Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Sharon Salzberg Takes on the Cliches: Authenticity, Love, and Being Your Own BFF

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

One of the most prominent western meditation teachers talks about how to take gauzy concepts and operationalize them in your actual life.A towering figure in the meditation world, Sharon Salzberg is a prominent teacher & New York Times best-selling author. She has played a crucial role bringing mindfulness and lovingkindness practices to the West.Sharon co-founded the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) alongside Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield and is the author of nine books, including Lovingkindness, Real Happiness, and the most recent Finding Your Way: Meditations, Thoughts, and Wisdom for Living an Authentic Life. Sharon lives in New York City and teaches around the world.In this episode we talk about:What Sharon means by “an authentic life”Learning to be your own BFFHow the notion of self-love squares with the Buddhist notion of emptinessWhy it can be harder to receive love and help than to give itRelated Episodes: - Sharon Salzberg, “Real Love”- Losing Your Patience? Here’s How to Get It Back | Dr. Kate Sweeny, Dr. Sarah Schnitker, and Sharon Salzberg- How to Stay Politically Engaged Without Losing Your Mind | Sharon Salzberg- Sharon Salzberg Makes Me Feel Better- Sharon Salzberg On: Openness, Not Believing the Stories You Tell Yourself, and Why the Most Powerful Tools Often Seem Stupid at FirstFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/sharon-salzberg-finding-your-waySee 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% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody. For me, one of the frustrating and actually hilarious aspects of starting to take seriously things like meditation or contemplation or personal growth, whatever you want to call it, one of the frustrating slash hilarious aspects of all of this is that sooner rather than later, you're going to bump up against cliches like authenticity, love, even self-love. And in my experience, more often than not, you are confronted with the fact that these cliches, as I often say, became cliché for a reason

because they're true. Today, we're gonna try to revivify some of these hackneyed notions with the great Sharon Salzburg. She hardly needs an introduction, but here's a brief one anyway. She is one of the co-founders of the Insight Meditation Society, which is a retreat center in Barry, Massachusetts. She's written many, many books, including her latest,

which is called Finding Your Way. Meditations, thoughts, and wisdom for living in authentic life. It's what's called a gift book with short segments and colorful illustrations. The kind of thing you can just pick up and browse through at random and find something thought-provoking and useful. In this conversation, we talked about what Sharon means by an authentic life, learning to be your own BFF, how the notion of self-love squares with the Buddhist notion of emptiness, in other words, the idea that the self is an illusion. We also talk about love writ large and why it can be harder to receive it rather than give it. And speaking of Buddhist misunderstandings, we also talk about how to score the notion of love with the idea of non-attachment.

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boy band and explore why, when he reached the top, he decided to walk away. Follow Terabli Famous wherever you get your podcasts. Sharon Salisberg, my friend, my teacher. Welcome back to the show. famous wherever you get your podcasts. Sharon Salisberg, my friend, my teacher. Welcome back to the show. Thank you so much. It's great to see you. Congratulations on your new book. Thank you. It's a great thing to hear. It's another book.

Well, it's that joke about it. Nobody likes writing a book, but we like having written them. So yes, publication day can be exciting. Or not, depending on the case. Depending on the book. Well, speaking of your book, in your subtitle, you use some words that got my attention. I wanted to maybe kick off this conversation there. The subtitle talks about, and these are your words,

living an authentic life. What does that mean to you beyond the cliche of authenticity? Well, I wrote the book in the height of my isolation due to the pandemic. And so the question of an authentic life was very strong for me. You know, like everything I expected was not the case.

I wasn't in New York, I was in Barry, I wasn't traveling, I wasn't teaching my normal schedule or anything approaching it, I wasn't teaching at all, except virtually life became virtual. And if I saw anybody that were masked, they were distanced and usually recording me for something else. But there were other things that were happening that were incredibly connected. And I felt really connected to the people I was teaching. People writing in the chats were so touching. They were so vulnerable about their situation and how lonely they were. And I felt

internationally connected all at once. You know, I'd be teaching people in Abu Dhabi and New York and all these places. And so I really thought, what is an authentic life? It's something about that connection and that connection feeling real and not authentic in the sense of so many people use the word authentic to mean frank, even if you're horrible, like you have terrible views or you're nasty to people, but you're upfront about it, you know, pretend. But I'm not using authentic in that sense, you know, it's much more something deeper than our normal kind of frantic way of being. So there's something about in your mind authenticity is connected to some sort of

connection or relationship to other people, whether it's virtual or not. Yeah, and also connected to ourselves. Like, it was certainly plenty of time to not be engaged in who's gonna pick me up at the airport. Where am I gonna stay and simply be? And I made these resolves during that time, it was certain things that never happened.

Like I thought, I'm gonna learn Spanish, I didn't learn a word. But I did resolve to be kinder and that proved to be amazing because there are levels of kindness that are not inauthentic, as you well know. It's not pretensor, hypocritical in any way, but it's out of reach because I'm just too busy and it's too much to do. And so to take the time, for example, my big result, one of my big results during that time was not to press send at the end of an email, but to read it again and position myself in the seat of the recipient. I think, how would this sound? Because it's such a funny medium. It can be so terse and so easily misunderstood. And I thought, okay, I'm just gonna read it again. Read it all again.

