Sharon Salzberg: Beginning Anew

Tami Simon: Today I speak with Sharon Salzberg, one of America’s leading meditation teachers. Sharon is a cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, and the author of many books, including “The Kindness Handbook, as well as several Sounds True audio learning programs, including, “Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience,” and “Guided Meditations for Love and Wisdom.”

Today we speak with Sharon in a very warm conversation about some of the insights she has had in her nearly four decades of a life of practice.

Tami Simon: Sharon, thanks for joining us here at Insights at the Edge. My job is to find out what your current edge is.

Sharon Salzberg: [Laughs] Does everyone laugh when you ask them that?

Tami Simon: No, not everybody. Some people have refused to admit that they have an edge. They don’t have an edge–they’re beyond edges. Some people are like, “Why are you making me uncomfortable. You didn’t tell me that was the object of this conversation.” But I’m curious [to know], if you do feel that there’s an edge for you. And what I mean by that is twofold: one, what you’re working on professionally that’s exciting for you. And then the second part, what, maybe, is taking your interest and attention internally. So, both.

Sharon Salzberg: Hmmh, well, externally, I think I’ve had some amazing opportunities in pretty recent times to be working with and teaching whole different kinds of populations of people. I did a program with the Garrison Institute for a number of years, which was offering trainings in meditation and yoga to domestic violence shelter workers. And it was really a project about working with vicarious trauma. To look at the characters themselves and the often phenomenal stress that they’re working with and under, and help provide what one person called a culture of wellness.

So that was an incredible project. We went from the frontline workers to directors and supervisors and finally executive directors. It was both incredibly touching to me to hear the stories of these people, mostly women, but not all women, who every day face a kind of suffering that we would all rather have tucked nicely away and not have to face, and who try to deal with it in their personal lives and not have it overcome them and define them, and whose care for others is so extraordinary and who have maybe not so many tools for caring for themselves. So that’s been an incredible thing, and I’m intrigued to see where that might go as people have a greater understanding of vicarious trauma and the kinds of experiences that nurses and relief workers and international refugee workers and all kinds of people are going through

Tami Simon: Let’s just explore that for one moment, Sharon. I’ve never heard that phrase before, “vicarious trauma.” So you mean people who have worked with other people who have that trauma and then experience that trauma themselves?

Sharon Salzberg: Yes, the phrase vicarious trauma is exactly that. It’s almost on a continuum of stress. It’s not really burnout, but something beyond burnout where your very sense of meaning and wholeness as a person is affected because of the trauma that you’re facing each day. I remember one of the women in the first retreat that we did was saying, “I can never tell my partner the things that I hear every day, the things that I see every day. I can never talk about it. I can never tell anyone. They’re too disturbing. They’re too horrible.” She was in a place where she was experiencing that kind of isolation and sense of being cut off and not knowing where to turn that was even beyond burnout, affecting her every day. So vicarious trauma is a current term that makes a lot of sense from the things that we ourselves witness.

Tami Simon: And obviously it makes sense that we can care for ourselves better if we’re caregivers if we have a meditation practice and a way to relax and renew. But I’m curious. How do you see meditation helping with the phenomenon of trauma?

Sharon Salzberg: I did an afternoon about a year ago at Walter Reed Hospital for nurses, because it was national or international nurses week. And I have a friend who’s a nurse there, so she invited me to do a program. There were many presenters and programs being given that week for the nurses. And before I did the afternoon she gave me a tour of one of the wards there. Of course it was extremely intense and provocative and painful to witness these young people and their families. It was so intense, and so at the end of the tour she said to me, “You know the nurses who can stay here—continue to serve here–are not the ones who get lost in sorrow. The nurses who stay here are the ones who can connect the resiliency of the human spirit.” And that’s the link. It’s not just meditation as a sort of calming tool, although it is that, and not just in terms of relaxation, but to connect to something larger that will give us a profound sense of resiliency—resiliency of the human spirit so that we’re not lost in sorrow. So that, I think, is the skill that I would so much love to share.

