Sharon Salzberg2013-05-25T04:03:30-04:00Sharon Salzberghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=sharon-salzbergCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Sharon SalzbergGood old fashioned elbow grease.Who to Vote For?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.19128232012-09-26T13:00:13-04:002012-11-26T05:12:02-05:00Sharon Salzberghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharon-salzberg/
I was stunned. As a spiritual leader, I knew I'd be busted if I told anyone who to vote for from the "pulpit," so to speak. And anyway, I don't think it's right to equate enlightenment, freedom or salvation with a particular candidate. That seems different to me than discussing values (like compassion) worldview (like interdependence) or ethics (like generosity) -- and any real discussion, from my point of view, involves free thinking. As in the quotation attributed to Albert Einstein, "The significant problems that we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them." I believe that collectively, we badly need some different ways of looking at life.
But we also need to vote. This is why I really admire the work of yogavotes.org and mindfulvotes.org. Voting is like alchemy -- taking an abstract value and breathing life into it. Voting is the expression of our commitment to ourselves, one another, this country and this world. And the imperative to vote is genuinely nonpartisan. When I did voter registration in Ohio in 2008, I didn't snatch the form back if someone indicated they were going to vote for the opposing party (I'm a registered Democrat, though I was an Independent for years). My ideal registration system would be an opt-out one, where every single person is registered once they turn 18. In Australia, I'm told, everyone is registered to vote and you pay a fine if you don't vote.
If every adult U.S. citizen would participate in the system, perhaps we would then also take the time to inform ourselves of the issues (not always easy in this day and age) and in addition, put ourselves in the shoes of others to try to understand where they are coming from (another thing that is not easy). We would all be better off for it.
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I think these views to some extent are a cultural legacy, the degradation of love to sentimentality and compassion to a root cause of fatigue. It is sometimes difficult to view compassion and loving kindness as the strengths they are. They are viewed too often as secondary virtues at best in our competitive culture ("If you can't be brave or brilliant or wonderful, then you might as well be kind"). But compassion does not imply ducking our responsibilities or shirking our power. Compassion, instead, is a potent tool for transformation since it requires us to step outside of our conditioned response patterns.
Ordinarily, we're so preoccupied with ourselves and defended against the "Other" that we feel continuously threatened and anxious. We forget how connected we actually are and it is this perceived division that creates antipathy and alienation. This limited perspective prompts responses that are less creative with fewer possibilities for happiness.
My friend, Cheri Maples, used this wisdom to help move her own community forward when she was a police officer. Cheri saw that when offenders were exposed to the extended consequences of their actions, their us-vs.-them behavior could shift. When a petty thief was told that because he ripped off a certain gas station, the kid who worked there couldn't support his sister, who could no longer make the rent and ended up on the street, this information shifted the boy's sense of what interconnection actually means. We have a limited awareness of how our actions ripple out into the world, but when we're reminded of how directly our behavior impacts others -- those we know and those we don't -- it changes our minds and hearts. "It doesn't matter what happens to them" shifts to "Oh, actually it does matter because they have many similarities to me." They have vulnerability, they're taking care of people, and they want to be happy. Our common ground expands in the light of attention.
So how do we deal with our outrage? It is indeed natural to be outraged in the face of injustice or cruelty. But when anger becomes a steady presence, it narrows our options, perceptions and possibilities. It burns us up. Unfortunately, many of us are taught to see non-aggression, and the resistance to us-vs.-them thinking, as passivity, weakness, or delusional. In fact, it is an act of courage to step outside our familiar reaction patterns to discover approaches that can shift the dynamic we face.
It's possible to feel outrage when it arises without it becoming our overriding motivation for seeking change. We can learn the art of fierce compassion -- redefining strength, deconstructing isolation and renewing a sense of community, practicing letting go of rigid us-vs.-them thinking -- while cultivating power and clarity in response to difficult situations. Love and compassion don't at all have to make us weak, or lead us to losing discernment and vision. We just have to learn how to find them. And see, in truth, what they bring us.
Cheri and I are doing a workshop at the Omega Institute this September on fierce compassion. Every time I get to explore this with others, I learn so much more myself.]]>A True Refugetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.12170052012-01-21T08:21:26-05:002012-03-22T05:12:02-04:00Sharon Salzberghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharon-salzberg/
The Buddha said, "From time to time, the enlightened one is born into the world an arahat, fully awakened, abounding in wisdom and goodness, happy, with knowledge of the worlds unsurpassed as a guide to those willing to be taught, a blessed one, a Buddha. By themselves they thoroughly understand. They make this knowledge known to others. They proclaim the truth, both in the letter and in the spirit, "lovely in the beginning, lovely in the middle, lovely in the end," abounding in wisdom and goodness, happy. What a wonderful sense of a possibility!
This Buddha, our Buddha you might say, arose in India in this world around 563 BC. He sat under a tree in Northern India and became enlightened. He came to birth as a human being, just as each of us has. This was perhaps accentuated for me by being in northern India, the land of the Buddha. I could take a short walk and be at the spot where, as bodhisattva, a being aspiring to enlightenment, the Buddha had the milk rice that fortified his body after so much extreme self-denial. And of course, day or night, I could go to the tree. The presence of the Buddha was intimate and everywhere, as though visiting the land of one's ancestors.
