Ep. 100 - Real Love with Sharon Salzberg

You know, can we take strong actions before our love and not be true? This is our quandary, and hopefully our exploration. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity! Welcome to episode 100 of synchronicity. My guest this week is Sharon Salzberg, the return of Sharon. She's been here before on synchronicity. I'm thrilled to have her as my hundredth guest. I guess she's technically not my hundredth guest because we've had repeats. But, you know, my hundredth episode guest. I don't have anything special planned for the hundredth episode.

I wanted to do a clip show, which I think would be really cool. And if there is a volunteer who wants to put that together, who's a listener, be my guest. And I will put it out there and give you credit and point in direction, people in your direction. Because that'd be really helpful and cool, I think. But I don't have anything planned because I have not had the time for it. But I encourage you, if you're a new listener, to go check out some of the other episodes. Because there's some stuff here, and people are enjoying it. And I enjoy doing it. So I haven't missed a week, so we're 104. When we get to episode 104, that'll have been two solid years of doing this.

And that should happen in October, if my math is correct. So, yeah, just a big thank you to everyone who has sustained this podcast. And truthfully, I said this before. I'd like to be one of those people who would think that I would do this if no one was listening. But I don't know that I am. My music, some of my other artistic things, I would do those, even if no one's listening. Because trust me, oftentimes they're not. But this, I like that there's a community and feedback, and it's not just me talking to myself. It is talking to you, and having you care about it is cool to me. So I'm really thrilled that you're doing that, and you're a listener.

That's awesome. It means a lot to me. I'm also really happy that Sharon is my guest today. We talk about love, which is one of my favorite subjects. I remember back in 2004 or three or so, I did a heavy dose of LSD. I don't know how much, to be honest. Who knows these days? Who's really testing it out unless you've got it? Unless you've got a really good hookup. Good for you. And I had a lot of things happen, but I remember afterwards, all I could talk about was unconditional love. I had shut up about unconditional love. And to the point where I was like, essentially alienating friends and strangers alike, because it's like, who wants to hear about that all of the time?

To me, it meant something, and there was more than just the words that were coming out, which led me to the conclusion that words are not always the best tools to communicate things, whether they're emotions or experiences. That's a conversation for another time. But anyway, I just had this huge profound sense of unconditional love, and it wasn't emotional. It wasn't like this, Sharon describes this, being swept away in this euphoric bliss. It was a real, it's almost an ineffable hard thing to say, but I defined it as unconditional love. It's also one of my, and so that always left an imprint on me, so I always think about love, at least in that context.

But love is a really tricky, tricky word. It means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and can mean different things to the same person. Like I said, there's romantic love. There can be the love of something. There can be intellectual love. There can be spiritual love. There can be loving someone who's being a dick to you because they're providing an opportunity for you to grow. And that doesn't mean, I love you. Thank you so much for being, you know, I really love that you fuck me over. That's the best. No, but you can have love extend to them for maybe making you realize something about yourself.

So it doesn't have to be that you're just like going and helping them and want to offer them things and like you would to like maybe a partner you're in a romantic relationship with. So there's this whole spectrum of love and it's complicated and it's stigmatized. And you don't have to look very far to realize that. So when someone like Sharon, who's been an active meditation teacher and meditator for decades, turns her gaze on a topic like love, I think it's worth while paying attention. I'm just love that I got to have a conversation with her. No pun intended. She talks about a lot of different things.

We talk about a lot of different things in this, including doubt. The varieties of type of love that people can encounter. There's real love, which her book is called. I don't want to forget about that. Sharon has a new book. Came out a couple months ago. It's called real love. 100% pick it up. It's not even a question. There's links on this podcast page to this episode and on the actual podcast, wherever you're listening. So please go get that. Sharon deserves our financial support in this way because the book is really fantastic. And I think after this episode, you'll hear why she's so great.

So I don't want to give the whole episode away. I know I do that every single beginning time. I do want to talk about this event September 21st in New York City at Noya House. There's going to be amazing people there. I just want to talk about people I know you know if you've been listening to this podcast. So if you want to get a sense of the vibe of this thing, here's who's going to be there. Jennifer Soudini. Ruby Warrington. Diego Young Pueblo. Sarah Potter. John F. Simon Jr. We're going to have Yoshino from the Artist Decoded podcast. Kelly McLean from the Dow of Comedy podcast. Michael Philip from Third Eyedrops.

That's just the people you can check out on this podcast and their respective channel. To see what's going on there. There's also going to be I think what is it? 14 other people. You can check out the entire lineup and details at WITMAWITMA.com. And I want to talk a little bit about the prices of the tickets. I haven't got any feedback on it, but I know what I would think if I saw a ticket price. It's $85. Just let's get that out of the way. If I saw a ticket price like $85. I don't know that I would be like, "Yeah, I'm definitely doing this right away." I've gone to music events that are that much, comedy shows, and I'm usually generally happy with that.