And if that proves to be a good idea, it was a good idea. So I slowed down because of circumstance and I wasn't planning the next thing. And there was life. It's interesting for me and I suspect for others who are familiar with you and your work to hear you of all people,

the most prominent Western proponent of loving kindness to say that you had to resolve to be kinder. Well, I didn't have to, that was the delight of it. And I appreciate that. Thank you so much. And certainly my life transformed when I began doing loving kindness practice a lot of those many years ago in the 80s.

I had even before then of course when I began meditating at all. So it wasn't like I had a struggle to think of a value or but I think for all of us we can always go deeper and there are always refinements and there are always times left out and I'm sorry I didn't know Spanish I wish I had, but this was really great. Let me go back to authenticity though, because it's one of these words that I feel it is used,

not by you, but by some people in very annoying ways, it feels hollow and cliché. And yet I think it's pointing to something incredibly important that I don't know that I can crystallize or articulate. So I'm kind of hoping to workshop it with you here. The other words that come up that seem to be in the same zone are like, I don't like this word either, but wholehearted or vulnerable or intimacy. The word I do like is kind of realness, but I don't know if I can make this into a question per se, but what are your thoughts as I ramble here?

I agree. I don't like any of those words either that much, but I of course I use them because it's what people understand for birthday browns, the same vulnerability, the strength was like a good twist on a word. But I think about you, for example, where I would imagine something happens in your own process so that equality, like loving kindness, your compassion, eventually did not seem a fabrication,

something you were forced to pretend to feel. Something that society was saying, perhaps this is good and even if you don't feel it, act like you do, or whatever hesitation you had, and I think importantly add about the terms and the ways it was being used, and something happened, so that it was a genuine expression of who you are and what you care about, and maybe more genuine than just the habits that we all tend to have. As you know, one of my favorite questions to ask myself and to ask others is, who do we look at and who do we look through? We may be in the grocery store or shopping somewhere

it's the same person that we tend to see time and time again, but we look right through them. We don't look at them. So what happens when we take the time to look at them? It's not forced, it's not coercion, it's not violent, but it takes intention to reach that place within us that is actually wanting to know what do I see, what happens when I don't look through people. And so something happened for all of us, each of us, and repeatedly happens, so that these qualities which could be cliched and gookie are suddenly seen

as parts of ourselves that were there, but not maybe access so much or not explored that much. And it feels like the most genuine way of being doesn't feel like artifice at all. Did it happen for you? Mr. Loving Kindness? Well, a couple of things. I want to answer that question. And I also want to put a pin in this notion of looking through people, because I want to come back to that, because I think that's worth its own separate strand.

First to say, you use the word genuine. Maybe that's the word. It's a little less annoying than lots of the other ones that we've been tossing around. I guess the way I think about it, and I'm six years into writing a book about it and not able to finish it apart because this is one of the things I'm still working to articulate. One way to say it for me in my experience is everybody wins when I'm not an asshole. That's a glib way to put it. But it does speak to the fact that there is this interesting and non-individualistic process

that can happen when you learn to be kinder to yourself and kinder to other people. That makes other people happier. It improves your relationships, and that in turn makes you happier. And so all the incentives then click into place. And that is more genuine than whatever habits you picked up from your parents or from the culture that might have blinded you to the possibilities and benefits of kindness.

Does any of that make sense to you? And it all makes sense that I think, in a way, when you said you didn't like those words, and I said I'm not really crazy about them either, that's what's extraordinary about being a writer. It's like you get to say it, you know, and you get to struggle and you get to go deep inside and look for how would you say it in a way that does resonate with you? And everything you said resonates with me.

Sometimes people call that greed. They say my motive is really bad. I want to happy your home life or I want happy your work life or whatever and I say well, let's not agree. That's science. That's saying Yeah, acts are consequential and the way we speak is consequential and we can change an environment because another interesting element I think about What you're describing is that's where learning takes place And that's what we don't necessarily understand. I think we That's where learning takes place. And that's what we don't necessarily understand.

I think we live many of us in a culture, either in families or communities, or the culture at large, where it feels like if you're ashamed enough that you'll improve, you'll be better. And I think it's actually the opposite is once a college, once quoted to me, the brain filled with shame cannot learn and so moving to the opposite state It's not complacency or giving up all values. It's not that at all

But it's having some compassion for yourself. It's realizing like yeah, this is how life is so many people ask me How do I Maintain mindfulness all day long at work and I say it's not going to happen? Or how do I keep the level of concentration? I got on that retreat and I said, that's not going to happen either. But you can return to it. We come back and we come back and we come back and we learn to come back more gracefully and with less blame and more quickly.

And that's really the whole thing. I agree with everything you just said in a particular thing about shame. I sometimes call it psychic constipation, because you can't learn, you can't process much if you're stuck in self-laceration, which by the way is ego-tism. It is you with your head up your ass. You're just totally in your own story. For me, what's been really helpful is this term that my friend, Dali Chug, who's been on the show a couple times, came up with which is good-ish.

