Sharon Salzberg -Mindfulness To Heal Ourselves And The World

Today’s guest is Sharon Salzberg, one of the most prominent voices in the field of meditation, co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society, and author of 11 books including the NY Times Best Seller Real Happiness.

Our conversation is about her newest book, Real change, Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World. It’s an incredibly timely book because she shares great examples of how we can bridge the worlds of mindfulness and social action.

Transcript

Welcome to Untangle.

I'm your host,

Patricia Karpis.

We're hoping that your meditation practice is giving you what you need to stay more calm,

Grounded,

And resilient this winter,

Wherever you are.

I'm always excited to interview Sharon Salzberg,

One of the most prominent voices in the field of meditation,

Co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society and author of 11 books.

In today's interview,

We have a conversation about her newest book.

It's an incredibly timely book,

And Sharon has a way of expressing complex ideas in her signature authentic down-to-earth style.

She invites us to rethink how we approach some of our most difficult emotions.

She also shares some great examples of how we can bridge the worlds of mindfulness and social action.

Now here's Sharon.

Sharon,

It is so great to have you back on Untangle.

Thanks so much for being with us today.

Thank you so much.

I want to start with this question.

What has this last year been like for you?

What are some of the ways that you have been challenged and coped with 2020?

It's been strange.

It's strange to even think that it's almost a year.

That's one of the strangest things of all.

I think,

Where did that time go?

Like,

I don't know if it's because it's so largely unstructured or because I'm not traveling or it has that kind of Groundhog Day feeling of like,

Oh yeah,

I'm waking up in the same place.

It's been a long time since I did that.

Everything,

As you say,

It's been challenging.

It's been extraordinary.

I have not been traveling.

All I do is teach online.

Some of the very,

Very touching things that happen that way are,

First of all,

Everything is really international.

People sign in from Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia and Russia.

What time is it?

People are having such a hard time and it's so moving to see both the goodness of people and the incredible stress,

Whether you're at home or working outside the home and facing all this uncertainty and difficulty.

It's very tough.

One of the things that happened for me this year is that I had a book come out,

Which was like the oddest time.

Everything about writing the preface of the book,

I think has been the hallmark of my year,

More than anything.

The book was supposed to come out last June.

It came out in September because the publisher postponed it.

A friend of mine was reading it and said to me,

This was some time in March or April,

And he himself,

His friend,

Was quite anxious because of the virus.

He said he kept reading the examples.

I put it in the book and thinking,

That's what made you anxious?

Wait until you see what's coming.

So taking that feedback,

I went back to the publisher and I said,

Would it be okay with you if I wrote a new preface that contextualized the book into everything people are going through?

And they said,

Fine.

So the overarching question I kept asking myself in writing that preface was what's still true?

In a time of so much grief and loss and craziness and uncertainty and shattered expectations,

Like what's still true?

What can I count on?

What's upholding me?

What am I relying on?

And that brought me right back to the essentials of my practice.

And that is still my question to myself all the time to ground my understanding and what I really care about the most.

Yeah,

It's a really interesting question because one of your goals was to bridge the worlds of mindfulness and social action.

And yet I love what you just said about coming back to the essentials.

How does mindfulness help us with us?

I think originally I was drawn to writing about that topic for largely two populations and that quickly expanded after the pandemic.

But the first was groups that I've been working with that have been very meaningful for me in the last several years.

People we call caregivers.

I keep thinking there's a better term,

But either in their personal lives,

Their relational lives,

Their professional lives,

They are caring for others.

They're really on the front lines of suffering and they are upholding this world as we know it and as we are counting on it.

And they're often unheralded and uncelebrated and unsupported.

It started with domestic violence shelter workers.

That was a four year program for the Garrison Institute and then international humanitarian aid workers.

And now back often to frontline medical personnel.

And it's so moving.

I mean,

Here are people with enormous care and compassion for others and they're burning out not because of lack of that,

But some other thing.

Maybe it's compassion for oneself or some kind of balance or even poignant recognition of the limits that we have.

Like things don't change right away.

And the system is not going to respond.

Whatever system is not going to respond to our demands.

We were in control and all kinds of things.

And then I thought,

Who else is like that?

And I thought,

Oh,

Activists really trying to change the world and not just activists as we might think of the term.

Actually in the book also,

There's a conversation I had with Bell Hooks and she was saying that she actually doesn't like the term social action because she's concerned that maybe people would only think about marching or protesting.

