Oren Jay Sofer: I think so much of the exploration that I’m doing in the book and inviting people to participate in is really this deep inquiry into our values, into what’s most important and really who are we, who are we as individuals but also what are we as conscious creatures and the stories we’ve been told, the stories we’ve created about our limitations personally and as a species, to really push the edges and see that at the core, we all long to love and be loved and that when we are connected to our values, this whole beautiful array of human qualities from patience to courage to devotion to resolve flower inside and provide a robust foundation for us to engage and respond.

James Shaheen: Hello, I’m James Shaheen, and this is Life As It Is. I’m here with my co-host Sharon Salzberg, and you just heard Oren Jay Sofer. Oren is a meditation teacher and member of the Spirit Rock Teachers Council. His work focuses on the relationship between contemplative practice and nonviolent communication. In his new book, Your Heart Was Made for This: Contemplative Practices for Meeting a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love, he lays out 26 qualities of the heart that can expand our capacity to respond to the challenges of oppression, overwhelm, burnout, and injustice. In our conversation with Oren, we talk about how spiritual practice can help us navigate personal and political crises, the power of everyday devotion, how we can reclaim our right to rest, and how curiosity can open the door to empathy and connection. Plus, Oren leads us in a guided meditation. So here’s my conversation with Oren Jay Sofer.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with meditation teacher Oren Jay Sofer and my co-host Sharon Salzberg. Hi, Oren. Hi, Sharon. It’s good to be with you both.

Oren Jay Sofer: Thanks, James. Happy to be here.

Sharon Salzberg: It’s good to see you both.

James Shaheen: So Oren, we’re here to talk about your new book, Your Heart Was Made for This: Contemplative Practices for Meeting a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love. So to start, I’ll ask you what we always ask. Can you tell us a bit about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Oren Jay Sofer: Sure. Absolutely. The book is really grappling with this question of what’s the role of our spiritual practice, our meditation, and the broader world of contemplative practice in the particular historical moment we’re living in. How did these skills that we develop in so many ways translate, do they translate into responding to the immense challenges that we’re seeing on so many levels in our world today? And for me, I was reflecting on this and really realizing that there’s been kind of a through line for me in my own practice with this book as kind of a natural development or most recent iteration in that development.

When I first started meditating when I was 19, not only was I trying to find my place in the world, but I was deeply troubled by the inequity in the world, the violence in our world, and so I was struggling with this question of how do I contribute? And the first thing that I explored and experimented with in a deep and serious way was meditation as a vehicle for understanding myself, doing some deep healing work, and positioning myself to contribute in a deeper way. Out of that came my exploration with nonviolent communication and looking at the gap between our meditation and our relationships. And so I pursued that for a decade or more and folded in trauma healing work as a way of expanding its relevance. This latest book and this particular phase of my life as a new parent, looking ahead to the future, is then really taking that next step from the relational to the social and the collective, saying how do we bring these qualities into our life and into our life as citizens?

James Shaheen: You open the book with a question: How do we reclaim our birthright to love while navigating a complex world in crisis? How do we make love our guide? So I’ll turn the question back on you. What does it look like to take love as our guide? And what gets in the way?

Oren Jay Sofer: I think so much of the exploration that I’m doing in the book and inviting people to participate in is really this deep inquiry into our values, into what’s most important and really who are we, who are we as individuals but also what are we as conscious creatures and the stories we’ve been told, the stories we’ve created about our limitations personally and as a species, to really push the edges and see that at the core, we all long to love and be loved and that when we are connected to our values, this whole beautiful array of human qualities from patience to courage to devotion to resolve flower inside and provide a robust foundation for us to engage and respond.

James Shaheen: One thing I can say about the book is I often ask myself, what do I say I value and how do I actually live? And I think your book contains a lot of  exercises about how to close that gap. You suggested if we do not shape our heart, the world will do it for us. That also resonated. So what do you mean by this? And how do we shape our hearts?

Oren Jay Sofer: Yeah. That’s a paraphrase of a teaching from one of my teachers, Ajahn Sucitto, the British monastic. I think what he’s pointing to and what I’m carrying forward is this understanding that there are so many strong forces in our world today from the media to technology to the education system to the economy that are attempting to mold us both inside and out. The entire education system in the modern industrial era is designed to produce obedient workers who are disconnected from their own power and needs and self-awareness. The persuasive design and technology, the attention economy, all of these are trying to make us docile consumers, and the systems that are destroying the foundations of life on our planet and that are wreaking havoc in communities around the world depend on us feeling disempowered and being obedient.

And so that quote is also coming from the Buddha. One of the epigraphs to the book is this teaching from the Dhammapada that irrigators channel water, fletchers shape an arrow, carpenters fashion wood, the wise train themselves. And there’s this understanding embedded not just in Buddhism but I think in all spiritual traditions and contemplative practice that the heart and the mind are malleable and that we can shape and train them and realize our potential.

So that quote there that you pulled forward is really looking at the tension between this potential we have to really blossom as human beings and the reality that if we don’t exert a force consciously and intentionally to train ourselves, then the larger forces of our world will inevitably shape us to fit into the mold that keeps the systems in our world going. And I think this is the promise of contemplative practice. This is the gift and the offer that’s a quite empowering and hopeful invitation. 

Sharon Salzberg: Well, speaking of invitations, you’re quoting what I have long said is my favorite sutta, where the quote that you use “If it were not possible, I would not ask you to do it, but because it’s possible, I say to you, cultivate the good, the beautiful, let it guide your life.” So when I was very young and beginning meditation, I would read, “Abandon that which is unskillful, cultivate the good. If it were not possible, I would not ask you to do it.” And I kept thinking, “The Buddha thinks I can do it.” And that was the part of it that just moved me so much. So I want to ask you what you mean by the beautiful. What do you think the Buddha meant by the beautiful?

Oren Jay Sofer: Mmm. I love that question, Sharon. It actually touches someplace very deep in me because, the word in Pali for beautiful, as you know, is kalyana. It’s two words, kalyana and kusala. These two words, skillful and beautiful. Our son is named after kalyana. So one of the things that’s been so moving to me about having a child in this first year of his life is getting to witness the purity of the joy and the delight and the inquisitiveness, the utter vulnerability of an infant, how raw we are when we come into this world, how dependent, how completely and utterly dependent we are on our caregivers.

And for me, that has been an incredible affirmation of what I’ve held to be true for so long in my own values, which is the sense that, at our core, there’s good and there’s beauty in our hearts. So I think to answer your question more directly, the Buddha points to what’s beautiful and good.

He takes a fairly pragmatic approach, as we know, of saying, Does it lead to the benefit, well-being, welfare of ourselves and others? Is it rooted in wisdom, compassion, generosity, and kindness, or does it lead to harm, confusion, ignorance? Is it rooted in, these qualities of not seeing, of greed and of hatred?

So cultivate the beautiful for me is saying turn toward that which has been there in our hearts all along that either has been covered over or hasn’t been nourished by our society, by our upbringing, by the different forces that we’ve encountered and do what’s actually going to nourish us and our communities and our worlds in the deepest way.

Sharon Salzberg: So you structure the book around twenty-six qualities of the heart, which you describe as distinct energy patterns that come into resonance with each other. Can you say more about these resonances and the harmonies that these qualities create?

Oren Jay Sofer: Absolutely. I feel very inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching and the way he really popularized this concept that the Buddha used of seeds in our consciousness, that they’re all of these different potentials, these capacities that we have. I see these qualities as very potent seeds of transformation. Many of them draw directly from the Buddha’s lists and the sort of pedagogical structures he uses, although some of them are ones that I think are there in the Buddha’s teachings implicitly but don’t show up in any of the lists, things like play or rest. Anyone who practices knows how essential these qualities are. I talk a little bit about how the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and so maybe I can give two examples, one from the roots I’m drawing from in the Buddhist tradition and then another personal.

The Buddha talks about the five spiritual faculties, which compose most of the first part of the book: aspiration, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom. And he says that these merge in the deathless. It’s a very powerful quote, I think, from the Anguttara Nikaya, where he’s pointing to when we cultivate these qualities to their fulfillment, they carry us beyond what we can know with our thinking mind and culminate in a kind of very deep transformative awakening.

On a more practical level, one of the things that I grappled with as I wrote the book was what’s the place of the more afflictive emotions we experience, just in our individual personal lives, but also on a larger scale as we face deepening climate emergency and political gridlock. What about grief and anger and rage and fear and confusion? Where do these fit in? And so what I see in myself is that these different qualities work together to create a strong and powerful inner space to process the difficult emotions we have.

So compassion, courage, and patience all allow us to grieve in a deep way. I lost my father earlier this year. Just seeing how all of the different qualities of my own practice have allowed me to grieve in a deep way, to not be afraid of the pain, to have the patience to allow it to come and go, to have the tenderness for the deep hurt that’s there and the loss.

Another example would be the way mindfulness and kindness, when there’s equanimity present, can transform fear or anger into a kind of generative power. So they work together, and I see them almost like ingredients in a recipe allowing us to digest and metabolize things and produce something much more useful than any one of them individually.

James Shaheen: Oren, the book focuses primarily on the internal cultivation of the qualities you mentioned, but you also discuss their external expression and how they can support societal transformation. So how can cultivating these qualities support social change?

Oren Jay Sofer: Thank you. I think there are multiple levels to this, many ways in which the cultivation of these qualities support social change. One, for those who are already engaged in some form of social change work, and I define and understand that quite broadly. I think that there’s a tendency to conflate the work for social change with the kind of direct action. What I see and believe is that it’s much, much broader and we need so much more.

It includes everything from building community to working on policy to doing art that inspires us and helps us see things in a new way. So for those who are doing social change work, I think that cultivating these qualities not only provides a tremendous amount of stability and fuel so that we don’t burn out, but it also attends to the inner transformation so that we don’t unintentionally reenact the dynamics of control and oppression and domination that we’re seeking to transform. We just look back at history and see how many revolutions ended up unwittingly replacing one system of domination with another. And we see this in social change circles and in movement spaces a lot where the vision of what we’re struggling for gets undermined by us-them mentalities or by cancel culture.

So it allows us to imbue the means with the end, to ensure that we’re aligning how we’re working for change with our vision of the kind of world that we want to live in. For those who, say, don’t understand, see, or experience themselves as working toward social change, I think that these qualities and the practice of cultivating them opens us up to feel more agency and creativity, to have a vehicle for expressing our love and care in the world.

I think about the story I quote in the introduction of some of the origins of socially engaged Buddhism where Thich Nhat Hanh, one of the key figures in socially engaged dharma, talked about bombs going off in the villages and making the choice to go out into the streets with the monastics in his temple to help those who were hurt and suffering from the bombs. His quote from one of his books is that mindfulness has to be engaged. Once there’s seeing, there must be acting. Otherwise, what’s the use of seeing? And so I think that cultivating these qualities helps us to make that connection, to make that bridge from what we’re seeing to actually having the skills, the means, the energy, the hope, the will to move into action.

Sharon Salzberg: So let’s talk for a moment about aspiration, which you describe as an act that connects us with a sense of what is possible. And I’m sure you’ve heard me quote it a lot, where I say I think we live in a time of blunted aspiration. Aspiration is not greed. You know, aspiration is aspiration. So can you say more about that quality? And what do you mean by aspiration as a verb?

Oren Jay Sofer: Yeah, well, there’s a certain irony in having you ask me that question. And for all of the listeners who don’t know why we’re laughing, Sharon’s book, Faith, is just such a gem of exploration, a whole book on this one quality.

Sharon Salzberg: Thank you.

Oren Jay Sofer: Yeah, so I’ve learned a tremendous amount about it from you. And I think I’m really drawing a lot from your teachings in this. And as you say, aspiration is a verb. It’s something that we do. It’s not something that we have. It’s to aspire. It’s to connect with the energy of our life, that spirit inside that moves us. What I love about aspiration, and of course we’re translating here from the Pali from the term saddha, which you translate as faith, some translate as conviction or confidence. I really think about it as this stirring inside of our heart that yearns for something better and that longs for a trust that there’s something meaningful about being alive, that there’s something fulfilling, just, or good in this remarkable, mysterious experience of being conscious. And the deeply inspiring placement of aspiration at the beginning is to me so brilliant in the Buddha’s teachings because he makes that connection if we don’t have a sense of what’s possible, we won’t try.

And the story I always tell is a quite mundane one. When I was in college, I love Bob Marley. I always have. I love his music. I was at a party and I saw a friend strumming a very simple two-chord reggae song, a Bob Marley song. And I looked at her playing the guitar and I thought, “That doesn’t look so hard. I could probably learn how to do that.” And I picked up a guitar, got a Bob Marley songbook, and taught myself to play. There’s aspiration there. There’s that sense that I could do that. There’s something there for me. Had I never had that aspiration, I wouldn’t have ever learned to play. And so Munindraji, who you studied with many, many decades ago and who I had the good fortune of meeting at the end of his life, he was fond of saying any aspiration can be accomplished if you’re wholehearted and you know the way.

That stayed with me all of these years as this invitation to really look deeply and say, well, what is my aspiration? What is it that I’m here on this planet to do? And I think that this is something that if we all were able to really listen deeply and ask ourselves that question, we could change this world so profoundly because I think that what all of these crises and emergencies are calling for is not for all of us to do one thing or the same thing but for each of us to do what we’re here to do to find our vocation and to contribute in the way that only we can, whether that’s through parenting or teaching or artwork or social change, direct social change work, all of these different avenues.

I think we see how the articulation of an aspiration on a collective level can move entire populations and how in movements for social change, holding fast to that vision powers movements in the face of tremendous resistance and odds.

James Shaheen: Oren, you mentioned aspiration, and you also say that it can help provide us with the energy for change, which is a big deal because another major theme of the book is energy, and sometimes we think of energy in terms of all or nothing, and it can be very easy to get burnt out. So how have you come to view energy in a more sustainable way?

Oren Jay Sofer: Yeah, I love exploring and talking about this because it’s present in our lives at all levels. I like to make the connection between the societal approach to energy. In Western society, there’s this kind of all-or-nothing model that comes from the fossil fuel industry, this extractive model of getting as much as possible as fast as possible for the most productivity accumulation, and I think we see the connections between that and how many of us are conditioned to live our personal lives with this sense of pressure to strive, this willpower, being over caffeinated, pushing past limits.

So there are many different ways, I think, to reclaim a more balanced relationship with energy for the kind of sustainable power you’re referring to. We can look at nature and the natural kind cycles of the seasons, the day and night, our very breath. All religious, spiritual, indigenous traditions honor cycles of activity and rest. This is a very potent investigation, I think, in each of our lives to explore how do we relate to our energy, how do we use our energy, and how can we start to reclaim our energy to see the degree to which we become disconnected from our bodies, from the rhythms of the planet and the earth and to start to reclaim that.

James Shaheen: Do you think that disconnection is what leads to burnout?

Oren Jay Sofer: Absolutely. I think it’s one of the main factors. When we’re disconnected, we either are unaware of the signals that our body is sending us for our needs for rest, or we’re aware of them and we override them. And that’s one of the key things that leads to burnout.

I quote Angela Davis in the book saying anyone who’s interested in making change in the world also has to learn to take care of herself, himself, themself. And I think that the conversation about energy is deeply connected to the conversation about rest. And in order to have sustainable energy, we need to learn how to rest and reclaim our right to rest. And so once we start to examine that, we begin to see that self-care and rest and developing a more sustainable relationship with energy is actually a radical act.

James Shaheen: So learning to rest, now that you mentioned it, requires another quality, and that’s patience. And it can be particularly hard to practice when we feel stressed or under pressure. But you distinguish patience from passivity, which I think is an important distinction. So how have you come to understand patience, and how can practicing patience actually support us in responding deliberately?

Oren Jay Sofer: Yeah. Thank you. That was one of the most enjoyable and interesting chapters for me to write because a number of colleagues of mine offered feedback on the chapter on patience and just this very sense that you’re speaking to have teasing out the difference between patients and passivity.

And there’s that powerful quote from Dr. King from his “Letter to Birmingham Jail,” where he says, “Those who say ‘Wait,’ that ‘wait’ has almost always meant never.” And so there’s this way in which when we look at social transformation, sometimes patience can mean passivity and there’s a certain kind of healthy impatience with oppressive conditions that urges us to act, and yet at the same time there’s a need for the long view with patience and social change.

Coming from the lens of meditation and contemplative practice, one of the ways that I’ve come to understand patience is on the moment-to-moment level in relation to our resistance to whatever’s happening and learning to bear with the internal tension of resisting pain and unpleasant experience, whether that’s unpleasant sensation or the pain and rage related to oppression or the destruction of the earth. So there’s a patience on this moment-to-moment level that allows us to have more breathing room inside to tolerate the discomfort we experience, when we disagree with or dislike what’s happening when it goes against our values and that capacity to bear with the discomfort on a moment-to-moment level starts to open up more space inside to draw on other resources and to make a more wise and empowered response so we’re not reacting based on that discomfort and that resistance.

James Shaheen: You also mentioned the etymology of the word patience. Why don’t you say something about that?

Oren Jay Sofer: Yeah, absolutely. So it comes from to to suffer. To be a patient in a hospital and medicine is to be one who suffers, and so the sense that patience includes the willingness to bear with discomfort consciously as connected to the meaning of the word. And I think for many of us who are troubled about what’s happening in the world, one of the things that I see us being called to is also to be patient with not knowing. And there’s a sense that the more we’re able to be patient with not having an answer, with not being able to see the outcome, the more sustainable our energy can be because the more we are needing that certainty, the more strained our internal resources become, the less resilience we have to stay engaged.

Sharon Salzberg: You know, you use language in such an interesting way, like the association of aspiration and faith, the association of patience and rest, and I’m wondering if you could say a little bit more about rest. I mean, you’re a new parent. You’re not getting any rest. Many of us have quite a lot of responsibility or we’re just very busy. Rest is not the fundamental attribute of our day.

Oren Jay Sofer: Yeah, we are starting to get more rest. He’s sleeping through the night after a whole year. I’ve gotten my first few nights, a full night of rest. I think there’s a few things that are important to me in examining our need for rest and how to honor it. And the first is expanding our definition of rest. I love Tricia Hersey’s definition of rest in her book Rest Is Resistance and her social media platform, the Nap Ministry. She defines rest as anything that connects the body and mind. And I love that because it really broadens the sense of what it means to rest.

And I think if we take an evolutionary perspective, we can see that our ancestors engaged in activities that were a certain kind of downtime that was very regulating for our nervous system, whether it was threshing or weaving or toolmaking or engaging in chit-chat conversations. So any kind of downtime can be recharging.

I think it’s also important to be very real about the barriers that are there to rest. I think rest is a human need. It’s a right. It’s not a luxury. And yet the structures of our society often make it one where those who have access to rest are those who have resources. I think as a society we’re over caffeinated and underresourced because we don’t get enough rest.

There are very real economic pressures, particularly here in the U. S. where the social safety net has been stripped away, just to meet basic needs like housing and health care, and then there are all the internal barriers to rest, the way our sense of self-worth and belonging gets tied to how much we accomplish, how well we perform. There’s this experience of the busier we are, somehow the more important we are, so people feel proud of being busy and not resting. I’ve found that it takes a very deliberate effort to learn how to rest. It involves learning to honor our limits. What can we let go of and say no to? A lot of that rides on cultivating self-compassion, seeing the suffering of being tired and strained and stressed and actually being willing to not only do something about it but feel it.

And I think that’s one of the reasons why many of us don’t rest is that as soon as we slow down, we have to feel the level of deep exhaustion or the things that we’ve been avoiding. Other deep questions to investigate are how much of my activity is necessary and how much of it is self-imposed? Can I relinquish my need to please others to take care of myself? Can I lower my standards in order to get more downtime? What would it be like to not always be productive? And even though the rigors of parenting are intensely demanding, it’s also taught me a tremendous amount about letting go of being productive and just being in the moment because so much of the time that’s all I can do. I think that we can find rest in small ways in short moments if we’re willing to look for it and break from our habits.

Sharon Salzberg: Including our habit of speed and instant gratification.

Oren Jay Sofer: Absolutely

Sharon Salzberg: Right, in the light of not getting instant gratification, we may set out to be committed to the beautiful and some very unbeautiful things may arise. That’s just reality. And that has to be OK. We have to have a degree of compassion and understanding toward that. Otherwise our journey is actually kind of incomplete. 

Oren Jay Sofer: Absolutely. I talk about that throughout the book really, but I think one of the places that I really try to make that point is in the chapter on mindfulness, because the commodification of mindfulness by the wellness industry I think is very dangerous.

The narrative there that mindfulness is about feeling good, which robs us of this potential for real healing and transformation and for a more integrated sense of being that allows us to respond and engage in a more whole and full way to recognize that the fear, the anger, the confusion, the doubt, all of the painful and uncomfortable experiences that come up in our lives and in our practice are not a problem or a failure but are actually part of the work.

And I think there’s a very direct parallel here to anti-oppression work and antiracism work and recognizing that the fear and the rage and the pain and the discomfort of looking at issues of privilege and power are a core and essential part of the work. As we accept that and shift the narrative of what does it mean to practice, what does it mean to be aware, to be mindful, it’s incredibly empowering.

