Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 510: Me, A Love Story: How Being OK With Yourself Makes You Better at Everything | Sharon Salzberg

Episode Date: October 17, 2022

It might be hard to find a more annoying cliché than self-love; it can seem empty and inactionable. And even if you could make it work, I think many of us suspect it would lead to complacent resignation or unbridled narcissism. But there is an enormous amount of evidence that self-love, or as the scientists call it, self-compassion, can make you more effective in reaching your goals as well as lead to better relationships with everybody around you. On today’s show, the great meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg will walk us through the idea that love— both self-love and other love— is a skill that can be cultivated with massively positive impacts. Salzberg is a meditation pioneer, world-renowned teacher, and New York Times bestselling author. She is one of the first to bring mindfulness and lovingkindness meditation to mainstream American culture over 45 years ago, inspiring generations of meditation teachers and wellness influencers. Sharon is co-founder of The Insight Meditation Society in Barre, MA, and the author of twelve books, including the New York Times bestseller, Real Happiness, now in its second edition, and her seminal work, Lovingkindness. Her forthcoming release, Real Life: The Journey from Isolation to Openness and Freedom, is set for release in April of 2023 from Flatiron Books. Her podcast, The Metta Hour, has amassed five million downloads and features interviews with thought leaders from the mindfulness movement and beyond. This episode comes out in conjunction with Dan Harris’ recent TED Talk on self-love. You can watch the full talk here.In this episode we talk about:The definition of self-hatred and its predominance in the WestThe real practical benefits of self-compassionWhether there is a difference between self-compassion and self-loveWhy many people resist the idea of self-loveThe distinction between empathy and compassion and how they work together in BuddhismHow to have lovingkindness for somebody who doesn't feel we have the right to existReclaiming words like love and happinessAnd how generosity makes us more wholeFull Shownotes: www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/sharon-salzberg-510See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% half year podcast. Dan Harris. Hey gang, it would be hard, in my opinion, to find a more annoying cliche or platitude than self-love. It's the kind of bathos that is deleted at us by spin instructors and Instagram influencers. It seems empty and inactionable. And even if you could make it work, I think many of us suspect it would lead to complacent resignation or unbridled narcissism.

In fact, though, there is an enormous amount of evidence that self-love, or as scientists call it, self-compassion, can make you more effective in reaching your goals, and it can lead to better relationships with everybody around you. We are releasing this episode on World Mental Health Day, which is also the day when my new and first TED Talk is being released, and said TED Talk is all about the relationship between loving yourself and loving others.

In it, I tell the mortifying story of a devastating 360 review I received a few years ago for the uninitiated a 360 review is an anonymous survey with the people in your life and it's designed to reveal your strengths. And I think perhaps more importantly your weaknesses. In the talk, I lay out how this mortifying experience led me to come up with what I semi facetiously called my unified field theory of love. Here's a quick clip. That's a deliberately ridiculous name, but I am actually pretty serious about using the word love. Granted, it's a confusing term because we use it to apply to everything from our spouses to our children to gluten-free snickerdoodles. But I am comfortable embracing the broadness of the term.

I consider love to be anything that falls within the human capacity to care. A capacity wired deeply into us via evolution. It's our ability to care, cooperate, and communicate that has allowed homo sapiens to thrive. And it is a failure to exercise that muscle. It is a lack of love that I think is at the root of our most pressing problems from inequality to violence to the climate crisis. Obviously these are all massive problems that are going to require massive structural change, but

at a baseline they also require us to care about one another. And it is harder to do that when you're stuck in a ceaseless spiral of self-centered self-flogulation. Thank you. So I guess what I'm trying to say here is there's a geopolitical case for you to get your shit together. And the massively empowering news is that love is not an unalterable factory setting. It is a skill that you can train. It's actually a family of skills. So that's a little bit of the talk.

I would love it. If you would go watch the whole thing, we put a link in the show notes. In fact, if you really want to do me a solid, you can share it as widely as possible. This idea that love, both self-love and other love is a skill, as opposed to a factory setting, is an idea that I think can have a massively positive impact if disseminated widely enough. And the person who I think has perhaps done the most of anybody in the West to promote this idea is my friend, the great meditation teacher Sharon Salzburg.

So in honor of World Mental Health Day and in honor of the launch of my TED Talk, I wanted to bring Sharon on to take a deep dive into these issues. In this conversation, we talk about the definition of self hatred and why it's a widespread in the West, the real practical benefits-hatred and why it's a widespread in the West, the real practical benefits of self-compassion, whether there's a difference between self-compassion and self-love, why many people so fiercely resist the idea of self-love, the distinction between empathy and compassion and how they work together in Buddhism, how to have loving kindness or compassion for somebody who doesn't feel we have

the right to exist, reclaiming words that are often relegated to cliches such as love and happiness, and how generosity makes us more whole. For anybody who's unfamiliar with Sharon, here's a little bio. She's a meditation pioneer, world-renowned teacher, and New York Times bestselling author. She was one of the first people to bring mindfulness and loving kindness meditation to mainstream American culture about 45 years ago, inspiring generations of meditation teachers and wellness influencers. Sharon is co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barry, Massachusetts, and the author of 12 books, including The New York Times bestseller, Real Happiness, now in its second edition, and her seminal work, Loving Kindness.

Her podcast, The Meta Hour, has amassed five million downloads and features interviews with thought leaders from the mindfulness movement and beyond. Okay, we'll get started with Sharon Salzberg right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier

instead of sending you into a shame spiral. Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10%.com. All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace?

Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcast. would make sense to start with the classic story of you asking his holiness, the Dalai Lama, about self-hatred. Can you tell that story? Certainly. Sometimes I hear other people tell the story, and it's quite funny, because I think that was me. I can't remember if it was 1990, 1989. I was at a very small conference in Durham, solid, India with this holiness and a bunch of psychologists and scholars and I had the opportunity to ask them a question.

So I said, your holiness, what do you think about self-hatred? And he said, what's that? And it was this look on his face, he gets when he's like, really puzzled, you know, like, I don't get it. And it's so interesting, as all these Westerners were like jumping up and down and say, it's this, it's that, it's that, it's that. And he was saying, is it some kind of nervous disorder? And are people like that very violent? And people in the room were saying, no, it's us. It's like all of us. And he didn't quite get it.

And not to deify that culture because it is a culture like any other culture with a lot of flaws. And yet, I think that rock bottom belief of what you will discover if you go underneath your personality and underneath your habits, what do you find? And it's very different.

And he kept saying, it's all along, he kept saying, but you've got Putin nature. How can you think of yourself that way? Like, you know, because from that position, culturally, you know, when you go that deep, you discover capacity, you discover potential, not fully realized potential, but potential. The most fascinating part to me was when we took a tea break and some of his translators were Western. And so they took the opportunity to gather around them and say, you know, this is the filter

through which we tend to hear the teachings. And so when we hear a very common English phrase in translation of Tibetan texts is give up all self-cherishing by which they mean self-preoccupation and selfishness, but it doesn't sound that way. It sounds like give up all self-cherishing by which they mean self-preoccupation and selfishness, but it doesn't sound that way. It sounds like, give up all caring about yourself. And so they say, when we hear a phrase, like, give up all self-cherishing, which you hear endlessly, in that context, this is what we hear. And it was fascinating just to watch that process of that distillation of the meeting of these cultures. Do you think self-hatred is uniquely Western that in Asian cultures they don't have it?

I think they have plenty going on. It's not that good, you know, like for sure. As anybody would everywhere, ultimately. But I think it is different. Like when the Dalai Lama came here to the Insight Meditation Society, it was 1979. I think it might have been his first trip if not to North America, and certainly to the area.

Bob Thurman was still in Amherst College and that's that far away and inviting him to come teach. They were quite old friends at that point. And we were like rash and young and innocent. We heard he was coming to the area. So we wrote a letter to the private office and we said, wouldn't he like to come here too? And then we got a letter back saying, yes, he would. So that was like a total madhouse. And you know, the police blocking Pleasant Street, the road that the center is on, and State Troopers patrolling the roof of the

guns, and you know, it was outrageous. And we had a retreat happening. So we lined up outside, so the Dalai Lama gave lunch. He went bowling, and the one lane bowling alley, the flatters of the blessed sacrament left to us. And then he, we brought him into the meditation hall to give a talk, which is still available, by the way, on Darmacy. And then he asked for questions. And some young man, he'd been sitting maybe for two weeks at that point raised his hand. And he said, basically, I realize I can't do it. This isn't going to work for me.

I might work for other people, but I just don't have the ability to concentrate or get deeper. I just can't do it. And the dialogue, I got that same look on his face. And he said, you're just wrong, you're wrong. And he went into the thing about Buddha nature and it's interesting because all these people

came up to me afterwards and said, he was wrong to say that. You should never tell anyone they're wrong and it's bad pedagogy. But the young man himself, he didn't mind at all, like being told he was wrong and he was wrong, you know, from that perspective. So I get that in Tibet, the view is underneath all of our radio synchrocies, all of our unwholesome qualities, there is what they refer to as Buddha nature, this inherent goodness. And actually,

we might talk about it because I don't know that all Buddhists believe that's true. But I guess what I'm trying to establish now is whether this self-hatred that seems really common, maybe self-hatred is too strong or word, but self-criticism, self-judgment, being hard on yourself seems extremely common, at least in the West. I'm tempted to believe that that's just a universal human attribute, but maybe not. No, I think it could be seen as an universal attribute, because when I say self-hatred,

I think I mean something a little more than that. I mean, there's so many personal conditions in your family or in that culture, you know, your teacher, like how they treat you. And but there's something about, there's almost a kind of hopelessness or despair when you think for what, you know, like, if I don't have the capacity to change, if I don't have an ability to we see it a little bit in the West like when people seem to feel like loving kindness or compassion as qualities, they're like a gift and you either have it or you don't. And the idea that's why Richie Davidson will say one of the really controversial things he has said and positive is that it's trainable. You can actually train to

be more compassionate than you are and And that's outrageous here somehow. Whereas it wouldn't be seen as outrageous there. I mean, you might feel, I don't got much gum and I'm not good at this. I think that would be naturally human. But the idea that this is for not, you know, like, what difference can this make? That I don't think you would see so much. So in the East, it's uncontroversial to think, at the very least, my mind is trainable. Yeah, yeah. So, it's worth unpacking, I guess, because it sounds to me like maybe you have a very specific

meaning of self-hatred and that it's different from the kind of being hard on ourselves or the way I've often described it as the liberal use of the internal cattle prod that many of us believe we need in order to Get anything done. It sounds to me perhaps that you that you think self-hatred is something deeper and more Prinicious. I do think it's deeper and more prinicious and I try to describe it It's hard to find the word sometimes, instead of self-criticism. I might say, incessent, merciless, hard, hard, self-criticism, because there's a degree to which I think I don't think you can say it only is found in the West and is never found in the East, but I think you'd see predominance based on those beliefs, you know, of who we

actually are. I'm sure you hear this argument all the time because I do. When people say to you, if I don't use the internal cattle prod if I'm not ruthlessly hard on myself, I will be forever on the couch. I will never get anything done. Well, I'm looking forward to the the furtherance of the research, you know, which I am given to understand I'm not a scientist, what I've heard is that the harsh, punitive environment, either internal or external, will spike people's performance, but briefly, and then we crash. So I think when we look at, what does it take to make a sustained effort?

