The Rich Roll Podcast - Meditation Master Sharon Salzberg On Real Love & The Art of Mindful Connection

Episode Date: June 26, 2017

We all yearn for connection, yet often feel trapped by our sense of isolation, anger, or envy. But there is a key that can free us from this prison of despair. Love. The problem? Love is just hard to talk about. Harder to understand. And perhaps even harder to practice. How we get it? How we give it? How do we attract it? How do we cultivate it? To answer these questions, first we have to define it. What is love, exactly?  Ask Sharon Salzberg and she'll tell you that it's not an emotion we should be trying to extract from another. In fact, don't even think about love as a feeling at all. Instead, consider it as an ability. An aptness or facility that resides within all of us that can be cultivated to create real, profound connections with others, with all, and most importantly ourselves. And it is that connection that will nourish the very sustenance of life itself and ultimately set you free. Today I sit down with Sharon to redefine our limited interpretation of love. To dispel the misunderstandings that confine and circumscribe it. To plumb the eternal truths within it — love based on direct interactions rather than preconceptions. And to explore how we can better cultivate and expand our experience of real love in our daily lives. For the uninitiated, Sharon Salzberg is a towering figure in the field of meditation. A world-renowned teacher and multiple New York Times' bestselling author, she has played a central, crucial role in bringing meditation and mindfulness practices to the West and into mainstream culture dating back to 1974 when she first began teaching. She is the co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, MA and the author of ten books, including the New York Times bestseller, Real Happiness*, her seminal work, Lovingkindness* and her newest release, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection* (the focus of today's conversation). Sharon is also a regular columnist for On Being, a contributor to Huffington Post, and the host of her own podcast, The Metta Hour. One of the many striking things about Sharon is that she's just cool. Like, really f*$king cool. Despite her undisputed luminary status in the meditation space, conspicuously absent is any hint of pretense or artifice. Down-to-earth and fun to be with, her approach to Buddhist teachings is modern, secular, and accessible, rendering the wisdom and it's practical applications relatable to all. This conversation is a deep dive into Sharon's extraordinary life. Enjoy! Rich

Part of the love for oneself is self-compassion, which really comes into play, not in our triumphs, you know, in our great days, but when we've blown it and we've made a mistake or we've fallen off a course that we want to stay on or whatever it is, you know, to be able to pick ourselves up and start over and have a sense of resilience really takes some examination. A lot of people think self-compassion is laziness. It's like, so what, I'll forgive myself. I'll blow it again in 10 seconds. Like letting yourself off the hook for everything.

That's right. But really, I think when we look at what's most effective and most efficient in making a change or getting something done, it's not going on a harangue towards yourself for like five and a half hours after you've blown it. It's like saying, okay, lessons learned or something like that or that doesn't feel very good or what can i do to make amends and then start over that's sharon salzberg and this is the ritual podcast The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey everybody, how you guys doing? What's happening? My name is Rich Roll. Welcome to my podcast.

We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care. Especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the

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is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. All right, we got through all that. Let's talk about today's show. Well, today, we are going to tackle the minefield of all minefields, love. Yeah, we're going to talk about love. So this, I would imagine, is perhaps the most discussed subject of all time and yet so tricky to talk about, especially for guys, I think. So I suppose on some level, this is a conversation about how we get love, how we give it, how we attract it, and how we cultivate it. But let's take a step back because what are we even talking about? I mean, what is love? What is love in the truest, most fundamental sense? How are we defining this word? If you ask today's guest, the great Sharon Salzberg, she will tell you that there is so much misunderstanding when it comes to

love, this idea of love, and that it's not something that we should be trying to extract from another human being, that it's not really a feeling at all, but much more an ability, an ability that we can all cultivate, an ability that resides within all of us to have real and profound connection, not just with others, but with ourselves. So who is Sharon Salzberg? Well, Sharon is a towering figure in the field of meditation. If you haven't heard of her, she is not only a world-renowned teacher, she is a multiple New York Times bestselling author and somebody who has played a central, a crucial role in actually bringing and introducing meditation and mindfulness practices to the West and mainstream culture, dating all

the way back to 1974 when she first began teaching. Sharon is the co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, and the author of 10 books, including the New York Times bestseller, Real Happiness, which is considered her seminal work, a book called Loving Kindness, which also is tremendous, and her newest release, it just came out, it's called Real Love, and it's great. I just finished it. Highly recommend it. And obviously, this is the focal point for today's conversation, love. Sharon is also a regular columnist for On Being. She is a contributor to the Huffington Post, and she has the host of her own podcast called The Meta Hour, Meta, M-E-T-T-A, and you

guys should all check that out. One of the many striking things about Sharon, I think, who, you know, like I said, is really this luminary, this legend in the meditation space, is that there's no pretense about her whatsoever. There's no artifice. There's no guru trappings. She's just cool. She's like super cool. She's very easy and fun to be with down to earth. And as you guys are going to see momentarily, she has a very modern, secular, and accessible approach to these Buddhist teachings that she espouses. And I had a blast talking to her. So this is a deep dive into many, many things. It's into Sharon's extraordinary life, of course, her interesting path to meditation, and then to becoming this luminary teacher.

But it's also about how we think about and practice love, not only love for oneself, but love for others and love for all. It's about unconscious pain and the value of suffering. It's about the three essential skills, compassion, mindfulness, and concentration that meditation can help us master by training our attention. And also, this is a conversation about what it looks like, or should I say how to practice compassion and loving kindness for others in what I think is fair to say a very divided time. All I can tell you is that Sharon really is the coolest and you guys are

definitely in for a treat with this one. I love this exchange. So get comfortable and let's talk to her, shall we? You guys ready to talk about love? Yeah, let's do that. So Sharon Salzberg, such a pleasure to sit down and chat with you today. Thank you. It's a great pleasure to see you. I'm super excited about it. We're going to talk about love. We're going to talk about meditation. We're going to talk about mindfulness, faith. What else are we going to talk about? Doubt, fear, suffering. Anything else you want to talk about? Those are all my topics. We're going to cover all of them. Fantastic. So I had the pleasure of meeting you at Jason Garner's house a couple months ago when I was up in Santa Cruz.

I got to meditate with you a little bit. Yeah. And I'm sorry I couldn't make it up to Santa Cruz a couple weeks ago to do it. But thank you for taking the time to chat today. It's a great delight, really. Yeah. So maybe perhaps the best sort of intro point or way into this is just to crack it wide open with real love. I mean, this is the name of the new book.

It's great. I'm about halfway through it. I'm not totally done with it, but it's fabulous. Congratulations. Yeah, thank you so much. I can't wait for people to experience the beauty and the wisdom in that. So, you know, why don't you define for us what real love is? What's the difference between how we conceptualize love in our current culture and your take on it?

That's the killer question, isn't it? It is, right? We'll just spend the next two hours talking about this. What is real love? I have to figure it out. I usually talk about it as a state of really profound connection that needs to take that concept away from kind of the adornments and the elaborations that the culture puts on it, that it has to be romantic. It has to have a certain flavor. Almost the whole book, actually, oddly enough,

was born out of this one line in a movie, the movie Den in Real Life. The line goes, Love is not a feeling, it's an ability. And, of course, we know it as a feeling. We yearn for it as a feeling. We think of it constantly sometimes as a feeling. But what if we reconceptualize that as an ability,

some capacity we have within us that's not in the hands of someone else, but is really part of us, And that other people may awaken it or enliven it or nourish it or threaten it, but it's within us. So, I realized that without that shift, I tended to think of love as a commodity. And it's almost like a package. And it's like the UPS person was standing in the doorstep with that package in his hand and changed his mind and went the other way and it'd be like hey wait a minute you know right i've lost all the love in my life but really it's within us and uh that was a huge shift for me

and how did you well i guess that's going to bring it back i want to get into the whole origin story we'll we'll work our way towards that for context. But you break the book up into three sections. It's basically love for oneself, love for others, and love for all. It's a journey towards reclaiming this word and freeing it of all the baggage that we kind of associate with it. And placing it in a context really as a verb, right? And not something to be, not this sort of state or something that we're striving for

or trying to get from another, but trying to really kind of germinate and cultivate within ourselves. That's right. And I think that realization has every level to it, including the fact that maybe it's up to us then, which can be a little scary. Like, whoa, wait a minute. We don't want to take personal responsibility.

That's no fun. Yeah, so maybe the package is a better deal. But yeah, it has lots of levels. But that's exactly it. When I first was thinking about this book and kind of creating it, and I talked to someone in publishing about it, they said to me, oh, the love market's really saturated. You know, it's like so overdone.

And I thought about that. And I thought, well, maybe the how to fix your relationship market or how to find your relationship. Romantic love market. You know, but this is something very different it's not a mistake that that you know the first section is cultivating love for oneself right and and i think we you know in our current society think of self-love as indulgent or selfish or narcissistic or an exercise of the ego. But really, you know, cultivating love for oneself is a foundational component in actually even having the capacity

to love other people. So, can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. I mean, I think we tend to think of self-love as narcissism and being selfish and, like you say, self-indulgent. But I think it has two really amazing components. One is a sense of inner resource, not feeling so exhausted and bereft and impoverished within, but having a sense of inner sufficiency or even inner abundance, which becomes like the source of being able to give and care and take care of others. If you feel like you've got nothing going on inside, nothing to contribute, it's kind of a really bleak and hollow world within. You don't look at somebody in pain and think, how can I help you? It's like, go away. I'm

really tired. It's too much. I can't bear it. And we truly can't bear it in that moment. But we have the capacity to have a very different view of our inner life and our experiences so that it doesn't feel so bleak and it doesn't feel so not good enough. And the other part of the love for oneself is self-compassion, which really comes into play not in our triumphs, you know, in our great days, but when we've blown it and we've made a mistake or we've fallen off a course that we want to stay on or whatever it is, to be able to pick ourselves up and start over and have a sense of resilience

really takes some examination. A lot of people think self-compassion is laziness. It's like, yeah, so what? I'll forgive myself. I'll blow it again in 10 seconds. Like letting yourself off the hook for everything. That's right. That's right. But really, I think when we look at what's most effective and most efficient in making a change or getting something done, it's not going on a harangue towards yourself for like five and a half hours after you've blown it. It's like saying, okay, lessons learned or something like that. Or that doesn't feel very good. Or what can I do to make amends?