I remember one of the most shocking moments for me in my early practice when I went back to India in my mid-twenties to practice with Munindraji before he passed. I had a really incredibly difficult time, and many of those suppressed emotions broke through to the surface in a kind of violent way, just untethered rage and violent images and voices inside of anger on the cushion. I got really destabilized, in the end deciding to return back home. And I talk about this in the book a little bit, actually, when I talk about energy and the need for balanced energy rather than pushing really hard with this all or nothing approach.

When I went to see Munindraji and broke down crying and told him how overwhelmed I was and how much anger and fear and rage I was experiencing, he looked at me from across the couch and he smiled. And he said, “When you tell me you’re suffering, I feel so happy for you. You’re making progress. You have to enjoy your suffering.” And he said, “You came here seeking enlightenment, and you think that means you’re going to feel peaceful and happy and good, but it’s quite the opposite. You need to encounter and feel all of the places that are preventing you from being at peace in order to find something deeper and more enduring.” And it was this total shift in my perspective to see, oh, I’ve been avoiding all of these things. And this is actually the way through.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, in the light of this conversation about integrated emotion and sort of quality of attention and almost like the holding environment we are creating, which can encompass the joy and the sorrow and the painful and the pleasant, I want to talk about the quality of devotion. Because it’s a tricky word in Buddhist contexts, as so many people tend to associate it with blind faith. Even when you referred back to my book, Faith, I thought, oh yeah, I got a lot of flack about that one. So I’m wondering about your own relationship to the word devotion, the concept of devotion, the practice of devotion, and how that’s changed as your practice has deepened and has also included these very difficult experiences.

Oren Jay Sofer: Thank you, Sharon. I love to talk about devotion because it has been such a rich part of my practice. My very rational Western sensibilities and my Jewish upbringing of bristling at the idea of bowing before a Buddha shrine or offering incense to shaving my head and taking robes and spending nearly three years living as a renunciate at the monastery. So I think one of the ways that I enjoy just highlighting the difference, and you pointed to this when you mentioned the title of your book Faith and how people bristle or react to that, is to just offer a few synonyms for the word devotion and to notice the different resonances inside with a word like sincerity, or wholeheartedness, or enthusiasm, or even reverence, or respect.

So to play with words again and talk about etymology, devotion contains the word vote. It comes from the Latin, which means that we commit. We commit fully. And to me, that’s what devotion is about. It’s a way of relating to anything with this quality of deep love and loyalty and generosity. When we’re devoted to something, we give a lot. We give our time, we give our energy, we give our attention. So we can be devoted to a life partner. We can be devoted to an instrument, to a craft. What I love about this is the understanding that devotion isn’t defined by the object but by the quality of our attention and the love that we bring to it.

And as you point out I think very appropriately, devotion without reason can be dangerous. So we see this throughout history. And at the same time, devotion can include the intellect without depending on it. I think we really need to look at the results of our devotion and see what is it leading to? Is it leading to good? Is it benefiting ourselves and others? And if so, then we can trust that what we’re devoting ourselves to is worthy. I think it’s a deep human need. And one of the things I talk about in the chapter is that particular passage in the Pali Canon that I had to reread the first time I came across it, where there’s this recounting of the Buddha’s reflections and thoughts after his awakening. And he essentially thinks, “Who or what am I going to be devoted to? Now that I’m awakened and I’ve sort of surpassed all of my teachers, what can I be devoted to?” It’s painful to live without devotion. And then he ultimately says, “Well, I’ll be devoted to this truth, to this way of being and living that I’ve discovered.”

I think that so much of the pain on a spiritual level in our world today comes from a lack of devotion, from an absence of the sacred, a kind of spiritual hunger, the sense of something missing without even knowing what it is. And then our need for devotion, our need to give ourselves to something larger than ourself in a wholehearted way gets misplaced onto work, onto substances, onto entertainment, and even into sort of twisted ways it gets misplaced onto self-judgment or being critical or feeling inadequate. In the book I’m really reaching to make this invitation to say what is it for each of us to be devoted? Where do we find that sense of wholehearted connection? Is it through relationship, art, music? Is it through our family? Is it through justice?

Parenting our son has given me new perspectives on devotion. When I was younger and practicing, I sat a few retreats with Thich Nhat Hanh and I felt so inspired by the mindfulness gathas he offered on washing the dishes like you’re bathing the baby Buddha. And I think as much as I integrated that into my practice, parenting has given me a new appreciation for it in two ways. One, there’s something different about bringing mindfulness and care and attention to the small acts when we have a lot of time to do formal practice. And it takes on a different quality when there’s no time to sit in meditation. Those moments of, say, washing a dish or brushing one’s teeth become imbued with a different quality of meaning and importance when that becomes our practice. It’s not like an extra thing. And then on the other hand, seeing how these small acts of changing a diaper or rocking my son to sleep can be imbued with so much love and can be a kind of act of devotion.

James Shaheen: So, Oren, you said so many nice things about so many nice qualities. I’m going to ask about one that’s a little bit more challenging. You write that we can never fulfill craving, but we can release it. Can you say something about how we release it, and how does renunciation, a word that also is a trigger for a lot of people, come into play here?

Oren Jay Sofer: Absolutely. Yeah, it was a very conscious choice to name the chapter renunciation rather than simplicity or letting go or these more palatable words for Western audience and popular world today.

Craving can be released is the understanding that it’s temporary. The Buddha likened craving to a fire that consumes everything in its path or to a bucket with a hole in it. No matter how much you put in, it’s always empty. If we study our experience, we start to learn the nature of craving and the nature of particularly sensory pleasure is that there’s this pattern of excitement and anticipation.

Then there’s this moment of a rush of pleasure and intensity, and then it fades, and we want another. We want another one. And if we can muster the patience, the mindfulness, the determination, the resolve to bear with the discomfort of craving, we see that it passes, that it’s not who we are, that there’s something larger within us than the craving, whatever it’s for, whether it’s for the ice cream or the relationship or the job. Not all desire leads to suffering, not all resistance is reactive.

So we hold on to a vision for equity, or a world in which we can breathe the air and drink the water and the food isn’t poisoned, where everyone has dignity and access to education and healthcare. We hold fast to that vision, but the craving is when there’s a contraction around it that limits our capacity to respond and to engage in a flexible way. And that’s what we study, and that’s what can be released is the sense of contraction around it, which narrows us inside.

James Shaheen: OK, I said that was the last question, but actually I have one more. The way you just spoke of that, you did some investigatory work. And the interesting thing to me is the power of curiosity. Curiosity, like what is this craving and looking at it? It’s interesting in that way. And I really began thinking about this when U Tejaniya talked about his series of depressions, and at one point he realized he couldn’t fight it, but then he became curious: What is this? And he began to investigate, and sort of as an ancillary effect, it lifted. Not because he wanted it to, but he became curious and began to investigate it. So I wonder if, to close, you can say something about curiosity and its power to break through, say, craving or many other afflictive emotions.

Oren Jay Sofer: Well, we can’t transform anything if we don’t understand it. In order to understand it, we need to get curious. Curiosity, as you’re pointing to in that story, doesn’t have an end or a goal. It’s just this openness to understand and to receive and absorb and learn. And there’s a certain kind of radical curiosity that we cultivate in contemplative practice that I think has a direct connection and support for social change, which is that we get interested in all of our experience, including what repels us.

It’s one thing to be curious about a beautiful sunset or a fascinating connection we have with a person in our life. And it’s another thing to be curious about someone who annoys us or about our back pain, our depression, or about a social condition that troubles us and keeps us up at night. So curiosity brings us into the experience of something to start to understand how it’s functioning so that we can engage with it in a more clear and skillful way.

It plays a direct role in nonviolent approaches to social transformation. King and Gandhi were both huge proponents of the initial stage of developing any strategy around a noncooperation campaign began with being curious and gathering information.

A strategic, principled nonviolent approach to any social change work includes curiosity and openness to one’s opponent and really understanding what their needs and values are, not creating an enemy in our mind’s eye, but seeing a potential partner to join us in beloved community. And so curiosity has that power to open the door to empathy and to deep connection.

James Shaheen: Oren, well, thanks so much for joining us. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of Oren’s new book, Your Heart Was Made for This. And to close, Oren, would you be willing to lead us in a short guided meditation?

Oren Jay Sofer: Oh, of course. Absolutely. So for anyone who’s listening, just invite you to let your body become still, sitting in a comfortable position where you can also feel alert. Your eyes can be closed or just softly gazing down at the ground in front of you. See what it’s like to just feel the weight of your body resting on the earth.

You might notice your breathing or the sounds around you. Just feeling the steady contact with the places your body touches the ground and letting all of the many words that we’ve shared today fade, feeling this earth that supports us, that sustains our life, that offers us air and water, food, and shelter, this earth that our body comes from and will return to.

And just noticing what it’s like to reflect on and appreciate our intimate connection with the planet, this vast source of strength and energy, this deep source of quiet, steadiness, and rest. And perhaps considering how this can be a source of inspiration and guidance for you in your life. And whenever you’re ready, you can let your eyes gently open.

Thanks so much for having me on the show. Sharon, James, it was a pleasure to be here.

James Shaheen: It’s great to have you, Oren. Good to see you again.

Oren Jay Sofer: You too.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Life As It Is with Oren Jay Sofer. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks and Life As It Is are produced by Sarah Fleming and The Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

Jenny Odell: You know, I think climate grief is so much grief for something, and I think in that acknowledgement is this recognition that you don’t really belong to yourself. I describe going to Elkhorn slew, seeing all of these birds. At that moment, there was such a profusion of them and they were so beautiful, but I also couldn’t see them not against the backdrop of loss. In that moment, I realized that it doesn’t really logically make sense to love anything, right? You know, from the point of total, utilitarian logic, why would you tie your fate to something that is endangered? And yet like that is the moment when you experience your deepest sense of humanity. 

James Shaheen: Hello, I’m James Shaheen, and this is Life As It Is. I’m here with my co-host Sharon Salzberg, and you just heard writer and artist Jenny Odell. It can be so easy to feel like there’s not enough time in the day. In her new book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, Jenny examines the history behind our relationship to time, from the day-to-day pressures of productivity to the deeper existential dread underlying the climate crisis. In the process, she explores alternative ways of experiencing time that can help us get past the illusion of the separate self and instead open us to wonder and freedom. In our conversation with Jenny, we talk about why she sees burnout as a spiritual issue, the dangers of apocalyptic thinking, and how we can honor our grief without being overcome by it. So here’s my conversation with Jenny Odell.

James Shaheen: OK, so I’m here with writer and artist Jenny Odell and my co-host Sharon Salzberg. Hi, Jenny. Hi, Sharon. Great to be with you both.

Jenny Odell: Hi, likewise.

Sharon Salzberg: It’s great to see you.

James Shaheen: So Jenny, I’ll ask you what we ask everyone who joins us here. We’re here to talk about your new book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. So to start, can you tell us a bit about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Jenny Odell: Yeah, sure. So my previous book that came out in 2019 called How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, and I think as I was kind of going around talking about that book and hearing back from readers, one of the pieces of feedback that I felt like I was getting was that even a reader who agrees with some of the points in the book about trying to think outside of the frame of sort of standard productivity and feeling like you always need to be producing something that these were ideas they could get behind but were having a hard time thinking about how they would make that work in their lives just in terms of time.

So I would hear from people who had children, multiple jobs, or maybe didn’t but were just thinking about someone in that position, like, what would that mean for them? And then at the same time, I myself was finding that I felt like I never had time. I was a full-time adjunct lecturer and also trying to make art because mostly my background is in art or had been up until that point, so it was honestly something that was annoying to me for a while. It’s like one of those questions that feels annoying until you realize that that is the question, that it’s something that’s worth pursuing.

You know, it was actually before the pandemic started that I wrote the proposal for this book wanting to think through not only a more equitable collective relationship to time but also how did we even get to the point where we think of time as money? What is that history? And maybe if we understood that more, it would be easier to imagine other ways of thinking about time that aren’t money.

James Shaheen: So let’s talk about other ways we might think of time because like everybody else, I’m one of those people who thinks there isn’t enough time in the day to get done what I think I’m supposed to get done, so I think of time in a linear sort of incremental way too just by default. So what are some of the alternative ways of experiencing time that you’ve found freeing?

Jenny Odell: I think that probably the biggest one was just acknowledging the social aspects of time. You know, if you look at time management, self-help books, a lot of them give the same—and they have for decades—given the same advice, which is to get a grid basically and log your time, and this is very much drawing from Taylorist practices in the factory and sort of like efficiency studies, and so that does give you the sense that time is stuff that you have—you know, I have mine and you have yours and there are ways of using it more efficiently but that have to do with just me individually.

And for me, thinking about how actually the way my time feels is very involved with other people, like who you answer to, for example, at work, women being expected to do more of the household duties, things that are social and have to do with power dynamics, whose time is valued, but also the fact that oftentimes, I think if you want more time or more control over your time, you need support from outside yourself, and that’s just a very different way of thinking about it than I have my spreadsheet of hours and I’m just not doing a good enough job using them efficiently.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you really trace the history of looking at time in that way, and especially during the industrial revolution, these self-help books and time management books began to present themselves. But you offer ways of thinking of time that are “not reducible to standardized units, but instead the very medium of possibility.” So can you say more about this? How can time be a form of possibility instead of something that we consume or don’t have enough of?

Jenny Odell: Yeah, I mean there’s this kind of irony, I think, of that spreadsheet idea of time where, on the one hand, it feels like you should be going faster and faster, and it’s often the way of thinking about time that goes hand in hand with the idea of acceleration or productivity, but it’s also the form of time that just for me personally feels very related to determinism and feeling like time is going to plod forward in this way in these units forever until the end of time, right? And especially during the pandemic, the idea that every day was the same, especially without the social kind of shaping of time that we were used to. And so I find that that is a very deadening way of thinking about time. And it’s also one that, for me, lends itself to things like climate dread, the idea that everything’s always going to get worse, that it’s always constantly linearly getting worse, and so I think when I talk about possibility, some of that was just what I drew from looking at examples of time in ecology, just like neighborhood ecology, things around me.

I talk about this Buckeye tree. It’s a California Buckeye tree that I walked past probably every other day, if not more, during the pandemic and treating that as my clock or as a clock. It’s a notable tree because it goes dormant in the summer, so right now if you were to walk past it, it would look dead. But it has the most amazing, most fragrant flowers. It’s one of my favorite smells, and it’s very easy to kind of watch it go through all the different stages, and I literally picked one branch that I would keep track of, and I was surprised at not only how sort of nonlinear it is—like the whole tree doesn’t proceed at the same rate, right? Like one branch is flowering. Another one isn’t. The tree across the way hasn’t even started yet. But also just the the image right of the flowers appearing and then flowering and then the fruit appearing is there’s something about growth and development in that image of time that I felt like was a very important antidote for me to that other understanding of time that feels a lot more like squares extending into the future.

James Shaheen: Right, so it’s a sense of time that’s more consistent with the varying rhythms of life. 

Jenny Odell: Yeah. And new things appearing. 

James Shaheen: Yeah. So much of how we perceive time is linked to how we pay attention, which is something that you were alluding to, paying attention to that one branch, and you suggest that through close observation, we can “unfreeze something in time.” So can you say more about what it means to unfreeze something in time?

Jenny Odell: Yeah, I think for me, it’s just an acknowledgment that other things around you are also changing and participating in time. So the complete opposite of this would be for me like a very alienated existence in which things in the world are just sort of there. Consumerism is a really good example of this, but I think there are less extreme versions of it. You know, even arguably someone who likes to go birdwatching like me, right, there’s still a way of looking at birds where you would just sort of see them as like automatons, like they’re just kind of there, they’re doing the thing that they do, whereas your life plays out in real historical time and those changes are meaningful. So for me, unfreezing something in time is kind of paying enough attention to something to break it out of that way of looking. For me, choosing that branch of that tree was a way of unfreezing it in time. I mean, you should see how many photos I have on my camera roll of this one branch. But it becomes, through that process of observation, the aliveness of that tree becomes a lot more accessible to me, and so it’s just sort of seeing something as a coparticipant with you in time the exact same way that time and life feels for you.

James Shaheen: That’s nice. You know, for Buddhists, this will be particularly interesting. Referring again to the act of observation that you mentioned, you write that we are “releasing something or someone from their bounds as a supposed stable individual entity existing in abstract time, seeing them not only as existing within time but also as the ongoing materialization of time itself.” In other words, attention can free us from the notion of a stable sense of self. So can you say more about that?

Jenny Odell: Yeah. I think that somewhere around that same part of the book, I quote Henri Bergson, the philosopher, saying that time is sort of inscribed in things, that things can be a register in which time is inscribed, and I’m thinking about actually recently I was at Fort Funston, which is in San Francisco, and I had not been there before, and all along this part of the coast, we have these kind of big sandstone cliffs, or cliffs of different kinds of rocks, and that particular spot, there is a cliff that has a lot of layers. Even if you don’t know, I’m very amateur at this point in terms of geology, but I’m very interested, and so there’s all these kind of obvious layers, but there’s one layer in the middle that’s very pronounced. It’s white. It almost looks like chalk, and I looked it up later and it turned out that that layer is from a volcanic eruption that happened pretty far north of here that blanketed everything with ash, this white ash. And then you see beyond that end, and then these other layers of rock are deposited.

I was just staring at this cliff for the longest time thinking like, I mean, we all sort of know that rocks are materializations of things that happened. Like if you want to describe what a type of rock is, usually the description of it is things that happened, right? But really just looking at this layer and thinking like that’s not a representation of this volcanic eruption, like that actually is the ash, and some of it had fallen off of this cliff face onto the beach, so I just picked up this piece of white rock and it was just in my hand. And so I think that that’s just like an amazing feeling, but also you at the same time can draw the same conclusions about yourself and that you are also in many ways a materialization of things that happen that is ongoing and constantly being built. And that is just a really nice, I think, counter to the way we’re treated as consumers and also on social media as kind of these fixed units that have very specific attributes.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, this really reminds me so much of the kinds of experiences that one can have in meditation. So it made me curious, aside from the clearly contemplative exercise with that tree, do you have a meditation practice that you do?

Jenny Odell: I do. It’s not a very consistent one. I wish that it were more consistent, but yes, I do try to meditate in the morning. I think that it’s really important for me as a grounding kind of practice, because I’m a very curious person. That probably comes across in the book. So my brain sort of wants to fly off in all directions all the time, and that’s definitely not helped by things like social media, and so I think that’s been—when I can keep the practice consistent, it’s been very helpful for me.

And then on the other side of things, I would say, I don’t know if I can call this a practice because it’s involuntary, but I very often throughout the day will be stopped by something. I live near one of those pedestrian stairways because I’m in kind of a hilly area, and the other day I was walking down the stairway thinking about something probably really silly, but it was very stressful to me at the time. My brows were furrowed. And a butterfly had landed on the steps in front of me. It’s a Gulf fritillary, I looked it up, but I hadn’t seen one around here before. I was unable to move. I just stood there for a really long time, and someone came up the stairs, and I am like one of those people who is just like, usually I would be like, “Oh, I don’t want to look weird or like I’m staring at something.” But I was like, no, I have to keep standing here looking at this butterfly because it was just like one of the most amazing things I’d ever seen.

When I was working at Stanford, this would happen to me a lot with birds because there are a lot of birds on that campus. So I don’t know if I would describe that as meditating, and it’s definitely not a practice, but I do think that I have kind of like contemplative moments that happen to me on a regular basis. And I feel like people who know me or who spend a lot of time with me kind of just have to put up with it. They know about it.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I would call that meditation for sure. I remember going in the Himalayas high up into the mountains and seeing a Tibetan Lama, a very venerated older Tibetan Lama who called that short moments many times, you know, many times during the day, if you’re lucky. I mean, there’s every possibility of just being distracted and not even noticing the butterflies. So there’s a practice there, you know?

Jenny Odell: Yeah, I love that.

Sharon Salzberg: And as you mentioned before, this really intrigued me, the book takes place against the backdrop of the pandemic, which was a time where our usual notions of time were in some ways upended or broken open. I certainly noticed that. I kept thinking, “This feels strange. I usually, I guess, mark time by, ‘Oh, I have to catch that plane’ or ‘I’m going to see so-and-so because I’m in their town.’” And it was, as you said, the sameness of every day was kind of amazing. And so I’m wondering if you could describe how the lockdown changed your relationship to time as well as how you pay attention.

Jenny Odell: Yeah. I mean, I think I had the experience that maybe a lot of people who worked from home, especially on the computer a lot, had, which was I was teaching online, so I did have a schedule, but I wasn’t going anywhere, and so it felt like, as I put in the book, work and leisure were two different tabs on my browser, and so it felt very undifferentiated,, and I think also maybe because I don’t have children, we also don’t have pets, so I just felt like I was kind of in this apartment, this unchanging apartment, and that every day felt very similar and without time, I guess.

And so one of the things that I did was I put a camera on a tripod and just pointed out the window and started taking these photos throughout the day without really understanding why. I think I just did it out of instinct because I needed to see evidence of change, and because it was March, there was actually a lot going on in the sky in terms of clouds and just even watching the color of the sky change throughout the day, and realizing that I just really needed to see that, that not only was it changing moment to moment, but that you would never see any of those images again after that moment in the sky.

