The Psychology of True Happiness Real Love: The art of mindful connection Sharon Salzberg Hello and welcome, everyone. We are very glad to have you joining us today and I'm especially happy to introduce our very special guest, Sharon Salzberg. Sharon is a central figure in the field of meditation, a world-renowned teacher and New York Times bestselling author. She has played a crucial role in bringing meditation and mindfulness practices to the west and into mainstream culture since 1974 and is the co-founder of Insight Meditation Center in Barre, Massachusetts. Sharon, it's a real pleasure to have you joining us today. Welcome. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. Sharon, the inquiry we're exploring today is what is true happiness and wellbeing? That s an essential question that drives most of our lives. In your most recent book, Real Love, takes this inquiry of the heart even deeper. I'm curious, what do you mean by real love? That's a question I'm asked all the time now. Really, I think about what we long for, what gives our life meaning and what helps us carry on so we don't feel completely defined by the events of the day. I think it's all about connection. That when we feel connected to ourselves, to a sense of purpose, to a bigger picture in life, to one another. Then we have a sense of belonging and we have a sense of wholeness that I think is the source of great well-being and happiness. Yes, I certainly agree with that and it's been a consistent theme with our other speakers in this conference. I'm wondering, if a person doesn't have a sense of connection to people around themselves, is there a way of finding that connection at an internal level? Oh, definitely. I think it's most essential at the internal level because circumstances of life keep changing. And also, I wouldn't necessarily think of connection as the singular intimate, romantic relationship. There are lots of ways we can connect with even a stranger in a store and feel very present. That's a state of enrichment or fulfillment, but absolutely I think it needs to begin with ourselves. One of the reasons I actually wrote the book was one line in a movie. The movie was called Dan in Real Life. It was written and directed by Peter Hedges. Peter wrote somewhere in there, "Love is not a feeling. It's an ability." Of course, it's also a feeling. It's the feeling we tend to yearn for and so on. But I really began thinking about love as an ability, as a capacity inside of us. I realized Sharon Salzberg August 9, 2017 p. 1
that just really lined up with experiences I'd had during intensive meditation practice that somehow before certain kinds of understandings came to me, I thought of love as a feeling and a sense of a commodity. It was like a package and it was in someone else's hands. It was almost like the UPS person would be standing on my doorstep and looked down at the package, looked at the address and saying, "Wrong place." And he goes somewhere else and then there'd be no love in my life. I would just be completely bereft. But in contrast to that, if I thought of it as an ability, that it was inside me. And other people, art or situations might enhance it, enliven it or threaten it, but it was mine. It was mine to nurture and mine to grow. And so that was a whole other understanding about life. It's a powerful shift from that love comes to us and we're kind of a passive recipient of circumstances. I love the UPS delivery man. I don't get that package. That's between passive recipient and being an embodiment of love that gets almost activated within us regardless of circumstance, we can plug into that love and feel it in these different ways, like you're saying, in the grocery store lineup even. When I've been working on the book, I really tried to in effect crowdsource a lot of it. I tried to, whether on social media or in person hear people's stories and learn from their experiences. And the very first group I did was in New York City. At one point, this man raised his hands and he said, "Most people think of a good relationship as 50:50. My dog and I, we're a 100:100." And I just love that. And then I was quite late with the book, unfortunately, and sometime went on and I was finally, finally about to send it in to the publisher. I was just about to press send and I have the thought, "I wonder if that story made it in there through all the editing and all the changes." I quickly looked it up and it had not so I added it and I pressed send. That was my last contribution to the topic. It's so important, right, that love it's not a ratio. It's like the fullness of our heart in each moment. That's right. That's right. You've used these words "capacity" and "ability." When I think of those words, what comes up for me is that's something that can be trained. Like we can expand our capacity to love. How do we do that? Well, I think of all my years of teaching loving kindness meditation which are considerable number of years now, there are probably two major controversies I've encountered. One is the presentation of love as a strength rather than a weakness. Many people think that to have a heart full of love means that you're kind of giving in or you're too nice. You're too sweet. You're like a people- Sharon Salzberg August 9, 2017 p. 2
