Sharon Salzberg — AOMGS 2024

Estimated read time: 1:20

Summary

Join Fleet Maul and Sharon Salzberg in an engaging session at the Art of Meditation Global Summit, where Sharon, a pioneer in meditation and author, delves into her journey and the impactful practice of loving-kindness meditation. With influences from various traditions and teachers like Goenka and the Dalai Lama, Sharon emphasizes the importance of love and connection in meditation. Her teachings intertwine insights from her experiences in India and her lifelong practice, providing valuable guidance on achieving inner peace and compassion through meditation. This session reflects her profound understanding of diverse meditation traditions and her focus on love as a central tenet of mindfulness.

Highlights

Fleet Maul introduces Sharon Salzberg, emphasizing her influence in the world of meditation and mindfulness. 🎤
Salzberg shares her journey to India and her studies under various meditation traditions. 🚀
Insight into the different teachings she has absorbed, particularly loving-kindness and its significance in modern practice. 🌿
Discussion on how loving-kindness helps counteract self-loathing and promotes self-compassion. 💪
Reflections on the interconnectedness and shared vulnerability of human experiences, a core theme in her teachings. 🔗

Key Takeaways

Sharon Salzberg is a meditation pioneer with over 45 years of experience, known for bringing mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation to mainstream Western culture. 🧘‍♀️
Salzberg's teachings are influenced by diverse traditions, including her studies with Goenka, Deepa Ma, and Tibetan teachers. 🌏
The practice of loving-kindness is essential for fostering connection, compassion, and inner peace. 💓
Salzberg emphasizes the importance of self-compassion and how it plays a critical role in effective meditation and mindfulness practice. 🤗
Her approach highlights the importance of understanding commonalities across meditation practices, regardless of their cultural origins. 🌐

Overview

Sharon Salzberg is celebrated as a meditation pioneer who masterfully blends mindfulness and loving-kindness into Western wellness culture. With a career spanning over four decades, she has been instrumental in making these ancient practices accessible and relatable. Known for her down-to-earth approach, Sharon has inspired countless individuals to pursue meditation and mindfulness for personal growth and healing.

In this engaging session with Fleet Maul, Sharon reflects on her personal journey, tracing back to her formative experiences in India. She recounts how diverse teachings from influential figures like Goenka and the Dalai Lama have shaped her understanding of meditation, underscoring the universality of core principles across different traditions. Sharon's stories highlight her commitment to spiritual exploration and the transformative power of loving-kindness meditation.

The session further explores the modern relevance of loving-kindness, particularly in addressing self-compassion and overcoming negative self-beliefs. Sharon passionately discusses how fostering compassion and interconnectedness can lead to profound inner peace and well-being. Her insights serve as a reminder of the potential within each of us to cultivate deeper connections with ourselves and others through mindful practices.

Chapters

00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and Welcome The Introduction and Welcome chapter begins with music that sets the stage for the session at the Art of Meditation Global Summit. The co-host, Fleet Maul, expresses excitement about the event and introduces his longtime friend and colleague, Sharon Salsberg, who is warmly welcomed.
00:30 - 10:00: Sharon Salzberg's Journey and Influences Sharon Salzberg is recognized as a meditation pioneer and an influential teacher and author. She is credited with introducing mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation into mainstream American culture over 45 years ago. Her work has inspired numerous meditation teachers and wellness influencers. Salzberg is known for her approachability and skill in demystifying meditation practices. This chapter explores her journey and influences that have shaped her work and contributed to her success.
10:00 - 19:00: Founding of Insight Meditation Society This chapter discusses the achievements of Sharon, co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society. It highlights her contributions as an author of 12 books, including bestsellers like 'Real Happiness' and 'Loving Kindness', as well as her latest work 'Real Life'. The chapter also notes the success of her podcast 'The Meta Hour', which has achieved over six million downloads, featuring interviews with leaders in mindfulness and related fields.
19:00 - 31:00: Importance of Loving-Kindness and Mindfulness This chapter discusses the long journey and experience of a meditation teacher whose career began shortly after college. This journey includes time spent in India and is notable for its foundation in the Insight Meditation tradition, particularly with a focus on loving-kindness meditation. The teacher is recognized for having studied with a diverse array of instructors across various traditions.
31:00 - 36:00: Four Brahma Viharas The chapter discusses influences on the author, particularly focusing on teachings around love and kindness. It mentions the impact of the Dalai Lama's teachings on compassion and asenka, a well-known teacher of 10-day vipassana retreats. The conversation suggests that these teachings have shaped the author's perspective and approach to the concept of the four Brahma Viharas, which include principles like love and compassion.
36:00 - 37:00: Closing Remarks The chapter titled 'Closing Remarks' provides insights into the speaker's experiences with various influential teachers. Two Indian teachers, Munindra and Deepa Ma, are mentioned as significant influences, with Deepa Ma being particularly impactful. Other influences include colleagues like Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield. The speaker also acknowledges studying with well-known Tibetan teachers such as K, Toan R, the great Zen Master To R, Ken R, and S R, a popular Toan teacher. The chapter emphasizes the diverse and rich array of spiritual and educational experiences that have shaped the speaker's journey.