As a human being, the Buddha's questions, his very compelling questions, were about the nature of life. It's as though he were asking, "What does it mean to be born into this human body, to be so vulnerable and dependent as an infant, to grow up, to grow older whether we like it or not, to die, unbelievably enough, even as we see all others die around us?" and "What does it mean to have this human mind which seems to veer constantly from one extreme to the other, always changing, so that we might wake up in the morning delighted to be alive, full of faith, really happy, and by the afternoon we're freaked out, we're frightened, we're angry, we feel guilty, we question our very right to be happy. It seems incomprehensible to us. And then at night it's something different again."
What does it mean as a human being to look for happiness, peace, joy, that is not confined within the body, within that changing mind? Is there a quality of happiness, is there a kind of peace that is not a compounded thing subject to change, to destruction, as conditions change? He had questions in effect that are very similar to our own. As he phrased the call to awakening for himself, he said, "Why should I who am subject to birth, old age, sickness, death, sorrow, and suffering, seeing the danger in these things, why should I take refuge in that which is also subject to change, to death, to sorrow, to suffering? Let me find that which is changeless, which is deathless, which is without sorrow, which is unborn and undying, that is a true refuge." And in fact this is what he found. He found a true refuge.
We say a human being sat under a tree 2600 years ago, motivated by compassion, brought there, moved there on a wave of moral force. There was no other place he could be. Throughout the night as he sat there, which was a full moon night, the full moon in May, he saw the conditioned nature of suffering, sorrow, grief, loss, and death. He traced it back. He traced it back until he came to ignorance. He saw his own and others' countless past lives stretching back over many ages and eons of the world. He saw in effect the spectacle of the whole universe, beings being born and dying in accordance with the laws of nature. He saw the cyclic path of all beings, the unfortunate and the illustrious and the rich and the poor, all beings tossed about on these waves of birth and old age, sickness and death. As the night went on, he saw the means of liberation. He saw suffering, the cause of suffering, the end of suffering, and the path to the end of suffering. At the first light of dawn, just as the star Venus broke in the morning sky, he saw through the very last trace of ignorance in himself and was completely enlightened.
And, it is taught, we too can be enlightened, every one of us. We can be completely freed from the bonds of limitation and conditioned confusion through our own endeavor, inspiration, effort and development. There is a path, and we can traverse it.]]>No Place To Hide: A Buddhist Perspective on Birtherstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8568312011-05-03T19:31:10-04:002011-07-03T05:12:02-04:00Sharon Salzberghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharon-salzberg/
Strangely, on that same day, for the first time in my life I received a message of hate via email. It came in on my website account, with the subject line, " Stinking Jews." The first line was, "We don't need Jews in Buddhism," and went on to describe Jews as greedy, stinking, and ghouls.
I'm not sure on what authority the writer was stating that Buddhism doesn't "need" any Jews. A lot of Buddhists (and Jews) would be very surprised to hear that Jews should be excluded from exploring the ethical teachings, the meditation methods, and the compassionate dimensions of Buddhism. I remembered during his inaugural address, President Obama called this a nation of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and non-believers. I was standing there in the freezing cold, in that crowd of millions, and murmured, "What about Buddhists?" At the very same moment, the man standing next to me, a total stranger, murmured, "What about Buddhists?" Later, on a political website I enjoy following, the same point came up, and someone commented, "Well, between Jews and non-believers, he covered an awful lot of American Buddhists."
And on the day President Obama released his long form birth certificate, and I received the hate filled email, while I was meditating I had quite a Martin Neimoller moment. Neimoller's well known poem, describing the dangers of political apathy, recalled his experience in Nazi Germany:
First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.
Being born Jewish, I personally don't make it past the third line to face the loneliness and terror of the last. But everybody in this country, even if you are not a communist or trade unionist or Jew or person of color or immigrant should take heed: hatred fostered doesn't tend to die out; creating an "other" whose life isn't seen as meaningful sets a fire that can burn wild and devastate many, including yourself; fear is easy to fan and hard to quell. Staying silent in the face of bigotry resolves nothing -- eventually there will be no place to hide. We can confront lies with the truth without demonizing anyone, and we have to, or ignorance gets stronger and stronger. We can stay connected to the dignity of our being no matter what trash comes our way, and we need to, for our own sake and to model a possibility for others. When we see someone else getting knocked down and we feel privileged and immune, we need to remind ourselves to guess again -- life just isn't like that, all tidy and static, without cycles of vulnerability and change. We don't know whose turn will be next, while we do know that without a legion of truth-tellers, it will be someone's.
]]>Opening the Heart with Lovingkindnesstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8303802011-03-03T08:49:00-05:002011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00Sharon Salzberghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharon-salzberg/
This has intrigued me from the beginning of my acquaintance with meditation practice: the big life lessons we learn to embody through meditation come in these itty bitty little packages. If we are trying to settle our attention on the feeling of the breath, for example, and find we have to continually start over after every two breaths opens the door to a bout of distraction, that doesn't seem like a very big deal. But it actually is.
What we are actually practicing is the art of beginning again, not accumulating a tally of more and more breaths before our attention wanders. As we hone the ability to let go of distraction, to begin again without rancor or judgment, we are deepening forgiveness and compassion for ourselves. And in life, we find we might make a mistake, and more easily begin again, or stray from our chosen course and begin again. We are practicing this in meditation whether we are working with the breath, or awareness of body or emotions, or doing the formal phrases of lovingkindness practice.