pleaser. You're complacent. And I don't see love that way at all. I see it as a tremendous power and strength. The other great controversy is that idea can be trained. And Eastern psychology, Buddhist psychology very much absolutely is believed that can be trained. I know it sounds weird, it sounds very cold and kind of mechanical like, "Oh, yeah, I went to school and I came out loving," or something. But it's very connected in Eastern psychology because qualities like love, compassion and kindness are considered emergent properties of how we pay attention. We know attention can be trained, absolutely. That's like the whole purpose of meditation practice is to train attention to be different. In this matter, we'd ask some questions about how we tend to pay attention. Like are we really present? Are we distracted a lot? Are we scattered? If you're talking to somebody you just met and you're not really listening, you're thinking about the email you need to write or looking around in the room at a party, looking at who might be more interesting to talk to, you're not going to really connect to the person right in front of you. We do what we do in the meditative process as we gather our attention. We come back and we really listen. So how are we paying attention and what are we paying attention to? When it comes to ourselves for example, we not uncommonly can fixate and obsess about everything that's wrong with us, what we don't like and the mistakes we made. Just this morning, I couldn't say what I wanted to say and I was like so bad so much so that our whole sense of who we are and all that will ever be can collapse into one of these mistakes. We've never done anything else. We need to broaden our perspective. It's not being conflict avoidance or pretending we're perfect or anybody is perfect, but did anything else happen this morning? And what's a truer picture of who we are, which has to include maybe the issues, but also the kindness we showed just that very same morning, our eagerness to learn and our willingness to put in the energy or whatever it is. It's not just one thing. What are we paying attention to? Then there is this supremely important question of who are we paying attention to? Who do we ignore? Who do we look right through? Not only because of bias or antipathy, but just indifference. Like who doesn't count? Who doesn't matter? Who do we objectify? If we ask ourselves that question and we shift the way we pay attention to include rather than exclude, we will feel far, far more connected than we do. So, it's really about broadening what we pay attention to with this quality of curiosity and openness. That's right. And presence. I we're not really there, if we're not really listening and if we're not really looking and I mean it's nothing for the curiosity actually to be nourished by. Sharon Salzberg August 9, 2017 p. 3
Right, that's right. These are capacities that you can train and then love, compassion and kindness like you said are emergent properties that grow out of this training of attention. That's right. How long does one have to practice training attention to cultivate this loving heart and this whole-hearted, the minimum dose? That's a question I always get. What's the minimum dose? I know. I mean that's what everyone in America wants to know. When I tease people sometimes I say, "It's America. Everyone wants to know what's the least amount of time I can put into this thing and still get a result?" It's an unreasonable question actually, but I don't think it's that healthy to go for the bare minimum all the time. I think what one sees, it's a few things. One is let's say you decided you're going to sit formally in meditation in cultivating these qualities ten minutes a day or 15 minutes a day. A month later or even years later frankly, you may not see any difference in that ten- or 15-minute period, but you'll see a big difference in your life. You'll see that you're different with yourself when you've made a mistake, when you've blown it in some way. And you're different meeting a stranger and you're different with somebody you feel some animosity from and toward. You'll be different in your life and that's where it really counts. So, less reactive. Less reactive, kinder, broader perspective, more ability to let go and more interested in others. I think I've seen a lot of people really struggle because we don't tend to look there. We tend to look at that formal ten- or 15-minute period for the results and it's not where we're going to find it. The other thing is that we still get reactive. We will. We'll get lost and some habits are very, very old and strong. But what you'll find is if you use to be awash in self-condemnation say for a day, a full day, over something you said or something you did, now it's lasting 30 minutes. That's a huge change in the quality of your life. But it's a really badfeeling-30-minutes. So very few people say, "Wow, this used to last all day." But that's how it happens actually. Then I've noticed for myself that for those 30 minutes, I'm less likely to go into shame about being reactive. That's the secondary, if you will, like judgment of my humanity and that kind of frees the heart even more. Right, that's right. It is what it is. It's a very gradual, but deep, deep and profound sense of change. Sharon Salzberg August 9, 2017 p. 4
Sharon, you mentioned where it matters which is how we are experiencing our life. The wholeheartedness, the openheartedness, the less reactivity and the more kindness. For those who maybe unfamiliar with the actual formal practice of it, I'm wondering if you could just spend a few moments here just describing what the training of attention means or the cultivation of the heart in a formal meditation practice. Well, I mean there are phases of it. They build on one another, the foundation is usually choosing an object of awareness, resting your attention on that object and when your attention has wandered as it often does. So, the past or the future, where you fall asleep or whatever. Once you realize that, seeing if you can let go gently of that distraction and bringing your attention back to that chosen object. One very common object although it's not universal by any means is the feeling of being depressed. But you can also use a mantra or a sound or an image or visualization. There is actually a formal loving kindness practice where you would use the silent repetition of certain phrases like, "May I be happy, may you be happy." But usually what we say is even if a great deal of your practice is not using the breath as that home base, it's usually good to have at least amount of your practice using the breath. Because as my first teachers would say, "First, you don't have to believe anything in order to feel your breath. If you're breathing, you can be meditating." As one teacher said I've always felt very charmingly, he said, "The breath is very portable." If you practice, say, five minutes a day using the breath as the vehicle for returning to yourself or returning to the moment, then you're at work and tempers are