool that makes sense versus this is a moment where I need to take a little bit more space. I think sometimes it's extracting from the anger the qualities that are really positive. Clarity, strength, courage. You know, because sometimes I say, and I think it's true, we sometimes rely socially on the angry person in the room. You know, because they're pointing to some like flaw in the carpet that everyone else is very carefully looking away from, not wanting to admit is there. and they're saying, look at that, look at that burn mark, look at it. You know, so sometimes we really depend on them as well, but it's not their anger. It's their anger that may be leading them, but the qualities within that are things like courage, truth telling. You know, and that is what I think we really want to try to absorb from that state. And we can, you know, people do. And back to my teachers, you know, one of the things that just fascinated me about them all along was that they usually didn't have really easy lives. You know, we look at some of the models we tend to hold, you know, the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, both lost their countries, you know, lived in exile, had tremendous suffering. And then I had teachers who had tremendous suffering personally, you know, losing children and things like that. And so not only do they not seem kind of bland, you know, but they haven't like come to this out of some incredibly cushy, indulged, you know, luxurious life. It's been a lot, a lot of hardship. and somehow that equanimity serves because what they're not is incredibly self-preoccupied. You know, my teacher Deepa Ma, for example, did lose two children and her husband and that was when she began meditating. She was living in Burma, her husband, and she were from Bangladesh, but he was in the civil service in Burma. And when he died, she was completely grief-stricken and she went to bed. She couldn't get out of bed. And the doctor came and said, you actually going to die of a broken heart Unless you do something about your mind you should learn how to meditate So she got up and she went to the monastery and learned how to meditate And she was like so incredibly compassionate It was like she knew anyone's life could change on a dime. And I never saw anybody, and it was kind of rejected by her, you know, but it was that lack of self-preoccupation that just fascinated me. Like she lives in Calcutta, and we'd like take a train and go see her. And she would say, how was your journey? Tell me, do you need some tea? Do you want some biscuits? And I think, boy, if I went through what she went through, I don't know if I'd care about anybody else's train journey, you know, but they were not like that. They were not sucking in all the energy in the room, you know. They were incredibly generous and giving. And so that equanimity didn't produce coldness. You know, it was very aligned with compassion. On the path of gradual development, it takes time to change your brain and your hormones and your body and your immune system and all the rest of it. The physicalness of our, on the one hand, sort of burdensome patterns and moods and gradually acquire new ways of being. That usually takes some time, but what does not take a lot of time and can happen just at the very start is that capacity to be mindful of whatever you're experiencing at the time, to shift your relationship to it. It may take a while, and I think it's important to value the gradual transformation of the heart-mind. Okay, good. But meanwhile, our relationship to it can be very rapidly transformed. And then going back to what you're getting at here, Sharon, about the self-obsession, the self-preoccupation and all that, I just wonder, I'm just reflecting on the ways in which that movement into observation, including the observation of the self-referential thoughts and possessiveness and righteousness and case against others and a sense of being aggrieved individually, whatever. When you shift into observation of it, you shift the frame of self in a broad sense. You move from self to person is the way I would kind of describe it. And I wondered if you could say more about that, kind of the magic of mindfulness to de-center the self-obsession. It seems to do that, you know, which is pretty amazing. I mean, I think there are a few things, you know, it does exactly that apparently even in terms of neuroscience, you know. But it also, we shift our frame of reference. So I think, you know, something we say is, like if you see your own greed, you see your own jealousy, you see your own hatred or fear, you don't call it bad or wrong or terrible. You recognize it as a state of suffering because you feel that, you know, you're in touch with that. And once we make that shift, then that's the moment that compassion can arise for ourselves, You know, that we, our whole frame of reference changes. And once you are developing compassion for yourself, it's, I think, a pretty natural extension to have compassion for others, which doesn't mean stupidity. You know, it doesn't mean you don't notice the difference between joy and sorrow or between greed and generosity. You know, of course we can see that, but we don't have the same relationship to those polarities. You know, it's very, very different. And I had a question for you. Do you, as I sometimes hear these days, do you think children are kind of naturally altruistic and compassionate? What an interesting question. Well, I'll tell a story on Forrest. Oh, okay. Oh, no. Good. It's a very sweet one. And