And she looked at me and said,

What about art?

Which also carries us forward into obviously new terrain and takes courage and ability to step up to uncertainty and all of that.

I think there are a lot of people like that and I wanted to help offer at least as an experiment,

Some contemplative tools to see if that could help make one's efforts in your family and your community,

Whatever more sustainable.

And then there's another group of people that I obviously know well,

Which is meditators and people who have done like introspection or self-reflection or use some contemplative method and have found their hearts genuinely expand and compassion.

Classic example would be somebody saying to me,

I was taking a walk and somebody on the street came up and asked me for a dollar and I gave them a dollar because that's always been my practice.

But this is the first time I ever looked that person in the eye and realized that was another human being.

I've heard that or some version of that so many times,

But so often it feels like anything I can do is so negligible,

It's so meaningless,

It's so nothing.

And so I wanted to help instill some sense of agency in those people.

And then when the pandemic happened,

Those circles expanded the caregiving role and having to see the world the way it is and fusing wisdom and compassion and finding a sense of agency when a day is so determined by circumstance.

All of that just seemed irrelevant for me.

And you talk about with meditation that it is a way to practice generosity and to connect with something bigger.

How does it do that?

Even for those of us that have been meditating for a long time or those of us that are just starting to meditate,

What is the way in which it does that?

Well,

I think it starts with something you were really alluding to before,

Which is being able to,

First of all,

To sit and center,

Get a greater sense of being centered.

And there are many,

Many ways of doing that.

And attendant to that skill is also learning how to let go of distraction and fragmentation and things that are taking you away gently and return your attention to whatever the object of meditation might be that you're trying to center on and being able to do that again and again and again to let go and begin again is itself a kind of resilience training.

That's like the foundation is to center.

And then we cultivate an ability,

And this is part of what mindfulness actually means,

We cultivate an ability to be with what becomes predominant.

And that may be some very painful feelings,

Tremendous sorrow,

Grief or anger or fear,

Whatever,

And not to think that's bad or wrong or now I'm having a bad experience in meditation.

And it's challenging,

But it's not bad because it's important that we be able to be with those feelings in a more genuine way.

Like this is not a visual medium and I don't have the right cup in my room.

Anyway,

People are taking to making me cups with sayings of mine.

I have one that says,

We feel what we feel.

We feel,

Instead of feeling,

I should have been able to stop this.

Why is it still here?

Meditating all these years,

I've been in therapy forever.

It's like,

Shouldn't be,

It's like,

We feel,

We feel.

And we need to allow every feeling the dignity of its reality,

Its presence.

But we also need to look at how we are relating to that feeling.

Because often we pile on,

I'm the only one who ever feels a sense of isolation.

This is the only thing I will ever feel.

So it's a sense of permanence.

What's it going to feel like tomorrow and the next day and the next weekend?

So there's all that anticipation that is then layered on top of what's going on.

All of those things make it a very difficult burden instead of something we can take an interest in.

So we learn how to distinguish the feeling from all those add-ons.

And then we're left with being able to look more deeply into the feeling.

Like if it's anger,

We will likely see moments of sadness,

Moments of fear.

Almost certainly we will see a kernel of helplessness in there.

Because that is often why we pick up the feeling of anger is to feel stronger and not feel so helpless.

And so what I've seen is that if you can get there,

Then once you acknowledge the helplessness,

You can determine on something to do some act,

Even if it seems very small.

But at any rate,

You have a much deeper understanding of that anger from seeing all those different strands and you see that it's always changing.

It's moving,

It's flowing.

It's actually not this solid state.

There's some space.

And in that space,

We have choice.

We have options appear.

Do I want to express it?

Do I want to press send?

Do I want to wait,

Email,

Whatever it is.

So we're empowered by that.

Yeah.

I have to say that the chapter on anger was my favorite.

I liked what you talked about in terms of our cultural ideas of what strength and power look like.

And you use the imagery of a clenched fist and as kind of an old ideal of anger versus water flowing and giving you this power,

Which is what you were just saying,

This fluidness of anger.

And I think in common views of what mindfulness must mean,

People often think about,

It's probably a good thing because it helps you really inhabit your life more.

Like if you're drinking a cup of coffee and you're not almost some multitasking also checking your email or watching the TV screen on mute,

Then you can actually smell the coffee,

Feel the warmth of the cup,

Taste the coffee.

It's a much more fulfilling experience.