Tami Simon: And can you be more explicit about how meditation leads to resiliency—or can lead to resiliency?

Sharon Salzberg: Yes. I think it’s in a few different ways. One is even just the training of awareness, so we’re not so scattered and shattered and overcome. And one is in the deepening of mindfulness so that we can understand the difference between what we’re actually experiencing right now and what we may be adding onto it, like sort of a helpless projecting into the future—it’s going to be even worse tomorrow, worse the day after—whatever we might tend to do. To notice how if we make a mistake that we can actually begin again. We don’t have to heap humiliation on top of the mistake. So mindfulness is really a way of returning us to our experience, even if the experience is difficult. It’s less difficult than if we’re adding all of these sort of habitual tendencies of projection into the future and comparing to the past, and being lost in tunnel vision.

I also remember, sort of in this light, doing a presentation once with Zainab Salbi who’s the founder of Women for Women International, which is an organization where people can sign up for a certain amount a month and sponsor a woman, usually in a war-torn country, you know Rwanda or Afghanistan or someplace. And Zainab said in her talk she had come back from Afghanistan and she was going around and describing the program in these venues and she kept telling the story of this woman who’d been brutalized and raped and had horrible, horrible things happen to her and Zainab said it was only much later that when she looked at what she had done that she realized that, “Oh I forgot to say the woman was an attorney. I forgot to say she was accomplished. I forgot to say there were these other parts of her that I wasn’t highlighting, I wasn’t elevating, and Zainab said for her that was a lesson on compassion to try to look at the whole person in the light as well as the dark and have a much more holistic sense of somebody and not to get just mired in the incredible pain, but to see that in the biggest context possible, so I think that’s actually like mindfulness or awareness.

I think also compassion is its own support. When we hit the right note of compassion and we’re not just lost in sorrow it connects us to a really big picture of life, almost like a feeling like we’re all in this together. So you don’t feel so distinctly responsible for making someone else’s suffering go away, but you understand that we are all in this together. I think it is its own kind of resiliency.

Tami Simon: Mmm Hmm. Well, very good. So now in terms of your insights at the edge, your own sort of personal process here.

Sharon Salzberg: [Laughs] Well, actually, when I got a note from one of your producers for the CD of the guided meditations, and the note came from someone in the marketing department who said something like, “Her bio says she’s been practicing meditation for like 38 years. That can’t possibly be true. Can you please check it out?” So that brought me to an age. And actually, it was a very important moment, because I find in a funny way like in my own practice, I find myself almost like wanting to go back to the beginning—I want to just sit and feel my breath, the very first meditation I ever learned. And have things be very clean and simple and structured.

When I think of it as 38 years I’m more surprised than your marketing department. [laughs] I think, that can’t be! It can’t be true, so I’m trying not to hold it in that context, but to really get back to basics and for some reason that’s very fulfilling to me.

Tami Simon: What does that mean, getting back to basics?

Sharon Salzberg: I think really it’s like relying on technique and the simplest of techniques—really just like sitting down and feeling my breath or even counting my breath, which I haven’t done in probably 35 years, and just taking a few moments now and then, aside from a regular sitting each day, but just stopping and feeling my breath and not applying more complicated metaphysics or a different set of learning to things. And really just like I just walked in the gates of the monastery in Bogdaya in India and started my practice, and it feels really good.

Tami Simon: I can imagine someone thinking, “Okay, hold on a second, 38 years later you’re going back, so what’s the frickin’ point? Why progress for 38 years to go back to the simple techniques?”

Sharon Salzberg: Well, of course, the technique is just the style. I never think of progress as linear anyway. I think it’s like a spiral. That we’re always kind of circling around and circling around, and circling around. The very first thing I did in that meditation retreat all those years ago, in January of 1971, was take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. You know I sometimes think if I really understood what that meant it wouldn’t be like the beginning. It would be the culmination of a path. We always go round and round.

Tami Simon: It is interesting, even if it’s a spiral, the spiral has some movement, some directionality. But that question that I think people can ask, which is—I’ve been doing this practice–am I progressing? How would I know? How does someone know?