So I suspect that if I had written this not during the pandemic, I would have written some amount on this on unfreezing things in time and trying to be attentive to change. But I think that the way time felt for me during the pandemic made it a lot more pronounced, and it made it much more into, it was less of an intellectual exercise and more of a survival kind of thing. Like I actually need to see evidence of change and time for myself, and so I think the way that I wrote about it was different.

James Shaheen: You know, Jenny, you suggest that perhaps one of the gifts of the pandemic was the expansion of doubt, and you write, “Simply as a gap in the known, doubt can be the emergency exit that leads somewhere else.” Can you say more about how doubt can help us exit our current ways of seeing and being?

Jenny Odell: Yeah. I mean, something that this book and my last book have in common is a concern on my part about not having enough time and space to think through something in a nuanced way, even when you want to, just not being given the opportunity. The obvious example of that, which I wrote about a lot on How to Do Nothing, is being expected to have a take immediately on Twitter about something that just happened. You know, I love spending time in archives and going through really old texts and primary sources and things like that, and I think I’m aware of how much time and patience it takes to get to the bottom of something or to get to the roots of why something is happening now at a time when we’re often given very easy and inaccurate answers as to why something’s happening.

For example, fires in California obviously have so much to do with climate change, but there’s also a whole piece of it that was like land stewardship and fire suppression and things that are more detailed than just like the world is burning, for example. But if you go on social media, especially when we had that day here in the Bay Area where the sky was orange, there was a lot of, I think, uncritical apocalyptic language without the nuances and details of why this was actually happening. And so the time and space that’s needed to get to the bottom of things is something that I am constantly looking for and takes a lot of attention, and the feeling that you have time that I feel like is very hard to come by these days, harder and harder.

James Shaheen: Right, you know, you just mentioned the sky being orange and a sense of apocalypse, and you know, we had something similar here. The Canadian fires, the smoke from the Canadian fires came all the way down the East Coast. And you point out that it can be so easy to fall into apocalyptic thinking and what you call declinism, which you describe as the belief that a once stable society is headed for inevitable and irreversible doom. So can you walk us through some of the dangers of this view?

Jenny Odell: Well, actually, I think this can connect to what you were saying about doubt, which is that I think that declinism can kind of foreclose a really crucial space of questioning or imagination or whatever you want to call it that would allow you to imagine other pathways forward. You know, it may be the case that that space is vanishingly small, but it doesn’t matter. It’s very important. I think Rebecca Solnit has written really beautifully about this. What you believe very literally affects what it is possible for you to do, and that’s not just some kind of like hand-wavy thing, right? Really, you see that individually in people, what they think they’re capable of doing affects what they’re able to do. But I think it’s also obviously true collectively. So I worry a lot about not only giving up before it’s over but how the world looks to someone who’s given up. 

James Shaheen: We had Rebecca Solnit on the show, and she did talk about emergence and what the etymology of the word emerge was, and it’s very similar to your understanding of doubt as sort of a space or an opportunity. There’s hope there still. But you also mentioned an equally problematic idea, and that’s nostalgia, which freezes an idealized version of the past and replaces the reality of change with a static image. So from a Buddhist perspective, this feels like a fundamental resistance or denial of impermanence.

Jenny Odell: Yeah, and to go back to the fire example, when I’m trying to describe that nostalgia in the book, I give the example of growing up in California and my parents and I driving up north and seeing unbroken forests as far as the eye can see and me as a child already thinking, “Oh, wow. That must be what primeval California looked like, and trees are good. It’s good that we have so many trees,” which is true, but at that age I was not aware of indigenous land practices or how much more of those particular mountains would have been meadows in the past, meadows maintained through fire sometimes. And so I think declinism goes hand in hand with this idea that things used to be better. And again, I have to say, a lot of things did used to be better. But a blanket notion that things were stable and they were a certain way for a long time up until now, now we’re going over the edge, and I think it’s kind of a myopic view in both directions. I think I’m much more interested in a notion of history where every moment is actually very contingent and at every moment things could have gone different ways and that if you look at history that way, the present moment appears very different, to me anyway. It looks like it could also go a lot of different ways.

James Shaheen: I have a funny version of what you were describing driving on the coast and seeing all the trees south of Los Angeles in Orange County. When I was very young, there were orange groves and orange groves and orange groves. And I was nostalgic for that until I finally realized how utterly unnatural those orange groves truly were. Anyway, Sharon.

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, well, I grew up in New York City, so when I saw a tree, it was like “Wow, there’s a tree.” So you also discuss the phenomenon of climate grief, which is something we’ve been exploring on this podcast recently, and it’s such a powerful question. How can we hold our grief about the climate without getting stuck in it? Or how can we honor sorrow without letting it overcome us?

Jenny Odell: Yeah, definitely. I just wrote the foreword for a book of poetry coming out next year called Near Earth Object by my now friend, former thesis advisor when I was an undergrad in the English department at Berkeley. It’s by John Shoptaw. I don’t know that he would characterize it as poems about climate grief. I think it’s about a lot more than that. But, you know, when I was writing the foreword and having read that book, it was very clear to me that poetry and poetics and art are really, really important parts of the answer for climate grief, as are collective practices and not mourning in isolation. 

The beginning of that book has a poem called “For the Birds,” and it’s just this amazing cataloging of birds that come to his bird feeder but are coming in fewer numbers. But it never sort of succumbs to either: it’s not like a nice poem about birds that doesn’t exist in historical time with the climate crisis, but it’s also not just a poem about there are fewer birds. It’s so suffused with the love of the person who’s looking at the birds who are coming to the bird feeder. And it’s talking about them almost like people. The poem describes seeing something that he thinks is a hawk and then realizing that they’re golden eagles who are refugees from the smoke from the fires. Reading that poem allows me to have all of the feelings that I need to have about what’s happening in their full spectrum.

And it’s not comfortable. But I don’t want to know what happens if I don’t have a place for that, and then because it’s a poem, other people can read it and we can talk about it. We can feel it together. And in writing that foreword, it made me aware of how important the arts are for expressing these feelings collectively.

Sharon Salzberg: That’s really such a powerful and important point. It reminds me, bell hooks was a friend of mine, and when I talked to her about this book I was writing about basically mindfulness and social change, she said she didn’t like the phrase social action because she was afraid it might only imply protesting and marching and things like that. And she looked at me and said, “What about art?” And just listening to you now, I had a whole new insight on one of the powers of art. I always thought of it as breaking boundaries and leading us to a new sense of possibility. But, of course, it’s not feeling so alone.

Jenny Odell: Right, and I think also giving us language because I think something that I observed when I was teaching college students, and I do briefly mention this in the book, observing the grief and the kind of despair on their part but also a kind of paralysis that I think happens when you don’t have the language to describe what you’re feeling. And then it just feels scary. It doesn’t feel like anything else. 

Sharon Salzberg: That’s wonderful. So you also suggest that grief can be incredibly useful as it can teach us new forms of subjecthood. So I wonder if you could say more about the types of subjecthood that grief makes possible.

Jenny Odell: Yeah. I mean, I think any experience of grief, I think climate grief is so much grief for something, right? I would say for someones. And I think in that acknowledgment is this recognition that you don’t really belong to yourself. I have a kind of similar moment in How to Do Nothing, I describe going to Elkhorn slew and seeing all of these birds. It’s actually a very similar feeling to that poem I just mentioned where at that moment, there was such a profusion of them and they were so beautiful, but I also couldn’t see them not against the backdrop of loss. and in that moment, I sort of realized that it doesn’t really logically make sense to love anything, right?

You know, from the point of just total utilitarian logic, why would you tie your fate to something that is endangered? And yet that is the moment when you experience your deepest sense of humanity. Just the experience of grief itself is like, “Oh, I care about something so much that it’s disassembling my ego.” That thing that you’re grieving for or that being has almost like the center of gravity is between you and that thing, and it has its own sort of like center. 

Sharon Salzberg: You know, climate grief can also lead to burnout, and you focus particularly on the spiritual dimensions of burnout. So I’m wondering how you see burnout as a spiritual issue.

Jenny Odell: Yeah, I mean, I can say for me personally, so much of this book but a lot of my work has come out of time that I’ve spent in the Santa Cruz mountains. I grew up right next to them, close enough to them to be familiar with them. And I have noticed that if I don’t go often enough, it’s not that often, but if I don’t go often enough, I start to experience something that I suspect is spiritual burnout. It’s become very clear to me that that place and the things that are in it and the relationship that I have with those things is a source of energy for me that I cannot create for myself and actually wouldn’t want to because I feel like that’s not even how that works.

I was looking at an old journal the other day, I think I was in the middle of doing press for How to Do Nothing, and I said they shouldn’t interview me. I wish they could interview the mountain. Because it didn’t feel like it came from me, and if it did, it came from the relationship between me and the place, and so I think that in a lot of cases, there’s going to be grief, but the thing that allows you to move forward through that is that source, the source of something that is giving you something that’s giving you energy, something that you feel so strongly about is kind of pulling you through it. I think you can actually bear a lot when something like that is in front of you.

Sharon Salzberg: You write that one component of climate nihilism and burnout is the inability to recognize the fundamental uncertainty that lives at the heart of every single moment, which in my mind brings us back to something you alluded to before when you said every moment is contingent, which also means there’s a kind of connection at every moment. Is that right?

Jenny Odell: Yeah, and that you are there. I think that in writing Saving Time, I realized how separate the time of my life had felt from historical time. Even if you read the news a lot, there’s still a sense that you’re not actually—there can be a sense that you’re not actually connected to that, that everyday life where you’re just kind of trying to make it through the day is not really connected in any meaningful way to the things that you see play out on the historical stage. And that is such a disempowering feeling.

The Sydney Writers Festival asked me and a couple of other authors to write letters to the future earlier this summer, and my letter to the future basically is this. It’s me talking to the people of the future saying that the thing that you and I have in common is that we live in a present and that every moment has been a present and that everything we do now just becomes the thing that someone in the future will take for granted, like all of the things, rights and things that we enjoy now, very much struggled for in the past.

I think intergenerational conversations are so important. My friend who wrote the poetry book that I wrote the foreword for is in his seventies, and I’m very lucky to have a handful of friends in their seventies. But I think that being able to take a longer historical view but within someone’s lived individual life, I think that makes it a lot harder to take 

James Shaheen: Jenny, you talk about burnout and the exhaustion that comes with that, but you also discuss another form of tiredness, what the writer Peter Handke calls tiredness that trusts in the world. Can you say more about this type of tiredness? How can surrendering to this type of tiredness actually open us up to something larger than ourselves?

Jenny Odell: Yeah, I think I would describe that kind of tiredness as sort of releasing one’s grasp on the world—the acquisitive grasp, maybe I should specify, the kind of leaning forward, wanting something to happen in the next moment. When I was on a public radio show talking about How to Do Nothing, there was a woman who called in who had just been injured and I think was maybe also retired recently, and she said that she had been sitting in a chair in her backyard not moving and that a bird landed on her at one point because she was so still, and she said—and she was so sincere, she said, “It’s been like the best time of my life.”

If you were to ask someone, Do you want to sit in a chair? I mean, it’s probably also a really nice backyard. But you know, that kind of being released from this need to always get to the next moment, to always want something from the next moment. Because the thing that kind of goes with that tiredness that he’s describing is also essentially an egolessness. I think he says, “Now I was in the world again,” or something like that, like in releasing that clenched feeling of “I’m me and I’m trying to get through the world and I’m trying to get the things that I need to get” and just letting go of that suddenly, I mean, in my personal experiences of this feeling, all of the sensory details of the world kind of flood back in and you’re like, “Oh, right. I’m here, and these other things are here”, and time feels very different.

James Shaheen: Yeah, one of the times in my life that I was most relaxed was when I was very sick, and I thought, Is this really what it takes for me to relax? But Handke describes these experiences as enabling “more of less of me,” making room for everything else. So how can tiredness help us get out of our own way?

Jenny Odell: I think maybe it’s just by slowing you down. I mean, it could be just as simple as that. I describe in that part of the book having an experience like that, where I wasn’t sick, but I had pulled an all-nighter, and just the fact of being essentially immobilized on the couch. That was one of the first times that I saw the bird, consciously saw the birds I years later realized were cedar waxwings. But, you know, that being kind of my gateway bird experience, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that that happened in a moment of openness, like forced openness, basically, where you notice things that are, I don’t know, outside of your own head.

James Shaheen: I remember those all nighters.

Jenny Odell: I can’t do that anymore.

James Shaheen: No, no, no. But you describe that experience as an opening onto infinity. Can you tell us more about that experience then?

Jenny Odell: Yeah, I remember it very vividly because the project that I was doing, I was making digital art at the time, so I had not only pulled an all-nighter, I’d been on the computer a lot, and then I’d gone to my day job where I also had to be on the computer a lot of the time. And so I got home, and I saw this cluster of so many birds, I now know that they do this. If you see cedar waxwings, they’re always in a really big group. But they were at the top of this redwood, and I thought that I was hallucinating pears growing at the top.

I mean, I was very tired, and I had so little knowledge about birds at the time that I didn’t even know how to go about finding what they were. So, anyway, years later, I figured out that they were cedar waxwings, who, at least in this area, aren’t here all year, and in fact they’re not here right now. They should be showing up soon, I think. And they also just in general move around a lot. Like they show up in a tree and they eat all the berries and then they go to the next area and they eat all the berries over there. Their tail colors have actually changed in response to, I can’t remember what kind, there’s some kind of ornamental plant that people use in the U. S. and it’s actually changing their tail color, and so all of these things I think are examples of how the presence of these birds, it’s not just that they’re there, it’s an expression of things that are happening in the environment: it’s the time of year, it’s the things that are fruiting, it’s their own sort of whims and behaviors and preferences, and so it’s actually quite magical that they showed up in that moment. It pointed to a lot of other things that were also happening outside of me.

Like I was on, obviously, clock time. I had been trying to get something done on time. Meanwhile, there are these sorts of migrations happening in these larger climate patterns that were there all along. And it’s like I just finally saw it.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you know, moments like the one you just described seem to unsettle the boundaries between us. Can you say more about what these experiences have taught you about what you call the illusion of the bounded self?

Jenny Odell: Yeah, I mean, even just what the self is is still a very active question for me. I wish I had it on my desk, but I literally just bought, I was at a used bookstore and I bought this reader that’s just different thinkers throughout time on what is a person and what is a self.

But I guess it’s only become more fascinatingly complicated for me through experiences like that. I am someone who has thought a lot about context, I think, for a long time. A lot of my art leading up to the books that I wrote kind of asked the question about how can you separate an individual thing from its context?

I was an artist in residence at a dump and I researched 200 objects, but their entire, like everything that I could find out about each one of them, and the conclusion that I came to was very similar, which was that this object you’re holding in your hand is the crystallization of economic patterns. People thought they wanted this or people thought they could get people to want this. These materials were available and cheap at this time, right, and hence you have this thing that seems like it’s just given, but actually all of these factors fed into it. So I think I’ve always been really interested in that in all domains.

So for the self, I do feel like I have some sort of core vaguely, but I do also feel like there’s Mountain Jenny, and then there’s Oakland Jenny, and there’s Paralyzed by a Butterfly Jenny, and I’m very different around different people, and I think someone could think that and come to the conclusion that like, OK, there just is no self. It’s all totally meaningless. I don’t really think that. I see it more as sort of like, I guess I have a very ecological view of the self, right, like it’s something that’s alive. It has relationships and balances and it can be out of balance, and it’s entirely made out of relationships.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, along those lines, in contrast to the notion of an isolated individual, you write that you’ve come to define being alive as an embrace. What does it mean that being alive is like an embrace?

Jenny Odell: Yeah, I think of it as a mix of sensitivity and then also just, I guess, love. I mean, I feel alive to the extent that I would see the birds at the top of the tree, you know, and not just see them but also feel moved by them. I think that is the kind of engine behind, for me, wanting to see what the next day brings and also wanting to see how I change in response to those things because when I think of the opposite of that, I mean, I kind of alluded to it earlier, but my nightmare is a life of just feeling like I’m just an isolated unit that’s just incidentally here on earth for a while and like not feeling like I have any relationship to anything.

I mean, I’m someone who’s very fortunate to have been able to mostly live in the same place my whole life, and that relationship that I have to this place is so, so meaningful. It’s so much a part of who I am, and I feel like it’s actually something that someone said to me in the book signing line recently was, “I don’t just think that we see places. I think that places see us.” I think that’s sort of what I mean by the embrace is I want to feel like I’m sensitive to things that are happening around me, but I feel seen, that this is a reciprocal relationship, that I’m looking at a world that’s also alive.

Sharon Salzberg: You say that in order for the embrace to be possible, the forward-leaning ego that grasps that time has to die, at least for the moment. So how does this happen?

Jenny Odell: Well, I guess you could pull an all-nighter or get really sick. Honestly though I think that there are a lot of different things that could happen and they all kind of fall under the category of interruption for me. I mean, I guess I was interrupted by that butterfly, right? Having something that is enough of an interruption that it cuts through that drive that you have. And I think that honestly, those things can be big or small. I mean, I can think of times when I went a different way to work or something, you know, and then I just realized how much I wasn’t noticing and how much was going on outside of my little provincial way of thinking, and it sort of blew my mind, and all I did was I just took a different route to work. I think the pandemic kind of was that for some people. I mean, that was a huge interruption. It really rearranged people’s lives, and just judging from what I’ve seen in terms of people not wanting to go back to the office, for example, or just not wanting to go back to the way things were, that interruption really opened up that space, I think.

Sharon Salzberg: And to go back to love for a moment, you quote the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, who writes that when we are actually seeing, we’re in a state of love and there’s no yesterday and no tomorrow. Can you say more about this state of love?

Jenny Odell: Yeah, I think one of the reasons it feels related to time for me and why I love that notion of the no tomorrow and no yesterday is because there’s nothing instrumental about love, and there’s so much right now that feels instrumental or wants to be instrumental. In How to Do Nothing, I talked about the idea from Martin Buber, which is I think related, of I-thou versus I-it, that having an I-thou relationship to something is much closer to what I was saying earlier about the center of gravity, and I-it is much more like things exist in the world for me to either use them or ignore them or discard them. But, you know, anyone who’s experienced even one second of love toward anything or anyone knows that the notion of gain or, I don’t know, strategy or anything like that really just doesn’t make any sense. Like it is the ultimate end in and of itself. If you’re there, you just want to be there, you know? And so it’s this weird thing where I have the linear timeline of my life and there are like these sort of developments and I have a career and all this, but I also know that these moments that I’ve had, these interruptions where I felt just like a feeling of love for the place where I was that did feel like it stopped time, I don’t really think of myself as having an age in those moments. It felt like they were all the same age. They’re very strikingly similar, and I suspect they will continue to be similar.

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, I mean, I hope this isn’t too strategic, but I can see the path. It’s like interruption and being willing to be interrupted, because I think there is, if not agency, there’s some willingness there, you know? Otherwise we’d grab our mini iPad and go back to it. So it’s the willingness to be interrupted and the quality of attention and love.

Jenny Odell: Yes. And I also think something I’ve been thinking about recently is I think on top of that, there’s the sort of being able to catch yourself when you’re falling into that kind of trap of starting to think about everything in a really instrumental way. I say this because, you know, I go to the Santa Cruz Mountains a handful of times a year, and sometimes I’ll write a letter to myself when I’m there. It’s like Mountain Jenny’s letter to Oakland Jenny, right, and it’s like, look, it’s gonna happen. You’re gonna get totally buried in this stuff and you’re gonna stop paying attention and you’re gonna think these things that are right in front of your face are so important. And you’re going to feel vaguely miserable, but you’re not going to know why.

And it’s like you just have to like trust me, you just need to come back here. Just come back here, you know, and then when you get back here, you’ll remember and then you write the next letter, right? But lately, I feel like those are so separate, and I’m really trying to find ways of having more of those moments, you know, somehow even in the midst of the times when it’s the most difficult.

Sharon Salzberg: So it’s exploring practices that can help us enter the state of love and seeing, really, in the moment.

James Shaheen: So, Jenny, I was going to tell you about how bad I am at leisure. The book made me consider that. It’s yet another interruption of the butterfly sort. But, sadly, we’re out of time. I just want to thank you so much for joining us. It’s been a great pleasure. Maybe next time we’ll talk about leisure. And for our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of Saving Time, available now. We like to close these podcasts with a short guided meditation. So here I’ll turn it over to Sharon.

Sharon Salzberg: Thank you. Thank you so much for an amazing conversation. Why don’t we just sit together for a few minutes? If you like, you can close your eyes. Just be comfortable. Depending on where you are, close your eyes or not. And just notice what’s happening in your body, what kinds of sensations are predominant, if any. You don’t have to judge anything or produce anything or change anything. Simply notice, observe.

And whatever sounds may be predominant. I’m sitting here in Massachusetts, and it’s raining and raining. Loud rain sounds. Of course, we might like certain sounds and not like others. But we don’t have to chase after them to hold on or push away. Just sit and be and be in connection with, unless you are responsible for responding to the sound, just let it wash through you.

Notice if you have a predominant mood, sleepy, joyous, intrigued, tired, again, without judgment, without chasing after something. You don’t even have to understand it in this moment. In this activity, simply be with. Observe. How is it? How is it changing?

