Good Life Project - Sharon Salzberg: Insight, Meditation and Lovingkindness

Episode Date: June 12, 2016

This week on The Good Life Project, we welcome Sharon Salzberg, a renowned meditation and lovingkindness teacher and founder of Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. She travel...s the world teaching people how to become aware and cultivate lovingkindness in their lives.Sharon also recently partnered with Dan Harris to bring her latest venture to life, 10% Happier, an exciting new app that builds on Dan’s book, 10% Happier.Today, Sharon and I dive into her inspiring path to peace and love and her journey to help others achieve the same. A journey that involved a pilgrimage to India, where she's meet not only her teacher, but a small group of students who, along with her, would eventually rise up to become some of the world's greatest teachers.In This Episode, You'll Learn:How Sharon's difficult childhood set in motion a deeper quest.Why Sharon went to India, what she hoped to find, and the surprises that awaited.How Sharon ended up in the town of Buddha's birth with a small group of students who would become some of the world's greatest teachers.What called Sharon back to the U.S. and why she decided to found the Insight Meditation Center in Barre, MA.What lovingkindness meditation really is and the unusual way Sharon practices it.How Sharon became involved with Dan Harris and the 10% Happier app.Why you need to take care of yourself in order to show others kindness.Mentioned in This Episode:Connect with Sharon: Insight Meditation Society | Facebook | Twitter | 10% Happier App10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works – A True Story by Dan HarrisDaniel GolemanSusan PiverRam DassJack KornfieldLinda Stone Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Starting point is 00:01:52 You can learn more and grab your spot at goodlifeproject.com slash camp or just go ahead and click the link in the show notes. On to our show. Buddha did not teach Buddhism. The Buddha taught a way of life. This is not about becoming something or assuming an identity or rejecting anything else. This is about awareness and cultivating your own awareness and living in a certain way so that you actually can be happy. Today's guest, Sharon Salzberg, is a meditation and loving kindness teacher who founded Insight Meditation Center in Bari, Massachusetts, and also travels the world teaching people
Starting point is 00:02:33 how to become aware and how to cultivate loving kindness and a whole bunch of other stuff. She's also recently partnered with Dan Harris to help bring the world this really interesting app called 10% Happier. Dan, by the way, is also, if you recognize his name and that name, the author of a book of the same name. And today's conversation really dives into Sharon's personal journey, her introduction from growing up in New York City and having a very troubled childhood to heading off to India and thinking she was going to live there for the rest of her life, but then being sent back here to plot a different course. And also, we really explore this thing called loving kindness and what it is and what it isn't
Starting point is 00:03:15 and where it begins and why sometimes we don't want to actually go there. So wide ranging, enjoyable, and I think really valuable conversation. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. You grew up in the city or? I grew up in Washington Heights. Ah, so a local. Very in the city, yes.
Starting point is 00:03:41 Well, that neighborhood has changed dramatically, especially over like the last 10 or 15 years. What kind of a kid were you? I'm curious. Depressed. Isolated. Right. Your family went through a lot of, it sounds like disruption in an early age. Can you talk to me about that a little bit? Sure. My parents split up when I was four. Then I lived with my mother. She died when I was nine. I went to live with my father's parents. He had just disappeared. I hadn't seen him at all. And he returned when I was 11 briefly.
Starting point is 00:04:07 And by that time, he was pretty severely mentally ill. And he was home for maybe six weeks or something. And then he ended up in a psychiatric facility in some form of which he lived in for the rest of his life. Yeah. Were you sort of acutely aware of what was going on or were you kind of shielded from it at that time? It was a mix. I knew, of course, what was going on, or were you kind of shielded from it at that time? It was a mix. I knew, of course, what was going on, but nobody ever talked about it. So, of course, I had enormous feelings within that I couldn't validate in any way.
Starting point is 00:04:35 And so my inner world and my outer world were very separate. And I went to college when I was 16. Being a product of the New York City public school system. I skipped a couple of grades. And when I was a sophomore, I took an Asian philosophy course, which was, I think, almost accidental in the ways those things are. And it was there when I heard about the Buddha's teaching and the Buddha talking in a very upfront way about suffering that that was the first enormous turning point, because it was like, oh, it's not just me. You know, I don't have to feel so different, so aberrant, so alone. This is a part of life. This is a natural part of life. And then I heard about the possibility of meditation in that course, you know, that there were things, practical, real things you
Starting point is 00:05:23 could do with your mind that would help you be happier. And so I was going to college in Buffalo, New York, State University of New York in Buffalo. I looked around Buffalo. Which is a very gray, cold place. Yeah, it is very cold. I've been to Buffalo. Yeah. And, you know, I looked around.
Starting point is 00:05:40 I just didn't see any place to actually learn. Because I wanted to know the how-to. Yeah. So that course, that one course lit a fire. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. By the way, I'm not slamming Buffalo, which just happens to be in the winter cold. No, no, no.
Starting point is 00:05:55 I'm about to have a Buffalo joke. And every time I tell it, there's someone in the room for Buffalo, which was a fabulous university. That's not a joke. Yeah. It had an independent study program. And if you created a project that they liked, you could go anywhere in the world theoretically for a year and then come back and do your fun. So that's my Buffalo joke. It being Buffalo, many people went, not that many people came back, which is true. But I created a project. I said, I want to
Starting point is 00:06:22 go to India and study Buddhist meditation. And this was 1970. And education was kind of wild in those days, especially there. It was very forward thinking school. And they said, yes. So I went off in the fall. It was like my junior year abroad. I went off to India with my student loans and my scholarship. Did you have a real sense of what you were actually going to do? No. Actually, I tell a story about maybe three or four days before I was leaving, Trungpa Rinpoche, who was a great Tibetan Lama, came to Buffalo. This was his first trip to the U.S. I don't know who did his tour. But he didn't speak at my university. He spoke at another college there.
Starting point is 00:07:02 And I went to see him. I was like, wow, like know, like a real Buddhist. And he gave a talk, and then I asked for a written question. So I wrote out the question. I'm about to leave for India in like three days. Can you tell me where to go to find a meditation teacher, a Buddhist meditation teacher? And he had this big pile of questions in front of him. And he like reached in and pulled up my question.
Starting point is 00:07:23 And he read it out loud and he said, I think you had perhaps best follow the pretense of accident. And that was it. You remember those words. Oh, yeah, definitely. It was like no addresses, no handy monastery guidebook. I think you had perhaps best follow the pretense of accident. That was my blessing. And it's exactly the way it happened. So you basically just got on a plane. I was with a couple of people. I wasn't all alone. Yeah. I got on a plane to Europe.