And then start over. Or that doesn't feel very good. Or what can I do to make amends? And then start over. Most of us walk around with an inordinate amount of self-judgment and self-criticism and doubt and an undercurrent of worthlessness or I'm not worthy of love. And we play this tape in our mind, right? And I think when you're in that spot, whether it's victimization or just sort of, you know, wallowing in your own fear or what have you, you tend to look outside yourself for love.

Like you look at another person as being the missing variable in that equation that's going to solve that for yourself as opposed to that inward journey of cultivating it within but the problem of course is that nothing you know will actually fill that gap right nothing outside and then i took in the book we know that intellectually well i a lot of people do and we but we still do it you know of course we do it you know and it hurts so much it's really sad um of course we do it. And it hurts so much. It's really sad. Of course we do it. But that's worthy of some self-compassion right there.

But we don't have to do it in as obsessed a way and as deluded a way, perhaps, as we once did. Because we can see clearly. We can see for ourselves. I think that the world is built of so many myths and just untruths, and we're led to believe so many things that simply aren't true. And we incorporate them, we run around trying to find the perfect whatever. And sometimes we can step back and say, wait a minute,

do I really need that, or what's the nature of that? And even love itself comes under that idea because so many times people think of love as being stupid or sentimental or weak or saccharine. And what's really strong is like vengefulness or whatever. But when you look at those states, just look at them, it's kind of the opposite, actually. Vengefulness is very narrow, very much tunnel vision, very much not seeing any options.

Hateful, you know, it doesn't feel really that good. And it's kind of brittle, you know, it's not really that strong. But love or compassion are states of tremendous spaciousness and presence and energy and generosity. They are actually stronger than we think. Yeah, I think it's a position of strength, but it lacks that rush that we get addicted to. We can become addicted to that anger response or vengefulness. And those are, I think I've heard you describe it, they're like brush fires. They burn very intensely, but ultimately they're not sustainable over the long run. And so, you know, love and compassion are deeper reservoirs that can sustain us over the long haul.

And, you know, we can't talk about this without sort of contextualizing it with what's going on currently culturally. You know, we're in a tremendously divisive situation at the moment socially, and we see a lot of anger. We see a lot of, it's almost like suddenly there's permission for a lot of this anger and vengefulness and resentment to birth itself and manifest itself in some pretty unhealthy ways yeah uh you know how does how does real love play into that in terms of how we navigate the world and and respond to that and you know tend to our own emotional bodies and you know what i mean like in terms of boundaries and

and you know just the daily conversations that we have i think it has a lot to do with balance. It's like there's a real need to, and I don't know that we ever understand these things intellectually or analytically, but to explore terrains of what could it possibly mean to have love and compassion for ourselves and for someone else at the same time? Or what could it mean to have compassion for someone and realize I agree with nothing they are proposing, and I'm going to fight, but not perhaps from a place of hatred? A place of neutrality. Yeah, it's a place of balance, of wishing that everyone could be free.

And that, I mean, I've worked with people, for example, with horribly abusive parents, I mean, horribly abusive parents, who said, I can't find the phrase, for example, with horribly abusive parents, I mean, horribly abusive parents, who said, I can't find the phrase, you know, like, what would I possibly be offering, you know? And I said, can you say maybe free of hatred? They said, yeah, that I can say. And something like that. It's a profound exploration, but I really do believe that our kind of corrosive, rigid sense of self and other, where the other doesn't count, it doesn't matter, is at the root of a lot of the really scary stuff that's going on. I find it scary too. I live part-time in New York City, in Greenwich Village, and a block away, people are painting swastikas on walls. And I think, wait a minute, this is really scary.

But I don't think fear is the basis for going forward in a good way, in a skillful way. And I think the sense of otherness, like it doesn't matter what happens to you, you're like a chair, you're not like a person, is at the root of a lot of that behavior. And so I don't want to perpetrate that myself. But I also do strongly believe in the power of love or the strength of love and compassion. It's not like being meek and obsequious and giving in, you know.

I think it's a whole other source of strength that can have us really fight. of strength that can have us really fight. There's a phrase in recovery parlance that goes like this, you cannot give something that you haven't got. Do you think that applies to how you think about love in the sense that you're really not capable of truly loving another until you love yourself. Are they exclusive in that regard? I actually don't think they're that completely exclusive. I had a conversation with this woman, Belle Hooks, in New York City,

and she called me on that. She didn't agree with that. She thought you really had to love yourself before you could love someone else. She said, you can care for someone or care about them but you can't really love them unless you love yourself and i said well you know i feel like i know people who do love others but you can't in the long term sustain that without love for yourself then right you know generosity becomes martyrdom or gets weird or distorted and you're no longer actually really caring you're you know generosity becomes martyrdom or gets weird or distorted and you're no longer actually really caring you're you know calculating like how much have i given you that you're not

returning you know yeah you're taking a balance sheet but i i think that there is a sort of act as if mentality that you can appropriate yeah i i'm thinking of this that animated video that you voiced the other day. I shared that on social media the other day. It's so beautiful. Were you like a llama? What was the animal that you were? I was a dog. Yeah. But it's basically the story. You could tell the story better than I, but essentially it's how we interact with the people on a daily basis, the cashier at the restaurant or the store and how we look through them as opposed to, you know, at them. And this idea that you, even if you're not feeling it, like to, you know what, I'm going to make a choice.

I'm going to actually engage this person. That's right. And try to, you know, see them as a whole human being. Yeah. And even if you're lacking that compassion for yourself that you know sort of adopting that behavior modality can reframe yeah how you you know not just interact with others but how you see yourself in the sense that you know self-esteem comes from performing esteemable acts and if you

get into the habit of doing that you are cultivating self-love in some regard by loving others oh I think you really are. That's well said. And there's something about that act that returns us to something inside of ourselves that is whole, that may be hidden or hard to see or obscured in some way. But in that act, if it's done purely, that's what we touch in on again. It's like, oh. And the reason for the animation was, which I also think is extremely cute.

It's really cute. I've never seen a dog before. I said what I shared and I was like, I should actually watch this every day because I have to be reminded. I look through people as much as the next person. We all do. It's sort of like the second great controversy

after Love is Weak and sort of stupid is that I think in Eastern philosophy, love is quite trainable. It's a skill. And it's a skill. It's trainable because it's based on how we pay attention. And we know attention is trainable. That's all that meditation is, is training attention. is trainable. That's all that meditation is, is training attention. So it's not like you're forcing yourself to feel something you don't really feel, or you're being hypocritical and covering over some really difficult feelings with this little veneer of sweetness. It's not like

that. But paying attention differently will lay the ground for love to emerge. And so it's completely here too. It's almost in our hands. Do we want to cultivate that skill or not? So, like you said, you go into that store and you look at the person, not through them. Something happens. Yeah, by honing your attention, by really focusing on your attention, by practicing this skill, you create that space that allows it to come in. that allows it to come in. And I like that idea because it allows you to take personal responsibility for your ability to love others and yourself as opposed to waiting for it to come in this romantic notion of how we sort of typically think about love. How do you communicate about this subject with men versus women?

Is there a difference in the vocabulary that you use? I think that it's, you know, am I going far afield to say that it's trickier with men? Because men are a little bit more clamped down. And even saying the word out loud can be challenging for a lot. can be challenging for a lot, and it sort of challenges ideas about masculinity and strength and all these kind of cultural identity issues that get played into. Well, another genesis of the book was a conversation I had with a friend of mine who's a man who was saying that in his mind the movement from a more conventional kind of love to more of a state of real love was in a way moving out of the center of privilege to really listen to his partner in a different way so he said you know

his wife suggested something he didn't really want to do, but he thought, you know what, it works for her. And it's not that convenient for me, but it's what she wants. So why should everything be referenced to my needs and my demands? And I would say to him in response, there are an awful lot of people, usually women in this world, who never voice their demands or their needs. usually women in this world, who never voiced their demands or their needs. So for them, moving to a more real kind of love or a liberated kind of love might be actually expressing who they are and what they desire.

And I like those two polarities. They're actually both in the book. I changed his name, but it was so interesting to me to watch that. I mean, I think there's movement and growth for anybody. And depending on your, if you think about it as balance, although it's not that sexy a word, but I think it really is a state of balance. It's a state of some repose or harmony,

and we're out of harmony one way or another. And the story I told from the women's side was about a friend of mine who outlived her cancer prognosis, I think, by 40 years, something like that. And she was telling me about her early healing journey when she was first sort of looking at her life and everything in her life. And she said, I used to be the kind of woman who I'd be sitting in the car with my husband boiling hot, and the most I could ever bring myself to say is, are you warm, dear?

So that's in big contrast to my other friend who's saying, you know what? It can't all be about me. And so I think that's like the magic of a creative process you know is is that dynamism of leaving where we are if we're stuck and in some kind of rut and moving to another place of getting outside yourself yeah and your own ideas and and needs and and thinking about those of the other yeah or your Or your own, in her case. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you, when you talk about love and real love,

is this a unifying singular concept? Because when I think about love, I think, you know, well, there's the way I love my wife, and that's different from how I love my kids and how I love my parents. You know, how do you parse that? I think it's both. The manifestation, the feeling will be very different. People would often ask that in classes.

