[APPLAUSE]
SHARON SALZBERG: Great, thank you so much.
It's such a delight to be here.
I was here a little bit for this conference, Wisdom 2.0,
so it was kind of nice coming back
into the same room and just sort of settling.
So I as you doubtless know, I am a meditation teacher.
And its very funny now when I'm introduced that way, because I
came back from India where I'd first gone to study--
I went in 1970, and came back in 1974.
And in those days, I'd be at a party or some social situation
and people would say to me, what do you do?
And I'd say, I teach meditation.
And they would kind of go, oh, that's weird.
Or occasionally, somebody would say to me, oh,
did you meet the Beatles when you were over there.
I'd say, sadly no, they went when I was in high school.
And now, all these years later-- after so much more significant
research, and science, and kind of a relanguaging
of the whole process-- the most common response
I hear when I say teach meditation is,
I'm so stressed out.
I could really use some of that.
Although my favorite response, which I also hear sometimes
is-- my partner should really meet you,
that'd be really good for them.
And these days, even going beyond the context of stress,
people see meditation-- I think rightly so--
as a kind of capacity building.
As a way of finding resourcefulness,
and a kind of an innovative energy within themselves.
Sometimes I hear the response which concerns me
the most, which is, oh I tried that once, I failed at it.
I couldn't do it.
And then what follows is some description
of what people expect.
I should be able to stop all my thinking.
I should have a completely blank mind.
I should have only beautiful thoughts,
like doubtless everyone else in the room is having.
I should be able to keep sleepiness completely at bay.
I should find perfect peace within the first hour.
Whatever it might be.
And that of course concerns me, because we say we believe very
strongly, you cannot fail at it.
It's impossible.
Because the essence of the meditative process
is changing the way we relate to everything.
So it's that quality of relationship,
that's where the transformation takes place.
So you can't actually be having the wrong experience,
the wrong thing happening.
So I'd gone to India to begin with.
It was actually my junior year in college.
I went to college when I was 16.
I'm a product of the New York City public school system
where they like to skip grades, so I skipped two grades.
And when I was a sophomore in college,
I took an Asian philosophy course--
which quite honestly, as I look back, was sort of happenstance.
I needed a philosophy course.
It was a requirement.
I looked at the schedule, and it was something
like-- it's on Tuesday, that would be convenient,
so let me take that.
And of course the course completely changed my life.
So this is what I heard in that context.
That there were some very practical,
immediate, direct tools that anybody
could do if they want to.
There wasn't, like, a prerequisite.
Anybody who wished to could pick them up,
and that these tools of meditation
were like skills training.
Training, first of all, in concentration.
In the ability to stabilize our attention.
Most of us experience ourselves as fairly distracted,
maybe not in every realm of our experience,
but at least in some.
Where we sit down to think something through, or work
through a dilemma, and then we're gone.
The way our minds tend to jump to the past,
and we go over and over and over some situation, often one
where we now have some kind of tinge of regret.
I should've said nothing, I should have said more.
Why did I go there, why didn't I, why did I stay?
Whatever it is.
And we don't go over it with an eye
toward making amends, or learning from our mistakes.
We just go over it, and over it, and over it, and over it.
Or our minds jump to the future, and we
create a scenario that has not happened, and may never happen.
Which is different that just kind of creating a space,
and letting your mind roam.
It's more like an anxiety driven construct-- of like,
well then this is going to happen,
and that's going to happen.
No doubt it will all fall apart when that happens.
And then we emerge from that with kind
of the burden of that.
So our minds tend to jump to the past, jump to the future.
Judgement.
Speculation.
And the process of developing concentration
is one of more stabilizing our attention.
It's not in a frozen way, it's not in a rigid way.
But it's like with tremendous flexibility and fluidity.
So we realize we're gone, we can come back.
So that the end result is that we're much more centered,
and grounded, and present.
And we recapture all that energy,
which has been just flying all over the place.
The larger consequence, the feeling
of that sort of distraction is said
to be a kind of fragmentation.
It's the way we have so much role identification
often in this society.
That people say, I feel like I'm one person at work,
and I'm a different person at home.
Or my very favorite example of that
still is, I was teaching in New York City somewhere.
And somebody raised her hand and she said,
I feel filled with loving kindness and compassion
for all beings everywhere, as long as I'm alone.