This is the meta-lesson, forged in the crucible of our effort, our openness to trying, the tenderness of our expanding hearts, our laughter at ourselves, our tears, our humility: we can always begin again. And we will have to.
In "Real Happiness" Sharon tells us about one of her students who thought "the whole idea of lovingkindness meditation seemed hokey and rote to her, but she focused on the phrases nevertheless." I've thought the same exact thing about lovingkindness meditation. It's a group hug, mushy, mawkish. As much as I like the idea of lovingkindness in theory, I've never taken it very seriously. I might say to myself "May I be happy," a few times and think of my mom for a while, but sooner or later -- usually around the time I start trying to extend that warm feeling to some jerk or other -- it just starts to feel silly and I go back to the serious business of trying to develop concentration.
Not today. Today I'm going to try to do some lovingkindness in earnest. Why the change of heart? To be honest, it's because it's been a long week. I've felt defeated and have been harder on myself than usual -- mostly about perceived transgressions against my body. You're not sleeping enough. You're not working out enough or meditating enough. How can you eat so much crappy food? It's endless and it's exhausting. So today I've decided to try to meet that negativity head on and give myself a little love for once.
As I was I was doing the dishes on Monday morning I was thinking about who I might think of during Loving-Kindness meditation this week. I was thinking of one person particular, a mother at my children's school who has made some very insensitive remarks regarding my 10-year old's seizures. (I am being really polite here, As one friend asked -- did you hit her?) I was all set to really focus on her when I was set to bring to mind a person whom you might have a difficulty or conflict with. I was ready!
But something happened, she faded far away as did her behavior, but during the sequence where we think of someone we have gratitude for there seemed to be a never ending parade of people that came to mind.
I learned how easy it can be to put all our energy into the negative, even though the positive so far out weighs it. I saw that fear and ignorance have very little power when they are set against the landscape of love and goodwill.
-- Christine Califra-Schiff, Writer
Love is a verb. Like cooking, painting, gardening -- when love is present, there is evidence. When I am loving, I am doing something.
I regularly do the lovingkindness meditation for my Grandmother. Often times I hear and see her saying the phrases for me.
So often, we don't know what to do in life. We don't know what to say or how to respond to a situation or person. Sometimes that person is ourselves. Whatever else is being called for, now you can say the phrases with sincerity and certainty. This is your blessing. This is your seal. This is your love made sustenance. This is your love made real.
-- Elesa Commerse, Meditation Teacher Working with Cancer Patients
Lovingkindess meditation... continuing with me. Not so easy tonight. Find myself just going back to the breath... trying some gathas... mountain... solid. In... out. Then very vividly... there is my dad. I can see him as sure as he is sitting there. He died 15 years ago. I just stay with it. My thoughts are about how he would always be at school early... in his classroom... eat his lunch in his classroom... and be in his classroom after school was out. He made sure his students knew he was there if they wanted some help or come in and chat. I had not had such vivid thoughts of him for quite awhile. It was nice to have him there. He was sitting at his desk. I remembered how much I loved him. I was feeling calmer... and then the thought... "I am here if you need me." I know it sounds a little nuts... but I just felt warm... calm... like I had just been hugged. I needed that. It was nice to have him there for a few minutes. It reminded me I am worth loving... if that makes sense. May I be safe from harm. May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I live with ease. It just made more sense and I could genuinely wish these things for myself.
-- Tracy Strauss, Administration Manager for a Local Courier
]]>Meditation Practice: A Paradigm Shifttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8201382011-02-09T08:46:00-05:002011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00Sharon Salzberghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharon-salzberg/
When I got back to the U.S., my friends and I captured the essentials of that retreat experience and began the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Mass. There too retreats are largely silent, and participants, aside from a short chore one is asked to do each day (helping chop vegetables, emptying trash, etc.) are free of other responsibilities.
I once had a friend on retreat whose "job" while there was cleaning a bathroom. His job in the rest of his life was as a musical conductor. It turned out he had to leave the retreat briefly to conduct a memorial concert at Carnegie Hall. He describes a very funny moment, standing on the stage that night, about to conduct a magnificent orchestra in the glorious environs of Carnegie Hall, when he had a passing thought, "I wonder if someone is cleaning that bathroom!"
It is so powerful when we can leave behind our ordinary identities, no longer think of ourselves primarily as a conductor, or writer, or salesclerk, and go to a supportive environment to deeply immerse in meditation practice. And what I have been learning lately is how very powerful it also is when we don't leave it all behind, when we bring a commitment to better understanding ourselves through meditation right into our ordinary everyday identity and jobs and lives.
For the month of February, coinciding with the release of my new book "Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation: a 28-Day Program," we have gathered a diverse group of people doing just that, and chronicling their experience of regularly meditating while still fulfilling the responsibilities of being a mom, or firefighter, or a police officer, or a minister, or teacher. There are about 60 people blogging, and anyone is welcome to join this 28 day challenge at any time, and comment.