If you think of yourself as a good-ish person, well then it's not a huge shock when somebody points out you've been an asshole, you don't have to take it all the way to being a direct affront at this assumption you've been carrying around that you're perfect, and you don't have to go into a death spiral around the fact that you're irredeemably rotten. It's like, yeah, I'm good-ish, but I can always improve, and that's where taking the shame out of the equation gets, for me, super useful.

So maybe we like to turn vulnerability after all because that would allow for expressing those things or understanding those things and not being ashamed of them. Yeah, well, I certainly like the concept. I don't know if I like the term, but there's, I think there's something incredibly powerful here. And it does bring me back to genuineness and this phrase that I often talk about and think about, or at least this is my understanding from Tibetan, the word for enlightenment is a clearing away

and a bringing forth. And so if you can clear away all the habit patterns, if you can clear away all of the gunk and the noise, what's actually below it all, which comports with how we were designed or wired or how we evolved as a species is what the psychological researchers might call pro-sociality. When some schools of Tibetan Buddhism, the word for meditation, which in Tibetan Buddhism

and Southern schools would be cultivation, like cultivating the grounds that certain things can emerge, the term in Tibetan Buddhism in those schools is getting familiar with it or getting used to it. And so that, of course, brings up the question like, what's it? And what's it is a belief that as human beings having an ordinary human life, every one of us has pretty well-had some moments

of incredible clarity or connection or love or peace or joy, but we're not well-forused to it. We don't live there. And even sometimes tremendous suffering can bring us there because everything else falls away. Art brings us there. So many things bring us there. Human love, but we don't dwell there, we don't abide there.

And so maybe we have a moment and we think, what was that? Or I want that back, or I never want to go there again, or whatever. I think I'll tell everyone about that. I don't want to tell anyone about that. But we don't know how to live there. And so meditation is not moving from nowhere, nothing,

being defective, being an a deficit to somewhere. You've had those moments. That is part of who you are, but there's so in frequency, there's so fleeting that now we're going to learn how to abide in the deepest places we have already known. So I always like that because you know, even cultivate gets that sense somewhat because if you're cultivating a garden, you need

to be so much patient and not grabby and also not in that equisitive mode. If I get a big insight before noon, I never have to meditate again or something like that. So I'm just cultivating the ground and creating the conditions for what I want to emerge. I need to put that piece of paper and write it down before my next meditation retreat where I do a lot of suffering around trying to get somewhere. I'll tell you my favorite word actually, let's go back to where it's,

my favorite word used to be poignant because I was trying to describe the feeling tone of compassion, which is not giddy with joy, it's got that sort of tug would that I were able to Ridge of all suffering I would in a moment and I'm not able But now my favorite word is emergent Seeing that all these things insight love Connection they're like emergent properties out of how we pay attention. So this is just a writing and I'm done

You're welcome to those words same more. So how we pay attention can lead to the emergence of love or Mindfulness. Let's go back to the grocery store clerk that you look through and it's not that you're Intrusive or nosy and you say tell me about your Joys and Sarah's necessarily at all, but if you look at them and something that happens And it's not that you're intrusive or nosy. And you say, tell me about your choice in sorrows, necessarily, at all. But if you look at them, it's something that happens. There's a kind of resonance. And the stories could be very different, but they're there.

Or all the times that we are stuck within a gender in our heads. And we're not really listening to somebody, not even a stranger, close family member. But we're just in that loop. If I've got to convince them of this, or it's got to be my way or something like that. When we can step out of that and actually pay attention and listen and communication could happen. So I think quite a bit depends on how we pay attention.

It also solves the big problem that people have, I think, with the idea that qualities like lover compassion can be trainable, which is a big problem for a lot of people, but it's not trainable in the cold or mechanical sense. It's more like if they are emerging properties of how we pay attention. We know attention is trainable because that's exactly what meditation practice is. How do we pay attention? Who do we pay attention to? What do we pay attention to? And it's only the negative, for example, or can we take it a broader picture of life if we accept that meditation or anything, really many things can train attention to be different. Then we have a formula, we have a foundation for actually being able to train these qualities.

I'm thinking about this notion of looking at people you normally look through. And I reflect with some, I don't want to say shame, but some embarrassment, or as our mutual friend, Cotian Paley, Ellison talks about the notion of healthy embarrassment, like looking at your past fuck ups with some sense of humor. So I look back with some, and I don't have to look too far back with some healthy embarrassment at my tendency at times to be deficient, arrogant, cold, removed in my own head, especially with people who are junior to me on the hierarchical scale or my wife used to point out that I often wouldn't say hello to the dormant when we live in the city and an apartment building and how over time really training the muscle to notice when I'm gonna look away and really deliberately not in a

big showy way, but just to look at people say a quick word, it doesn't take a bunch of time, but it really changes the texture and flavor of the whole day when I can remember to do it. Does that all sound familiar to you? Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah. So it's like loving kind of training in real time, you know, in person. Coming up Sharon Salzberg talks about the role of self-love when it comes to your external