Sharon Salzberg — AOMGS 2024 Transcription

00:00 - 00:30 [Music] [Music] hi welcome to another session here on day one of the art of meditation Global Summit my name is Fleet Maul your co-host for this session and I'm really thrilled to be here with my longtime friend and colleague Sharon salsberg welcome Sharon thank you so much
00:30 - 01:00 well we're just thrilled to have you be part of this Summit kind of can't imagine doing it without you so I'm going to share a bit of your bio although most of our audience I'm sure is very familiar with you already and then we'll jump right into the conversation Sharon salsberg is a meditation Pioneer well-renowned teacher and New York Times best-selling author she is one of the first to bring mindfulness and love and kindness meditation to mainstream American culture over 45 years ago inspiring generations of meditation teachers and wellness influencers with her relatable demystifying approach Sharon is
01:00 - 01:30 co-founder of the Insight Meditation society and the author of 12 books including the New York Times bestseller real happiness now in its second edition her seminal work loving kindness and her latest book real life the journey from isolation to openness and freedom released in April of this year her podcast The Meta hour has amassed six million downloads and features interviews with thought leaders from the mindfulness movement and Beyond so Sharon your um life as a practitioner
01:30 - 02:00 and and meditation teacher spans quite a few decades now and uh I know that your journey I believe your journey began almost right out of college going to India and um and interestingly you're you're known as a basus style meditation teacher in the Insight Meditation tradition and especially for your loving kindness uh uh meditation teachings and yet you've you've studied with a diverse array of teachers across Traditions um
02:00 - 02:30 if people want to I'm not going to ask you to go into this in detail if people want to go to your website Sharon salsberg doccom influences uh they can read all about this but I know as Holiness of Dal Lama has been very influential and his teachings on compassion I I would assume it somewhat inspired your focus on love and kindness as well um uh asenka the the well-known basa teacher with the the 10day style retreats that are well known
02:30 - 03:00 uh you studed with two Indian teachers munindra and Deepa ma uh I know you talk about Deepa ma frequently I think she was strong influence uh maybe sandita along with your colleagues Joseph Goldstein and Jack har maybe is the primary influence um but you've also studied with uh well-known Tibetan teachers like K and toan R the great Zan Master to R and and Ken R uh and S R who's a popular toan teacher out there
03:00 - 03:30 now and so I'm wondering with uh with these broad influences and all from the very beginning you've you've been exposed to these different traditions and continued to study with different teachers how you kind of became you know primarily situated within this V and loving kindness realm and not probably a lot of people don't even know how broad your study is and your influences are and um and maybe just kind of connect
03:30 - 04:00 the dots or maybe situate what you do within the broader connection of these influences around meditation Traditions yeah well it's it's a whole story um I went to India during college it was basically my J junior year abroad I went uh with an A year of independent study credit um coming to me from my time in India and I wrote The Proposal saying I'm going to study meditation so it was it was right up front front uh
04:00 - 04:30 but education was kind of Wild and Woolly in those days and they said sure um I had a a deep deep desire to learn how to meditate I had a feeling it would be within the Buddhist context uh just from a class I done Asian philosophy in college and uh I didn't know where to go I didn't know anything really and so um ended up in India which is you know where I was aiming for um and my first meditation teacher was actually Asen
04:30 - 05:00 goenka he had just left Burma um a lot of what we call vasar Insight Meditation uh is um really meaning the southern schools you know it means different things in different Traditions um certainly within Tibetan tradition as well but but uh largely I think in terms of the culture what we mean is Burma Thailand those countries and so going had just left Burma he was
05:00 - 05:30 in India he was teaching these 10-day Retreats uh and that's where I began um so where I met many of my friends by the way like Joseph Goldstein or ramas or uh any number of people um and he taught a method which is uh certainly classic of settling your attention for a few days on the feeling or the sensation of your breath because concentration is often the platform for larger expanse into Insight
05:30 - 06:00 Meditation and then after those three days of just being with the breath uh practicing for seven days of moving your attention throughout your body from the top of your head uh to your toes and what these days uh we would probably call the body scan popularized by John kevinson with the John starts at your toes I think and works his way up um and the whole idea a of of the Insight Meditation was uh
06:00 - 06:30 using often very simple sounding techniques in order to become more present more balanced more interested in your experience rather than judging it accepting or rejecting it accepting the sense of grabbing onto it um and because of that because we're paying attention differently Insight or wisdom would develop uh at the very end of of that first Retreat Goa let a loving meditation which is a a different