Let me try to explain as clearly as I can why we priced it at this. We're doing it at a really nice venue called Noya House. They're not really making any money on this either. They're providing operational staff, some AV support so we can record it and get it out afterwards. We can see that we're going to facilitate the live streams that we're going to be doing. When all it's done, it's causing a decent chunk of change to get this event off the ground. We're also, obviously, partnered with three people here. We're busing our asses working on this. This isn't really a plea. I want people to know that this isn't some like, "Hey, let's get rich off an event."

I understand that the ticket price may be high for some people. I haven't had any feedback from this and I know we're pitching this right now at least before Labor Day and people may be a Burning Man and all these other things are going on. But I am offering for people who want a little bit of a discount a code. If you use the code MPN, so M is in Mary, P is in Paul, and is in Noah, you get $10 off the ticket price. Also, if you're listening to this podcast and this is not going out, this is not a promotional for everyone. If you want to come to this event and you're in New York City, but you can't afford it, send me an email at Noah@syncpodcast.com and we'll work something out because I want people who are there physically, who want to go to this to be able to come.

Finally, you may have heard me talk about it before, the creative evolution, the course I developed to help you access and maintain a creative practice. I'm going to offer that for anyone who goes to this event in New York City, who has been interested in that. I will give that to you for free, the email version. I got a lot of great feedback from people recently who still are finding it on older episodes. I'm going to throw that into, I basically want to make this worth your while in as many ways as I can because I know it's going to be a really cool event. I have no doubts about that whatsoever.

If you're a listener of the show and it sounds interesting and you like any of the people I mentioned or any people you see, I want you to be able to come. I'm not going to beat you over the head with this every single week. I'll mention it running up to the event, but I would love to see you. I'll also have details on the live stream, how you can watch all of this stuff if you can't make it there because it would be kind of not cool if we just are like, "You're not going to be able to see it because you don't live in New York." Not cool. That's all I got this week in the intro. I appreciate you listening.

Sharon is amazing. Please enjoy this episode without further ado. She's Sharon Salzburg. Cool. I really appreciate you doing this one too. This is actually going to be my hundredth episode, which is hard to believe. Oh, that's fabulous. I'd like to have other people's podcasts that I like. It's super fun, right? I know. I just did one the other day. It's a lot more relaxing. It is a lot more relaxing. Although I will say this is a relaxing one for me too, so I'm not particularly stressed. Cool. We'll just get started. I mean, if there's anything specifically you want to cover, obviously, we'll get into the book and love and all of those things, but outside of that, I have a few directions.

I want to talk a little bit about Goankka and some other things. Are you ready to get started? Sure. Just remind me about how long this is. It'll probably be 45 minutes to an hour. Okay. No longer. Cool. Cool. All right. Obviously, I'm familiar with you for a whole host of reasons, but I was doing just a little. I heard on Shawn's podcast, very, that this was your 10th book, and I think I knew that before that. So I was like, all right, let me go look at all the titles of your books and see what kind of, I know what the emerging themes are, but then I remember that you pick these themes and these words that have these tremendous amount of stigma attached to them, right?

And I love that because I think if we can get to the core of what those words inherently mean or mean to different people, we can kind of destigmatize them, which I imagine is the goal when you're writing things like this and love. So I was, I was wondering if we could just start there, like, what, what is it that compels you to kind of pick these topics that seem to have these stigmas attached to them, but really do have something powerful to communicate underneath, nevertheless? Well, you know, I'm not even sure I, I do that consciously at some point. I did the same thing. I looked at different titles and I saw the pattern.

I thought, oh, isn't that interesting? I knew, I knew with faith that I was doing that because even my friends would say, what in the world are you writing about that for? You know, you better call it something else, which commercially might have been a better idea. But I, my whole thing was I wanted to redeem the word, you know, I wanted to take it out of the realm of being silenced and not being able to ask questions and having to give up self respect to just take on the vision of truth of another and, you know, all the things the word had come to mean to people and bring it back to what more my experience of a living kind of faith was.

And so I just thought, oh, yeah, let's try. Well, just to jump in with faith here, what, what is your living experience with faith? Because this is a word I find myself trying to explain or the experience quite often in different ways. Sometimes I feel like I'm effective. Sometimes I'm like, nope, did not convey there. So like, what's your lived experience of the word faith? Well, you know, in part, I use a very Buddhist perspective and in part, it was a major part it is very, very personal, and that is it's in the Buddhist teaching, it's offering your heart, it's giving over your heart to something.

And so it's an activity and it's a little bit like stepping off the sidelines into trying to actualize a possibility. It's like people often ask me, what brought you to India at the age of 18? You know, I was a college student and I did one course in Asian philosophy, I heard about the Buddha, I heard about meditation and then I was in India, I had never even been to California when I went to India. You know, people say, what did you, what was that moment? And I think part of my writing the book, Faith, was the exploration of that moment because I could have stayed, I was going to school in Buffalo in New York, could have stayed in Buffalo, finished up, you know, got a graduate degree in Asian studies or something like that, you know, or if I was that interested or some other academic pursuit and never having gone, but there was something in me that said, what could this mean for you?