relationships and often misunderstood dynamic. And how all of this is actually not in conflict with the Buddhist idea that there is ultimately no self. Go San Real. At least is a journalist that's what I've always believed. Sure, odd things happen in my childhood bedroom, but ultimately, I shrugged it all off. That is, until a couple of years ago, when I discovered that every subsequent argument of that house is convinced they've experienced something inexplicable too, including the

most recent inhabitant who says she was visited at night by the ghost of a faceless woman. And it gets even stranger. It just so happens that the alleged ghost haunted my childhood room might just be my wife's great grandmother. Who was murdered in the house next door by two gunshots to the face. From wandering in Pineapple Street Studios comes Ghost Story, a podcast about family secrets overwhelming coincidence and the things that come back to haunt us. Follow Go Story on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can binge all episodes ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus. We can't see tomorrow, but we can hear it. And it sounds like a renewable natural gas bus replacing conventional fleets. We're bridging to a sustainable energy future. Working today to ensure tomorrow is on. Enrich. Life takes energy. And don't miss out on celebration of Sharon Salisberg's new book. We've made her course on Loving Kindness, which we call 10% nicer. Free over in the 10% happier app until October 23rd. Download the 10% happier app today wherever you get your apps

and get started for free. In your new book, you talk about having a healthy relationship, not only with other people, but also with yourself. There's a passage about being your own BFF. What is that all about? In the classical tradition, when we do love and kind of practice, we start with ourselves, which I used to always a little odd.

The idea that's not selfish, it's not self preoccupied, it's not self-centered. But it really is like a kind of foundational exercise. And I don't mean one, like sometimes people say, I'm going to do loving kinds only for myself. And I'm not sure that's perfect either because then it becomes like a project. And how do you know when you're done? What's enough? So you can think of someone else like your poor dormant who's been standing there in the cold. There's some balance there. But oddly enough for many of us in our time and our culture, we are hard to offer loving kindness to ourselves.

They say they start in a classical practice with yourself because the underlying principle of that practice is doing the easiest way possible. Some meant to be struggle, it's creative, it's fun, it's interesting. And so you start with yourself because clearly you are easier than anybody. That's produced a lot of laughs over the years because it's not so for many of us that we're not the easiest and all. And so I always encourage people to switch up the order,

go back to the principle, maybe you start with your puppy or your cat or your teacher, somebody that you love in an easier kind of way and they would say you're parent but that also could be complicated. And start there and bring yourself in later, it's fine. But do bring yourself in.

It's like you can't leave yourself out altogether. And that's the idea is that we're building on this emergence and allowing things to unfold in an easier way and discovering capacities inside of ourselves that are covered over perhaps or hidden from viewer that we don't really trust that much and we don't trust them more. And so that's the nature of the practice.

And so when we say beer on, or I say beer on BFF, it's a fun way of saying, don't shrink away from that. That's not wrong. It's not selfish. And at the same time, it's not a project. It's not past fail. We just are working in the way that we're working. And it is inextricably interwoven with how you treat other people and therefore how you feel about yourself. It isn't just an isolated project. Yeah. Yeah. And it goes back an isolated project. Yeah, yeah. And it goes back and forth. I mean, you know, people often say,

you can't really love somebody until you love yourself. And I think that may be in the most genuine, refined sense of love, but I and we probably know plenty of people who are devoted to caring for others and truly caring for them, and they're not included themselves in that package, and that's, it's unsustainable. It's what it is.

I think it could be a very pure kind of loving compassion for a little while, but it's just unsustainable. We get exhausted. What about the beef that some people have, some of our mutual friends have that self love is kind of like anti-buddhist in a way because the whole practice is about seeing that the self was an illusion. People have that beef, I know. My first book was Club Living Kindness. It came out in 1995.

And I heard that a fair amount. This is a practice that you will not see the emptiness of things. You'll just be feeling good. People will get attached to good feeling, which isn't necessarily the case, depending on one's understanding. And it's true, it's not a practice that's designed to deepen, particularly one's understanding of emptiness. It is a practice that's about being less afraid,

feeling more connected, seeing more clearly in a sense of understanding kind of the interdependence of life, that sense of self and other in us and them is a construct because we'd such a dwell more in the realm of we rather than you, you know, over there, and me way over here. It just thinks shift, but I did hear that critique a lot, and at the same time I was coming upon people like I had been practicing mindfulness for about 14 or 15 years when I went to Burmese and did intensive loving kindness training. And then my whole practice for about four years was just loving kindness. I had wanted to learn loving kindness training. And then my whole practice for about four years was just loving kindness.

I had wanted to learn loving kindness from the day I started meditating, which was January 7th, 1971, but I didn't have anyone to teach me and I tried on my own and I learned how it was done, but it didn't really work until I went to Burma and did this intensive retreat for three months to start with. I understood what had given me and tools I had already through the Mindfulness practice

that were great. And yet the benefit I was accruing from doing this particular practice and started to go on the country right to book. Anyway, I was teaching, loving kind of, probably 10 years, refer to the book. And then the book came out, and then I kept writing into people who'd say to me, you know, I've been practicing a long time, and I didn't realize because this is the context

in which I practice, we chant about this, about serving all beings. We have rituals about it. We have scripture about it, but I actually didn't have to train or embellish or enhance that quality in myself. And here it is. And it's not mine.

