Life Kit - Making Social Change, With Help From Meditation

Episode Date: October 20, 2020

When the world feels upside-down, it might seem counterintuitive to turn inward to create change. But that's exactly what meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg says we should do.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is NPR's Life Kit. I'm Elise Hu. Today we're talking mindfulness and meditation, but maybe not in a way you're used to. Imagine you're on a subway and these Martians come and they zap the subway cars so that those of you who are in there are going to be together forever. That's Sharon Salzberg. She's a best-selling author and world-renowned meditation expert. She really likes this alien subway example her friend shared with her because it reminds us we're not alone. We're all connected.

What do you do? You know, if somebody's hungry, you feed them. If somebody's freaking out, you try to calm them down. Not because you necessarily like them or approve of them, but because you're going to be together forever. Well, guess what? There's a kind of reality to that. We share this life. We share this planet. We need to be responsive to one another as though what we do affects others and what others do will affect us

because that's the truth of things. When the outside world feels so upside down, like it often does these days, it might feel counterintuitive to look inside yourself for change. But that's exactly what Sharon Salzberg says is the answer. Meditation and mindfulness can get you on the path to being that helpful person on the subway car. You know, sometimes the change we seek is vast and deep, and that doesn't mean it's going to happen right away. But we understand that everything is like a step-by-step process, and we're going to put everything we've got into this next step. Her new book, Real Change, Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and Our World, is all about practicing our own mindfulness and about how meditation can create ripples of real

change. I've wanted to write this book for years, both because I know so many people who are meditators who are really looking for a way to bring their compassion alive into the world, and I know so many activists who are really on the front lines of suffering and trying to make a difference and who are really burning out and maybe could use some of these practices. In this episode of Life Kit, my interview with meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg about her new book and how using meditation more in our everyday lives can make this subway car we call a planet a little bit better. All right, Sharon, let's start at the beginning.

You say in your book that mindfulness and meditation practices are often thought of as personal and too maybe inward focused. But you also say they can be very social as well. Can you introduce us to that idea? I think one of the strangest things I discovered about meditation practice is that while it looks like maybe the most solitary activity imaginable, you might be all alone. You might be sitting with your eyes closed. What it actually produces is a profound sense of connection, not only to yourself, but to others. There's some awareness of how interconnected this world actually is, and how entwined our lives are that just seems to come as a kind of insight. And that's the beginning of really wanting to live those values and not just like sit there and enjoy them. For folks who are approaching meditation as a concept for the

first time or mindfulness, and they hear about mindfulness, but don't quite understand it or think of it as something that's a little woo-woo. How are mindfulness and meditation foundations for what you argue is the possibility of social change? Well, mindfulness can be practiced in lots of different ways meditation is like a direct shot at it you know it's like saying okay for these next five or ten or fifteen minutes whatever i'm going to just try cultivating this ability so mindfulness is really an ability to be with our experience without the intense overlay of so much projection or comparison or judgment. And that way we get actually a cleaner, clearer view of what our experience actually is. So we may have physical

pain or heartache or disappointment. And right away, just out of habit, we start projecting it into the future. Like, what's it going to feel like tomorrow? What's it going to feel like next week? So not only... Or we try to push it away. Or we try to push it away. So we not only have what's actually happening, we have the burden of our reaction to what's happening. Or our fears of how people might think of what's happening. Yeah, no, exactly. We try to just let go of those add-ons and be more directly with our experience.

And that, I think, is partly where we find one another. When you actually get to look at the state, because you're experiencing it directly, you think, look at that. You know, that's not that week after all. And so we reorient our priorities and our worldview changes. We are in a real reckoning, a real racial reckoning in the United States and in the middle of a global pandemic with coronavirus. And you write of how we respond to wake up calls and respond to crisis situations. So it's fight, flight, or freeze reactions. And I know a lot of us can really relate to this sense of freezing. And you talk about refining that into a response that's more active

and engaged. Can you walk us through that? I think the whole point of that description is that the stress dynamic is really a dynamic. There's the stressor, the pressure, the incident, the situation coming at us, and then there's the resource with which it's met. And we don't usually give much power to that sense of resource. And that is not meant to imply that we never try to change the stressor. We do. We try to change the circumstance and alter things and so on, but we often neglect that incredible power that we have

through meeting things differently. How many times do we have people trying to help us and we don't let in those helping hands, you know, turning away a resource or we give up before we even began? You know, so there are lots of ways in which we realize that we can well cultivate a greater sense of resource with which to meet the adversity that's happening. So is the resource and the power that we meet these challenges, is that agency? You know, you write an entire chapter on agency. So talk a little bit about that and what it means to you. Well, what I've seen, you know, in so many people over so many years of teaching is that even as we develop a lot more kindness and compassion, there's often a feeling like I could never do enough, whatever I have to contribute. So like meager, it's so like little and nothing.

