How to Become Less Reactive with Sharon Salzberg | Being Well

Hello and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forest Tansen. If you're new to the podcast, thanks for listening today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. I'm joined today by two very special guests. First, clinical psychologist Rick Hansen. So, Dad, how are you doing today? >> I'm great and I'm psyched. And before we go further, I want to say that I consider Sharon, our guest, uh, to be a personal teacher of mine, someone I hold in tremendous esteem. And resting in that feeling is actually I think a really important thing for people in general. Period. Even if it's somewhat goes against my aging hippie egalitarian nature. >> Well, as you just said, Dad, we are here with the co-founder of the Inside Meditation Society, a truly worldrenowned teacher uh and the author of 14 books, Sharon Salsberg. Sharon was one of the first people to bring mindfulness and meditation to the mainstream American culture over 50 years ago. And her books include her seinal work, Love and Kindness. >> But she was very young then. You can see pictures of her. She was a little little cherub. So young. So young. >> So so young. So young. And also her first children's book, which just came out, Kind Carl, a little crocodile with big feelings. And this was co-authored with, I hope I say this correctly, Jason Grrew. So Sharon, thanks for joining us today. How are you doing? >> I'm doing really well. I'm actually in Barry, Massachusetts, next door to the Insight Meditation Society, which is going to turn 50 since we started it. All of us were really children, you know, at the time. >> So, you guys have known each other, as you just alluded to there, for a quite a while at this point. And I I'm wondering, not to put you on the spot or anything, but do you happen to remember when and where you met? >> Where did we meet? >> Well, first off, if you can do this for us in the Patreon account, I don't know. at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, the sister center to IMS there in Barry, Massachusetts. At Spirit Rock in a hut, it's called the Gratitude Hut. There are these various photographs and one of them is of Sharon. I think you were maybe 19 or 22 or some really young age at the time with I believe Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield and another young woman whose name escapes me. If we could find that photograph or if you could share it, it would just >> I'll hunt it down online. >> Super cool. For >> if I can find it, I'll even put it in the video of this podcast. We'll just have it as a little popup up here. Yeah, >> sure. It was Jacqueline Mandel Schwarz or Schwarz Mandel, I guess, is the right order. And I was 23. >> Yeah. I think I might have interviewed you. I reached out to you if I could interview for some program I was doing maybe. And I was very nervous cuz you're of course up there. you know, the pantheon. And you can really feel when someone's treating you like a thou to their eye rather than, you know, one person to smile at and quickly move on. And I always felt like an a thou to your eye. >> Oh, thank you. It's really beautiful >> because that's you. You, thou, all beings, you you treat them as a thou. And your children's book's marvelous, too. We're going to get into that. And I thought one of the sweetest parts of Carl's journey, it's not just Carl working with his own reactions. is Carl learning to thou all the other beings >> in his world to treat them as a thou to his eye. For me, one of the things that I was sort of taking in as I was reading through this, it's a picture book for kids and it's very easy to kind of frame it in that way, but I actually think that kids books are a great way in to thinking about ideas in kind of a fresh way. And also when you're writing for kids, you have to make choices about how deep into a topic do I want to go? What do I want to emphasize? You know, I'm dealing with only so much text on the page. And so you have to make choices about what am I going to emphasize in this very limited uh amount of space that I have. And I'm wondering of of all the places that you could have started or all the ideas you could have emphasized, why did you choose the ones that you put in this book? Well, I was actually approached by Shambala Publications to to write the book or co-author the book. It was really fascinating for me because what I saw was that everything I was used to talking about like loving kindness meditation or the development of compassion had to become really concrete, you know, and and appropriate. And so for example in loving kindness meditation kind of classically one way of doing it and the way I was taught it was to silently repeat certain phrases as a kind of gift or offering to oneself and to others like may you be safe may you be happy and so we started out with well what does it feel like to be safe you know when I was writing this thing for kids like if you're about to cross a really crazy busy street and someone takes your hand cuz they want to help you. That's safe. That's what safe feels like. And it's that feeling that we are offering to others. We're we're wishing, oh, may you have this. And it was really fun, you know, starting with somebody you really like and then maybe a kid you're mad at right now, but you usually like them. And then, you know, just sort of trying to enter that world of of a child. >> I've worked with a lot of children. I'm a child therapist. I have a lot of background there. One of the very first things you start with is um Carl noticing what he's experiencing. Carl Carl is initially hijacked by his reactivity. He's just swept away. And step one is for him to be able to notice it, to be able to recognize it. And again, that's such an important foundational step, as you well know, of course, in our in our own adult journey. So, I just kind of wonder if you could just say more about the importance of that first step of being able to recognize or step back a little bit from your own experiences. >> Well, actually, one of my favorite definitions of mindfulness came from an article I read like a really long time ago in the New York Times. It was about one of the first pilot programs bringing mindfulness into the classroom. So this was a fourth grade classroom in Oakland, California. And so the kids are like eight or nine years old. And the journalist asked one of the kids, "What is mindfulness? What is mindfulness?" And the kid replied, "Mindfulness means not hitting someone in the mouth. That's what mindfulness means." And I thought, "That's a great definition of mindfulness." Cuz what does it imply? the first thing which you're describing. We know what we're feeling as we're beginning to feel it. Not after it's accelerated, not after we've sent off that email, not after we've lashed out at somebody, but we're feeling we're aware of what's cooking, you know, as it as it happens. It also implies a certain balanced relationship, say, to that anger or irritation. Because if we just get completely swept up in the emotion of the moment and consumed by it, we're likely to hit a lot of people in the mouth cuz life can be really frustrating. But on the other hand, if we hate what we're feeling and we're ashamed of it and we try to stuff it down, repress it, we get tighter and tighter and tighter and we'll explode. So mindfulness has, we say, both those components. We're aware of what we're feeling and we're not freaked out about it. you know, there there's a kind of balanced relationship there and that creates and we see this in Carl the crocodile too. It creates a kind of space and in that space we might see options we hadn't seen before. We might see creative responses to the situation, you know. So, I like to think of that kid thinking hit someone in the mouth last week. Didn't work out that well, you know. maybe I'll try my words or or whatever, you know, I'll try to shift things around. So, it's not like a passive quality, you know, where we just sort of grin and bear it, but we're not sort of driven by by the habits of old. >> What helps people in general get more space around that experience? And I talk to people sometimes who feel really hijacked by the feelings that they're having or um they have an interaction