But once I'm with others, it's really rough.
And everybody laughed, because we all
knew exactly what she meant.
And it can be the other way around.
We might feel fine when we're with others,
and very ill at ease being alone.
So our lives can be very cut apart.
Or seem very cut apart.
Whereas the reality is that they're seamless.
We're of one piece.
So concentration and a greater stabilization of attention
is one of the great skills of meditation.
The second is mindfulness, which for me feels
kind of like the word of the hour.
When I came back from India, of course,
no one ever use the word mindfulness,
unless you were using it in a very kind of classical context
in terms of meditation training.
And now it's just everywhere.
I teach in Washington, DC about once a month,
and one of my great amusements is listening to the conductors.
Because every once in awhile they
will say please be mindful of the gap between the train
and the station platform, and I get very excited.
I'm like, oh they said mindful.
Mostly they say what they really mean,
which is please be careful of the gap.
I recently had the conductor who simply said, there's a gap.
It's like, no hint about how he wanted you to relate to it.
It's just like, there it is.
But really, you hear this word like everywhere now.
So classically, mindfulness means a quality of awareness.
A way of paying attention so that our perception of what's
happening in the moment is not so distorted by bias.
Projection into the future, like what's this
going to feel like in three months, eight months, 10
years, right?
Which distorts our sense of what's happening right now.
And interestingly enough, as an example of that,
in some of the meditation research around physical pain
what they've discovered-- and this
is Richie Davidson's lab in Madison, Wisconsin.
I don't know how they got IRB approval to inflict pain,
but somehow they did.
And what they discovered was that the difference
between meditators and non-meditators
was not the reaction to the pain.
Everybody had the reaction to pain.
But the difference was in terms of what happened next,
where they said non-meditators tended
to flip into an anticipatory cycle.
It's like, whatever happened in terms of the pain,
you know the tension, the reaction, happened.
But then they didn't relax subsequent to that.
Because they were very caught up in when's the next bout coming.
How bad is it going to be.
How intense will be.
Right?
Whereas the meditators have that same reaction to pain, but then
it was over.
And they weren't caught in all of that anticipation.
It's interesting.
So maybe that is a great tendency,
or we just pile on to our experience in some way,
but we're continually adding so many layers of interpretation
and judgment that we lose touch with what
is actually happening right now.
Or, we have a big thing about control.
I shouldn't be feeling this way.
This is here.
I've been meditating for 40 years.
It shouldn't be here anymore.
Or I spent $10,000 in therapy just last year,
surely it should be gone.
Or no one else feels this.
Or whatever it might be.
All of which tends to distort the actual experience.
And so we say that mindfulness is the ability
to make the distinction between what our direct experience is,
and then everything we make of it.
It's not to say we want to destroy or annihilate
that narrative capacity.
We want that, for sure.
But we don't necessarily want to be stuck there.
Right?
We might want more to be able to see things
from different angles, and see them for ourselves.
Just in the interests of freedom.
So my favorite example of mindfulness
these days is, let's say you're on your way to a party.
And you run into a friend, and the friend says to you,
you know who I met today?
That new person who's going to be our colleague,
and they're really, really, really boring.
And then you go to the party, and who do you end up
stuck talking to you, but the very person
you have just been told is like the most boring person
on earth.
Very likely, you don't really listen to them.
You don't really look at them.
You're thinking about the 50 emails you need to send,
or everybody else you'd rather be talking to
than this very person.
But sometimes we realize that, and we stop,
and we gather our attention, and we do really listen.
And we really look.
Maybe we come to the end of that party and we walk out thinking,
you know that new person?
They are so boring.
But maybe we don't.
Because life is full of surprises
when we pay attention.
So why take a borrowed impression, what
someone else said about something or someone,
rather than developing our capacity to realize that.
Let go of some of those preconceptions and assumptions.
See more directly, and decide for ourselves.
So one of the great dangers of mindfulness
in terms of the language that we tend to use around it,
is that it can seem so passive.
It's so complacent.
Or so it seems.
Of course, it doesn't really.
When we say things like, mindfulness
means accepting things the way that they are,
it sounds like you're going to vegetate.
Or, be with your experience without judgment,
that you're going to lose discernment
and an edge of activity.
And of course, it's not like that at all.
It's much more creating that space.
That our action is comprehensive.