Starting point is 00:07:53 We went overland through Europe and the Mideast, basically. Yeah. Very different place at that time also. Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan. Yeah, no bus and train. Yeah, yeah. It was really outrageous. So where was the first place you actually landed in India then?
Starting point is 00:08:10 I went to Dharamsala because I heard the Dalai Lama right there. I heard he was a Buddhist. You're like, okay, that's my starting point. Was it what you expected? It was amazing, but it wasn't what I felt I needed in that there were, of course, great, great lamas and great meditation teachers. But it was one of those situations that somehow didn't quite work. Like I'd go to the class and they'd say, oh, the translator's out of town for two weeks. So come back in two weeks.
Starting point is 00:08:37 So I'd come back in two weeks and the lama had to go to the dentist who happens to be the other end of India. So we don't know when he's coming back. So he'd wait and wait and wait. And it was while I was in Dharamsala. I actually was in a Tibetan restaurant. And I overheard a conversation about a yoga conference that was going to be happening in New Delhi. And I thought, I'll go there. Maybe I'll find a teacher there.
Starting point is 00:09:03 So we went to New Delhi. And it was a really dispiriting experience, the low point of which was these yogis and swamis up on the stage pushing and shoving against each other to be the first to grab the mic to speak. And it was just awful. Then Dan Goleman, who at the time was a graduate student in psychology studying meditation. Of course, it was decades before emotional intelligence, you know, but he was delivering a paper at that conference.
Starting point is 00:09:31 Oh, at that conference. In some weird way, and he gave a talk, and he mentioned at the end of the talk that he was on his way to this town called Bodh Gaya, which is where the descendant of the tree they say the Buddha was sitting under when he became enlightened was. He was going to do this intensive 10-day meditation retreat, which had no cultural baggage. It was like the straight how-to stuff.
Starting point is 00:09:53 He said Ram Dass was also going to be sitting there as a meditator. And I thought, that's it. And it was it. Right. Was Ram Dass Ram Dass at that point? Yeah, he was Ram Dass. All right. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:10:03 So you went to that? Yeah, yeah. And what was the experience there? It was amazing. So Ram Dass was there as a student. Krishna Das was there as a student. Oh, no kidding. The whole crew.
Starting point is 00:10:14 The whole crew. Joseph Goldstein was there as a student. Oh, that's so funny. Yeah. It's like that was the inciting incident for a lot of the people in this country now. That's right. Danny was there. So it was this amazing gathering of people.
Starting point is 00:10:25 The teacher was SN Goenka. He had just left Burma. He had barely begun teaching. It was extraordinary. You know, it was such an enormous sense of adventure. Yeah. Like, wow, you know, there's an inner world, and you can access it,
Starting point is 00:10:40 and you can really learn all about who you are. And so it was a combination of this extraordinary community and this tremendous inner adventure. Yeah, that's incredible. I mean, did you have a sense for it? You said when you landed in Dharamsala, it wasn't what you needed. Did you have a sense for what you were actually seeking at that point or what you at least thought you needed?
Starting point is 00:11:00 Yeah, I mean, I think I was looking for something like the mechanics, you know, like sit this way. It's like the nuts and bolts how do you do it yeah how do you do it and i mean i think that is a fantastic moment like thank goodness you know like because i you know i was in college or i'd gone to college very early is used to studying things you know and i could have been satisfied with that. So there was some like wild instinct in me that said, no, that's not enough. When you're there with also this group of stunning humans, everyone came from very different places then at that point. What was it like to sort of be moving through this experience with those humans?
Starting point is 00:11:43 It was incredible. I mean, this was, you know, Krishnas wasn't Krishnas. He was still Jeffrey. Jeffrey, right. You know, and. The kid from, where did he go? Brandeis or something like that? No, he went to another SUNY, Stony Brook, I think.
Starting point is 00:11:56 Is that what it was? I know he was like a basketball player and almost, I think, the front man for Blue Oyster Cult or something like that. Yeah, yeah. I'm like, all right. Yeah. Ramdas was the one who was sort of like the patriarch. He was older.
Starting point is 00:12:08 He'd been to India before. He was already Ram Dass. They still all had their English names. And I think about that sometimes because he was like the patriarch and the elder. And he was like 38, you know, because we were so young. That's amazing. What changed in you during that in just that moment because it seems like that was a powerful moment yeah everything changed it was
Starting point is 00:12:30 like from the moment i sat down just felt there's truth here there's truth here for me it wasn't easy and you know i mean i had a lot going on inside and and it wasn't easy at all but i just knew you know there's a rightness here there's truth here and going also is fabulous in the orientation he gave or the foundation he laid the first night he made a point of saying the buddha did not teach buddhism the buddha taught a way of life this is not about becoming something or assuming an identity or rejecting anything else this is about awareness and cultivating your own awareness and living in a certain way so This is not about becoming something or assuming an identity or rejecting anything else. This is about awareness and cultivating your own awareness and living in a certain way so that you actually can be happy. So powerful, too.
Starting point is 00:13:21 I sometimes wonder these days if it is really about sort of, you know, like becoming that person on that path rather than. And I don't want to say that it's bad if that's what it's about but the idea that that rather than just like can can we equip ourselves with a set of tools that might allow us to live in some way with more ease in the world i hope so yeah from that initial experience uh was it your intention to go back and just finish your degree also i'm curious or was this like did you when you were going in your mind you're like this is the start of something bigger i to go back and just finish your degree also? I'm curious. Or was this like, when you were going in your mind, you were like, this is the start of something bigger. I did go back and finish my degree. I was more than a year gone.
Starting point is 00:13:52 I was a little tardy. And when I came back and went back to Buffalo, I ended up getting two years of independent study credit. I wrote some humongous paper on Buddhism, which they accepted for like in lieu of classwork. And I have no idea what that is right now. I'd love to find it again. Wouldn't that be interesting to go back and see that?
Starting point is 00:14:11 Yeah. And I got two years of independent study credit. I went back to India. And I finally came back in 1974. Right. What was it that you felt like you needed to do that you could get in India that you couldn't get by studying with teachers here? I'm curious.
