Sharon Salzberg: Real Happiness At Work

Contributing editor Amy Gross speaks with renowned meditation teacher and best-selling author Sharon Salzberg. Co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, Salzberg was among the first to bring mindfulness meditation practice to the West. Her book, Real Happiness at Work, helps us cultivate mindfulness, compassion, and awareness. In this podcast, Salzberg speaks on the practices that can help us bring these qualities into our workplace.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Tricycle Talks.

I'm James Shaheen,

Editor and publisher of Tricycle the Buddhist Review.

Our guest today is renowned meditation teacher and bestselling author Sharon Salzberg.

Sharon is co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Berry,

Massachusetts,

And was among the first to bring mindfulness meditation practice to the West.

She's been teaching meditation in the US and internationally for nearly four decades and is a frequent contributor to Tricycle.

In her new book,

Real Happiness at Work,

Sharon brings Buddhist-inspired strategies for attaining health,

Balance,

And peace of mind to the workplace.

And now,

Let's listen to contributing editor Amy Gross chat with Sharon Salzberg about getting centered at work.

It's great to be here talking with you about real happiness at work.

And my first thought was,

Are people saying,

What do you mean happiness at work?

You know,

Isn't happiness what you do on the weekends or when you retire?

And work is where you go to stake your claim to fame or at least a paycheck?

Well,

It's interesting.

The book Real Happiness at Work follows on my previous book,

Real Happiness.

And in writing that,

I got a lot of feedback about the folly of looking for happiness that people seem to think of happiness as something very superficial,

Kind of like being happy-go-lucky and something a little foolish as well,

Like endless pleasure seeking.

And what I meant by happiness was something much deeper than that,

Of course.

It's like a sense of inner resourcefulness,

A sense of sufficiency within really that can keep us going through good times and bad times.

And one of the things we did with that previous book was because the actual title of it is Real Happiness,

The Power of Meditation,

A 28-day program.

When February came around,

Which conveniently had 28 days that year,

We did a challenge where we invited people to undertake the meditation program and to blog about it on my website.

And it was that group of people and their feedback that really made me think a lot about work,

The workplace,

Whether one works in the home or outside the home,

And how much of the day we spend trying to get something done or make a paycheck or whatever it might be.

And the stories,

One after another,

Were really about a lot of unhappiness,

A lot of conflict,

Lack of fulfillment and burnout and so on.

So it was this really powerfully intriguing area,

Like can we possibly bring the tools of resourcefulness and that sense of inner sufficiency and mindfulness into that very complicated area?

When I think about the stories of suffering you must have heard to make you think there's a book here,

My first thought was about fear,

Insecurity,

Compromises one has to make because this is a job situation where people don't get to quit on a lark.

There may be nothing there.

People are putting together jobs like a patchwork quilt.

Can you remember any of those stories that particularly touched you?

People were relating incidents where maybe they had contributed something quite meaningful to a project and their boss took all the credit.

People certainly were relating stories and people who were nurses,

Firefighters,

Police officers about being in a constant crisis mentality and not being able at some point to discern the difference between what might be urgent and what was an emergency.

When I worked with the domestic violence shelter workers which I talk a lot about in the book,

It was part of this pilot project of the Garrison Institute bringing yoga and meditation to the frontline workers.

They talked a lot about isolation and how they couldn't really talk about their work experience at home,

Not just because of confidentiality but because it was too terrible to relate and they were ultimately even isolated from one another.

People who were medical students talked about how their initial values that had motivated them were actually being thwarted by the training itself and how maybe they'd gone into that line of work because of compassion and there was no room for that to live and breathe in the kind of harried routine and the tremendous pressure of the job.

Business people talked about really longing to bring their own innermost values and ethics,

Sense of ethics into a world where it didn't seem to have much place and people really have almost every line of work talked about their values being threatened when they were asked to do something that they felt was just wrong and there they were in this big quandary.

And everywhere people talked about lack of communication and it seemed that no matter what the job was and what the other challenges were,

Things were so much better or so much worse because of the sense of collegiality or the lack of it.

So it seems like the perfect Buddhist stew of insecurity,

Unreliability.

So these teachings have a lot of relevance to work.

I think they really do and it's a very hard time,

That's very clear and the pressures are that much more complex and difficult to bear.

But it's almost like my training in Buddhist thinking or Buddhist psychology especially is to start where we are.