And all of that is true,

But classically the main thrust of mindfulness was wonderful to have a more genuinely lived life.

That's undeniable.

The main thrust of mindfulness was really about insight.

It was really understanding our lives.

It's understanding that,

Oh,

Look at that.

And the heart of that anger,

There's so often helplessness.

It's understanding how much our desire may just be masking loneliness.

And it's understanding how much everything's changing all of the time.

And that we do have choice about what we want to carry out.

And it's understanding our profound interconnection.

And I always think that's one of the weirdest things about meditation.

It looks like the most solitary activity in the world.

You may be all alone.

You may have your eyes closed.

But somehow in the process,

One of the very genuine insights is how connected we all are.

I want to get to that section on how interconnected we are,

Because I feel like that is so important.

But I loved where you talked about how we power through life on autopilot and then something jolts us awake.

And in that jolting,

We have this moment that we can react or respond.

And you quoted an activist in the book saying that anger is always a signal emotion.

And the first reaction is,

This isn't who I am.

Or there's something that ignites the voice inside of you and you talk about sometimes when it strikes,

It's like a forest fire burning.

And it's when we become,

And I think this is the human part of us.

So many people will talk about how when they're angry,

They feel maybe passive aggressive,

Or you become sarcastic,

Or you're ruminating so that inside it feels like it's poisoning you versus the group or person that you might be angry about.

And then what you were just saying is when you actually peel back all of this and you look at what's underneath that,

There's often sadness,

There's often hurt,

There's often some feeling of unworthiness.

How do we transform,

And I know this is part of the Buddhist psychology that I really like so much,

Transforming anger into what you call discerning wisdom.

How does that work for people that maybe that's not a natural process for?

It starts with what we were talking about before,

Which is allowing the reality and the dignity of every feeling that comes up strongly because it's there.

So maybe the first thing we do in terms of cultivating mindfulness or the meditative process is we pivot.

It's like when we have a strong emotion of any kind,

Our interest or even fixation is going toward the object.

Like if you really want a new car,

You're busy thinking about what you want,

That kind of upholstery or that feature.

You don't usually turn your attention around and ask yourself,

What does it feel like to want something so much?

What am I feeling in my body?

What is this feeling?

And that's how we discern is because we're paying attention differently.

And then we look for those add-ons.

I shouldn't feel anger.

I've been meditating for 50 years,

For God's sake.

I've been in therapy forever.

And we see if we can relinquish the add-on.

So then we have the feeling in our body and the ability to pay attention to it more truly.

Now the Buddhist psychology likens anger to a forest fire.

I should also say it's not all negative.

The positive part of anger is the energy.

We're not complacent.

We're not passive.

We're not like giving in.

And it's got a kind of integrity.

It's drawing boundaries and it has this cutting through quality.

I think probably all of us have experienced being in a meeting or something like that.

And it's the angriest person in the room who was pointing out an unpleasant truth that no one else wants to look at.

It's like they're pointing to the burn mark in the carpet and saying,

Well,

Look at that.

And everyone else is like staring carefully at the ceiling because we don't want to talk about it,

But we actually count on those people and their energy to cut through social niceties and agreements about complacency and say,

Look at that.

So that's the positive part of the anger.

The more negative or you can say damaging parts are like a forest fire.

It said it can burn up its own support.

It can damage us,

The host quite considerably.

And like a forest fire,

It can burn really wild.

So we might end up in a place far from where we intended to be.

And just as there's that power of cutting through an anger,

There's also a kind of diluted quality because it's so fixed.

Like if you bring up just now,

The last time you were really,

Really angry at yourself,

However long ago that was spring it up and you'll notice it's not a mood.

It's not an environment where you're also thinking,

You know what?

I did five great things the same day that I said that stupid thing at the meeting,

Those five great things,

They're gone.

So we don't have all the information.

We lose options.

We lose the chance for creativity.

So in the end,

What we are challenged to try to do is capture that energy and get just swirled around by the rest.

So when I was writing real change,

I had this like,

You know what?

I want to quote,

I want to use that Gandhi quote where he said something like it.

Again,

I want to draw a distinction between feeling anger,

Which is natural and being overwhelmed by or totally wrapped up in a consumed by anger.

So I thought I want to use that Gandhi quote where he says something like being lost in anger is like drinking poison,

Thinking it's going to kill the other guy.

So if I wanted to use it in a book,

I looked it up and I could not find it attributed to Gandhi anywhere.