What does it take to stick to something, to really make change, to learn something new? It's not actually gonna be that quality of merciless and sussing, punishing self-criticism that's gonna do it for us, that oddly enough, it is something like self-compassion that is the most efficient, effective way to actually make change. And I think the studies are bearing that out. To your mind, is there a difference between self-compassion and self-love?

No, I mean, we can argue the difference between those words and any case. Like Bob or Fredrickson, who's one of the researchers in the University of North Carolina studying love and kindness in CHAS for years? She once said, compassion is love that's looking at suffering. So you could say it's like the same quality, but it's gazing upon a different aspect of human existence. Yeah, I mean, in giving this TED talk that I gave recently and in working on this book that the TED talk material is a preview of.

I've been kind of hung up on some linguistic issues that I've actually been meaning to ask you about, so here's my opportunity, which is that in both Buddhism and in modern science, there are lots of terms for positive qualities. So in science, they study civility, they study niceness, kindness, generosity, gratitude, compassion, empathy, and in Buddhism, we practice many of the same qualities. To me, the term that I'm using, but I'd be curious to hear from you whether you think it makes sense. The term I'm using to describe all of them is love. That's beautiful, but I think that more is poetic than necessarily rigorously scientific.

I don't know how I'd have to ask. I mean, I just think of love as just our evolutionarily wired capacity to care about ourselves and others. So all of those positive qualities that scientists are studying and Buddhists are practicing just seem to fall right under that. You could do that. I mean, there are ways in which if you look at Buddhism and you look at those teachings with all the lists,

there are many times when you get the feeling, well, the solid list of 10 parameys, 10 perfections could be condensed into one, but you could do that with generosity. You could say they're all parts of generosity, they're all parts of gratitude, they're all parts of equanimity, but I would take love. I'm not, I like that. To that, I just finished my book. So is the opposite of self, I feel like there's this self love industrial complex that largely lives on Instagram and filled with all of these influencers telling us, you gotta love yourself. And, you know, it's like the kind of slogan that gets knit onto throw pillows.

And so people are exhorting us to love ourselves all the time. But when you think about self-love, what do you think it actually means aside from the slogans which might be empty or not helpful? Well, I tend to think of the opposite of self-hatred being more like self-compassion, which I think is a little different. Because first, in general, I think evolutionary biologists would tell us we have a negativity bias that we're likely to walk into a room we're about to give a TED talk and we see threat, we see danger, we see that person who looks like they're in a bad mood. You know,

we don't think about the glory of it all, you know, or the beauty of it all. That's just not where our tension tends to go, just from centuries of habit. So it takes intentionality, and that's an interesting concept. It's not force, not coercion, not violence. It takes intentionality to say, what else is going on in this room? You know, what do I have to be grateful for? What do I have?

That's good. So in that sense self-love would play a part but self-compassion tends to play a part in the times when we've blown it when you've gotten up on that stage and you trip, you know, you can't remember the word for the life of you. Those are the times we need self-compassion. It's a little different than just appreciating ourselves. It's really a kind of tenderness or admission of vulnerability and care rather than condemnation. And it's also in that moment, if you look at, you know, again, Christian F. for people like who really study self-compassion, it's some sense that you're not alone.

It's not just you. It's never just you. It's never just me. It's never just us. You know, these are universal qualities. We fall down. We make mistakes. We're flawed.

And, but we have this ability, it's amazing ability to pick ourselves up and start over. And, you know, we, we get so intense and fears and, and the condemnation that we, we forget the rest. But if we are practicing for greater self-compassion We tend to remember the rest and we can switch, you know, we can we can move back to a more resilient state so I think self-compassion is actually more the opposite and that's confusing, you know like a lot of people think it's laziness and that're going to lose their edge and they're going to lose their creative impetus and they're going to lose their ambition and I don't

think any of that's true. Why not? Because I haven't seen that. I've seen that. It's not true. We've had many guests on the show talk about the difference between an inner drill sergeant and an inner coach. What do you think it would be more effective internally or externally

having somebody scream at you, expletives or somebody who really cares about you, give you tough, but caring feedback? Yeah, I mean, especially if you're thinking long term, you're thinking real change, for example, you know, rather than a kind of scared, reactive, bolt out of the room, to try to make it better. Well, when I think of people's resistance to self-love, self-compassion, and again, this is a semantic thing,

but I kind of think of self-compassion as just an aspect of self-love. I don't think of self-love reductively as just appreciating yourself. It's caring about yourself, and that can be caring about your suffering, which would be self-compassion. But when we think about why people resisted,

aside from the fact that it can seem corny, what about the, and I'm sure you've heard this a million times, the fear that if I get into this self-love thing or self-compassion thing, it's going to be self-ish. Well, I mean, that definitely is a common thread in people's ideas. Even if you suggest somebody sit for 13 minutes a day in meditation, I can't. My to-do list is outrageous. I have to take care everybody else. It's too selfish to take 13 minutes a day for myself. But of course, we also know better. One of the really interesting areas of study, as you know, I'm sure is the distinction between empathy and compassion.