Right. You know, and that's a good thing, like wanting to actualize, wanting to be in the center of possibility instead of just marginalized on the side, so offering your heart, getting into that kind of activity. That's very special and wonderful about the Buddhist perspective is that doubt is not an enemy of faith. Doubt is really an ally of faith, questioning, wondering, insisting on seeing for yourself. All those things are considered very positive, they're not problematic. So is that is that in in so in the grandsons, I think I totally get that concept experientially too, like, you know, the famous rhombus of suffering is the sandpaper of our incarnation.

You know, it, it, it escapes us to accommodate the changing circumstances and the inevitability of life in a certain way. That said, when I'm actually going through it, sometimes that does doubt does feel like a direct enemy of my experience. So it's how to, how to maintain that perspective in, in the face of things where it, at least seemingly at the, the temporal experience that things are not going well, right? There is something objectively external circumstances are not purposely conspiring against you or people, you know, but stuff is not going great. How, what are some ways that we maintain that kind of active clarity or wisdom about the function of doubt and being an ally of faith?

Because that's awesome. And I don't, I don't really know. I've probably heard it before. I don't think I've really heard it if you get that. That's, that's pretty awesome. Yeah. Well, there are, there are different kinds of doubts. There's the kind of doubt that has some belief in one's own capacity to at least eventually understand and have some inner strengths and, and so on. And then there's the kind of doubt that they quote speculative debt, which is more just being stuck. Mm hmm. You know, it's like not being able to take the next step because you feel like you need to know what's going to happen 50 steps down the road, and that just leaves us stuck because you can't know.

And so the, almost the best example is this in the book of faith actually, I got of that sense of doubt that's sort of useless was, it's, we were maybe in this day and age we'd call it cynicism. It's like not being willing to try something out for oneself, but just standing on the sidelines and kind of putting it down, you know, you know, being scornful of it. So the example is from, they say the Buddha is, I'm sure you know, got enlightened and sitting under a tree, um, and he spent 49 days just in the vicinity of the tree, uh, doing different, you know, just walking meditation for seven days.

He happily contemplated something for seven days and, um, very sweetly he gazed at the tree and gratitude for having sheltered him in his night of practice for seven days. So at the end of, uh, seven times seven, the end of 49 days, he got up and he decided to walk to a nearby town in order to meet up with, um, these old friends of his in order to, you know, deliver his first lecture and the first sermon and the first person he came upon us, he was walking, uh, was this man. So this is just like 49 days after the Buddha's enlightenment, he was like really radiant. Um, and this man was struck by his radiance and said, who are you?

What are you? Are you a human being? Some kind of celestial being, um, who are you? And the Buddha said, I'm awake. And the man said, yeah, maybe and he walked away. So that's an example of what I called walk away dad. It's not that useful. Like he could have, I mean, that's an outrageous thing to say on a wake. There's no reason to believe that. Well, why if he'd stuck around and you're awake and can anybody get away? Can I get a right path, you know, well, my awake look like you're awake. You know, like he could have asked anything and that would have been useful. Right. It's like this open mindedness and receptivity to something.

Right. I see. I see. I see. But just walking away with useless because, you know, you're missing it, you're closing yourself off from, I mean, this is that. That approach, you know, whether nefarious or not and typically not really does lead to a lot of the kind of rigidity and close my goodness that creates a lot of these sticky situations for everyone, not just, you know, and that's how to kind of, I mean, I think we have the blueprint. And I mean, it's a, it's not a purposeful, but I think a great segue into your latest book, which is real love, which talk about a word that has stigma attached to it.

You picked a really another really, really good one. So, I mean, especially because like I, you know this, I have been in the Ramdas camp, you know, which is bhakti yoga, which is all about love. I mean, that's, it's a celebration of love, but I still still to this day, given the right circumstances or context will recoil at the word be like, ah, it's too mushy right there. Like that is not something I can get behind. And I think sometimes that's valid, like this is not the right usage of maybe this word, but sometimes it's just, you know, an inborn reaction to it. So what did you discover? I know you were writing this book for a while.

What did you discover along the way about people's relationship with the word and then ultimately, you know, what it means to you and also from the Buddhist perspective too. Well, it was, it was an amazing journey, you know, to save me a long time to just focus. You know, well, first of all, you know, I teach so much loving kindness meditation. And the word, the term loving kindness is the common translation of this word from Pauli, which is the language of the original Buddhist text and that word is met to M-E-T-T-A. Right. And it's pretty well virtually almost always that translated as loving kindness and that's fine.

I certainly use the word, but my concern about loving kindness as a term is that it might, it's sort of an odd term. You don't use it in casual conversation. Right. You know, my concern is that that might make the quality itself seem somewhat arcane and removed from day to day life and precious, like in a negative sense of the word. Though I was, I was walking down the street in Brooklyn to go teach it, this yoga center and I got out of the car and these two young women were coming toward me and I heard them talking about loving kindness. So I thought, oh, I know where they're going and they didn't.

They worked right by the yoga center and everything back. So I thought, oh, this is like the hip just block in Brooklyn and everyone's seeing my love, loving kindness, and I've had scholars and translators say to me, we'll don't say loving kindness, just say love, you know, loving kindness is kind of cutie, you know, just say love, that's what you know. But love is a very problematic term. We love everything from our yogurt to, you know, our wallpaper to everything or are we, you know, we think of love as kind of sentimentality and being sort of gooey and ungrounded and unreal and, you know, and that's not, of course, at all what meta means.