I saw it attributed to the Buddha and Oprah Winfrey and Carrie Fisher,

The big book AA and Nelson Mandela.

It's like,

I have no idea who said it and you just said it too.

So it's the right way of thinking.

I think it's actually true.

It's not because we're so frightful or anything that we try to do that capturing of the energy and not get consumed by the anger,

But it's because it's so hurtful.

We can do that.

And mindfulness is said to be the agent that allows us to do that.

Once we are aware and interested in the anger and paying attention to it,

We have that ability to take the energy and not just ruminate endlessly about what's wrong.

It's such a great muscle to build.

And in the book,

You also talk about creating a bigger perspective and what you were just saying about that negative energy,

Your anger,

Just seeing that one thing.

I imagine this very small lens,

This teeny little telescope that you look through versus this wide lens,

Which allows you to see that bigger perspective and to honor all of it without getting stuck in that little small seeing.

And maybe that's clear seeing,

Being able to see things from that bigger point of view.

There's so much in this book,

Such great wisdom and tools for being a human being.

And in the chapter on grief,

You talk about this idea of getting lost in deep pain,

Which I think is similar to getting lost in deep anger.

But you talk also about honoring what we're losing or have lost in some way.

And this idea,

Your quote here,

If we feel all our feelings,

Is the other quote,

Your quote here with some things just hurt,

Which you mentioned earlier.

How do we let things hurt,

Know that we may have lost something very dear to us and move through that to a place that feels better?

I think in a few ways.

I also have a cup that says something just hurt,

Which a friend sent me.

Because I think we can also be down on ourselves.

It's just my attitude.

If I had a more open mind,

It wouldn't hurt or it's my wrong way of thinking or I'm not receiving this properly or whatever,

But I think something's just hurt.

But again,

What we don't need is the extra suffering,

The sense of isolation instead of being part of the human family and sense of having failed because we haven't rested control over life.

And all those things are extra as well as anticipation of the next moment's worth of pain and sorrow.

So we learn how to be with it.

And I quote someone in the book,

Grief is love that doesn't have the normal place to land.

The person is gone solidly or the situation is gone.

It's like when you start out and you asked me about a year and I thought,

Wow,

It's been a year.

I can't believe it.

Like I came up,

I'm speaking to you from Massachusetts.

I also have a rental apartment in New York city.

I arrived back in New York city after five weeks away in California in early March.

And I came up here because I started feeling this is really strange.

I'm doing these really large gatherings and teaching and nobody really knows anything about this virus.

And it feels so tense.

And I have a home in Massachusetts near the retreat center.

I co-founded the insight meditation society.

I thought I'll go away for two weeks and ride it out.

So I came up here with my snow boots almost a year ago.

Wow.

You think,

Wow,

Life looks so different and all the dreams and hopes that people have.

And there's a lot of grief and it's natural.

It's inevitable,

But it's also part of that grief is love.

And I think that is something of what helps us heal in a way is remembering that and also taking some time to focus on the love,

Which is at the center of it.

I think that's also some of the response to that and it's phases depending on what your situation is,

But I know a lot of people who've lost people one way or another school shootings or the virus or just the passage of time.

And there's something about also allowing yourself to experience the joy that is part of life.

And it's not even that recollecting that love that is a joyful thing actually,

Or seeing the sunset or whatever it might be,

Some small thing.

And it's very hard to do that.

Actually you feel guilty or it just feels wrong in the face of so much.

But again,

It comes back to understanding where resilience comes from and being depleted and exhausted and overcome is not a place where we can actually help anybody else or even connect authentically to anybody else.

And so we can make a point of looking for some balance.

We need to honor the pain and not pretend.

I mean,

It's such a tensionous society,

But we need to do that.

And at the same time,

We need to take in the joy.

Yeah.

There's this quote from a journalist that you have in the book,

I think his name,

I might not be saying this correctly,

But Dar Jamal.

And it says,

I am grieving,

But I've never felt more alive.

I have found it is possible to reach a place of acceptance and inner peace while enduring the grief and suffering that are inevitable.

And then you also say the sad pain of grief is what knits us more closely together.

This is so true.

There's something about this last year.

Like if I had to pick one thing that I would want to carry on after all of this,

It would be some of the deeper,

More meaningful conversations and experiences that maybe it's been over Zoom versus hugging or meeting at a coffee shop.

It does seem like there's more of a deep,

Introspective,

Reflective nature.

Do you find this or is this just because we live in this world of meditation and mindfulness?