Let's be realistic you know rather than having some kind of fancy notion of where we'd like to get.

And so the first time I sat down with the editor of the book and she said what do you want the chapters to be about?

And I said how about one on burnout,

One on ethical wounds,

One on meaninglessness and she kind of looked horrified and said how about resilience instead of burnout?

And of course she was right in terms of injecting that sense of possibility because you don't just want to stay with recounting of how bad things are.

But that is my instinct.

It's like okay let's look at it truly.

Let's be honest about what the experience is and see if there is a way that we can find a genuine level of fulfillment and peace.

And mindfulness seems to be the great tool for doing this.

I've quoted you as saying if you want to be significantly happier,

Dramatically slow down what you're doing and mindfulness is just about that.

Yeah,

I think that's why I try to talk about core meditations in the book because if we can establish some confidence in those then the rest like the stealth meditations and the exercises and the reflections,

They're all born of that foundation and their ways of experimenting and bringing it into life in the actual workplace.

But I always find that I come back to mindfulness meditation as the platform because without it,

I find for me a lot of these recommendations are kind of theoretical like don't pick up your phone on the first ring,

Let it ring three times and breathe.

I think how great is that?

But if I don't have some basis of mindfulness,

How will I ever remember that in the middle of a chaotic crazy kind of workplace and the phone rings?

I'm going to pick it up.

And so starting with building that platform,

I think is a very wise thing to do.

So these core meditations begin with walking meditation,

Breathing meditation,

Drinking tea,

I noticed was a core meditation.

And loving kindness.

And loving kindness.

These are the basic practices of mindfulness.

Can you give us a sense of core meditation breathing?

Sure,

You might sit down for a predetermined length of time so you don't have to constantly look at your watch and set an alarm or something or an app,

Use an app.

You can close your eyes or not.

It's fine to sit comfortably and rest your attention on the feeling of the breath,

The actual sensations of the natural breath.

You don't have to try to make it deeper or different and see if there's a place where the breath is clearest for you or strongest for you and just place your attention in that area,

Nostrils or chest or abdomen and tune into the actual sensations of the breath.

Now what you likely find is that it's not 7,

000 breaths before your mind wanders.

You know,

It's one or two or maybe four and then you're gone.

Your mind has jumped to the past or jumped to the future,

Judgment or speculation or something.

And we do say that the moment you realize that is the magic moment in the whole training because that's the moment we have the chance to practice letting go and beginning again.

So we realize we've been distracted or we've fallen asleep or whatever.

We gently let go,

Bring our attention back to the feeling of the breath.

So that's an example of the kind of training.

So I'd love to turn to how mindfulness really penetrates the workplace and is the antidote to the stresses,

Which I think is code for suffering,

To the stresses of work.

And the first area,

It seems to me,

That mindfulness comes into play is the idea of no self,

Anata.

And here is what you talk about is the conflation of I am my job.

So that's myself.

That's a very strong grip.

And most of us,

I think,

Who've played in the fields of corporate life have had the experience of dealing with very strong feelings that our job is to extend our turf,

Defend our turf.

And then here's a mindfulness coming in to say,

Look at the suffering that's causing.

So I'm wondering how mindfulness practice comes in and says,

A,

Here's the suffering,

B,

What to do about it.

I think it's always good to acknowledge the suffering that we're in.

Otherwise,

We just keep doing the same things,

Right,

Over and over again.

So it's not a bad thing to experience one's pain or stress or tension or frustration.

It's really a very good thing.

And if we can learn to be mindful enough to see these feelings quickly as they're beginning to arise,

Not after they've escalated into some explosion,

Then we realize we might have different choices.

There are some reactions we have that we want to take action from.

We want them to motivate us to do something or say something,

But maybe not in the heat of the moment.

There's a wonderful word in the Pali language,

The language of the original Buddhist text,

Papancha,

Which means proliferation.

Or I heard one translator once describe it as the imperialistic tendency of mind where something happens and the entire world is taken over.

And we do that all of the time.

Something happens and we think this is the end of the world for me.

I'll never be able to accomplish this.

Or this is all my fault.

It has nothing to do with the global worldwide economic slowdown.

It's my folly.

It's my humiliation.

You know,

There's so many things we pile on to an experience in any single moment that we need to be able to separate what our actual experience is from all those interpretations and judgments and some of which may be true and many of which are not.