The literal translation of meta is friendship, but I have problems with that too because in my mind friendship implies, you know, wanting to spend time together and I think loving kindness actually doesn't, you know, you might have a heart full of love and compassion for someone and realize, I can't do it, it's not safe or it's balanced or not now or, you know, it's time to say no or who knows, you know, what kinds of reasons. But that doesn't mean your heart is closed or shut down, you know, there's such a tough love, there's such a thing, it's fierce compassion. And so I sort of circled back to trying to use the word love, which was the birth of this book, you know, can we really explore what that word is and see a way where it isn't all completely entangled with like pop culture and song, you know, in those ways.

Yeah. Romantic love. Yeah. Essentially. And I'm sure throughout the process, like you realize that, I mean, it covers the spectrum, like you're talking about loving yogurt, like I probably use the word God knows how many times a day and obviously when I'm talking about, you know, the cucumber I just grew, I really do love it. But I also really love my son and a qualitatively different way, just a little bit. Maybe there's a thread there that's the same, of course, but it does. It's such a broad kind of usage. And then how it gets picked up colloquially, I mean, it's like the word literal, which I'm so I'm very guilty of using.

I say the word literally when I don't mean literally, and so like love just has kind of been inserted into our everyday lexicon, which I don't think is a horrible thing by any means, but it's getting to the, to the, that maybe the energy, I'm trying to find the right word. What do you know of him? But isn't there be a word that kind of communicates the, the initial energy or the actual something behind it? Do you know what I'm talking about or trying to get at? Not exactly, but I, I, I wouldn't know the word anyway. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's essentially trying to get to the root of what this word can mean to people in a productive and practical way.

Because I think like what you're saying is sometimes the pragmatic and practical aspects of these things can get lost. And I think they do have a function in our lives and, and arguably one of the most important ones. Yeah, I mean, like what, what are some of the, the stories, not necessarily from the book, but they can be from the book, but of people's, you know, reactions to the word love. Well, I mean, I, I tend to define it as connection, like a profound sense of connection, which doesn't mean you like somebody. And it doesn't mean you're going to take them home with you. But you really deeply know that you're, you know, your life says something to do with one another.

And it isn't necessarily emotional, which hangs people up a lot, you know, because we, we tend to identify love with the sort of surging, sweeping, you know, warmth that like transports us. And if that's not what we feel, we think it's not love, but, you know, the whole thesis is that, well, first of all, the book evolved out of this one line in the movie as the movie was Dan in real life. It's about 10 years old now. Yeah, I know. Yeah. Yeah. So one of the characters says love is not a feeling, it's an ability. Love is not a feeling. It's an ability. And, you know, which really resonated with me, it really paralleled some of the kind of meditative experiences I'd had doing intensive loving kind of practice where I realized that when I thought of love as a feeling, and of course it is also a feeling, but right when I thought of it, you know, primarily as a feeling, or only as a feeling, then it became like a commodity in my mind and I realized it was like a package and it was a package in someone else's hands that someone could give me love, you know, or they could take it away from me.

And if they took it away from me, then I'd be completely bereft like there'd be no love in my life at all. But it was almost like seeing that EPS delivery person sitting in my doorstep, taking a glance down at the address and saying, "Nah, never mind. Come somewhere else." They walked off into the distance, like, "Wait a minute, that leaves me with nothing." Right. You know, in contrast to see it as an ability reminds us that it's within us, it's ours. And other people may awaken it, or live in it, or threaten it for hours. Right. It's innate. Right. That's right. It's part of us. It's a capacity.

It's an ability, which also means it can be helped to flower and grow another controversy. Why is that a controversy? I think, you know, I'm often puzzled over that. I think maybe sometimes I think in the last week, we tend to believe that something like love or compassion is like a gift, and you either have it or you don't, and you don't. You're like, "Add a lot, or it tends to hold." Yeah. I'm going to train and love. From the Eastern point of view, or certainly the Buddhist point of view, it's absolutely trainable because that quality of connection, that quality of caring is born from how we pay attention.

You know, if you're talking to somebody and you're not really listening, and you're completely scattered, and you don't take them in, you don't feel very connected, and the answer's not to force yourself to care. The answer is to pay attention. Right. You know, so as you switch the way you're paying attention, the care will come naturally. It will come automatically. Right. The question is when we're talking about, I guess, love when we also look at it through our own experiences, right? Here's another kind of link between your book with Robert Thurman, Love Your Enemies, and Real Love is loving through difficult experiences in our own lives, either with other people, or even if we grow it out into the ever fun and happy world of politics.

How do we maintain this, or not maintain, but access our innate love, right? Like how do we do that? And I love what you're saying that this isn't something that someone gives us or takes away from us. This is something that's available to us, and it's also not just a feeling or an emotion. So we can maintain a loving perspective, even if we vehemently disagree with someone that we are maintaining that perspective too. So how do we get into this? There's two, I guess there's two questions in here. One is as we're personally and intrapersonally going through difficult experiences. What are some things we do to stay in touch with that innate love?