And it always interested me because you can see in the world the coldness and the cruelty of a lack of empathy. We certainly see it. And so I used to really just celebrate and applaud all these efforts to do empathy training in these various arenas. And empathy in this sense, I think, really tends to mean that kind of resonance, that felt sense of what someone is likely going through, especially if it seems tough, you know, things seem hard. But I was working and I have worked and still work with a lot of people who are like frontline medical personnel or first responders or caregivers and various institutional

settings are in their family. And I kept thinking, these people have plenty of empathy. You know, they're burning after some other reason. And that was when the distinction came between the way you could say, a lot of people in those roles. And we play those roles sometimes just in friendship. People will say, can I qualify to come to your course for caregivers? Like somehow every single friendship I have ends up in me taking care of people. It's just what I do. Anytime it's easier to be to give

them receive and we're kind of in that role. And so, you know, there's a certain imbalance. Maybe we can offer loving kind of stuff. There's far more easily than receive it, you know, or accept it for ourselves. Or maybe we have tremendous care about someone's situation and not a lot of wisdom. Like, there are limitations on what I can do or this, you know, I and not a lot of wisdom, like their limitations and what I can do or this, you know, I'm not in charge of this universe too bad really, or it's not all going to work out on my timetable, I can't be this impatient, you know, and those are the things that really help and burn out much more than getting more deeply, you know, empathetic, it doesn't make a difference. We're already there.

And so compassion, just to finish that model, would be more defined as the, what's in some sort of psychology, it's a two-port definition. One part is the empathy. It's like the trembling of the quivering of the heart in response to seeing pain or suffering. And then the second part is the compassion part. It's a movement of the heart, the movement toward, not into, but toward the suffering, to see if we can be of help, not to kind of go in with a savior complex,

but to see if we can be of help. So there's a lot of balance that's sort of built in to the definition. It's actually hard to stay to understand, I think. but it's all there right there, you know, that we tend to need something we need wisdom, we need understanding, we need understanding limits, we need an ability to receive as well as to give for it to be a kind of more fall on state that actually is going to make a very big difference. on state that actually is going to make a very big difference. When it comes to this fear that somehow self compassion or self love, it might be selfish. Do you believe there is a connection between, and I know this is tricky territory, and you've written about it, is there a connection between being able to be okay with yourself, okay with your own suffering and to love yourself properly understood love

and the most broad, capacious understanding of that term and your ability to love other people? Is there a connection there? Well, there is some connection. I don't tend to be one of the people who believe this is like a one on one equivalence that you cannot love others until you love yourself perfectly. It's a long haul, you know, perhaps or a hard road. And I just know so many people who do love other people far more than they love themselves,

but the imbalance is never helpful when it's really vast. And I think at some point we have to include ourselves. We can't leave ourselves at all together and expect that. It's gonna be like a whole summer. That is really gonna be love for that matter. It becomes a different kind of exchange. You know, it's much more transactional. It's much more frustrated.

Why aren't you getting better? You know, I've decided. You know, I'd tilt Tuesday and it's much more frustrated. Why aren't you getting better? You know, I've decided. You had tilts Tuesday and it's like, what are you Monday? You know, and it doesn't have to be that way, but it's hard. You know, like as you're asking these questions or as you're speaking, I keep thinking about the conditioning we have about how we brought up to believe this is what a strong person looks like. This is what a kind of complete person looks like and accomplished and highly regarded. You know, what do you have to do? And then the further questions, you know, like, how alone are we really, like, is it really

is isolating? Is it seems, you know, life where are we connected in different ways? And so that's why we pay attention is to actually see those things. So the trope that you can't love other people until you love yourself is just demonstrably untrue as you've said. We all know people who are incredibly loving, even though they may be really hard on themselves. However, if I'm hearing you correctly, it's not helpful to be self-loathing. In fact, you probably be even better at loving other people if you could have some inner okness.

Yeah, I'm sure that's true. And it would last longer. And there would be fewer strings attached. I think it would be more like a kind of generosity of the spirit. Coming up Sharon talks about why she prefers the term basic okness instead of basic goodness or boot in nature. She'll also talk about love as an ability and a responsibility, and our cultural confusion about how to define the word love after this.

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of loving kindness meditation or met to meditation in the West. I had done some loving kindness retreats with you, but I went on one, the longest one I'd ever been on with another teacher named Spring Washam. And there was a moment where I realized that all of the demons, my own demons, the parts of my personality that I disliked the most and was really struggling against. I thought I was being mindful of them, but I realized when I was on this retreat flooding the mind with this, it gives someone artificial warmth.

In other words, you know, you're repeating these phrases of me, be happy, maybe healthy, all day long, and it can feel a little artificial. But day seven or eight of this, the mind is really suffused with this friendliness. And I thought, you know, I was being reasonably mindful when my anger or selfishness would come up in my mind. But I realized at this key moment in this retreat that my mindfulness had this here to fore unseen

aversive flick. I didn't really want to be okay with the uglier parts of my personality. But in this container where the mind was diffused, as I said, with warmth, I could see that my anger, my acquisitiveness were really just ancient programs that were the organism trying to protect itself. And once I saw that, I started to be much easier on myself. And I think that inexorably led to me being less judgmental of other people's stuff. And so that, to me, is, as I understand it, like, part of, at least the connection between self-love and other love. Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes a lot of sense and I think what you would say earlier, I think has layers and layers and layers to it. It's

like it's hard for us to admit even the pain of what? Some of the things we feel are evoking in us, you know, it's like we're so trained to avoid pain and and consider it sort of dishonorable. Like if we'd been in control, like we're supposed to be, it wouldn't hurt. You know, that's just off this way off. And so to admit that we hurt is hard and to allow kind of the presence of whatever feeling may be arising as hard and tagging in there with it and not Make it worse not make it hurt worse by hating it, you know and adding shame and Gelt and all those other things and then um