And so then we have a clear picture of what's actually happening when we're not thinking we are responsible for every single thing in the universe,

For example.

And we have options for how we want to respond.

And this makes for a much less stressful situation.

It's like we have difficulty.

We have obstacles.

We have challenges.

And that's not all that we have.

You know,

We can see them as they are and try to work through them.

And the other thing that's very important is to take in the positive.

We may be quite conditioned,

Say,

At the end of the workday to look back at the day almost as though to evaluate ourselves like how do I do today.

And we might be very conditioned to pretty well only remember the mistakes we made and the things we didn't say perfectly and that we were late with something or whatever it might be.

And maybe that really stupid thing we said at lunch at the meeting just haunts us and our whole sense of who we are and all that we will ever be just collapses around that comment.

And we need to have the kind of fluid intelligence,

The flexibility of awareness,

Which comes from mindfulness to say,

OK,

Yes,

That's true.

It's not that we're trying to pretend that comment was brilliant and witty.

Maybe it was really stupid.

And there are consequences for that.

But that's not all that we are ever.

So within that same miserable seeming day,

There were positive moments or there were moments of repose or there were moments of generosity,

Something like that.

And we have to be inclusive rather than shutting down when we're just looking back at the day.

I'm thinking if I am my job and I lose my job or I can't even get a job.

I'm in my 20s.

I've gone to college.

I can't get a job or mid 50s man.

I was just hearing that the suicide rate of men in their 50s has gone up seriously.

And I'm figuring a lot of them have lost their jobs.

There's no door for them to knock on.

So these people may be able to acknowledge a moment of generosity during the day.

But there they are.

And they're out in the cold.

What do you say to them?

I mean,

These are often desperate times for people and they're always desperate people amongst us because we don't necessarily create a society that acknowledges the worth of every being,

Whatever they may be accomplishing or achieving or accumulating or triumphing at.

You know,

It's not that easy.

It's one of the reasons why I think meditation practice is not just to feel like a little better in a horrible situation.

It's actually a pretty revolutionary tool because we're talking about re-seeing,

Re-visioning what's possible for any person and what's possible for the community of beings in society.

And it's very hard but I think it's essential to not be defined through the eyes of others,

Whether it's,

You know,

A really,

Really bad situation the way you're talking about or even just in the ordinary course of a day getting praise and blame.

You know,

We do something,

We write something,

We give a talk and some people love it and some people don't.

And,

You know,

We like hearing praise.

We don't like hearing blame in the Buddhist configuration of praise and blame and praise and blame.

And that's natural.

And of course we're human beings.

It's not that praise and blame,

I think,

Morph into one another,

You know,

And we don't know the difference.

Of course we know the difference and we care but how much do we care?

Are we so completely defined by the view others have of us that we go way up when the praise comes and we're just destroyed when the blame comes?

And we need some other sense of who we are and our own potential wholeness and the integrity of our being outside of how others view us,

Outside of our status or role description or whatever.

You talk in the book about the possibility of listening to criticism instead of as a humiliation but as a way to learn more,

Which seems so sensible and it is so hard,

Can be so hard.

Yes,

Indeed.

So I'm trying to feel my way into how meditation helps us do that.

Well,

One of the main things meditation does is give us access to what we're feeling so that we can see quickly we're resistant,

We're impatient,

We're angry,

We're blaming.

And then because we see so quickly and because we have a balanced relationship to those feelings,

We're not all freaked out like,

Oh my god,

I'm angry,

I'm going to lose it.

Nor are we just diving into the anger as an example.

I'm such an angry person and I always will be but we have that kind of balanced relationship to what we're feeling then we have a choice.

So maybe I feel myself stiffening up in resistance and not wanting to hear and then I remind myself you can take this in.

Maybe it's worthy,

Maybe it's not.

You know,

You can breathe for a moment and just take this in.

And also remembering that even if somebody is very unskillful in offering feedback or criticism,

There may be a jewel within that for us.

We don't have to obsess about who they are and how crude they are and what they overlook and all of that.

There may be something for us that we can appreciate and grow from.

That's really intense practice.

Isn't it really,

It's really moment to moment,

Listening,

Checking in with yourself.

You have another line about listening without agreeing or disagreeing,

Which seems like another really challenging practice.

Well,

We're so quick to make assumptions and we have our preconceptions which can really narrow our fields of perception.