It's a paradigm shift for me, and an inspiring one. The meditation traditions I started and have continued practicing have all emphasized inclusivity: anyone can do this who is interested. You don't have to believe anything, adopt a dogma in order to learn how to meditate. This isn't limited to special people, or lucky people, or people of a certain background. But of course economic constraints, information gaps, cultural assumptions all do their own limiting. It's going to take creative forms, new ways of communicating, and all of us challenging our own assumptions to breathe life into that assertion of inclusivity. I have been so moved at the depth of experience, the commitment, and the honesty and kindness of the participants in this challenge, each fulfilling the demands of their ordinary lives, each showing a way forward to new manifestations of practice, community, awareness and love.
Here are just some brief samples from the first week of the challenge:
From Actress Daphne Zuniga:
I wake up, It's the first day! The day my new clarity and calmness will begin! The day I will be helping everything align with my true self and I will begin to align with the Universe's true self! Yay! The day things will begin to bug me less! And things will fall into place better. I'll get what I want with out wanting it too much, just the right balanced amount. It won't take long, since I used to do silent retreats for several days at a time, boy those were the days! Days of miracles, beautiful inner experiences beyond all others... okay, let me get my coffee, my blanket, my Real Happiness book, set my timer, and go sit on the couch.
From a Human Rights Worker in Rwanda:
If I can spend time sitting in a corner area of my floor that I've never sat before, if while sitting there I notice the way the colors of ribbon on the bookshelf interact with each other, if I can become familiar with the sounds of the deafening birds outside my window and the scrape of the mop against the concrete, then perhaps that's good enough for now. If during this sit I begin to make a mental list of the many things I need to do later, then at least moving through that opens up the space and place to see what is underneath.
From a NYC Firefighter:
It has been brutal weather these past few weeks in NYC. A lot of us firefighters are being over worked due to the city's low budget. So even though we were running around all day and night for 24 hours I managed to squeeze in a meditation session while we sat at a manhole fire for three hours.
I was in my bunker gear sitting in the fire truck, wet and cold. It was quiet so I decided to try and meditate on the breath. I sat comfortably with my back straight and started to focus on my breath. Inhale, exhale, repeat =)
From Police Officer Deb Brown:
One of the things you are expected to be able to do efficiently when you become a police officer is to multitask. New officers will wash out if they can't drive, listen to the radio, look for suspects, witnesses, complainants, victims, criminal activity, monitor the mobile data computer, look for addresses, figure out where they are going and a myriad of other things that can compete for one's attention... So, you train and train at the academy and then hit the street and it can all go horribly awry if you can't multitask. And by 'awry', I mean 'in death.' And like so many things in this career, it is difficult to give up those habits/skills when you take off the uniform. The challenge for me (and I suppose others in law enforcement) is learning to let go and focus on one thing at a time when not on the job.
]]>Beyond Sorrow: The Resilience of the Human Spirittag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8104252011-01-19T08:53:00-05:002011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00Sharon Salzberghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharon-salzberg/
At the end of the tour, my friend turned to me and said, "You know, the nurses who can stay here (and keep serving) are not the ones who get lost in sorrow. The nurses who can stay here are the ones who can connect to the resiliency of the human spirit."
It's awfully easy to get lost in sorrow, long term, big time. Just last week offered up a lot of sorrow, for some quietly, for some publicly, for some with national import, and for some with no one at all to notice. My mother died when I was nine years old; I retain an acute sense of what it is like to be a nine-year-old girl, like Christina Green was in the last year of her life in Tucson. Martin Luther King Jr. would have turned 82 last Saturday; he was assassinated while still in his thirties. Violence and loss circled around and touched many, many lives every day last week -- as it does every week.
How do we come back to the resiliency of the human spirit? I often think that the most important step is realizing we need to. We don't want to be broken, of course, but we often seem to not want to focus on our own healing or happiness -- it seems selfish, unnecessary. But actually our own happiness and healing are what remind us of change and possibility, and form our resiliency, our sustained ability to flourish ourselves and to give to others.
Commonly we find resiliency through connection: to nature, to community, to inner strengths, to a sense of life bigger than the circumstances we see in front of us.
When the Buddha says, "Hatred will never cease by hatred; hatred will only cease by love," he is inviting us to connect to a law vaster and more abiding than our usual tendencies, as is Martin Luther King Jr. when he says, "Somebody must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and the chain of evil in the universe. And you do that by love." When the poet Rainer Marie Rilke says, "Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us," he is pushing us to consider a whole different picture of life than we might be accustomed to. And when President Barack Obama says, "Our task, working together, is to constantly widen the circle of our concern," he is urging us toward a vision that sees ourselves in one another, and dares us toward a moral imagination that gets bigger, not smaller, even when we feel so overcome. ]]>Meditation: The Key to Resilience in Caregivingtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7841222010-11-19T09:21:00-05:002011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00Sharon Salzberghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharon-salzberg/People Who Care for People: Tools for Resiliency at the Garrison Institute, I find myself reflecting on caregivers I know. Some practice caregiving professionally, as nurses, first responders, chaplains, non-profit attorneys; others in their personal lives, as parents, children, siblings, friends. As difficult and pressured as caring for others can be, as tiring and overwhelming as it often becomes, many express a very powerful happiness at being able to serve.
An important element in how we keep going is being able to touch that happiness, broadening our perspective beyond what we see just in front of us, reminding us of our deepest motivation and what we care about most. In a challenging environment, facing our own or others' suffering, we need to draw on inner resources.