Sharon Salzberg: Oh I think you know. The best way to know is not what happens in the formal period of practice but in your life. Are you happier? Are you able to let go more when your plane is late? When you find your mind starting to spin out? What’s the level of compassion and graciousness with which you can unstuck and come back to the moment?

I notice in traveling now I have a sort of mantra that I adopt when my mind starts to spin out like “Whoooo my plane is late, I’m not going to arrive in Portland till midnight. What if there are no cabs—the Portland airport is probably really small.” I see that and I kind of laugh. And my mantra is, “Something’ll happen.”

And I think it’s really throughout one’s life. Especially, going back over and over again in my teaching to this idea of beginning again. You know, okay, I blew it; I can start over. I got distracted; I can start over. I forget; I can start over. And I think the way in which we start over and how quickly we’re able to start over really says a lot about progress in the practice.

Tami Simon: Now, Sharon I’m curious–we’re going to track back in history about how you
became “the kindness lady”?

Sharon Salzberg: [Laughs] Thank you. I always think that’s very funny. It’s better than being the anger lady.

Tami Simon: Here you are a mediation teacher and you can tell us how you got attracted to the dharma, but then I’d love to hear then from that point how you became what I’m calling the kindness lady, the premiere teacher of loving kindness.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I went to Burma in 1985 and I went specifically to what are called the four brahmaviharas. It’s loving kindness and compassion and sympathetic joy, which is joy in the happiness of others, and equanimity, which is balance of mind. So I went specifically to do those four practices, and when I came back I began teaching them and this is probably before many people, if anybody in the West, was really focusing on teaching these particular practices. Buddhism in general is an insight practice and very much relies on the flourishing of insight in terms of transformation. I think the general perspective in the West was that the brahmaviharas are kind of nice, but not very important, maybe, and there I was teaching them and still teaching them and still teaching them and I finally wrote the book, “Loving Kindness” and so everything kind of flowed from there.

Now, of course, it’s very different in terms of how these practices are held. In part I think about—I’m kind of famous in some circles for—I think it was 1990, 1989 one of these years when I was in Dharamsala when one of the mind and life conferences of the Dalai Lama, and I had a chance to ask him a question, so I said, “Oh your holiness, what do you think about self-hatred?” And he didn’t know what I was talking about. And there was all this buzz in the room and it was really quite funny, and he said, “People like that, are they very violent?” and he said, “Is it some kind of mental disorder?” and he had no idea. And it was really quite fun, because the translators, who were westerners got very animated and were trying to explain to him how so many western people heard certain aspects of Buddhist teaching like right effort and strive on with diligence, and how those words often entered a tremendous pool of self-judgment and self-condemnation within us. It was quite instructive.

That was one moment in time, and now when the Dalai Lama is speaking, almost every single time he’ll say something. Then he’ll say, “Of course, if you have a problem with low self-esteem then this would be seen differently. And here’s this other thing and this other perspective and this other way you should view it.” So I was very amused by that.

Tami Simon: Now Sharon why would low self-esteem or the phenomenon of self-hatred not be something that would be experienced widely in the Tibetan or Eastern context? Why is that only a Western phenomenon?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I think—I don’t want to glamorize Asian culture—but in terms of that particular issue, there’s a very deep sense that is quite different. If we really discovered who we actually are within the Eastern context—certainly within the Buddhist context—we’d find Buddha nature. And so I’ve heard the Dalai Lama say that. Even in that one conference, he was quite puzzled and he’d say, “But how can you think of yourself like that? You have Buddha nature.” So it’s this idea that fundamentally we all have a capacity for understanding, for growth, for love and compassion, and no one is left out of this vision of possibility. It may be a capacity that’s very unrealized and covered over or buried, but it’s there, and so it’s a whole different view of who we fundamentally are.

Tami Simon: But, I mean, there must also be parenting patterns that would also be distinct. Do you know what I mean? That would create this low self-esteem that is very common in the West.