I was just taking what I learned and putting it in book form and putting it out there. And I'm so glad that I did. And there was that commentary. Yes, you could say it's not going to help you necessarily understand the truth of emptiness. But if emptiness is the truth, anything we do that brings us closer to the truth, including serving a meal to an elderly person and listening to them having a conversation with them. Anything we do that brings us closer to

the truth is going to bring us closer to that. Also emptiness doesn't mean hollowness to use your word. You know, it's not a way to blank. It means contingency. It actually means interconnection. There's that angle in which we are actually enhancing that understanding. And I see practice is all of life and life is practice. And so it's going to have different emphasis and different methodologies at different times. And you could also say that they're at two different levels. There's the absolute level, in which case, you're using words like you may you be happy

that don't make sense. But the Buddha also spoke in terms of relative truth. He didn't say you psychophysical bundle of aggregates over there, sit here. And He said you, Momok, sit here. We just use relative language because we're normal human beings. And so is he actually in some way. And it's fine to have different levels going at different times. Let me see if I can just like any good FM DJ go back and back

announce some of the tracks that were just played there. I just want to make sure that people listening understand some of the key terms you were using. So let me try to see if I can define them. And then you as my teacher can correct me where I go wrong. Amtiness, we could do a whole series of podcasts on Amtiness. But one way to understand it is that the world may look solid to you, may look like reality is one continuous movie, but like any film, it's actually 24 frames per second.

Nothing is as solid as it seems, including you. If you look for Sharon between your ears, if you close your eyes and try to find Sharon in your mind, you won't find some core nugget of Sharon. On some relative level, there is a Sharon. Of course, if Sharon looks in the mirror, she will see her reflection. And so, yes, on the level of consensual reality, Sharon exists. But on the ultimate level, and in Buddhism, we often talk about two levels of reality. On the ultimate level, there is no core nugget of sharing you can find. Just as this chair I'm sitting in right now, I can all recognize it as a chair, but if we put a high powered microscope on it, we'd see it's mostly empty space and spinning

subatomic particles. And two things can be true at the same time. And you were saying before that, yes, there is this critique of loving kindness that it's really on the relative level, on the more superficial level of reality. You're not seeing the true emptiness of things. But if in fact, seeing interconnection, which does happen, I believe, inexorably through loving kindness practice, then you see that your life has something to do with the lives of the people around you, doesn't that, as you indicated, just lead you straight toward emptiness anyway?

Yeah, that's great. I would say the core idea, yeah, I would add a few adjectives. It's like a core of Sharon or Dan, that is unchanging, that is solid, that is independent of causes and conditions, you know, that's in charge. So, like, a little core inside shouldn't it be pulling the strings, like a puppet show?

Shouldn't it be able to say, well, I'm not going to die? That doesn't mean there's nothing we can do in terms of extending our life, but that idea, I'm never going to be afraid again. I've decided, it doesn't seem to be the little empowered core in there that can make things happen just according to Will or wish and so that was just to add on to I think a very fine description Truly of what emptiness is that's when I met by you and you as a word hollow before and so it's not hollow It's not like everything dissolves and nothing will exist. Everything exists as it exists, but how does it exist right now? If we really pay attention to this constant change and there's no single solid, independent,

in charge, little secret ingredient in there, it's just not. And it would be a different world, actually, if they were, perhaps. And I'm not sure relative is more superficial. It's different. It's how things work. The more ultimate level would be dealing very directly with this idea of the solid impermeable unchanging independent self, which is just not there. And what's our experience when that misconception dissolves, and we see things more the way that they are,

then we do see interconnection. And because everything's still happening, it's not like the world disappears. And it's all happening because of cause and effect, because actions have consequences, because love will produce a certain energy, a certain result, in a room, in a family, within ourselves. Hatred and perpetual hatred and chronic hatred will produce a different kind of energy and a different atmosphere and it's different place to work.

That's what's going around all the time. And so that's the relative, is what we face all the time as we look at how things are connected. Coming up Sharon talks about the line between love and attachment, the challenge of receiving other people's generosity, and the particular issue she is personally working on in her own practice. Deep in the enchanted forest, from the whimsical world of Disney Frozen, something is wrong. Arondelle is in danger once again from dark forces threatening to disrupt the peace and tranquility. And it's up to Anna and Elsa to stop the villains before it's too late. For the last ten years, Frozen has mesmerized millions around the world.

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The only question is, are Anna and Elsa able to save their peaceful kingdom? Listen early and add free to the entire season of Disney Frozen Forces of Nature podcast, along with exclusive bonus content on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, or Wondery Plus kits on Apple Podcasts. When if we told you that there's a darker side to royalty? And more often than not, life as a prince or princess is anything but a fairy tale.