starting to go up and anxiety is starting to flare. There's all this pressure. The momentum around you is crazy. You don't have to open up your closet door and pull out a special cushion, a gong, incense, symbols and sit down and look weird. It's like you're breathing. Nobody even has to know you're doing it. When you use the breath that way to return to yourself, you're also returning to your values to things you really care about. It's actually very powerful. That's sort of the effect of having a regular, formal practice in some ways. There are few keys. One is once you've chosen what that object is going to be, the idea really is to rest your attention. Say with the breath. Sometimes people feel like they got a strangle hold on the breath. Their mind will wander. They'll really wander more. It's strained in activity. And the other thing which is absolutely key is your mind will wander. That's expected. We spend a lot of time just in the past and in the future not in a useful way. The whole trick is not accumulating more breath before your mind wanders. The whole goal is to let go more and more gently. It's what one of my teachers once called exercise is letting-go muscle and returning. This is where self-compassion comes in. When you realize you've been distracted, it's easy to spend the next seven hours Sharon Salzberg August 9, 2017 p. 5
blaming yourself and feeling like a failure. It's like resilience training. We want to have some kindness towards ourselves and just start over. Right, I love the phrase that the orientation is to recognize when your mind wanders, release where it's gone and return to the breath. Recognize, release and return. Rather than, you must focus on the breath which sets you up for failure. Right, that's true. Right. Then once we're settled with the breath, resting with the breath, how does that work with the heart? Well, if you're practicing particularly techniques that rely a lot on the tool of mindfulness, then what you would then do is you would take this attention which has now become kind of very clear and present. You start applying it to other things that come up in your awareness like physical sensation or emotions. You really learn a lot about the different things that we feel. The only way to do that is not to fight, not to struggle and not to blame yourself. Like, "Why am I still angry? I've been meditating for over 45 years. I shouldn't be angry anymore. This is a disgrace." That doesn't help. You have to have an almost tenderness toward your experience, whatever it is, and you cultivate that along with the mindfulness. It's a part of it. As you come to learn sort of your whole emotional landscape, it's not in a judgmental way. It's really deepening that force of love. Then of course there are specific techniques that are especially designed to deepen loving kindness and compassion. That's a choice too. You could say, "I want to really in a dedicated way explore those things for a while." Right, that's when the repetition of those phrases might be helpful. That's right, yes. When you're speaking, what arises for me is that the cultivation of the heart in this state of real love isn't just about having so-called positive emotions. But it is the quality of presence, that tenderness, that we meet whatever arises in our awareness. That is that kind of wholeheartedness really is what I'm getting that you mean by real love. It's not just about those positive feel-good feelings. No, I mean I think positive feel-good feelings feel good. They do, but they're kind of time-limited. They come and go like everything else. I think there's a much deeper sense of resource we can have. Even I will say for all that we all need, most of us need tremendous help and training really in opening to painful experience without adding a sense of being isolated, blaming and so on, but really finding one another in difficult times. Not all of us really absorb pleasure Sharon Salzberg August 9, 2017 p. 6
very well either. Sometimes we're so distracted we hardly take it in. We have such a fixed idea of what's happening or what should be happening that what is happening is fine, but not to us because it's not good enough. We talk about meditation practices, a kind of revamp of our relationship to everything, the painful experiences we have and the pleasant experiences we have. Even the neutral experiences we have, the kind of ordinary, repetitive, routine times where we tend to be kind of half asleep. We can wake up actually and feel connected then as well. The whole world and our full experience becomes an opportunity then for presence. Yes, that's right and love. And love. I'm going to stretch us a little bit here, Sharon. You have a chapter in your book called Love Everybody. If we're really talking about every moment and every experience being an opportunity to love and we look at what's happening in our world right now around this tribalism, political divisiveness and a lot of vitriol in the media, how can we love everybody when we might disagree quite vehemently with people or who have been hurt by people? Just as I said in the first group that man told me the story about his dog, the very last group I did with people face-to-face was in Barre, Massachusetts where the Insight Meditation Society is. This one man said to me, something like, "My whole life I've been taught that liking somebody is, yeah, that's expected. Of course, we like everybody. But loving somebody, that's rare, rare supreme accomplishment." He said to me, "You're reversing it. You're saying we can love everybody and maybe we don't like anybody at all very much." I looked at him and I said, "You're right. I am. I hadn't even thought of it that way." Because there's a certain meaning of love. It doesn't mean approval. It doesn't mean romance. It doesn't mean you want to go into the sunset together. It doesn't mean you ever want to see them. You may not like them at all, but there's this deep sense within that our lives have something to do with one another. In fact, when you look at the kind of hatred and things that are going on that seems to have come from such a profound sense of disconnection. You don't want to replicate that somehow in your response. But it should never mean giving in, not caring anymore or not fighting anymore. It shouldn't ever and I think that's a real degradation of our understanding of love. I think we are at a time where understanding of love has gotten quite degraded. In a way, I almost think it was kind of part of why I wanted to write the book. I wanted to help reclaim the word. Because I don't see it as a weakness or something that makes us kind of stupid and sentimental. I see it as a tremendous power. I think people with enormous amount of love in their hearts has done great things and are doing great things right now. Sharon Salzberg August 9, 2017 p. 7