You know to be able to extend. I mean, that's what's so confusing. It takes it. I think a deep exploration And it's good of what loving kindness actually means or what love actually means because it can't mean like succumbing right like I'm gonna love my jealousy or my pettiness or my inability to give anybody anything you know my hoarding you know Whatever and everybody let it triumph, you know in real my life that doesn't make any sense or

People ask me all the time now Why should I have loving kindness for somebody who doesn't even feel have the right to exist? Because of whatever you know race or gender or gender orientation or sexual preference or whatever and it's a very interesting question It's an important question and it Begins with deciding what you mean by love. We're loving kindness because of it means acquiescence or subjugation and extolling and praise the other when you really think they're incredibly harmful and damaging. It makes no sense to get up earlier, even earlier in the morning, you know, it's just 15 minutes of loving kindness, probably like, why? But if it means something else to you, you know, some glimpse

of a truer, deeper connection, that's just reality. Or the thing I say to myself all the time, and I say to people in response is, I keep coming back to them saying in the teachings, the Buddha taught thought loving kind of practice is the antidote to fear and I say that over and over again to myself and to others And then I think well if it's the antidote to fear with this relationship Same my relationship to this person who's trying to define me in some way would that be enhanced by having a little less fear And I said yes, you know, that's a good thing. Let's go there. Something that's happened for me and I want to run this by you to see if it makes sense is the more I've practiced

love and kindness, the more I've developed a sense of okayness with my own demons, the less judgmental I am of other people's demons. You know, like for me, I would say the number one most difficult person for me is Trump. And I'm not like cool with some of the things he's done. I'm not acquiescing to it. But part of me can at least imagine that if I had those parents and that kind of, both the nature and the nurture side, it's entirely possible.

I would behave in the exact same ways he has. And that's not, it doesn't feel great to contemplate that, but it feels better than blind rage. How does that sound to you? Well, I think it's better not only because it feels better, but because it's more true. It's like coming closer to the reality of life. We are strongly conditioned. Look at it. Infancy, you know? Like, helpless, this little baby. So subject to the actions and intentions of those around them. It doesn't take a deep dive into looking at that family, you know, like, to see how

it happened. And what's hard for us, I think, even harder for us is the fact that often people who are in our eyes creating the most damage in the world because of their position don't look like they're suffering. They look pretty self-satisfied. Yes. Bug. Yes.

You can damn, you know. Yes. Like, and I said, I was asked that once and I was in a stage in Berkeley with some reason that were like dozens of other teachers almost on the stage. And someone asked that question, like he said, I have a really hard time. It's like, I know for myself, if I look within that I am reckless that I say things that are hurtful that I do things that are hurtful when I myself am in a place of pain Presumably I look at some of these political leaders, and I don't see the pain. It's really hard for me What do you think and there was like really there must have been like 20 of us on the stage and no one said it work

No one want to answer the question Finally I answered it. I said, I'm with you. I said, I look at people and I think if they can only fray a little bit around the edges, and I could glimpse the suffering I know, the compassion would be there, which is another question. Compassion doesn't mean weakness.

It doesn't mean not doing anything to try to make change. But anyway, I said, I know the compassion would be there, but I just keep coming back to using myself as the laboratory, which is what I got used to through meditation. If it's true for me that those actions and that speech comes out of a place of pain, I would think it's very likely true for these other people as well, you know, so even though they don't show it, I also believe and this came really directly I think from my exposure to Buddhism. I believe that we can live lives that aren't just mediocre kind of getting by and just okay. We can

It's breathtaking what a human being in terms of kindness and Intelligence and connection and care and can do and people do it every day. Very unselibrated, unharmed, people every single day. And you know, when you go visit that hospice, you know, it's happening. And we are capable of so much and anything. That's what you chose. That's how you chose to relate to people knowing you know, like, you know, like, looking at how low that seems and it doesn't look that attractive.

Father Gregory Boyle was on the show recently, he said something to me that really stuck with me, which is that we were talking about whether evil exists. And he said, I believe in horrible behavior, but not evil or horrible people. And when somebody's doing things so consistently acting in anti-social, unhelpful ways, you need to think about it not as good and evil,

but as healthy or unhealthy. Yeah. But since we're talking about evil here, or perhaps it's non-existence, let's just go back to Buddha nature for a second because we started there, the idea in some schools of Buddhism that underneath it all, we are essentially good. Have you seen evidence to that effect and what would a counter-argument be? I don't quite go there. I'm a little bit more in the Dan Harris school. I mean, I'm a New Yorker, you know, born in Brad. I'm like, I don't know.

And in fact, even my teacher, son of a bitch, he doesn't say basic goodness, which is the common translation. He'll say basic okayness. You know, there's something okay. There's something called something fulfilled And I'm going to go there. I just talk about capacity. I think it is potential. It's huge, huge, unreal, often unrealized potential that exists no matter what. And that's what we did not do something to deserve. That's like our breath rate. If we're born, we have the potential to grow, to change, to get wiser, to get more loving. And it's hard to find that potential. It's hard to trust it. It's way covered over for most of us, but it's there. And that's the basis upon which we practice meditation, because if there was no capacity to grow, it's like, why bother? You know, so there's a sort of sneaky reference to it in that sense. It's very implicit, but basic goodness is a little hard to come by when you see,

like you think about Gregory Doyle and the people he works with, he has a right to be talking about evil, you know, evil actions and it makes sense that people can do some amazing things that are just horrible to one another as well as merciful and generous and so on. So I like basic cocaineina's better than basic goodness, and I like capacity better than them all. And yet in one of your books, I believe it was either the kindness handbook or real love.

