[Applause]
sharon uh
a lot's been happening over the last
several months
um as i mentioned we have coved and
wildfires and black lives matter
and an election and
you know the further destruction of our
environment with climate climate change
and so a lot of people are afraid
or worried there's also been an increase
in a sense of loneliness
and isolation which you talk about
extensively
in your book it's you know even before
covid there there's this epidemic of
loneliness as you put in and
so much suffering
one of the things i really love about
your approach
and your your your writings is that
you make it um
clear that it's okay to feel what we
feel
and even in that meditation you know the
you know we're breathing anyway our job
is
to feel it to notice it
and you know in the midst of everything
happening
in our world and in our family life and
with the economy and
many people losing their jobs there's
this increased
feeling of anger
loneliness anxiety depression
and you know i think it would be easy
to write a book about real change in the
sense that we have to fight and we have
to like go for our vision at all costs
and we have to do it with a sense of
love and peace in our hearts from day
one
um but that's just not the reality for
99
of us like we have these um challenging
emotions
arising in us
um and and you make it uh clear that
it's okay
to actually be angry and i was very
struck by the section about anger like
yeah like anger can actually be a really
good thing
or like it's a it can be very useful
for us it's not this thing that we have
to run away from or smother with love
or get rid of you know and i think in
some
buddhist circles or spiritual circles
there's
some contradictory teachings around
anger and
you make it very clear it's okay to feel
angry like um you know if we don't feel
anger we're not paying attention
sometimes you quoted that quote
um and uh
later on in the book you you um you
mentioned that it's also okay not to
feel
forgiveness right away if we feel
like we've been harmed or someone close
to us has been harmed like
it's okay not to feel the need to cross
that bridge too soon
and so there's a lot of this maybe
self-judgment
around how we should feel versus how we
actually are feeling
um so could you speak to that
um that notion that it's it's actually
okay to feel what we feel
even in the midst of fighting for
um something to be different
sure i mean there's a lot in there in
that and that is great so
uh first i should say i don't
generally speaking choose my book titles
and
somehow i got on the real train and you
know like
with real happiness and then someone
else chose real happiness at work and
real love and
real change was actually a joke title
for a long time
because it felt like okay it goes in the
sequence
we didn't know what else to call it and
then it stuck but i'm
in many ways appreciating the word real
or realistic more than i ever did before
i have a friend bob thurman who's a
buddhist scholar and his
favorite word is realistic and i used to
hear him and think that's kind of boring
you know like i wanted to be realistic
about things but
uh as time has gone on i've i've grown
to respect that
that idea more and more meaning being in
harmony with the truth of how things are
because anything else is going to
disempower us we're going to be at some
weird oblique angle to how things are
and in some state of denial or futile
protestation i don't want it to be this
way well this is how it is
and that doesn't mean we get inert or
passive or we don't take action but
i think the best place to take action
from
is in that kind of full acknowledgement
of how things are
and sometimes how things are internally
or externally
are full of suffering and so there's a
lot in
what you said first of all with certain
feelings even in a very classical
buddhist sense
as you know um
we don't have to call feelings of greed
or jealousy or anger or fear
bad or wrong we can understand them as
states of suffering
at which they are and whether it's ours
or someone else's and
the states that make our lives if we are
lost in them and that's sort of the
whole point feeling something is very
different than being overcome by it
defined by it um let around by it
and and that's where we have a lot of
power and choice
just through being able to pay attention
in a different way
i think it's kind of unjust to oneself
and and even cruel to say
i shouldn't feel this i shouldn't be
afraid anymore i should have stopped
grieving long ago i should you know
i should be beyond this i've been
meditating now for like 7 000 years you
know why do i still feel this
which makes no sense because we feel
what we feel
when conditions come together for
something to arise it will arise
we can affect those conditions for sure
but we can't
absolutely control them or dominate them
and
and our our real power lies in what do
we do with something when it's come up
and anger would be a really good example
of that
it's a complex feeling it's not a simple
thing
um we feel we feel and we have to allow
every feeling the dignity of its
presence
you know and recognize okay this is
what's happening right now
something like anger is usually very
layered and if we can be mindful of it
and pay attention to it without either
condemning it or ourselves
or just saying yes you know i'm gonna do
this vengeful thing and then that
um we learn a lot you know i've seen
sitting with anger
you know the layers of sadness the
layers of fear
and almost always in there there's like
a
kernel of helplessness and tibetan
buddhism they say anger is what we pick
up when we feel weak because we think
it's going to make us strong
and its strength is the energy
there's a kind of um cutting through
energy of anger
which is very needed actually and we
know sometimes
in a meeting and a gathering remember
when we have gatherings
uh sometimes it's the angriest person in
the room
that is insisting that everybody looks
at that problem and everyone else is
kind of studiously looking the other way
not wanting to face it and they're
saying no look at that
you know so we actually rely on that
cutting through energy but
when a person is consumed by it or
overcome by it
when it really becomes kind of a way of
life
it's very destructive and the
buddhist psychology talks about anger as
being like a forest fire
which burns up its own support it can
destroy the host
and like a fire it can range very
wild and end up we might end up
someplace we actually don't want to be
so the big question for us becomes how
do we harness the energy of it
that kind of cutting through possibility
without getting consumed by it now this
is not easy but it's actually almost
like a
characteristic of mindfulness that it
helps us
let's do that and i you know use the
words and testimony of a lot of
activists in the book
about their own experience of just that
and in fact when i was writing the book
i thought you know what would be cool
is to quote gandhi uh
for saying and again this is not putting
ourselves down effort for what we feel
but uh it's the difference between
feeling something and being lost in it
so uh i thought oh i can use that ghandi
quote where you said something like
being lost in anger is like drinking
poison thinking it's gonna kill the
other guy
so then i looked it up because i wanted
to put it in the book so i had to source
it and
i never saw it attributed to gandhi at
all
i sort of attributed to the buddha and
oprah winfrey and the big book of aaa
and carrie fisher and nelson mandela
have no idea who said it
but it's very wise you know so it's not
because
what we're feeling is bad um or
injudicious it's because out of
compassion for ourselves
we decide do i want to get dedicated to
this and just keep
getting overcome by it or is the way we
want to find another way
the other way is not dismissing it but
utilizing the energy of it