with a friend, a partner who just says something really hits them the wrong way and their their mouth is moving before they feel like their brain's had time to catch up. Uh I'm wondering what do you think helps somebody? >> Well, there's so many kind of methods. You know, for me, a lot of them are encapsulated in in meditation. So even something simple as uh naming the feeling you know which we do as a sort of meditative technique of mental noting and I was once I was actually I was online listening to someone's memorial service and and part of the memorial service he they played some recordings of him you know in his voice and one of the things he said was I'm a meditator and the technique that I use is called mental mental noting. And with mental noting, you want to name your emotion before it names you. In other words, before it overtakes you and and consumes you, you think, "Oh, there's anger." Not like, "I'm such an angry person and I always will be." So, we learn, that's another thing. We learn to make a distinction between what we're feeling and everything we add to it. Like, next year, you know, it's going to be even worse or I'm the only one who ever feels this. And you know for me my path was so much about meditation. It doesn't have to be meditation clearly you know to develop those skills but uh for me meditation was a very direct avenue to doing just that. >> So the essence of it is there's a kind of observing of the experience. There's a there's an awareness of the experience um even as one feels it. So when it's not um becoming in becoming divided away from experiences, we're we're fully feeling them. I think sometimes people misunderstand that about mindfulness. You're still really feeling it. It's there for you, but there's a spaciousness around it, some a certain disidentification from it. Um okay, a lot of that I think for many people certainly is not very verbal. >> It's somatic. They're in touch with themselves. There's an intouchness. There's an awareness. But noting, trying to label the complex subtlety of what you're feeling in your belly when you're around an authority figure, it goes way beyond the word fear, right? You know, just the word alone, I think sometimes people get caught up in noting like it it becomes almost robotic. And I just wondered if you could say more about mindful self-awareness that's not necessarily verbalized. >> Even if it is verbalized, it points us back to our direct experience, you know. So if I'm feeling that kind of anger and I leap into I'm such a terrible person, I shouldn't have this, but after all, I do have it and I just, you know, I deserve to be treated better and next year I'm going to, you know, um that's very different than simply applying the word anger, which can be the pointer of like what are you feeling right now? >> Yeah. >> What does it feel like in your body? What's the kind of anger moving? Because as you know, we look at any of these feelings, they're very complex. Within that anger, we may see sadness, we may see fear, we may see guilt, we may see grief, and we see change. You know, this thing that arises that seems so permanent forever, who we really are, when we really look at it, it's moving. It's changing because it's it's alive, you know. And you're right, of course, that so many people find a tremendous awkwardness in that particular technique of mental noting, but it's just an example, and you could say a symbolic example if you choose not to do it precisely, of a relationship. How am I relating to this thing that I'm feeling? You know, am I grabbing on to it? Am I taking it to heart? Am I feeling burdened by it? Do I hate it? Yeah. >> Or am I just aware of it? >> As somebody's general reactivity um goes down, maybe because they've adopted some of these practices, they've, you know, they're doing a noting practice, they've got a little practice with mindfulness in general, getting some space around reactivity, whatever it is for them. I think that from the outside, it's easy to think that what's happened is they just don't feel things as strongly as they used to. they've developed this like perfect teflon Buddha equinimity things just you know slide right off and all of that. Uh my experience with even very advanced meditators and people who do a lot of practice like you guys do is that this isn't really the case. You know maybe there's some more equinimity. Sure that comes along. That's one of the benefits of practice. But really it's that reactivity has gone down. Not that the initial like sensory experience that you're having has gotten so much more more calmed out or you're just not feeling it anymore. And I I would actually love to hear both of you guys talk about that a little bit. Like what's your experience with that Ben? I >> I think that's right. Even if you go back to the classical teachings where the Buddha said uh we experience the world in every moment in one of six ways seeing, hearing, tasting, touching or through the mind door, through mind objects um thoughts, cognition, emotion so on. And he said that we feel every one of those moments to be pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. And that's not kind of a fixed characteristic. If you like didn't get any sleep last night, that same comment may seem really unpleasant, you know, whereas >> the other day it was just neutral or or even amusing or something. But even even if it's not fixed and rigid, there will be that component of the feeling tone of pleasantness, unpleasantness or neutrality. Now a lot of people think and maybe this is part of your question that if they practice really a lot and they get to be great meditators, everything becomes neutral. >> Yeah. It all just totally, >> you know, it's just sort of like this blob, you know, this grayness and some people long for that and some people dread it, but it's not what happens anyway. So, it's kind of, you know, it's not it's not real. We feel the pleasantness, we feel the pain of things, we feel uh or we recognize neutrality, but we are different with it. You know, if you look at pleasant sight, pleasant sound, the kind of classical comment is that we get lost in craving. I've got to keep this. I've got to keep it from changing. I've got to keep that person from changing. You know, so I always have this pleasant feeling. I've got to and you know, if we really look and I I think contemporary understanding will expand that. There are plenty of people, and I'm sure Rick could speak to this uh much better than I can professionally. There are plenty of people who can allow pleasure, right, who reject it. I think I think it was from you, Rick. I heard uh first about savoring, you know, things like that, you know. So, uh one way or another, we can have a very distorted kind of relationship to pleasure and certainly with pain. You know, if you look at American society, it's like so extremely phobic about painful experience. I was talking to somebody the other day and I said, "I am old enough uh and also, you know, grew up in part with my grandparents who were Eastern European immigrants and had certain cultural biases." You know, I said, "I'm old enough so that I don't remember as a child ever hearing the word cancer spoken out loud. if somebody was going to be described as having cancer, you know, everyone whispered it like it was this terrible secret, you know, and and there's so many threads of that in in this society anyway, you know, whatever one's personal conditioning is. And um but we can be different with painful feeling. And that's a little bit what uh Carl the Crocodile learns, you know, it's like things can be really painful, you know, or even uh just difficult and we can be kinder to ourselves and to others. We can have more balance. We don't have to um throw an eraser is what he did, you know, at the blackboard. And then I'm also really interested in neutral experience because there's so much in our day that's just kind of neutral. You know, it's not really pleasant. It's not really unpleasant and we just numb out and and we sort of go to sleep. We wait for something better to happen in order to feel alive. And that is the definition of mindfulness is is having a different relationship to what's pleasant, what's painful, and what's neutral. And that also means that