Just see if you can settle your attention on the feeling of your breath. Just the normal, natural breath wherever it’s clearest or strongest for you. The nostrils, or the chest, or the abdomen. Find that place. Bring your attention there and just rest.

See if you can feel one breath without concern for what’s already gone by. Without leaning forward for even the very next breath. Just this one. And here we are. When you feel ready, you can open your eyes or lift your gaze, and we’ll end the meditation.

James Shaheen: Thank you, Sharon. Thank you, Jenny. That was great.

Jenny Odell: Thank you.

Sharon Salzberg: Thank you.

James Shaheen: Congratulations again on the book.

Jenny Odell: Thanks.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Life As It Is with Jenny Odell. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks and Life As It Is are produced by Sarah Fleming and The Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

Ross Gay: In this practice, I don’t mean to diminish the sort of fullness of life, the full complicatedness of life. But what I do mean to do is to attend very fully. That’s my hope. And by attending very fully, it also means I’m attending to what is astonishingly beautiful. So that kind of thing of, oh, you’re looking on the bright side of things, I say I’m not looking at the bright side of things, I’m just trying to look at everything. I’m very capable of looking at what’s miserable.

James Shaheen: Hello, I’m James Shaheen, and this is Life As It Is. I’m here with my co-host Sharon Salzberg, and you just heard poet and essayist Ross Gay. In 2016, Ross set out to document a delight each day for a year. After he published The Book of Delights, his friend asked him if he planned to continue his practice. Five years later, he began The Book of (More) Delights, demonstrating that the sources of delight are endless—and that they multiply when attended to and shared. With characteristic humor and grace, he chronicles his everyday encounters with delight, from the fleeting sweetness of strangers to the startling beauty of the falsetto to the unexpected joys of aging. In our conversation with Ross, we talk about why he believes delight is evidence of our interconnectedness, how he understands faith, and how to find delight even in awkward/unpleasant encounters. Ross also reads an essay from his new book. So here’s my conversation with Ross Gay.

James Shaheen: OK, so I’m here with writer Ross Gay and my co-host, Sharon Salzberg. Hi Ross. Hi Sharon. It’s great to be with you both.

Ross Gay: Same. Good to be with you.

Sharon Salzberg: Hi. 

James Shaheen: I guess I should say welcome back, Ross.

Ross Gay: Thanks for having me.

James Shaheen: This is the second time. You know, first it was Book of Delights. Now it’s Book of More Delights, which is a delight.

Ross Gay: Very creative title. 

James Shaheen: Book of Delights 2, right?

Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah.

James Shaheen: But the world called for more delight. So can you tell me how this sequel came about?

Ross Gay: Yeah, and I talk about this a little bit in the introduction. Basically, when I was finishing the book, my buddy Patrick Rosal, he’s a writer and we share work and stuff. He asked me if I was going to keep doing the practice of writing. For people who don’t know, the premise of the book or the way the book works is that every day for a year, I write a short essay about something that delights me. And when I finished the first one in 2017, my buddy asked me if I was gonna keep doing it and I had other stuff to get to, but it did make me think, oh, maybe I’ll do it every X number of years. So I decided five years, and that’s kind of how it came to be.

James Shaheen: So is this going to be a lifelong practice as far as you can tell?

Ross Gay: It might be. Yeah. It might be, we’ll see. But it’s pleasant. I like to write essays, and it’s a neat frame for me to just be able to put a little bracket around things and to write essays. It feels like I get around to thinking about what I need to think about one way or another.

James Shaheen: Well, I’m all for getting these every five years, so thank you.

Ross Gay: Oh, good.

James Shaheen: This one is great. We’ll look forward to the next. But could you tell us more about the process of writing the delights? What constraints did you give yourself?

Ross Gay: So first thing is daily. I write them every day, and then I give myself thirty minutes to do them. And then for the most part, I write them by hand. Very occasionally I wouldn’t write them by hand, and very occasionally they’d take more than thirty minutes. That’s just the first draft.

But, so it’s a daily practice. At first, I was calling it a, I can’t remember, like a discipline or something. And then I said, you know, let’s call practice. And that’s how it goes. This year I wrote them all in notebooks, grade books that I got from where I teach. So, there’s a whole shelf of grade books full of delight.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I was listening to a podcast with Jennifer Egan and she talked about writing by hand. So I have to ask you, why do you write by hand?

Ross Gay: Until I wrote the delights, I had mostly written by hand, so that was familiar to me anyway. But as I was doing it, I did realize there was a kind of thinking that happens by hand that doesn’t happen on the computer. And a big part of that thinking is that I’m not deleting big parts of my thinking so I’m able to track the way that my thinking arrives where it does. And that to me is very interesting to sort of see how we got to where we got. And so when I’m doing it by hand, I think I’m more inclined to actually leave some of the remnants of that, some of the trail of how I got to where I arrive at.

James Shaheen: So the last time you were on the show, you had just published a book on joy. So I’m curious, how do you think about the difference between joy and delight, and how would you define each of them? Maybe that’s a tough question, but I thought I’d ask it anyway.

Ross Gay: No, it’s a good question. I like that question, and I don’t know. I’d ask it back too because one of the things I think of delight as occasional, like the hummingbird lands very close to you and you feel delight, which now I’m starting to feel like among the definitions for delight is something like the pleasant evidence of our connection or something like that. But joy, I feel like it’s just there and you can sort of enter into it. In a way, joy feels like the connection itself and delight feels like the little bells, you know, the little reminders that, oh, there’s this fundamental connection here. So that’s how I think of it: delight more occasional; joy, more ever present in a way, sort of waiting.

James Shaheen: You sound a little like Sharon now. Sharon?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, this is tough. I mean, words are fascinating. You know, there’s awe and there’s wonder and there’s delight and there’s happiness and there’s joy. And I remember a journalist once saying to me that no one was really interested in happiness anymore, they were only interested in joy. And I said I find that very unfortunate because I have the word happiness in most of my book titles. You know, that’s really a sad thing to hear. But part of my question is that you said that one of the unexpected perks of writing a book about delight is that readers will reach out to you to share their own practices of delight. And I’m wondering if you actually first found a different response from people using the word joy and using the word delight.

Ross Gay: It’s funny, I think what you’re talking about of people being interested in joy instead of happiness, people will have the same response to the word joy for sure and delight. They’ll think that I’m talking about something that is, I don’t know, that’s not serious, I don’t know. I was at a reading recently, maybe six months ago, and a woman was in the front row and she was just not interested. As I sort of explained what I was thinking about in these books, she actually softened and was like, “Oh, OK, I’m ready for this.” But she didn’t want to hear about just happy little stuff, so it was interesting.

Sharon Salzberg: One of the things you say, which is so fascinating, is that delight compels us to share, and so I think there must be quite a bit of discovery you go through as others share their delights with you.

Ross Gay: It’s one of the pleasures of this, which I could never have anticipated at all. One of the pleasures of having written these books is that people will say, “Oh, this delighted me, this thing delighted me.” You know, sometimes I’ll get a little letter or I’ll get, you know, people online or something like that. And it’s an interesting thing because that makes one’s life a little bit more pleasant. I did not expect that. At the same time, people also, and this feels very interesting and moving to me, people will also say that the book was a friend to me during this incredible crisis, and that feels also moving. That feels instructive in some way. It feels like there’s something really relevant and important to the thing of like what it means to be in the presence of people who are not dismissing or diminishing the suffering of each other but are also in the midst of it able to call attention to what is incomprehensibly beautiful, and that feels really important.

But also the other thing that’s been really interesting to me, and I hadn’t anticipated it, is that there are a lot of people who sort of say, “Oh yeah, we started a delight practice,” and it looks like any number of things. People get on Zoom doing a delight every morning or something like that. That’s another thing I could not have anticipated exactly. Although looking back, I see, oh yeah, it’s a kind of practice, it’s daily, it’s got constraints. It’s a thing that’s in a way easy to kind of plug into,

Sharon Salzberg: Another thing you say that’s very interesting is that you’ve come to appreciate how delight is given to us. So what does it mean for delight to be given to us?

Ross Gay: That follows the other thing, like the people will often thank me because they now have this delight practice that they do with their friends. And I try to remember to be like, this thing is given to me. All I’m doing is like paying attention. And in a way it’s sort of like that practice, which itself feels like a practice to remember that I’m just paying attention. I’m not making the stuff. I’m just paying attention. That’s how it feels like it’s given to me. You know, we have a garden, and this time of year, it’s amazing. Among the amazing things are these hummingbirds are showing up and I’m just paying attention. I’m just noting it. So in that way it feels like it’s given to me. So for whomever this book is useful and for those who feel like I’m giving it to them, I’m like, yeah, we’re all giving it to each other. And that feels like there’s kind of bounty, which feels nice.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, in Buddhist traditions, one of the sublime states is mudita, or sympathetic joy or appreciative joy, as it’s sometimes called, which is really joy in the happiness of others. Instead of falling sway to so much envy or jealousy, it’s really actually taking delight in the happiness of others. So I wonder if you could say something about that.

Ross Gay: That feels also like a thing that I learned writing the first book, which was that so often I’d be—there’s an essay in that first book where I talk about there’s a toddler walking down the row of an airplane and the adults couldn’t not freak out. They were just so excited by this baby. And I was in the midst of reading this book about something horrible, and eventually I had to kind of put it down to enjoy all of the enjoyment that I was in the midst of. And it was like this kind of wonderful, pure enjoyment, and I do feel like that’s a thing that I started to learn, that so much of my delight was actually delighting at the delight of other people in the way that we do when we let ourselves. It feels like it’s kind of built in, and it feels nice to sort of be practicing that built-in thing. 

James Shaheen: You know, you mentioned paying attention, I’m just paying attention, and I loved it when you wrote you’re not being optimistic, you’re just paying attention. So do you think delight has shaped or even restructured how you pay attention?

Ross Gay: Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. Because there’s all these things that I feel like just by doing this practice, I’ve gathered a kind of reservoir of things that now I know, “Oh, that’s happening. That delights me,” as opposed to it’s just happening. I feel like it is a thing that I’m sort of like, oh yeah, that’s another thing that I love actually. Something like that. That’s one of the things that I found myself arguing a little bit with the delights as the kind of optimistic practice in part because in this practice, I don’t mean to diminish the sort of fullness of life, the full complicatedness of life. But what I do mean to do is to attend very fully. That’s my hope. And by attending very fully, it also means I’m attending to what is astonishingly beautiful. So that kind of thing of like, oh, you’re looking on the bright side of things, I say I’m not looking at the bright side of things, I’m just trying to look at everything. You know, I’m trying to look at everything. I’m very capable of looking at what’s miserable.

James Shaheen: Well, that’s kind of a default. I mean, that’s not hard.

Ross Gay: Yeah, that’s not hard.

James Shaheen: Right. You know, often what you’re fully attentive to is what we might otherwise take for granted or consider ordinary. But in your work, the common or the everyday becomes unfamiliar and new, and sometimes in a startling way. So I’m wondering how this relates to your background as a poet. We recently had the poet Jane Hirshfeld on the podcast, and she talked about the process of defamiliarization. Do you see a connection between your poetry and your openness to this type of wonder, or seeing in the common or everyday or the taken for granted something extraordinary?

Ross Gay: I think there’s probably something to the practice of writing poems, how I try to do it, which is to at least on one hand be, I mean, at the basic level, be trying to sort of make, handle, use language in a way that does in fact defamiliarize our understanding. I feel like that might be a way to think about it first.

But the other thing that I think about with poems is that it is, again, for me, the way I try to write poems is to pay attention to something with a kind of precision or a kind of accuracy or a kind of intensity that does make whatever the thing is transform in the process of my observation. I’m not trying to transform anything. I’m trying to pay very close attention to something. But by now I know that for the most part, usually when I pay close attention to things, they transform to some extent. You know, I do feel like writing poems can be a good practice for just noticing.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you describe ordinary experiences or sometimes experiences that might be negative in ways that show us how to take joy in them. I mean, I really laughed when you went camping. You and your partner were ill-prepared. You were wearing cotton, which, according to the veteran you come across, is lethal. I never thought of cotton as lethal.

Ross Gay: Who knew?

James Shaheen: And she’s basically berating you for being so ill prepared, and rather than taking offense, you see the humor and sort of the joy in that situation too. So I really appreciated that, and I got a good laugh out of it. You say that wonder is an experience where the world is made to you anew. Can you say more about what delight has taught you about being perpetually wonderstruck, even in the face of these situations that might otherwise be difficult? I have to go back to the camping one. That was so funny.

Ross Gay: It was funny. I think maybe one of the things about this practice—it’s funny the way you raise it makes me think differently—is that it might be the case that there’s always, like, I’m trying to think about the way that a practice sort of grounds something and it orients something and maybe it sort of puts guardrails on it in a certain kind of way like I know something about it.

But it might be the case that if, while I’m doing this practice, I’m wondering every day kind of alert in a certain kind of way to what’s going to delight me. It’s starting with a question: I wonder. I wonder what’s gonna delight me. And I wonder too, I’m saying that word a lot, if that experience of not knowing what’s going to delight you sort of prepares the ground of not knowing. The vocation for the ear is to not know. Maybe there’s a first knowing, which is like, “Something’s probably going to delight me.” But the not knowing is like, “I don’t know what it is.”

So the delight in a way, it feels like that practice of just being not sure feels to some extent, or maybe to a large extent, connected to wonder, which to me feels like a kind of fundamental unknowing. What do you think?

James Shaheen: What do I think? I think that that’s an excellent way to go about it, because if I already know, nothing’s going to be new. Nothing’s going to inspire wonder. I mean, this is the second time we’ve had you on, and I think you’ve become unwittingly more Buddhist, more Buddhist than me or Sharon. It’s just very interesting. Not knowing is something that comes up a lot in Buddhism. It’s like beginner’s mind, more or less. But I was really amazed. I thought if somebody berated me like that on a camping trail, I don’t know if I would’ve taken joy in it. But you’re really good at this.

Ross Gay: You know, it took some—I acknowledge that I’m like, man, she was really going after me.

James Shaheen: Well, that’s there too. That’s there too. But all of it is a joy. Or a delight, I should say.

Ross Gay: Yeah, that’s right.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, in my experience, that’s a really interesting moment when I realize that my habit, my conditioning is such to see what’s wrong and see what’s worrisome and I can complain about in contrast to what else happened today. And to realize that it’s like a rut, it’s a habit, and moving out of it takes not force or violence but intentionality. It’s like, What else happened today? Or Where is the good in this? And people think that’s hypocritical or stupid, like you’re just kind of walking around with a smile on your face, not really feeling anything, but it’s not true.

It opens us to parts of life or a truth that we’re not hanging out with a lot. You know, it’s kind of unfamiliar and, and there’s something whole about that and fulfilling. You also write very beautifully that one of the purposes of the beautiful is to bring us to wordlessness and grant us silence, which is another way of not knowing. I’m wondering how you view the connection between beauty and silence.

Ross Gay: One thing I want to say about what you were saying too is that acknowledgement of And what else? What else today? I wonder about that as an opening question as opposed to a closing question, like the question, What do we love? What do I love? as opposed to, all of which is also important, What is coming for me? But what do we love in common, or what was beautiful, or what was given to you?

Those things feel to me really like sort of opening questions that bring us closer to one another or help us to acknowledge our connection to another, which to me then sort of further inclines us to make connections. They grow the thing that they witness, it feels to me in some way.

But beauty and silence, that’s such a good question. That essay that you’re mentioning, it’s an essay about the mostly eighties pop group DeBarge, and I’m talking about the falsetto and that the falsetto sometimes is beautiful enough that it can kind of stun us into silence. You know, it might come back to the same thing that silence is evidence of wonder. It’s evidence of the unknown. Sometimes the beautiful or what is sort of startlingly beautiful, part of what makes it startlingly beautiful is that we can’t conceptualize it or we can’t wrap our minds around it, and so we get to just be silent in the face of it. I wonder if it’s that.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, so much of the book centers on the physicality of delight, and I’m wondering, how does delight feel in your body, and what about joy? Is it different?

Ross Gay: That’s also a good way of taxonomizing delight and joy. I do feel like joy is a—I’m more inclined to weep in joy. There’s something about that. In a way, it almost might be more like disassembling, joy. Like there might be something more in that beautiful way of sort of unbecoming with joy, whereas delight, again, it feels like a bell or something. It feels more like [gasp] kind of thing, that kind of sweet startling. But joy, for me, when I’m feeling joy and the experiences that I’ve had of joy and also the experiences that I’ve had that in retrospect may have been joy but were not, were terrifying, it feels like becoming something else, disappearing in some kind of way.

James Shaheen: Sometimes we feel ambivalent about joy or delight. We almost feel an inability to fully feel it or embrace it. We might even feel some vague sense of guilt about it. What about that?

Ross Gay: To me, that’s an immature—when I say immature, I don’t mean that with judgment. It feels like an immature understanding of what something like joy is or the way I think of joy. It’s kind of like a commercial where you’re dancing with your new car. If that’s joy, then that’s like, whatever, who cares. But when I’m talking about joy or delight, I’m thinking of it as being in the midst of our lives, which are full and complicated, and we know we’re going to die.

James Shaheen: Right, I tend to think that we suffer from a lack of it, frankly.

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah. I mean, I understand the pattern just because I have it and because I work so often and with great joy with caregivers, people who, either in their families or in their professional lives, are really on the front lines of suffering. And it’s very hard to feel you do deserve this delight. The way I approach it is really trying to think through more deeply, like where does resilience come from? And what happens when that avenue is blocked and you’re not getting fed in that way and you get depleted and you get exhausted, even more exhausted and utterly crash in the end? And so I think you’re right. We don’t understand it quite, and so the word I tend to use is incomplete. Like, I feel good when I have something nice happen. That’s true. But I also feel good when I can breathe and connect and see someone else. I’m filled with some feeling, which helps me keep going.

Ross Gay: Yeah, for sure. I agree.

James Shaheen: Another recurring theme of the book is time, and you write that though the nominal subject of the book is delight, the real subject is the passage of time. Can you say more about how your relationship to time has shifted over the years? How have you been noticing time’s passage differently?

Ross Gay: Well, you know, my mother’s outside in the kitchen. She’s been here for five days. She just turned 82. Every time we’re here, we talk about my father’s death. He died nineteen years ago, and it’s a significant part of our experience. But you know, like to be with your mother, I just turned 49, and she’s like, “God, Rossy.” I think it’s probably the case for most people, but the older you get, the more you’re like, time, huh, this thing. The answer to your question is I don’t quite know. I do understand that sometimes, for instance, the fact of this book being five years after the first book, that’s why I say the nominal subject of this book is passed of time. Because a few times I’m referencing what happened five years ago, and there’s something that we just know embedded in that story is like, “Oh, and then if you do this every five years, there will be a last one.” It might be this one, but it might be like four down the road. You know, who knows. But that to me, in a way, it makes it extra interesting. And in a way it actually adds that layer that when you’re talking about delight and you’re also talking about aging, you’re talking about delight and you’re also talking about dying.

James Shaheen: Right, it does seem like getting older plays a larger role in this collection, and you chronicle what you call the many jewels of aging. Could you share a bit about how getting older has shifted your relationship to joy and delight? Has it changed how you’re experiencing these states?

Ross Gay: Yeah, I feel like one is that I’ve sort of given myself the task of attending to the states. I don’t know that when I was say 30, I yet had the wherewithal or the chops or the interest or whatever to quite be. It’s very interesting to me now, and among the reasons I think joy and delight are so interesting to me is because I’m deeply in belief of the fact that we’re all connected. I believe in this deep and fundamental connection. And I suspect when I was like a kid, I didn’t want to believe that. And I think there are probably significant parts of myself that still don’t want to believe that, but I feel like that’s probably where a lot of my pain in my life comes from—that I don’t want to be connected, you know, I want to sort of isolate.

So I think that might be one sort of significant way that the older I get my relationship to delight and joy change. I’m very interested in this idea of joy in part because I’m interested in spending my time paying attention to how we’re connected. It’s much more interesting to me now than paying attention to how we’re not connected, which I’ve spent a lot of time doing. But I feel like the much more interesting thing is paying attention to how we’re connected.

James Shaheen: Yeah. I mean, I think here of what they’re referring to is the epidemic of loneliness. It seems that people do not feel so connected. But you’ve also said the most interesting thing about us humans is that we die and we change, which resonates deeply with Buddhist teachings, although I won’t push any more Buddhism onto you, Ross. You seem a natural at this. How do you see our mortality as an occasion for joy?

Ross Gay: If that’s one of the grounds of our being together, it feels like that’s one of the things that we share, that for the start, I feel like there’s something really moving about walking down the street and seeing whoever it is walking toward me and being like, “Oh yeah, you too will die. We’re both going to be dead.” I think that’s an interesting ground to sort of operate on. I also think there’s also this sort of this shared fleetingness of things that if we can kind of get a handle of that, be less afraid of that, be curious about that, it also seems to me to be like a ground of sharing, to be practicing witnesses of how fleeting this whole thing is. That offers a kind of possibility for generosity, a different kind of generosity if we think that that’s another thing that we don’t share—I’m going to die but you’re not, or vice versa.

James Shaheen: We do sometimes go about our lives as if that were true.

