How to Attend With Sharon Salzberg
This week we are learning to be more present with meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg. Hear her conversation with Alice and Melissa about how the pandemic has highlighted how interconnected we are and what we can do to gain some stability in the midst of uncertainty. Sharon is the New York Times bestselling author of True Happiness , Loving Kindness , and True Love: The Art of Mindful Communication . Her latest book, Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Yourself and the World , is out in September.
We also had Sharon on the show in 2017 in an episode called How to Find True Love , which we highly recommend watching too!
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Highlights from this week’s series
From an interview with Sharon Salzberg
How meditation can remind us of how interconnected we are:
[F] First, it is a great irony in terms of meditation, because it seems to be the most solitary activity in the universe. It’s like you’re just sitting there. You know, maybe with your eyes closed. But it serves to connect you with a broader meaning of life and with other people. And even apart from meditation, in physical isolation it is so important to remember that we are all connected. And I’ve seen, you know, friends, for example, have amazing resilience or enthusiasm when they were able to help someone else. And the help cannot be extraordinary. But this is a way to make contact. A friend from New York told me that she never knew the names of any of her neighbors. And now everyone has exchanged phone numbers in case help is needed. And I know so many stories like that. What seemed like little things, but actually led us to another place of energy and ability to move on.
On how developing the ability to be present and consider what you are doing and what you don’t know can help keep us from going up the spiral:
I’m actually more scared when they think I know and it’s going to be really bad. And all the stories I tell really turn me on. And even in the midst of it all, if I remind myself, “You know what? You do not know “. I feel some kind of space. I feel relieved. And this is the type of thing where, you know, it’s obvious that we need to plan intelligently to the point where we can, or we need to react to a moment that calls for action in the future … But the ways that we think and we just making these alarming predictions. “It’s going to be so awful, I’ll never go back to New York, anyway…” It just adds to our burden. And so I treasure the skills that I developed, like wait a minute, you don’t have to go there. And as you can best say to yourself, “It’s okay, I can let it go. Let me get back to what it is. “
On fighting anger:
I would never want anyone to underestimate the importance of anger in any way. What we don’t want is for anger to be a kind of chronic condition, or so overwhelming or so overwhelming that it becomes the motivation for how we act, what we say, what we do. I say this for a number of reasons. You know, in Buddhist psychology, they say that anger is like a wildfire that can burn up your own support. In the end, it could destroy us. And yet there is an energy in him that, you know, is not passive, not overconfident. He can draw the line. He can tell what happened. And sometimes it seems to me that we know that at a meeting or something like that, the most evil person in the room points out an unpleasant truth that no one wants to look at and, perhaps, diligently avoids, you know. So there is power in that. And we want to have this strength, a sense of purpose and boundaries, but not obey them.
Hear more of Sharon’s wisdom and advice for now by listening to the entire episode.
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