06:30 - 07:00 methodology and in um doing it it was almost like a ceremonial way of saying goodbye so that was actually my introduction to love and kindness meditation was January 1971 um and I was intrigued by it I thought what's that you know uh but I didn't have a way of getting further instruction you know guidance or whatever so I went on and did more courses with goano because you there would be a little Gap and then he teached another
07:00 - 07:30 course uh and then I was in India right so it was it was this kind of this is also I should say pre- interet you know no one had a cell phone no one had emails so uh what happened to me was really what was happening which was Word of Mouth you know somebody showed me a photo of Ky rache previous KY rache uh and I found his faith face arresting like captivating and he was at the other end of India and I thought I'm going to go there and discover what he has to say that's
07:30 - 08:00 how we lived um so I went there and then uh there entered for me a period of not very useful kind of doubt there can be very useful kind of doubt and questioning and insisting on seeing the truth for yourself but this was sort of useless and punishing which was I would sit and instead of meditating I would think which practice should I do the descriptions were very different the metaphysics were different clearly although I was not sophisticated enough
08:00 - 08:30 to understand it there was a core of things that were very very similar but I hadn't I wasn't there so I thought should I do this should I do that well I get enlightened faster doing this or do that well those people seem more enlightened than these people but then again I know those people better than I know these people if I knew these people what should I do this or so of course I was not meditating at all and uh it was like completely useless and um I went through this for some time then I thought you know what just do something doesn't have to be a lifetime commitment
08:30 - 09:00 it's like you've got to get out of this kind of endless conjecture and put something into practice and so I chose the Burmese method which was you know just be with your breath be with your Sensations uh because it seemed so simple seemed so direct and then um there followed many years of exploring both I will say even when I felt it was important for me to have a commitment to a practice I was always hearing lectures and uh taking
09:00 - 09:30 teachings from many people and by then I came to understand kind of the commonality of the approach and the spirit and uh the values and and so on um and I was always inspired by by many other teachers and uh there came you know a lot of iteration a lot of change and um I was uh leaving India for the second time in 1974 when I went to visit this this teacher this woman deeper M deepa's
09:30 - 10:00 mother it's like a nickname and told her I was going back to the States for what I thought was going to be a very very brief return and before I went back to India for the rest of my life and and she said to me when you go back you'll be teaching and I said no I W she said yes well I said no I won you know and there ensued a whole conversation and and of course she was correct and I was not so uh I always found the tools of Insight Meditation and later loving
10:00 - 10:30 kindness when I got to do that in depth um very simple very direct a very good teaching medium and have loved my Tibetan teachers and their approach and the kind of um The Poetry of it and the openness of it um and I felt in many ways that I was having experiences in my own practice just doing what I was doing that I did not find the language for necessarily
10:30 - 11:00 always with my say Burmese teachers or Indian teachers but it was right there with the Tibetan teachers and so I felt a kind of homecoming as well when I could be with them and still yet when I teach um I I rely on the methods that I learned uh not necessarily the the body scan but other kinds of mindfulness practices and loving kindness wonderful so just so you know I think important for people to our audience to appreciate the the breath of
11:00 - 11:30 meditation traditions and kind of how they've evolved here in the west and uh uh you know I know that um I believe after you returned from India I think you were at uh the founding uh sections of neuropa Institute now neuropa University along with Jack cornfield and Joseph Goldstein and and of course that University was founded by the Tibetan teacher trun and uh and ramdas was teaching there that first summer as well so there's all these different Traditions I
11:30 - 12:00 believe also I I think you're you're probably friends and colleagues with Mir mirbi and and uh and chrisan some people whose teacher was neim Corley Baba there's a whole kind of New England connection here among MTH teachers and Tibetan Buddhist teachers and Ne coroli Baba students and and so I wonder if you could say something about that that connection at the first summer atopa and then from there you went on to found the Insight Meditation Center in in Barry well uh even before in Europa back in my first Retreat you know in in India
12:00 - 12:30 uh began January 7th 1971 um ramdas was there as a student he'd already uh been to India become ramdas been fired by Harvard for psychedelics um and gone back to India looking for his teacher now again this is this is this is a day of you know word of mouth and uh no one had a cell phone even you couldn't call somebody say you know who I saw in the marketplace was this Guru you know uh it