Like sometimes it's funny when you witness two people having a conversation and they're basically saying the same thing but they can't seem to agree with one another because they're saying it in two different ways and you think,

Wait a minute.

Why are you arguing?

Aren't you kind of getting to the same place?

But from within it's hard to see because we can hold on to that particular way of expression or that point of view so strongly.

That's why I think it's so wonderful to undertake these things as a practice.

They are difficult for sure and I think one should minimize that but it's also it makes our whole life feel so creative that we're not just like going to work,

Getting home.

Every encounter,

Every challenge is a way of growing and changing.

It's very vital.

It's very alive.

Another thing you said is the phrase,

And this is how it's going to be forever,

As the non-meditative attitude.

Well that's what we do.

You know,

We have everything much more rarely in pleasant,

Beautiful,

Wonderful circumstance where we have other issues but certainly more commonly in painful,

Challenging,

Difficult situations.

Our whole sense of possibility and change,

The reality of change,

It just disappears.

And we undertake not just the experience of the discomfort or the pain in the moment,

Physical or emotional,

Whatever it might be,

But we also are taking on all of that anticipation.

What's it going to feel like next week?

What's it going to feel like next month?

What's it going to feel like next year?

You know,

I just recently,

Even though I live in Massachusetts,

I,

As you know,

Have a sublet apartment in New York City and I just recently had to move from one building to another and I just kind of ruling it.

I thought,

Oh no,

You know,

I've lived in this building for so long now and I'm so used to it and I travel so much and I'm in Massachusetts as well so it's like such a comfortable place to have,

Just this kind of place to have and,

You know,

I was kind of complaining to this friend of mine and she said,

Maybe you'll like the new building better.

And I thought,

That never occurred to me for a single second.

Like,

Wow.

And it's not yes or no but it's admitting what we don't know.

And I thought,

Isn't that an interesting perspective?

Maybe it's all going to be better.

Possibility.

Yes.

Sharon,

You're aiming in this book towards a radical redefining of happiness at work and I want to read something from the book.

Feeling good about what we do for a living depends more on our moment to moment experiences than it does on prestige,

Status,

Or pay.

And you talk about moving from what we do to how we do it.

And my reaction to that,

Which is turning everything about work into a practice.

Everything about learning,

Every criticism,

Every joy,

Responding,

Reacting to it all,

Sense of isolation,

The sense of connection,

Everything that happens,

Making it a practice,

As you say,

No matter how modest the job.

And it really made me almost want to go back to work.

Wow.

I'm so happy.

So I'd love you to unpack that for us.

Well,

I mean,

That's a radical shift for most of us.

And yet I think it's very true.

I know that my whole day has been impacted by a conversation I could have with a taxi driver or a limo driver.

And I had one just the other night.

I was giving a talk in Manhattan and the venue had arranged for this car service to pick me up.

And I got in the car and the driver was a Russian immigrant,

An older man.

And he said to me,

I've been watching you on YouTube.

You teach meditation.

And I said,

That's right.

And he said,

I think meditation is becoming everything you can be.

And he said,

You can't be more than you can be,

But you can be everything you can be.

Guru.

And I thought,

Wow,

You know,

Maybe you should give it a talk.

That would be really great.

You know,

That we all have something to contribute to the well-being of those around us,

However modest the job may be.

And we denigrate ourselves or we compare ourselves to others or we think what should have been or what might have been.

But rather than doing that,

We can practice non-distractedness,

Being really present with what we do,

Actually connecting as fully as we can with anyone that we encounter in one way or another.

And we have actually added to their day.

And at the same time,

We have such a sense of presence and such a sense of wholeness in our own being that we do become happier.

And from that happiness itself,

We have more to give.

One of your stealth meditations seemed to me a kind of a hologram of the whole book.

It was about,

Say hello,

Ask a question of somebody you don't normally talk to,

A receptionist,

A shop girl,

Shop person,

Shop girl is so anachronistic,

And have an encounter with that person.

And I was thinking,

I can imagine me in the old life going,

I don't have time to have conversation with the receptionist.

I'm busy.

And yet it seems to work against the isolation that super busy person has.

You talk about if you find connection at work,

It's going to give you a sense of meaning.

It seemed like such a simple thing.

What was your intention with writing that?

One of the basic principles of loving-kindness meditation is that the qualities of loving-kindness and compassion and connection are trainable.