It's not coming from someone else's vision of what's true.
That we can make choice very easily.
We're going to do just a little bit of meditation
here together, and one of the standard kind of beginnings
to a meditation instruction is to sit and just
listen to sound.
Of course, there's not a lot of sound
here, but I'll make some just by talking.
I once gave that instruction somewhere,
and immediately someone raised their hand
and said, well, what if it's the sound of the smoke alarm
I hear.
Am I supposed to sit here mindfully knowing
that the smoke alarm is going off?
Or should I get up?
And I said, I'd get up.
All right.
But I can see how one can have that impression.
And yet, really the relationship of mindfulness to whatever
we're experiencing-- something very vital, and alive,
and creative because we're freeing ourselves
from all of those old habits of perception.
And then the last great skill of meditation practice, the third,
is compassion.
Or loving kindness.
Compassion for ourselves.
Compassion for others.
And this is a very interesting thing.
First of all, the notion that compassion can be trained
is a little weird, I find, in the West.
People think of it as cold and mechanistic,
whereas in the Eastern psychology,
say in Buddhist psychology, absolutely
it's considered that compassion can be trained,
because we know that attention can be trained.
And compassion is like an emergent property
of how we pay attention.
How do we recover when we've made a mistake.
When we've lost sight of our aspiration.
When we've strayed from our chosen course.
And the kind of mini version of that
is inherent in the meditation instruction.
You sit down.
You have an object of awareness, say
it's the feeling of the breath, which
is what we're going to do.
And most people discover it's not 900 breaths
before their attention wonders.
Usually it's more like three.
Or maybe five, or maybe eight.
Maybe one.
And then we're gone.
And sometimes we are way gone.
And then comes this magic moment when we realize oh, it's
been quite some time since I last felt a breath.
That's the moment where instead of the berating ourselves,
and chastising ourselves, and feeling like a failure.
We practice letting go, with practice beginning again.
And the only way we can do that is
to deepen compassion for ourselves.
And this is very interesting also,
because I was teaching somewhere very recently,
and someone raised their hand and said, I don't buy that.
You know, I think if you have compassion for yourself,
in effect, if you forgive yourself,
that it just makes you lazy.
That you're going to give up a sense of clarity
about ambition, or goal.
And that you're just going to let yourself do anything.
But I don't honestly buy that.
Because I think if we look at how we learn, how we grow,
how we change, it's usually not from that kind
of brutal self-judgment.
So just in the example of the meditation,
you sit down to feel the breath.
It is one breath, and then you're gone.
It's not that useful.
It's not that efficient.
It's not that effective to realize
that you've been distracted and then
launch into this spiral of self-judgment.
I can't believe I'm thinking.
No one else in the room is thinking.
They're all sitting here in bliss.
They're all sitting here bathed in brilliant white light.
Or is that golden light, I forget what color of light
that's supposed to be.
Some kind of light everybody gets, but I don't have it.
They have it.
I don't have it.
They're not thinking.
I'm thinking.
Maybe they are thinking, but they're
thinking beautiful thoughts.
They're thinking wonderful thoughts.
That's because they're wonderful people.
I'm not a wonderful person.
That's why I'm thinking such stupid thoughts.
I'm thinking such petty thoughts.
I'm thinking about the traffic flow on 9th Avenue.
Why am I thinking about the traffic flow on 9th Avenue.
I'm not responsible for the traffic flow.
And anyway, I wrote to the mayor's office last year.
You know, and it's just like, why am I doing that?
I'm so bad.
I'm so useless.
Right?
So if we just engage in that, if we fall into that,
then not only have we extended the period of distraction
sometimes considerably, but it's so demoralizing.
It's so exhausting.
We say in contrast that the healing is in the return.
Not in never having wandered to begin with.
It's in our ability to bounce back,
to come back with compassion.
With clarity.
OK, so that's the basic platform of the meditative process.
And everything I talk about in this book that
follows that-- resiliency, open awareness, integrity--
we consider an emergent property of those three.
Concentration, mindfulness, and compassion.
That's how they get developed in a real way.
So that the platform is really using these tools
as a kind of skills training, just
like I learned way back when.
It doesn't have to be involved, needless to say,
in a belief system, or a dogma, or a certain kind of tradition,
even.
But just a kind of practical application of these tools.