from the vantage point of mindfulness, it doesn't matter what our experience is. You know, we'd like to think that maybe meditation's a little a little difficult and be in the beginning, but then we're going to enter this realm where it's like so lovely and placid and blissful and peaceful. And maybe it's not, but that's okay. truly, you know, not just a solace or comfort from the point of view of wisdom and insight and compassion and so on. It's actually okay. >> It's a really deep question for us that you're asking. I think Sharon will be familiar with this metaphor of the notion that the the the path has two tracks and it's like uh as we engage our own path uh it's like being in a wagon with two wheels following two tracks and one is the track of true nature already. The idea that deep down in every person underneath it all is a kind of wellspring that's uh uh wakeful, benevolent, uh deeper than personality, deeper than gender socialization, you know, kind of a well of being. And even arguably deeper than that perhaps is an ultimately unconditioned ground of all. So and the process there is recognizing true nature and becoming more and more permeable to it and rested in it and removing the obscurations to it. Okay. Then the other track is one of gradual development which includes both gradually releasing habit patterns and tendencies and moods and afflictions and hindrances that um occupy us and also gradually cultivating positive qualities. uh skillfulness, emotional intelligence, secure attachment, healthy self-worth, factors of awakening, um tranquility, investigation and mindfulness itself as a kind of inner muscle that we acquire over time. So I would say definitely uh what's available to people in general and I think certainly you know in the path laid out by the Buddha early Buddhism um this process of gradual development which also includes not just um changing the interior landscape in general and also very much what Sharon's been talking about shifting our relationship to it. So for me it would be both hand that there is a process in which people become often you know less reactive less prickly. We see this for Carl. Carl becomes happier while also really shifting his relationship to his own mind stream. I wonder about because the book is so much about reactivity. It's really the focus of it. like how do we how do we deal with these unpleasant experiences that we have and and get to to something else where some kind of better behavior can come out of this unpleasant feeling. You know, I feel something bad. I don't like that I feel it. Now what? And um one of the you guys are so much more uh familiar with this than I am, but my general understanding is that one of the big uh things that gets explored in aspects of Buddhist practice is the relationship between anger and fear and how anger and fear are somewhat similar in their qualities. Anger often emerges out of different kinds of fear. I think about Carl's behavior. You know, he's afraid that the other kids don't like him. He's afraid that uh he is a certain kind of way that his self-concept is like I am this snappy crocodile. What if I am just this thing is kind of like implicit uh underneath some of the things that he's communicating. And I think about uh life in the world in America or in other places in the world more broadly these days. So much of our frustration with other people is driven by a kind of fear of them. And so I think this just takes me to thinking about like the functions of anger and how appreciating those functions can help us form a different kind of relationship to it. >> In certain schools of Buddhism, it's not even so much that anger comes out of fear. It's the same mind state. It's just two different forms. Anger being the expressive, energized, outflowing form and fear being the held in kind of frozen, imploding form of striking out against what's happening, wanting to declare it to be untrue, wanting to separate from it one way or the other. So they're the same thing, you know, in in those certain schools. And that was really where I was trained. So it's a little bit funny sometimes because of course all these things are translations into English. which in some ways is sort of an awkward vehicle for nuance of the mind. Um it's like you know a very classic one is uh in Asian languages heart and mind are the same word you know and not so in English with very different implications in English and I've heard many u western student ask a you know Burmese or Tibetan teacher um how do I not be so much in my mind and get into my heart and the teacher always looks very puzzled because you've just asked ask them how do I get out of my heart mind to get into my heart mind you know and it doesn't make any sense so it's a little bit like like that um so you could say from that point of view anger has many forms one of which is that kind of uh repulsion you know like pulling in and and being so afraid um and it's a they're you know they're both in both manifestations it's a very powerful force and worth looking at. So, another way you could think of mindfulness is is a willingness to explore, you know, instead of denouncing what you're feeling or freaking out about it or diving into it and letting it rule the day, like what is this, you know, what's this made of? How's it how's it behaving? How's it making me feel? Um, and and that's really a fascinating journey. So anger in the Buddhist psychology is and this doesn't mean feeling anger. That's another important distinction. It means sort of being overwhelmed by anger and especially when it becomes our motivation to act. They would say anger you know in that kind of involvement is likened to a forest fire which burns up its own support which means it damages the host which is us right. It's our nervous system. It's our relationships, our families. Sometimes, um, our bodies, you know, our health. And like a forest fire, it might burn to leave us very far from where we want to be. And so developing uh like the positive part of anger is the energy. So developing a relationship where we can actually take the energy of it you know and not be complacent and have boundaries and you know a sense of integrity and uh being able to say no and things like that without getting lost in it and overwhelmed by it and the burning is the task you know and you can say it's not easy but um and it's not easy but being lost in it is so painful when we are paying attention And it's also so distorting. I mean, this is something that Carl the crocodile discovers when he's really angry at himself. You know, he makes a mistake in spelling and uh freaks out. He throws the eraser at the board, goes running, and then he's sitting at home and he's having all these thoughts like, "I have no friends. I'm stupid." You know, crocodiles can't learn or something like that. And then because he's practicing awareness of what he's feeling, he sees, oh, those those thoughts are actually not reflecting the truth. Three people came to my birthday party and I'm not stupid. You know, I just made a mistake. And and then he learns, which is one of my favorite parts of the book, he learns to put those particularly harsh thoughts in these clouds and has them float away. and then he resolves to be kinder to himself and notices how that feels and that becomes the basis for wanting to be kind to others. So um it's not that we look at anger and say it's wrong and I'm a terrible person and uh but we do want to explore that different relationship to it so that we have some options. You know we're not so driven into action and fear is another one I think I've spent quite a bit of time looking at my own fear. Um, and one of the things I've seen is that despite the world's pronouncement that we're afraid of the unknown, which of course is also true, I get really afraid when I think I do know and it's going to be really bad. And it's all the stories that I tell myself. That's when I really get going. And and that was a really useful insight because even when I'm not sitting on a cushion just in life when I see that arc beginning I remind myself you know what you don't know then I relax then things open up then there's space. You might not know this about me but the YouTube videos that I watch most frequently aren't about psychology or mental health. They're about cooking. I love cooking and I do a lot of it. So, I'm pretty picky about cookware. When you're touching an object everyday, you want it to feel nice and perform well. Carowway sent us their 12piece ceramic nonstick set in the marold color, and Elizabeth and I have loved them. The color is great. I think they're really beautiful, and I've used this uh 10 1/2 in ceramic coated fry pan literally everyday since I got it. It heats up really nicely. The surface is very slick, and this has made it great to use with sticky ingredients like eggs and fish, and it's also very easy to clean. 