Starting point is 00:14:24 There were no teachers here. That's true. Right at that time. get in India that you couldn't get by studying with teachers here. I'm curious. There were no teachers here. That's true, right, at that time. I mean, that's not fair. There were, I mean, Trungpa Rinpoche was somewhere. Right. Suzuki Roshi was somewhere. There were no teachers in Burmese tradition here. And I had Tibetan teachers also at that point, you know,
Starting point is 00:14:38 but I ended up, for the sake of my practice, really focusing for a while on Burmese lineage. What was it that drew you to that lineage as opposed to if you had the exposure to the others? I think that's one of the big sort of interesting pop culture assumptions about Buddhism these days also because it is so much a part of at least American culture these days is that Buddhism is just Buddhism rather than there are actually there are different paths and different lineages that really have different lenses. Yeah, I mean, in the beginning, I mean, they were both extraordinary, and there were exemplars and teachers that were extraordinary. And it was an amazing time. You know, like you'd check into a hotel in Calcutta, and somebody like Dujamu Pache, who was one of the most eminent Tibetan lamas,
Starting point is 00:15:24 happened to be staying in the same hotel. And you'd hear, oh, he's doing teachings in the dining room at 7 o'clock. It was amazing and very blessed in so many ways. And the thing is that I got really confused. And so I would sit to meditate, for example, and instead of doing either methodology, I would just think, should I do this? Should I do that? Should I do this? Should I do that? Which one's better? Which one's faster? How do I get enlightened faster? Well, these people seem more enlightened than those people. Then I know these people better than I know those people. If I knew those people and these people. It's like keep a chart. Should I do this? Should I do that? And finally, I said to myself, just do something. It doesn't have to be a lifetime commitment, but you've got to get out of your head. like not wanting to make the mistake of taking the wrong path. That's right. That's right.
Starting point is 00:16:27 And it's just I think there's something really powerful to be said about just creating momentum, you know, and then adjusting course if it's not. If for some reason it's not right down the road. Yeah. I was so stuck and just to stand still and I had to do something. Yeah. How much of it was, I'm curious for you, the culture of the community surrounding that tradition along with the teachings? Because I know there's, you know, you've got the teachings, but you've also got the teacher and you've got the community and they all play their roles.
Starting point is 00:16:57 I think it was, I mean, I have since, you know, had much closer relationships with Tibetan teachers and Tibetan communities. But I think the strongest thing that drew me to the people doing Tibetan practice at the time was this tremendous sense of commitment. Really, how generous have you been today? How have you brought this into your life? What have you given up today that you might have grabbed? How much renunciation did you practice today? You know, in the Burmese tradition, we were more, I think,
Starting point is 00:17:30 focused on those immersion experiences in the retreats, at least for that time. And that was attractive, too, because it was like a completely modeled life. You know, there was a schedule. There were bells. They locked the gates. You know, it was like if you wanted to go out and buy a cookie, you had to climb over that gate. You know, it was like a big thing. And, you know, there was somebody like Goenka chanting.
Starting point is 00:18:06 I had other teachers, too, in that tradition who were incredible, you know and and very important for me yeah curious about a couple of things there the idea of everything being prescribed i think is something that we love the idea of and at the same time it almost seems counter to like sort of like the fundamentals of what the practice is about. Yeah, well, it's structure, you know, so we relate differently to structure. And it's meant to be a training period. It's not meant to be a prescription for life. You know, it's not like you want to spend your life being silent, necessarily, or not making eye contact with people or not reading anything. Unless you live in New York, in which case you never make eye contact with people. I don't know. People smile at me all the time.
Starting point is 00:18:48 It's the beautiful pink shirt you're wearing. Thank you. I don't know. It's because I do loving kindness meditation whenever I'm walking down the street in New York. Oh, no kidding. I think, are they doing it too? You know, what's going on here? You know, so it's not meant to be like, oh, this is how you can live the rest of your life.
Starting point is 00:19:03 But this is a way of letting it all go. And for me, because you can tell from that example I gave about the Tibetan and the Burmese, I have a certain kind of mind. So I'd wake up and I think, should I sit? Should I walk? Should I sit? Should I walk? And to have it decided for me was actually a great blessing. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:19:22 In those days, you you know the structure really supported me yeah you also you mentioned that the sort of the intensive retreat nature of what you're doing i think i know what you're talking about there but for my benefit and for the benefit of those can you take me into what you mean by that more yeah i mean it's just a certain structure it's like an immersion experience where those retreats were not completely silent, but we had silent days and silent periods. And these days, I think, even in that style, they are silent. But you wake up, theoretically, at some early hour of the morning, and there's a schedule
Starting point is 00:19:55 of sitting meditation. I didn't have walking meditation, but IMS, the Insight Meditation Society, the center I co-founded, you'd have sitting meditation, walking meditation, some meals. Everything's in silence except for teacher contact. You know, there are times when you can ask questions or there are times of instruction. There are times where you meet with a teacher in a smaller group or individually. And you sit and you walk and you sit and you walk and you sit and you walk and you eat now and then. And then there's a lecture, a discourse at night.
Starting point is 00:20:23 And then there's another walking in another city you go to bed so you're kind of held in this container of a structure this tremendous group support this tremendous peer pressure we happen to be extremely nice we're not militant
Starting point is 00:20:38 no one's going to say where are you you slept late you're taking a walk in the woods a bad person it's not like that at all. But the structure exists to support you. Yeah. And it seems like it's also meant to push you. Yeah. So, I mean, what's the why there? What's behind that? Well, there are a couple of things. One is, in terms of a retreat, the thread that gives us the most results is continuity of
Starting point is 00:21:02 practice, where everything becomes a practice whether you're drinking a cup of tea or you're getting dressed or you're sitting or you're walking and so there's a huge amount of responsibility taken away from you you're not cooking you're not shopping you're not doing your laundry you're not you know you're being taken care of and the food is great by the way it's just there and uh you know so you're in this. The only thing, your job is cultivating awareness and love and compassion. That's it. You know, for two days, three days, seven days, however long you're there. So that's an amazing thing.
Starting point is 00:21:35 And then being pushed, it's like as long as it's in the right way. You know, so many people have ideas about what should happen when they meditate. And people say often to me if they me, and they hear I teach meditation, they say, oh, I tried that once. I failed at it. And then maybe they describe, oh, I couldn't stop thinking. I couldn't make my mind blank. I couldn't have only beautiful thoughts.