I consider that a very interesting moment
too, because there is a big difference
between thinking about them and doing them.
It's of course so much easier to think about them
than to actually do them.
There's something-- it's almost like alchemy in that moment--
where we're not deferring, and we're not postponing.
And we're saying, let me see if this is true for me.
It's like a grand experiment that we make.
One of the ways this particular book
came about for me was born from a previous book of mine which
is called real happiness, which is
like a template for establishing a meditation program in one's
life.
And that book came out a couple of years ago.
And subsequent to that, in February,
we ran a challenge on my website where people could sign up
and we asked them to blog or comment and describe
their own meditation practice.
And we asked everyone, please be honest.
Unless you actually sat down and 10 seconds later you
were floating away in a cloud of bliss, don't say that.
You know, lets really create an authentic community
by disclosing what our experience actually is.
So people did that, and it was so beautiful
and so interesting.
And at the same time, it seemed clearer
that even given the wide variety of occupations that people were
engaged in-- from firefighters, an undercover policewoman,
and lots of tech people, and school teachers, and nurses,
and all kinds of people-- one of the most challenging arenas
to take these values and make them real was work.
So then I began to look at, OK, let's say that you understand
and practice some amount of stabilizing attention,
and refining attention through mindfulness,
and knowing how to begin again, and having
that deepening of compassion-- what
does that look like in the workplace.
What might it look like, and how might you
take that and make it real.
So it's not just a nice thought.
They say that the greatest predictor of happiness at work
is a sense of meaning.
And that's very interesting, because sometimes the meaning
comes not at all from the job description,
but it can come from what we bring to that job.
How we are.
First of all, there's a sense of doing a craft well.
Having great integrity and fullness.
In doing just the best we can do at something.
And it also comes from any kind of communication
and connection.
Realizing that when we relate to somebody else,
whether it's a colleague, or a client,
or whatever it is-- that is a meaningful moment.
It's not just nothing.
It's not negligible.
And that we can use that encounter, whatever
it is, toward the well being of not only
a mission, but that other person.
And I find that with any kind of job.
It is really interesting.
And I'll just close-- before we start
sitting for a few minutes, and then do questions--
with what is, I think, my favorite story from the book.
And that is this time-- I love telling this story in New York
City because you don't need a huge, long preamble about taxis
and changes of shift, but anyway.
It was one of those hours when it's so, so hard to get a taxi.
And I was further downtown, and I was on my way
to Midtown, New York to try to hear the Vietnamese Zen teacher
Thich Nhat Hanh give a lecture.
And it was just that time, and I couldn't get a cab,
and then a cab finally stopped.
And of course the lights were off,
and they ask where you're going, so that they
could see if your destination matches
where they need to drop off the cab.
And so I told him, and he said, OK get in.
So I got in a cab, and then we got
stuck in the most unbelievable, awful, unthinkable unbearable
traffic.
I'd never seen anything like it.
And we were just crawling along, going nowhere.
And my first thought was, oh great,
I'm not going to make the lecture.
I then I really felt very bad in terms of the cab driver.
I thought, he was nice enough to stop.
His shift was over.
I don't know if he gets penalized in some way.
I don't know if he has to pay a fine in some way.
And I said to him, I am so sorry.
It was really good of you to stop,
and now I've never seen traffic like this.
It's just unbelievable.
I am so, so sorry.
And he said to me, Madam, traffic is not your fault.
And then he said, nor is it mine.
And I thought, wow.
First of all, I don't have to get
to the lecture, because I just had an enlightened cab driver,
and that was like my nugget of wisdom for the day.
And I kept thinking about that second comment, nor is it mine.
And I thought about how many times in a day
he's usually blamed for something that's not his fault.
Bridge is closed, traffic's crazy.
Some other driver does something else.
And I thought, what wisdom not to take that on.
And I thought, OK, there it is.
There's an encounter that was really, really important.
So I think that's a wonderful example of what
we bring to any job that we do, and how
it can really make a difference.
OK, so let's do some meditation.
Is that OK?
So, we say the essence of meditation practice
is balance, that's interesting.
Instead of our normal, maybe more acquisitive frame
of mind-- like if I have a big insight soon,
I can get up and leave.
The whole sensibility is that the insight, everything else
we want, will emerge from bringing
our system into greater balance.
So they say some balance is experienced right away
in our posture.