And then the second question is, we can get to afterwards, which is the shifting cultural landscape, and how to maintain some level of equanimity and love through that as well, because I know that's thrown a ton of people off too. But let's start with intrapersonal love through difficult experiences. Well, I mean, it's a lot depends on how we pay attention, and this is a training for me. For everybody, it's not my answer, but my answer would be, I access it to meditation and having a regular meditative practice and not just when things are hard, but when things are ordinary and things are boring and things are just going along, because it's almost like muscle strength, that's like strength training.

So then when things are really hard, you have some resource, you've built that from just a mere capacity to something that can help sustain you. Right. And that doesn't mean you don't feel bad, or you don't even feel bad. Right. Right. You remember what you really care about, you remember what's most important for you. Remember, actions have consequences, so maybe there's some feelings you want to have passed through you without sending that email, you know, or whatever it is, you know, we have a lot of choice, we have a lot of power in those things when we're aware. And so it's learning how to pay attention differently, and then we take that into the difficult times.

So let me ask you this, because I am probably up there with the worst offenders in terms of following through with a regular meditation practice. I think every February, I'm great at it because there's your meditation challenge, which works, but then inevitably, and there are totally different reasons whenever it happens, I get knocked off, and then it's just like you're saying it's muscle training. It's like, if you have an exercise in a while and you try to go do it, it's just like, oh, my God, this is how do people do this ever. And that's somehow how I get with meditation. And so I've tried a lot of different things like redefining how I, you know, redefining meditation, finding different ways that can get me in a state where I'm recognizing awareness.

But what do you, I'm sure you get this a lot, and I know actually going to a place in meditating with a teacher who is skilled in this, what, what do you recommend? What's the jumpstart for getting back into a meditation practice or starting one if you've been knocked off a few times? What do you recommend for people? I'm sure you've gotten this question before. Well, everybody gets knocked off, you know, I mean, I mean, that's, that's like the rhythm of life. Right. And that's why in actual teaching of meditative technique, the thing I tend to emphasize the most far more than anything is learning how to begin again, gracefully, you know, like let's say you're trying to be with the brass and which was the first instruction I ever got in India, you know, sit down and feel your brass and, and I felt, how hard can this be?

I was like, whoa, it's not so easy. It wasn't like 800 breaths or 900 breaths before my mind wondered, it was one, you know, the first step. Right. And then I heard over and over again, that the most important point happens after you've been distracted where you need to practice letting go. You need to practice starting over and beginning again, not being said demoralized or self-hating or whatever it is, you know, which takes a lot. Right. You know, let go and start over and that's the real teaching in there. So you're almost like you're practicing resilience right in that. I just found that the most important life skill, which is why I say that nothing because I I just never have found anything like venerable old age where, you know, at this point where we don't have to start over and over and over and over.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's really true. It's the, I mean, that is the skill. I guess, you know, and it is that that ability of getting in, not even in the necessary right mind state, but the idea of accepting that the challenge is the opportunity, you know, the ability that when like inevitably what happens to me, if I try to sit down, take a few breaths amidst the chaos that might be happening. Monkey mind jumps in. It's like, you don't have that you think you have time for this? No way. And I know the Gandhi saying, you know, if you don't have 10 minutes of meditate, you need to meditate for like 20 or it's an hour or whatever it is.

It's, it's true, but yet I, I can, I'm very good, very, very good at convincing myself of things that aren't necessarily for the benefit of me or, you know, my own self care. But it's great to hear it, you know, from you, especially that, that is, that really is the skill there. That is the skill. So how do those two things interface? How do we get the love and the awareness that can come through meditation? There's kind of the nexus point that we should be tuning into through your experiences. I mean, one of the beautiful things is you, you have meditated for a really long time. And I think that's incredible that it's so, I also just know people who do these.

I can see it. My friends and people I've spoken to do the, the 10 day retreats, the proportion of retreats. There is a clarity that comes from the people immediately following and usually it falls through far after that really I know a lot of people experiment with a lot of different modalities. But that is one of the most replicable, clear thinking about things that I've seen. So what, what have your experiences kind of led you as to the, the connection between this love and awareness that we experience? Well, I can see it, you know, like, like the example that, you know, we've been using say, trying to settle your attention on the feeling of the breath only to discover you're far, far away.

And you need to let go and come back the, the real ingredient in that, whether it's ever a name or not, is self-compassion because if your tendency is to realize, oh, it's been quite some time since I that's felt the breath and then just going to rant against yourself. You know, that is endless and it's mean-spirited and you're so despairing and it feels so horrible. And when we, we all do that, you know, we'll emerge from that. Not only have we added sometimes a considerable length to the distraction, it's like maybe the distraction lasted 30 seconds in this last, you know, three hours, but we, we leave that space feeling so bad and we're so exhausted and we feel so demoralized and we don't have a sense of the wherewithal within us to go on and, you know, just continue or do better or whatever it is.