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You know. >> Yeah. >> And I think well, I think the hardest thing in some ways is wanting that to happen. I kind of learned that most from talking to activists. Um I was once in a panel with this uh friend now that I didn't know her then uh that I now quote a lot, Malikica Dot, who is um we were just on this panel together and she was saying she had uh she's Indian and American and uh she was in India and a friend of hers was in I think a really bad car accident. So she was in the hospital and the system at least in those days in Indian hospitals was that your family and friends really had to come in and help take care of you and the only place in the hospital the only empty bed for her friend was on the burn unit even though that wasn't her situation. So Malikica was there visiting her friend, taking care of her friend on the burn unit and she saw many, many women who and you know had been burnt by their mother-in-law, by their husband, you know, some horrible, horrible suffering and Malikica who was an attorney resolved to really try to make a change and so she formed this organization called Breakthrough Working Against Violence Against Women. So then we're on the panel and so Malikica is talking about the outrage that she felt at everything she was seeing and then she said but you know I don't know how to dial it down and she said you see it throughout my organization the backbiting and and the ways people treat each other so that is being overcome by anger even if you generated it initially in a kind of almost like wise response to something as a state. It It can be so sticky and and so overwhelming. That's the task, you know, and it never works to say I shouldn't feel what I'm feeling. We feel what we feel, which apparently is one of my great or often used sayings. I don't know if it's great, but when I was teaching incessantly during the pandemic online, apparently I was saying the same thing over and over again. So people started sending me mugs with those sayings on it and one of them was we feel what we feel. You know we have to allow the kind of dignity of every feeling but that doesn't mean we want to take every feeling to heart and let it overcome us and let it make decisions for us. >> So we're talking here about kind of forms of appropriate anger and clearly there are times in life where it makes sense to express yourself to other people. you know, you don't want a bottle. Uh you don't want to be a doormat. All of those different things that people talk about when you start mentioning uh loving kindness practice or meta practice or whatever else to somebody, you know, all the kind of classic classic oppositions to it. Also, we want to be uh thoughtful about how we express anger to other people and we don't want to be consumed by it. And also, I feel like there is this uh way where anger can become a habit for people. Anger was kind of a habit for Carl. >> And you know, I I can think of people uh I've myself when I was a teenager, I was this way at least a little bit where you just kind of snap as a response because you're used to snapping as Carl said, something along those lines. You know, crocodile snap. That's just the way they are. And I'm wondering what you think helps people separate out these these different things. appropriate anger maybe on the one hand from more the habit of anger or this kind of habitual response to to just stimuli in general on the other like what helps people think okay this is a moment where this is a tool that makes sense versus this is a moment where I need to take a little bit more space >> I think sometimes it's extracting from the anger the qualities that are really positive clarity strength courage Um, you know, cuz sometimes I say, and I think it's true, we sometimes rely socially on the angry person in the room, you know, cuz they're pointing to some like flaw in the carpet that everyone else is very carefully looking away from, not wanting to admit is there and they're saying, "Look at that. Look at that burn mark. Look at it." You know, so sometimes we really depend on them as well. But it's not their anger. It's their anger that may be leading them but it the qualities within that arc are things like courage uh truthtelling you know and that is what I think we really want to try to absorb from from that state and we can you know people do and back to my teachers you know one of the things that just fascinated me about them all along was that they usually didn't have really easy lives. You know, we look at some of the models we tend to hold. You know, the Daly Lama, Tiknad Han, uh both lost their countries, you know, lived in exile, had tremendous suffering. And then I had teachers who had tremendous suffering personally, you know, losing children and things like that. Um, and so not only do they not seem kind of bland, you know, uh, but they they haven't like come to this out of some incredibly cushy, indulged, you know, luxurious life. It's been a lot a lot of hardship. And somehow that equinimity um, serves because what they're not is incredibly self-p preoccupied. You know I would I would my teacher deep for example did lose two children and her husband and um and that was when she began meditating. She was living in Burma. Her husband uh and she were uh from Bangladesh but he was in the civil service in Burma and when he died she was completely griefstricken and she went to bed. She couldn't get out of bed and the doctor came and said, "You're actually going to die of a broken heart unless you do something about your mind. You should learn how to meditate." So, she got up and she went to the monastery and learned how to meditate. And she was like so incredibly compassionate. It was like she knew anyone's life could change on a dime. And I never saw anybody I was kind of rejected by her, you know. Um, but it was that lack of self-p preoccupation that just fascinated me. Like she lived in Kolkata and we'd like take a train and go see her and she would say, "How was your journey? Tell me, do you need some tea? Do you want some biscuits?" And I think, "Boy, if I went through what she went through, I don't know if I'd care about anybody else's train journey, you know, but they were not like that. they were not um sucking in all the energy in the room, you know, they were incredibly generous and giving and uh so that equinimity didn't produce coldness, you know, it was it was very aligned with compassion. On the path of gradual development, uh it takes time to change your brain and your hormones and your body and your immune system and all the rest of it. the physicalness of our on the one hand sort of burdensome patterns and and moods and and gradually acquire new ways of being that usually takes some time. But what does not take a lot of time and can happen just at the very start uh is that capacity to be mindful of whatever you're experiencing at the time to shift your relationship to it. It may take a while and I think it's important to um value the gradual transformation of the heart mind. Okay, good. But meanwhile, our relationship to it can be very rapidly transformed. And then going back to what you're getting at here, Sharon, about the selfobsession, the self-p preoccupation and all that. Um, I just wonder I'm just reflecting on the ways in which that that movement into observation, including the observation of the self-reerential thoughts and possessiveness and righteousness and case against others and the sense of being agrieved individually, whatever the when you shift into observation of it, you you shift the frame of self in a broad sense. You move from self to