I'm Brooke Sifrin, and I'm Arisha Skidmore Williams, and we're the hosts of Wondery's podcasts, Even the Rich and Rich and Daily, and we're so excited to tell you about our brand new podcast called Even the Royals, where we'll be pulling back the curtain on royal families past and present from all over the world. On Even the Royals, we'll cover everything from stories you thought you knew, like Marie Antoinette, who was actually a victim of a vulgar propaganda campaign which started a wild chain of events that led to her eventual beheading. Or Catherine de Medici, who was assumed to be responsible for one of the most devastating

massacres in French history. But in reality, she was a mother holding on to her dying dynasty. Royal status might be bright and shiny, but it comes with the expense of everything else, like your freedom, your privacy, and sometimes even your head. Follow even the royals on the Wendry app or wherever you get your podcasts. If you don't want to wait for more episodes, join Wendry Plus today to listen exclusively and add free. Here's another question that I often hear, and I'm sure you hear it all the time, when

it comes to the connection between, or the relationship between love and Buddhism. And Buddhism, as you know, there's a lot of focus on seeing emptiness, seeing that everything's changing all the time and therefore there is no core, solid, independent, Sharon or Dan and that the one of the only sensible ways to relate to all of this is to not be attached. By clinging too hard to things that will not last, I am bound to suffer. How do I love somebody without being attached to them? It's a little more complicated nowadays because of Western schools of psychology

around attachment theory and secure attachment and all that. It doesn't, I think, mean quite the same thing. I think, she's not to say it's gonna be easy anyway, but when I try to understand attachment as a concept, sometimes I substitute the word control and that helps make sense. That's actually not love. That's a different thing. Love, if you call love, wishing for the happiness and well-being of the other. Then that's something we can have even towards somebody whose behavior we think is really bad and we want to help prevent in some way. So it's not passive, it doesn't mean you're not trying to create change at all. But that's like a more like a motivating factor.

Are you saying what you're saying or holding back from saying anything at all because of care or because of connection or because of fear? Are you saying what you're saying or doing what you're doing or trying to make the change? saying what you're saying or doing what you're doing or trying to make the change? You that you're seeking out of compassion for yourself or for all, for even the person acting? Or is it really hatred? And so we pay attention to what's motivating us. I think more than anything. And it comes to understand that, yeah, I can take very strong action, but it doesn't have to be rooted or born out of those old habits of being. And so the world kind of opens up in terms of what we might do.

Like people often say, well, I don't know about developing a more loving, hard-to-developing compassion, because then I could only say, yes, I can only let them move back in. I can only lend them more money. And it's not like that. We might act in any way, not meekle, sweet, and all that. So when I think of attachment, I often think about having any children.

And yet, I know certainly I have great friends who have children and grandchildren. And the distinction that that parent or grandparent even has to make between wanting the happiness of the child, wanting them to be fulfilled, wanting their well-being and wanting them to be a certain way. Even with some duress to oneself, letting go. Like I have a friend who's a grandparent who she would describe herself and does quite publicly.

As having a very nervous, anxious constitution, she's just kind of wired that way and it's done a lot of work. But I remember one of her grandsons at one point said to her that when he grew up, he wanted to be a police officer, which for her it was like the kids of death and he ended up not doing that. But I watched her process, you know, where she like gulped and knew that it would be wrong to say, I have a very different vision for you. And you should be a rabbi or whatever, something nice, safe and and out of love for him, she couldn't do that and say,

you can't do that, it'll drive me crazy, I want to sleep. And there was a kind of letting go there that was very beautiful and ended up not turning out quite that way anyway and so she can hopefully sleep at night. I'm sure that every parent, everyone who loves someone deeply in that way every parent, everyone who loves someone deeply in that way has a lot of letting go involves, letting go of attachment and needing to be in control. My son is in the regrettable habit right now of wearing fake gold chains to school and I'm doing a lot of letting go around letting him make his own sartorial decisions as catastrophic as I might feel them to be, having said that, let me just take it to a darker place. What about when you lose somebody that you really love?

DeMorne? Yeah, of course, that I think that's a question a lot of people have. Yeah, I think you mourn. They're doing the high to the pandemic when I was teaching so much and apparently saying some of the same things over and over again. People got to making me cups and sending them to me

With some of those things like this one says banging your head against the walls never fun Apparently I said a good deal and one of them was something's just hurt Something's a hurt. They're hurtful. They're horrible that I could do the wrong attitude not because you need more equity And I guess you're thinking is this you something's just hurt because you need more equanimity and equanimity. And I guess what you're thinking is this skews, something's just hurt. There are terrible things to live through. And what we don't need is extra suffering.

That's different than the idea that I should be in some sublime state about this. Because the extra suffering would be like, we feel the pain and we add a kind of misconstrued sense of isolation from the only one who has ever felt, or I will ever feel this kind of misconstrued sense of isolation. I'm the only one who has ever felt or will ever feel this kind of pain. Or this is blameworthy. I should have said or they should have done.

And we more see things in the light of wisdom. And yet they hurt. They say the Buddha when his two chief disciples died within, I think, two weeks of one another. He said at one point in a discourse, like his son in the moon have left the sky. So he wasn't saying, like, I'm really cool. I got this, people die. It's an nature of things.