so I think this was, while Jan might have been pregnant with Laurel, Laurel had not yet come along. So Forrest was maybe two and a half or so. And we went out to a local Sizzler restaurant and money was kind of tight for Jan and me then. I maybe had just gotten out of graduate school. No, I was still in graduate school. Goodness, still then. And so we sit down at a table, like as one does at Sizzler, and it's Jan and I and Forrest, who's a super cute two-year-old, just well-behaved, sitting in his chair and having a great time. And next to us was this older couple. They seemed kind of like grandparent-y. Okay. And we could see them watching us, you know, interacting. Finally, the check came. And on top of it was this peppermint candy. There was a candy that would come with the check to sweeten, you know, the bitter pill. I'm having to pay them some money. Anyway, you know how that is. And Forrest liked sweets and liked sweets a lot then. And he reached for it. And as he was reaching for it, the grandfatherly type man at the adjacent table reached for it as well. And so Forrest had it in his hand. And the grandfatherly man, in a joking way, said, could I have that? Or can I have it. And- He was messing with me. Messing with me. Yeah. And we all expected Forrest to do the normal, possessive, my precious kind of thing. And Forrest looked at him and his face kind of softened and opened and he handed the man the candy. I feel almost teary talking about it. That's so sweet. Very, very sweet. like the whole room like whoa and how touching so i think yes there is a lot of that and it's also normal developmentally you know for three-year-olds three to five typically to be kind of self-referential you know for them to shift out of their own frame to recognize how it is for other people it's not so natural to them in general but i do believe there is a a deep inherent goodness and movement toward altruism in children in general. And then, of course, child rearing occurs in their peers and nursery school. And then that sibling comes along and pushes them out of the throne they occupied. And life continues. Was I that way because children have this deep wellspring of givingness? Or was I that way because I grew up in a situation where, yeah, even though at that moment in time, there were certainly some restrictions on us financially or things like that. But I'm sure as a three-year-old or whatever, I always kind of had a sense that there was sort of enough stuff. You know, what am I sacrificing to give? I imagine somebody who's coming up from a very different background could have a very different reaction to that kind of thing. Anyways, I just think the nature and nurture of this is really tough to peel apart, yeah. Yeah, what do you think about that, Sharon? Well, you know, I do hear it more and more and read it. And it's a little bit aligned with what you were talking about before, that sense of kind of a fundamental goodness or awareness that just needs to be uncovered. I personally, you know, I've of course been exposed to both those perspectives and in a way they don't seem that different to me. They may be different emotionally for somebody at certain phases or stages, but in my mind, there's always work to do. you're either uncovering what's already there or you're cultivating what is not yet strong, but it's not like one's a free ride, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Well, to go with that, I mean, there are a lot of non-dual types who would say that, well, since the ground of all is always the ground of all, even though it transcends our capacity to language it, and if there is an innate Buddha nature, innate goodness, the spark of the divine within, however, again, it's kind of framed, if that's always the case, well, it's always available. And, you know, it's not a lot of work to kind of settle in. Now, I would say that many of the people who say that have been doing a lot of work for 30 years, and now they're settled into it. I don't know. What's your take on all that? Well, I mean, from the non-dual Buddhist schools, they would say, you know, yes, that could all be true. But one needs to stabilize that access. You know, the access may always be there, but look at our day, you know, look at our lives. It's not necessarily expressive of that, you know, so the work, so to speak. And it's got a different flavor to it, you know. So when I say work, I sort of hesitated, but the path is really stabilizing it. So how do you do that? You return again and again, and you, you know, clean up your life a little bit, you know, so the obscurations are not so strong, and then you clean up your life a little more. And then, you know, so it does have a different flavor, and sometimes that could be a healthier flavor. if you fall into cultivating means straining, which it really shouldn't. But it's certainly possible and even easy to fall into that sometimes. And so it could be a good antidote. But I mean, I, of course, have met many of those people and heard that. And I was thinking, you're the one who schlepped all the way to India, you know, to be in a community where you could assure one another of your innate goodness. And that's a schlep, you know, and that's some effort. And being in a community is not always easy. And I just believe that there's always work. Does that trap you in seeking? No, I mean, you could be very grateful, you know, I think if you have a sense of confidence in a path. Well, you know, I understand what you're saying, but it's also, you look at those