Ross Gay: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Sharon Salzberg: You also write about how delight can occasion and be occasion by faith—faith in each other, and our capacity for “mutual, radiant, unpredictable. Sloppy mycelial, transgressive care.” Could you say more about how you understand faith?

Ross Gay: That feels like a lesson for me regularly, and maybe this is part of the practice of this delight thing. It’s interesting. In the first book I had this essay where I’d been writing a bunch of ideas for delights, just ideas, and eventually I had to get rid of them because that wasn’t the practice. The practice was to have a delight every day, and to have a delight every day was a kind of faith that there would be a delight every day, which I think comes from practice. I feel like in this instance, the faith follows the practice. The practice has provided the evidence that, oh yeah, you can have faith in this thing. So maybe that’s how I would say that faith and delight or faith and joy sort of arrive together, you know, or how they have a connection to one another. It feels very much that.

There’s another one in this book where I’m talking about my friend Kate’s cat got lost. In the essay I sort of reveal that every time I see a little sign on a telephone pole that says “Lost Cat,” I’m like, “Oh man, that’s a bummer. You’re never going to see your cat again.” And in a way I’m like, oh yeah, I have a kind of faith, and my faith in that universe compels me to contribute to that universe, which is to say that when I see a bummer, I’m not looking around for anyone’s cat. If my friend’s cat gets lost, I’m not helping them out. Right. You know? And I’ve been an asshole on account of that. My friend Kate, on the other hand, has faith in this other kind of cat-rescuing universe. She made signs, and her cat got back to her. And in a way, the other thing that kind of comes from that is that it’s a beautiful story, actually. Her cat got lost. She put up signs. She goes to the place where her cat got lost, which is behind a strip mall in a murky, swampy area. She goes out there at dawn one day shortly after the cat gets lost, and there are people out there calling her cat’s name.

That’s the kind of faith that she gave me, but I needed a reason to sort of have that faith. In a way, the thing that I’m thinking about in that essay is that often these things are given to you by other people. Someone has to teach you that, oh, when you put signs up, people kind of try to take care of you.

Sharon Salzberg: It’s interesting, I wrote a book called Faith, so it’s a topic I’m very interested in. And one of the reasons I wrote it, I realized later looking back, was that I have a kind of passion for redeeming words, words that used to maybe be useful for us in our lives or uplifting or opening in some way, and then through association and the different ways they get used, they get maybe a very negative connotation. Certainly that was the case when I was writing Faith. People would say to me, “Why are you doing that?,” my friends, and clearly for them there was an association between faith and being silenced and not being able to ask questions. And you are using it really in an opposite kind of way, bringing us to not knowing and opening and it’s very, very different.

Ross Gay: Yeah. I had a friend say something once, and I remember it kind of blew my mind when we were kids. We were in college or something, and he said that faith doesn’t exist without doubt. Something like that. And I remember that that was such a beautiful observation, like, oh yeah, there’s some degree of suspension.

Sharon Salzberg: And also questioning and opening. When I was writing the book, I had a freelance editor and she said, “What’s the opposite of faith? Isn’t it doubt?” And I said, well, no, not from the Buddhist perspective, because the right kind of doubt, which is a sincere questioning, not being cynical—we can be full of doubt, which is really just a mask for fear, like I don’t know if I can do it, so I’ll pretend it’s not worth doing. But when it’s the right kind of questioning and not knowing and insisting on seeing the truth for yourself, it only enhances faith. And then she said to me, “Well, if it’s not doubt, what is the opposite of faith?” And I had, as usual, one of those experiences where I just heard this word come out of my mouth, and that word was despair. Because faith is that which also connects us maybe to our inner strengths, to a bigger picture of life, to a sense of maybe the cat will come back. I don’t know that it will, it’s not that kind of faith. But maybe, maybe. And so the opposite connection is the severing of connection, which is despair.

Ross Gay: That’s right. And it comes back also to the second part of the question earlier about change, that nothing is going to change even in our relationships or in each other. In addition to just being sad, that is despair. It’s just like, no, this is never gonna change.

Sharon Salzberg: I’m also curious how you understand our messiness and unpredictability, which has come up a few times in this conversation.

Ross Gay: Yeah. That comes back to that change business. I feel like another thing that age has something to do with. I think getting older, our messiness and unpredictability, I feel like that’s a thing that, one, I’m more comfortable paying attention to in myself. You know, not totally comfortable, but more comfortable.

But also there’s a kind of notion that we are not one thing and that we are many things—and that we are many things in the process of becoming many more things. That to me, again, like the fact that we die, the fact that we change and we are not one thing, it’s so interesting to me, and that feels to me, again, like a kind of faith, a kind of faith that also inclines me to feel tender toward others when I can kind of hold that, oh yeah, we’re changing. We’re changing. I don’t know what I’m going to be tomorrow or next week, but I also don’t know what anyone else or anything else is going to be tomorrow or next week. That feels like, although again, it’s a kind of groundlessness, it feels also like a kind of potential for a kind of sweetness in a way. Like, oh, what are you going to be? Where are you going?

James Shaheen: You know, Ross, in this book, you begin with your birthday, and I was reading it on Sharon’s birthday and I thought, I wonder what he wrote on my birthday. So I’m a little biased, but I really liked what you wrote on my birthday.

Ross Gay: Which is what?

James Shaheen: It was February 1st. It was “My Neighbor’s Face.” And I was wondering if you could read that for us.

Ross Gay: Yeah. Let me find that.

“My Neighbor’s Face”

As I was walking home today, my neighbor pulled up next to me in his car, rolled his window down, and said, very gently, Hey Ross, while pointing at our car, which has a crumpled rear end, and the back windshield busted out. It’s a mess. He looked alarmed, worried, and concerned, which explains his tone of voice, solemn, soft, pointing from the seat of his car to ours, this dude with whom I suspect I perhaps do not share some values. Hang on. How long can I abide in myself the infantile, arrogant notion that I would know anything about anyone’s values without asking them what they value, myself included? I mean to say I bet I didn’t vote like my neighbor in 2020—maybe there was a sign or a sticker?—which, if we’re being real, might not actually have all that much to do with values; for political parties, and perhaps more explicitly the heads of those parties, do not have values, they have donors, they have shareholders, and they have promises, both parties, which more and more seem like one party, that they have no intention to keep. Oh, I guess I stand corrected: those are values.

But per values I would like to share with my neighbor, I aspire to share with my neighbor—along with knowing his name, which is sort of step one in being a good neighbor, which places me at step zero, trailing him on that front—let me simply report what he said to me, softly, just as I hope I also would do if I saw my neighbor’s car crunched up, making my face as loving and tender as I could, just in case of the worst, as he did, looking over at the wreckage, pointing: Is she okay? He didn’t mean the car (that would be a difference of values), he meant the most-often driver of the car, Stephanie. We then had a nice laugh about it once it was established all was okay, it was Stephanie’s very rubbery twenty-seven-year-old son driving, and he was okay, as was the driver of the truck who rear-ended him. My neighbor exhaled loudly, shaking his head, and said, Phew, it looked bad. Then he lauded the Honda, patting the door of the one he was driving, which, though I’d seen him driving it at least one million times, if you were to have asked me earlier, I would’ve told you, with great conviction, that he drives a Chevy or Ford. And after we were together praising the Honda—me mainly about mileage and how long they seem to run—he said something technical about axels or carburetors or WD-40 or something and I pretended I understood and nodded and laughed and thanked him for checking on us.

James Shaheen: You know, that’s really wonderful. One of the reasons I picked it, aside from the fact that it was written on my birthday, one of the reasons I picked it is that we live in such polarizing times and these spontaneous expressions of concern seem to affirm our capacity to care for each other, to feel connected, as you say, despite the fact that so much in the culture works against that. So that was really lovely. Thank you.

Ross Gay: Thank you for noticing that.

Sharon Salzberg: Before we close, I’m wondering what’s been delighting you today?

Ross Gay: Like I said, my mom coming here, she hasn’t been here for a few years, and to have her here, you know, we have a pretty sweet garden and we dug potatoes and made potatoes and green beans the other night. And just having kind of a slow, sweet time with my mother has been really, really, really delightful. Really lovely. 

Sharon Salzberg: So nice. So James, I want to ask you too.

James Shaheen: What delights me today? I was just about to say. This podcast today has really delighted me. It’s such a pleasure to be with you, Ross. What delights you today, Sharon?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, now you’ve pointed out several things. I’m delighted that Ross is with his mother. I’m delighted that this podcast has been so wonderful. And I’d say finding some space in my day has really brought me a lot of delight.

James Shaheen: Ross, do you have anything else to add?

Ross Gay: No, it’s been really nice. It was fun talking last time, and it’s fun talking because it feels like the deepening of the questions, so I’m grateful for the questions and to be in conversation with you all. It feels like keeping the unknown sort of fluttering, which feels lovely.

James Shaheen: Well, we’ll definitely do it again. I’m sure Sharon is on board with that too.

Sharon Salzberg: It was lovely. Does someone have to write another book or can we do it before then?

James Shaheen: Yeah, we’ll figure out a way. Okay. So, Ross, thanks so much for joining us. It’s truly a delight. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of The Book of (More) Delights, available now. We like to close these podcasts with a short guided meditation. So Sharon?

Sharon Salzberg: Thank you. Thank you all so much. If you want to just sit comfortably, you can close your eyes or not, however you feel most at ease. Just settle your attention on the natural flow of the in- and out-breath, wherever you feel it most distinctly, the nostrils, the chest, or the abdomen, and the operative word here is rest. We rest our attention gently on the breath. Sometimes the image is used of resting our attention lightly, like a bird settling on a flower.

It’s something so easeful out of recognizing that we’re breathing anyway. All we need to do is feel it. Nothing extra, nothing strained. You don’t have to get ready for even the very next breath. It’s just this one.

I’m going to ask you for a few moments to think of something in your life today or yesterday, something immediate that you feel grateful to when you notice it. It may be something you overlook. It may be something seemingly small. And it may bring up all kinds of feelings, like embarrassment, or this is stupid, or I’ve got to concentrate some more on the pain or my problems. Whatever happens, it’s fine. You can let all those feelings arise, but see what it’s like when you stretch a little bit and you kind of point the flashlight of your attention onto that which has been good. Something. Just one thing.

Because we’re not moving from the complaints, which are the only truth, to something that’s fanciful or funny. We’re moving to a truth that we may hardly ever look at. So let’s give it a little airtime. And you can bring your attention back to the feeling of the breath. When you feel ready, you can open your eyes or lift your gaze, and we’ll end the meditation.

James Shaheen: Thank you, Sharon. Thank you, Ross.

Ross Gay: Thank you. 

James Shaheen: We’ll do this again. It’s a lot of fun.

Ross Gay: Good, yeah, for sure. Have a good one. It’s good to see you all.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Life As It Is with Ross Gay. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks and Life As It Is are produced by Sarah Fleming and The Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

Anthony Back: You know, when I was a young physician, I was trained that care was all the nice things that you did, and really now I think of care as it is the way I bring myself to the room to meet this other person and the way I can stay there regardless of what is coming up for them because the more that we can both be present with everything, the more I think the potential for kind of healing there really is.

James Shaheen: Hello, I’m James Shaheen, and welcome to Life As It Is. I’m here with my co-host Sharon Salzberg, and you just heard Tony Back, a palliative care physician and practicing Zen Buddhist. Tony currently serves as co-director of the University of Washington Center for Excellence in Palliative Care, and he leads retreats on being with dying at the Upaya Zen Center in New Mexico. In our conversation with Tony, we talk about how he came to Buddhism, how Buddhism has changed how he relates to feelings of powerlessness as a physician, how he deals with burnout and moral injury, and what James Joyce and Virginia Woolf have taught him about how to pay attention. So here’s our conversation with Tony Back.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with Dr. Anthony Back and my co-host Sharon Salzberg. Hi Tony. Thanks for joining us.

Anthony Back: Thank you.

James Shaheen: So you’re currently the co-director of the University of Washington Center for Excellence in Palliative Care and a professor of oncology and medicine, and you’re also a practicing Zen Buddhist. So to start, how did you first come to Buddhism?

Anthony Back: I came to Buddhism really out of a sense of trying to survive. I was a young oncologist. I was feeling a little overwhelmed by the amount of suffering and death that I was dealing with, and I thought, “How will I make a career of this? How will I keep doing this day in and day out?” And that led me to mindfulness and Jon Kabat-Zinn and then to Roshi Joan Halifax at Upaya Zen Center.

James Shaheen: So it started out as a coping strategy and then became a committed practice.

Anthony Back: Totally. It started out as “How am I just going to get through the day” and over time deepened into this other practice.

James Shaheen: Right, so you were already an oncologist when you came to Zen practice. How did you come to medicine?

Anthony Back: I came to medicine because as a young man, my mother had died of a pre-leukemia syndrome when I was in college. She had been sick for several years. I had kind of a vague idea what was going on, but my parents were very concerned about my success and not distracting me and not making me sad, and so they didn’t really talk about my mother’s illness much. I didn’t talk to her directly about it very much, and I didn’t really get a lot of information about it. But I got a phone call when I was a sophomore in the dorm. You know, in those days you went to the phone at the end of the hall. And I heard from an oncologist that all of a sudden she had really taken a turn for the worse. She was in the hospital. There was something going on with her spleen. And that was how I found out it was really serious.

James Shaheen: So around this time, you wrote your senior thesis on James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, two of my favorites as well. How did the study of narrative influence how you think about illness and medicine?

Anthony Back: Oh, it has had a huge influence on me, I mean, what I learned from both Joyce and Woolf, because what I really studied was how a sense of personal identity was rendered in that stream of consciousness narrative technique. What I took away from that was the incredible richness of just one moment and the incredible particularity that different people have because of their background, because of their surroundings, because of everything about them. It made me really clear that someone else’s experience was totally different than mine and that in fact there was something amazing happening all the time in the background that I couldn’t really see very easily, that I couldn’t perceive. You know, in Joyce there are all these different chapters of all the fantastical and sometimes fanciful and sometimes poignant worlds that are going on inside people’s minds. And in Virginia Woolf, what I got was this sense of actually how interconnected we are, that there are these kinds of invisible ways of being that we are together with each other, and I didn’t really realize at the time—I was just very interested in what they were doing with narrative—that that actually really stuck with me in a way, and for me it was a real preparation for mindfulness and the inquiry into my own mind that that practice became. 

James Shaheen: Just to go back to Woolf for a moment, what really resonates there with many Buddhists who like Woolf are these moments of being that may even be accelerated or induced by facing one’s mortality. But I wonder, are there patterns that you see emerging in the narratives you hear patients tell?

Anthony Back: Yes, to some degree. I think of a couple of things. You know, I’ve just been interviewing patients for this study that I’m doing of psilocybin-assisted therapy for a group, and so, for example, one of the people said to me, “I went to see a doctor about my cancer. The first thing the doctor said was, ‘You know, I can’t cure this illness.’” And she said, “I completely had a panic attack. I didn’t want to show it. But basically everything in my mind was going, was screaming, ‘Oh my God, what is happening?’” And from that day on, she started to have panic attacks. And what I think is one of the patterns there is this tremendous dislocation that people feel when they get the news of something like cancer or serious illness. All of a sudden, everything looks different, and that’s one of the big narratives.

Another narrative that I see a lot of is this narrative—this was really identified by a writer, Arthur Frank, who had a serious illness and did a lot of writing about the illness experience. He identified something called the quest narrative, meaning the quest for my former condition to be restored, for things to be exactly like they were, for me not to have to worry about this, and I see a great deal of that, especially in the cancer space.

And then finally there’s another one that is a narrative about “What am I becoming,” which I think of as a different kind of narrative that is a much more open-ended narrative that is really an inquiry about “What is my life about now given all these different things?” And that in a way, that’s one of the ones I try to encourage as a physician. ? I feel like that is a way into a kind of new adaptation and a new reinvention of the self. 

James Shaheen: Yeah, it’s interesting, this idea of dislocation or all sorts of narratives that repeat themselves when people are at the end of their lives. A close friend of mine a few years back got his diagnosis and he said, and I don’t know where he got it from, that he felt like he had walked into a room that nobody else could enter. So that sense of separateness needs somehow or another connection. It is very interesting. But on a similar note, have you noticed any stories that you yourself have felt trapped in, either as an oncologist or as a palliative care doctor?

Anthony Back: Oh, yeah. I mean, how much time do you have, James?

James Shaheen: We have some time. I would rather talk about Woolf and Joyce, but here we are talking about death, which is related.

Anthony Back: Yeah. Well, of course, one of the stories is, “I’m an oncologist, I should be able to fix this, and if I’m not fixing it, it must be because I’m doing something wrong.” Like that’s one of my stories. Or if I were a better doctor, this person would understand themselves better and they would adapt better, and what is happening to them is their difficulty is my fault in some way. And there’s another one about feeling heroic. Something good happens and I feel like the hero, and I’m writing the story of myself as the doctor hero, with all the trappings that entail, that’s a very kind of comforting, also trapping story. But yeah, I have all those things going on.

James Shaheen: So you work as a palliative care doctor, and for our listeners who may not be familiar with palliative care, could you give us a brief introduction to the field?

Anthony Back: Sure. Palliative care is specialized medical care that is aimed at treating the ss symptoms, dealing with the stress, and improving coping for people who are living with a serious illness. And so palliative care can be given at any time, at any stage in a serious illness, and so it’s really meant to help people live well in this face of whatever their illness may be.

James Shaheen: So you’re an oncologist, but what drew you specifically to palliative care?

Anthony Back: I think it is because, you know, in my own personal experience, that was the part that I don’t think happened for my mother, and as a young oncologist, that was the part that I felt like nobody was really doing.

I remember in my training, I was following a really famous oncologist around on rounds, and we had been seeing a woman who, like my mother, had pre-leukemia, had an infection, ended up in the emergency room, was staying there because there was no bed in the hospital for her, and we were about to go see her the next day, and the attending said in the hallway, “Hey, what happened to Mrs. So-and-so?” And the fellow said, “Oh, she died.” And the attending said, “Well, she was an old trout,” and then he turned the corner and everybody followed him like a school of fish. And I was walking along going, “Holy shit, what just happened?”

Nobody said a word of it. Nobody acknowledged it. We didn’t go talk to the family, even though we had been the oncology team supposedly taking care of her in the hospital. And I thought, “What is this? What is happening here?” SoI think it was experiences like that that made me think there was more to be done there. 

James Shaheen: So a lot, though, has changed since then, and you’re a part of that change. Can you say something about that?

Anthony Back: Yeah, so I do think there has been this awareness that has turned into a set of medical practices and now a new specialty, a relatively new specialty, in medicine that is meant to make this issue visible and address it and bring the same kind of expertise to it that we bring to, you know, trying to stop the cancer or cure the cancer. And so that is the field of palliative care.

Sharon Salzberg: It was very evocative for me when you were talking about your family and your conditioning around death and loss and so on, because mine is very, very similar, which carried on through—my mother died when I was 9, and I was then living with my father’s parents, who felt the kindest thing of all was not to ever mention her again. And so this very strange kind of silence surrounded that, you know, and, and the eventuality of death. And it was also very interesting for me when James said that quote from his friend about entering a room that no one else could enter because in a way we all enter that room inevitably. And so there’s cultural conditioning, there’s family conditioning. I know that when I grew up, you wouldn’t say the word cancer like it was a normal word, you know, you had a whisper or, and so all of that makes honest communication about illness and really being there in a way for people who are struggling very difficult. Thinking that so much of palliative care actually seems linked to honest communication about illness and death, I’m curious about how your Buddhist practice might influence your ability to have these open conversations.

Anthony Back: So what my practice has really given me and what it’s really enabled me to do is work at a layer that is below just the words. Of course, there’s all this teaching about what words to use and what words help you come across as empathic. But what my practices taught me was that my, uh, stillness can make space for whatever that other person is experiencing and that my ability to be with it and not push it away myself or distract them or try to distract myself, that really creates a kind of field for that kind of deeper communication. And people pick up on that right away, I think. And I don’t think I would’ve learned that any other way, really.

You know, the priority in my world is not about stillness. It’s about doing, doing, doing and about efficiency, efficiency and faster, faster, faster. And it really took taking myself out of the hospital or the cancer center to learn to practice that kind of stillness inside and outside to be able to do that and to sit with people.

Sharon Salzberg: Because it’s really, I mean, it’s striking me that there’s layer upon layer of conditioning. There’s just the conditioning of a human being. When we’re confronted with suffering, it can be so tempting to look away or to try to avoid it at all costs. And then you have the kind of, I would assume, sort of professional obligation to make it all better, you know, in some way. And that’s another layer of conditioning, you know, as you described, like fix it, make it better, do it faster. And I’m wondering how you’ve seen this kind of avoidance or resistance to suffering itself play out in the medical field, and how do you train providers to be able to talk openly about suffering?

Anthony Back: Well, in the medical field and among the people I am training and among colleagues, I think the usual reaction to suffering is that we should be able to do something about this and we should be able to treat it. And if we can’t treat it now, we need to find some new treatments to treat it. And so we need to do more research and do more clinical trials and all that stuff. And there is something really good in all that, right? That is how medical practice improves. And yet if we don’t pause to be with that suffering and to witness it and to be present with it with that person, then something gets missed, and people really notice that.