But when, since, as he knew people die, and that kind of protestation of life should not include that, that didn't have to be there. That's extra. Life does include that. That didn't have to be the that's extra life doesn't include that on top of that we have very strange cultural accretions around death and dying and so not only do we have the existential pain of it all but we have whatever we've inherited and so it's a lot of challenge I would say I was coming to a state of pure mourning in that bereavement.

There are a couple of analogies that sometimes get used here that might be helpful, illuminating things. One, this is a little bit more tongue in cheek, but I heard this from a mutual friend of ours, Dr. Mark Epstein, and I was asking what was a like for the Buddha when he lost a friend or stubbed a toe or whatever, dealt with the same traumas and indignities that we all deal with. And he said, he imagined that it would be like getting punched in the face, but after having received a dose of heroin, that it would still hurt, but might hurt significantly less. That is not an endorsement of heroin. The other analogy that's a little bit more fit for public consumption is, and this is easier

to see rather than to hear. But if you imagine your palm with an open fist, you can put anybody love there and you're holding them, but you're not grasping them as opposed to when you clench your fist. So I can love my son and know that like everything else in the universe, he's temporary. Yeah, which is a reflection people do, he's temporary for sure because that's the nature of life. And just notice that doesn't diminish the love of anything. If we have that kind of consciousness, it should make it more piercing in a way. Yeah.

Poignant even. Yeah. Bring it back to that. Last thing I want to ask you about from your book is the difficulty many of us have in receiving generosity. Can you describe that phenomenon? And I'd be curious whether it's true for you. I say it's true for me, but not as true as I've observed

in some other people. Because my big model for that was actually Rambdas, who was at my first retreat in January 1971 as a student. He'd already been to India and was Rambdas, not Richard Alpert. He'd already been to India and was Ramdas, not Richard Alpert. He'd already been fired from Harvard. He'd come back to India to see his guru. I'd known him for a really long time and we were good friends and this group of us. He was the kind of person. He was a helper. He was a giver. He was the first person I knew working with dying people. He was the first person I knew working with prisoners. He was the first person I knew working with dying people. He's the first person I knew working with prisoners

He was the first person I knew working with homeless people and kept taking his spiritual Practice out into the world and he was also a curmudgeon and you couldn't thank him for anything You couldn't even give him a birthday present. It was just his way and and then you know, of course He has massive stroke and lived in a wheelchair for the last, I know, 15, 18 years of his life as a public speaker, which had really been his magic. And, you know, he had aphasia, he would be long silences. And if you were speaking with him and you'd be sitting up in that stage and, you know, just what he wanted to say and you couldn't say it because you knew he had to find the word

himself. And he said once once he was teaching, he said, the hardest thing of all with the stroke, harder than physical pain, harder than living in a wheelchair, harder than all this change in speech has been being able to receive. He said, there's the hardest thing of all and it was the most liberating. And he said, one of my famous books was called, How Can I Help? And he said, now I feel like writing a book called, How Can You Help Me?

And it was true. It was like, towards the end of his life post-stroke. It was like some boundary to Zalalt. And so it's like love could come in and come out. And I felt it certainly. It was like he was made of like, he was made of love. He was just transparent. And that was the change.

It was actually being able to, he had to receive, or that would have been a call for bitterness forever. And so it was amazing to sort of watch that. So I feel like, yes, you know, I'm much more comfortable giving than receiving, but then I've got even the model. He was worse.

You know, so I know so many people like that. The caregiver is the helpers. And it's a very powerful thing to pay attention to, but I'm not reminding myself that receiving is also a practice. And what is the mechanism by which receiving how exactly is receiving generosity of good spiritual practice? Can you just explain the blocking and tackling on that? Well, I think everything again comes down to paying attention. It's like noticing how it feels when somebody says, I love your book, Probably feels really good, but there might be some part there

and saying, I wish I had more time than I might have done it even better. And noticing it all, just keep paying attention. Where does it feel like to feel the appreciation, let it in? Or here's one. The book that's coming out is my 13th book. And with my 12th book, which also came out this year, I've been so incredibly grateful when anyone has said that it meant a lot to them and I thought it was really good because

I thought it's so easy to imagine your 12th book. So people say she should have stopped it in a rate like she's saying the're going over and over again. It's not that much to say. It's all like a body of knowledge. So I'm feeling incredibly grateful, but I can imagine falling to the space, which I've not, like number 13, will there ever be a 14?

I have nothing left to say ever. I might have that thought, but I know it's just a thought. But to fall into that, I think I'm done. I can't do it. It's all over. It would also be easy and you don't want that. But should that happen?

Just keep paying attention. Where does it feel like to have a sense of hopelessness I'm done? Where does it feel like to think, well, something inspires me. I'm just going to write. It doesn't have to be for publication. Let me see where it goes.

Where does it feel like to determine on bringing creativity into your every day, some way? Where does it feel like someone does like your book? And just always pay attention to that. That's really using it as a practice because you begin to see, you just begin to see the nuance. Here is a place I felt like I needed to be in control and I couldn't control. I mean, that's the thing about public presentation of creativity, right?