Whether you care for a young child, an aging parent, a difficult-to-understand teenager, a client at work with no clear resolution to their problems in sight, any skillful relationship of caregiving relies on balance -- the balance between opening one's heart endlessly and accepting the limits of what one can do. The balance between compassion and equanimity. Compassion is the trembling or the quivering of the heart in response to suffering. Equanimity is a spacious stillness that can accept things as they are. The balance of compassion and equanimity allows us to profoundly care, and yet not get overwhelmed and unable to cope because of that caring.
I have been involved for several years in a program run by the Garrison Institute, bringing the tools of meditation and yoga to domestic violence shelter workers, and then to shelter supervisors and directors. These people are very much on the front lines of suffering, dealing daily with their clients' issues of betrayal, heartbreak, fear, anger, humiliation. They might be survivors of trauma themselves. They might receive very little institutional support. They inevitably rely on inner resiliency to sustain their work over the long term.
Our premise has been that fostering greater balance of heart and mind is a key to that resiliency, and that one valuable avenue to cultivating this balance is meditation practice. Meditation helps us see our own difficult mind states -- such as anger or fear or a sense of helplessness -- with compassion instead of self-judgment. It also provides a refuge during life's storms by helping us connect compassionately with others, no matter the circumstances.
Especially in times of uncertainty or pain, meditation broadens our perspective and deepens our courage. The spaciousness of mind and greater ease of heart that naturally arise through balanced awareness and compassion are fundamental components of a resilient spirit. They bring us an unusual kind of happiness, one not determined by the conditions we find ourselves in, not defined by the amount of "success" or "failure" we saw in our efforts today. Meditation helps us return, again and again, to this unique happiness.]]>What's Better for Creativity: Depression or Happiness?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7755732010-10-30T04:38:00-04:002011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00Sharon Salzberghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharon-salzberg/
This was how it was described:
How do the arts help us to express, or indeed to uncover, our spiritual yearnings and questions or certainties? What do the artist and the spiritual master have to teach each other from their respective disciplines? What is the role of tradition (or, conversely, iconoclasm) in maintaining or renewing art and spiritual life? Is the human being innately spiritual, innately artistic?
The first question began, "In the West many people believe that creativity comes from torment, while in the East there is more of a tradition of great art coming from balance and realization." I myself know that this is true because many meditation students have asked a variant of this, equating edginess, boldness and creativity with inner pain, and happiness with dullness, laziness and giving up. Artists, actors, musicians have expressed some reluctance to practice meditation lest they be content in all the worst ways, lying about in placid obliviousness.
Alice Walker responded in an interesting way, saying that early in her career she had felt that good poetry must come from sadness, a notion that she had picked that up from Langston Hughes. But as she got older, she said, she found that she was just getting happier and happier, and was, of course, still writing. Richard Gere talked about being a lost, angry young man playing roles of lost, angry young men, and how the spaciousness of greater and greater happiness allowed him not to identify with those roles, not inhabiting them so fully, but to play with them, to be flexible.
The Dalai Lama took the conversation to another place, seeming to define beauty as a good heart or wholesome mind state, rather than by any external measure. He recounted that many times he had been brought to a cathedral and asked to admire its artistic beauty, but that that didn't hold a lot of interest for him. He was more concerned with freedom from suffering, with internal states, with motivation and heart space.
I suspect that the Dalai Lama couldn't even imagine the concept that one might cling to suffering for a creative edge or think of happiness as a dulling agent. Happiness in Buddhist teaching is seen as inner abundance, resourcefulness, the wellspring of energy within that allows us to serve, give, offer, create. If we don't ever think we have enough, we're not motivated to give. If we are depleted, exhausted, demoralized and despondent, we don't nearly have the energy to help others, to express, to go forth and try to make a difference. So happiness isn't at all seen as laziness but the foundation of very great activity of all kinds.
]]>How Doing Nothing Can Help You Truly Livetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.5748912010-05-24T09:18:00-04:002011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00Sharon Salzberghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharon-salzberg/
Although that motto never made it into our official presentation, it actually was an accurate description of insight meditation, or mindfulness meditation. Basically, we enter into mindfulness practice so that we can learn how to do nothing and not waste our time, because wasting our time is wasting our lives.
We come to meditation to learn how not to act out the habitual tendencies we generally live by, those actions that create suffering for ourselves and others, and get us into so much trouble. Doing nothing does not mean going to sleep, but it does mean resting -- resting the mind by being present to whatever is happening in the moment, without adding on the effort of attempting to control it. Doing nothing means unplugging from the compulsion to always keep ourselves busy, the habit of shielding ourselves from certain feelings, the tension of trying to manipulate our experience before we even fully acknowledge what that experience is.
In our usual mind state, we are continually activating the process that in Buddhist terminology is known as "bhava," which literally means "becoming." In this space of becoming, we are subtly leaning forward into the future, trying to have security based on feeling that we can hold on, we can try to keep things from changing. We are continually out of balance in this state -- in meditation we might notice that we even try to feel the next breath while the present one is still happening.
When we speak about letting go, or unplugging, or renouncing, we are talking about dropping the burden of becoming and just returning our awareness to the natural center of our being, returning to a state of natural peace. The movement that is often helpful in meditation is to come back, to relax, to let go of leaning forward, to let go of grasping. We can relax even from the anticipation of our next breath. We settle back, return to the present, and return to ourselves. This is what we mean by doing nothing, or unplugging.