And this is something that's very foreign in the West.

I think that,

I'm not exactly sure why.

I find it quite fascinating.

Sometimes I think we think that something like compassion is a gift and you've either got it or you don't.

And if you don't,

You're out of luck.

Or it's just a spontaneous emotional outburst in a way.

And if it doesn't happen,

There's nothing you can do.

But in Eastern psychology or in Buddhist psychology,

Absolutely those qualities are considered trainable because they rest on how we pay attention.

And we know that attention is trainable.

So here are the people,

The person at the checkout counter or dry cleaner or something,

The kind of people we might normally look through and somehow discount.

They become the other,

Not even through prejudice or bias,

But just indifference.

And so we don't notice them.

They're really a function more than a person.

They're like an object.

And it's amazing to actually look at somebody rather than look through them.

It doesn't actually take that much time away from one's busy schedule.

And there's a completely different sense of connection that will ensue.

That person,

Even the telemarketer is a person and often a person who's kind of desperate,

Right?

You don't have to buy it or whatever,

But you can treat them like a human being.

And this person who's serving us in some way,

If they weren't doing their job,

We would actually be held up,

Right?

Like what if the dry cleaner didn't do that?

And it's just this cascading effect.

And so we are in an interdependent universe.

And just the very nature of things is that everybody is worthy of some respect and honoring of their own sense of dignity.

So that's really the vision of loving kindness.

And it doesn't have to be magnificent.

You don't have to hear everyone's life story in all of its details and give them your rent control department or whatever it might be.

But you can ask a question.

You can really look at them.

And in doing so,

Your own sense of isolation is soothed,

Is dissolved.

You cite some research about an interaction with a nasty boss can transmit into the employee's spouse and spouse's work.

So we're talking about interdependence on a very logical level.

Say hello to someone,

Smile and make contact.

That's easy to understand.

But this is really at a more mysterious level,

Isn't it?

How do you understand that?

I don't know if anyone totally understands it,

But it is like emotional contagion.

We have those mirror neurons which are firing and kind of empathic resonance with someone else and we just carry it.

And it's like I've always wanted to do one of those,

I don't know what it is exactly,

A test,

A survey where like where did this dollar bill come from?

Who had it in the past?

And just be able to trace all the interactions and the exchanges and the business and maybe donation that single dollar bill travels the world.

And so does a mood and so does an intention of the heart if we actualize it and not always in ways that are visible to us.

But it's just the nature of things.

You know,

It's not fanciful or romantic or sentimental,

But we are so closely connected and we do create a collective as well as have our own individual feelings and reactions.

It kind of amplifies motivation for making contact with that receptionist.

We talked about busyness and you say,

And I challenge you on this.

You talk about the illusion of insufficient time.

So please explain how it's an illusion.

Well sometimes what's happening is that where maybe we're frantically multitasking thinking that that's going to help us get everything done.

But in fact,

Our attention is so divided,

It's so fragmented that we're worse off than if we were just to do one thing at a time and give it our full attention.

And also there's a certain amount of time that's taken up just in that kind of a punch away,

That proliferation like,

Oh no,

Once I do this,

Then I'm going to have to do that.

And we're not doing that.

We're just thinking in dread about how we will have to.

And so all of the ways in which we get distracted by the past,

By the future,

By judgment,

By speculation,

That takes up quite a chunk of time.

And just the training to be more concentrated,

To be more present,

To be more focused actually allows us to get more done in a limited period of time.

And we also can see sometimes we say yes too often,

Don't we?

And part of why we have this enormous amount of things to do is that we don't have a great way of setting priorities because we have a great difficulty in saying no.

And so we've got this mound of things that we perhaps can't get done in that period of time.

And we do need to set priorities and focus fully on each one.

You're reminding me of a conversation I had with the editor-in-chief of a magazine about maybe seven years ago who was doing a magazine with one of those newly cut staffs,

Was doing the website for it,

And was then in the process of doing the iPad app,

Which usually takes a whole staff.

And I think she had 10 people on the staff.

She was answering her own phone,

Etc.

I said,

Is there a possibility you could tell your boss that you can't do it all?

And she said,

Nope.

She ultimately quit.

But at that point,

I mean,

And for how many years was she working under conditions that sounds like a good job?

And then you think about the people whose job don't even sound good,

So they're not even getting the ego strokes of that.