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, there probably are, but what I got from his was really just that kind of fundamental belief, which–it’s like we breathe it in. If we really knew who we were it would be quite regrettable and somehow debased, guilty or whatever that might be, and it just permeates the culture, actually.

Tami Simon: Now when you wrote your book on faith—our discussion about this self-evident Buddha nature leads me to that—tell me what was your inspiration to write that.

Sharon Salzberg: It was very funny. I was having a conversation with a friend—he was also a writer—and because loving kindness at that time expressed so much of what had been important to me and what I dedicated my time to. So this friend said to me, “What do you do when your first book expresses your whole life’s work and you want to keep writing?” And I said to him, “I guess you look deeper.” So I began looking deeper, and I thought well, if there’s something that’s actually more fundamental to what my sense of what my path has been than loving kindness it would be faith, so I decided to write the book.

Tami Simon: And what do you mean by that word, faith?

Sharon Salzberg: The way that I used it is sort of in the sense—the classic Buddhist sense—it’s to place your heart upon, to offer your heart. And the way that I used it was very much in the sense of moving from an abstract sense of possibility, like somebody saying, “Hey you have Buddha nature,” and you’re thinking, “Oh that’s nice,” to moving closer to the center of that possibility, so that it’s the movement to actualize one’s own capacity. So it’s not standing on the sidelines and it’s not thinking, “Oh, you know, great for the Buddha, it’s too bad I live in New York,” or whatever, but it’s really saying I want to find out what I can do, what’s possible for me and very much has the sense of movement or stirring.

Tami Simon: What has tested your own faith?

Sharon Salzberg: Oh, so many things have tested my faith.

Tami Simon: [I mean] like big ones?

Sharon Salzberg: I should say my faith has been tested by different things at different times. I don’t think I’ve ever really felt completely torn asunder from, say, the Buddhist Teaching. I certainly had very little faith in myself in the beginning of my path. But I had enough to get to India, so that’s all that counts. But I think that that was probably the most strident thing in the beginning. Can I really do this? Is this really possible? And there was enough. So, yes, I can do this.

What I wrote about in the book was a time some ways into my practice when I felt just totally overcome by suffering and pain, not physical pain, but emotional pain. I felt like I had nothing in my arsenal, like nothing that could really move me along and help me get out of it. As I tried desperately to strategize and think my way through to how I can manipulate this experience so it didn’t hurt so much. It was actually there—it was only going back to the essentials, being somewhat kind to myself and to be aware of what’s going on and in effect reweaving some strands of connection, because I defined and experienced the opposite of faith is really being in kind of despair, of feeling totally cut off. So I slowly rewove some connectedness back and felt myself emerge from that period.

Tami Simon: What was interesting to me—I read that section on faith and despair–was a couple things. One that it happened when you were 20 years into your life as a mediator. Some idea people might have that after two decades you would be beyond the potential to be that despair filled. I’m curious what you have to say about that.

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, it was rather shocking to me, too [laughs heartily]. I didn’t think that was going to happen. But maybe some of it depends upon what one holds as one of the ultimate goals of the path. Somebody just said to me just the other day they didn’t think they could really ever teach anybody because it was so hard for them—their practice was so hard and they had so many struggles. And I said well, that’s what makes a good teacher, if you just like sit down and you take a few breaths and you’re awash in brilliant white light, and you float off into the air, you’re really not of use to anybody, you know, because most people don’t have that experience, and so if ultimately your practice is not just about yourself, but is also in larger dedication to others, maybe 20 or 30 or 40 years into your practice to have a really difficult time is not such a bad thing either.

Tami Simon: In terms of the benefit it might be able to bring to other people.

Sharon Salzberg: Um hmm.

Tami Simon: The other thing that I think was curious in this chapter was you talked about how this despair arose in the midst of a mediation retreat. The reason that’s interesting to me is sometimes people have this idea that meditation will be the all-bringing-of-peace factor, and here something was sort of archeologically dug up in your experience that was actually quite painful. So I’m curious about that, too, your view of meditation as a ticket to peace?