Meditation is not the construction of something foreign, it is not an effort to attain and then hold on to a particular experience. We may have a secret desire that through meditation we will accumulate a stockpile of magical experiences, or at least a mystical trophy or two, and then we will be able to proudly display them for others to see. We may feel that we will increase our value as human beings by a process of spiritual acquisition, gaining more goodness and purity, acquiring enlightenment and understanding with a certain sense of ownership and possessiveness: "my enlightenment," and "my clear understanding." Our typical consumer-culture mind wants to view enlightenment as performance art or as social cachet: "People will surely notice that I've been transformed. That will be awfully impressive."
Letting go of this burdensome desire for acquisition and performance, we can just let the mind rest in ease as we learn to unplug. As Tibetan lama Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche put it, "Rest in natural great peace, this exhausted mind." Then, rather than wasting our time, our learning to practice doing nothing can lead us into the deep and renewing rest of truly living.
]]>How Silence Can Help Us Unplugtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.5588842010-05-15T07:00:00-04:002011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00Sharon Salzberghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharon-salzberg/Unplug, a few of my friends chuckled. "You have to plug it in to get directions on how to unplug," one witty pal pointed out. True enough, and perhaps somewhat ironic, but also not a problem.
Sometimes our issue seems to be an excess of technology, but actually it is an excess of distractedness, an inability to settle and simply be. One colleague was once leading stress reduction sessions for someone who complained that he didn't have enough time in the day, that he felt disconnected from his family, and that he was plain stressed out. When asked to describe how he typically spent his time, he described reading an average of four newspapers and watching an average of three television news shows each and every day. My colleague simply suggested a reduction to two newspapers and one television news show, which changed the man's life. He reconnected to his family and became a lot happier. Are we reluctant to step away from what we are used to just because we get used to it, even though it is bringing us more discontent and dissatisfaction than actual joy?
Often when people come on retreat, like the ones we lead at the Insight Meditation Society, it's not grappling with meditation methods or a group of strangers that concerns them most -- it is undertaking silence apart from communicating with a teacher, unplugging from the normal ways we use speech to find distraction from what we are feeling and sensing. People come and express their apprehension about being silent. At times they say something like "My partner thinks I just cannot remain silent for three days or seven days." Once someone came and said, " They are taking a betting pool at my office about how long before I break the silence."
But almost always, at the end of the retreat, silence is one of the components of the experience that people point to as having been the most beautiful. It's as though, for once in our lives, we don't feel compelled to fill the space, but can simply be. We don't need to present ourselves to others as interesting, or funny, or cynical or hopeless -- we can unplug from all of that and connect much more fully with our genuine experience as it actually is.
And that in essence is what unplugging is about -- not shunning our stuff or hating our habits of news consumption or social discourse -- but being willing to experiment with our time and attention, which are the core treasures of our lives. Can we step out of some ruts, and consider times of just being with what is, rather than numbing out or spinning away through needing excess external stimulation?
At times when I am myself sitting at a retreat, and at the end I get into my car to drive away, I watch my hand move forward to turn on the radio. When I can be mindful, I notice the fact that I actually don't want in that moment to listen to the news or hear some music. But because I am no longer on a silent retreat, I suddenly feel like I cannot just quietly drive -- I must completely fill the empty space with some kind of sound. When I see that, I can then bring my hand back to the steering wheel, feel my breath, feel my body, notice where I am. And feel the delight of having stepped away from what I actually didn't want to begin with. That's the great relief of learning how to unplug. ]]>The Buddha's Five Protections - Part 2tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.5427632010-04-19T12:16:00-04:002011-05-25T16:10:21-04:00Sharon Salzberghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharon-salzberg/morality, and then through understanding and studying the teachings, as we described in the previous post.
The next protection comes through having the support of spiritual friends, good friends, and being able to explore and discuss the teachings with these good friends. This is likened to loosening the earth around the roots of a plant or tree. In contact with the spiritual community, spiritual friends, or a teacher, we can often dissolve the artificial constructs of our own sense of limitation and see what our potential actually is in a given moment. We can more readily connect our immediate experience to a larger picture. We're not left alone with our own sense of what we are capable of, or our own lonely interpretation of what is happening.
The fourth protection is concentration. This is likened to weeding a plot of land, protecting it from things that will not be helpful. In terms of the mind, it means protecting ourselves from hindrances, putting in mental effort to get concentrated -- right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration, to weed the garden. It means developing the power not to be tossed around by our various changing mind states.
With these three qualities taken together -- right effort, concentration, and mindfulness -- hindrances like grasping, anger, sluggishness, restlessness, or doubt cannot find a home, a foothold in the mind, when they arise. These qualities bring mental strength, stability, calmness, and power. We apply our effort to be mindful, to be aware in this very moment, right here and now, and we bring a very wholehearted effort to it. This brings concentration. It is this power of concentration that we use to cut through the world of surface appearances to get to a much deeper reality.
The last protection is a very interesting and subtle one: not allowing ourselves to get attached to any state at all, not even to states of comfort, bliss, calm, equanimity, insight, or any other really pleasant thing that can happen in meditation practice.