I want to love everybody, but I kind of like my husband a lot. Do I have to give him up? Do I have to go back in the pool or something? No. Of course, we would say in Buddhist teaching, we would say we have different karma with different people. him up you know does he have to go back in the pool or something you know uh no i mean of course we have i mean we would say you know in in buddhist teaching we'd say we have different karma with different people but um you know that's a little bit esoteric a way of saying it but we do have different roles or relationships with different people they're going to feel very different

they're going to manifest differently uh but there's something about that kind of pure connection where we're just there that I think is actually the same and it's maybe maybe most complicated actually with children because of the responsibility of you know needing to protect them and take care of them and so on

but it goes back to honing your attention yeah right and mindfulness and meditation and you know that that journey to being able to do that right and we're gonna we're gonna talk about that so let's contextualize this i want to i want to go back to the to the you know the origin story here because uh it's quite remarkable the journey that you've been on to be able to do what you do today. So take me back to the early days in New York City and your upbringing. My life. Oh, yeah.

So I had a very traumatic, disordered, chaotic kind of childhood. When I wrote this book called Faith, I looked back, which is sort of my faith journey. I looked back, and I realized that by the time I went to college at the age of 16, I'd lived in five different family configurations. Every one of them shifted because of a death or some loss or some profound craziness. And so my parents got divorced when I was four. My father disappeared.

And I lived with my mother and her siblings until I was nine. And then my mother died very suddenly. And I lived with my father's parents whom I hardly knew. My father didn't reappear for another couple of years. So my grandfather died. His father died. And then my father came back. And he was back for about six weeks when he took an overdose of sleeping pills and ended up in some mental health facility or another for the rest of his life, which was,

you know, pretty extensive. So either VA hospital, nursing home, or sometimes on the streets if he would run away or something like that. And sometimes he'd be better and sometimes he'd be not so well. So... Was there a diagnosis for that? Well, I think his actual diagnosis was paranoid schizophrenic. Whether in those days those were done with tremendous accuracy or not, I'm not really sure. But then I lived with my grandmother until I went to college

at the age of 16. So that made so five five different incarnations and and and and a tragic you know yeah occurrence in each one of those that you had to weather at a very early age yeah yeah the trauma of that i i can't even fathom it's amazing you made it through that and and you know we're able to kind of get through high school and get yourself to college right yeah do you remember feeling like when you went away to you went upstate to college yeah buffalo so do you do you remember feeling a like a sense of free like i need to get away from this or what was the you know kind of emotional experience it wasn't it was close to that it

wasn't exactly i need to get away from this but i kept thinking there's something else there's something and. There's something. And how were you carrying your suffering at that time? I was completely isolated. I was very shut down. I was very unhappy but not expressive of it. I didn't even know what was happening within me. It was actually only when I started meditating when I went to India that I began uncovering kind of the range of what,

you know, the range of what I was experiencing, which was rage and fear and, you know, sadness and all these things. And I found that shocking. You know, I didn't know I felt this. Right. Yeah, you talk about that in the book, the experience that a lot of people have when they begin, you know, kind of an intensive meditation practice for the first time. They think they're all good,

and then suddenly they're crying uncontrollably and they have all this rage or whatever, and they're like, I thought this was supposed to make me, I thought I was happy. Where's the peace? This is a jip, you know? And you're saying, no, you're exactly where you need to be because you're actually confronting your suffering

for the very first time, And that's part of this process of, you know, acknowledgement and ultimately working through it. I mean, this is a little bit, my story is a little bit in this book. It's much more extensively in this book, Faith. And many, many people come up to me and say, I had a childhood just like yours. I really understand. So it's hardly rare actually all right so you're in buffalo and you find yourself in like an asian studies class right do you remember what pulled you towards that class to begin with was there like an a conscious or unconscious you unconscious magnetizing force to that? It's a little bit like some of it was really just convenience. It fit into my schedule.

I needed to do a philosophy course because it was a requirement. Some of it was kind of in the air. The Beatles had gone to India. Everyone was like. Maharishi. Yeah, Maharishi was around. People were looking at like Indian music and sitars. And Chai hadn't hit yet. That hadn't come in much later.

I don't know where they closed, but it was what was happening. I went to school in the 60s. And it was really in the Asian philosophy course that two things happened. One was in the component on Buddhism, which was most of it, when I heard the Buddhists say there's suffering in life, that this is a natural part of life, it was probably the most liberating thing I'd ever heard. Right, to be born is to suffer.

To be born is to suffer. And it was finally the thought, it's not just me. Because I'd been so different from everybody else all those years. Like, what do you say in French class when you're supposed to say what your father does for a living in French? It's like, I don't know how to say this. And suddenly there was no sense of being excluded. It's like we're all suffering.

Not always. Not that life is horrible, but there's always suffering in someone's life somewhere along the line. And that's the truth. And I felt incredibly freed just by that statement. And then I heard about these practices called meditation, where you could actually do something about your mind and be happier. And it was like, I looked around Buffalo, New York, and at that time, I didn't find it anywhere.

It might have been there, but now it's probably everywhere. I just didn't see it. So the school had an independent study program where if you created a project that they liked, you could go anywhere for a year, theoretically, and then come back. So I created a project. I want to go to India.

Right. It's interesting. Do you think that if you had decided to go to City College in New York or something like that that you would have ended up in analysis instead you know i never i never thought in like a very woody allen kind of way that's very funny i never thought of that no i don't think no i mean you know when we finish telling your whole story i mean mean, it's always that thing of like, when you look back in the rearview mirror, everything lines up perfectly. Do you think about it in terms of fate? Do you feel like, you know, like this was on some level a predestined course for you or that you were tapping into some kind of past life experience that led you towards this? that led you towards this?

I don't think of it exactly as firmly as fate, but I think it was meant to be in a way. Or somehow I managed to use it in a way that was really good. I stayed in India for more than a year. I came back, finished school, went back to India. And then when I was leaving in 1974, for what I thought was going to be a very brief visit home, before I lived in India for the rest of my life, I went to see one of my teachers who was a woman named Deepa Ma. Deepa Ma is like a nickname, Deepa's mother. And she was a woman who had suffered terribly in her life. And so she'd

gotten into practice. She had three children, two of whom died. Her husband died really suddenly. And she developed this heart condition. She went to bed. She was living in Burma at the time. She couldn't get out of bed. And the doctor came and said, you're actually going to die of a broken heart unless you do something about your mind.

You should learn how to meditate. So she got out of bed. do something about your mind you should learn how to meditate so she got out of bed and uh she went to the retreat center and when she emerged somehow she had metabolized all that horrible grief and pain into some kind of compassion for everybody it was like this enormous radiance she had and uh she was my teacher and so i went to see her say goodbye for my short short short trip home. And she said, when you get to the States, you'll be teaching. And I said, no, I won't.

And she said, yes, you will. And I said, no, I won't. And she said, yes, you will. And I said, no, I won't. And you're like 21 at this point. I was 21, yeah. And she said two things that were really amazing. The first was she said, you really understand suffering.

That's why you should teach. And that was the first moment i ever thought that everything i had been through had like a purpose sort of and then she said you can do anything you want to do it's only you're thinking you can't do it that's going to keep you from doing it right and and i think it's it's that knowing you're suffering and owning your suffering and and leveraging that suffering as a vehicle for healing not only yourself, but others. That has really been the touchdown of your life.

But to take it back, just to kind of back into the timeline here a little bit, before you meet Deepa Ma, I mean, you go, you have this great story where even before you go to India, you met with a Tibetan monk, right? And you're like, what should I do when I get to India? And he's like, what does he, he says, follow the pretense of accident. And you're like, I don't know what that means, right? It's only later that you understand. But you go and you're kind of meandering around India

and you find yourself at this ashram for this meditation retreat. And unbeknownst to you, you're surrounded by all these people at this ashram for this meditation retreat. And unbeknownst to you, you're surrounded by all these people that ultimately return like yourself and become leaders in this meditation movement throughout the West. Joseph Goldstein, Ram Dass, Krishna Dass. Dan Goldman. Yeah, I mean, unbelievable, right?

That that was your first meditation retreat like when i see that when i i mean it's like it gives me chills it's like this is you're exactly where you're supposed to be this was like perfect for you and this is all meant to be unfolding in the way that it did yeah i i think it was i i i look back at that you know that particular era and i think amazing you know we're all still so close and we're all still like doing it in some way or another and ramdas was ramdas at that point right i mean he had already you know he had already had quite a bit of fame in notari i mean be here now came out when came out then came he got the box when we were there together oh he did wow it arrived and say look at this you know yeah yeah so it's like 1971 uh-huh

do you know you probably know bhagavan das yeah yeah yeah he actually he married my wife and i really yeah yeah wow so for those who don't know bhagavan actually was a lanky teenager who ultimately led ram das to neem karoli baba right introduced them and neem karoli Baba, right? Introduce them and Neem Karoli Baba becoming Ram Dass' teacher and, you know, the rest is history. Amazing, right? So you have this initial meditation retreat, and this is your introduction. I mean, that began as a Vipassana retreat, right? Yeah, it was a Vipassana retreat. And it kind of ended with you being introduced to Metta.

So maybe describe the difference between those two traditions. Okay, so Vipassana is a word in Pali, which is the language of the original Buddhist text. It just means insight meditation. So that one particular style of doing meditation has come to be associated with the word Vipassana. The teacher was S. N. Goenka. And it was just a kind of mostly mindfulness of the body and body sensations and experiencing everything like emotions

and thoughts through those sensations. And the retreat began with just a kind of awareness of the breath, which is a practice most people get familiar with first, just resting your attention on the feeling of the breath and bringing your attention back when it wanders, which is continuous. And then this awareness of the body. So right at the end, Goenka led a metta, M-E-T-T-A,

meditation, and that was almost like a ceremonial way of ending the retreat. Metta means loving kindness in Pali. So that was the moment I heard, oh, there's another style. There's another way of practicing. And that's kind of interesting. It's all about love. It's about filling your being with the sense of love.