person. It's the way I would kind of describe it. And I wondered if you could say more about that kind of the magic of mindfulness to desenter the selfobsession. >> It seems to do that you know uh >> which is pretty amazing. I mean I think there are a few things you know it it does exactly that apparently even in terms of neuroscience you know um but it also uh we shift our frame of reference. So I think you know something we say is like if you see your own greed, you see your own jealousy and you see your own hatred or fear, you don't call it bad or wrong or terrible. You recognize it as a state of suffering because you feel that you know you're you're in touch with that. >> And once we make that shift then that's the moment that compassion can arise for ourselves. you know that we uh our whole frame of reference changes and once you are developing compassion for yourself it's I think a pretty natural extension to have compassion for others which doesn't mean stupidity you know it doesn't mean you don't notice the difference between joy and sorrow or between greed and generosity you know of course we can see that but we don't have the same relationship to to those polarities, you know, it's very very different. And I had a question for you. Do you, as I sometimes hear uh these days, do you think children are kind of naturally altruistic and compassionate? >> What an interesting question. Um, well, I'll tell a story on Forest. >> Oh, okay. >> Oh, no. >> Good. >> It's a very sweet one. Uh, so I think this was while Jan might have been pregnant with Laurel. Laurel had not yet come along. So Forest was maybe two and a half or so. And we went out to a local Sizzler restaurant and money was kind of tight for Jan and me then. I maybe had just gotten out of graduate school. No, I was still in graduate school. Goodness, still then. And so we sit down at a table like as one does at Sizzler and it's Jan and I and and for us she's a super cute two-year-old just well behaved sitting in his chair and having a great time. And next to us was this older couple. They seemed kind of like grandparenty. Okay. And we could see them watching us, you know, interacting. Finally, the uh the check came and on top of it was this peppermint candy. there was a candy that would come with the check to sweeten, you know, the bitter pill of having to pay them some money. Anyway, you know how that is. And Boris liked sweets and liked sweets a lot then. And >> he reached for it and uh as he was reaching for it, the grandfatherly type man at the adjacent table reached for it as well. And so Forest had it in his hand and the grandfatherly man in a joking way said, "Could I have that or can I have it?" And >> was messing with me, messing with me. >> Yeah. And we all expected Forest to do the normal possessive my precious kind of thing. And Forest looked at him and his face kind of softened and opened and he handed the man the candy. I feel almost teary talking about the room. very sweet >> like the whole room like whoa and how touching. So I think yes there is a lot of that and it's also normal developmentally you know for three-year-olds three to five typically to be kind of self-referential you know for them to shift out of their own frame to recognize how it is for other people um it's not so natural to them in general but I do believe there is a a deep inherent goodness and movement toward altruism in children in general. And then of course child rearing occurs, >> right? School >> in their peers and nursery school. And then this sibling comes along and pushes them out of the throne they occupied. And you know, you know, was I that way because children have this deep wellspring of givingness or was I that way because I grew up in a situation where yeah, even though at at that moment in time there were certainly some restrictions on us financially or things like that. But I'm I'm sure as a three-year-old or whatever, I always kind of had a sense that there was sort of enough stuff. You know, what am I sacrificing to give? I I imagine somebody who's coming up from a very different background could have a very different reaction to that kind of thing. Anyways, it's I I just think the nature and nurture of this is really tough to peel apart. Yeah. >> Yeah. What do you think about that, Sharon? >> Well, you know, I I do hear it more and more and and read it and it's a little bit aligned with what you were talking about before, that sense of um kind of a fundamental goodness or >> um awareness that just needs to be uncovered. I personally, you know, I I've of course been exposed to both those perspectives and in a way they don't seem that different to me. They may be different emotionally for somebody at certain phases or stages, but in my mind, there's always work to do. You're either uncovering what's already there or you're cultivating what is not yet strong. But it it's not like one's a free ride, you know. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well to well to go with that I mean there are a lot of non-dual types >> Mhm. who would say that well since the ground of all is always the ground of all even though it transcends our capacity to language it and if there is an innate Buddha nature innate goodness you know the spark of the divine within however again it's kind of framed if that's always the case well >> it's always available and u you know is not a lot of work to kind of settle in or uh now I I would say that many of the people who say that have been doing a lot of work for 30 years and now they're settled into it. I don't know what what's your take on all that. >> Well, I mean from the non-dual Buddhist schools they would say you know yes that that could all be true but one needs to stabilize that access. you know the access may always be there but look at look at our day you know look at our lives it's not >> necessarily expressive of of that you know so the the work so to speak and it's got a different flavor to it you know so when I say work I sort of hesitated but the the path is really stabilizing it so how do you do that you return again and again and you you know clean up your life a little bit you know so the obscurations are not so strong and then you clean up your life a little more and then you know so it it it does have a different flavor and sometimes that could be a healthier flavor if you fall into cultivating means straining which it really shouldn't. Um but it's it's certainly possible and even easy to fall into that sometimes and uh so it could be a good antidote but um I mean I of course have met many of those people and heard that and I was thinking you're the one who slept all the way to India you know to you know be in a community where you could assure one another of your innate goodness and that's a schle you know and that's some effort and uh Being in a community is not always easy and is I I just believe that that there's always work. >> Does that trap you in seeking? >> No. I mean, you could be very grateful, you know, I think if you if you have a sense of confidence in a path. Well, we are, you know, I understand what you're saying, but it's also um you look at those stories, you know, of the great non-dual teacher who lived in a cave for 20 years or something, you know, and you think that was a lot of work. >> Yeah. Yeah. Hey there, thanks for watching and sorry for the brief interruption, but it turns out that over 60% of the people watching this right now are not subscribed to the channel. So, if you could just take a moment to hit the subscribe button, it would really help me out. I'd appreciate it a lot. All right, back to the show. You were saying something a moment ago, Sharon, that I would love to come back to and ask you a question about, which is this kind of movement um from something as an identity like you were talking about uh I want to I think I I made a note from it because it was really good. Yeah. that. So the um I think the line was you recognize your your fear, anger, greed not as something you are but as a state of suffering. So in that you're decoupling identity from what's happening. This is actually a really big move for people and in the relatively small amount of coaching work that I've done, I've seen it over and over again as a kind of transformative