To remember non-attachment is to remember what freedom is all about. If we get attached, even to a beautiful state of being, we are caught, and ultimately we will suffer. We work to observe anything that comes our way, experience it while it is here, and be able to let go of it.
What is important is not getting intoxicated with a good feeling or getting intoxicated even with an insight. These take many forms in our practice. We go through times of great release, where there has been physical holding for what feels like forever, and something opens up and releases. We go through times of catharsis where things that have been bottled up and repressed come to the surface and get freed. We go through times when we experience altered states, where concentration gets very strong, and we feel very far out, and it is all very wonderful.
It's not like we are trying to put these experiences down or scorn them. What we are going through should not be denigrated. We just need to realize that although they may be powerful and important and true, they are not ultimately what the practice is about. The practice is about freedom in every moment, which means not holding on, not grasping. To be able to be absolutely here with whatever is happening. We understand that the movement, the growth of the practice, comes from letting go, not from getting and having and acquiring. The more we can be at peace in this very moment, with how things actually are, the greater the protection that we have.
This is a great protection because it means that we won't settle for less than what we are capable of, we won't compromise. We won't give up freedom for just another experience, even a very special, extraordinary experience.
With an intention to see more clearly, to be free from habit and conditioning, we have planted a seed, and now we need to use all of these ways to nourish it and protect it. To protect the dharma, the truth, so that we, in turn, can be protected by it.]]>The Buddha's Five Protections - Part 1tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.5173052010-03-29T14:28:13-04:002011-05-25T16:00:23-04:00Sharon Salzberghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharon-salzberg/
The first of these protections is having a very strong commitment to morality, protecting ourselves with a dedication to ethics. This is comparable to fencing in a plot of land to keep wild animals away. We are keeping away what was once translated as the "outrageous defilements," the defilements that are so strong that they overcome us, so that we hurt others, hurt ourselves. As we look around, it's very clear that in this world people do outrageous things to one another all of the time. It's not that these qualities or actions make us bad people, but they bring tremendous suffering if we don't know how to work with them. We can see the consequences of our actions clearly, and know that the things we care about, the things we do, really matter.
If we have a very strong commitment, so that we can trust ourselves and be beacons of trust for others no matter what the circumstance, then we're protected from suffering the consequences of many actions. We can be protected from that pain.
We can also be protected from guilt, which is one of the worst kinds of self-torment. We can be protected from alienation from others, and the kind of inner turmoil and fear that comes when we're living in some way that isn't straightforward, isn't clear. We all know that state - it is quite painful to always be second guessing our actions - "What if they find out I lied? How many more people do I need to deceive to keep the deception going?"
There are two qualities that are talked about in Buddhist teaching. In Pali they're called hiri and ottapah, which are usually translated as moral shame and moral dread (which I find are very difficult terms to grasp). What is really meant here is a very beautiful and delicate sense of conscience. It's like an extreme sensitivity where something inside us just pulls back from harming or from hurting. This is a beautiful movement born out of caring deeply for ourselves and others. A sense of conscience isn't the same as being moralistic, or judging ourselves or others: rather, it is developed through the process of having a commitment to care and compassion.
The second protection has to do with listening to the dhamma (the teachings) or studying the dhamma -- reading books, going to lectures, consulting source material, and trying to understand the theory of the teachings. This is compared to watering our plot of land regularly. Study clarifies the path for us. It helps us know practical methods of meditation practice, put them into action and also understand the larger truth that is manifest through the different techniques, through each moment of experience. So, for example, we see that we are not just feeling the sensations of the breath, but we are observing the truth of change while doing so.
The Buddha said that when there is understanding, along with practice, then one's path becomes very broad. He likened it to the kind of path an elephant makes going through the jungle. Our view of practice is not limited to a certain technique. We understand that what is essential in the end is not mental noting, or moving slowly, or moving our attention through the body from head to feet, but rather it is what these skillful means do, what they bring, why we do them, what they imply. This kind of understanding makes our path very broad.
It's important to understand the protection of this, and the kind of inspiration, faith, and power that come out of understanding what we're doing. In a single moment we can understand we are not just facing a knee pain, or our discouragement and our wishing the sitting would end, but that right in the moment of seeing that knee pain, we're able to explore the teachings of the Buddha. What does it mean to have a painful experience? What does it mean to hate it, and to fear it? What does it mean to allow it, to be able to experience it fully? Right there, we have a core teaching.
And it is right in that moment that we find bondage or freedom, not this afternoon after lunch when we're feeling better or tomorrow or the next retreat, it's right in that moment. If we can understand that, then we're very powerfully protected because we have the energy to keep going no matter what is happening.
]]>One Who Protects The Truth Will Be Protected By Ittag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.4933322010-03-10T14:43:55-05:002011-05-25T15:45:22-04:00Sharon Salzberghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharon-salzberg/
Protection, as we use the word in Buddhism, is actually wisdom, it's insight. Protection is seeing and knowing deeply that all things in our experience arise due to causes, due to conditions coming together in a certain way. We need the compassion and the courage to change the conditions that support our suffering. Those conditions are things like ignorance, bitterness, negligence, clinging, and holding on. That is why the path is so gentle and so wise -- even the pain that we experience is seen as a combination of conditions coming together, and rather than struggling against the pain, we develop confidence that if we change the conditions we will change the effect.