There's just too much to do.

And you wonder how they can set boundaries.

It's all fine to say set boundaries,

But they can't.

Yeah,

I mean,

It may not be possible with a particular boss or a particular structure.

But then there are also things,

And we do the best we can,

You know.

There are also things to look at.

I use the example in the book of,

I can't remember the exact exercise,

But when we had a consultant come into the Insight Meditation Society and was working with our board,

They were doing this exercise where they paired us up.

And it was something like tic-tac-toe,

Something like that.

And they didn't really give us many instructions.

But basically,

We wanted to accumulate a certain amount of points doing whatever we were doing on this piece of paper.

And it was very funny because I and the person I was paired with,

And then the next several,

Several rounds of pairs,

We all just made the assumption that we were competing against one another.

And as a result,

We had very few points,

Each of us in the pairs.

And we went around the room.

And then finally,

Right toward the end,

There were a couple of people who said,

Well,

We decided to work together.

And we weren't going to compete against one another.

We were going to cooperate.

And they have like more points than any of the rest of us.

And I thought,

Which was the purpose of the exercise,

You know,

To show how we might inject kind of needless competition and lack of a team,

Things like that.

And it was kind of startling.

It was like,

Oh,

Look what we did.

You know,

So many of us made the assumption that it was just me and me alone.

And that's what success was going to be defined by.

And the only team that had greater success were the people who worked together.

So sometimes,

Even if,

You know,

We have the kind of terrible structure or difficult boss or whatever,

We can't change everything.

But we might be able to look at certain patterns and see if we can change some things and then have a better day for everyone concerned.

That's key for you.

That's the theme running through the book.

It just it infuses every page,

Which is so different from what I think of when I think of a manual for work,

Which is motivation to get ahead and keep your energy up,

Kind of aggressive,

Being in the arena,

In the gladiator rain,

You know,

Rather than,

Well,

Here's another line,

When work becomes a source of connection,

It gains in meaning.

So again,

Here's this whole other aim for work,

Because we all want meaning.

And some of us are doing work that intrinsically has meaning and some of us don't.

And yet,

With this thought,

Every job,

As you say,

You know,

No matter how modest can be in service to the world.

I think it's really true.

And even jobs that have great meaning,

You know,

Then I think other things I talk about in the book,

Like resiliency are really going to come into play because the kind of obviously meaningful work,

Although I absolutely believe it's all meaningful,

However modest,

But you know,

When we're really dealing directly with suffering of beings and trying to change that,

That's very hard.

And it's so easy to burn out and get lost in frustration and impatience and feeling of desolation and nothing's happening fast enough and nothing's happening powerfully enough.

And it's very hard to sustain that kind of work as well.

And different of these skills like resiliency and compassion and equanimity really have to come into play.

You had a definition of compassion that I've actually never heard.

You say it's understanding that people's bad behavior,

I'm paraphrasing,

Bad behavior comes from unhappiness,

Which may be hard to remember,

You know,

When you've got a bully of a boss or nut job,

You know,

Some irascible cab driver.

But it seems like a powerful reminder and inescapably evokes compassion.

Yeah,

Well,

We begin with ourselves.

I mean,

When we are meditating,

We're practicing mindfulness and we're looking within and we see these waves of rage and fear and jealousy and greed.

If we look carefully and don't get lost in the judgment,

Then we see,

Ooh,

That's painful,

That really hurts.

And if we can establish that kind of understanding with ourselves,

We'll have compassion for ourselves.

And we can extend it to compassion for others.

It's very hard,

Especially when that person doesn't seem all that unhappy.

You know,

They seem pretty content with their mean behavior.

And yet,

If we understand just the nature of the mind and the heart and life in a deeper way,

We know it's not true.

You know,

They may be disconnected from real limitation and smallness and narrowness of their life,

But it's there.

It actually does really hurt.

There's a line about not taking other people's behavior personally,

Which I think is another really big challenge.

And I would add that you're also saying,

Don't take your own behavior personally.

Can you talk about that?

Yeah,

I think there's a fine line.

Of course,

We have to be responsible for what we do or what we say or how we react.

But at the same time,

There are just waves and waves and waves of conditions that are affecting this moment in time.

With somebody else,

Somebody told me a story recently about their boss behaving just miserably for about a week.

And this person came to do a retreat.