No,

I mean,

I think the whole earth quieted down to some degree to some people clearly that was unbearable.

So there's a lot of that.

There's a lot of just act me out as well.

But one of the things that I've been most moved by this last year is people reaching out to one another.

I'm not in New York city at the moment,

But I'm very connected with a lot of people there.

And I hear over and over again,

Things like I've lived in the same apartment for 12 years.

I never even knew my neighbors' names.

Now we all have one another's names and phone numbers.

We just check in on one another,

Things like that.

I've just heard that so many times.

Just before I left New York,

Actually,

It was the day I decided to leave New York for two weeks,

West March.

I was teaching somewhere.

And the way they do that in that particular place is that the speaker sits with the audience until they're formally introduced.

Then they get up on the stage and they start speaking.

So I was still in the audience and I was sitting next to somebody who said to me,

She had been very uncertain about coming.

She was phenomenally anxious.

Nobody quite knew anything except maybe don't shake hands,

But she decided to come.

But she was like,

Clearly she was beside herself.

So I started out by saying,

Wow,

There are certain ways of breathing that actually are said to chill out our nervous system,

Which is true.

And those just briefly is basically to have your out-breath be longer than your in-breath and your parasympathetic nervous system will start taking over from your sympathetic nervous system.

So your blood pressure is likely to go down and you'll feel more at ease.

And there are many fancy ways of doing that.

Like you breathe into this count and you hold for this count and you breathe out for that camp.

But basically it's just that your out-breath needs to be longer than your in-breath.

So I said that to her and she didn't seem interested.

I said,

Well,

There's loving kindness meditation where you may offer phrases like maybe happy,

Maybe peaceful to all these different people and beings in your life.

And she didn't seem interested.

So then I just looked at her and I said,

Is there anyone you can help?

She lit up,

She got really radiant and she said,

Well,

You know,

I do have this elderly neighbor and maybe I can slip a note under her door and ask if I can go shopping for her.

There was some moving to me and then I thought,

All right,

I've seen that as I'm sure you have over this year,

So many times,

Just people doing the smallish thing as well as really big things,

Which is really great.

Yeah,

And that does connect us so much to one another and it goes back to how important service is in any way that we define it.

I wanted to say one more thing because I really like this quote about resilience,

Where you talk about,

You say,

At some point you notice that you can bend and not break.

Resilience is something that accretes over time as we develop a habit of consciously responding to or being with our pain without freaking out.

I just think that's such a great way to look at it that bit by bit we learn to bend and not break.

There's so many things in this book that jumped out,

But you were talking about trauma.

You mentioned Joan Halifax,

Who you were talking about how we often see our traumas as gifts or there's something that we can learn from them.

And she uses the phrase,

These are givens,

Not gifts.

And that's about accepting things.

I was thinking you must have a mug that says things are as they are.

I don't,

But that's a great idea.

I'll do it myself.

No one needs to send me one.

We'll see how many you get.

You can,

Patricia,

But I don't want any of you listening.

Okay,

Good.

Well,

I think the import of Rosie Jones' statement was that sometimes we actually try to force ourselves to be grateful for something because somebody says that's the right approach.

She should be grateful for your cancer diagnosis because it's shown you the profundity.

And I think maybe not.

I am a New Yorker,

Like so mind your own business.

And so Rosie Jones was really addressing that feeling like I have to experience this as a gift.

And what is she saying is don't force yourself.

It's a given.

What we need to do is incorporate the full embodied knowledge like this happened,

This actually happened,

And then we can go on.

And maybe we would see it as a gift,

But maybe not.

It's just,

It's a little too coercive to say that.

And so she was really responding to that sense of I have to be grateful and I'm not doing well with that because I'm not in fact grateful.

But we do need to work,

I think,

On that complete integration,

Which is a kind of acceptance.

Yeah.

And do you see that acceptance as a step towards equanimity?

And if yes or no,

What role does equanimity play in our lives?

I would say yes.

Equanimity is an odd word.

It's very popular in Buddhist psychology.

It often to us implies like coldness or indifference,

But it actually means balance.

And I'll tell you my favorite way of seeing equanimity now.

It's like the balance that comes from wisdom.

So it's like perspective.

So it's also like a really big space in which we can hold seemingly opposite things.

The incredible sorrow of loss and the incredible joy of seeing a child smile or the fact that something really hurts and it's also impermanent.

We learned to hold many different things at once.