That's how you start. And extending it to all others. And I longed for that, certainly. And I looked for that for and that became your sweet spot yeah right and did you were you aware of that at that moment like this is going to be my thing no i'm because i was so naive i was so young and i didn't know how i mean i knew that there was a way of doing it intensively um with structure and stuff but i didn't know what it was and and just so we're clear like like, so the Vipassana,

it's really focused on the breath, but the actual practice of Metta is repetition of a mantra, but not a mantra in the traditional sense. It's sort of like these sayings, right, where you're emitting loving kindness into the world. Yeah. We consider it like a practice of generosity, so it's offering.

You know, instead of looking through you, I look at you and think, may you be happy, may you be peaceful, or whatever the particular thing is. And so from there, where do you go from there? Twinka? You meet Deepa Ma shortly after that. I met her probably a year later or nine months later. I stayed in India. I practiced with other teachers.

I practiced with Tibetan teachers. I ended up going back to Budh Gaya, which is where I started with going and kind of continuing on in that tradition. So I probably met her that summer, summer of 71, something like that. And I stayed beyond my year away from Buffalo. But then I went back and I did what I needed to do to get two years of independent study credit. So I did that and then I went back to India. So ultimately you were in India for like four years though, on and off?

Almost four years, like three and a half years. And the idea at the time was you were just going to stay there, right? My idea was that I was going to stay there. So Deepamma had a different plan for you. And unbeknownst to you, that plan begins to manifest. So you come back with no intention of carrying out this edict that she had laid forth for you. But ultimately, that's basically what transpires. Yeah.

Yeah. Ramdas, I don't know when he came back actually but he was back and uh joseph goldstein whom i'd met in my first retreat and we were good friends he'd come back about six months before i didn't uh ramdas was teaching uh nirupa institute had just opened up that summer in boulder it was their inaugural summer and is the first Buddhist institute, now university, in the country. And Ram Dass had like a mega class of like 1,000 people. And Trungpa Rinpoche, who was the same one who said to me,

follow the pretense of accident, it's his school. He founded it. Wow. So he had like some of the same and some different 1,000 people class. And Ram Dass divided his class into the meditation subgroup and the chanting subgroup. So Joseph was doing the meditation subgroup, and Jack Kornfield was there teaching his own class,

living down the hall. So the joke, although it was absolutely true, when I sort of did what I need to in New York, was that of all this group of people who had gotten quite close in India, Joseph was the only one with a job and an apartment, so he went to Boulder. Everybody kind of flopped at his place, right? Yeah, we did.

There were nine of us living in this one-bedroom apartment. He tells this story and said it was absolutely horrible for him. He's a very meticulous person. I'm sure he drove him insane, but he said until he stopped thinking of it as his apartment and it was just we were all living together. Right, like he was a rather fastidious yeah gentleman yes yeah he had to have his own journey with non-attachment that's right he did we all moved in so um he uh was quite popular with the students and was asked to stay on for the second summer session. So I stayed on with him. And then

we were invited to teach a one-month retreat, which we did. That was the first retreat we taught. So we did that. And then we were invited to teach a 10-day retreat up in, or two-week retreat up in Vancouver. So I think Jack and Joseph and I all went up there. And then it was just like that. We were sleeping on people's living room couches. Right. And we had nothing. And a letter would come and say, would you come teach a retreat? And we'd say, oh, yeah, let's do that. Right.

So you're just like this traveling band of merry meditation people. Yeah. Yeah. But you're getting, I mean, people are showing up for this, right? Some people were, yeah. Uh-huh. Maybe if we had 35 people, 40 people, 50 people were ecstatic. And ultimately, this leads to you founding the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts, right?

So what year was that? How many years after that was that? Okay. So that was two years. So this all happens in a pretty rapid succession, right? You take over this large house and monastery it was a monastery yeah and you it's a really large house you institutionalize this yeah and that exists to this day yeah which is amazing right and i and i love how it was kind of uh it was a lark right

like is anybody going to show up like how are we going to pay the mortgage at this place and totally that kind of thing it was like well what happened before then was that we were just crashing in people's houses and responding to these letters. Somebody has said, I think in great defense, he said, I have another house in Felton, like a rental property. Why don't you go there and stay there a while? That's why I was so amused when Jason moved to Felton. I said, Felton, that's where we started out.

It was like our first address in this country. So we went into this house, and we did the only thing we knew how to do, which was opened it as a retreat center. So like three extra bedrooms or something like that. And people would come and do their own retreat, and we'd feed them. And Jack Kornfield taught his first retreat ever in that living room. There were 19 people. Wow.

And somebody came through, and he said, why don't you start a real retreat center? And all the people I know who can really help you, their messages. So we went back east. And we looked up and down the East Coast and finally found this property in Barry, which was in Novitiate. And it cost $150,000, like this huge institutional building and 80 acres of land.

So, of course, we didn't have $150,000 in 1975. And so we raised $50,000. The Fathers of the Blessed Sacrament gave us a $50,000 mortgage, and we couldn't't get a bank mortgage so three very brave people personally took out loans wow so we could open the door so our mantra really for the first year was can always close in a year right and which didn't make them very happy but uh that was our mantra because who knew amazing was there a specific moment where you kind of consciously realized that Deepa Ma's prophecy was coming true for you? I think there was, and it was years later.

Yeah. I just kept thinking, you know, I'll do it for a while. I'll do it for a few months. I'll do it. And then I thought, no, this is it. This is my life, actually. Yeah. And, I mean, could you have imagined that you would have, you know,

become this legendary teacher? No. Who gets to travel around the world and get celebrated yeah no not at all i mean it's amazing yeah it's everything it's uh it's it's quite it's been quite an amazing journey for you i would say um so i want to talk about uh this idea and you address this in the book and I've talked about this in the past on the podcast, but I think it's super important. And it's, you know, the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves and how we get caught up in these narratives that don't serve you, you know,

where these stories come from and how we can, you know, decouple that narrative and begin the process of telling ourselves a new story. In the book, I write about if you have a kind of a prevalent, frequent, similar critical voice, like your inner critic, sometimes what's good is give it a persona, give it a name, give it a wardrobe. So I named my inner critic Lucy after the character in the Peanuts comic strip with apologies to all the Lucys in the world. I'd seen this cartoon where in the first frame Lucy is talking to Charlie Brown, and she says, you know, Charlie Brown, what your problem is?

The problem with you is that you're you. Then in the second frame, poor Charlie Brown says, well, what in the world can I do about that? Then in the third and final frame, Lucy says, I don't pretend to be able to give advice. I merely point out the problem. And somehow whenever I was walking by this desk, I would see that cartoon, and my eye would fall right on the line.

The problem with you is that you're you. Because that Lucy voice had been so dominant in my early life, and I really credit my meditation training for basically having a different relationship to Lucy, you know, instead of on the one hand, believing her completely, like, you're right, Lucy, you're always right. Or on the other hand, hating her and fearing her and being ashamed and all of that. I realized I had two ways of approaching her. One was, hi, Lucy. Like, I see you, you know.

And the other was, chill out, Lucy. Right. And, you know, packed into that is the idea of becoming the observer as opposed to identifying with that voice as being part and parcel of who you are. That's right. Like wrapping it up into your identity. Yeah, and it actually happened very soon after I saw the cartoon. Something great happened for me. And my first thought was, it's never going to happen again.

Right. And being the observer was different. It's like, you're right. It's the negative bias, right? And you talk about this in the book as well. We're hardwired, we're predisposed to identify these negative things that occur to us. And then choose to string those together and create this story about who we are, how we got here, and what's going to happen to us in the future.

That's right. Right? So to expand on that a little bit. Well, I mean, I think something that can be confusing for us is the difference between intentionality and coercion. And we use a lot of intentionality in these approaches because we are conditioned in usually toward, say, negativity. If you're thinking about your day and almost like evaluating yourself, like, how well did I do today? It's not uncommon to pretty well only think about the mistakes and what you didn't do that well, and you didn't show up that well, and you didn't say that really great. And it takes intentionality to kind of say anything

else happened today. You know, it's not hypocrisy, it's not denying that there were issues, you know, but it's not all that happened, right? So, to get to a truer, bigger picture, we have to actually move our attention consciously towards the good. You know, anything good happened today? Any good within me? And that kind of elasticity or flexibility of attention is also part of the meditative process. But it begins, really, with seeing the story. Because not only do we tell stories about ourselves, but others tell stories about us.

And so, those can be very unconscious. And we tell stories about other people. And we tell stories about other people, exactly. You know, there's somebody, I also tell this story in the book, somebody told me a writer friend of mine, he'd given a lecture somewhere and in the course of the lecture he mentioned how reading Proust, remembrances of things past have been so crucial for him at some stage of his development and he was at dinner after the lecture and a group of people came up to him, this woman came forth and his assumption about her, his thought about her was, oh, she looks like poorly educated, you know, she's probably not

very smart. And then she said to him, I was at your was, oh, she looks like poorly educated, you know, she's probably not very smart. And then she said to him, I was at your lecture, so his heart kind of sank, you know, what's she going to say? And then she said, I just want to say that I find reading Proust in the original French much more fulfilling. And I was like, okay, well, all right. So, in thinking about that, like I'm thinking about, you know, of course, the story I tell myself about myself, but also the story that I tell about the other people that I encounter throughout my day. And that story is generally reflective of my own state of mind and how I feel about myself. Like if I feel good about myself, I'm probably going to tell a more flattering version of, you know, these other people that I encounter throughout my day.