stories, you know, of the great non-dual teacher who lived in a cave for 20 years or something, you know, and you think that was a lot of work. Yeah, yeah. Back to the show after a quick break. Now, back to the show. You were saying something a moment ago, Sharon, that I would love to come back to and ask you a question about, which is this kind of movement from something as an identity. Like you were talking about I think I made a note from it because it was really good. Yeah, I think the line was, you recognize your fear, anger, greed, not as something you are, but as a state of suffering. So in that, you're decoupling identity from what's happening. This is actually a really big move for people. And in the relatively small amount of coaching work that I've done, I've seen it over and over again as a kind of transformative moment where people go from thinking of themselves as a fill-in-the-blank kind of person, if we apply this idea really broadly, I'm the kind of person who can't have that sort of a conversation with my friend. I'm the kind of person who just gets really activated when people do whatever it is that they do, to really viewing themselves with a much more open perspective. And of course, some of the answer to this is just meditation helps a lot, But I'm wondering in general what you've found tends to help people with that, that movement from this as a view of self to this as a state, and particularly this as a state of suffering. You just pointed out coaching or therapy or a really good community. It's like I once was at some conference and I heard a therapist. I don't think he was a coach per se. I think he was a therapist say, instead of saying, I'm an angry person, say, I'm feeling anger right now. And so that makes a shift. What are those moments where we're suddenly like, oh, I've been holding on really tight. And then the relief of letting go is really enormous. And it could happen a thousand different ways. I think about art a lot, you know, and creativity and what happens in those moments when we make something that didn't exist before, even if it's, you know, not an exhibit in the Guggenheim or something, you know, but it's something that is coming from within. You know, there's so many ways in which we want that perspective shift. And I think that's exactly what we want because there's so much possibility once we open in that way. It's like even Carl, we'll go back to my crocodile. I, first of all, had to learn the German student alligator and a crocodile for this book, which was not natural to me being from New York City. but you know there there's a time after he goes through his big change where he's you know it says he still gets sad sometimes and so what does he do sometimes he jumps up and down his trampoline sometimes he uses every single crayon in the box and sometimes he just cries and that's okay too He's not limited into a kind of not caring or bland perspective, but he's so different with himself. Because not only is there that shift in identity that you're describing, there's just so much more kindness toward ourselves. If you're looking at being jealous and you think that's disgusting, and I've been in therapy for a thousand years, why am I still jealous? I've been meditating forever. Or am I still jealous? That's really different than, ooh, that really hurts. And having that kindness toward ourselves. This is a bit of a personal question, Sharon. So if you want to pass on it, feel free to pass on it. But I'm wondering if you have any examples of this from your own life. Any things that you've really moved self-concept around or different ways you've come to think about yourself? I've had, I mean, I've been meditating for over 50 years. I have like a million examples. A thousand versions of these. Yeah, totally, totally. But I think it was such a huge issue for me because I can look back and, you know, I started meditating in January of 1971. And I've had a number of teachers since then. And I can think of, you know, oh, in 1971, my first teacher said this to me. 1973, this other teacher said this other thing to me, but it's kind of the same thing. In 1975, it was all around self-judgment. I have this one teacher, Menindra, who said something to me also in the early 70s, like, why are you so upset about that thought that came up in your mind? Did you invite it? Did you say, like, 315, I'd like to be filled with self-hatred, please? And he said, no, but when conditions come together for something to arise, it will arise. And you can affect those conditions, you know, for sure. It's like if you realize I'm very vulnerable to flying off the handle when I haven't slept or when I get drunk or whatever it is, you know, you can affect those conditions. But you can't ultimately absolutely control them. Like I'm never going to be angry again, never going to be frightened again. And when I look back at how many times in different ways a teacher was saying the same thing to me, it gives me a glimpse of how big a problem it was. you know, that I was so self-judgmental and so harsh, which is probably another reason that loving-kindness meditation as a style of practice became so important for me. Well, thank you for sharing that, Sharon. I appreciate that. I would say over time, I think identity does shift, and it goes back to what you've been emphasizing, Sharon, which is what's our relationship to what we're experiencing. and increasingly I think for many people identity kind of starts moving increasingly toward being in kind of the space in which things