See if your back can be straight,
without being strained or over-arched.
You want some energy, but not so much energy
that you're really rigid and uptight.
You also want to be relaxed, but not so relaxed
that you're way slumped over, nearly bound to fall asleep.
And we'll start just by listening to sound,
whether it's the sound of my voice, or other sounds.
It's the way of relaxing deep inside.
Allowing our experience to come and go.
Of course we like certain sounds and we don't like others.
But we don't have to chase after them to hold on, or push away.
Just let it come, let it go.
And bring your attention to the feeling of your body sitting,
whatever sensations you discover.
Bring your attention to your hands.
See if you can make the shift from the more conceptual level,
let go fingers, to the world of direct sensation.
Picking up, pulsing, throbbing, pressure.
Whatever it might be.
You don't have to name these things, but feel them.
And then bring your attention to the feeling of your breath.
Just the normal, natural breath.
Wherever it's clearest or strongest for you.
Maybe that's the nostrils, or the chest, or the abdomen.
If you find that place, you can bring your attention
there and just rest.
See if you can feel one breath.
If you like, you can use a quiet mental notation of in, out--
or rising, falling-- to help support
the awareness of the breath, but very quiet.
So that your attention, your attention
is really going to feeling the breath.
And if images, or sounds, or sensations, or emotions
should arise-- but they're not all that strong-- if you
can stay connected to the feeling of the breath,
just let them flow on by.
You're breathing.
But if something comes up with a bang,
and it just pulls you away, you get lost in thought, spun out
in a fantasy, or you fall asleep, don't worry about it.
The most important moment of the whole process
is considered to be that moment.
That's the moment we have the chance to be really different.
So instead of judging yourself, and condemning yourself,
see if you can gently let go.
And shepherd your attention back to the feeling of the breath.
If you have to let go and begin again, like 10,000 times,
in the next few minutes, that's really OK.
That's the training.
And when you feel ready, you can open your eyes.
So, we have a little time for questions or comments, anything
you'd like to talk about.
And those two mics are there.
If you can make your way over there, that would be great.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
SHARON SALZBERG: Hi.
AUDIENCE: I have been meditating for a couple of years now.
Actually, things to you.
I took some of your classes at the Tibet House.
And I find that I'm still struggling
with this very basic thing, which
is how to focus on the breath without controlling the breath.
And I've tried all kinds of tricks, and some of them
occasionally work.
Most of them don't.
And I wondered if you had any thought on that.
SHARON SALZBERG: What are your tricks?
AUDIENCE: One of them was to focus-- instead of focusing
on the most prominent place where the breath is,
to focus on something else that's affected by the breath,
such as, like, my shoulders, and how
they're affected by the breath.
And then I don't control it quite as much.
SHARON SALZBERG: Right, OK.
First of all, I wouldn't worry so much
about controlling the breath.
It doesn't need to become the major project of your practice.
The reason we say don't is more to counter
the tendency we would have to feel, well I'm not breathing
deeply enough, properly, appropriately, skillfully,
whatever it is.
And thereby making it a breath exercise, rather than
an awareness exercise.
So, if you find that you're controlling the breath somewhat
and it's not exhausting you, it's OK.
Don't worry about it.
A lot of what we talk about in terms of controlling the breath
is creating a kind of balance.
So that would mean spaciousness, openness.
So that the breath feels like it's
happening in a bigger space.
And so, people-- it is like a personal experiment
that people make-- just to see what helps
create more that sense of space.
For some people, it's as simple as listening to sound.
Which tends to be more expansive in awareness.
Or feeling your whole body, and feeling
the breath happening within the body.
It may be that if you're mostly with the breath
at the nostrils, that switching to the abdomen
will have a different sense to it.
So it's things like that.
It's just kind of playing.
Not with a sense of like, I've got to correct this.
But just to see if you can create some balance.
AUDIENCE: Right, OK.
Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Hi Sharon, thank you for coming, or Salzberg.
I've been meditating for quite some time,
and the example you brought up about sending the letter
to the mayor, and those demoralizing thoughts-- one
thing that I've practiced is making them positive.
My fear is that it kind of gives you
this sense of maybe false value, or arrogance.
Have you seen that happen to people in the past?
SHARON SALZBERG: So you have those kinds of thoughts,
and then you switch them?