Starting point is 00:21:58 I couldn't keep the anxiety away or whatever. And we say you cannot fail at it, that that's actually impossible. Because the goal is not to have a certain thing happen or not happen. The goal is to relate differently to anything that is happening. Thoughts, feelings, sensations, whatever it is, pleasant, painful, neutral. We develop a relationship to all of that that's open and present and non-judging and compassionate and so on. So you can't have the wrong experience. So as long as there's that understanding, then putting your heart into it and not, you know, kind of giving up two and a
Starting point is 00:22:38 half minutes into a sitting because you got a little bored or you got a little sleepy, you know, it's a tremendous experience. Yeah. So Susan Piver, who we both know, tells this story about how she was on a three-day retreat or a seven-day retreat. And pretty soon into it, she was just really, really bored. And she happened to be a huge fan of the movie, The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Oh, yeah.
Starting point is 00:23:04 To the point where she'd watch it in the late times and she knew every scene and every line in it. So she said she literally replayed the entire movie from end to end ahead. And she was cracking up at the funny points and people were looking like, what was going on? And she's like, you know what? It was still a good set. You know, she's like, this was, it was where I needed to be in that moment at that time.
Starting point is 00:23:24 And it was, it was okay. Yeah. You know, rather than just like beating herself up or saying, oh, that was terrible. I failed at everything, which is, I think we have these crazy set of, you know, false expectations that we layer on to us about what it's supposed to be. We do. We do. So from your journey, you spent a significant additional amount of time in India. When did you actually finally come back?
Starting point is 00:23:48 74. Okay. And when you came back, was it with the intention of turning around and teaching? I had one teacher, this woman named Deepama. And when I realized in 74 I had to leave and come back to the States, it was with the intention of getting a new visa, doing stuff I needed to do here, seeing some family, and turning it right around and going back to India for the rest of my life. No kidding. But I went to Calcutta to see Deepa Ma to get her blessing before I was leaving.
Starting point is 00:24:22 And Joseph Goldstein, whom I'd met in my first retreat, had already come back and he'd been back for about six months. And when I went to see Deepa Ma, she said to me, when you go back, you'll be teaching with Joseph. And I said, no, I won't. And she said, yes, you will. And I said, no, I won't. And she said, yes, you will. I said, no, I won't. And then she said two things that were really amazing. One was, you really understand suffering, that's why you should teach. And I had had this very traumatic childhood. And I think it was the first time I ever thought of it as sort of a value in some way, especially for others.
Starting point is 00:24:57 And then she said to me, you can do anything you want to do, but you're thinking you can't do it. That's going to stop you. And I left her. She lived in what we would call a tenement, like a little room up, you know, four flights of stairs. And I went down those stairs thinking, no, I won't. And then I thought, I'm coming right back. And then I got back to the States and I did what I had to do.
Starting point is 00:25:16 In the meantime, Trungpa Rinpoche had just opened Naropa Institute. It was the first summer of Naropa, which is now Naropa University. And it was in Boulder. And it was this extraordinary gathering of people. And Ram Dass had – he was there. And he had maybe 1,000 people in his class. And he had these little subsections, like the chanting subsection that Krishna Dass was leading and the meditation subsection that Joseph was leading. And our joke amongst this community of people who had gotten really close in India was that here we were back in the States, nowhere to go.
Starting point is 00:25:52 Joseph was the only one with a job and an apartment, so we all went to Boulder. So at one point, I think nine of us moved into his one bedroom apartment. And if you know Joseph, he's like extremely meticulous. He really suffered. He tells this story too. And he said he really suffered until he stopped thinking of it as his apartment. And he was fine. We were just all living there.
Starting point is 00:26:13 So this was the first summer session. It was about two weeks before the end. Jack Kornfield was living down the hall teaching his own class. And then Joseph was so popular, he was asked to stay on for the second summer session so i stayed on too and we were teaching that together and then we got invited to teach a one-month retreat joseph and i and so we went and taught that and then we got invited to teach like a two-week retreat and jack came along you know so it was like the invitations were coming not every moment you know in between we're sleeping on people's living room couches and
Starting point is 00:26:50 we had nothing and and then one day i think in his own defense because we're living in his house a lot this guy said his friend in california said you know i have a rental property down near Santa Cruz. Why don't you go stay there? So we did, and we opened it up as a retreat center where people could come and do their own retreats. And it had maybe two extra bedrooms, something like that. So somebody came through at one point, and he said, why don't you open a real retreat center? You know, it would be like a sacred site in this country. It would be a place where the kind of energy that gets engendered when people come together for that purpose doesn't have to dissipate.
Starting point is 00:27:29 And he said, I know the people who can help you. They're all in Massachusetts. So we turned around and we looked up and down the East Coast. And we finally found this place in Barron, Massachusetts. And it's like one day I woke up and I thought of what Deepa Ma had said. And I thought, she's right. You know, this is my life now. And I go back or have gone back, but I don't live there anymore. I live here. Yeah. So it's interesting. It was less sort of like there was this moment. It was more this just progression where you just kind of realized, yeah, this is it.
Starting point is 00:28:01 Yeah. Well, I mean, it was, you know, it wasn't seen as a career in those days. Right. I mean, that's my other curiosity also, because it's I mean, it was, you know, it wasn't seen as a career in those days. Right. I mean, that's my other curiosity also, because it's like, you're young and you're, you know, so you're less burdened. But at the same time,
Starting point is 00:28:12 you know, there's probably the voice in your head saying like, what am I actually, how am I going to live? How am I going to pay for, I mean, you grew up in New York too. So there's like that sensibility,
Starting point is 00:28:22 even though, but I'm curious also, like where, because you lost your mom really young and because you, I don't know if you would say you lost your dad young, but he, you know, how does that play? Because it's almost like you're alone in the world, you know, making all these decisions on the one hand without their guidance and on the other hand, unburdened by their expectations. Like did, was that part of the sort of your experience? without their guidance, and on the other hand, unburdened by their expectations. Was that part of your experience? I guess.
Starting point is 00:28:54 Certainly I was unburdened by anyone's expectations at that point. So I think compared to my other friends, yeah, definitely. Because it was really weird and aberrant in those days. It's so different now. I was signing books somewhere, and somebody online came up to me and said, I'm a mindfulness coach. And I thought, I don't know what that means. But there are a lot of people who say that. And then the second person said, I'm thinking of starting a second career in mindfulness. And the third person said, I'm getting a degree in mindfulness.
Starting point is 00:29:25 And I thought, what world am I in, you know? So it was very different then. Of course, it was a very, very weird thing to do, it seemed. So when you actually made the decision to start a center, did you think it's – is it like the, if I build it, they will come? Kind of. It was a little more uncertain than that. It was like our mantra for the first year was we can always close it.