12:30 - 13:00 was all it was like magic and and so uh to spend time doing something Noble and worthy he was doing these meditation Retreats as he was waiting for word of where he might find his teacher and there were a whole bunch of people there because of ramas um I'd say Mirai uh probably who was Linda at the time and chrisad US certainly who was Jeffrey at the time um so these are all populations of my first Retreat as well as well as Dan Gman who first brought me to that
13:00 - 13:30 Retreat um and so uh you know going get taught Retreat after Retreat after Retreat little gaps in between and then at some point this crew of people around rhas decided they were going to go in search of n kly babba um he was a guru who I've always been impressed uh all these years later it's been just about 50 years that of all my friends who who had met him and were close to
13:30 - 14:00 him every single one that I can think of points back to that moment as um significant worthy opening uh to a world they had never dreamed could exist a Power of Love they didn't dream could exist I don't know anybody who says yeah I was young you know like you're kind of stupid you know or I got infatuated it was crazy you know like every single one of them so uh this group of people not
14:00 - 14:30 knowing where he was decided they were going to go off they had a van they rented and I sometimes chrisan us and I teaching together we joke because we tell the same story from two different points of view I talk about waving goodbye to the van and he talks about getting on the van as Jeffrey getting off as Christian us eventually um so they went off to see uh to see if they could find him and I stayed I was uh newly to practice I was so excited about
14:30 - 15:00 learning and and now I look back and it's it's so kind of sweet like every breath was exciting like is it gonna tingle is it you know um I was learning a huge amount about myself and I also had the thought they don't know where he is you know like they're just going off and so and of course as these stories are so magic he um Ras uh wanted to go on to New Deli in the van he wanted ice
15:00 - 15:30 cream probably in a comfortable bed and Danny Gman who had uh left some of those gaps in between Retreats he'd gone to the grounds of the Kumba this giant Festival um and bathing ritual in Indian the festival was over but he wanted people to see the grounds which were somewhat nearby on a detour so he and Ros got into an argument he finally persuaded the van and ramas to allow the van to go to see the grounds so they pull up to the grounds and there's new
15:30 - 16:00 cly Baba waiting for them right in front of the entrance and he had woken up that morning apparently and told his hosts uh please prepare food for like 28 people which is exactly the number on the bus including the driver you know so uh when I next saw them they all had different names and they were you know uh the pantheon of into gods and goddesses and and had that kind of devotional cor but uh one of the things
16:00 - 16:30 about Nim cly Baba was that he didn't teach a method actually so they were often we were often finding one another in a retreat or studying with a Tibet teacher or something like that and India was kind of like that it was just like uh and some of my teachers especially uh this one teacher manindra who's also from the Burmese tradition he was very much like that if you said to him I want to study with this crazy s and Swami down in the south of India he said go
16:30 - 17:00 go check it out he said the Dharma the truth of things it doesn't have to be afraid of anything just go check it out see for yourself see for yourself what seems right so that was also very strongly like my ethic um and happening there and so we're all just kind of learning but sometimes it was clear that it would be better for individuals um to kind of focus on a technique it certainly was better for me because
17:00 - 17:30 at least for time you know until I moved to something else because all of all that confusion like should I do this should I do that should you know not actually doing anything it's much better to put something into practice um and sort of get on with it that way EUR was like a little reflection of of that really special time so um romdas was teaching you know as you said his Mega class at with like a thousand people he invited Joseph who
17:30 - 18:00 made met that Retreat um to teach this little meditation subgroup Christian do was teaching the chanting subgroup um Jack was living down the hall uh from Joseph that's where they kind of got together and I shed up with a small group of friends because I you know come back to New York I done what I needed to do and then uh our joke was that of this group of friends uh from India Joseph was the one with a job in an apartment because they put him in
18:00 - 18:30 student housing for the summer and so we all appeared in his his place and moved in which is true and he was so popular he was invited to stay on for the second session of neuropa and that everything began from there so um our entire world was launched from there and uh we would respond to invitations you know we'd get a letter because it was all letters like I could get together some friends in a cook would you like to lead a retreat and