And at the end of the retreat,

She said,

Never occurred to me they might be going through something.

You know,

And I don't know if it's appropriate in that particular work culture to ask or not.

But even just remembering,

Oh,

That could be,

You know,

That it's not just appearing,

Their behavior is not just appearing in a vacuum.

You know,

They may well be going through something that's very difficult and they don't know how to handle it.

And so they're passing it on to everybody else.

That's very useful.

And with ourselves,

It's like the example of somebody losing their job.

You know,

We do have to be responsible and look at our actions and see if there's something we could do better.

But at the same time,

We are not completely responsible for an entire worldwide recession or depression.

We're just not.

And we take it on as though we were.

You know,

And there's so much humiliation and so much kind of collapse that it's really being unfair to ourselves as being quite unjust.

You know,

So we have to be able to separate out that sense of responsibility,

Which is important to cultivate from that sense of taking it all on like it's all me.

We've long used the image of difficult emotions being visitors.

So in that sense,

We don't own those emotions.

So we can't take it personally that they have arrived and seem to be settled in.

You know,

There's a great relativity to life that when those emotions arise,

The difficult emotions,

We tend to think of them as the inevitable permanent unyielding reaction to a certain experience.

And yet we don't always react in the same way.

You know,

Maybe we had a good night's sleep and our colleague is late with a paper or something like that.

We think,

OK,

We can make up that time.

Maybe we had no sleep at all and the colleague is even more on time but still late.

We completely freak out,

You know?

And so there's a lot that goes into every moment to make that reaction and we can see the relativity of it and say,

Well,

Do I want to carry this into action or not?

Maybe I don't want to go off to the computer and write out the email and press send right away.

Maybe I want to write the email and wait a bit to see if this reaction sustains or it actually begins to abate.

And they will all abate.

Everything will come and go.

It's just the nature of things.

When you talk about sleep,

You remind me of this brilliant phrase you're using,

Strategic renewal,

Which makes a business project out of taking longer vacations,

Getting more sleep,

Midday breaks,

And of course,

In this context,

Meditating.

Well,

I learned that in writing,

As I'm sure you know very well.

I might have learned it from you actually,

You know,

That if I feel stuck,

It's not that useful to just sit there.

It's better to go take a walk.

And all those moments where we're not consciously trying to analyze our way through the problem or something where our mind just gets more relaxed and more open and more spacious,

So many times the resolution will come or the answer or the next step will come,

Even if it's not the ultimate resolution.

And so we need that.

We need to take a break.

We need to know how to step back.

We need to know how to create some space.

And meditation is a perfect way of doing that.

I was really interested that in this whole book,

Which is full of core meditations,

Stealth meditations,

So many mantras like yours when anxiety is urging you to freak out because the plane is late or something,

And I love this mantra of yours is something will happen.

Well,

Something does always happen anyway.

I think that,

You know,

If I'm sitting there on the airplane and I'm falling into a state of anxiety,

It's anxiety because of sheer conjecture.

Oh,

No,

I'll arrive at the hub city too late to catch my connection.

Oh,

No,

I wonder how late I'll be in my destination.

Oh,

No,

They'll probably lose my luggage.

Oh,

No,

You know,

There won't be any cabs.

How am I going to get to the place I'm going?

And that's just speculation and as is,

I think,

Quite a lot of anxiety-driven thought.

And so what I do to bring myself back to the present moment and kind of soothe my whole now jangled system is I remind myself something will happen,

Right?

There'll be a bus or I'll even I'll spend the night in the airport.

I just I can't work it out right now because it's all imaginary.

There's another mantra that I've used of yours,

Which is just do the next thing,

Which seems to be a great beam of light into a muddle.

That's so great.

Just do the next thing.

I mean,

A lot of what those stealth meditations are,

Are ways of bringing qualities like mindfulness and concentration and loving kindness into a real work situation,

Like write that email and maybe don't press send right away or something that came from a lot of people I was talking to about their work situation was write the email and send it to yourself and see what it's like to get that email as a recipient before you decide if you want to alter it in some way and send it on to somebody else.

So it's quite fun or you know,

Don't multitask every single moment of the day.

Maybe use your commute as a time when you're not also texting or getting messages,

But you're just being as you walk or take the subway or whatever it might be.

And there's so many just little moments where we can cut the crazy momentum of our day and return to ourselves and return to the moment.

It's quite fun really.