AUDIENCE: To very positive, right?
Like, wow, I sent a letter to the mayor.
Like, I have all this power, or you know--
SHARON SALZBERG: I don't think that's a problem.
I think ultimately all those different methods,
and the things we try, and the tricks, and the ways we play,
are all aimed toward creating a more balanced relationship
to our experience.
And if that's what helps you see the thought as just a thought,
and not take it so to heart, and not be so embroiled in it,
it's great.
The way I usually work is more like-- myself,
in my own practices.
You know, sometimes I tell the story
about once having seen a cartoon from the Peanuts comic strip.
I saw it in a house that some friends had rented for several
of us to do a retreat in, and it was
left on the desk in the bedroom that had been set aside for me.
So, in the first frame of the cartoon,
Lucy is talking to Charlie Brown,
and she says, oh you know, Charlie Brown,
what your problem is-- the problem with you
is that you're you.
And then in the second frame, poor Charlie Brown looks at her
and says, well what in the world can I do about that?
And then in the third and final frame,
Lucy says, I don't pretend to be able to give advice,
I merely point out the problem.
And somehow whenever I was walking by that desk,
my eye would fall right on that line.
The problem with you is that you're you.
Because that Lucy voice had been so amazingly predominant
in my earlier life.
And I felt that one of the techniques that I have been
trained in, in terms of mindfulness,
is called mental noting.
Where you quietly place a label if the word comes easily
on your predominant experience.
So, I felt like seeing that cartoon gave me
a new mental note, which was kind of like, hi Lucy.
Or my favorite form of that was, chill out Lucy.
You know, something great would happen for me,
and my next thought would be, it's never
going to happen again.
And I could say, chill out Lucy.
You know, so it's not like all freaked out,
like Lucy's still here after all these years of meditating.
Or, yes Lucy, you're right.
You're always right.
But it's a very different kind of relationship--
of recognition, balance, a little bit of space,
a little bit of humor.
Some tenderness, some compassion,
and an ability to let go.
Like, OK, I see you.
So that's one way of working.
And if it works for you to work with kind
of molding the thoughts, or seeing them in a different way,
then that's just another way of bringing balance.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
SHARON SALZBERG: Hi.
AUDIENCE 3: I just had a question.
I've kind of been a meditation dabbler for a number of years.
But I've never had a long term teacher.
But I did have long term music teachers.
And I just wonder if this instruction you gave
is similar to instruction I've heard elsewhere.
And I guess I just wonder, if you've
been doing it for a long time, or whatever
your experience was.
If kind of by analogy, what we do now
is sort of like playing scales.
And then when you're at your level,
it's like you're playing Brahms concertos or something.
If it's like a really fundamentally, amazingly
different experience, or if you could somehow speak to what
the processes is like.
SHARON SALZBERG: Yeah, I mean in some ways I actually
see the instruction as a fractal, which fascinates me.
Like, the very first instruction I
ever got, when I went to India all those years ago,
and began my meditation practice, which
was in the context of an intensive 10 day retreat.
Because it took me awhile to find
just the kind of practical, pragmatic approach
I was looking for.
That was the first instruction I heard.
Sit down and feel your breath.
And I was very dismissive.
I thought, feel my breath?
I came all the way to India.
Where's the magnificent, fantastic, esoteric technique
that's going to wipe out all my suffering
and make me a totally happy person.
I thought, feel my breath?
I could have stayed in Buffalo, where
I was going to school, to feel my breath.
And then I thought, how hard can this be.
And then I was like, whoa, this is not so easy.
So there's so much contained in that simple instruction.
Settle your mind in the moment.
Realize you're distracted, and come back.
There's a huge amount there that has
ramifications and implications for something so much bigger.
So, in a way I'm still playing the scales 40 years later.
And another way, of course my experience
is completely different.
I think I was so self-judgmental in the kind of level of anguish
that I experienced and expressed when I was distracted,
or I had an emotion I didn't like and was very strong.
And now it's much more like, hey, chill out Lucy.
Which makes a big difference.
I think there's a common trajectory
that people go through depending on what motivates you.
In the beginning, there's a trajectory
toward greater and greater inclusivity and compassion
that's born out of wisdom.
Like, it's not forced.
It's not something that you feel obliged to develop.
It's just something shifts.