are happening. You know, I think of it as the difference between the person and the self. Clearly there are persons. Is there actually a self as this sort of presumed congealed unified entity inside? Well, if you look really closely, you can't find such a one. You can find fragments of such a one and references to such a one. You sure can't find such a one in the underlying neurology of the sense of self. So in any case, there's a kind of a shift away from identification with that perspective, that righteousness, that possessiveness, that grievance, that hurt, all the rest of it. Carl is very caught up in Carl in the beginning of your book, right? But then over time, the sense of being a person becomes much more fluid. the boundaries start softening at the edges You start feeling more and more like you a person process you know as part of a much larger process And it sort of opens out there And yeah maybe I ask you this question which is, I think a lot of people are afraid that as that softening of the self-world boundary starts occurring, that people will become patsies or pushed around by others. They won't stick up for themselves. And it's actually been my experience that as people increasingly disidentify from and disengage from kind of a self, who are you looking at? What are you going to do to me? You know, I want this or that. They actually become better at taking care of the needs of themselves broadly as a person. You know, they have more of a sense of their own rights, their own dignity. They're less reactive. They're more effective in actually working with others to get their needs met. So anyway, I just wondered what you would say to someone who's maybe concerned that they're going to become just like a, I don't know what, a big puddle that other people will be walking on. Yeah, really. Well, I certainly do hear that a lot. And in a time of the rising ties of hatred, which seem really to be happening, you know, right now. And always, and to some extent, for sure, but in a very intense sort of way right now. You know, it's a little bit funny also to be such a, you talked about my brand earlier, you know, to be so affiliated with loving kindness, because it's almost like, really? You know, and, you know, are you telling me that, you know, and people for a long time have said, you know, are you saying I should try loving kindness or compassion to that person who doesn't feel people like me should exist even? Or the way it's been phrased these days, which is also kind of funny, isn't loving kindness or compassion the same as appeasement? I haven't often heard the word appeasement since I was studying World War II. But that's the fear, and it's a very reasonable fear. I think it's the right fear to have, but it takes exploration to see if it's even true. And like you, I would posit it's not true, that there's an ability to sustain effort and not burn out and be clear and not absorb sort of the toxic energy of another. You can't stop it from coming at you, you know, but you don't have to absorb it and kind of suck it up, you know, in those ways. And it's tricky because it's only, I think, honestly, in the experience of it. It's like the experiment. Are you willing to make the experiment to see what happens? It's only in making the experiment that you see, oh, this is a strength. You know, this is not a weakness. This is not becoming a patsy or we're just giving in. It's really quite something to ponder. Like, what do you think when you hear about or maybe study a loneliness epidemic? Because in my mind, that's sort of related. You know, if we feel disconnected and apart, doesn't, you know, that sense of loneliness is not going to be resolved by getting more friends or going to a social club. It's some inner knowing that in a way we kind of belong to one another. I see it as something really real. I was very struck by Vivek Murthy, his comment, as you know, the previous Surgeon General, who said that the health burden of chronic loneliness, distinct from enjoying solitude. I'd say two of my favorite things in the world are having dinner by myself with a good book and a nice restaurant or being off trail in wilderness by myself. Two of my favorite things. I'm not lonely in those settings, right? Okay. So loneliness has as much health burden as smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day. Lifetime. Holy moly. So I reflect a lot on, okay, what to do. And I think it's helpful to start by realizing that the source of a lot of what might seem so personal, like a failure. Oh, they're all so happy. As Forrest says, we see the highlight reels of other people's lives on social media, and then we contrast that to our own day-to-day soap opera. Messy reality, yeah. Yeah, messy reality. And I think a lot of the loneliness people experience is due to these massive forces that are not personal. Just the way in which people now travel long distances off into work. They aren't working with other people alongside. The nature of work has changed. All kinds of other fragmentation of different kinds, divisiveness, and so on. So that's helpful to realize it's not so much your fault. Second, I'm really struck by the ways in which many times people who are lonely are alienated from themselves. They feel a kind of inner homelessness. and you know the great proverb that the root of all sickness is homesickness, right? Tara Brock will quote that. That's where I first heard it. And so that's one thing people can do is to become friends with yourself, you know, like Carl does. Carl befriends