And it doesn't take up so much time that we then can't get anything done.

A little vacation.

Yeah.

There's one more that I want to ask you about.

Boredom is a feedback cue that our attention is half-hearted.

That's such a Sharon way of phrasing it that it has to do with the heart.

And I think about people and jobs they hate and how this mantra could really make a difference for them.

I think it's both the way we relate to others.

It's a little bit like those people I was talking about that we look through or we discount in some way.

Like why aren't we getting a sense of fulfillment and connection out of talking to a stranger or trying to help someone work through their problem?

Even if it's the 7 billionth time we've heard that same problem.

We could have a meaningful moment of connection right there if we're paying attention.

But if we're kind of listening or thinking about the 50 emails we need to write or the person we'd rather be talking to when it's lunch break or something,

There's not going to be that sense of connection.

And so too with a task.

If our attention is very divided and fragmented and we don't feel very present with something,

There's not going to be much fulfillment there and it's endless because it doesn't matter the task.

You could be doing some extraordinary thing that's being praised all over the world and if you're not present for it,

You're not fulfilled by it.

You're really actually quite bored.

And so instead of thinking that boredom is something to avoid and some dreadful occurrence that I need a more intense job,

Oh boy,

To realize that the quality of our attention actually plays a big role in whether we feel bored or not.

You say that beginning again,

This simple and challenging act of starting over fresh is really the key to this whole endeavor of real happiness at work.

I think there's a story you tell of a nurse who would pause outside a door so as not to bring the last patient into the room.

Did you come to this in the book?

It comes down to beginning again?

I'm not really surprised because it's almost like that's the fractal,

You know,

That very foundational meditation instruction of resting your attention on an object like the feeling of the breath only to discover that your mind wanders very quickly is like the core teaching in fact because it's so easy at that moment of having been distracted and realizing that to just jump onto a train of tremendous self-judgment and criticism and go far,

Far away for a very long time and the actual training is to let go gently and begin again which will save a lot of time and also kind of restore our spirit instead of getting so demoralized by blaming ourselves for another hour and a half.

And that very beginning instruction carries out throughout the entire path and throughout our entire lives because we will make mistakes or we'll lose sight of our aspiration or we'll stray from our chosen course and it's not weakness,

It's not indulgence,

It's really the most intelligent and effective way to accomplish something to be able to let go and to start over to really marshal our energy and have it come together and move on in the direction we want to go.

You say about beginning again that it's not only the key but this is what creativity is and this is what resilience is.

The word inspiration is so overused but this book is so inspiring Sharon,

It just really I think makes you feel work as any moment is an opportunity to connect,

To relate to people,

To respond rather than to react,

To live every moment freshly,

To begin again every moment and it's just a great gift.

Wow,

Thank you.

I would like one more gift from you which is I'd like you to read how you end the book.

The very end?

Very end.

Meditation provides a refuge during life's tumultuous storms by helping us connect compassionately with ourselves and with others no matter the circumstances so that difficulty doesn't lead to alienation.

Meditation also helps us awaken to joy and animates our ordinary routines that it comes alive for us.

The spaciousness of mind and greater ease of heart that naturally arise through concentration,

Mindfulness and compassion are fundamental components of an open and renewed spirit.

Being happy at work is possible for all of us anytime and anywhere with open eyes and tender heart we only need to take the first step.

Thank you so much Sharon.

Thank you.

You've been listening to Amy Gross in conversation with Sharon Salzberg about Sharon's newest book,

Real Happiness at Work.

Sharon will be leading a four week video retreat based on real happiness at work beginning February 3rd at tricycle.

Com.

In the meantime,

If you'd like to share your experiences at work,

Visit us at tricycle.

Com where you can leave a comment.

From all of us at tricycle,

I'm James Shaheen,

Editor and publisher,

Saying thanks for listening.

Reviews

So helpful! Thank you ❤️🙏❤️

Thank you for the perfect reminders of why I meditate and attempt to animate goodness everywhere. Also, how important it is to be realistic about taking on responsibilities, setting limits, and going to empathy in ambiguous situations. Sharon is one of the very best teachers of the dharma. She is wise, insightful, compassionate, and giving. Thanks to IT and Tricycle for making this available without charging.

This was a great talk! Just what I needed.✨🙏🦋

I could have listened to this all day. Perfect timing and topic!

Wonderful as always ❤️