So that even if you're thinking about your job,
there's just a kind of recognition
of how many other people need to do their jobs in a good way
so that you can do your job in a good way.
Right?
That we're not so isolated, were not so alone.
That we exist as part of networks, and patterns,
and a bigger fabric of life.
Or, my very favorite reflection, which we could do right now,
is how many people come to mind as having played
any kind of role in your being here in this room right now.
Right?
Because we're all here because-- myself
included-- because of conversations, and encounters,
and relationships.
And somebody gave us a book, or someone told us
about their meditation practice, or whatever it might be.
It's just layers, and layers, and layers.
So this moment in time is actually
a confluence of connections.
As is every moment in time.
And so, whereas in the beginning that
might have seemed like an abstract notion
to me-- because I saw it, and saw it, and saw it, to be
true-- then it's just, it's just different in those ways.
And so, one of things I really love about meditation practice
is the level in which it seems to change us.
Because it's not deliberative, and it's not studied.
In the sense that you're not encountering a stranger
and feeling disinterested, and then thinking, well, you know,
I just did an eight week meditation class on compassion.
And I really should force myself to smile,
and pretend to be interested.
It's not like that.
There's just shifts that go on.
So that these things come much more naturally.
Remember when the Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,
one of my friends said, giving the Dalai Lama
a peace prize is like giving mother nature an art award.
But his level of compassion-- I thought of him
because I've seen him meet many strangers, obviously,
of all kinds.
And he always seems to be present
and interested and caring.
You don't get the feeling he's sitting there thinking,
oh God, not you.
Not five more people, I can't believe it.
But I am the Dalai Lama, so I better act like I care.
There seems to be a very authentic sense of presence.
But he's the one that gets up at like 3:00 every morning
and practices for three hours.
It didn't just happen.
But the changes become embodied.
They become more natural in that way.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
SHARON SALZBERG: Hi.
AUDIENCE: So, when I think about mindfulness in everyday life,
not specifically just during meditation,
and I think about the distractions that all of us
have in life here.
It's usually a vibrating phone, or an email alert or something.
But then also with all of the other people that you've
met in various professions, I'm wondering
if there were any more practical tips, or just general things
that worked for people.
Whether it was ignoring those distractions,
or making a note of them, and what works.
SHARON SALZBERG: Great.
So what tends to work is ritualizing kinds of pauses.
You know, they don't-- well, two things.
One is uni-tasking every now and then, instead of multitasking.
And the other is ritualizing certain pauses.
They don't have to be-- neither has to be very lengthy.
But, we need them to punctuate our day.
So that they're repeated.
And in terms of pauses, for example
a very classic example would be don't pick up
the phone on the first ring.
Let it ring three times, and breath.
And then you pick it up.
It's almost unbearable to think about.
But if you actually do it, it's like-- in those moments,
we can return to ourselves.
Because usually what happens, as you are implying,
is that we get caught in this kind of crazy momentum.
And we're taken so far away from ourselves that we're just--
and we're getting increasingly agitated,
and then it's harder to return because we
know it's going to feel comfortable when we come back.
But if we just kind of regularly come back.
We come back to the moment.
We come back to ourselves.
We can utilize something like the breath, which
is with us-- I was going to say always,
except I learned in doing an interview for this book,
the journalist told me there was such a thing as email apnea.
Which I hadn't known before.
That people tend to stop breathing, actually,
checking email.
Which is also interesting, and kind of dreadful.
But, since we're breathing most of the time,
and we could be breathing more if we're mindful,
it's a great vehicle for just coming back.
And once we come back to the moment, and to ourselves,
we're also coming back to our sense of priorities,
our sense of values.
They're just apparent to us, whereas they're not
when we're just kind of caught in the momentum.
And then uni-tasking.
I'm sure you know studies show that multitasking isn't
as great as what it's made out to be,
in that we're actually not more effective,
we're not more efficient, we're not getting more done.
So even though we've got this huge amount to do,
and it seems like it will get done the best if we do it
all at once, it's not going to happen in a good way.
And so, here too, it's like a question
of ritualizing or committing.
Like three times a day, if I'm drinking a cup of tea,
or drinking a cup of coffee, I'm going to just do that.
I'm not going to do that, and check my email,
and have a phone conversation, and watch the news on TV.
And if we if we can get into that habit of just bringing
mindfulness in these short momen-- one of my teachers
said short moments many times-- then it
will make a very big difference.