You talked about these studies of infants who give in the opportunity to help somebody will take it, which does seem to support basic goodness. Yeah, well, it's an ability. I think that is, maybe this also could be a plan where it's, I like ability, you know, love is an ability. In fact, when I was working on real love, which was a couple of books ago,

and I turned it in, and the editor of the book said, you haven't finished it, you have to finish it. And I said, I finished it, that's why I turned it in and the editor of the book said, you haven't finished it. You have to finish it. And I said, I finished it. That's why I turned it in. And you said, you didn't really finish it. You told some story. You drifted off.

It's wearing it to the ozone, which is my habit. And one of the theses of that book is actually based on this line from this movie, Dan, in real life, in which Peter had just who wrote it and directed it, said, love is not a feeling, it's an ability. And of course, love is a feeling, it's a feeling we tend to crave quite a bit. But think of it as an ability that it's not someone else's hands. So then us and other people may ignite it or help nurture it or threaten it. But ultimately, it's in us, it's ours. And it's to get this image of like the UPS person standing

at the doorstep with his package in his hand, because there's a feeling it's also a little bit like a commodity and you have it or you don't. So I used to see him like with his package of love, glancing down his address and thinking, you know, I don't think so, going off into the distance, I'd be like, wait a minute, then I have nothing. You've now taken all the love out of my life. But if it's inside me, it's inside me. And I may be enriched by the

presence of others, say, but ultimately it's mine. So that was a really important basis of the book. And then I couldn't finish it apparently. And then the 2016 presidential election happened. And I finished in 15 minutes. Because it seemed to me that if love is an ability, it's also probably a responsibility. If I want love, president, a conversation, maybe I have to bring it in. If I want it in room as a consideration, maybe I have to be the one. No, no, maybe he's going to do it.

And so I like the ability, responsibility, link. So I keep coming back to that. How do you define love? As a profound sense of connection. So it may not be emotional at all, even. But it says moments of inclusion, those moments of knowing, of clear seeing. It's like, you know, if you have a lot of assumptions about somebody and they're not even based on your own experience, but what you've heard about them, for example, and you realize I'm not listening to this person, I'm not really looking at them and you actually stop that just being in meshed in those thoughts and you listen and you realize, they're surprising.

They're not quite the person I thought they were. In that moment, something inside you relaxes and you're really there, I would call that love. You may not then say, I'm going to, you know, see you every night for the next month. You may never see them again, but I don't think it demands a certain kind of action or activity, but it's that moment of being not connected. It's such a fraught term and you write about this in real love because we associate the word love either with, well, I talked about this in Ted too,

that we think of it as romantic love, familial love, or we use the word to describe our attitude toward gluten-free snicker noodles. So it creates this enormous amount of confusion about what love is, whereas the Greeks had different names for different types of love, familial love, friendship, love for all humans. Anyway, yep, please pick up the thread

in terms of our cultural confusion about this concept. Well, it's very confusing for all those reasons that you just named. It can seem so sentimental, it's very confusing for all those reasons that you just named it can seem so sentimental, it can seem so superficial. But there are a lot of things like that, you know, the word happiness, which happens to figure a lot of my book titles, you know, it's also confusing people say, well, that's just like endless pleasure seeking. And so how about if we redefine happiness and what about the word

faith, you know, and the ways it's come to just mean belief or even dogma and, you know, there's so many things lost to us in a way because of what the words have come to mean. And I realize I like, I like reclaiming words as part of what it's doing, you know,, the love thing and love itself. It's a confusing, confusing term. It can mean exchange, it can mean romance, it can mean sentimentality. It can mean, I like that cookie. Yes, I think both of us share the engend, and I probably just stole it from you to nudge us sort of broader understanding of this word.

Yeah. It can mean all of those things, and that's okay. Mm-hmm. Coming up Sharon talks about loving kindness as the antidote to fear, the connection between loving ourselves and loving other people, and how she feels having just turned 70 years old.

After this. 70 years old after this. Let me go back to something you said earlier, I made a note of wanting to hear more about this. You said that the Buddha initially taught loving kindness, meta, me, TTA, sort of friendliness meditation, this form of meditation where you, we systematically send good wishes to all sorts of beings, including ourselves. You said he taught this initially as an antidote to fear. Can you say more about that? Well, the legend, and you'll enjoy this because it's right up your alley. The legend is that the Buddha first taught love and kindness meditation to the group of monks. After he'd originally taught some other kind of meditation and sent them off to a particular

forest to meditate in and it happened to be that that forest was haunted. I had tree spirits in it. And they didn't like the presence of the monks are very resentful. And so they try to frighten them away. They appeared as like these ghoulish visions and made terrible sounds and they were these apparitions. And sure enough, the monks became terrified and they ran away. They ran back to the Buddha. And they said, please, Buddha sent us through different forests. And he said, I'm going to send you back to the same forest, but I'm going to give you the only protection you'll need. And that was the first teaching

of loving kindness practice. And he said, don't just recite it in a kind of empty way. Actually, practice it when you go back there. And so they went back and as these stories all end so happily, the tree spurs were so taken by the beautiful energy of the loving kindness coming their way that they decided they actually quite liked the monks there. And they'd feed them and take care of them and so on. So not all real life stories and so happily, you know, but those ones always do. And that was the first teaching. So whether or not you believe in tree spirits or you're going to go there, it seems clear. He taught it as the antidote to fear. And energetically, you can feel that. Another mental attribute that works with anger and fear,

which are considered the same state. Just two different forms is interest. You know, if you're really angry at somebody, you just want to push them away and dismiss them or fear is the same thing, except the sea opposite movement is like recoiling instead of pushing. But it's striking out against