18:30 - 19:00 some combination of Joseph Jack and I and a few other friends who are teaching with us would go in in some way or another two of us or three of us and at the end of that Retreat we never knew if there'd be another Retreat till the next letter Came Upon Came Upon Us and um it was a different world then and so uh ultimately somebody said to us why don't you start a retreat center it can be like a sacred site in this country it could be a place where the kind of energy that gets generated
19:00 - 19:30 doesn't have to dissipate and he said to us I know all the people can help you they're all in Massachusetts which is true so uh we came back to the east coast and and ultimately bought this property uh we moved in Valentine's Day 1976 is where I am right now I'm next door to the Insight Meditation society and Barry Mouse wow what a story and I think that for people who are a little younger than
19:30 - 20:00 us to even just appreciate how different the world was back then pre- interet pre- cell phones and so forth and there was this Serendipity and and auspicious coincidence and Magic about everything uh in terms of people's spiritual path and these kind of connections you're talking about and and of course now it's a very different world where it's all this Marketplace and the apps and the whole thing and but also at the same time uh teachers like yourself and Joseph Goldstein and Jack and others have are have become beloved teachers
20:00 - 20:30 who are are very um well known by people today so it's just really interesting let's focus on your um uh teachings on the love and kindness practice or The Meta practice and um uh you know it it seems like such an important practice for our Western culture where you know in part as The Human Condition it maybe exacerbated by some of the I think a slight mistaken religious views of some wisdom
20:30 - 21:00 Traditions that that became dominant yes you know that that have have promoted a lot of self-loathing and self-hatred and and so forth in westerners and uh so it seems like this loving kindness practice is really an important place to begin for so many of us yeah I mean I think that's really true and I you as I said I got acquainted with it the first time at my first Retreat um and was very intrigued with it and which was a good Instinct and uh
21:00 - 21:30 yet it was many years before I had a kind of formal situation with a teacher and guidance instructor and in those years I you know I learned how you did it and there are many ways of doing it but I learned several ways of doing it and uh we Tred to practice on my own but it wasn't the same as having that kind of guidance and finally in 1985 I went to Burma and did this intensive period of loving kindness practice so um in many ways I would consider loving
21:30 - 22:00 kindness the quality of the heart that is wishing well for ourselves for others that honors interconnection that sees interconnection um rather than reifying or solidifying that sense of self and other and us and them we understand that on the levels in which it works but we also understand the levels in which it's more about we than about you and me totally totally
22:00 - 22:30 separate um I find that it's actually uh in many ways it's like um it's the secret ingredient in mindfulness practice in mindfulness practice you may begin with say resting your attention on the feeling of the breath but you would then move on at some point either the sensation in that way that going Inka taught or uh to a more open awareness seeing what becomes predominant it's an emotion it's a different emotion it's a thought it's a sensation applying the
22:30 - 23:00 same skill of mindfulness that kind of balanced awareness to whatever becomes predominant and that for many of us the secret ingredient really is loving kindness because it's not easy you know I'm somewhat famous for example with my first teacher goena for having marched up to him and saying at one point I never used to be an angry person before I started meditating thereby laying blame exactly where I felt it belonged just clearly on him it's clearly his fault and of course
23:00 - 23:30 I had been hugely angry but I hadn't been in touch with it so I was I was 18 years old never having been in therapy before looking within and of course I was discovering those sort of things and I was very upset I wouldn't call that mindfulness really it it was better than not knowing the anger was there the definitely better but it wasn't exactly balanced it wasn't exactly interested it was horrified you know I was horrified um and this the missing
23:30 - 24:00 ingredient was some kind of compassion for myself some kind of presence that wasn't judging so harshly all of which is about the loving kindness and so um I could have used it actually as a precursor as a building block to a better mindfulness so it exists there and it exists certainly along with qualities like compassion as the expression of mindfulness you know when we see more clearly we do see
24:00 - 24:30 interdependence when we're more balanced and aware we can see more clearly one of the things we do see is how connected we all are however alone we might feel we are in fact connected and so um out of that connection it's not you know some of these people think loving kindness is kind of gooey and sentimental and a little awful too you know because you just get stupid and you do these stupid things you're smiling all the time it's like that at all um it's an inner state