his own reactions. I think that's really helpful. Then another thing that really strikes me is that people who feel lonely often do have a dearth, a lack. It's a thin soup of social supplies coming their way. They don't have a mate. They don't have a circle of friends. It's hard to make friends after you kind of pass through your early 20s, whether it's college or a bar scene. What do you do? And yes, that's true. There may not be a lot coming toward you, But interestingly, if you tap into your own lovingness, your own loving kindness, your own compassion, your own basic friendliness, as you know, and I'll just say it for others, the root of the word metta for loving kindness is friend, just friendliness. It's like, that's not to be all cosmic. Just smile at someone or listen to them for a minute. Anyway, what flows out of you is under your control. You don't have control a lot of what comes into you, but what flows out of you that does connect you with others, feeds you and protects you as it flows through you, and is a soothing balm to the wound and the unmet longing of loneliness. For me, it's a deep matter of wisdom to recognize the ways in which we're at the effect of the world, and we have things arise dependently. We're dependent upon so many causes and conditions, and a lot of them suck. And on the other hand, there's a wise effort. There's making the efforts inside the mind and out in the world, thoughtward and deed, that can make a difference in our life in the range that we have influence. So I wonder how you see that, how you help people and how you do that in your own life. The balance of being at the effect or at cause. Well, it's always a balance. You know, I think, you know, I was interviewed once by this journalist about doom scrolling, and I didn't know what the word meant. So we started out, you know, he said, one of your colleagues recommended you. So what do you think about doom scrolling and what should we do about it? So I said, what is it? And he explained it to me, and I said, oh, yeah, I do that. And so some of it is, back to things we were talking about earlier, is seeing the effect, feeling the effect of certain activities on oneself instead of just living in this dream of being disconnected. It's like, oh, look at how I feel after my eighth hour of being online or something like that and using that as an impetus, not to be like a better person or perfect person, but just out of kindness to myself. It's like, oh, this really needs to be, I need a little less of the world coming in and working with my own sense of resource inside. And then, you know, I'm not implying like being cut off and oblivious because here it is, you know, impinging like crazy. But it sort of goes back in my mind to something I realized, which kind of surprised me. It's that when the Buddha was talking about, say, meditation practice, the purpose of it was not to suffer. That there's nothing redemptive about suffering inherently. Because there are plenty of people who suffer and they're bitter and hostile and isolated. there's a possibility there, but it's not inevitable that suffering will open us to love, you know, or compassion. But because there is that possibility there, we want to work to relate differently to the suffering, you know, so it's not so engulfing or whatever. And that always fascinated me, you know, that the purpose of practice was not to suffer. Purpose of life is not to suffer. It's inevitable it will happen. But how are we going to be with it? That's the whole point. So there's always some sense of agency and possibility in how we're relating. And, you know, there are all these parts of the text about suffering leading to compassion, leading to faith, leading to a sense of something bigger. But you just have to look around. It doesn't always happen that way, you know, and I think we need to understand that we need to have a sense of a path and confidence in it. We fall down and we pick ourselves up and we start over. But there is a way that we can relate differently to circumstances. And some of that may involve more seclusion, more, you know, solitude at times or an ethical revolution in your life, depending on how you behave or you live. It might mean don't doom scroll like all day long. Perhaps you might feel better and have more energy to try to do something about this world, you know, rather than just feel desolated, you know, by it. all born of paying attention. I don't think I can find a better period to put on the end of the sentence. I've really enjoyed this, Sharon. It's always great to talk with you. You have such a human approach to your teaching that I really appreciate. It's so grounded in people's real lives and their real experiences, including the unpleasant ones. Is there anything that you would like people to know about where to find you, what you're doing these days? If they want to consume more Sharon Salzberg-related content, where would we go? anything like that. You can just look on my website, which is SharonSalsberg.com. And I'm working on a workbook on loving kindness for Sounds True. So between Kind Carl, the children's book, and the workbook, I'm saying, well, my books are having fewer and fewer words these days. I don't know that that's a trend. I might reverse that and see you read another book book someday, but that's it for now. It's a very natural process, I think. I remember talking to somebody, an expert on trauma, actually years and years ago, who said that he hadn't written a book about it, Dr. Jacob Hom, to name drop him. But