AUDIENCE: All right, thanks.
SHARON SALZBERG: Uh huh.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
SHARON SALZBERG: Hi.
AUDIENCE: So, my question is on oneness,
which you touched on a little bit earlier,
but I was hoping we could dive into more detail.
So, in New York City, and at work,
we can often get caught up in I. I'm
late for work, I need a taxi.
I want that promotion.
I'd like to be the one to improve that algorithm
product, et cetera.
Google is great at fostering a we driven environment,
but how can we on a personal level
use our practice to connect with that idea of oneness
and become closer to it, and really
indoctrinate it into our daily work.
SHARON SALZBERG: One of their reflections
that we do-- I mean, I think one answer is actually
a kind of loving kindness meditation, or training,
so that we really look at others rather than look through them.
And that we, you know if you think
about the people you might normally
encounter who are kind of neutral for you,
like check-out person at the supermarket,
or whatever it might be.
Where we do tend to create an other out of indifference.
Not antipathy, or prejudice, but just indifference.
And you make the experiment, what
happens when I actually look at somebody, instead
of look through them.
And in terms of work, as well, there's a certain remembrance
that first of all, everybody's a human being and everybody
wants to be happy.
It doesn't mean you're not competing, sometimes,
or whatever it might be.
But there's a certain remembrance,
and you actually can do it as a kind of reflection.
Everybody's a human being, and everybody wants to be happy.
And sometimes a corollary to that is everybody
makes mistakes.
So, after I'd written the book, in addition to-- now
I'm in that phase where it's after the book,
so now I'm learning all these other things,
and all these people are bringing anecdotes, and stuff,
and I think oh damn.
But anyway.
After I'd written the book, I was teaching somewhere here
in New York, and some it came to me
and said all week long my boss has been like a tyrant
in a very uncharacteristic way.
And she's been really unfair, and she's
been really off-putting and critical,
and it was only sitting here meditating that it occurred
to me for the first time, maybe she's going through something.
Maybe something hard is happening in her life.
And I said to her, well do you have the kind of relationship
where you can ask her, is anything going on?
She said, you know actually I do.
But I thought that was an interesting moment.
It's like we don't usually we stop, and think,
oh maybe that person has something going on.
Because we're just engaged in defensive or reactive mode.
I think it's just a very powerful reflection.
Everybody's a human being, and everybody wants to be happy.
And of course the fear is that that's
going to make us sort of weak, and sentimental,
and kind of gooey, and we're going to lose our edge.
But I think the reality, of course, is not that at all.
It's just-- it is more as you say,
a kind of we consciousness within which
we can be quite strong.
So, I think we need to stop, but maybe one more.
Just finish.
AUDIENCE: Thanks for being here.
SHARON SALZBERG: Sure.
AUDIENCE: So I have a question about loving kindness
meditation.
I've sort of practiced mindfulness meditation
on and off for a couple years, but every time I've
tried to get into loving kindness it ends up
being much easier to direct positive thoughts
externally than internally.
And I guess that's the order-- you start with yourself,
and then the ones close to you, and then sort of neutral.
Understanding that probably comes
from some sort of self-judgement place,
is there a set of tricks or something,
like something that makes that barrier easier to cross.
SHARON SALZBERG: I'll teach you the basic trick.
Don't start with yourself.
No, truly.
The principle of loving kindness practice,
where instead of gathering our attention around the feeling
of the breath, we're gathering our attention
around the silent repetition of certain phrases.
Very simple phrases, like may I be happy.
Or may you be happy, something like that.
And the principle, classically, is
that it's supposed to be done in the easiest way possible.
And the reality is that starting with ourselves, which
is how you're supposed to start, because it's
said to be easiest, is not always easiest.
Sometimes it's really, really hard.
So I always go back to that fundamental principle
of doing it in the easiest way possible.
Because part of what's developing along
with the loving kindness is confidence and clarity.
It's understanding the difference
between maybe having compassion for someone else and giving in.
Or understanding what it feels like to have compassion
for yourself and someone else.
Or, there's a lot that is developing all along the way,
and so it's worth not struggling.
It doesn't mean you never include yourself,
because you have to.
But it doesn't have to be right away.
It really doesn't.
OK, thank you.
[APPLAUSE]