moment. >> Yeah. where people go from thinking of themselves as a fill-in-theblank kind of person, if we apply this idea really broadly, I'm the kind of person who can't have that sort of a conversation with uh with my friend. I'm the kind of person who just gets really activated when people do whatever it is that they do, you know, um to really viewing themselves with a much more like open perspective. And of course some some of the answer to this is just like meditation helps a lot. But I I'm wondering in general what you found tends to help people with that that that movement from uh this as a view of self to this as a state and particularly this as a state of suffering. >> You know you just pointed out coaching you know or therapy or >> a really good community. It's like I I once was at some conference and I heard a therapist, I don't think he was a coach per se, I think he was a therapist say instead of saying um I'm an angry person, say I'm feeling anger right now, right? And and so uh that makes a shift, you know, like one of those moments where we're suddenly like, "Oh, I've been holding on really tight." And then the relief of letting go is is really enormous and and it could happen a thousand different ways. Um I think about art a lot, you know, and creativity and uh what happens in those moments when when we make something that didn't exist before, even if it's, you know, not an exhibit in the Guggenheim or something, you know, but it's it's something that is coming from within. You know, there's so many ways in which we we want that perspective shift and I think that's exactly what we want because there's so much possibility once we open in that way. It's like even Carl and we go back to my crocodile. I first of all had to learn the German student alligator and a crocodile for this book which was not natural to me being from New York City. Um, but you know there there's a time after he goes through his big change where he's, you know, it says he still gets sad sometimes. And so what does he do? Sometimes he jumps up and down his trampoline. Sometimes he uses every single crayon in the box. And sometimes he just cries. And that's okay, too. He's not limited into uh a kind of not caring or bland perspective, but he's so different with himself because not only is there that shift in identity that you're describing, there's just so much more kindness toward ourselves. If you're looking at being jealous and you think that's disgusting, you know, and like I've been in therapy for a thousand years, why am I still jealous? So, I've been meditating forever or am I still jealous? That's really different than, oh, that really hurts >> and having that that kindness toward ourselves. >> This is a bit of a personal question, Sharon. So, if you want to pass on it, feel free to pass on it. >> But I'm wondering if you have any examples of this from your own life. Any any things that you've really moved self-concept around or different ways you've come to think about yourself? >> I've had a I mean, I've been meditating for over 50. I have like a million examples >> versions of these. Yeah, totally. Totally. Yeah. >> Um, but I think it was such a huge issue for me because I can look back and, you know, I started meditating in January of 1971 and I've had a number of teachers since then and I can think of, you know, oh, in 1971 that my first teacher said this to me, 1973, this other teacher said this other thing to me, but it's kind of the same thing. in 1975 and it was all around um self- judgment. I have this one teacher Manindra who said something to me also in the early 70s like why are you so upset about that thought that came up in your mind did you invite it did you say at like 3:15 I'd like to be filled with self-hatred please and he said no but when conditions come together for something to arise it will arise and you can affect those conditions you know for sure it's like if you realize I'm very vulnerable to flying off the handle when I haven't slept or when I get drunk or whatever it is, you know, you can affect those conditions, but you can't ultimately absolutely control them. Like, I'm never going to be angry again, never going to be frightened again. And when I look back at how many times in different ways a teacher was saying the same thing to me, it gives me a glimpse of how big a problem it was, you know, that I was so self-judgmental and and so harsh. Um, which is probably another reason that loving kindness meditation as a style of practice became so important for me. >> Well, thank you for sharing that, Sharon. I appreciate that. >> I I I would say over time I think identity does shift and it goes back to what you've been emphasizing Sharon which is what's our our relationship to what we're experiencing. And increasingly I think for many people identity kind of starts moving increasingly toward being in kind of the space in which things are happening. You know the I think of it as the difference between the person and the self. Clearly there are persons. Is there actually a self as this sort of presumed congealed unified entity inside? Well if you look really closely you you can't find such a one. You can find fragments of such a one and references to such a one. You sure can't find such a one in the underlying neurology of the sense of self. So in any case, there's a kind of a shift away from, you know, identification with that perspective, that righteousness, that possessiveness, that grievance, that hurt, all the rest of it. Carl is very caught up in Carl in the beginning of your book, right? But then over time uh the sense of being a person becomes much more fluid. The boundaries start softening at the edges. You start feeling more and more like you're a person process. You know it's part of a much larger process. And it it sort of opens out there. And yeah, maybe I'll ask you this question which is I think a lot of people are afraid that uh as that softening of the self-world boundary starts occurring that uh people will become psies or pushed around by others. They won't stick up for themselves. And it's actually been my experience that as people increasingly disidentify from and disengage from kind of a self who are you looking at, what are you going to do to me, you know, I want this or that. They actually become better at taking care of the needs of themselves broadly as a person. You know, they they they have more of a sense of uh their own rights, their own dignity. They they're less reactive. they're more effective and actually working with others to get their needs met. So anyway, I just wondered what you would say to someone who's a maybe concerned that they're going to become a just like a I don't know what a big puddle that other people will be walking on. >> Yeah. Really? Uh well I certainly do hear that a lot and um in a time of you know the rising ties of hatred which seem really to be happening you know uh right now and always and to some extent for sure but in a very um intense sort of way right now. Um, you know, it's a little bit funny also to be such a um, you talked about my brand earlier, you know, to to be so affiliated with loving kindness. Um, because it's almost like really, you know, >> Yeah. And you know, are you telling me that I, you know, and people for a long time have said, you know, are you saying I should try loving kindness or compassion to that person who doesn't feel people like like me should exist even? Or the way it's been phrased these days, which is also kind of funny, is isn't loving kindness or compassion the same as appeasement? you haven't often, you know, I haven't often heard the word appeasement since I was studying World War II, you know, like >> um but that's the fear and it's a very reasonable fear. I think it's the right fear to have, but it takes exploration to see if it's even true. And and like you, I would I would posit it's not true that there's an ability to sustain effort and not burn out and be clear and not absorb sort of the toxic energy of another. You can't stop it from coming at you, you know, but you don't have to absorb it and kind of suck it up, you know, in those ways. And it's tricky because it's only I think honestly in the experience of it. It's like the experiment. Are you willing to make the experiment to