Sharon Salzberg: [Laughs] I think it’s better seen as a ticket to freedom. It depends upon how you define peace, but it comes and goes. Certainly pleasure comes and goes and is not necessarily really indicative of anything, but there’s a deeper peace from integrating the wholeness of one’s being and all these very, very difficult experiences as well.

I would also say very little surprises me anymore, which is not necessarily a bad thing either and that there’s a kind of humility about the path that I think is also very good. It’s also what I meant by a spiral. I think that it’s not so different from times people have said to me, “Wow, I can’t believe I’m still angry about my divorce from twenty years ago. I thought I was way over that.” These things just come up and they have residue and we work with them.

Tami Simon: When you say meditation more as a ticket to freedom, what do you mean? What kind of freedom is that?

Sharon Salzberg: I think of it largely in terms of relationship, how we’re relating to what our experience is. Just because the word peace can be so confusing, it doesn’t necessarily mean placid and serene, but it might mean not being caught up and defined by and identifying with some troubling thing that has come up.

As one of my Tibetan teachers Sakyam Rimpoche said, it’s not the thoughts that are the problems, it’s the glue. It’s the way we glue ourselves to them and they glue themselves to us and suddenly we’re lost in tremendous tunnel vision and our whole sense of who we are, all that we’ll ever be, just collapses around this one thing, this terrible feeling or this certain thought. And yet it’s all part of a passing show and we don’t need to have that collapse, so in a way I think that’s what progress is.

Tami Simon: Here in 2009 a lot of people are experiencing an increase in the general instability of their lives, whether that’s from economic pressures or just the speed at which their life might be changing and I’m curious about what you have to say about faith in the context of that fear and anxiety that people may be experiencing in an increasing way.

Sharon Salzberg: I’d like to think that as difficult and painful as it genuinely is for a lot of people that we can do what we each individually can do to reorient our priorities and to have a different sense of what counts. I think of Wendell Berry who said the smallest unit of health is a community, and just the way the predominant ethic, certainly in this country, has gone, there can be very little sense of community and such a tremendous drive toward acquiring and having. I’m not talking about having what one needs, which is very important, but kind of beyond that we have an opportunity to turn some things around.

We need faith, not that everything will be perfect or that it doesn’t matter what’s going on right now. I think it does matter, but we can have faith in exploring other means of happiness and a different sense of interconnection. We can find a vision of the world that is true, which is that we’re all connected and we all depend on one another and start from there.

Tami Simon: When you quote Wendell Berry about the value of a community and the health of a community, what is it that you’re envisioning?

Sharon Salzberg: I think that somebody told me a story about when they were organizing in the last presidential campaign for Barack Obama and that there were people that were going out—and I think it was Indiana—they knocked on someone’s door, and the guy answered and was grumpy and said, “I don’t vote, I’m not interested in voting.” And they went away and then thought, “Nah, we’re going back.” And they went back and he was just as grumpy and dismissive and said, “Go away, I’m not interested in voting,” and they went back I don’t know how many times and finally he said, “I’m going to tell you the truth. The reason I’m not interested in voting is because I can’t read or write.” And they said, “We’re going to teach you.” And I thought how many of us know if our neighbors can read or write? Do we actually know one another and do we pay attention to one another? Wouldn’t it be incredible if we didn’t have to buy a yet bigger TV or do whatever we might be accustomed to doing and actually join with one another for everyone’s benefit in some way? So I think of that story quite a lot.

Tami Simon: That’s an incredible story. Let’s say someone is just feeling a lot of fear about their personal situation, the amount of change that’s occurring in their life or the economic pressures that they’re under. How do you suggest they work with that?

Sharon Salzberg: First of all, I think everyone needs to keep breathing. These are fearful times. It’s not unreasonable to be quite anxious and afraid. It’s not just make believe and not just manufactured by one’s mind. There are fearful times. But when we get caught in that loop, then again we get a kind of tunnel vision and can’t see what’s possible or positive and we can’t be creative in that moment of being caught. We don’t understand if we have options because we don’t even see them. And so really to breathe and try to ground that energy. Because another thing about fear is it’s a lot of energy. But it’s very wild and ungrounded and jagged and just going all over the place. So to do our best to ground that energy so we can see what’s in front of us and see what options there are always and to understand the movement of life. That everything is always changing and that sometimes we get lost in fear because we forget that—not changes and only loss, it’s also beginnings and renewals and new doors opening and things like that.