Yeah, so I won't do anything. And so I think agency is that moment when we do something, you know, it's that one step. And, and so many times we're befuddled. We don't know what to do and nothing seems enough. But we have to take that one step and that's agency. It means finding the one thing that you can make real to begin with. Just making a call, getting someone's phone number and making sure they have yours in case you need it. It's like we're rebuilding at the same time everything's falling apart. And so we have to look at what we are building and what we really care about. It sounds to me like you're saying these individual acts can together bring about the

societal change that is necessary. Kind of going back to the original idea we were talking about. Yeah, because it's real, you know, like. I don't think we need to lose that vision at all of kind of vast systemic change and that understanding that there are causes and conditions for a lot of what we see and we don't need to stay just on the surface. We can look deeper at those causes and conditions. But at the same time, what's real, you know, it's that person right in front of you who's scared to go to the grocery store. Or, you know, I know so many stories of people who reach out to someone who seemed lonely. You know, people in New York would say

to me, I've lived in this building, in this apartment for 12 years, and I never even knew my neighbor's name. And now we all have one another's phone numbers and we check in on one another. You know, that's... That has been a nice, yeah, that has been a nice outcome of this, the increased sense of community, right? And neighborliness. I've heard some stories like that as well. Okay, let's move on to anger. A lot of us are angry right now for a lot of reasons. But you write about mining the energy of anger and harvesting it. Can you explain?

Yeah, it's considered, you know, like in the meditative perspective, anger is like a mixed emotion. It's got enormous energy, and that's really positive and has often a kind of cutting through capacity. Like sometimes it's the angriest person in the room at the meeting who's pointing out the problem that no one else wants to look at, and we're all studiously looking the other way, and they're saying, look at this. You know, so we rely on that also. But if one gets consumed by it and overwhelmed by it, not just feeling it, but really being defined by it, then it tends to be devastating to oneself. And it really can destroy or damage a lot, you know, our health, our relationships. That's why we want to mine the energy of it.

We don't want to deny it or put ourselves down for what we're feeling ever. But we want to take the energy of it without being so lost in the burning and the kind of tunnel vision. It's like if you think about, for example, the last time you were really angry at yourself, it's not usually a time where you think, I did five great things the same morning. You know, it's like they're gone. So we get lost in a kind of tunnel vision and we don't see options that may actually be there for us. So talk me through the practicality of that. How would we actually practice a mindfulness of anger? Well, one of the things we say to begin with is we do a pivot because when we have a strong emotion of any kind, then we tend to be entranced with the object.

It's like if you really, really, really want a new car, you are thinking about which feature and should I do this or should I buy that? You're not necessarily turning your attention around and saying, what does it feel like to want something so much? So it's just what we do with the anger. We're turning our attention around to anger itself. Like what does it feel like in want something so much. So that's just what we do with the anger. We're turning our attention around to anger itself. Like, what does it feel like in my body? Okay. And then what's the sort of anger movie? Because if you just watch, not judging, you know, and not being lost in it, you see anger is a very complex emotion. It almost always has sadness in it, fear in it, maybe grief in it, maybe guilt in it.

And always, pretty well, you see a kind of kernel of helplessness in it. And if we can get there to where we really observe the helplessness, then that's the moment where we resolve on an action. And that's the beginning of channeling the energy. Grief, another really complicated emotion. And one way that we lose energy is when we get overwhelmed by feelings of loss and pain and grief. What is the first step that someone could take to kind of get out of his or her own way when feeling kind of that sort of profound loss?

Well, again, you know, I think it's a multi-tiered process. We have to honor what we're feeling and not think like, you know, it's been an hour and a half, I should be over it. Time to get over it, right, moving on. It's like, that's just not fair. And there may be plenty of other people saying that to us, but we don't need to say it to ourselves either. You know, and so to really honor, I mean, whatever the loss is of a person, of a situation,

of an ideal, it hurts. It's really painful. And then we look at what we might be adding to that, you know, and especially maybe a sense of isolation, like I'm the only one. Because really, this is one of the things, our vulnerability to loss should be one of the things that brings us together, because we all share it. And if we feel like completely cast aside by life in our grief, then I would look at ways of forging some kind of connection to others. And I read something once, which is somewhere in the book,

about how grief is love that doesn't have the normal place to land. And something I do in that reflection is I go back to, okay, let me also honor the love and recognize the love that is in here, because that's still intact. That's not lost. That's really beautiful. Yeah, I've heard some things about how grief, the amount of grief you feel is kind of the flip side of the amount of love that you felt. Well, I'm glad you brought this up because with so much pain happening in the world right now, it seems like a lot of us who are also going through moments of joy and pleasure stand to feel a little guilty about that pleasure or joy, or not wanting to post good things that