It is a constant struggle honestly to make the time to be still in the midst of these busy practices. And because it’s not reinforced by the system, because it’s not reimbursed, for example, because it’s not really formally taught, you know, very often mindfulness gets this label of being just another little technique. And of course, what you learn after years of practice is that it is a way that you bring yourself into everything. It’s a way you are present in the moment. It’s not just some kind of thing you apply at the moment. Of course, it is good to apply it when you’re stressed out or when you’re freaking out or when you’re like, “Yikes.” But there is another layer of it that is the ground that you’re coming from.

Actually, what I have found in my own practice is that actually being that is much more important than talking about it. So I can do some things like I will have a moment of mindfulness on rounds or a moment for somebody who’s really had a tough time. Or even when I’m with a patient, I will say, “Wow. Let’s, can we take a moment just so I can take that in,” you know, and I make it about me so that they don’t have to feel like I’m asking them to do something. But in a way it’s what happens in between all those things that I think is the most powerful teaching of all. And then of course with the patients, there’s a whole, and families, there’s a whole different thing.

Sharon Salzberg: And I’m also thinking about colleagues in the sense that the first time I ever heard the term moral injury, it was from some hospice nurses who were talking about how they’d find themselves sometimes in a situation where the patient was ready to go and the clinicians were quite ready to not, you know, intervene excessively and let them go, but the family could not let them go. And so there was a kind of moral quandary there. Moral injury is a kind of soul wound where you have these divided loyalties in a way, you know, your own values and then the situation.

The next time I heard the term was really through Roshi Joan, who was exploring it extensively. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the courses you teach on being with dying at Upaya with Roshi Joan and the complexity of these kinds of situations.

Anthony Back: Yeah, well, let’s start with moral injury. Moral injury in the case of a clinician is when a clinician knows what they think would be best and has some experience to back it up and yet feels blocked or prevented from doing that by some other circumstance, you know, a system that won’t give them the time, a family member who can’t bear the thought of losing their loved one.

And when clinicians have a really strong sense of what the best course, the best pathway ff would be for someone, that being blocked can really feel like kind of a soul wound. It can feel like, “Wow, I am not doing the work I was meant to do, the work I’m equipped to do, the work that would be really facilitative for this person.”

Now, of course, there’s always a caveat in there about knowing what is best for another person, right? That’s a whole thing in and of itself. And yet there are times when you know you as a nurse or doctor or another clinician really perceive that suffering is being magnified or suffering is being amplified by the blockade of people or systems around somebody that are preventing something from happening. And one of those is really around how we meet the moment of death, right? And so those moral injuries, I mean, they’re things that clinicians really remember and that stick with them.

For example, I was working with an ICU nurse. She was an ICU nurse during the worst part of COVID. She was with a patient who was intubated from COVID in the ICU, still having difficulty breathing, struggling on his tube, trying to talk to her, you know, can’t talk because of this tube in there, and she was the only person in the room, ao she felt completely responsible for him. And then it turned out he was getting worse and worse, and she had to give him a medicine that would actually paralyze him so that his body would resist as little as possible to the breathing machine that puts air down into your lungs.

What happened was she realized as she was giving him the medicine that she was probably blocking the only way he had left to communicate with her. And so even though there was part of her that knew that she was doing the medically indicated thing to help him on the ventilator, there was part of her that felt like, “Oh my God, I am preventing him from communicating it all.” And it was a moment of real moral injury for her where she felt like “I am not doing the right thing for this person.”

And so in that case, the block was this imperative to save his life, keep him breathing. She wasn’t at all sure that he was what he really wanted or needed at that point in his illness. And so those moments, they stick with. 

In the course that I teach with Roshi Joan, “Being with Dying,” and then another one called “G.R.A.C.E.,” we actually invite and create space for clinicians to remember those moments, to go back to them, in a way to tell their stories about them, and create a setting in the retreat, where unlike regular life, people aren’t just going, “Oh, you did the best you can, move on. Oh, that probably would’ve happened anyway. Oh, there was nothing more you could have done,” because that experience of being deeply listened to and to learn yourself how to be with all those emotions that come up, that is actually an incredibly healing thing.

And that’s really maybe the most important thing that goes on at these retreats is that, you know, we teach a lot of mindfulness skills and a lot of other ways to think about that. These are clinicians, so we teach a lot of the neuroscience that supports what happens in, uh, many Buddhist practices. But really, the healing thing is being in this community of other practitioners who’ve all been there, who all have their own stories, who listen to each other’s stories and simply witness them. And so that’s a great deal of what happens there.

James Shaheen: Tony, I’m really glad you mentioned that sometimes protocol isn’t what’s called for, because maybe 30 years ago I was with someone who was in his last days and he was told, “Don’t have a glass of water. You may aspirate. “And so he asked for a glass of water and I said, “Well, they said you’re not supposed to have water.” He said, “James, I’m dying. I can have a glass of water,” and I gave him a glass of water, and he drank it with mixed results, but he was thirsty.

But yeah, you’ve talked about the sense of inadequacy and powerlessness you can feel in the face of a patient’s suffering. Has your Zen practice shifted your relationship to this powerlessness, and maybe more broadly, has it changed your understanding of what it means to provide care?

Anthony Back: So first, I would say that Zen practice has radically shifted my sense of what powerlessness means and what it is in the sense that I no longer expect to have that kind of power over that, like I really appreciate all the things that medical technology can do, and yet I don’t invoke them and use them with the same kind of expectation that I will be able to have power over another person’s body where there are things going on biologically that are so complicated that, you know, we’ll never be able to completely understand them. And so coming at it that way, which I think gives me a kind of humility about the situation, I think that changes how I expect everything to happen. And, you know, ex expectations are a huge issue, right, for all of us.

So the other thing that has really shifted about what providing care means is that there’s a technical aspect to my care, the care that I provide, but then there is also this other more personal aspect, which is this person-to-person aspect, which I think of as more than even just emotional care. It is the care of being present. It’s the care of witnessing. It is the care of sharing space with another human being. And I think that’s a very different sense of care than I have had earlier in my career. You know, when I was a young physician, I was trained that care was all the nice things that you did or all the extra things that you did that were beyond the minimum. And really now I think of care as it is the way I bring myself to the room to meet this other person and the way I can stay there or try to stay there regardless of what is coming up for them and for me to use that time that we are together to invite everything into the room. Because the more that we can both be present with everything, the more I think the potential for kind of healing there really is, and it is healing for both of us, right. It is healing for that person, and it is healing for me, even though the emphasis is on them,

James Shaheen: Just really quickly, how do you make a decision, for instance, intubating a patient who might otherwise have communicated, although with difficulty, or the person who wants the glass of water, how do you make that decision?

Anthony Back: Oh yeah. Yeah, so for the person who needs to be intubated, so I’ll say that, you know, there are situations where medically, there are guidelines and research and all that stuff about measurements you make to decide when someone needs a new medical intervention, and then you do that in the context of what is this person’s goals? How much is this person willing to go through? Have they told me that they think this is going to be worth it? Are they on board with that? Because if they’re not on board with that, it doesn’t matter how technically adept I am. It won’t turn out well in the end.

And so those kinds of technological interventions I have to make always in the setting of do I know what they are really aiming for, and do I know in what way they’re willing to go through certain kinds of medical things to get there?

And then for the glass of water, it’s the same thing. You know, it’s like, what is all wrapped up in that glass of water for that person, and what is the danger really? Is the danger that he’s going to cough a little bit and we’re gonna have to reposition him and help him get over that, and is that going to be a real burden on him? I know enough now as a palliative care doctor and a person who’s been with dying people to know that one glass of water is not going to be the end of his life. He may cough, but you know what? He’s not going to die because someone gave him a glass of water. So if he wants a glass of water, you know, hand it to him. And if you have to, you can comment to, you know, go a little slowly with it so he doesn’t take a big gulp and, you know, really cough. And that I am balancing against the sense of someone near the end of their life having agency over their own body, having the feeling that I as someone right nearby will respect and honor what he needs and wants, right, and all that actually in that setting is as important or more important than just the mechanical aspects of aspiration or coughing, right, and that’s what you did for him.

James Shaheen: Yeah, it made the most sense.

Anthony Back: Yeah. And that was an honoring of him. You know, if he knows and everyone knows he’s near the end of his life and he asks for something, wow. We have to have a pretty good reason not to say that we won’t do something that we could easily do, right?

James Shaheen: Well, what you’re saying is that you listen to the patient. That’s not always the case, but it’s really refreshing to hear that. This was thirty years ago. But Sharon, I think, has a question. 

Sharaon Salzberg: So, uh, you’ve discussed how your practice influences your clinical work, but I’m also curious about the other direction. Has this day-to-day work in such complex moving situations as a palliative care doctor changed your relationship to Buddhist practice?

Anthony Back: Well, I will say that my experience as a doctor sitting with people who are dealing with a serious illness or dying, it has totally changed my worldview. I mean, I think I started out in this work as kind of a materialist, right? Like you have a body and it’s just stuff and you die and it’s over. And sitting with people actually has given me the sense that there’s something much, much different. Like being at with somebody at the moment of death and being really present for that, there is clearly something happening that is not really described by medical science that we don’t know, but it is a profound shift when someone’s spirit leaves the room, and that has really forced me to recognize that there is something else going on at the universe that I really was never trained about, and my Buddhist practice is what has allowed me to really perceive that.

I think if I had not learned to stay still long enough to feel inside myself, I don’t think I would’ve ever noticed that was happening. And I see it all the time actually at work. Everyone’s running around so much, and everybody’s worried about all these different things, and someone dies and they just don’t even notice what happened and they don’t feel it. And actually, I think those experiences over and over have really tuned me in to a level of my practice that I’m not sure I would have accessed just on my own, because being with people has really changed what it means for me to even be present in my own body.

And so what that does, I think, for me is it gives me a different point of reference for myself, but it has also given me a point of reference about how we are all really interconnected, right? Like, I’m interconnected to everything, and actually if I pay close enough attention and my mind is quiet, I can actually feel it like all the time, and that is a source of encouragement and a kind of joy and a kind of curiosity and a kind of awe really. Even in really busy moments. I can get a taste of that on a good day.

Sharon Salzberg: That’s beautiful.

Sharon Salzberg: One of the themes we’ve been exploring recently on the podcast is dealing with burnout, especially for those in helping professions. I know this has been an area of focus for you as well, and I’m wondering if you could walk us through how you understand burnout. We talked about moral injury, and just now in this last response, you touched upon taking in the joy and the awesomeness and the wonder of life as well. So, you know, that I think would have to be a part of dealing with conditions that could steadily produce burnout. So, to begin with, how do you understand burnout?

Anthony Back: Yeah, so the scientific definition that I use as burnout is a condition where people experience three things. They feel emotionally exhausted, right? Like “I just can’t bring myself to the situation anymore, it’s just too hard.” Then there’s the cynicism, which is “No matter what I do, this is going to turn out badly.” And then there’s the, uh, sense of low personal accomplishment, like “I am working really hard, and I’m really not making a difference in the world.”

Those three aspects are three different aspects of what can get measured in like a scientific question or as burnout, and I think what has happened and what I see is that there has been such a focus in medical practice on medicine as a series of procedures, right? It’s not about care actually. It’s about a series of procedures. And everything in the system is designed to set up the procedure, execute the procedure, bill the procedure. That’s really it. And then you go to the next procedure. And what that means for a clinician is that your work is really measured according to how many of those procedures you’ve done, how well they were executed, and whether they had the desired effect.

What that can lead to in a really difficult time, like in the COVID pandemic, is the sense that I just do these things over and over and over, and then if they stop working because something changes, like we don’t exactly know how COVID is going to act, or I am running into a lot of new situations, well, then what I know to do feels like it’s not working, and if I just keep doing it and keep doing it and it’s not working and not working and not working, then after a while I go, “Why should I bother? Why should I bother to put myself out there?” And you extend yourself less and you are less present because you think “I’m just going to, you know, close my eyes and get through the day.” And it constricts your whole field of vision. And what that does is that makes you less porous to all the complicatedness of it, but it also makes you less porous to the joy of it and the satisfaction of it. And so that’s how I see burnout now.

I mean, in a way, it’s a changing of your orientation to what’s around you so that your expectations become that nothing is going to work, and then what that turns into is because you are not then doing your work to the same degree, that that happens, like you are in fact achieving less, and that turns into a spiral. And it’s hard. It’s hard to experience and hard to get out of.

James Shaheen: So Tony, you’re currently conducting a study on psilocybin-assisted therapy for doctors and nurses who experienced burnout from the pandemic. Could you tell us a little bit about that study and how it came about?

Anthony Back: Yeah. Well, it came about from my direct experience in the pandemic of seeing people and talking to people who were really just blown away by their experience in the pandemic, and to the point where they felt like they were not functional. And I remember, you know, Roshi Joan did a, we did a retreat online for clinicians early in the pandemic because we thought, “Well, there seems to be a need here,” and they were like eight hundred people who signed up, and we were like, “Oh my gosh, there’s really something going on here.”

This is a different part of my life, but I have been looking at the potential for psychedelics to sort of reset how people see the world, how they hold their expectations, how they work with their own assumptions and their own habits and patterns. And, you know, one of the things is that psychedelics can disrupt our habits and patterns long enough for us to say, “Gee, is this really what I should be doing? Is there a new pattern that I could develop or a new habit that I could develop that is actually more adaptive for me in the current situation?”

And then there is this other ability of a well-guided psychedelic experience for people to enable themselves to experience some of the deep-seated feelings that they have been not allowing themselves to feel. You know, doctors and nurses, they’re so professionalized about what happens. It becomes hard to feel. After you’ve been preventing yourself from feeling everything for a long time, it becomes just hard to feel what’s really happening, and a well-guided psilocybin experience can do that. So I started this study as a way of investigating whether this is a way to work on the inner side of how people end up in burnout.

James Shaheen: You know, I’d like to read a quote from an article you were kind enough to write for Tricycle. You write, “What I am realizing as the study unfolds is that how we all recover from the pandemic—from the suffering, the burdens, the changed identities—starts with how we cultivate our own presence, as well as how we extend that presence to the people we are with.” You refer to a reciprocity of presence. Can you say something about that?

Anthony Back: Yes. You know, what I have begun to realize really sitting with doctors and nurses in this study, because sitting with people while they’re having their psilocybin experience is really like a meditation retreat. It’s like you are holding space for them. You are completely present with yourself, but you are also present with them. So it’s just a very interesting variation on what happens when you are in a long meditation retreat.

And what I came to realize is it wasn’t just me sitting there being open for them, and it wasn’t just about them doing their own thing. There are subtle ways in which we know each other is there, subtle ways in which we interact with each other. And they can be the small things that happen in the room—you know, somebody needs to go to the bathroom or they want a glass of water. And they can be deeper things like when somebody sat up with me and sat right across from me and said, “I can really feel you here.”

All those experiences, I think, allow people to feel their own presence and allow me to feel my own presence with them. And that kind of exchange is what I meant by a kind of reciprocity, and in fact, it’s always happening, and I’m just not always so aware of it, but in that setting, I have become really attuned to it.

James Shaheen: OK, we’re running short on time, so one last question. I was asked not long ago to speak to a group of humanities students at Berkeley. And People who were majoring in literature were asking, “What is this degree going to do for me?” And yet you’ve integrated your background in the humanities too into your medical practice. You know, back to Joyce and Woolf, I’m sorry, but how, how would you say the value of that education, what value did that bring to your work as a medicine oncologist?

Anthony Back: Well, you know what, I mean, there are a couple of things. One is it was about the value of paying close attention. For me, this was pre-mindfulness, right? It was about the value of paying attention to every sentence, to every comma, and that ability to focus like that I think has been incredibly fruitful for me, and it has led to all these avenues in life I would’ve never expected.

And then the other thing is that there are people who, like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, who had such a profound understanding of the mind and of human experience that even though they weren’t scientists and they didn’t know any the things that I talk about now in terms of scientific concepts, what they knew and rendered was a deep kind of understanding of the world that I think only happens in a kind of act of creative imagination like those novels represent.

There’s nothing like it, even in the scientific literature. And I go back to those kinds of writings again and again even now because they are so rich. And so I think of the humanities for me as really the ground of everything else I’ve done. And so I know that everyone feels really pressed to do something really practical, but it turns out that these fundamental abilities and capacities that we build, they’re what really sustain you in the long run.

James Shaheen: OK, so we have a nice way of closing. First of all, thank you, Tony, for joining us. It’s been wonderful. We typically close with a meditation led by Sharon, but I leave it to the two of you to decide which one of you will lead the meditation.

Anthony Back: Oh, beautiful. 

Sharon Salzberg: I actually had that thought as well. I thought, Tony, why don’t you lead us in the short meditation? Then I get to just sit, which is great.

Anthony Back: Sure. I would love that. Thank you. So first, if you allow your body to settle in the chair and just imagine that you are sinking deeply into the chair and the chair is completely supporting you, let your body soften and just take three breaths and on the in breath one, and on the breath, I’ll count three.

So, on the in-breath 1, and on the out-breath, 1, 2, 3. Again, in on 1, and out, 1, 2, 3. Notice the stillness, however much there is. Last one. On the in-breath, 1, and out, 1, 2, 3.

Now, as your breathing comes back to normal, whatever that is for you, just notice the tiny movements your body is making as you breathe and just allow them, and let yourself take in everything in this present moment and allow it to pass through you.

And for whatever brought you to this podcast, remember why you’re really here. Remember what you’d like to look forward to or what direction or what aspiration. Just hold that for a moment with your next out-breath. And on the next out-breath, please dedicate your practice to the well-being of all. And when you are ready, you can open your eyes. Thank you.

James Shaheen: OK, so I opened my eyes and I thank you, Tony. Thank you, Sharon. It was great to speak with you both.

Sharon Salzberg: Thank you all.

Anthony Back: Thank you.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Life As It Is with Tony Back. To read Tony’s article on psilocybin-assisted therapy, visit tricycle.org. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks and Life As It Is are produced by Sarah Fleming and The Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

James Shaheen: Hello and welcome to Life As It Is. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. These days, with catastrophe after catastrophe, it can be easy to turn to despair and to believe that there is nothing we can do. But writer Rebecca Solnit is determined to change that narrative. Over the course of her career, Solnit has published twenty-five books on feminism, popular power, social change and insurrection, and hope and catastrophe. Her most recent project, Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, brings together climate scientists and activists from around the world to address the social, political, and spiritual dimensions of our current crisis. Together, they envision a path forward. In today’s episode of Life As It Is, my co-host Sharon Salzberg and I sit down with Rebecca to discuss the power of hope in times of catastrophe, the dangers of hyperindividualism, and why she believes beauty is an essential piece of activist work.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with writer Rebecca Solnit and my co-host Sharon Salzberg. Hi, Rebecca. Hi, Sharon. It’s great to be with you both.

Rebecca Solnit: Likewise. Thank you.

Sharon Salzberg: Hi.

James Shaheen: So Rebecca, you’ve published twenty-five books on topics as broad as feminism, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, and hope and catastrophe. So today, we’re here to talk about a book of essays you’ve edited called Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, which is part of a larger project to change the narrative around climate change. To start, can you tell us a bit about the book and what inspired you to work with others to write it?

Rebecca Solnit: Yeah, in 2020, I met the wonderful young climate activist Thelma Young Lutunatabua, who’s based in Fiji, and we realized we had a really shared vision that a lot of the climate despair, grief, anxiety, angst could be not washed away but really helped a lot by good frameworks and good facts, and that you really needed both because it’s not only the facts of the situation but how you understand big things, the nature of change, what human beings really need, what abundance could consist of, where power lies, that we’re really impacting how people imagine where we are and what we can do. So Thelma and I started a project that was initially just a website a little over a year ago and weren’t quite sure what we were going to do next. At a dinner party for a climate activist, I announced the Not Too Late project, and everyone else just kind of looked at me and said, “Rebecca, this needs to be a book.” So I scampered back home, Thelma and my wonderful publishers at Haymarket got on board immediately, and Thelma and I started reaching out. We knew we couldn’t do this alone, and we needed voices from different experiences within the climate movement from people on the front lines, people who are scientists, people who are organizers, people who understand the politics particularly well, and that really only a diversity of voices, only a chorus could really address the breadth and depth of what’s going on.

James Shaheen: Well, I have to say, I think the chorus has been successful so far. In writing about climate emergency, you say that emergency comes from the word emerge, or to exit or leave behind. So what can we learn from this understanding of emergency as a leaving behind the familiar?

Rebecca Solnit: I love etymologies in general, and I found the etymology of emergency so compelling because you look at it, and it literally means to emerge from something, to exit the way that things have been and enter into something new, which is always a scary time. Things can go wrong; they can get much worse; sometimes they can get better. And it’s a real moment of decision. It reminds me of the term crisis, which in medical terms means the point at which the patient either begins to recover or heads towards death, and both are possible. Emergencies often get us out of being stuck, and although we tend to fear them, they’re not always bad.

James Shaheen: Well, you write that our present moment is an exodus into the unknown, and our task is to make a home in this space of uncertainty and possibility. Can you say more about how we can take refuge in the unknown?