Tami Simon: Well said. Beginning anew.

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, beginning anew.

Tami Simon: So Sharon, over the years that I’ve known you I’ve heard you tell remarkable stories of the teachers that you’ve met and the experiences that you’ve had with various teachers. So, first of all, do you seek out teachers? How have you had so many remarkable experiences with so many remarkable teachers?

Sharon Salzberg: Except for the very early beginnings of my meditation practice in India, no, I haven’t sought out teachers, I’ve just found them.

Tami Simon: Okay, so tell me about that. What do you mean you’ve just found them?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, sometimes I would want a teacher in a certain sense of the word. Like when Sida Upandis’s Burmese meditation teacher came to the Insight Meditation Society in 1984 I was going to sit a three-month retreat with him and I wanted a teacher to guide me through that period of practice. I’d heard he had a great body of knowledge and he had guided many people through the particular style of meditation, so we invited him but I didn’t expect a very profound relationship, necessarily, with him, and yet from the moment I saw him I felt, “Oh, there’s really something very strong here.” Or when I went to Paris in 1990 or so and Surya Das, who was an old friend, who I’d actually gone to college with, said to me, “Oh one of my teachers, Nerolchel(?)Kan(?) Rimpoche is here, do you want to meet him?” and I said, “Sure,” and the moment I walked into the room I felt this extraordinary connection to him. That’s what I mean by it just sort of happens.

Tami Simon: It seems though that this recognition that you’ve had with various teachers has been really important to you. What would you say happens in those relationships that has been so critical to your own unfolding?

Sharon Salzberg: I think it’s an environment of trust, where I’m able to go to the edge, so to speak, more, of my experience because I feel like I’m in the context of their care and incredible depth of knowledge and wisdom and so that kind of second guessing or hesitancy or taking a half step instead of three doesn’t really happen with a strong teacher that I really trust, and there’s been tremendous love. It’s an extraordinary relationship.

Tami Simon: Um hmm. It does seem that the relationship with a dharma teacher has certain love qualities, and I’m curious what you think about that.

Sharon Salzberg: In Tibetan tradition they say things like you should examine a teacher for like five years before you establish that particular relationship with them because you have to trust their motivation and feel like they’re not teaching for the sake of their ego or great wealth or something like that. If you have examined them very critically then that’s the point, not before, to enter into that kind of relationship because they don’t see it as just like learning typing or something. It is a very intense connection in which you really become quite vulnerable to their motivation. So have to feel that they’re not trying to get something from you, but that their relationship is about your own liberation. That’s an extraordinary feeling of love. That it’s not even an exchange, actually, that this other person is there completely for you. It’s quite remarkable.

Tami Simon: I know a lot of Sounds True listeners have asked the question of Sounds True, “I’ve purchased various CDs and books that have taught me how to meditate, but do I need a teacher to really progress or can I just learn from a book or learn from a CD?” So what’s your response to that?

Sharon Salzberg: I think the situation in our current time in our culture is that many people will not have that kind of teacher-student relationship or not have it very often, and that’s actually okay. I think that there’s a way in which we most ultimately depend on our own practice anyway and that there’s great wisdom and insight and also I think a sincere meditation practice is like a self-correcting process. There’s times I look back and I think well, I was really way out of balance. I was trying much too hard or I wasn’t trying nearly hard enough. And I question, would I have seen that anyway just as I continued on with my practice, and I actually believe I would have, but having a teacher at those times also made that kind of understanding and the need to rebalance very clear, not always in comfortable ways. Like a teacher could well say, “Hey, you’re trying kind of hard, aren’t you.” So I think you could relax in some manner. So it’s not always very comfortable but is hastens some understandings, but will we have the understanding anyway? I actually believe we will.