Yeah. You know, it holds to anything we're trying to do in our life where we're having to start again. And so it's right there in the technique. That's where we're learning it. Right. And I mean, I just, I remember I'm always struck by the quote where someone asked, I think I heard you say this where they asked the Dalai Lama, you know, what about Seth Hadrid? And he's like, what? He's like, what? He's like, what? What? What do you want? What does that mean? That I don't, we don't know what that is. Yeah. And that is obviously is a mean, if you don't, if you're, you're fortunate enough to not have any reflected back negativity at yourself, awesome, but I'm sure even if you're one of those people, you can see people do have a problem with that.

Just look at their actions of how they treat other people that that's coming from inside. That's not just, that's not just like a spontaneous response. So it really is incredible how we don't really even, I mean, that's why we, the secret, I guess, if there is a secret in the, the meditative, like cultivating awareness practices is that once you be able, once you can recognize and see these things, you have the ability to potentially at least accommodate and interact and potentially transmute or even get to the functionality of these things rather than just, you know, being stuck in these patterns, right?

Speaking of patterns, what, how do you personally engage with politics in this day and age? I'm curious. I know you're on Twitter, are you, do you follow it on Twitter? Like, how do you, what is your day-to-day experience of what's going on? If it is a day-to-day experience. It is a day-to-day experience. I have actually not watched television news since before the election. Same. Good for you. And thank you. Good to you too. I do follow it on Twitter, a lot of who my followers are journalists or political commentators because I am a very political person in a lot of ways and I've really appreciated things I've seen in New York, like movements that say, you know, turn your anger into action.

Yeah. Because one of the things I've been passionate about for very, very long time is voting. And I really have urged people to vote, I've written things, asking people to vote. I've noticed, you know, the comments I get back, when they seem to post it, I'm not always very kind, but it seems to me that it's very close to a kind of Dharma understanding of like, it's like if everyone has innate dignity and everyone has the right to vote, no one should take that voice away from us and it's saying I am worth something when we do that vote. And I think it's just really important and so it's not that I've abandoned my interest, you know, in the political process, I just think that's what I'm most passionate about.

That's where I should turn my energy. I hear a lot of what else is going on, but it, you know, I find it awful and it's scary, you know, it's like, I mean, I'm, it was raised Jewish and maybe it would be this way anyway, I hope it would be this way anyway, but this I just trust because I don't find very thrilling. Yeah. Yeah. Even in the Hindu context, they're still offsetting off putting for people who grew up where they didn't really mean that. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's scary. Yeah. Yeah. It is. It is scary. I guess I see this crazy, my dad just pointed out, he's staying with me today. He just pointed out that this eclipse just cut the country in half, you know, which he viewed as very symbolic, even though it's not the literal half of who voted for who.

And then in seven years, we also have another one that cuts the country in half on another diagonal. And it is kind of symbolic of how this country feels right now, whether it really is that way or not. What kind of bounce this idea of what you were talking about, this dignity that we are able to express through voting, but also through making our individual choices, both personally and communally and collectively to kind of create the world we want to live in and trying to find that line between being aware of what's going on, but also being like, I don't want to get so caught up where I'm walking around, which does the reason we were saying, you know, one of the doves of the cap for the political news stuff is you see people who get really sucked in can get a very rigid perspective and take on all these things on both sides.

And I don't mean to do the Donald Trump on many sides. I'm not talking about Nazis, I'm talking about left right political ideologies, but you see it happens. And I don't find it doesn't make me cynical, but it obviously is a bit unsettling to see the state of divisiveness, so how do you when you're seeing this and you're aware of what's going on, like if someone's listening and let's say they're the type of person, I'm luckily one who's not, I have too many actual problems in my real life to worry about the political problems in terms of getting too caught up in them, that's my take. But let's say someone is really riled up about this stuff.

What advice could you give to them for mindfully engaging either their own reactions or just objectively what's going on out there? I think it's do something, you know, first of all, what's interesting is that the Buddha taught loving kindness as the antidote to fear, you know, so I just said about four times. It's scary. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And part of my effort to redeem words in a way is with the word love is I would like love to be part of a conversation and not just be seen as giving in or being sentimental being kind of stupid, you know, like, right, um, the, you know, can we take strong action before another love and not hatred is, is our quandary and hopefully our exploration and, you know, so I think cultivating the real state of love is part of it.

I think taking action, you know, it's not just, I mean, I know there's a lot of conversation and not wrong conversation after the election about having conversations with people who have different points of view, but I think that's just one element, you know, because I mean, I think I could have a conversation with somebody forever and I won't, I don't believe actually I'm not a moral relativist. I think there is right and wrong. Yes. Yes. And you know, the things that cause suffering and the things that not and I can talk to somebody, you know, so we're both blue in the face and they're not going to convince me of, you know, it being correct to, you know, have people, kids go hungry in this country or something like that.

Right. Right. Right. I think it's just wrong. And so, um, and I'm sure the things that, you know, I think can believe that they find just distorted. So I think that's not the only thing I think we have to take what moves us and put it into action, even if it's just like a small act of good heartedness that feels like so insufficient, like, right, it's not nearly approaching the magnitude of the problem. It's like, let's do something. Right. It doesn't have to be overtly political. Could be artistic. It could be feeding somebody, it could be, you know, wrapping sandwiches for meals on wheels, you know, as long as it still exists.