24:30 - 25:00 of Freedom where we are honoring connection we're recognizing our lives are connected and we wish people could come out of suffering it would be a better world not only for the people who are distinctly suffering but even for the people causing suffering if they were suffering less themselves then it would be a better world because they would be causing less for others and so um that does doesn't mandate a certain kind of action it doesn't mean you have to let
25:00 - 25:30 them move back in whoever they are you have to be heard again you have to give them more money you have to say yes you have to smile it doesn't mean you've got to behave in a certain way it's an inner State and how we do behave might depend on discernment and history and understanding maybe it's balance like some compassion for yourself as well as for somebody else so take a lot to really understand what we mean by loving kindness and we go through
25:30 - 26:00 various stages in that in that exploration through the practice of it well it's such an important practice and and really on so many levels e even if someone's primary interest at least what they feel their primary interest in meditation is is about developing liberating Insight or or being able to you know practice your way into deep somati and things like that and and it can can really be a cognitive practice until we find a way to soften the heart
26:00 - 26:30 and come into the body and so love and kindness really seems to be there needs to be an internal softening uh and you know that's so important and then ultimately you all the great contemplative Traditions are about you know getting Beyond The Duality of The Limited self and so loveing kindness practice when we do it both for ourselves and with others is about as you were describing getting to that we and to that more uh universal dimension so it's it it's it's a profoundly deep practice and of course
26:30 - 27:00 in recent years the need for self-compassion has become so evident you have the self-compassion model developed by Christen and Christopher gmer and you have the rain practice and uh with Tara and others that focused on a lot uh it seems that people just realizing there's a deep need for this and but the classic meta practice um it it just seems like such a multi-dimensional practice uh that's very necessary within the context I mean even if you weren't doing classic meta practice it seems to for your practice
27:00 - 27:30 to deepen you'd have to be bringing some Spirit of that into your practice I think that's really true and I've also watched with some uh kind of amusement how in in very recent years with the popularization of a word like mindfulness uh people then looking at the word and say well it sounds kind of cold you know sounds a little clinical like I want to be mindful what does that mean and um and so i' heard people propose let's call it
27:30 - 28:00 kindfulness let's call it you know warm mindfulness was one and of course it was ROM us with loving awareness let's call it loving awareness um that's what we should call it and I think we can call it mindfulness but we have to hopefully know what it means absolutely and and one of the better known forms of secular mindfulness of course John kitson's mindfulness based stretch ruction he developed these attitudinal qualities I think originally seven now nine but they I don't know if he uses the ter he
28:00 - 28:30 doesn't use the term self-compassion but certainly self-acceptance and openness curiosity and fresh beginners mind things like this are are about that that softening into and allowing and and you know really coming home to ourselves at a deeper and deeper level so um and The Meta practice has just been a core practice for me for so long and I I feel it it it it brings my practice to the heart it it spirit izes my practice it embodies my practice it's it's um it's
28:30 - 29:00 just a beautiful practice I wonder before I'm in a moment I'm going to invite you to lead us in a in a session of of love and kindness practice could you just for a moment situated within the context of H there's a construct a traditional construct in thaden Buddhism and it's actually in Tibetan Buddhism as well the the four Brahma viharas or four immeasurables sometimes called the four boundless of olds of which loving kindness is one could you kind of situate it within that construct because in some way the practice includes addresses all four of those and it is
29:00 - 29:30 the one of them the love and kindness so the context is the four Brahma viharas Brahma meaning Divine or uh Celestial I heard one translation of it once that I liked which was the word best and vihara means dwelling or abiding or home so taken together these four qualities are said to form our best home and the first these is loving kindness It's the common translation of
29:30 - 30:00 the word in po language of the original Buddhist text meta MTA my tree in Sanskrit um and I use loving kindness certainly is as the translation but I've always been a little concerned that it might make the quality itself seem a little bit like far away from day-to-day life because you don't use that term loving kindness very often some translators and Scholars have come to me said just say love love stop being so cutesy about it you mean love you know
30:00 - 30:30 but love is so complicated a term like what do we mean when we say love um the literal translation is friendship I don't tend to use that either because my concern is really what we were talking about just before that the number of people whove come to me and say things like we I to develop a more loving heart doesn't that mean I have to let them move back in doesn't that mean I have to visit them you know um even though they hurt me so