happen to them on social media or over-celebrate. As we are trying to do the best we can, how do we cultivate a little joy? Are we allowed to feel a certain amount of joy or celebration right now, despite all of the global pain? I think we have to. We need to not be so depleted. We need to not be so exhausted and overcome by pain, because then we can't help anybody anyway. One of the people that I talk about in the book is this woman, Samantha, who's this amazing young woman from Parkland, Florida, whose mother is a teacher

at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and was there on the day of the school shooting. And I went down there sometime in 2018 and was teaching. And there were a whole bunch of people there. And at one point, Samantha raised her hand. She said, I feel really weird because I'm having an incredible time here, meeting you and learning about mindfulness and doing these practices. And I know the only reason it's happening is because that horrible thing happened. And I don't know how to get over it in order to enjoy this. And I said to her, I don't know if we ever get over it

so much as we learn to hold them both at once. And in Buddhist terminology, we'd call that equanimity. It's like having a big enough heart and mind to be able to hold all of that experience at once. Another practical takeaway that I'm looking for, Sharon, that would be really helpful is, is there a quick mindfulness practice when you go around and teach? Is there a mindfulness practice when we're feeling really worked up during the course of the day that you can share with us that, you know, I could use in the course of my life? Like the next time more people from the White House get sick with COVID or there's some sort of news breaking or, you know, I'm in a fight with my kids. Yeah, I mean, if you're really trying to re-regulate your nervous system, which comes in handy in these times. The basic

scientific teaching, and this is a simplification, but is if your out-breath is longer than your in-breath, then your parasympathetic nervous system will take over for your sympathetic nervous system. Your blood pressure will go down, and you'll start to calm down. And there are fancier ways of doing it, like you breathe into the count of four, and you'll start to calm down. And there are fancier ways of doing it, like you breathe into the count of four, and you breathe out to the count of eight. There are lots of forms of it, but the basic need is to have your out-breath be longer than your in-breath, and it'll happen that way. That's such a great takeaway, just on breathing. Try and make your out-breath longer than your in-breath. Yeah. Well, one idea and one theme that comes up again and again in your book, and also just

in this conversation, is the idea of belonging and interconnectedness. And we're talking about this at a time we're all pretty isolated still from one another and really craving connection in some way. But in the book, you're talking about a deeper, more universal kind of interconnectedness, right, that transcends this time that we're in? Yeah, I mean, I think it's just the truth of how things are, you know, like, even before the pandemic, you know, when I kept reading that there was a loneliness epidemic in the States and England and Japan, I think it was. And when I would read about social connection in terms of health care and how a very strong healing agent seemed to be,

to have a sense of social connection, I kept thinking, well, it can't be numbers. It can't be like, well, I only have two friends, I need four. It must be some inner sense of belonging, of feeling connected to life, feeling connected to others, whether we knew them or not. And I believe that's it, which is why even in these really bizarre circumstances, we can be cultivating that. What do we stand to gain by recognizing interconnectedness? I think one of the powerful things about it is that it's actually true, you know, and that I think of this story I tell sometimes where I was riding in a car with a friend of mine, and we were caught in this

incredible, terrible, awful traffic and complaining bitterly about it the whole time. And then my friend turned to me and said, well, we're the traffic too, you know. And I thought, oh, right, you know, like they're complaining about us. And I look back at that sense of, like, I am the center of the universe. It's my road. You are an interloper and you're in my way by slowing down. And I thought, well, there's privilege right there, right? And what if that could drop away? And I could recognize, well, we're the traffic too. We're all the traffic. Now let's deal with this mess. Meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg, her new book is called Real

Change Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World. Sharon, thank you so much. Thank you. For more Life Kit, check out our other episodes. We have an episode on embracing solitude, another on how to give advice, which I really loved, and lots more. You can find those at npr.org slash life kit. And if you love Life Kit and want more, which we hope you do, subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org slash life Kit newsletter. And like we do at the end of each episode, here's a completely random tip. This time from listener Kelly Gavel. Hi, my tip is if you have really unripe avocados, you can use wool socks to ripen them in about 24 to 48 hours. So you think like me, high socks, you put two avocados in and then you wrap the rest of the sock kind of just around it and make

it nice and snug. And that way all of your avocados will be ripened in time. Have a great day. Bye-bye. Do you have a random tip? Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823. That's 202-216-9823. Or email us at lifekick at npr.org. This episode was produced by Andy Tagle. Megan Cain is the managing producer and Beth Donovan is our senior editor. Our digital editor is Claire Lombardo and our editorial assistant is Claire Marie Schneider. I'm Elise Hugh. Thanks for listening. be incarcerated. And I know that his music got him incarcerated, but they got the wrong guy. Listen now to the Louder Than A Riot podcast from NPR Music.