Tami Simon: That’s interesting the idea of the self-correcting mechanism. That sounds a little bit like even a kind of faith.

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, well, I think there needs to be some kind of understanding, too, because you can set out on a course of meditation say, and have a lot of wrong understanding and just punish yourself like if you have the thought, “I shouldn’t have thoughts, like thoughts are coming up in my mind—like I’m a disgrace. I mean I can’t meditate at all. This is just terrible,” then first of all it’s untrue and second of all a sure-fire way to really suffer a lot as you sit there and think anyway. So I think there needs to be a context of some genuine understanding of what to expect and what the meditation will bring and will not bring and then past that I think it really will self correct.

Tami Simon: Do you have people come to you and say, “Sharon will you be my teacher,” and throw themselves down on the ground?

Sharon Salzberg: [Laughs] Yes, I do.

Tami Simon: And how do you respond? How do you assess the situation? Is it individual?

Sharon Salzberg: No, I think the way my life is it’s not really in that old-fashioned sense of a teacher. It’s not something that really happens for me because I travel, and I think most of my work is really more introducing new people or writing or something like that as compared to that kind of particular teacher-student relationship. Although some people probably think of me as their teacher. They do many retreats with me or something like that.

Tami Simon: Do you feel responsibility to people who ask you, “Will you be my teacher?” and is there some sense of what you’ve taken on?

Sharon Salzberg: I don’t really ever say yes [laughs].

Tami Simon: What do you say?

Sharon Salzberg: I mean not in that old sense of the word. I say well, I don’t really do that or I’m traveling a lot. I think if you come to retreats we’ll get to know each other, I’ll try to help you with your practice, but I don’t really have that kind of relationship with people.

Tami Simon: Umm Hmm, Interesting. Okay, just one final question. I can imagine somebody listening and hearing about beginning anew and thinking, “I like that idea and I’d like to approach my life with a fresh start, but I just feel terrible about myself for x, y, z reason and what you said about asking the Dalai Lama that question about self-hatred, well that’s kind of where I am, so how do I get there?”

Sharon Salzberg: [Laughs}

Tami Simon: “I want to begin anew, but I can’t.”

Sharon Salzberg: I would say there’s a period of maybe reflection and study and looking at things, so, for example in the Buddhist teaching I’ve written about in several books, sometimes there’s a distinction made between what we would call remorse and what we’d call guilt, with remorse being a genuine pain, having behaved badly or whatever it might be—inability to forgive ourselves and move on. And guilt being more of lacerating self-hatred where we’re just stuck and we go over and over and over whatever it is we did or whatever character traits we think we have that are just unchanging and forever and who we really are. So I think understanding is a tremendous tool. First understanding that there’s a distinction, and that nothing is served by that kind of endless guilt. We just get exhausted and then we have nothing to give someone else because we’re so mired in that pain, and that being able to forgive ourselves and move on doesn’t mean that we’re perfect and that nothing we did was wrong but that we need to have the energy to be different in the future.

That kind of wisdom or understanding is a very important point, because when we don’t understand that distinction then there’s no impetus to really make a change. We’ll just stay in the guilt forever. Or to see the tendency of one’s mind when we’re very angry at ourselves—to see that kind of collapse—and how we may not remember the 50 other things that happened today, just that one where we were so terrible. Something like that. And I think if we set the stage like that then really the rest is just a process of practice. And certainly something like loving-kindness practice and loving kindness toward oneself would have a very big effect.

Tami Simon: It goes back the idea that insight can really create a change.

Sharon Salzberg: And I think it creates the context for change, because if we don’t understand that, we’re just going round and round—a pattern that doesn’t serve us and doesn’t serve others–then we have no ability to see clear, and I think that’s the hardest part sometimes–to understand, well, this is just destructive, I need to go through some process to not be so stuck here. But once we have that understanding then we can undertake the process.

Tami Simon: Very good. Well thank you Sharon, it’s been great to talk to you.

Sharon Salzberg: Thank you, it’s great to talk to you.