Um, you know, but really getting guys, and you said it also just a few minutes ago collectively. Hmm. Something very interesting about a sense of community. Yeah. In times of great division, it doesn't have to be like a rigid, we're right in your wrong kind of community, you know, spending our time doing that, but, but it's not easy to confront ones on fears. It's not easy to go forward and, and to do that sort of together is, is, uh, a lot nicer than doing it all along. Yeah. And I mean, it makes me think of it in my own life. I have a lot of different social groups, right? I know a lot of different people from a lot of different likes, as I'm sure you do, and a lot of people do.

And especially in your function as a teacher, people are interested generally in meditation and things you speak about, um, you meet a lot of different people and you realize that not everyone's perspective is going to be your own. It's impossible. Right. But you also realize that people are shaped by many different things in the world. And then when you start to realize there's many different perspectives, there's many different people, you see that none of their opposing perspectives denies or takes away any of their innate humanity and the qualities that make them a person and the divisions and opinions and things we have, even if like, I agree with you, there's right and wrong.

And I might starkly disagree with someone and maybe my earnest hope is that they'll change their mind, but it doesn't mean we have to be enemies of each other. We have to set up these boundaries and I see a lot of boundaries getting set up, right? And I see a lot of, uh, you know, snark, subtle snark, subtle things moving in pejorative things that they're really not going to serve any function for what's going on out there culturally or collectively or even individually, it doesn't make us happier people to be constantly deriding other people. So I love that you say like this antidote of doing a small thing.

And I also doubly love that it can be artistic and creative too because I feel like that that gives us two different things. It gives us an outlet for that energy, which if we don't get can get really not good in a lot of ways and we take that, that step, that doing something step that is just seems really important. It's like if you're meditating and you have some very important insight that you feel can help you or someone else, if you just didn't do anything about it, you know, is, is it super? Is it worth as much as if you actually acted on it and it made things better out here in the world?

I don't know. I mean, that's a, that's a philosophical question, but I think the answer is yes. You should do it. You should take action on the thing that comes up from there. That's maybe why you're having it. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I absolutely love that. So, okay. I wanted, I mentioned at the beginning, I wanted to talk a little bit about Goenka because I'm sure I don't know if you know this, but I tend, I really like reading and I like also finding quotes from people who I resonate with, you know, and Goenka is someone who whenever I come across, it's always in the meditation vein typically, but the clarity of the words that have been recorded are just incredible, just absolutely cut through everything incredible.

So I was, I would wonder if you could just share a story or two about him and just kind of his influence on mindfulness. Now is a buzzword. You know that. Loving kindness. Buzzword. All these things are buzzwords, but this is a guy who really kind of proliferated, you know, the genesis of this, at least in the West, I, I don't know if everyone is super familiar with him, but we're talking about S and Goenka and I would just love to hear something about him from you. Sure. He was actually my first teacher. I went to India. It was almost like my junior year abroad, it was, was part of this college program like an independent study program and I created a project saying I wanted to go to India and study previous meditation and I accepted it, that was my year's assignment.

So, but I was looking for something very practical, very direct, very how to, you know, I wasn't really interested in a tremendous amount of scholarship or philosophy or, you know, whatever. I really wanted to have to do the thing. And so, and it wasn't like now, you know, I was going to Buffalo, like I said, and I looked around and maybe there were a few places to learn, but I had no idea where they were or anything. Right. So, went to India and when I found him, I knew it was absolutely perfect. The first, he taught in the context of these intensive tendary treats, they weren't like in my day.

They weren't completely silent and they weren't quite so strict, but still they were, you know, they were very intensive and he, the first night of my first retreat, going because said the Buddha did not teach Buddhism, the Buddha taught a way of life. And this is in their way about becoming a Buddhist and you don't have to reject anything else. You know, you had a lot of Hindu students, you had some Muslim students and it being Indian had a whole bunch of New Western students. So this is really my foundation and I've never veered from that. I, you know, so some nice people ask me about secular mindfulness and I say, well, from my experience, mindfulness, you know, my personal experience, I've always used it in a secular way, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. He was a teacher and he set the stage, so he, like when it was part of an Indian family with strong ties to Burma, and he had maybe grown up in Burma and certainly he was living in Burma at the time and had a Burmese passport and Burma was, you know, under a military dictatorship at the time, it was very difficult when I was first in India, really at first you could only go to Burma for 24 hours and then after a little while, maybe a year you could go for seven days only. Oh, wow. So he had, his mother was living in India and she became ill, so he had to get whatever kind of permission he needed in order to leave Burma and he did and he was with his mother in India and she recovered and so he was there.

He taught a 10-day retreat down near Bombay somewhere where I guess she was living and then he taught maybe another one and then he came up to Bhagaya. So I sat, well, it was maybe his third or fourth retreat ever. Oh, wow. Wow. Maybe fourth, maybe fourth because at that retreat, that was the place where I met Joseph Goldstein, Ramdas, Krishna Das, Ramesh. There were a number of people nearby, all I met, everybody in Delhi on the way there, you know, who were at my first retreat, who really liked life-long friends. Right. Daniel Goldman brought me there. He's the one who told me about the retreat.