You can't demand that everybody likes it. This is what it feels like to not be in control. This is what it feels like to remember to thank somebody and not take it for granted because it could have been another way. And we just keep paying attention and paying attention. We have interest. We have curiosity rather than judgment about what we discover within ourselves. And that becomes the basis for really using all of these experiences as part of our practice. Final question for me, and I've asked you this question on other occasions,

but I'm always curious to hear answers from people in your position who've been practicing for a long time. What is the edge in your practice right now? What is the thing you're working on the most, where you struggle with the most low these many years of practice? I wouldn't use the word struggle. It doesn't feel that way. I feel like I'm on the edge, often between. I have a number of practices that are just open and spacious and not particularly particular, and then I have a number of practices like loving kindness, which is very specific, and

it's got a lot of form to it and structure and moving between the two is an interesting edge for me. I spent a long time in life just doing loving kindness practice. I spent a long time after that doing basically mindfulness practice, especially open spacious awareness when I sit every day. And I would do loving kind of practice when I resolve this to do it whenever I was waiting. And I counted every amount of transportation is waiting. So walking down the streets of New York,

certainly waiting and awaiting them somewhere every airplane, every taxi. I would do loving kind of practice York, certainly waiting and awaiting them somewhere every airplane, every taxi, I would do loving kindness practice silently, eyes open, and then I stopped going anywhere, more recently. And so thinking, so I go back to doing loving kindness practice in that formal way, very structured, as part of my formal practice, or not, it's just an interesting dance that I do. as part of my formal practice or not. It's just an interesting dance that I do. So the balance between structured and unstructured practice, and by which I think you're referring to unstructured stuff

that you would do in your free range living and structured as a formal seated practice. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's fun. How do you resolve that? I think my current resolution is to go back and do more loving kind of practice in a strict seated way in a sequence in which I was taught using the phrases, even that I was taught,

that are a little different than the ones we used, maybe even use them in poly, and just see what happens when I recreate that, the kind of commitment and structure. Is there something I should have asked you today that I still ask you? No. I hope your book on loving canis goes well. I get to read it soon and I'm sure it will help many people, but I hope it's a source of a lot of joy for you. Thank you. I'm trying. I'm actually, I think at edge in my practice and life is giving myself permission to let the book take what it's going to take, not rush it, and even try to enjoy the process, which would be a real novelty for me. And yes, that is a thing I'm working on, occasional starbursts of promise on that front. It's certainly not a non-stop parade

of joy. Before I let you go, can you please plug your new book and any of the preceding books or any other resources that you're putting out in the world that you want people to know about? Sure. The two books about the yellow covers, very different of 2023. The book's about to have yellow covers, very different of 2023. The book that came out in April was called Real Life. That was book number 12. And I like that, what a lot is about what life is like when we're feeling most contracted and most trapped. And what it's like when we open and feel more expansive and what we take with us on that journey,

what we can leave behind, things like that. And so this current book is the first time I've had an Illustrator book, it's a little gift book. And that was a really fascinating process that's called Finding Your Way. And it was more suited to the way I think and write, which is unstructured, instead of having to have a theme throughout, which is unstructured, instead of having to have a theme throughout,

which is more difficult for me. It would be like, I hear a quote from my Anjalu is one example. When we know better, we do better. And that reminds me of one of my colleagues often saying everyone's just doing the best that they can. And I would always sit there and listen and think, I don't know about that. Like, I'm a New Yorker. What do you mean everyone's doing the best that they can? Well, of course, they're saying the same thing. And my evolution in understanding that.

So it might be a quote in a commentary or something somebody said that resonated with me or short essay that I wrote about something. And so it's like lots of small pieces very suited to our time in our attention span, I think. And then it was just so cool to be illustrated in those ways as well. So I really appreciate this with coming book as well. I think it is really suited to how we learn these days and how we take in things and yeah, they both have yellow covers. As I said, it's my yellow period.

Well, congratulations. And thank you for this book, the preceding book, and all the preceding books. Thanks you for all of your teaching. Thanks for being such a great friend. And thanks for coming on the show today. Thank you so much. Thanks again, Sharon, love having around. You can find Sharon's new book, Finding Your Way, Meditation's Thoughts and Wisdom for Living in Authentic Life, Everywhere You Get Books on October 10th. And you can find all things Sharon at SharonSalesburg.com. Thank you to you for listening, go give us a rating or a review that really

helps also go check out all the stuff I'm doing on social media that also helps. Thank you most of all to stuff I'm doing on social media. That also helps. Thank you most of all to everybody who works so hard on this show. 10% Happier is produced by Tara Anderson, Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justine Davie, and Lauren Smith. DJ Cashmere is our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor,

and Kimmy Reggler is our executive producer, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonnaventure of Ultravalid Audio, and Nick Thorburn of the Great Band Islands wrote our theme check out his new album. We'll see you all on Monday for a brand new episode. We're gonna talk about clear thinking and decision-making with a guy who has thought a lot about that. Name a shame Parish. That's coming up on Monday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music.

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