If we understand this one concept, then we can understand what it is meant by the word "protection." This is how we can move our lives and train our hearts in a certain direction and not just float along taking things as they come, getting knocked down and feeling helpless as we suffer. It's a little bit like owning a plot of land. To use it well is to protect it, to treasure it. I recently heard an interview with the Dalai Lama, where the interviewer pointed out that when the Dalai Lama had been asked a few days prior what he thought about Tiger Woods's situation, the Dalai Lama had not known who Tiger Woods was. But then when asked about the need for discipline in one's personal life, in contrast to the harshness we might associate with the word discipline, the Dalai Lama noted that discipline could be seen as protecting our own best interests. It's like nurturing our own true happiness.
One who protects the dhamma, the truth, will be protected by it. When we see the relatedness of ourselves to the universe, that we do not live as isolated entities, untouched by what is going on around us, not affecting what is going on around us, when we see through that, that we are interrelated, then we can see that to protect others is to protect ourselves, and to protect ourselves it to protect others. To cherish others is to cherish ourselves. To cherish ourselves is to cherish others. And in that same way, we relate to the truth. If we support it, if we embrace it, if we uphold it, we will be embraced by it, we will be supported and upheld by it.
At the heart of this idea is the knowing that what we are looking for is a place to rest. We are looking for a safe haven, a sense of being. To be still, instead of toppling forward, careening through the world of constant change. We're looking for a refuge. To find the refuge, we learn to protect ourselves, and in protecting ourselves we learn to protect all beings.
There are two phrases in Pali - one is called klésa bhumi and the other is called pañña bhumi. Bhumi means place of occurrence, place of arising. Klésa means defilement or more literally, torment of the mind, those qualities like greed and anger that, when we are lost in them, bring a strong degree of unhappiness. And pañña means wisdom. What these two phrases taken together mean is that the body and the mind are the place of occurrence for both tremendous unhappiness and for wisdom, for both bondage and for freedom.
When the body and the mind are unobserved, we remain unawakened. This is the ground for suffering to arise. When we do observe, then we see deeply the nature of the body and the mind, then that very same body and mind are the ground for liberation to arise. It's not as though we have to take our body and mind, and trade them in for better ones in order to be able to experience liberation. It's the very same body and mind, unobserved or observed, that is the ground for being lost or being free. We have the power to go in either direction.
]]>Buddhism: Between Desire and Emptinesstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.4841152010-03-03T14:45:48-05:002011-05-25T15:40:24-04:00Sharon Salzberghttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharon-salzberg/
I was in Toronto not too long ago and at one point passed a giant billboard that had a picture of a car and one phrase: "Lust conquers all." I never got to go by it again to investigate further. But despite the prevalence of that kind of message, on visible and invisible billboards everywhere, counting on the fervor of our lust to conquer the exigencies of change, the flow of time, or the avoidance of death, is clearly folly.
Yet if that view permeates our belief systems and our motivations, we will continually act from that place and be disappointed again and again. This doesn't mean that we can't enjoy anything, but the clinging and grasping and fruitless attachment can well go, and we would be happier people, living more in accord with how things actually are.
The other extreme view holds that our lives are chaos. Here, everything is empty so it doesn't matter what we do, what we care about, what we think about. It's all kind of blank or void. It's from that point of view that people will say: "Well, if effort to improve my life or make this a better world is an empty phenomenon, what difference does it make if I put forth effort or not? Why bother?" It is then that a Zen master would usually take a stick and hit somebody over the head. "If everything is empty, why did that hurt?"
From the Buddhist point of view, it is true that emptiness is a characteristic of all of life - if we look carefully at any experience we will find transparency, insubstantiality, with no solid, unchanging core to our experience. But that does not mean that nothing matters. Things don't just happen in this world of arising and passing away. We don't live in some kind of crazy, accidental universe. Things happen according to certain laws, laws of nature. Laws such as the law of karma, which teaches us that as a certain seed gets planted, so will that fruit be. If we plant an apple seed, we can beg and plead and implore to have a mango, but we aren't going to get it. There is a way to get a mango, because we live in a lawful universe, and that is to plant a mango seed.
It is very important that we be able to hold both these truths at the same time - the ultimate emptiness of our experience, its constant changing nature, and, at the same time, to understand that it is lawful. It's not crazy, and it's not haphazard, and we can, and must direct our lives according to these laws.
When the Dalai Lama was here some years ago, he was asked by somebody giving a talk about these two aspects of the teachings, understanding emptiness and the ultimate nature of all experience, and then understanding the law of karma in the relative world, the world of relationship. He was asked if he had to make a choice between these two approaches and could only teach one, which one would he teach? He said he would teach the law of karma because, in each and every moment, if we understand that law, we have the possibility of really transforming our lives.
The middle way is a view of life that avoids the extreme of misguided grasping born of believing there is something we can find, or buy, or cling to that will not change. And it avoids the despair and nihilism born from the mistaken belief that nothing matters, that all is meaningless. It avoids these extremes by offering us a vision that is empowered by its alliance with the truth of how things are: that everything arises, but also passes; that what we do matters, though we won't find anything that does not change; that totems against impermanence won't keep us safe, but we can, in accordance with laws of nature such as karma, create a life filled with wisdom and love.
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