But when you really kind of analyze it, like, you realize, like, over the course of your life, billions of things have happened to you. Billions, right? And we extract out, you know, these 10 things that happened over the course of our life and we identify with them so deeply, so thoroughly that they infect and invade how we see ourselves, every decision that we make, how we interact with other people, the words that come out of our mouth, the kind of even looking at that or being critical of the veracity of that, let alone reframing it, is something I think most people don't even begin to engage in. Do you agree? That's true. That's absolutely true. Which is why I think seeing the story is maybe the first and the most critical step. Because a lot of people don't even believe that.

I was teaching somewhere and somebody said, I don't really see how others can tell stories about us because they don't know us. How could they be telling a story about us? And I said, I think everything is telling a story about us. Architecture tells a story about us. The retreat center I co-founded, the Insight Meditation Society, just we built this sort of structure

so that people in wheelchairs can come in the front door and it's really big and not very pretty, you know, because previously people in wheelchairs had to go around the side and then down the back. You know, it's snowy and gooky. It wasn't the right story, you know story to be telling people about belonging or inclusion. And so we raised all this money and we built this thing. And I find it personally very treacherous because I was a New Yorker.

I learned how to drive when I was older. And I'm not that great a driver. And I'm parked somewhere beyond and I have to back out. It's protruding into the driveway. And I really don't like it, but it's the right story. And we don't realize how much we're impacted by all of those views coming toward us about who we are. And it takes a great deal of integrity to have a sense of, this is who I am, actually. And the process of really engaging that comes back again to honing your attention, right? And you kind of lay it out in the book in this four-step process that you call RAIN, right?

Can you walk me through that? Sure. RAIN is something that is often used, especially when a difficult emotion comes up, but you can use it many, many ways. So let's say anger comes up in your experience rather than dismissing it or explaining it or hating yourself for it or plotting revenge. You want to just look at the feeling. And this is something that's rare with strong emotion. Usually we get so captivated by the object. Like if you really, really want something, you think about the thing. Like I just bought a new car, you know, so it's like what color,

you know, what thing, what feature. We very rarely kind of pivot our attention to look at the feeling itself. Like what does it feel like to want something so much? Or what does it feel like to be so angry or so frightened? So that's the first step. It's kind of pivoting. And then we apply this acronym RAIN. The first is recognize what's happening.

Like, oh, it's anger. The second is acknowledge it or accept it. Don't add on to it the shame and the distress and the fear and all of that. Just be with it as it is. The third is I, is investigate. Look into it. Not why is it here and what am I going to do about it, but if we really look at a state of anger, we will likely see fear.

We will see sadness. We may see grief. We'll likely see helplessness. And we have a much clearer sense of what is actually cooking below the surface. And we also see it's constantly changing. Look at that. It has just kind of this nature of arising and passing away. And then N, non-identification, is you don't have to fall into, I'm such an angry person,

I will be forever. This itself is a passing state. And it's a very different way of being with those kinds of emotions. One of the things you talk about in the book, a lot of people, their entry point for meditation is this desire to quell the monkey mind. Like, I've got to, it's just my mind, I can't, it's insane. And you had a kind of interesting take on that. Like, it's not about getting rid of that as much as it is not identifying with it or coming into a different kind of relationship with that. Yeah. I think it's very much about coming into a

different kind of relationship with that because you can't get rid of it. You know, I mean, that's first of all, a hopeless task and it's very embattled. It's like tiring. And maybe more than anything these days, if I'm introduced as a meditation teacher, well, probably more than anything, people will respond with, I'm so stressed out, I could use some of that.

But second comes, I tried that once, I failed at it. Right. Because that's what people's notion is. I should have a totally blank mind. I shouldn't have any thoughts. I should have only beautiful thoughts. Anxiety shouldn't come back. I shouldn't get sleepy.

Whereas we say that the essence of the meditation is not what's happening. It's how we're relating to what's happening. And so any of that might happen, but you could be different with it. You could be more centered. You could be more balanced. You could be more centered. You could be more balanced. You could be more aware. You could be kinder. All of that comes into play as we evolve in the meditation.

So it's not that easy to describe as a metric. It's easier to say, well, that doesn't happen anymore, or I don't get distracted anymore. But to say, I come back from distraction more gracefully with a better sense of humor, that's not that easy. But that's really what happens. Yeah, it's a gradual thing. I mean, you tell the story in the book of dropping the glass. Yeah.

Right? Like thinking that this practice is not really doing anything for you until you have this situation where you drop this class and you don't react the way you usually do you react with sort of a you know a more loving you know response to yourself right yeah but i think ancillary like sort of tangentially related to this idea of you know people saying i tried meditation it didn't work for me because you know my monkey mind's out of control like baked into that is this sense of perfectionism, right? Like, if I can't do it perfect, I'm not going to do it. Holding yourself to this certain standard and the kind of violence that's associated with that

and how that's really anti-love, right? It's isolating and it's separating yourself from others and yourself. So can you elaborate on that a little bit? Well, one of the pillars of self-compassion as a psychological theory in current Western psychology is understanding we're part of a human family. You know, like when you blow it, you're not the only person in life who's ever done that.

And that's a big ingredient in that kind of changed relationship. Which again, it's not laziness or excuses for what you've done or doing, but it's understanding this is part of the human condition. And we can pick up, we can begin again. This is resilience, in effect. And so we do have notions of perfection. Never thinking that perfection really, it never lasts. You know, like you have the perfect piece of fruit and then it starts to decay. Or I just bought a new car and it's like, honestly, when I left it, someone had pooped on it, some creature. And a bird, obviously, not a bear. But it was like, oh, no, I can't believe it.

You know, like, where's my perfect car? Right, like making peace with the fact that truly nothing is static. Like, our human brains want to believe that, you know, there will always be democracy in America. Well, maybe I'm not so sure right now. You know what I mean? Like, just certain things that we take for granted. Like, my wife will always be there. And I'll always live in this house.

That's right. And all of these things. And it's scary to think that you know to really embrace that impermanence but but there's a freedom in that right that allows you to decouple from you know these this sense of perfectionism and other traits that well yeah it's free because it's true you know it's like sound like this fanciful spiritual notion you're trying to superimpose on reality it is reality and the further we get from reality the more we hurt because we're like banging our head against the wall one of the the benefits for me of mindfulness practice and meditation is developing a, you know, sort of a more objective and expansive understanding of

certain character traits and my relationship to them with the extent to which they lead me astray or, you know, propel me forward. So an example of that in my case is, you know, self-will. Like for my whole life, I thought everything good that ever happened to me is because I buckled down and worked hard for it, worked harder than than anybody else i overcame this talent deficit gap and was able to like get shit done right uh but it's that same uh same trait that has led me down many a dark alley right like sort of that self-reliance um detached me from, you know, a greater sense of, you know, engagement in the world. And when I was struggling with drugs and alcohol, it was the key, you know, preventative element from me allowing myself to get sober because I associated surrender with

defeat or weakness, et cetera. So, can you talk a little bit about our relationship with our character traits and how we can develop a better understanding of how they work and how to transcend them? Well, I think that holds true even for the stories we tell ourselves. I mean, a lot of those stories served a very useful purpose in some stage of development, you know, when you were putting your alcoholic parents to bed or, you know, you were all alone and trying to struggle, you know, I don't mean you, you know, your story, but because I don't know your story. But, you know, when one is weaving a story to survive, basically, you know, one's circumstances often as a child, that's a useful story. But when it becomes the singular story, then we're stuck. and it becomes very difficult to let go of that it's very difficult because

you have identified so completely with it and it served you to some extent right you know and may no longer be serving you and you you and you you become blind to how it's not serving you right because you are so self-identified with it yeah and so how do we work our way out of that well it all comes back to honing your attention right attention and these practices of mindfulness and meditation yes definitely but since you mentioned recovery you know uh there's a amazing role for community as well you know it's like that fellowship in the recovery community um is magnificent i wish i could redesign you know a 12-step group for everything yeah you know everything well the principles are applicable

to every human being and whatever they're challenged by yeah i mean i've worked with people and i looked at them and they have terrible family situations. And I said, please tell me someone drinks so you can go down on them. You know, like, please. And she said, sorry, I don't drink. Right. Because that plays a strong role, too. It's like we reformulate our sense of what's normal in human relationship through relationship.

And that can be very powerful as well. But a tremendous amount comes back to honing attention. Right. And the journey really at the risk of sort of being reductionist about this whole thing is that you really have to engage this inward journey and embrace it if you want to get to this place of not completion but you know sufficient wholeness where you can love yourself and and be capable of of loving another and not looking to someone else you know it's like that idea you know that jerry mcguire like you complete me is such a lie that so many people buy into. And quite honestly, leads them astray and further away from what they're seeking.

Yeah, definitely. And you'll find it everywhere. It's just like pulverizing us, that message, from every direction. And that's another role for community, actually. It's like people to step away together from the prevalent messaging of the society and to reinforce the strength say i want to look differently i want to look at it from another angle and you know it's a it's a we're having an amazing moment right now because you know meditation and mindfulness these things are now

very much of the zeitgeist. And for the majority of your career, they really weren't. And I would imagine that this cuts both ways for you. On the one hand, it's kind of amazing. Now there's all this science and people are talking about these ideas that you've been teaching for so long. And it must be very gratifying on a certain level to see the mainstream consciousness uh adapting and adopting these tactics and practices but at the same time i would imagine there's some

level of you know kind of uh bastardization of you know these these principles and traditions that you hold so dear as they become kind of diluted so that they can be digestible to the average human being. So how do you, like, what is your opinion on all of that? Definitely. Well, sometimes I identify myself just this morning to somebody as I guess being on the left-wing fringe of the orthodoxy because I am of the orthodoxy.