what's happening, trying to declare it to be untrue. Whereas if we have a state of love, we're also kind of curious. It's like, huh, what do you mean by that? Why do you feel that? Or why are you so freaked out? Where are you going? You know, it's like openness and coming closer and paying attention in a different way. And so it's kind of energetic of the opposite than the withdrawal of fear. And it makes sense that we almost replace it, you know, the fear with the sense of connection. How would that work in an average life? Like I'm afraid of climate change in the kind of world

my son's gonna grow up in, or I'm claustrophobic. So don't like MRIs and elevators, or I'm walking in our backyard and the lights gone out and it's afraid of the dark. How would loving kindness very practically help me in any one of those moments? I don't know that if I was trying to do with a phobia, I would use loving kindness to my first remedy, probably mindfulness, but I think it helps in the sense that you don't consider yourself a broken person, you know, like damage beyond redemption because you're a fear.

So it's all those after effects, like the aftershocks, the judgment and self-judgment and the condemnation and the shame and all of that. That's the things we tend to heap upon or already pain to state. That's where it would come in so that we weren't doing so much of that and realizing we're all afraid of something. I just did a podcast interview with sonny and my teacher because he hasn't book coming out.

He was telling the story, which I've heard him tell many times, but how he's afraid of heights. I said, I can't really him tell many times, about how he's afraid of heights. And I said, I can't really believe you're afraid of heights because I'm afraid of heights. And there was like some of this kind of home movie that was making the rounds for a while of him and his brother going back to the village where they were born and grew up for like the first six years of his life. And everyone was writing to me saying, look at those beaming smiles, look at those glories of justice. And all I could see was that little crumbly path

that looked like it was watched out in the rain. If your foot slipped, you'd go down like 90 million feet to some cavern and never be seen again. And really, it's all I could see was that path I thought I'm never going there. Never. Never. Never. But, you know, was that painful for me to say I was afraid of heights enough?

But would it have been some years ago? Yes. I would have been so embarrassed. I'm like, who cares? You know? So I think it's different. It's a different kind of fear because we're also afraid of so much that someone wants to find Bikku, the word that usually translates as

monk as something about worthy fear, you know, someone who knows what makes sense to be afraid of and doesn't get misled into the things we're taught to be afraid of, like kindness, giving too much. You should be afraid of climate effects, you know, climate warming, or what do we call these days. You should be afraid of climate effects, you know, climate warming order we call it these days. We should be all afraid of that, but that doesn't mean that sort of overwhelmed by fear makes any sense in terms of choosing action. Maybe another way in which love is an antidote to fear is that if you're stuck in anxiety about climate change or really anything being helpful to somebody else, which is a form of love, again, broadly understood, can get you out of your head. Absolutely.

I mean, when I was last teaching in a large group setting, it was March 2020, March 9, 2020 to be exact. And it was at the Ruben Museum in New York. And as the Ruben, as you know, the situation is that you sit in the audience until you introduce, and then you go up on the stage. So this was like their Monday meditation class, and a lot of people would come every week.

And this woman was sitting next to me, and she was terrified, you know, and it was such an anxious time in New York. And people were starting to get sick, and you didn't quite know exactly how. It was really, it was before everything shut down, obviously. And she said to me, you know, I almost didn't come. And then I came and, you know, I'm so anxious, I don't know what to do. And I said, well, you know, there are these kind of breathing techniques that you can use

where the basic principle is that if your out breath is longer than your in-breath, the parasympathetic nervous system will start taking over from the sympathetic nervous system. You'll chill, you know, a very likely blood pressure could go down and things just ease, and people use this for panic attacks and so on. So she wasn't interested in that. So I said, well, you know, this is loving kindness meditation. Where if you do that meditation, you'll you'll come upon a very profound sense of connection with others. You won't feel so alone sort of doing battle with life. And she was interested in that either. So I looked at her and I said, I know when you can help. And she lit up, she got really radiant.

She said, you know, I have this neighbor and they're elderly and maybe I could slip a note under the door and see if I could help them with groceries. And I thought, look at that. That's so interesting. You know, then I left New York and I haven't really, I mean, I've been back, you know, but I haven't really moved back there in a real sense. But I've, you know, I witnessed so many friends

and I saw and heard so many stories of like, I've lived in this building for 12 years and everyone in my neighbor's names. And now we all keep track of one another and we're trying to make sure we're okay. I mean, that may be long gone too, you know, but there was a little period of people really turning to help one another, which was really important. Hopefully this connection is appropriate, but it kind of wings us back to this, I think this trope, this misunderstanding that you need to love yourself before you love others, because what you see here is that the act of loving others, and again, we're talking in a broad, down to earth, in no nonsense way, the act of loving others. And again, we're talking in a broad, down to earth,

in no nonsense way, the act of caring enough about other people in order to help them can remind you of your own worthiness. And so I think there is a connection between loving yourself and loving others, a sort of a double helix. But you can access it from either side. You can access it from the other love side and you can access it from the self-love side. Am I thinking about this correctly? Yeah, I absolutely agree. Because any sort of generosity, even if it's fleeting, brings us back to the place where we are whole, where we're not at a loss by that act of giving, that we're not left thereafter with less even, we're left with more actually,

because of the generosity and the depth of the connection and so on. So it may be very, very fleeting, but it's there. There's something about that return that, yeah, I can give, you know, I am of worth, or I'm basically okay, you know, even. And I think it does have function that way and it's very important to appreciate that

Let me finish by asking a little bit about you you recently turned 70 Did I really oh my god And you've been very open about the many struggles in your life. And I think it's not a coincidence that you're the person who asked the Dalai Lama about self-hatred. When you see aspects of your personality arising in your own mind these days, after all these years of meditation, after all these years of being alive, how does it go? Are you able to muster with some reliability, self-love, self-compassion, whatever we want to call it?