Absolutely. We can look at Martin Luther King, for example, as an example of someone who was moved by love and certainly stood up to injustice. Love is not passive. Contrary to what we're being sold, it's not something to be commodified, but it's a quality of being that is really open. It allows us to meet whatever's happening with skill and wisdom. I am just curious about, you've written this book and this book I will say it's like a guide book for cultivating an open and loving heart. I love it. It's not just conceptual. You've got practices. You've got reflections. It's really about opening and feeling the heart. What would you say is your practice that has most opened your heart, Sharon, in your life? I would say it was probably loving kindness practice. I began my meditation practice with a kind of mindfulness practice. Of course that was my first exposure so that was huge. So not to deny that, but in that same retreat I began meditating in India. I went there as part of a college program, kind of like my junior year abroad. I began meditating in the context of an intensive ten-day retreat. And just toward the end of the retreat the teacher, S. N. Goenka, introduced loving kindness practice. It was a kind of ceremonial way of saying goodbye. Like here we are, going back out into the world. It was only 14 years later that I got a chance to go to Burma and go do intensive structured loving kindness practice with a teacher. That was a tremendous transition point in my life. Again it worked in just a way it was described. I wouldn't say that, and I wanted it like anybody else. I had like a great breakthrough moment where I could say, "Oh, like at 4:14, I loved myself completely. It's all done. It wasn't like that. But I left that monastery a different person than who I had been when I walked in. Yes, you talked about that in the book. Just that shift into feeling your innate capacity to love that is independent of having an other or an object to activate it. That you are love. We are love. I'm curious. We so often hear that you have to love yourself before you can love others. What do you think about that? Well, apparently, I've started a controversy of my own anyway because I say, well, what I was trying to say in the book was I don't really believe that you have to love yourself completely before you can love others because then it becomes a project. It's like a self-improvement project. You think, "Well, I have to just discard anyone else." I feel like I've met many people who powerfully love others and not so much themselves, whether they're professionally caregivers of some kind. I've worked with people from domestic violence shelter workers to humanitarian aid workers all around the world. Whether you're doing that professionally or personally in your family or whatever or amongst your friends, you're the caregiver. I feel like that love for others is genuine, but I don't think it can be sustained. Because if you only love others and you only care for others Sharon Salzberg August 9, 2017 p. 8
and you're not considering yourself, I think after a while your home motivational field gets a little odd. What was once maybe like generosity of the spirit becomes more like judgment. You get resentful and it's not the same. It may look the same on the surface, but it's not at all the same within. Somewhere we have to figure, we can't leave ourselves out completely. In the classical loving kindness practice, you actually start with yourself, offering loving kindness to yourself because you're building like this reservoir or this sense of resource inside out of which you can give to others. The sequence of loving kindness in the classical practice is also said to be based on the principle of doing it the easiest way possible. We're supposed to be the easiest. Of course, that is so rarely the case for many of us these days. Not true, yes. Yes, if someone's really struggling we tend to just say, "Well, switch the order. It doesn't matter. You don't have to start with yourself." Sometimes it's easier to start with a pet. Sometimes it's easier to start with a pet. The Buddhist text say like who embodies love for you? When you think of them do you smile? It could be an adult, it could be a child and it could be a pet. Who makes you smile? And then from there, just feeling the ripple in your life. You have to include yourself. Yes, you have to include yourself. Sharon, I'm curious. What is the one takeaway you most want your readers to know? I think it would be that, can I do three? You can do three. One is that love is a strength. The second is that it's trainable. It's not just for others. It's for us too. Then the third is really, let's make sure love is a part of the conversation whether we're talking about our inner move toward well-being or we're talking about revisioning society in some way. I love that. I love your motivation of reclaiming love as a strength and really an essential quality of being that we need in this time for our own well-being and for the well-being of our communities and really our planet. Thank you so much, Sharon. I want to just say that if people are interested in your work that your Sharon Salzberg August 9, 2017 p. 9
website has got a list of your retreats and your most recent book, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection, is just a gem. I can't recommend that enough, but thank you so much for joining us, Sharon. Well, thank you. 2017 The Shift Network. All rights reserved. Sharon Salzberg August 9, 2017 p. 10