You know, I had, you could say, a classical education. And I really studied with immensely wonderful teachers. And my own teacher told me to teach. That's the old-fashioned way. You know, many, many people come up to me and say, I'm a mindfulness teacher. And I don't even know what that means anymore. It used to be I'd say, well, who was your teacher?

Because then I'd know something like, if they said Thich Nhat Hanh, I'd think of social action. If they said somebody else, I'd think, oh, you know, that's like intense concentration or whatever. But I don't even know what it means anymore. Anybody can be a mindfulness teacher. Anybody can be a mindfulness teacher. Go for it.

No barrier to entry. It's the Wild West. You know, there's no licensing. There's nothing. But on the one hand, I am of the far left wing because I think it's great. I think it's tremendous. So many times somebody will come up to me and say, I'm a mindfulness teacher.

And the next thing I'll say is, I'm teaching that hellish prison. And I think, well, I'm not. God bless you. That's great. People are sincerely motivated, mostly, and really doing a great service to a lot of people. I have great issues around a couple of things. One is the nature of the training. There's an emphasis these days in this society, in this time, on scaling, as though that was the greatest virtue, that fewer people going to a greater depth is not enough.

It needs to be more and more and more people doing the thing, even if it's quite superficially. And so that means you need more and more and more instructors. And so how are they trained? Are they trained, or are they just out there? And it's not good for them as people, the instructors, and it's not really serving the other people. I was reading a study the other day that the headline was surprising to me.

It said something like, mindfulness, in contradiction to many other studies, mindfulness does not lead to empathy. And I thought, I don't get that because I've read so many studies, and don't get that, because I've read so many studies. And I know it anyway, but I've read so many studies that show the opposite. So then I was reading the actual study, and it turned out that the training, the mindfulness training, was five minutes long. Literally, it was five minutes long.

And I thought, oh, my God. And then the principal investigator and people were challenged about that. And they said, well, these other studies were just using five minutes of meditation. And they showed something or other. So that was like the standard. And I thought, five minutes is like, you know, enough. Right, right, right. I mean, there's still a long way to go.

That's what I read into that. But there is something about, you know, the respect for the teacher. You know what I mean? I mean, right now it's like we have access to, app, 10% Happier. I know you're involved in that. And there's a plethora of other ones that probably vary in quality. The good information is available, but there's also a lot of garbage. So it requires a little bit more discernment. But that tactile experience of sitting at the foot of a master, we've sort of gotten away from that. And I think there's a reverence for that that we should perhaps appreciate a little bit more fully. Yeah, I think it's a beautiful thing.

And it's like when my friend Joseph Goldstein was first in Asia, he was actually in the Peace Corps, and he was just a school teacher uh teaching english and he said when he walked into the room his he was in thailand his students would bow because it's a culture of respect for the teacher you know like we're like hurling chairs at our teachers you know like yeah it's different it's different um you know on some level though i guess the counterpoint is i mean look you know my personal story like when i got out of rehab like i started going to yoga and i went to the yoga class in brentwood where they played hip-hop music and there was lots of pretty girls and i don't know whether i would have gone to yoga otherwise but that was my welcome mat you know what i mean and

it allowed me to walk in the door and i've since gone on a journey with that that has taken me to a very different place but but had i been told like you have to do it this way and you've got to find this kind of teacher like i might not have walked through that door to begin with so there's a you have to kind of um have a respect for the individual and say look let's just get you attract let's dangle this like shiny object in front you. You know what I mean? And trust that if this resonates with you, that you'll then grab that and take it to a different place. Yeah, I mean, I think that's very true. You know, as a teacher, you kind of have to find your own place,

like what feels right to you in terms of the context, the languaging. Do you teach a yoga class where people chant Aum, or do they think they're stretching? It could be anything, and it's all beneficial to someone. And as an individual looking for a system or a teacher, I know it's weird and awkward the way I'm saying it, but I usually say you have to be a consumer. You have to feel what's right for you and go there you know don't hang out with the people in the place of the where you feel like

oh this is weird you know right yeah because then you're not in the long run you're gonna tap out right yeah but on this subject of teachers you know ramdas talks about this like we you know in our in our culture we have great reverence for the intellectuals, you know, and he uses Lincoln and Einstein, and we put these people up on a pedestal and, or athletes, right? LeBron James, you know, Michael Jordan, these people, these are the people that are the icons of our culture. What we don't do is celebrate the spiritual masters, you know, the great teachers of developing consciousness, like they do in India.

And I can see you as a young person in India realizing that's very much the culture there, right? That respect and that reverence for these individuals that hold that capacity that we just lack in our Western culture. You know, is there, culture. Can we shift that? Do you see a future in which we can develop that kind of reverence or you could see the ascension of these kinds of consciousness,

consciousness wielding individuals, holding that kind of stature? I think I can. I think it's going to come about in a kind of strange way because as I was listening to you just now, I started thinking about my first trip to the Soviet Union and going to the grave sites of different poets. And you'd think these people were rock stars, you know. And we don't treat poets that way either necessarily or artists or,

you know, and I think this is the kind of time where when people talk about social action and social justice and movements, I always say, well, what about the artists? You know, like, I have a feeling that's going to lead the way and, you know, people express their deepest values in different ways and have different strengths. But I think there's going to be a whole breakaway of communication and expression through art, through all those media. And I think that's going to bring about a whole other sense of consciousness,

which will include kind of strict consciousness movements and people teaching meditation and things like that. I think it's going to form the kind of radical edge. Yeah. I would like to see that. I would like to see that happen. Well, we're certainly in a moment where, you know, we need art desperately for sure.

And I could see that. You know, I think that there's, you know, a fertile environment for that to occur. But at the same time, we're more distracted than ever. These devices that we have that we think are connecting us more deeply with our fellow human are actually alienating. And I have a weird relationship with social media because of what I do. I'm very connected and tapped in.

And it's allowed me to connect with amazing people. You know, like, I've been able to meet in person, you know, phenomenal individuals all across the world as a result of that platform. But I have to keep my relationship with it in check so that I'm not just sitting at home. What kids? Disconnected, right? So it's like, yeah, I can use the 10% Happier app, or I can use Headspace. And yet that's not a replacement for being out in the world and cultivating community and these things. So how do you talk about that when you're teaching these principles? Well, I think it's really true.

And I think it is a matter of restraint. And I also, I love technology. And I think of myself often at the age of 18, going off to India, and like so scared and so determined. And I, you know, I'd never even been to California before when I went to India. But I needed to go to India. You don't have to go to India, as you say, anymore. And very, very fine teachings and approaches are available through your phone. But what's missing is the community aspect often. And so it can't replace having a living sense of some connection with another human being. But it often does. And so I think it's tremendously freeing. When I've taught things online, you know, and I've seen, you know, people in Poland doing it or, you know, people all over the world doing it.

And it's amazing to me that it really is kind of this global community now. You know, it's not. It allows these ideas to travel. Yeah. Instantaneously. It's amazing. People can have the experience. They don't have to think wistfully of feeling like you get a visa or whatever it might be.

But I think definitely need, first of all, we need discipline because I have a friend who every time we have dinner together will tweet it out. Each of us will tweet out having dinner with so-and-so. Once we were in a restaurant doing that and somebody knew him and they came up to him and said, are you going to talk to each other at all? Are you just going to stay on your phones the whole time?

He goes, yeah, people do stay on their phones the whole time. The optics are not great. It's too like meditation teachers are on their phones sitting across from each other at a restaurant. Exactly. It's just what it looked like. It's just what it was. But I think we can learn to be reasonable about it the other thing people tell me uh like i have a professor friend who was talking about his students and he said people his students he felt really

used the media of you know online communication social media uh just as a means of comparison and kind of putting other people down like people don't post a photo of their imperfect meal of course you know and i said i first i said i wonder if that's an age thing because my people are usually posting like about their shoulder surgery or something like that you know our aches and pains and complaints but um there's something about that, you know, that some consciousness that needs to enter. Like, what are we really trying to communicate? And if we feel completely inauthentic over and over and over again

because it's just some act, you know, then it's clearly not serving us. And we need to find that somewhere else. Yeah, it requires discernment. You know, I mean, you can use that to, again, go back to the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. not serving us and we need to find that somewhere else yeah it requires discernment you know i mean you can use that to again go back to the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves you can use that to fuel that story that's not serving you look at how much better everybody else is doing everybody's doing great i'm doing terrible it's never going to happen for me you know whatever that self-defeating narrative is yeah so in and that discernment is a journey towards self-love right yeah so back to back to you know back to real love and and within

that is you know judgment right and so how do we you know and healthy boundaries correct right so how do we exercise healthy boundaries in the practice of real love and self love? Like when we're, you know, if there's people in our life that, you know, that we need to exercise from our experience, you know what I mean? Like, like, how do you do that in a way that's still compassionate? Like how, you know, you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. I mean, one of the things we would say is really having a sense of clarity about where love and compassion reside, which we would say is in one's motivation or intention.

It's not in the action. So it's like the same as tough love or fierce compassion. The arena of the psyche that is supposed to be most transformed through the practice or deepening of loving kindness and compassion is the arena of motivation or intention. So if, for example, you have largely been motivated by fear in what you do or what you say or what you hold back from doing or saying, and you deepen these qualities,

you'll be largely motivated by a sense of connection. But that doesn't determine what you'll do. You know, out of that care, that connection, even that kindness. In the moment, there's a real discernment that needs to take place, which is very, very contextual. You know, in this moment, in this particular point in time, in this relationship, what do I feel is the most skillful way to say this, or most skillful thing to do? Is it yes or no? Is it giving them the money or not giving them the money?

And, you know, we make mistakes for sure. I call it our best guess. But it's discernment. It's different than the care. And we conflate those two, and that's the place where people often say, well, I don't know about that love thing. Then I can only be sweet and say yes. Right, it gets murky if you're a people pleaser. Yeah, exactly.