And because it wasn't, you know, fully silent, maybe, you know, we did form a very strong bundle of us. You know, so they had, most of them, I think, had already done one or two retreats when I showed up. So maybe this was the fourth, then he ended going to stay down and taught several more 10-day retreats and then left. So you know, it was really an amazing moment in time, just being there together. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's always blown away by certain teachers who, in recent history, and not even some a little farther back, who just still have the kind of cultural impact whether people realize that or not, that is, it's just astounding.

And you know, I, we've spoken about it before a little bit, but I do think lineage is important with anything. I just think knowing where things come from in general gives you some insight into what those things might be, only crazy, but that's, that's just generally what I think. And so knowing that these things stem back, I mean, we're also in a climate now, like we're who's not a teacher, right? I'm sure you, you must think this all the time, like who's not a meditation teacher, who's not a yoga teacher, who's not a new age teacher, who's not a whatever it is, and having some ground and it's not to say those people aren't teachers in their own way, but having some groundedness and tradition in a supportive sense is, I think, typically what I look for with this stuff.

So I always love hearing about that. So we'll wrap it up in a second, but I realized I think the last time I had you on, it was early on, and I wasn't asking questions at the end of episode. So I asked three short questions and then one longer question at the end. So here are the questions and, you know, answer however, feels appropriate. What's your favorite color? Blue. What's your favorite number? Sixteen. What's your favorite animal? Dog. Cool. And here is one that you will enjoy. What's a practical tip that has helped you in your life that you could share with listeners? Well, this goes back to another teacher of mine, and meditation practice, and this teacher named Minindra, who I also studied, was very early on, and there I was living in India, and even though I wasn't always on retreat, you know, life was very simple.

There were no cell phones then, and computers, you know, I was like, no, no, yeah, you know, and still I found it very difficult to have a daily meditation practice. I had a certain kind of pattern like when I sat and it felt good, you know, I think, oh, great, I'm going to live in India for the rest of my life feeling exactly this way. And then when I sat and it didn't feel that good, I'd get up, or I think it doesn't work except on retreat, or I can't do it, or something like that. And I went to Minindra with this pattern and described it, and he said, if you will have one piece of advice, and that is just put your body there.

He said, every day you put your body there, some days it will feel one way, other days it will feel another way. It's like you've just got to do it, and, you know, it doesn't have to be for endless hours each day, but I realized I'm also the kind of person who, the kind of person that benefits you structure, I'm the kind of person who benefits from the every dayness of it. Like, if I said to myself, okay, you're going to practice three times a week, it wouldn't work, you know, because it would be Monday, and I think, well, I'll start on Wednesday, or, you know, when we Wednesday, I think, oh, I'll do it three times on Saturday, you know, it's like it was every day, it's every day, and if it's for two minutes, it's for two minutes, that's what the reality is, but it's every day.

Right, right, right, right, right, right, it's, I completely relate to benefiting from structure, even though I'll resist it. Pretty decent. It's time. Sharon, thank you so much for coming on again, and it's always a pleasure speaking with you. Well, thank you so much. Cool. I'll clip it there. You know, I was talking to Lily a little bit, we're going to have a call about stuff, but you know, if there's any way I can help with anything, even with my iPod network, if you have something you want to go out about the book, or anything we can do to help, you know, we're happy to. That's great. Yeah, I'm still sort of in-book promotion mode, so I don't love anything, you know.

Cool. Maybe we'll think of who that other person was, or you'll have me on again, and we'll just talk about lovers. Yeah, I know there's a few other people who express interest. We're doing this big event, the 21st, I'm gonna, I'm gonna meet a lot of different people who I think are doing different things in this space. I don't know what their prerogatives or intentions are, but I know a lot of them really seem like great people, and there's any connections that can be fostered there, of course. I will. That's a great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And send me your schedule. I'd love to see you soon. Yes. I can't think of the type of my head where I am when, but- I will.

Let's definitely find a time to get together, for sure. Great. Okay, dear. Take care. All right. Thanks, Sharon. Bye-bye. ♪♪♪ Thank you for listening past the music. A reminder, I'm gonna have an EP coming out sometime in the fall. Probably not September, think in October, I'll have details on that. I know a lot of you have been asking on YouTube and other places where to get the music. I'm gonna have a place where you can get it. As a reminder, you don't have to do it, but on Patreon, if you like any of the music you hear on any of these shows, you can sign up at the level. I think it's $9 a month where you get access to any music you hear on this show.

And I'm gonna be really ramping up what I'm doing on Patreon in the coming months. I finally have some time and space to do that, so I really appreciate it. Big shout out to Patrick Nemczyk, who just continues to be the coolest. What else we got going on? That's it. I love you. Thank you. I will see you next. The grill is shot. The chairs are held together by optimism, and what happened to the rug? Sounds like your outdoor setup is not ready for patio season. Fix it all with Wayfair. Drop Wayfair for grills, rugs, furniture, and more. With 20 million 5-star reviews, room of choice delivery, and expert setup on qualifying orders, it's never been easier to do more for less.

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