Starting point is 00:29:46 We can always close it. Because who knew? Right. Yeah, because this was a very different time. It's sort of like you have to step back. And we couldn't even get a mortgage, actually. Three very brave people, kind people, personally co-signed a loan because we couldn't get a mortgage. So they weren't that happy when we'd say we can always close in a year.
Starting point is 00:30:05 But that's all we knew. we can always close in a year. But that's all we knew. We can always close in a year. Do you remember the first moment you sort of stepped in there to teach your first? Yeah. This is our 40th anniversary year, so we're having a lot of reminiscing, a lot of looking at old photos, a lot of conversations like that. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:30:26 What was that first moment like? Well, I remember a lot of first moments. I remember the first moment of seeing the place. Yeah. And then practicing. We had no programming for the first month, so we decided to sit ourselves, you know, so practicing there and then an open house, you know, and then teaching, which was like, wow. But it was all, you know, everything was up to us.
Starting point is 00:30:50 It was a very pioneering effort. It's the first center I've ever heard of that was begun in the West by Westerners that didn't refer back to a singular Asian teacher who was either in Asia or here. You know, like every Zen center, and there weren't many, and every Tibetan center had like the gurus. So we were kind of making everything up as we went along. Should we have Buddhas was one question. Ah, so where did you come on that? Yeah, we had, well, you know, the reason, I mean, of course, you know, we look at the Buddha as like this tremendous teacher and source of all this wisdom.
Starting point is 00:31:25 And in fact, you know, especially, for example, with loving kindness practice, which I'm so associated with in the eyes of the world. Once somebody said to me, this is so incredible. When did you make it up? And I said, well, really, I didn't make anything up. You know, nothing. Right, right. You know, so that all calls for yes let's have buddha statues everywhere that's the point you know we didn't make it up but on the other hand here is like
Starting point is 00:31:49 my first retreat the first night going is saying the buddha did not teach buddhism this is not about becoming a buddhist and i thought we're here you know like what's it going to look like what's it going to mean it looks like idol worship it's too weird you know but we went back and forth and back and forth and then the truth truth is that Jack Kornfield, who when Joseph and I were in India, Jack had a sort of parallel life in Thailand. We didn't meet till Boulder. But when he was in the Peace Corps in Thailand, he'd done a lot of shopping and he had an enormous number of Buddhist statues in his mother's attic in Maryland. And one day this U-Haul pulled up and all these
Starting point is 00:32:24 Buddhists. Okay, that's what Buddhists are after. Decision made. Exactly. And one day this U-Haul pulled up and all these Buddhists. Okay, let's put Buddhists around. Exactly. And they're free. Yeah, and they're here. And then the building was in Ovisia. It was run by the Fathers of the Blessed Sacrament, which is what it said up above the doorway, Fathers of the Blessed Sacrament. And we got someone to get up in a very tall ladder and said, could you please rearrange these letters so it says something about us? And they came up with Metta, M-E-T-T-A, which means loving kindness. And that's still there. But we had a big debate.
Starting point is 00:32:54 Why do we have a word nobody knows what it means? Maybe we should have a different word. Yeah. But it's still there. So somebody just – there must be an order still somewhere in the Fathers of the Blessed Sacrament. Somebody got a photo of when it the Fathers of the Blessed Sacrament. Somebody got a photo of when it said Fathers of the Blessed Sacrament. And you could see how it became meta. That's too funny.
Starting point is 00:33:13 It's so interesting, though, because in a past life, I owned a yoga studio in New York City in Hell's Kitchen. And there was this great yoga all over New York City, and I didn't want to just start another center. That came out of a sort of business background as a lawyer. And what I realized was that your average middle-aged sort of like lawyer or business professional wouldn't set foot in the studios that were around the city. So there was this really similar dance of how far we want to preserve the essence of the practice so that it really, it matters. And at the same time, you know, my goal was to create a place where it lowered barriers to participation and let people ease into whatever depth of what was built around it at their own place. So like when we started, we had no chanting at the end of any class,
Starting point is 00:34:01 there was no oming. And then, you know, and we, there was no incense because I knew that a lot of women actually had migraine, scent triggered migraines. So we stripped a whole bunch of the things out of it. But then over the years, more and more and more sort of started to come back in. And that's interesting. Yeah. I think part of it was just my orientation, but I think also part of it was a lot of it just started to become just much more mainstream. Yeah. and people were just in general more comfortable with the idea but when
Starting point is 00:34:28 you did this this was brand spanking new yeah yeah yeah no it's very odd and even now you know i think because there's so much outreach to you know veterans or you know all kinds of people and i think i don't know about that oming and we don't know but you know like you know some yoga centers i don't know about that dancing shiva you know like yeah and it's really i think there's always this sort of like dance between like how true am i to the tradition versus i just like i just know people start doing this things are going to change no matter why they come to it so let's just make it available as available i remember we opened back when the village voice was like the big paper in new york there was like they wrote about us and they're still remember the headlines of this day it was like yuppie yoga comes to manhattan and i'm like oh this sucks and then that night you know the
Starting point is 00:35:17 door flew open and a whole bunch of people came in they're like is this where the yuppie yoga is i was like why yes it is it's like whatever looking for this place. I was like, why, yes, it is. Like whatever it takes. Because like, it's like, you know, if it's like what you said earlier, like if you develop a practice of with consistency, it doesn't matter why you came to it.
Starting point is 00:35:36 Things are going to start to change. Yeah. So from there, did you, at some point, was there a moment where you kind of said, this is becoming something real and significant? In the country, you mean?
Starting point is 00:35:48 In your center. Yes. It took years, really. I mean, in the beginning, so many of the people were like us. They'd been to India or they had a secret longing to go to India. So they were kind of like in the club. Yeah, exactly. And then I think the first, well, then there were a lot of psychotherapists, the people interested in the mind, the rebels of the day.
Starting point is 00:36:13 And then I think there was a wave of older people, people who were just retiring and were looking for a new lease on life, or maybe they had really wanted their whole lives to explore these things and hadn't been able to. And then, you know, there are waves of younger people. And then it happens often in ways. I was talking to a scientist friend of mine, and he said, you know, the scientists are really getting into this. That's how you know it's really transplanting into this culture. And then I was talking to a friend of mine whose wife is an artist,
Starting point is 00:36:46 and he said, you know, the artists are really getting into this. That's how you know it's really transplanting into the culture. And I said, well, you know what? This other friend, this mutual friend said, it was like, but you could just see, you know, the spreading. One of the things, you talked about two phrases around the practice, mindfulness, and also met meta or loving kindness. Describe a bit what, in your experience, what do you mean by mindfulness and what do you mean by loving kindness?