30:30 - 31:00 much the last time or were dangerous the last time uh I've heard so many of those questions that for me the word friendship implies let's go to the movies together or let's do something together but it is an interstate so I tend to try to use the term connection it's a profound acknowledgment of how connected our lives are doesn't mean you like somebody doesn't mean you approve of them doesn't mean you're not going
31:00 - 31:30 to uh make effort to try to have them not have power over you or anybody else but within you're not lost in that sort of endless loop of you know misery over being consumed by their action actually um and so that's loving kindness the second quality is very close to it I think in English we would tend to use the word
31:30 - 32:00 synonymously but within the Buddhist psychology it was somewhat different flavor and that would be compassion so one of the precursors for loving kindness is to reflect on the fact that everybody wants to be happy in a deep meaning of Happiness we want a feeling of being at home somewhere in his body in his mind with one another on this planet we want to sense of belonging and it's because of
32:00 - 32:30 ignorance that we have what someone once term bad aim we think that's going to bring us happiness finally you know endless accumulation or being in control of everybody or you know and it never does so but the urge toward happiness has us feel closer to one another the precursor to compassion which is defined sometimes as the um Ling or the quivering of the heart in response to seeing pain or
32:30 - 33:00 suffering it's a movement of the heart and it's a movement toward to see if we can be of help so notice it's not a movement into to definitely be of help like go into the fire as well burn up yourself it's not a movement toward to seize control and be the Savior um it's a movement toward to see if we can be of help and the precursor to
33:00 - 33:30 that rather than focusing on everyone's wish to be happy is more like the reality of everybody's vulnerability it's not that we suffer to the same degree all of us because we don't but that vulnerability it's so shared we life is so insecure it's so unfathomable I look at the last years we've lived through you know if I see somebody now which is not that coming yet you know and they say I haven't seen
33:30 - 34:00 you in four years I think that can't be and I think oh it is you know like um life is like that and so sometimes people confuse compassion for kind of hierarchical state like I have this perfect life or throwing this bit of kindness down on you because your life's falling apart which might never could well guess what it could so you get a different you get a feeling about the different flavor of these states you know almost
34:00 - 34:30 like the kind of poignancy of compassion the recognition of of pain and so on sympathetic Joy is kind of the energetic opposite it allows us to look at somebody's success or Good Fortune without falling so deeply into jealousy or Envy without so completely being taken over by the voice that says oh if you had a little bit less going for you I'd be happier right now you know
34:30 - 35:00 you don't have to lose everything but if you could shine a little less that would be better but instead of feeling like ripped off or threatened by someone else's happiness we actually do feel happy when regarding their happiness so those three are kind of a a bundle of generosity of the spirit fourth brah vhar is equinity which is the voice of wisdom um it would be the voice that combines with compassion that
35:00 - 35:30 says would that I could just snap my fingers and and your pain and suffering would dissolve would that I could and you know what I can't life's not like that I'm not in control of your choices I'm not in control of your decisions I can't stop change I can't make only nice things happen that's the truth of things and and interestingly enough wisdom or equinity in this sense
35:30 - 36:00 doesn't dissuade us from taking action it actually strengthens the action because there's not so much frustration and impatience and I've got to be in control kind of thing going on I know equin is used in different ways and different Traditions but that is the way in which you know I was taught in the context um so it's equinity is the voice of wisdom that holds all of these states and allows them to be in you could almost say their purest form because otherwise loving kindness would become
36:00 - 36:30 attachment and interestingly the word for the sort of degeneration of compassion is what we would call burnout you know that we we just it's too much um we can't move toward anymore because we don't have any energy things like that and so it's a very powerful in refined teaching yeah Sharon Sal the author of the book loving kindness and many other
36:30 - 37:00 books and your most recent book is real life the journey from isolation to openness and freedom that seems like a wonderful practice for that because for whatever reason with the viudes of life and the traumas of life we tend to want to close the the heart kind of hardens and we close down it's natural it's normal to protect ourselves but then that separates us and so you know the any practice that can allow us in a workable gentle way to opening again opening the heart is really our way back
37:00 - 37:30 to connection and freedom so this that's a beautiful practice for that so thank you so much Sharon yeah thank you wishing you all the [Music] best