Because then you think self-love or loving others is basically just always being available to what they want and doing what they want to do. And that's a lack of self-love, right? Because you aren't discerning and you're not creating a healthy boundary. Yeah, I mean, you have to. And so in teaching, I go over that point again and again and again and again. They're different. You can be coming from a really loving motive, a really loving place,

and your best guess of the right way to act in this moment in time is really fierce. It's really intense. It's having a strong boundary. It's saying no. I'm not going to give you more money. No, you can't move in again. And you don't have to feel like that indicates lack of love in your heart because it doesn't necessarily at all. And the way you know the difference is by looking, you know, is by paying attention. This is all a journey towards self-actualization

and really embodying your most authentic self, right? And getting to a place where you can trust your instincts. And those impulses that arise are the signals that are the lampposts on your path. But I think it gets confusing because if you're not in a good place, or if those impulses and instincts are being driven by addiction or that unhealthy narrative then they're not they're not trustworthy instincts right so how do you how do you know when you can trust them and and and allow them to light your path and when do you know like you know what like i need some more i gotta do a little bit of more work before i can trust whatever's arising in me.

Yeah. Well, I mean, it's never bad to have the thought I need to do some more work, you know, because we usually all need to do some more work. But I think some of that has to do with community. Sometimes other people saying you really should chill, you know, that was kind of harsh. Right. And sometimes it has to do with just buying time. Like I have a friend who said she could never say no to people. And so in her meditation practice,

one day she kind of brought up in her mind that kind of scenario as an act of creative imagination, like when she was asked a question where she really should say no. And she felt what was happening in her body, this kind of almost panic that would viscerally start taking over, like they won't love me anymore, you know, whatever. And she used that sensation as a kind of feedback system so that when she was in an actual situation like at work

and somebody would ask her that very kind of question and she would feel that sort of panic begin to come over her, she would say, I can't answer you quite yet. I need a little time. Like, she couldn't say no, but if she had more time, she could say no. It's like writing out that email but not sending it. That's right, exactly. Write out the email but don't send it.

And so you need certain curbs in place like that, that it's a matter of discipline. It's almost play. Like I'm going to, today whenever I write an email, I'm not going to send it right away or something like that. That's a discipline. We're almost play. Today, whenever I write an email, I'm not going to send it right away or something like that. That's a discipline. But within that, you also need to be kind to yourself and not say, I'm like a wretched person. I can never say no. You can say, oh, look at this. Here's that habit. I'm not going to let it hold sway again.

How do you create healthy boundaries around yourself when everybody wants a piece of you? It can be like a vampiric thing, right? If you don't have that boundary, everyone's sucking you dry. And as a teacher and as somebody who's holding a certain frequency that people want and gravitate towards you, you've got to take care of yourself or you can't take care of them yeah no it's true and that first of all you need to remember that very fact yeah you know that that's very true and then um you know i feel really lucky i still have teachers and i still

consider myself a student and i still practice and uh without that i can't even imagine you know what it would be like. And I think there's something about authenticity which is very important because sometimes in trying to please that image and live up to that image. Right, you have to live up to this idea of who everybody thinks you are. That's right, which is crazy. It's like training. I just told this story a couple of trips ago.

I was in the San Francisco airport, and my flight was six and a half hours late and i was fine for five and a half hours so i was really mellow and then i was like really getting impatient and uh and just then somebody came up to me and said are you sharon salzburg right and i thought damn you know like should come up an hour ago yeah i was in a much better place or somebody taking a video of you chewing out the airline person that goes viral nobody wants that nobody wants that you know yeah it's it's got to be difficult i would imagine so what does your practice look like um i practice every day uh look like? I practice every day.

Different lengths. My goal is to try to do like 40 minutes a day, if not all at once then in chunks. I try to practice in informal times, like walking down the streets of especially with loving kindness. Walking down the streets of New York City

or sitting on an airplane, silently repeating, may you be happy or may all beings be happy. Which is quite fun. It's a whole other way of being in New York. And I try to do retreats at least periodically, but I think it's the everydayness of it that really saves me. Right, so there's the formal part of the practice

and then there's carrying that into your interactions in the world which is a form of practice in and of itself right yeah so what are the what are the challenges that you still face like when you have like what are the what are the things that you're working on overcoming or improving on yeah well i mean i think it's some of it is like this energy gap you know it's like every time i feel like I'm at the right level of energy, something more is asked of me. And so I feel like I'm always in a gap pretty well and needing to somehow meet that.

I think one of the greatest challenges I have is just like, it's not exactly a challenge challenge it's more like a process you know of feeling like um it's it's a little strange when people kind of know your name you know and but the things that make you happy are the things that always made you happy you know which are very simple and so remembering that that's what counts you know and that's that's a life that's your life and it's simply being with friends or simply hanging out or looking at the flowers or i like the light in la a lot you know just looking at the light and uh remembering that that's my life you know and everything else is like this overlay that exists somewhere else and how does that get reconcil life, you know, and everything else is like this overlay that exists somewhere else.

And how does that get reconciled with, you know, this idea, you know, like of the Buddha, like I'm working towards enlightenment, you know what I mean? Like it can be very achievement oriented. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I can get there, you know, because I really like meditation as an art form, which is why, you know, I'd like to devote more time again to it, just for the sheer art form of it,

you know, and the places one can go in one's mind and consciousness and things like that. I don't feel, like, driven to get enlightened in this lifetime. I think it's likely to take more than one lifetime. But I do feel it's possible. I don't think the ultimate goal of meditation is to be a little less stressed out. I think that there are things we're capable of as human beings, as ordinary human beings,

in the matters of wisdom and love that are incredible. And sure, I would like to be there, you know, and I've never lost sight of that, you know, that possibility. Have you met people that you feel are truly enlightened beings? Yeah. I mean, I think Deepamwa, for example, although she would never say she was completely done, you know, that would be, I mean, I can't even imagine her saying that.

But she would be an example. And, like, the most super humble person you can imagine. And her love, her compassion was also very maternal. It would be like, would you like another cup of tea? You know, or can I get you something? Or how was your journey? Right, just grounded in the real world. Yeah.

What do you make of these stories that you hear, you know, more in the Hindu tradition, of these, you know, famous, you know, yogis that go into the cave and don't eat for months on end or become breatharians or, you know, these crazy stories of, you know, you hear these insane stories, right, of like they have superpowers almost, right?

Are these apocryphal? No, I don't think they're. I mean, some of them are probably apocryphal. Some of them are probably completely untrue. But not necessarily. I mean, I think there's, at least in the Buddhist tradition, there's some schools of the Buddhist tradition, there's a pretty clear delineation between paths of power and paths of wisdom.

So if you develop really, really, really strong concentration, pretty much only that's a path of power, because you're taking the energy of the universe and bringing it to yourself. It's from that place that people develop what we would call psychic powers or paranormal abilities. And it's from a place of mindfulness and clear seeing and wisdom that we develop qualities like love. So it's very different.

Although they support one another sometimes, but you could develop power without love. And then all you've got is power. The dark power. The dark power. develop power without love and then all you've got is power the dark power the dark power so they said deepama for example my teacher uh in her youth she was trained in those concentration techniques and she could do things like that like what walk through walls over really you know um go back in time and hear the buddha give a talk or go back in time and see where you were in your previous life or

visit different realms of existence or things like that. She could, you know, so, or you hear those Neem Karoli Baba stories about reading your mind and stuff like that. Or if you read like Autobiography of a Yogi, there's lots of stories in there about stuff like that.

Yeah, so I have friends who are completely freaked out at the notion of Deepamal walking through a wall. I mean, that's heavy, right? Yeah, but it's so irrelevant to who she was. People don't talk about it. I mean, they say that she could take a potato and bake it in her hand and make it taste like chocolate. But people don't ever... I mean, who cares? No and make it taste like chocolate but people don't ever i mean who cares no matter how much you like chocolate like neem karoli was it neem no was it neem karoli baba no maybe it was maharishi who took like a bunch of acid and it didn't

nothing happened nothing happened yeah maybe i don't know but definitely neem karoli baba and you know so but i say to them, those very friends, I say, well, do you believe some of those Neem Krollibaba stories about him knowing what was happening with your family in the States, which you didn't even know about yet? They said, oh, absolutely, because that's the mind. That's not materiality. But if you ask somebody who has studied it, they'll say,

what they do is they say you know material stuff is said to be made of earth air water and space or if they're water and fire in space and they can separate the elements so apparently when somebody like tp mod looks at that wall she sees the space that's what she goes through and it seems like a it seems like almost like a less cultured or sophisticated attainment than your mind being able to you know it's it's considered very it's like fundamental in a way so um i don't get why it's so uh bizarre to people compared to the other bizarre things that we experience and accept yeah i guess it's a it's how you it's how you frame it right i mean it's

so beyond our imagination to you know believe that somebody could do that but you know and we could go down that rabbit hole for a long time that's that's crazy stuff but we should land this plane um we'll get we'll get back to the more grounded space here you know people there's a lot of people that listen to this that are into meditation. They're into mindfulness practices. There's also a lot of people that flirt with the idea and don't actually do it. So somebody's listening to this, and they're like, you know, the time is now. I'm ready.