see what happens? It's only in making the experiment that you see. Oh, this is a strength. You know, this is not a weakness. This is not becoming a psy or just giving in. It's really quite something to ponder. Like what do you think when you hear about or maybe study a loneliness epidemic? Because in my mind that's sort of related. You know, if we feel disconnected and and apart doesn't, you know, that that sense of loneliness is not going to be resolved by getting more friends, you know, or going to a social club. It's some inner knowing that in a way we kind of belong to one another. I see it as something really real. I was very struck by Vivic Merti uh his comment as you know the previous surgeon general uh who said that the health burden of chronic loneliness distinct from enjoying solitude. I'd say >> two of my favorite things in the world are having dinner by myself with a good book and a nice restaurant or being off trail in wilderness by myself. Two of my favorite things. I'm not lonely in those settings. Right. Okay. So loneliness has as much health burden as smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day lifetime. Holy moly. So I reflect a lot on okay what to do. And I think it's helpful to start by realizing that the source of a lot of what might seem so personal like a failure. Oh, they're all so happy. As Forest says, we see the highlight reels of other people's lives on social media and then we contrast that to our own, you know, day-to-day soap opera. >> Messy reality. Yeah. >> Yeah. messy reality. And I think a lot of the loneliness people experience is due to these massive forces that are not personal. Just the way in which people now travel long distances often to work. They aren't working with other people alongside. The nature of work has changed. Um all kinds of other fragmentation of different kinds, divisiveness and so on. So that's helpful to realize it's not so much your fault. Second, I'm really struck by the ways in which many times people who are lonely are alienated from themselves. They're they're they feel a kind of inner homelessness. And you know the great proverb that the root of all sickness is homesickness, right? >> Tara Brock will quote that. That's where I first heard it. and that so that's one thing people can do is to become friends with yourself you know like Carl does Carl befriends his own reactions I think that's really helpful then the another thing that really strikes me is that people who feel lonely often do have a a dir a lack it's a thin soup of social supplies coming their way they're they don't have a mate they don't have a circle of friends it's hard to make friends, you know, after you kind of pass through your early 20s and whether it's college or a bar scene, what do you do? And yes, that's true. There may not be a lot coming toward you, but interestingly, if you tap into your own lovingness, your own loving kindness, you know, your own compassion, your own basic friendliness, as you know, and I'll just say it for others, the root of the word meta for loving kindness is friend. Just friendliness. It's like doesn't have to be all cosmic. Just smile at someone or listen to them for a minute. Um anyway, what flows out of you is under your control. Uh you may not you don't have control a lot of what comes into you, but what flows out of you that does connect you with others feeds you and protects you as it flows through you uh and is a soothing balm to the wound and the unmet longing of loneliness. For me it's a deep matter of wisdom to recognize the ways in which we're at the effect of the world and we have things arise dependently. You know we're dependent upon so many causes and conditions and a lot of them suck you know and on the other hand there's uh wise effort. there's making the efforts inside the mind and out in the world thought word and deed um that can make a difference in our life in the range that we have influence. So I wonder how you see that how you help people and how you do that in your own life that that balance of right being at the effect or at cause. Well, it's always a balance, you know. I I think um you I was interviewed once uh by this journalist about doom scrolling and I don't know what the word meant. So, he started out, you know, he said, "One of your colleagues recommended you and so what do you think about doom scrolling and what should we do about it?" So, I said, "What is it?" And he explained it to me and I said, "Oh, yeah, I do that." You know, and and so some of it is, you know, back to things we were talking about earlier is seeing the effect, feeling the effect of certain activities on oneself instead of just living in this dream, you know, of of being disconnected. It's like, oh, look at how I feel after my eighth hour of, you know, being online or or uh something like that. and using that as an imp impetus not to be like a better person or perfect person but just out of kindness to myself. It's like, oh, this this really needs to be I need a little less of the world coming in and and working with my own sense of resource inside. And then, you know, I'm not implying like being cut off and oblivious cuz here it is, you know, uh impinging like crazy, but um it it sort of goes back in my mind to something I realized which kind of surprised me. It's that when the Buddha was talking about say meditation practice, the purpose of it was not to suffer. That there's nothing redemptive about suffering inherently because there are plenty of people who suffer and they're bitter and hostile and isolated. There's a possibility there, but it's not inevitable that suffering will open us to love, you know, or compassion. But because there is that possibility there, we want to work to relate differently to the suffering, you know, so it's not so engulfing or whatever. And that always fascinated me, you know, that the purpose of practice was not to suffer. The purpose of life is not to suffer. It's inevitable. It will happen. But how are we going to be with it? That's the whole point. So there's always some sense of agency and uh possibility in in how we're relating. And um you know there there all these parts of the text about suffering leading to compassion, leading to faith, >> leading to a sense of something bigger. But you just have to look around. And it doesn't always happen that way, you know, and I think we need to understand that um we we need to have a sense of a path um and confidence in it and we fall down and we pick ourselves up and we start over. But there is a way that we can relate differently to circumstances. And some of that may involve more seclusion, more, you know, solitude at times or uh an ethical revolution in your life depending on how you behave or you live. Uh it might mean don't doom scroll like all day long. Perhaps you might feel better and have more energy to try to do something about this world, you know, rather than just feel desolated, you know, by it. And um all born of paying attention. >> I don't think I can find a better period to put on the end of the sentence. I've really enjoyed this, Sharon. It's always great to talk with you. Uh you have such a human approach to your teaching that I really appreciate. It's so grounded in people's real lives and their real experiences, including the unpleasant ones. Uh, is there anything that you would like people to know about where to find you, what you're doing these days, if they want to consume more Sharon Solsber related content, where would we go? Anything like that. >> Um, you can just look on my website, which is sharber.com. And I'm working on a uh a workbook on loving kindness for sounds true. So between kind Carl the children's book and the workbook I'm saying well my books are having fewer and fewer words these days you know so I don't know that that's a trend I might reverse that and see see about another book book someday but that's that's it for now >> it's a very natural process I think I remember talking to uh somebody an expert on trauma actually years and years ago who said that he had hadn't written a book about it uh Dr. Jacob Hal to name drop him and but he mentioned that if he were to write a book about trauma it would just be 300 blank pages and there would be one instruction at the beginning which is fill