Starting point is 00:37:15 I'm curious how those play together. Well, as qualities, they're very supportive of one another. They're very intertwined as methodologies that can be distinguished so with mindfulness practice the goal is to really see one's experience more clearly without so many distorting lenses you know so for example maybe you have the habit when something uncomfortable arises in your body to right away start projecting into the future like what's it gonna feel like in 10 minutes what's it gonna feel like, what's it going to feel like in 10 minutes? What's it going to feel like tomorrow? What's it going to feel like next week? So not only do we have the actual experience in the moment, we have all that additional anticipation, which is miserable. And so we see that beginning to arise, let go of it and come
Starting point is 00:37:57 back to what's actually happening. So we start with centering the attention on the feeling of the breath and then move through the body and emotions and so on. So it becomes this way of really developing a lot of insight and understanding about our experience because we're actually looking at our experience instead of being driven by these old habits. Loving-kindness practice is a different method where I sometimes call it a stretch, where we realize that we tend to pay attention in a certain way and we consciously pay attention in a different way. So, for example, if you're in the habit at the end of the day of looking back at yourself almost as though to evaluate yourself, like, how did I do today? And if you're in the habit of pretty well only remembering the mistakes you made and what you didn't do quite right. Which most of us are. You stretch. And it's almost like asking yourself, anything good happen today?
Starting point is 00:38:48 Any good within me? You know, so we do that through the silent repetition of certain phrases so that we're paying attention differently. Instead of castigating ourselves and blaming ourselves, we're wishing ourselves well. Another example is there are tons of people we encounter we look right through you know they're objects to us person who works behind the counter in the supermarket or maybe the homeless person you know and so the question becomes what happens when we look at them instead of through them so this isn't like a a need to like take them home with you or have them be your best friend but
Starting point is 00:39:27 what is that moment we like kind of recognize the humanity of that person and so we use the phrases to pay attention differently so it actually it takes intentionality and it kind of makes our world bigger more inclusive yeah i mean it's beautiful it's also and also speaks to how much we don't see yeah you know and how much more of the world there really is available to us yeah yeah no totally totally yeah what's your sense of why we why we withdraw that way these days well i know that's just a these days problem yeah right just cut those two words off the sentence, right? The human condition is what it is. Yeah. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:40:06 I mean, it's disconnection. You know, we're profoundly disconnected from ourselves. We're disconnected from one another. And usually there's the in group and the out group. You know, and most people are in the out group. We ourselves can be in the out group to ourselves. But, you know, I often think about that person behind the counter and how we tend to be with them where they really are. They're a function for us.
Starting point is 00:40:30 They're not a person. And we're not necessarily in – I mean, I think a lot of social structures are broken down. So we're not necessarily anywhere with the strong sense of community much you know like that person behind the counter maybe they would have been in my church or something my synagogue but yeah because a lot of that's kind of falling away these days you don't have that other opportunity yeah to see them as part of your community as part of like, they're you fundamentally. Yeah. I wonder, do you have a sense for how much sort of like what feels to me like the acceleration of the pace of life plays into that too?
Starting point is 00:41:14 I think so. I mean, I have this friend, Linda Stone, who coined this phrase, continuous partial attention. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, I didn't know. I've heard the phrase. I never knew that's what she coined it. I got it. You know, I met her afterwards because I was quoting her all the time.
Starting point is 00:41:25 And she wrote to me on Twitter and said, I hear you're quoting me all the time. And then we became friends. So continuous partial attention, which I think is so apt. And she lays it on fear of missing anything, you know, because there's so much. It's like you're on Twitter and you think, what about my email? What about Facebook? And what about this? What about that?
Starting point is 00:41:45 You know? Yeah, it does feel to me like that's behind, you know, we're constantly so distracted that it pulls us away from seeing people for who they are and validating them. It's not validating because we're not, it's not our job or we don't have the ability to validate somebody else, but just actually
Starting point is 00:42:01 owning the fact that they're real and they're there. Can you take me more into loving kindness practice? You talked about sort of a progression, and I know it starts with a reflection on you, which is sort of an interesting, I always look at that with this corollary with it. In yoga, there's a himsa, which a lot of people translate as nonviolence. But I think a lot of times we don't look at it first as nonviolence to ourselves. We just kind of like immediately say, well, that's for other people or towards other people. And it seems like that reflection and the first, we should call it a phase of loving kindness meditation is really,
Starting point is 00:42:39 it's like, let's turn this on ourselves first. Well, one way of seeing the practice of loving kindness is as a practice of generosity. It's like generosity of the spirit. And sometimes we look at material generosity just as a kind of teaching vehicle because it's so much more concrete, right? So it's said that the best kind of generosity comes from a sense of inner abundance. And it makes sense, right? Because even if you have a huge amount by external measures, if you have the internal feeling that you don't have enough, it's very hard to give.
Starting point is 00:43:14 So, you know, we might give from lots of different motives, obligation or showing off or martyrdom. We feel we don't deserve to have anything. But the best kind of generosity comes from that sense of inner abundance. And so then, you know, generosity of the spirit, thanking somebody, being present with somebody, paying attention, having loving kindness for them, having compassion for them. If we feel depleted and overcome and we've got nothing going on inside, it's very hard to be giving or offering from a good place. It's very, very hard. So there is a big emphasis on loving kindness for oneself.
Starting point is 00:43:49 It's like renewal. It's resilience. It's creating the wherewithal, that sense of inner resource, so that we can, in a much better way, be paying attention to others. And so it always struck me as odd, you know, that even in the traditional Buddhist teaching, you start with loving kindness for yourself. And I thought, wow, that is, you know,
Starting point is 00:44:12 surely it's all about self-denial and self-abnegation, but it's not. You know, it's about building this sense of resource. Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense. You know, if you're on empty, you've got nothing to give. And if you genuinely want to be of service, you got to have a well or else you end up completely gutted and you can't serve anybody. Yeah, that's true. the practice and say, well, let me do something to love myself up or like, yeah, as being a little too self-aggrandizing or self-serving. And that's what stops us from wanting to go there on a certain level. Oh, yeah. Tremendously.