I'm down with Sharon. How can I begin this journey? How can you kickstart somebody into this adventure? I think these days there's so many ways. You can get Dan Harris' app, for example, 10% Happier, or another app, you know, that you feel interested in, or a book, or a class. You know, I think the important thing is just enough clarity in the beginning

so you don't torture yourself by ideas of what should be happening. And that doesn't take much. But some reassuranceurance like, yes, it's normal to be thinking. It's okay that you always get distracted. You can just begin again. That's the point. And with that, then it's a question of your own practice. And so I usually say, maybe whatever's comfortable for you, 15 minutes a day for a month, 10 minutes a day for a month, just do that you know and then you'll see if you want to do it yeah make a commitment that's reasonable yeah you know that's not so outlandish that you're going to abandon it three days in um and then you know

create a little accountability around it i mean you talk about this a lot like you know tell people this is what you're going to do and and and get yourself on the hook you know what i mean so that at least there's a little you know not shame but like you know you're going to do and get yourself on the hook. You know what I mean? So that at least there's a little, you know, not shame, but like, you know, you're going to feel like, you know, you're a little emotionally invested in this and there's some support for you, you know, and if you don't have anybody in your town or whatever, or any friends that are going to be of like mind, then seek it virtually, you know, use that computer in your pocket and find groups online. And these apps have accountability built into them as well, like reminders and, you know use that computer in your pocket and and find groups online and and these

apps have accountability built into them as well like reminders and you know little things like that that can that can allow you to do that do you have like a a loving kindness practice that you could kind of share somebody could that somebody could walk away from this and start to do sure i mean uh the simplest one is probably choose two or three phrases that are the gift you would like to give to yourself. Like, may I be peaceful? May I calm down? But they need to be big enough so you can then use pretty much

the same phrases for others. So that's why people use things like may I be happy, may I be peaceful. And just sit quietly for a few moments and make that offering to yourself. And just keep repeating the phrases. Your mind will wander everywhere. Don't worry about that. You can let go of the distractions one by one. It's okay.

And just come back to the phrases. Don't count on some tremendous feeling coming up. Just do it a little bit. Then think of somebody you really care about. Usually someone who's helped you. Even if you've never met them, they've inspired you. And offer the phrases to them. Even if the words don't seem perfect,

they're like a conduit for that way of connecting. And then, just for fun, have that person offer the phrases back to you so that you're in the position of the recipient yeah that's a weird feeling yeah right yeah that brings up all kinds of weird emotions it does you know it's interesting when you do that yeah so i just gave you a very provocative exercise rather than one that's good what about like you know sometimes like i'll develop a resentment against somebody else and and it will like monopolize my thinking. And it really

undermines the quality of my day or my week. Right. So, you know, in recovery, they say like, you know, pray for that person, like wish them well. So there's a I'm sure there's a loving kindness version of that where you're like wishing well on that person because you're the one who's suffering as a result of that resentment. Right. And the path to freedom is by decoupling yourself from that emotion. Exactly. And I wouldn't neglect, in that case, loving kindness for yourself. I would intermingle it. Either start with yourself and move to that person

or do yourself together. May we be happy. May we be peaceful. Because you're right. Of course, resentment is such a corrosive, relentless feeling. And it's so obsessive. It's like the amount of time any of us can spend going through the list of someone's faults. And then we go through it again, and again, and again, and then again. And it's very tiring. Beautiful. I think we did it.

All right. How do you feel? I feel great. You feel good? Yeah. Awesome. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time. The work you do is very meaningful, and I hope that you continue to do it. The new book is fantastic. Everybody should pick it up, along with the other 8 billion books that you've written. You've written, what, 10 now? This is number 10. This is number 10, right? And you have a podcast, right? I seem to, yeah.

The Meta Hour, right? The Meta Hour, yeah. So it's really great. In the course of preparing for this, I listened to a bunch of episodes and I really enjoyed it. So that's very cool as well. And in the course of rolling out this book, I'm sure you're going to be out in the world

in a way that you probably aren't usually. Do you have some speaking engagements coming up? Can people just find that on your website? Yeah, it's all on my website. Right. So, awesome. Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, thank you.

So, SharonSalzburg.com is the place to find everything that's going on with an E. Salzburg with an E. And you're Sharon Salzburg on all the social media stuff right cool so yeah if you're digging on sharon connect with her there and pick up her book right thank you cool awesome sharon thank you peace let's yeah man that's what i'm talking about i love that that conversation. She is the best. I hope you guys enjoyed it as well. Sharon is just, she's a gem. She's a national treasure, a wonderful person. Definitely check out her new book, Real Love, The Art of Mindful Connection, and check out her other

books as well, as well as her podcast. I've got all of that stuff listed and linked in the show notes for you guys. And if you guys aren't checking out the show notes that I put together, uh, with the help of Jason cameo, we, we spent a lot of time like compiling all these resources to, uh, help you further connect with each of the guests. So please make a point of going to richroll.com and going to the episode page for today's episode. And also the past episodes, I think you guys can really take your education and your infotainment beyond the earbuds with the resources that we put together on a weekly basis. All right, a few thoughts on love and sharing before I let you guys go today. I mean, look, there's very few people in the world who are going to argue with the fact that we need a little bit more love for each other in this crazy planet during these insane

times. But let's start with ourselves. It's like what Sharon said in the beginning of the podcast, that it's up to us that this capacity for love resides within us. And if you've got nothing going on good inside of yourself, then you're not going to be able to extend yourself to others. You're not going to be able to exude that love and compassion or be able to share that love with another. You're not going to be able to be of service to be helpful to your fellow human or your loved ones. So like I've said before, if you want to be of service to anybody else, you've got to have your own house in order. And this is not about being perfect.

None of us are perfect. Of course, myself included. But the more compassionate that we can become towards ourselves, the more that we can kind of cultivate self-love, then the more compassionate we can be. We can make ourselves available to other people. And that ain't going to make the world worse, people. I can promise you that. Hey, you guys know about our meal planner? Not to shift gears here, but I got to tell you about this.

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been amazing. And I'm so proud to be able to offer all of you guys out there something that is so helpful and also incredibly affordable. All of this is available to you for just $1.90 a week. also incredibly affordable. All of this is available to you for just $1.90 a week. Unbelievable, right? Feedback's been amazing. I love the fact that so many of you are sharing the recipes that you're creating and doing that on Instagram and Facebook, et cetera. So if you're struggling with how to put together a plant-based program on the daily, this might be for you. So go to meals.richroll.com or just click on meal planner on my website. You can see it right there up at the top. Plant Power Ireland. It's coming up quick here, you guys. We've got a few spots left. Pick them up while they're hot. July 24th through 31,

Ballyvalon. This incredible manor on 90 acres in County Cork. It's going to be extraordinary. Seven days of transformation with Julie and I. We're going to cook. It's going to be extraordinary. Seven days of transformation with Julie and I. We're going to cook. We're going to eat. We're going to run. We're going to meditate. We're going to do tea ceremony. We're going to have super intense workshops on everything from relationships to creativity to nutrition to athletic performance. And we're just going to commune. We're going to create community around these ideas that are so important to us. We've done a couple of these retreats. They've been extraordinary experiences, life-changing experiences for the people that have attended, and it feels really great to be able to connect with this tribe, this community that's slowly

growing, and this is how we change lives. This is how we make an impact on culture. It's one person at a time. And Julie and I just love doing these events. We're looking forward to this. Like I said, there's a few spots left for this trip. So if this sounds like your divine appointment, sounds like something you would be into, go to ourplantpowerworld.com. All the information is there and you can sign up there. If you guys would like to receive a free weekly email from me, I send one out every Thursday. It's called roll call five or six things that have inspired me or that have informed me or that have made me think or a product that I've used, usually documentaries, newspaper articles, long reads. I don't know a whole bunch of cool stuff.

Just basically my only rule is, oh, is this cool? Is this something I'd like to share with the podcast community, with the community of people that are following along on this journey that we're on collectively and together? And I send it out. Like I said, it's free. There's no hitch. There's no affiliate links in there. I'm not trying to sell you anything. Just good stuff. So you can sign up for that anywhere on my website, any of those places where you just type in your email address, or you can go to richroll.com forward slash subscribe. Have you guys picked up Julie's new book?

This cheese is nuts. It's killing it out there. The reviews are amazing. It's selling like crazy. People are really enjoying it. So proud of the work that she put into this amazing book. And I really think it holds the power to transform lives. So if you listen to my two-part Ditch Dairy series with Dr. Neil Bernard and also with Julie, I don't know, if that's not going to convince you as to why you need to get off dairy, then I don't know what to

tell you. But Julie's book is the path forward. It shows you in very simple terms how to create these unbelievably delicious plant-based cheeses so you don't have to let go of that creamy deliciousness that you're used to. So check that out. What else can I tell you? If you'd like to support this show and my work, there's a couple simple, easy, free ways to do that. It won't take up any of your time. Share it with your friends and on social media. Post your favorite episode.

Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. And if you're going to do one thing, click subscribe. That's the most important thing. As a matter of fact, grab your friend's phone, open the podcast app, and subscribe to them. I'm not past that kind of stuff, you guys. phone, open the podcast app and subscribe them. I'm not past that kind of stuff. You guys. Uh, also I've got a Patreon set up for those of you who want to support my work, uh, financially and much love to everybody who has done that. Like I said, uh, it was the last episode or a couple episodes ago. I am taking a hard look at Patreon and trying to figure out, um, what I can offer

to those of you who are patronizing me in that manner with additional content that's sort of behind the velvet rope beyond the podcast. Maybe it's doing a periodic ask me anything episode that only Patreon subscribers have access to or something like that. I'm thinking about it. I'm definitely going to figure this out soon. I'll keep you posted on that. That's it, you guys.

Have a great couple days. I'll be back with you soon. I'll keep you posted on that. That's it, you guys. Have a great couple days. I'll be back with you soon. I want to thank everybody who put on today's podcast, Jason Camiello for audio engineering and production, help with the show notes and the WordPress page, Sean Patterson for help on graphics, not just help. He created all the graphics. Thank you, Sean. And theme music, as always, by Anna Lemma. But most of all, I want to thank Sharon Salzberg, beautiful soul, fantastic conversation. Hope you guys got a lot out of that and are left with much to think about when it comes to love and meditation and how we navigate our lives on planet earth. Love wide, love deep. see you guys soon peace plants Thank you.