Rebecca Solnit: I’ve been talking about the fact that the future is dark, the future is unknowable, and running into the Western and I think particularly American wild enthusiasm for certainty, whether or not it’s based on truth and accuracy or not. People seem to really dislike uncertainty, or a lot of people. One of the things I love about Buddhism is I think it really encourages to engage with codependent arising, which means that innumerable forces are at work and exactly how they’ll dance together remains to be seen. I think of both optimism and pessimism as well as despair as forms of certainty about the future. “We know what’s going to happen” is their assumption. Pessimists assume it’s terrible but let themselves off the hook from doing anything because they speak as though the future has already been decided. Optimists take the opposite position but with the same kind of certainty that everything will be fine, nothing is required. I think part of it is that uncertainty is unnerving because certainty is predictability. Security means no emergence, no emergency. But also because it demands a lot of us. If we are actually creating the future in the present, the future does not yet exist, then we have tremendous responsibility to actually get in there and engage and create it. So I really wanted to look at all the things around that: that anxiety about the avoidance of recognizing the truth of uncertainty, which I think is also about recognizing another thing Buddhism has to teach us, which is change is constant. I think people often don’t have much memory of the past, the historical past, so they think of the present as a kind of eternity that’s somehow being shattered, rather than that the world was radically different twenty and fifty, let alone a hundred years ago. So of course, it’s going to be different in the next ten and twenty and fifty years, but how it will be different is something we’re deciding now. And that’s so true for climate. This is the decade of decision.

Sharon Salzberg: Throughout your career, you’ve written about the power of hope in times of catastrophe. You say that hope is not a lottery ticket but an ax you break down doors with in an emergency. So how does hope function as an ax? And how can we harness hope as a powerful organizing tool?

Rebecca Solnit: One of the quotes when I began writing about hope twenty years ago I loved is that you can’t have hope without action, but you can’t have action without hope. I think there’s a lot of misconceptions about hope. One is that it’s optimism, which is certainty about the future, whereas hope is just about possibility. Another is that hope is a feeling and that if you don’t feel good, you can’t be hopeful. And we know people in the worst situations in the world dared to hope not because everything looked good or felt good but because there’s something worth doing. So hope is an ax to break doors down with for me is about first of all recognizing that it’s active, not passive. Hope is where you begin, but you don’t just sit there on the couch feeling hopeful, but that you actually need to take it and act on it. I love the anti-prison activist Mariame Kaba’s definition that hope is a discipline, meaning that it’s a real commitment to who you want to be, how you want to be in the world, that you’re going to try without being confident or certain about outcome.

A quote that Thelma and I both go back to a lot is Vaclav Havel, the Czechoslovakian activist who helped topple the regime but in ways that were so unforeseeable until it happened. And so he’s a great beacon of hope, and he said, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.” And I’ll just say one more thing, which is, I think also people think if you don’t always win, then your hope was ill-founded, but it’s always a gamble. You know, you’re breaking down that door with an ax, but whether you’re going to get everyone out of the theater on fire or the flooding basement remains to be seen, but you might as well try.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I think one of the things you also serve in your work is redeeming words, which is a very powerful thing when they’ve changed meaning. I think about love in that way, for example, you know, where it’s kind of gotten degraded so that we see it as sentimentality or losing energy rather than gaining energy and so on, being able to kind of turn that around and say, “Hey, wait a minute.” So you actually liken hope to love and the sense of taking risks and being vulnerable to the possibility of grief and loss. So can you say more about that?

Rebecca Solnit: Yeah, hope, I think, is a kind of vulnerability, and you don’t hope if you don’t care, so it’s a form of care. Cynicism is a way of saying it’s not worth caring because it’s all going to hell anyway, there’s nothing we can do, we never win, etc. It’s a form of giving up beforehand. And it’s often seen as very sophisticated. When I wrote my book twenty years ago, Hope in the Dark, I was really struck by who was hopeful, which was often people on the frontlines of the Zapatistas, farmworkers facing modern-day slavery, poverty, and exploitation, and who was cynical and despairing, which was often really comfortable people who saw it as a form of solidarity with people they imagined as being desperate and therefore hopeless. And there I think they were wrong about the hope, if not the desperation. But they also I think were ultimately taking care of themselves rather than the world. Cynicism doesn’t require anything of you. It’s a posture. Hope does put you on the spot. If you hope we can win, then why the hell aren’t you doing anything to win? If you hope that this life can be saved, you better get out there and save it. You know, I think hope is inextricable from action, whereas cynicism is really kind of almost inextricable from passivity or making decisions that may benefit yourself but not the greater whole. I think it comes partly out of a sense of powerlessness, partly out of a sense of separateness.

I think so much encourages people to believe they can’t win, so all you can win is a really good posture for yourself in the world and how you present yourself. But I think that’s wrong. I think there’s so much more you can win, and the historical record shows that, which is why now think of hope, which is about the future, as very connected to memory about the past. If you remember how different the world was, how many times small groups, civil society, nonviolent direct action, concerted campaigns, dedicated individuals change the world, you know that the world can be changed by these means because it has been changed, and you know that the world is changing all the time, and the fossil fuel companies, Wall Street, capitalism are all very willing to change it for the worse. We should be at least as willing to change it for the better.

James Shaheen: Rebecca, you also quote AOC, who says that hope is not something you have but something you create with your actions and manifest in the world. So can you say more about the process of creating and manifesting hope through action?

Rebecca Solnit: Well, she’s referring to a bunch of things that are in that wonderful passage from a talk she gave. I think one thing is that she herself was pretty hopeless. Standing Rock made her hopeful, which I find incredibly exciting, because I know a lot of people would say the action at Standing Rock tried to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline; they didn’t stop it, therefore they lost. But so many things happened at Standing Rock. It was maybe the biggest gathering of Native people in North American history. It gave a lot of young Native people a sense of hope and worth and agency they didn’t have before, which I’ve heard directly from people on Standing Rock. It educated a lot of the settler colonial world about Native land rights, a commitment to protecting the natural world, and it convinced AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to give her her full and proper name, to go home and run for office. And in one of the great upset victories of recent years, she beat an incredibly powerful and successful-long term Democratic Congressman to take office and then become a great force for climate in Congress. To back up a little bit. I think AOC is saying her own version of hope without action is just wishful thinking, or kind of toxic positivity, you could almost call it. Action without hope, I’m not sure really knows what to do or why it’s doing it. And people also think hope is this very big, fancy thing that most of us don’t have, and it’s like you stand at the bus stop, because you hope the bus will come, you flip the light switch because you hope the light’s going to go on, you go down to the coffee shop because you hope they’re open, and they’re going to make you a cup of coffee. We have little acts of hope all the time. You call your mom because you’re hoping she’s gonna pick up the phone and act like your mom if you were lucky enough to have a good mom and she’s still on Earth. And it’s really kind of about cause-and-effect relations and our ability to participate in them and influence them. It’s not exotic. It’s not extreme. But it can be harnessed to big political goals, big goals for a better world, for some cessation of suffering. And I think it’s a good way to live because there’s also often this rhetoric that all these things that are noble are somehow eating your broccoli, and nothing against broccoli, but as I often say about activism, sometimes it’s drinking your champagne, and I have met the most wonderful people and seen the most extraordinary things by being in the activist world. It’s been an education. It’s given me great friendships, it’s greatly enriched my life. And I think I feel a lot better about climate change, because I’m actively engaged. I don’t do it just to take care of myself, but it is a certain kind of well-being I think is a fringe benefit of living this way. 

James Shaheen: One thing that did come out of Standing Rock is precisely the sort of narrative that supports us and encourages us and invites us to engage. So I don’t even think about whether or not the pipeline was built, I think about the amazing kind of galvanizing force that movement brought to the public. But you draw from the work of the Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, who argued that hope is a belief in the plausibility of the possible as opposed to the necessity of the probable. Can you walk us through this statement? How does hope emerge from possibility? And how can it free us from the sense of doom and gloom inevitability in despair?

Rebecca Solnit: One thing I find among the many excuses people have for inaction is that sense of what’s going to happen. If they don’t say that the future has already been written or is already preordained, they’ll talk about plausibility. The big guys usually win. And that’s often true. It’s not always true that the likely thing is what happens and it can happen in the worst way, too. One of the things I found terrifying just before the 2016 election is that Hillary Clinton was given, I think, an 87% chance of winning. A lot of people walked around like that was 100% chance. And as I’ve been saying, ever since, guess what, she had an 87% chance of winning, but guess what, we live in the 13% chance about 13% of the time. And so I think possibility rather than probability is partly about knowing it’s worth trying even if it doesn’t seem like what is likely to happen but also that you can make things happen. For a while, I was leading climate chants at protests that were like, “Don’t ask what will happen, be what happens.” We see people make things happen all the time, the civil rights movement made voting rights happen. And you know, we’re not in racial paradise yet. But it changed a lot of things.  We know that this stuff matters. We know that this stuff makes things change. And what I love about the greatest activists is that they don’t say, “Does this look likely? Does this look possible? Does this look easy?” They just say “This is the right thing to do.”

There’s a wonderful book by Adam Hochschild called Bury the Chains about a dozen Quaker men in London in the 1770s who decided to abolish slavery in the British Empire. And it was such a radical thing to decide. And it was so implausible. Only one of them lived the next 50 years it took to see slavery abolished in the British Empire. But they were one of the forces that did that, and it was implausible when they started out. Women voting was really implausible when that idea was introduced into the conversation in the 1840s, which is why it took 80 years. So many things take a while, five years, ten years, twenty years. We had about a decade-long campaign to stop the KXL pipeline, and there were people telling us we were going to lose all the way until we won, and 10 years isn’t even that long compared to a lot of other struggles. But it took a while. And so all that I think is equipment for doing what needs to be done without just passively guessing what’s likely to happen, and really settling for it, settling for destruction, settling for suffering, settling for abuse, settling for any quality is something we don’t have to do. Settling for it is a form, as my friend Roshi Joan Halifax would say, of moral injury.

James Shaheen: Right, you also talk about the dangers of settling for despair, and you write that despair is a luxury. So what do you mean by this?

Rebecca Solnit: I did write a piece about despair as a luxury. Because if the threat is imminent, you’re usually not despairing. If you can get the kids into the lifeboat, you’re gonna get the kids into the lifeboat, not say, “Oh, it probably won’t work to get the kids into the lifeboat, I’ll just watch them drown.” And so I often find that despair is people who weren’t on the frontlines aren’t facing these things, essentially giving up on behalf of other people and excusing themselves from action. What I’m calling action, I think, is part of being connected to the greater whole. I also think that that’s a good way to live. The opposite is to feel powerless and disconnected. And I know why people feel both ways. And I feel that a huge amount in our society works really hard at making you feel those ways. A good citizen is a bad consumer. A good consumer is often a bad citizen. Everything tells us we’re consumers, and almost nothing tells us that we’re citizens, not just consumers, that we have agency, we have a role to play, we have power, maybe not alone, but we have immense power together.

Sharon Salzberg: I once was writing a book on faith, which is a lot about the way you describe hope, you know, I just use the word faith. My freelance editor said to me, “What’s the opposite of faith? Isn’t it doubt?” And I said, well, no, in the Buddhist tradition, the right kind of doubt is really helpful to faith because you need to question and wonder and find out for yourself and then your faith deepens. So she said, “Well, what’s the opposite of faith?” And I said despair. And I meant it in the sense of disconnection the way you’re using disconnect. But it sounds like you’re saying within despair, we can still have a sense of possibility and that the despair is the heartbreak in a way over what is and yet we can also see what could be.

Rebecca Solnit: One thing I ended up saying pretty regularly is that I totally respect and acknowledge despair as an emotion. I can feel it myself about things in my personal life, things in the world. But to recognize despair as an emotion, we have to add it’s really important not to confuse it for an analysis. And anybody who’s ever been depressed knows that feeling that nothing will ever get better, nothing will ever change, and we can usually throw in nobody loves me, and it’s not worth it.

Sharon Salzberg: And I’m the only one who’s ever felt this.

Rebecca Solnit: Oh, god, yeah. You know, I often think of the fact that depression, back to etymologies, also means a hollow in the ground. It’s as though you fall into this hollow where you can’t see out, you can’t see the bigger world around you. Your horizon is just the sort of crumbly dirt edges of this hole that you might have dug yourself and you might be able to dig or climb your way out of. So despair as an emotion, absolutely, and there’s every reason for people to feel it at times. We’re in a really tough era and between the new authoritarianism and the kind of white supremacists, misogynist, transphobic homophobic backlash, the physical state of the Earth as climate impacts are all around us. There’s a lot to feel despair about. But despair as an emotion doesn’t have to be despair as an analysis. I also say base your feelings on facts, and that’s what the whole Not Too Late project was about is that people literally, without consulting with the best sources, with the scientists, with activists, the people who are really doing the hard work to understand the situation deeply. People would think it’s too late. We don’t know what to do. We don’t have the solutions. Nobody cares. Nobody’s doing anything.

So base your feelings on facts, recognize despair as an emotion, but don’t turn it into an analysis because that usually means that you’re fiddling with facts, or sort of cherry picking misinformation to feed the despair. And that’s the feedback loop people get into is that they seek out stuff that feeds the despair that renders them passive, that keeps him disengaged. And so it’s partly about picking good sources of who to believe, who to follow, who to connect to, I think, and partly about how you live in relationship to an emergency or a crisis. And that’s a choice we get to make. I think there’s a lot of spiritual equipment in Buddhism and other practices. There’s a lot of practical equipment in understanding how activism works and understanding climate science. We have four or five really top climate scientists in the Not Too Late anthology, because we really wanted to hear from them directly about why they’re hopeful and what they believe can be done, just like we have people on South Pacific islands facing going underwater, facing typhoons facing tremendous loss, speaking about their commitments.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, it’s also possible to encounter a narrative that grief and sadness are almost a kind of failure, and what you’re suggesting seems to be that sadness is a totally appropriate response to crisis and can serve as a doorway to action. So it’s really interesting how sadness and grief might mobilize us toward action.

Rebecca Solnit: I’ve come to think of emotions as deep and shallow rather than happy and sad. Part of consumer culture tells us that what we really want is to feel happy. And I think people imagine that as what I like to call the wall-to-wall carpeting of the psyche of nothing ever makes you feel terrible, nothing seems difficult, nothing feels tragic. We’re mortal beings on earth. Death happens, loss happens, change happens. Of course, we’re going to face things that will make us feel sad. And I think much worse than sadness is that fear of sadness, that you may feel sad, and then you feel like you’re not supposed to feel this way and it’s wrong and you have to do something to abolish it or find some way to numb out or learn to not care. And so I think this is pretty far from climate, but different relationships to the emotions can be really helpful, that it’s OK to be sad. Of course, all of us are sad some of the time, and it’s not a failure, just like mortality is not a failure. Sadness also is not defeat, and it doesn’t have to break you.

One thing I hear a lot is a version of human nature in which we’re tremendously fragile and we cannot deal with despair, grief, loss, difficulty, or we should not be expected to. One of the things I love about Roshi Joan Halifax, I think she comes from another generation, but she also comes from decades of deep Buddhist practice. And her whole take on human nature is that we’re actually really tough, we’re resilient. We can survive a lot. And so I also think part of what we need to do to address the climate crisis is to look at the deeper stories we’ve been told: that life is supposed to be easy, that we’re very fragile creatures, that we can’t adapt. Another story I find really important for addressing this as so many people believe another false narrative, which is that we currently live in an age of abundance and climate requires terrible renunciation of us. I think there’s a way to reframe that where we live in an era of austerity when it comes to social connection, to joy, to friendship, to free time, to hope about the future, to living in a healthy world where the air is breathable, the food is good for you and not contaminated, the ocean is thriving.

For the sake of fossil fuel, in particular, we’ve renounced so much. We’ve renounced clean air, we’ve renounced the future, we’ve renounced kids not having asthma in so many parts of the world. Because of fossil fuel emissions, about 8 million people a year die of respiratory problems related just to the particulate matter, not even to some of the other aspects. So what if we don’t live in an era of abundance, but doing what the climate requires of us, leaving the age of fossil fuels behind, could bring us to an era where the water is clean, the air is clean, the natural world is thriving, and we can feel more joy than anxiety when we look at it, where food is good for you, where people have more time for friendship, for joy, for time in the natural world, for creativity, or meditation, or cooking or painting or whatever gives us pleasure. And so how we tell the stories are so crucial, and not only the stories about the natural world, but deep down, the stories about human nature. What do we really want? What makes us thrive? What is the nature of our connections to each other? All these things, I think, are part of what we need to address. And so the climate crisis, as Thelma likes to say, is partly an imagination crisis, lack of an ability to imagine that maybe the world could get better, maybe this is not as good as it gets. So changing the story is not all you need to do to change the world. But you can’t change the world without changing the story about who matters, what matters, who we can be.

James Shaheen: You mentioned renunciation, and in Buddhism, it’s letting go of what harms us and allows us to cultivate greater freedom and joy, and it seems to me that that’s what you’re saying.

Rebecca Solnit: Absolutely. I think it was a Buddhist practitioner who said renunciation is great when you’re giving up something that makes you miserable. But of course, the dominant culture in the Western world is Christianity, where renunciation is the kind of monastic austerity or giving things up for Lent. It’s about a form of self-denial where you’re giving up things you actually want or that you think are fun or that might even be good for you. I think the Buddha’s take on renunciation is a lot more encouraging. But I think around climate, people imagine that we’re supposed to renounce things. And you often hear people when you ask them what they’re doing about climate change, talking about recycling, or I don’t fly anymore, or I’m vegan, about thinking that all we have in our own hands is renunciation of one kind or another. But in fact, there’s so much more we have in our hands. We have so much more agency and power. And I think the renunciation we need has to be collective. First of all, we have to give up fossil fuels. We have to find other ways to power the systems. And one of the things very few people grasp and it took me a long time to really understand is that in the 21st century, we’ve had the most astonishing energy revolution. In the year 2000, we could not really have left fossil fuel behind. Thanks to the incredible improvements, we can give up fossil fuel, and it’s not a renunciation any more than drinking poison, giving that up should feel like renunciation. You know, we’re giving up something incredibly destructive, or we can give it up.

And so reframing is such an important part of the work and it’s why the climate crisis is an imagination crisis. Why old stories have gotten us into this and new stories, which are sometimes the oldest stories of all indigenous stories, Buddha stories of non separation, non duality, of the fact that we in nature were never separate, are really important equipment. And it’s exciting to see that they are more and more present in the culture at large.

James Shaheen: Well, you mentioned reframing, and you also reframe what it means to measure our wealth, if you don’t mind, I’ll read from the book: “What if we measured our wealth in other ways, as confidence in the future, as the clarity of the air and its breathability, as pride in one’s community and country, as integrity in our material and moral lives, as having seen the summer’s shooting stars or throwing moon-viewing parties or watching the migratory birds arrive, as friendship and the sense of safety that means help is there when needed, as honor and dignity and a meaningful life?” And I’d also just like to add, there’s a difficulty about writing about spirituality in a culture that is to a significant degree hostile to it. There isn’t a lot of room sometimes to affirm spiritual life. So can you say something about that?

Rebecca Solnit: Yeah, I think a lot of people imagined spirituality as the kind of religion that either they think depends on theocratic beliefs that are not scientifically verifiable. The kind of dogmatic atheists think religion isn’t about going and hanging out with all the people you know at church and hearing the good word or singing with the chorus, listening to the music, smelling the incense, they think it’s just about believing things that aren’t true. So I think that there’s suspicion on that level. But I also think one of the radical and exciting and beautiful things that’s happened in the last maybe fifty years, particularly the last thirty, is that Buddhist ideas and indigenous worldviews have come to play a larger and larger role in the Western world. It’s really common on part of the left to talk as though we’re starting from scratch, the good things don’t exist yet, we need to bring them in. But they’re already here. I was so moved when Thich Nhat Hanh died to see how many people who didn’t consider themselves Buddhist had one way or another been touched by his life, his words, his writing, his example. And it was just a reminder for me that these other sets of values, I think, are increasingly prevalent in the culture already. They have real meaning for people. And I think indigenous ideas that we’re not separate from nature, that we have deep responsibility for it, that relationship to it is an important part of our spiritual, emotional, psychic, and cultural lives, as well as physical dependence.

These ideas are circulating. To me, it’s like the seeds have been planted, we just need to water them and help them propagate and spread. And so I would add science to indigenous and Buddhist worldviews as more and more telling us in beautiful and terrifying ways that everything is connected to everything else. Climate itself is a kind of dharma teacher come to tell us, damn it, everything is connected to everything else. Because all that burning of coal, oil and gas is thickening the carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere, which is an insulating blanket, which makes it hotter, which is why there’s unbearable heat right now in China, Mexico, and Texas, why there’s unprecedented forest fires in Canada and smoke as we speak, making the air perilous in Michigan and a lot of the Midwest, and that will probably return to the East Coast as it did earlier this month.

So the ideas are there. I think just supporting them, helping people understand the basis for them, promoting them, talking about them, supporting them is part of the climate job. And people usually also think climate work is just shutting down fossil fuel extraction or putting up wind turbines. But it’s also about changing our imaginations, about giving us the equipment to be the people we need to be to live in the world we need for the best possible scenario. It’s a cultural crisis. And I think the creative work, which is also the theological work, is not just the practical stuff, not just fossil fuel and energy and energy policy and economics. It’s what kind of human beings do we need to be to be people who make choices based on the well-being of the whole rather than individual profit and benefit. And that’s something Native American culture has been very strong on is this sense that you don’t make decisions in isolation, because you don’t imagine yourself as an isolated individual, you imagine yourself as woven into a beautiful tapestry or network or Indra’s net of the whole.