Starting point is 00:44:52 Even practice itself. Like I often say, I think I ended one of my books with saying, isn't it ironic if somebody said to us, here's this thing you can do 20 minutes a day, really help your friend? We do it. But really help me? Oh, no, I don't have time. You know, I can't do it. help your friend we do it but really help me oh no i don't have time you know i can't do it i couldn't possibly do it you should see my to-do list that's so selfish you know i need to take care of everybody else i can't spend 20 minutes but you cannot run on empty forever you just can't and you know so it's not selfish it's not
Starting point is 00:45:20 it's not the same as being self-preoccupied or yeah or whatever it's really important i just like i love the airplane analogy where it's like what are the instructions like if you're a It's not the same as being self-preoccupied or whatever. It's really important. I love the airplane analogy where it's like, what are the instructions? If you're a parent, put the mask on you first. Yeah. Right? Because you're of no service to anyone else if you go out. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:45:41 There's layers of shame and all that stuff that just gets put upon us. I love what you shared earlier in our conversation, though, about the fact that you just mentioned that before this, you were walking down the street in New York City, and you're looking at different people offering loving kindness. Is that just a regular, is that just the way, I mean, is that a deliberate practice for you at this point, or is it just the way you are? It's a deliberate practice. Okay. Because I'm thinking, I don't do that, but I'd like to. Well, I do sit every day. I have like a formal meditation practice. For four years, I went to Burma in 1985, so I started practice in January 71, January 7, 1971.
Starting point is 00:46:18 I happened to be teaching at Lodro Rinsler's studio, Mindful, with Novels, that night, and i remembered and i i said hey guess what you know this is my 45th anniversary of becoming a meditator and i saw lojo start to run out the door and i said are you going to get me a cake which he was you know sounds like yeah so it took a while you know before i went to brahma and did intensive loving-kindness practice, like 14 years. But from 85 till 89, that was my entire practice, whether I was sitting at home or I was on retreat, I just did loving-kindness practice. And most people I know have some kind of awareness practice and some kind of loving-kindness or compassion practice. And you just divide up the time in different ways.
Starting point is 00:47:03 So these days, the way I divide up the time is different ways so these days the way i divide up the time is my daily sitting is largely like a mindfulness practice but i have this resolve to do loving kindness whenever i'm waiting and i count every mode of transportation as waiting so airplanes walking down the streets of new york and literally waiting you know online in the grocery store something like that yeah instead of fretting or getting peeved you know, online in the grocery store, something like that. Yeah. Instead of fretting or getting peeved, you know, I do loving kindness. And it's very interesting. Yeah. Interesting in what way?
Starting point is 00:47:29 Like, what is it? Well, for one thing, I find that all the same judgments might arise in my mind, but I cap it with a little loving kindness. Like, why are you wearing a jacket? It's so hot out. Be happy. You know, something like that. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:47:43 So it's like you can end it with a different energy. Yeah. Yeah. But that's so interesting too. And I love the fact that that's, you're not denying the fact that you're still a human being. You're still good looking people. There's still judgment.
Starting point is 00:47:54 There's still this and that. And not so much but, but and you can then come back to this place, which just leaves you reoriented. You know, it's not like you have to leave behind that essence of who you are. It's like you keep coming back to a place and a practice. And over the time, I mean, just I think you live in the world differently when you do that. No, definitely.
Starting point is 00:48:17 And that's why when, you know, if somebody's smiling, coming in the other direction down the street and they smile at me, I think maybe they're doing it too. I don't know. Right. Wouldn't that be a nice assumption? Just like, I'm going to assume that they're doing it too. And thank you. So you spend a good chunk of your life now, I mean, both at the center, but also traveling around the world, teaching and writing. And more recently you've become involved in, I guess, sort of the latest technological project. And I'm curious about this. Will you tell me about it?
Starting point is 00:48:50 Well, I love technology, personally. I mean, even though I teased about continuous port of attention and devices. I love technology. And one thing I've seen it really do is, like, sometimes people come to me in New york and they you know they say things like uh i'm just back briefly i'm working in rwanda i have no spiritual community at all help me you know and it's not like here you can google like you know charlotte north carolina insight meditation which i've done right you know and there's a group there may be a group there and there's yoga there now here but you know so often people are actually reliant on
Starting point is 00:49:25 on that other kind of community and and help and i think it's fantastic and dan harris is a friend and a very funny friend you know amusing friend and dan for those who don't know is the guy who had kind of a public meltdown as a mainstream news broadcaster and had a panic attack and then found mindfulness as a way to sort of like find his way back to being okay in a really high-stress job and then wrote a book, which was a huge seller called 10% Happier. 10% Happier. And not only mindfulness, but loving kindness, which irks him no end.
Starting point is 00:50:00 He is like the original cynic. And we have a big routine about this because, you know, he's like, oh, God, not that, you know. Yeah. And when his book came out and he was being interviewed, some of us were asked to do these little films, you know, videos that they were going to show him, and he was going to respond in his interview.
Starting point is 00:50:21 He's the one who told me. My first book was called Loving Kindness, and he told me he used to read it on the new york city subway and he was so embarrassed to be seen reading a book that he used to hide the cover and then uh just as his book was coming out he started posting loving kindness meditations you know and i so i said in this little video, I said, imagine my delight when I saw that Dan Harris was like posting loving kindness meditations. And so they showed him this video and he laughed and he said, it is the most annoying meditation in the world, but it works. So what made you want to team up with him?
Starting point is 00:50:59 Well, I think, I mean, I love him. He's a fantastic articulator of that point of view. You know, like, don't try to snow me. And, you know, this is a practice. I mean, I love him. He's a fantastic articulator of that point of view. You know, like, don't try to snow me. And, you know, this is a practice. This is not a cult. Right. A belief system. And it's revolutionary.
Starting point is 00:51:15 The way he puts it is so sweet. He said, my wife thanks Sharon Salzberg every single day of our marriage because I'm so much less of a jerk. You know, so I recorded this thing, this course for his app called 10% Nicer. That's what we call it. Right. So you guys ended up collaborating on an app, 10% Happier app, which I'm curious about because on the one hand, I have this love-hate relationship with technology,
Starting point is 00:51:40 probably for a lot of similar reasons we've talked about. And I'm also curious about just the idea of appifying the practice and sort of like, you know, the potential pluses and minuses. I was 18 years old. I'd never even been to California before. I'd barely been on an airplane before. But my suffering was so acute that I was sort of driven to do something. And these days, it's so much more accessible. You don't have to go to the other end of the world. But you still need to be sincere in your motivation. And often that is derived from suffering, you know, for many people.
Starting point is 00:52:29 Not always. Sometimes it's just a really big curiosity about life. You want to understand things more deeply, which is fine, you know. But I think much more important than the delivery system is the quality of the training of the person who is teaching. Because as there's this push to have the practices be more and more and more widespread, you know, people maybe with much less experience in practice are also either being trained as teachers or calling themselves teachers. I mean, I think somebody like Dan runs a tight ship. There's a lot of quality control.