these in and that would be the process for people. So maybe that's the maybe that's the kind of takeaway from some of what you're doing here. Yeah. >> I really love this conversation today with Rick and Sharon Salsberg. We talked about anger and reactivity through the lens of Sharon's new children's book, Kind Carl, which is just an absolutely adorable book. And one of the moments early on in the conversation that stuck with me, was when Sharon said that one of her favorite definitions of mindfulness comes from children. It came from a kid. Mindfulness means not hitting someone in the mouth. And when you put it that simply, a lot of stuff gets clarified. Some of the big topics that we explored were cognitive diffusion. In other words, how do you start seeing a thought or a feeling as just a thought or just a feeling as opposed to this statement of reality or uh what it suggests about who you are as a person? I'm the kind of person who feels angry all the time. I'm the kind of person who struggles to control my reactivity. And how do we move towards seeing that thought as just a thought or that feeling of anger as just a feeling? We also talked about managing anger and frustration and creating a more flexible sense of self. And then Rick and Sharon talked a lot about practice, about the path of practice in general and how your reactivity can change over time. Another part of the conversation that I'm going to remember is when Sharon talked about my uh my kind of joke of the Teflon Buddha image that people often have of advanced meditators. And sure, reactivity in general does go down. those uh negative stimuli maybe won't feel quite as bad as they used to after you're practicing for a while. But what you really emphasized is it's more that everything else changes. The space that you hold those feelings in changes. Your relationship to them changes. Uh your desire to get more of the good out of that anger or frustration and less of the suffering maybe changes as well. you develop some tools that help you extract from the anger the qualities that are more positive. And she mentioned clarity, movement into action, seeing what's true, a kind of energy, courage, truthtelling, all of this good stuff that we can get from anger and frustration and that are often particularly useful for people who have gone through some really painful experiences in life. People who have experienced trauma, people who come from marginalized groups of people. Those are groups of people that have often had their anger taken away from them. And so reclaiming the useful aspects of it can be really valuable. Sharon also talked about the value of accepting our feelings in general. If we hate the feeling or push down the feeling, we tend to just get tighter with other people, we feel worse ourselves. And as we've talked about a lot on the podcast, that material most of the time boils out of us one way or the other. We also talked about the relationship between anger and fear and how Sharon mentioned that in some Buddhist traditions, anger and fear are actually viewed as the same mind state. So these are just different expressions of the same state. They are inextricably linked to each other. Sharon had this comment when she was talking about that about how suffering is not something we're aiming for. And yes, that might sound kind of obvious to people, but it exists inside of actually a really important context here. The Buddhist started out as an aesthetic. This is somebody who was trying to move away from pleasure in all of its forms and was seeking out these various practices of essentially self-deprivation, twisting his body into uncomfortable positions, uh not eating food for long periods of time because there was a thought at the time that this could help somebody reach a you know a more advanced state of practice. And there are some people and and in some traditions that is a line that people follow. But in the Buddhist process, what he found was eventually that no, this is seeking out suffering is not the point here. The point is to relieve ourselves of suffering. And so that's very much aligned with the comment that Sharon made. And so recognizing for him how suffering wasn't the path of growth was revelatory. I also enjoyed just how relational Sharon and Rick were during this conversation. It was fun to be here with both of them. They've known each other for a while. They've got a lot of professional experience with each other and they're just so thoughtful about all of these issues. So, I really enjoyed this conversation personally. If you made it this far and you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, if you could take a moment to hit the subscribe button wherever you're listening to it now on, maybe that's Apple or Spotify, maybe you're watching us on YouTube. You can also leave a comment, hit the like button, leave a rating and a positive review. If you're listening on Spotify, that also really helps us out. If you'd like to find some other ways to support the show, you can find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com/beingwellodcast. And for just a couple dollars a month, you can support us and you'll get a couple of bonuses in return like transcripts or adree versions of the episodes. If you'd like to read my writing, I'm also writing more often on Substack these days and you can check that out. Until next time, thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you soon.

What does mindfulness really mean? According to one fourth-grader, "Not hitting someone in the mouth." Legendary meditation teacher @SharonSalzbergVideo joins @RickHanson and me to discuss how we can work skillfully with anger, fear, and reactivity without becoming doormats or numbing ourselves out through the lens of her new children’s book Kind Karl. We explore the protective function of anger, and how we can create more space by relating differently to our thoughts, emotions, and sense of self. Sharon shares a Buddhist lens that links anger and fear, and how looking closely at “what’s in the anger” can help us get clarity without collateral damage. Along the way, we talk about the difference between healthy moral anger and the habit of anger, how to extract the positive energy from difficult emotions without getting burned, and how lovingkindness and self-compassion can be active, strengthening forces. About our Guest: Sharon Salzberg is the co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society, a world-renowned teacher of mindfulness, and author or co-author of 14 books including her seminal work Lovingkindness and her first children’s book Kind Karl: A Little Crocodile with Big Feelings. I'm not a clinician, and what I say on this channel should not be taken as medical advice. Key Topics: 0:00 Intro and Sharon’s new children’s book 1:30 Rick and Sharon’s personal history 3:40 Making abstract concepts direct and simple 6:00 “Mindfulness means not hitting someone in the mouth.” 12:30 Equanimity, reactivity, and our relationship with pleasure and pain 27:30 Ad: Caraway 29:03 Healthy moral anger and outrage 34:17 How mindfulness decenters the self 43:53 Decoupling identity from states of suffering 50:23 Dissolving boundaries, self protection, and loneliness 1:03:09 Recap Sponsors: Over 100,000 people have given their Caraway Kitchen products a 5 star rating, and Caraway’s cookware set is a favorite for a reason. Visit https://Carawayhome.com/BEINGWELL or use code BEINGWELL at checkout. Subscribe to Being Well on: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/being-well-with-dr-rick-hanson/id1120885936 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5d87ZU1XY0fpdYNSEwXLVQ Who Am I: I'm Forrest, the co-author of Resilient (https://amzn.to/3iXLerD) and host of the Being Well Podcast (https://apple.co/38ufGG0). I'm making videos focused on simplifying psychology, mental health, and personal growth. Subscribe to Rick on YouTube: http://youtube.com/@RickHanson?sub_confirmation=1 Get Rick's Free Newsletters: https://rickhanson.com/writings/newsletters-from-dr-rick-hanson/ Follow Rick Here: 🌍 https://rickhanson.com/ 📸 https://www.instagram.com/rickhansonphd You can follow me here: 🎤 https://apple.co/38ufGG0 🌍 https://www.forresthanson.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/f.hanson