I think so, yeah, I do. I mean, in that regard, I entered that pandemic period. I'm so very sequestered in a lot of ways, but not as much as I have been for years, and I answered sort of really not knowing. And I feel like I drew upon all the skills I'd learned in 50 years of practice, and they were there. They were completely present for me and made a difference. I think that one aspect of self-compassion, which I referred to before, that is very meaningful to me, is this understanding that I'm not alone. Because it feels so alone, you know, like anything, I said that, you know, in front of all those people. Did I just say that about turning 70 or no? But you never alone. And realizing this is human existence and it's frailty. And one of my

colleagues who very often when we were teaching together physically would say everyone's just doing the best that they can. I'm just doing the best that they can. It would really annoy me. I'm in a 10-hour school, although I'm a neo-fighting 10-hour school. Synicism, skepticism, really, we're baby,

but I think, come on, you know, like, but Chris, he was right. Everyone is doing the best of that kind because if we had less ignorance and less delusion and someone, we would do better. And it's only when I sort of saw a quote from my angel who said in some way, like, when you know better, you do better that I thought, oh, yeah, that's a more palatable form for me than everyone's just doing the best that they can. And I think it's true and I don't doubt it. I don't go through fits about it. Like yeah, I think that's really right. I did the best that I could. And you know things can be hard like I just finished two books and that means a public presentation of what I believe and

what I care about. Not everyone may think I have anyone to say which is reasonable criticism. I think that I am a little spooked about turning 70 in the sense that it just doesn't seem real. You know, I can be real. But nonetheless, you know, here it is, kind of far out. It happens, I remember when somebody, a friend of mine,

is very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, well, it's a bit of, he reflects on dying every day of his life and his meditation. And she said, do you think it'll help when you die? And he said, I don't know, hope so. I left that. Do you reflect on death every day? No, but I should. I mean, I know I should. I do sometimes. It's just another flipping of a page on the calendar, but I can imagine when you get to a round number like 70, it starts to feel more real. It's very real. I mean, there's so many elements to it.

Death and the eminence of death, you know, relatively speaking, is certainly part of it, but there's so many other parts of it. I just thought, oh, well, you know, someday it would be fun to go to journalism school, which is something I always wanted to do for somebody's none of the way. And I thought, no, I'm never, I'm not gonna suddenly undertake like an entire new professional training, you know,

like, finishing issues, learning probably in Sanskrit. And it's just interesting watching things fall away, even before you come to the prospect of dying, you know, when it all falls away. I can imagine there would be a positive way to look at this. I have an uncle who, upon turning 60, was asked how he felt and he said off the hook. Oh, that's great. Yeah, no, I definitely feel that. I mean, it's, it's, it's a kind of ease of being, you know, like, it's sort of a zook-john teaching, and it was just been teaching like, who cares? It's one of the things they teach us, say, who cares?

Now, it would be easy to misconstrue that as nihilism. Totally. It'd be very easy, you know, and I just think that's probably a secret teaching emotion. How do you do it? How do you apply who cares in a healthy way and not a nihilistic way? Well, I think we'll go back to since you have a book coming out eventually. Who cares? Who cares? I mean, what do we look at? To care.

We have to care. But what do we look at? It can't necessarily be conventional standards, because that's heartbreaking. You never know what circumstances are going to arise. And it has to be like, did I say what I really need to say? It was a compel. I mean, the best work comes out of being compelled.

You have to say it. And you don't even know why, but you have to say it. And did you do that? Did you honor that? And we really, as president, you possibly could be. And the dialogue I'm going to say in this panel that people are dragging them to look at things like architecture and paintings and stuff like that. Saying, it wasn't beautiful, it wasn't beautiful. And he said, and to bet, we believe a work of art is beautiful, depending on what happens

in the mind of the creator in creating it. Like, do they get more enlightened? Do they get more wise? Do they get more compassion and sentence of beautiful work? Let me ask you in closing here, the question I habitually ask, which is, is there anything I should have asked you today that I didn't ask? Oh, gosh. You can ask me how in the world I thought I had anything left to say that I would write

this in order books. When are these books coming out? One is coming out April 11th, 2023, and one is coming out, I think sometime in October 2023. And what are they? The April 11th book is called Real Life because there was in the pandemic and home in Barry. And I watched, actually, I've now watched it many, many times on YouTube. This program called Saturday Night Sater, which was a saider of the year because no one was going anywhere. I learned a lot and it was incredibly beautiful and funny and outrageous.

So I watched it that year. I watched it the next year. I watched it many times. But anyway, the message that reminded me of what I already knew, which was that the word Egypt symbolically means a narrow place. So symbolically, not in terms of geopolitics, which would be tricky to get into. But in terms of the symbolism, the movement of the Exodus is the movement from constriction and narrowness and basically being uptight to being expansive and open. And so what is that movement? So I go back to Christopher Desmond, talk about that, and sets the arc of the book. And then the

other book is a gift book. It's the first time I have like a little illustrated book. Will you come back on when these books come out? I would love to. They'd be thrilling. Thank you for doing this today. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. May all beings be loving. Thanks again to Sharon. Thank you as well to everybody who works so hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justine Davie and Lauren Smith. And a reminder to hear my full TED talk.

Check out the video on TED.com or head over to the Ted Talks daily podcast, wherever you're listening to this podcast. They post a new idea there every day so you can listen to some of the other great speakers from the conference and there were many. We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with 1-3-plus

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