he mentioned that if he were to write a book about trauma, it would just be 300 blank pages, and there would be one instruction at the beginning, which is fill these in, and that would be the process for people. So maybe that's the kind of takeaway from some of what you're doing here. I really loved this conversation today with Rick and Sharon Salzberg. We talked about anger and reactivity through the lens of Sharon's new children's book, Kind Carl, which is just an absolutely adorable book. And one of the moments early on in the conversation that stuck with me was when Sharon said that one of her favorite definitions of mindfulness comes from children. It came from a kid. Mindfulness means not hitting someone in the mouth. And when you put it that simply, a lot of stuff gets clarified. Some of the big topics that we explored were cognitive diffusion. In other words, how do you start seeing a thought or a feeling as just a thought or just a feeling as opposed to this statement of reality or what it suggests about who you are as a person? I'm the kind of person who feels angry all the time. I'm the kind of person who struggles to control my reactivity? And how do we move towards seeing that thought as just a thought, or that feeling of anger as just a feeling? We also talked about managing anger and frustration and creating a more flexible sense of self. And then Rick and Sharon talked a lot about practice, about the path of practice in general, and how your reactivity can change over time. Another part of the conversation that I'm going to remember is when Sharon talked about my kind of joke of the Teflon Buddha image that people often have of advanced meditators. And sure, reactivity in general does go down. Those negative stimuli maybe won't feel quite as bad as they used to after you're practicing for a while. But what you really emphasized is it's more that everything else changes. The space that you hold those feelings and changes, your relationship to them changes, your desire to get more of the good out of that anger or frustration, and less of the suffering, maybe changes as well. You develop some tools that help you extract from the anger the qualities that are more positive. And she mentioned clarity, movement into action, seeing what's true, a kind of energy, courage, truth telling, all of this good stuff that we can get from anger and frustration and that are often particularly useful for people who have gone through some really painful experiences in life. People who have experienced trauma, people who come from marginalized groups of people. Those are groups of people that have often had their anger taken away from them. And so reclaiming the useful aspects of it can be really valuable. Sharon also talked about the value of accepting our feelings in general. If we hate the feeling or push down the feeling, we tend to just get tighter with other people. We feel worse ourselves. And as we've talked about a lot on the podcast, that material most of the time boils out of us one way or the other. We also talked about the relationship between anger and fear and how Sharon mentioned that in some Buddhist traditions, anger and fear are actually viewed as the same mind state. So these are just different expressions of the same state. They are inextricably linked to each other. Sharon had this comment when she was talking about that, about how suffering is not something we're aiming for. And yes, that might sound kind of obvious to people, but it exists inside of actually a really important context here. The Buddha started out as an ascetic. This is somebody who was trying to move away from pleasure in all of its forms, and was seeking out these various practices of essentially self-deprivation, twisting his body into uncomfortable positions, not eating food for long periods of time. Because there was a thought at the time that this could help somebody reach a more advanced state of practice. And there are some people and in some traditions that is a line that people follow. But in the Buddhist process, what he found was eventually that, no, this is seeking out suffering is not the point here. The point is to relieve ourselves of suffering. And so that's very much aligned with the comment that Sharon made. And so recognizing for him how suffering wasn't the path of growth was revelatory. I also enjoyed just how relational Sharon and Rick were during this conversation. It was fun to be here with both of them. They've known each other for a while. They've got a lot of professional experience with each other. And they're just so thoughtful about all of these issues. So I really enjoyed this conversation personally. If you made it this far and you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, if you could take a moment to hit the subscribe button wherever you're listening to it now on, maybe that's Apple or Spotify, maybe you're watching us on YouTube. You can also leave a comment, hit the like button, leave a rating and a positive review. If you're listening on Spotify, that also really helps us out. If you'd like to find some other ways to support the show, you can find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. And for just a couple dollars a month, you can support us and you'll get a couple of bonuses in return, like transcripts or ad-free versions of the episodes. If you'd like to read my writing, I'm also writing more often on Substack these days, and you can check that out. Until next time, thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you soon.