So my exemplar of that actually these days is a young woman I met almost three years ago when I went down to Parkland,

Florida to lead a day long workshop for this community that had experienced the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School where 17 people were killed and another 17 were injured.

This young woman who's also in the book,

Samantha,

Raised her hand somewhere in the course of the workshop and she said,

I feel really weird basically because this is a great day and I'm so moved being here with you,

You all and learning these methods.

But she said,

I know the only reason it happened was because that horrible thing happened and I don't know how to get over that in order to fully appreciate this.

And I said,

I don't know that we ever get over it so much as we learned to hold them both at once.

And that's what we call equanimity.

And we talked about the yin yang symbol where there's that white squirrely part and there's a dark circle in the middle of it and then there's the dark swirly part and the light circle in the middle of it and seeing the darkness and the light and the light and the darkness.

So then when the book actually came out years later,

One of the ways that I launched it was doing this series of YouTube things.

And I did one panel.

I moderated a panel with people all from Parkland community and Samantha was on the panel.

So I said,

Hey,

Samantha,

Remember that conversation we had a few years ago?

We talked about equanimity and we talked about yin yang.

And she said to me,

Not only do I remember it,

I think about it every single day of my life.

So that has become the North star for my life.

And it's really amazing that she is my favorite exemplar these days because we need to be able to feel many things at once.

If you're only looking at the darkness,

It's tough.

It's overwhelming.

You can't necessarily find the energy to go on in some sustained way.

We're trying to make a difference or just be authentically with people or whatever.

But at the same time,

If you're only looking at the light,

If you're determined to do that,

It's like you're floating somewhere that is so unreal.

It's so unrealistic and ultimately not helpful.

Yeah.

That is really such a great way to describe that.

And it really has a lot to do with how we construct our worldviews.

And having that bigger worldview also helps us to become more aware of our interconnectedness.

And you talk about intersectionality.

Can you explain that a little bit?

That was the evolution of my understanding,

Listening to a friend,

Molly Cadotte,

Who's an attorney and an activist and a shaman and many things.

Talking about it through the years of this program,

We would co-teach through the Omega Institute for Women's Leadership and intersectionality as the political term is usually describing kind of the multiple roles or multiple identities any of us may incorporate and therefore either maybe experiencing oppression from others or injustice from others for a lot of different reasons,

A lot of different ways,

Or may also imply just the change in status or empowerment we might have just as one person,

Depending on context.

So Malika will use the example of being born in India and a very high caste,

A Brahmin,

A very highly educated and being lauded for that,

Being a citizen here,

A woman of color,

A woman as an attorney.

And so there's a way in which she feels she is not treated fairly,

Also for part of who she is.

It's a very interesting perspective.

So the first time I heard it from Malika,

Political theory,

And I thought,

She's talking about interconnection.

And then she went on and I realized,

No,

She's not.

She's talking about something very different.

And maybe three years later,

Malika said,

You know what this reminds me of?

It reminds me of interconnection.

I thought,

Yes,

I knew it.

But it is interesting.

Maybe the Buddha said something like,

You can experience the entire universe within this fathom long body.

We're not just one thing.

It opens our minds to feel more interconnected with others when we know we're not one thing and we can see that they're not one thing.

And so that speaks to the bigger lens too.

Sharon,

Do you have a wish or hope for 2021 moving forward?

I'm a big New Year's Eve fan.

Although I had to look up somebody's email address and the poor woman had written to me a New Year's Eve before 2020.

And she was saying,

I can't wait.

This year has been so hard.

I can't wait for 2020.

It'll be like a miracle.

And I thought,

Oh God.

And it was just a Tibetan New Year the other day.

And I always say as a Jew and a Buddhist and an American,

I get three a year.

It's good.

I do have a lot of hope.

I hope that the generosity and the camaraderie that some people have really been able to experience and express will spread and that we'll find one another and have a better way of going on.

Yeah.

That's beautiful.

Thank you so much.

And thank you so much for writing this book.

I'm glad it came out when it did.

Thanks so much for being with us today on Untangle.

So grateful for you,

Sharon.

Well,

Thank you.

Thanks to Sharon for being on Untangle today.

Wishing you a calm and grounded week ahead.

We will see you next week.

Reviews

So insightful and helpful this morning when I feel really hopeless in the face of my personal challenges.

Thank you Patricia for sharing your interview with Sharon Salzberg...so many nuggets revealed to germinate and marinate with. Sending good wishes. 🌻