Starting point is 00:53:07 The delivery system is one thing in that it's off the zap. But he's pretty rigorous in who he has on there. What's the risk of learning from somebody who has not been taught rigorously? I think it's a few things, and it won't necessarily happen, because the sincerity of your motivation will, you know, I think be a very, very strong factor. But one is what we talked about, you know, if somebody doesn't have a really thorough understanding that the goal is not to block thoughts, or, you know, only have beautiful thoughts, then their judgment and your maybe insane self judgment are going to match, you know, only have beautiful thoughts, then their judgment and your maybe insane self-judgment are going to match,
Starting point is 00:53:49 you know, and you're really going to go down. And I think there's something, you know, we all face difficulty and you need to persevere. And there's something about the depth of the experience of the instructor that kind of helps you keep going. And you feel, oh, yeah, you know, it's worth it, you know, even though it's not instantly gratifying. When we first opened the Insight Meditation Society,
Starting point is 00:54:15 we received two letters that were remarkable for how they were addressed. One, instead of being addressed to the Insight Meditation Society, was addressed to the Instant Meditation Society. And that's what we're trained for, right? It's got to happen instantly or it's not worth it. The other, by the way, which was my favorite, instead of being addressed to the Insight Meditation Society, it was addressed to the Hindsight Meditation Society. And I love that. Because there have been a lot of times, say, in my practice where I felt nothing was happening.
Starting point is 00:54:44 Only for me to look back later and say, oh, look at that. Yeah. Something was happening. You know, and to have an instructor who knows it's okay if it doesn't happen instantly is really valuable. Yeah. whether the part of the delivery is being able to, when you're in that part of a practice where you're like your six months window and you just feel like there's just nothing happening, man,
Starting point is 00:55:11 or my practice, just, so part of it is somebody sort of like walking you through the practice, but how much of it is also the teachings that come along with it where somewhere along those six months you have a wonderful teacher who knows that in any six month window, that thought is going to pop up.
Starting point is 00:55:26 And they drop that into what they say to let you know, like check in and say, you may be feeling this. Something is happening. Keep going. Yeah, definitely. And, you know, on 10% Happier, they have a whole cadre of very experienced coaches. Before I became a part of it in terms of teaching on it. And when they just began, it was just Joseph Goldstein. I actually registered for it.
Starting point is 00:55:49 I bought it. And they only asked for your first name. So I registered as Sharon. And so somebody got in touch with me and said, may I ask, is this your first time meditating? I wrote and I said, well, no, actually, I've been meditating for a long time. And they said, oh, well, we have some experienced people if you have questions, and I'll just be the go-between. And then we just kind of carried on together,
Starting point is 00:56:13 and then Joseph told them who I was. That's too funny. Sort of blew the surprise, but it was fun. I think providing access to both the teaching and a teacher in some way to sort of be there to answer this question is so important. What about the idea of creating community and the way that that intersects with technology? I think it's a great potential of technology. I hope more and more people take advantage of that because it's usually important, whether
Starting point is 00:56:40 it's people being able to respond to one another or hear and see the experiences of other people whether it's through blogging or whatever you know they whatever form they decide it's going to take i think it's really really important and some places uh some centers for example will have a kind of buddy system and, in my personal life, I have a group of friends, there are five of us total, this is one example, where this one friend said if he woke up in the morning and he turned right, he's at his computer. If he turns left, he's at his sitting cushion. And so we have a little support group where every day, once you've sat, and you don't have to say for how long, you don't have to divulge the degree of your concentration or anything. day once you've sat and you don't have to say for how long, you don't have to divulge the degree of your concentration or anything. But once you've sat, you write an email to the other four and the subject line is always turn left.
Starting point is 00:57:34 And then if you want, turn left. That was just in Ireland. Turn left in Ireland. Turn left in Barry Mass or you know, I'd say anything. And it's so interesting because any community brings up everything about human relationships and interactions so i've had a sitting practice for decades you know and so it's always the first one to write and then i get really paranoid oh no they think i'm showing off they think i'm just like a goody goody maybe i'll wait you know i'll wait eight hours after i said it's like is there a delay somewhere so like won't send it out for
Starting point is 00:58:04 you know and as long as you can laugh at your own mind then it's a great support after I sat. It's like, is there a delay somewhere so it won't send it out for a certain amount of time? You know, as long as you can laugh at your own mind, then it's a great support. That's great. It's funny. I use, I see it every morning
Starting point is 00:58:12 but I use an app as a timer and I'm tempted, I've been tempted sometimes to just go grab a kitchen timer or something like that but in this weird way, I almost feel like
Starting point is 00:58:21 it's part of my practice to look at my phone and not choose email. Yeah. And there are days where I do choose email. I mean, most of the time these days it's not, but in this weird way, I do feel like it's actually part of the practice to look at it and then choose to sit. And sometimes it's actually annoyingly difficult to not give in to that thing that thing you know she's like i'll just scan really quickly and then i'll sit but i want to be just super respective of your time and come full
Starting point is 00:58:52 circle here i think it's really exciting what you're doing it's to sort of look at your journey from hey i'm getting on a plane you know to take a year again almost like this and then building this incredible center and community and teaching around the world. And now becoming one of the people who's really leading, how do we actually take this with integrity and leverage technology and flatten the world to a certain extent where people don't have direct access to wonderful teachers like you can experience it. So if we come full circle, the name of this is Good Life Project. So if I offer that term out to you to live a good life, what comes up? Connection, ethics, and clarity. I think those are beautiful ways to live. And I think they're much more salient to our happiness than status or size of our apartment or whatever it is.
Starting point is 00:59:38 Thank you. Thank you. Hey, thanks so much for listening. We love sharing real, unscripted conversations and ideas that matter. And if you enjoy that too, and if you enjoy what we're up to, I'd be so grateful if you would take just a few seconds and rate and review the podcast. It really helps us get the word out. You can actually do that now right from the podcast app on your phone. If you have an iPhone, you just click on the reviews tab and take a few seconds and jam over there. And if you haven't yet subscribed while you're there, then make sure you hit the subscribe button while you're at it. And then you'll be sure to never miss out
Starting point is 01:00:14 on any of our incredible guests or conversations or riffs. And for those of you, our awesome community who are on other platforms, any love that you might be able to offer sharing our message would just be so appreciated. Until next time, this is Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project. We'll be right back. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,
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