Sharon Salzberg: So some of that sounds like self-awareness, some intuition, because we need some means of discerning that this is just a loop, this is bringing me down, this is leaving me feeling hopeless, or this is leading me to seek community, this is leading me to seek clarity and more information, and I want to do something to help somebody even if it feels like there could never be enough.

Rebecca Solnit: Enough is such an interesting thing. Thelma talks about enough and how we become people who feel like we have enough. But I also think enough in terms of how much is enough to do. And there’s often a sense that if you can’t save everything, you can’t save anything. One of the most profound things I’ve seen in recent decades was the day after Hurricane Katrina put 80% of New Orleans underwater, there was bumper-to-bumper boat traffic of people trying to get into New Orleans, that is people towing boat trailers. And those people stand for me for the greatness of human nature, engaging in an emergency, nobody thought they could put their fishing boat in and rescue all of the tens of thousands of people who had been stranded, mostly because they’re too poor to evacuate. But these people went in there anyway. And they did rescue tens of thousands of people. Nobody rescued everybody, but a lot of them rescued somebody.

I think for me, that’s been the great metaphor or allegory for the world: Get your boat in the water. You’re not going to rescue everybody. It’s not your job to do it all by yourself. And rescuing somebody is deeply meaningful even if you can’t rescue everybody. With the climate crisis, we’re not going to return the world to the ecological state it was in fifty or a hundred years ago. But the best case scenario is infinitely better than the worst case scenario for their survival of hundreds of millions of people and their ability to stay in their ancestral places rather than to become climate refugees for species for the overall condition of the planet for people now living and people yet to be born over the next thousands and thousands of years and all living things. It is so worth doing. And of course, enough is such a strange criterion. But if you rescued thirty-seven people in the flooded city of New Orleans, was that enough? It was certainly something.

James Shaheen: You know, as you and Sharon have both said, there are some stories that move us toward a more positive outcome. And then there are stories that move us toward despair. And probably one of the more pernicious stories in the climate crisis. And in Western culture, perhaps, is the notion of the autonomous individual actor. Can you say more about the dangers of an overvaluation of individualism and how it can prevent us from acting in community?

Rebecca Solnit: Yeah, as I said, when you ask people what they’re doing about climate, mostly they’ll tell you about individual acts of virtue, usually renunciation, like, “I recycle, I don’t eat meat, I bicycle,” although I definitely count bicycling as a pleasure too. It’s rare that somebody says, “I vote, I work on getting out the vote for climate positive candidates, I support this legislation, I campaign for my high school to put solar over the parking lot.” So we’ve really been encouraged and the fossil fuel industry played a direct role in it when it came to climate footprints to think of what we have to contribute as our individual virtue, which is mostly passive. It’s mostly not doing things. It’s that we imagine ourselves as individuals, we imagine ourselves as consumers who can maybe consume less or consume differently. And I really want us to see ourselves as citizens, by which I don’t mean you hold nationality and a passport in a country, but you see yourself as a member of civil society—to see that together, we have so much more power to decide who wins elections, which decides what kind of legislation will pass, to create pressure to pass important legislation to maybe get out there and physically blockade the fossil fuel project or pipeline or something like that, to educate, to encourage each other.

There’s so much we can do not through the renunciation that’s about giving things up but by actively laying hands on our own power and possibility. And there are times when individuals have tremendous power but only because somehow they connect other people. Greta Thunberg got out there all alone at age 15 with her cardboard sign for her climate strike, but only because she was the right person in the right place at the right time did her action resonate. That made it something that was internationally impactful that caused climate strikes and youth actions to go on on every continent on Earth except Antarctica. So also seeing ourselves as members of communities, and that’s where our strength lies to build a movement. So the isolated individual I think makes us both sad and weak—sad because it feeds loneliness. It feeds a sense that we don’t need to care about anything else and nothing cares about us. And weak I think because our power lies in our connections. It’s not autonomous, because we were never autonomous. So I think getting over the idea of individuality is that I don’t get to have my own dreams and wild imagination and course through life, but I do that in relationship to other people and with respect for all the other beings that I impact and they impact me. One other thing I’ll throw out is the kind of sad framing we constantly get around climate as responsibility, which is like, “Oh, I have to take care of this other thing.” To me, it always sounds like chores and the ways that we tell kids that doing stuff is chores, which makes it kind of moral virtue and also kind of a drag, not nearly as fun as playing. What I love about Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass and her public speaking and other work is that her constant framework is reciprocity. We want to do stuff for the Earth because the Earth does everything for us, that food, water, and air are all produced as something we benefit from depend upon. We’re giving back because so much has been given to us. We can give in a spirit of gratitude while feeling rich, rather than like, oh god, we have to do our chores or we can’t do this; we have to do that. I think the spirit of it is really important too.

James Shaheen: You seem to be describing alternatives to hyperindividualism. And I like that you quote Bill McKibben, who says that the most significant thing we can do for the climate is to stop being an individual and join something. So it’s almost like a renunciation of the notion of a separate self. We’re back at renunciation again in a way that we renounce something that is harmful to us.

Rebecca Solnit: Can I just reframe what Bill said, because I think what he said is such a perfect summary. The first time I heard him say it, he was exhausted because he worked so hard for decades for climate. We were sitting on the floor of an activist event in Paris while the Paris climate treaty was being negotiated, and somebody came up and asked him a question he’s heard a thousand times before and said, “What’s the most effective thing I can do as an individual?” He looked at them and said, “Stop being an individual. Find something to join. Join an organization, a movement, a campaign. Find a community.” And again, I think this feels like the refrain of the conversation. That’s where you find your power. But I think it’s also really helpful personally. You also assuage loneliness and being alone. You assuage your powerlessness. You get to hang out with people who maybe already have some good experience of making change and can help you learn about it. And I find that there are a lot of fantastic people with great strength, commitment, idealism, and generosity, and being around them is so good. There’s a wonderful anecdote where Ananda asks the Buddha, “The sangha, good community is half the spiritual life, isn’t it?” And the Buddha replies, “It’s the whole thing.” And I think that you could interpret that very narrowly as just getting your Buddhist sangha. But I think looking for people living a bodhisattva vow or a life of commitment in another way including climate activism is another way to pursue that.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, sometimes the notion of community can seem a little daunting. I think one of the great things you’ve said is getting to know our neighbors is one of the most powerful things we can do.

Rebecca Solnit: We live in terrible isolation. I think the pandemic made it worse. I think there’s a deep yearning for community. And even the Surgeon General of the United States right now, he’s an extraordinary man, talks about loneliness as the other epidemic in the United States. And it has a real impact on people’s physical and mental well-being. I think it lies behind a lot of the mass shooting, suicides, addictions, and other really tragic things around us. And so seeing community as a health thing for the planet, for human beings, for society, I think is important. And it’s also a kind of garden that needs feeding and watering and being taken care of.

I fear that we need to start over again, because so many of the organizations, whether it’s churches, recreational groups, square dancing, bowling, unions, etc. that people used to belong to aren’t part of people’s lives now. So we have to look at joining things, as Bill said, as something for our own benefit as well and figure out where that lies. And I think again, about what constitutes abundance. We’re in an economy that makes so many people work so hard. They don’t have as much time for friendship, for community, let alone for volunteering and activism as they might. In a world where people feel pretty secure, they don’t feel like they have to work frantically, they don’t work sixty hours a week, they have time for their family, their kids, their garden, their neighborhood, they’re participating in public life, participating in festivals and connecting to the natural world. And so time is something we can imagine poverty or abundance of too. We often think of abundance in material terms. But as I said before, I want to turn that around to look at all the nonmaterial things that we can be rich in, and being rich and time is such a good foundation for all the rest of it. In an economy with more security and more quality, we’re much more likely to have those things than we are in a radical inequality and precariousness that so many people experience in the United States right now.

I would just say there’s an indigenous worldview that tells us we’re not separate. There’s a Buddhist worldview. And science more and more, natural science, biological science, is describing a world of interconnectedness, a world not driven by the competition that Social Darwinists wanted us to believe in. But by cooperation, mutuality, symbiosis, we now recognize the majority of cells in our own body do not have human DNA. They’re all the microbes that keep our guts working and everything else, that even what you call yourself is actually a big community of many species lurching around. There’s so many forms of beautiful interdependence of relationships between species, the plants that require the insects and birds and bats to pollinate them, the insects, birds and bats that in turn require the flowers to feed upon all the natural systems. And of course, climate science is also understanding the feedback loops of everything being connected. So I feel more and more that it’s coming into focus on spiritual, imaginative, and also scientific levels. We’re recognizing a world in which we have never been individuals, that the individual is sometimes a useful way to describe ourselves or others, and sometimes it’s not a useful way, it’s a harmful way, because it’s obliterating the nonseparation, the nonduality of all being. And Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, was a real milestone for that, to understand the natural world is so deeply interconnected, that whatever we do affects so many other things, that we can’t really treat anything as separate, we have to understand how it affects the whole. And so that’s a scientific fact, that’s also a moral imperative, that I think is also a beautiful vision of a world in which we don’t have to feel that existential loneliness, of separateness and we don’t have to imagine human beings is separate from the rest of the web of life, or Indra’s net, or however you want to describe it.

Sharon Salzberg: You say that above all, Not Too Late is a love story, which I loved, and though we can be told that beauty and pleasure and joy aren’t necessary, they are in fact vital to our survival. Can you say more about how love and pleasure can guide us in these difficult times?

Rebecca Solnit: Yeah, I did an event last fall with the wonderful writer Julian Aguon, who’s a queer Indigenous poet from the island of Guam, colonized still by the US, also a climate lawyer with the Blue Ocean Law firm, a leader in an incredible victory in the United Nations recently. But so I did this event for his wonderful book, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies, where I was his interlocutor. I’d never met him. I didn’t really know what he’d be like. Before the event, he murmured in my ear, “Be sure we talk about beauty, joy, and abundance,” and I was just in love. It was so great, because so often we are taught to frame these things in terms of austerity. And I think the left has been very austere. We’ve treated beauty and joy as superfluous, self-indulgent, unnecessary, bourgeois.

I wrote a book called Orwell’s Roses recently, and I was very amused that a left-wing woman wrote in scolding him that flowers are bourgeois. Flowers have existed for tens of millions of years before human beings did. Most of what we eat is either a flowering plant or something that depends on flowering plants directly. So it’s such a funny thing to say. But I think beauty also comes from meaning, from moral beauty, the opposite of moral injury and moral ugliness. I think joy comes from a meaningful life, from deep connection. I think beauty, joy, and abundance can also be imagined in these ways that are quite banal and superficial. Beauty becomes “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the prettiest of them all?” Joy becomes just the kind of disconnected lightheartedness that’s not paying attention to the state of the world. Abundance becomes greed or materialism. But there are other versions that I think are spiritual or ethical or engaged. I think, first of all, if you’re utterly miserable, you’re usually a terrible activist, and you’re often dragging down other activists around you, and that kind of self-denial often creates miserable activists.

Second of all, I think you can lose sight of what we’re fighting for. We want a world of beauty, joy, and abundance, and there’s no reason why we can’t enjoy as much as possible of those things along the way. I think there’s a real danger, and I’ve seen it in a lot of hardcore left-wing activists, of actually forgetting what the goal is or imagining that the goal is some kind of justice without knowing that justice is beautiful and joyful, that justice should be a kind of abundance, that security, not the security of weapons and militarism, but the security of knowing that you’re not going to starve or be homeless or go without healthcare, that you’re not imperiled by guns and violence. I think there’s beauty and joy in the security of feeling the interconnectedness that’s almost the opposite of violence. I think understanding how everything’s connected is beautiful. And there’s a kind of intellectual beauty and understanding and learning and things like that.

So I think we have to understand those things more deeply. And I think they are connected to love, that love is itself often a kind of beauty, joy, and abundance and something that comes from within us. And again, I think capitalism is so often teaching us to ask, “Well, how do we get love?” like it’s a commodity we want to stockpile. We want lots of people to love us or people to fall madly in love with us. But giving love is also a kind of abundance. How do we feel that we have abundant hearts that can afford to love, that have a lot of love to give, that we’re rich in love and generosity in that way? How do we imagine love as also a pleasure and a joy to give as well as receive and that there’s a reciprocity there, that it’s circulating? It shouldn’t only be coming in, it shouldn’t only be going out, but the more it circulates, the more it circulates. Because I think also capitalism has taught us to imagine everything in terms of material objects. If I take away some of your toys, I have more toys because you have fewer toys. But if I take away some of your well-being, I don’t have more well-being. If I take away your joy, your sense of abundance, your sense of your own value, it’s like cutting you off at the knees may make you shorter, but it doesn’t actually make me taller. So I think it’s also understanding the economy of the immaterial, which is a generosity economy, a gift economy, an economy in which the more you give, the more you get, because it’s weaving it all together. It’s helping it all circulate.

James Shaheen: So you mentioned your recent book, Orwell’s Roses. So how did you learn about George Orwell’s love of gardening?

Rebecca Solnit: There’s a bunch of pieces of that. I went into the roses. The people who live in the cottage he moved into in 1936 at the time were quite confident he planted them. They’re a little more uncertain about that now, but it made me look harder first at the essay that had got me there about planting roses and fruit trees and then into his journals and letters. I found in Orwell that nothing had led me to expect. It was a lot more joyful, sensual, engaged with the natural world than that kind of angsty, austere, grim, antifascist Orwell we’re usually given. And so I spent a few years delving deep into his work. First, I think Orwell understood that in order to spend a lot of his life facing the most difficult, scary, and unpleasant things, he needed to come back and renew himself, and he took such joy and pleasure in gardening. In a 1940 questionnaire, he said, “Aside from writing, the most important thing in my life is gardening, particularly vegetable gardening.”

But I think he also understood we can live in a world of swirling and confusing information, and that grounding yourself in something tangible and specific, hands on with the physical material natural world helps you keep your own capacity to perceive, judge, trust yourself, because all through 1984, that’s what he shows his protagonist Winston Smith doing. There’s a beautiful passage where Winston says almost like a little mantra, “Water is wet, stones are hard, objects dropped fall towards the center of the earth” because he lives in a world that’s trying so hard to disorient you, make you distrust your own capacity to perceive, remember, and judge. So how do you revolt against Big Brother? There’s another line in the book that says, “The final instruction of the authorities was not to trust the evidence of your eyes and ears,” and something I’ve learned is you can invert something to understand what is the opposite? Trusting your eyes and ears makes you a rebel, makes you a person who thinks for herself or himself, makes you a person who can be independent from Big Brother telling you what to think.

Winston revolts very ineffectually and basically gets swept up in a trap when he tries to join a conspiracy against the regime, but he revolts pretty effectively by having a love affair, going to the country, listening to birdsong, cherishing memories and objects, trying to ascertain the truth, trusting his own judgment, really setting himself up not as an individual in terms of separateness in the way we’re talking about it for our climate purposes but separate from a manipulative and corrosive regime. So I think Orwell understood that this also kept his mind equipped, that not only was there pleasure and joy and abundance in the gardening and all the time he spent in the natural world but that it was also keeping his mind kind of supple, independent, capable of sorting through the information not completely swept away. And something that’s been really interesting to me as a writer is what are the things we need to do that a lot of people might say are frivolous, decadent, self-indulgent, superfluous, and people on the left say those things all the time if you’re doing anything fun and leisurely. What are these things we need to do that don’t look important, don’t look productive, but that allow us to then go do the most important and productive things we need to do.

There’s a wonderful essay by Lawrence Weschler called “Vermeer in Bosnia,” where he’s sitting in the war crimes tribunal for the Bosnian war crimes in The Hague, and he asked the judge afterwards how he can bear to sit and listen day after day to these stories of absolute atrocity. The judge thinks for a moment, and then his face brightens he says, “Oh, after work, I go to the museum and look at the Vermeers.” And I know lots of people would say looking at Vermeers is frivolous or superfluous or unnecessary or a thousand things like that. But essentially, looking at the Vermeers, if it helps a judge prosecute war crimes and therefore maintain justice on Earth, then 400-year-old paintings and the enjoyment of them is part of justice work, and we can’t discount anything, whether it’s baking cookies or birdwatching or surfing or any pleasure, if it helps people do the really important work they need to do, and that’s something I really felt I got from him.

James Shaheen: You know, sadly, we’re out of time. But Rebecca, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been a great pleasure.

Rebecca Solnit: Thank you for letting me circulate some ideas, and wonderful to be with you.

Sharon Salzberg: It’s beautiful. It’s wonderful.

James Shaheen: You too, and for our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, available now. We’d like to close these podcasts with a short guided meditation, so I’ll hand this over to Sharon.

Sharon Salzberg: Thank you so much. I would like us just to sit, eyes open or closed, however you feel most at ease. Just feel natural in what you’re doing. Take some breaths, which as we’ve heard is one of the great markers of interconnection, like it or not. Feel what’s coursing through your body, different emotions, different resolves perhaps. Pay some attention to those stories. “I can’t fix it. I can’t do enough.” If you feel yourself just getting swept up and lost or disconnected in some way, take a breath. Come back. We have a refuge. We have a home base. It’s already happening. Just feel the breath. So thank you.

James Shaheen: Thank you, Sharon. Thank you, Rebecca.

Rebecca Solnit: Thank you both. And Sharon, if you’re ever coming out for Spirit Rock or anything, I would love to meet you.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Life As It Is with Rebecca Solnit. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks and Life As It Is are produced by As It Should Be Productions and Sarah Fleming. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

James Shaheen: Hello and welcome to Life As It Is. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. For the past sixty years, composer and interdisciplinary artist Meredith Monk has been expanding the possibilities of the human voice. A pioneer of extended vocal technique and interdisciplinary performance, she has created collaborative performance pieces that stretch the limits of music, inspiring figures from Björk to Merce Cunningham. Her most recent work, Indra’s Net, draws from her decades of Buddhist practice and explores themes of impermanence and interdependence against the backdrop of our ecological crisis. In today’s episode of Life As It Is, my co-host Sharon Salzberg and I sit down with Meredith to discuss the relationship between her art and her meditation practice, the importance of listening fearlessly, and why she believes art is a bodhisattva activity.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with composer and singer Meredith Monk and my co-host, Sharon Salzberg. Hi, Meredith. Hi, Sharon. It’s great to be with you both.

Meredith Monk: Hi, James. Hi, Sharon.

Sharon Salzberg: Hi there.

James Shaheen: So Meredith, you’re celebrating your 80th birthday this year, and you’ve been performing since you were a child. Over the course of your career, you’ve composed and performed are figures ranging from your own teacher, Pema Chödrön, to His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. So how did you first come to music, and how did you first come to Buddhism?

Meredith Monk: Well, my mother was a singer on the radio in the 1930s. She did solo performances in music shows like the Prudential Hour or the Hit Parade, but then she became a jingle singer, so she was recording commercials. My grandfather had been a bass-baritone who came from Russia and had a concert career in New York and also had a music conservatory. And then my great-grandfather apparently was a cantor in Russia. I’m a fourth-generation singer, so music was something that was just like breathing for me, very natural. I was singing at a very young age and reading music before I read words. But I had to find my own way in a family of all singers or artists. In a way, I could have followed that path. But I knew that I liked making things at a young age, and so I wanted to make my own.

James Shaheen: And how about Buddhism? How did you come to Buddhism?

Meredith Monk: Of course, through art, like everything goes into my life. I had heard Trungpa Rinpoche do a talk in New York. I was always seeking, even when I was in school. I was a Baha’i for a while. I went to a Quaker High School, which was, in a way, a marvelous way of understanding quiet. It was very natural to have Buddhism be part of my life because I love those meetings for worship. I come from an Eastern European Jewish background, but we were not practicing. So I was searching, and I heard a talk by Trungpa Rinpoche in New York. And then I was very interested. I was very skeptical about organized religion, so I hovered about, but then Barbara Dilley, who is an old friend of mine, who was teaching at Naropa Institute in 1975, said, “Would you come and teach voice and movement?” I taught, I think, for a few days, and I did one or two performances. I also heard his talks there, and I was really inspired by first of all my students that seemed to have such an open-hearted sense of expansion and imagination, and then his talks were wonderful. I think that as a young artist, I intuitively followed these principles in my aesthetic life, but I think I was quite behind as a person. So I started realizing little by little that those principles were very fundamental Buddhist ideas that I had developed as an artist but did not know how to get them into my life at all. So little by little, I just became more and more involved, even though again, I was quite skeptical about a scene. And it was a scene. And then there was a certain point in my life that was maybe even ten years later that I had really entangled myself in my own neurosis. And at that time, I was in my punk period, and a friend of mine said, “Well, why don’t you read Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior?” I was like, “Oh, I don’t know that hippie stuff, I don’t know.” And then I read it, and I was literally in tears and felt that he was really speaking to me. And I started doing the Shambhala training.

James Shaheen: You know, you mentioned the tools that you use for your art were things that you were not able to really incorporate in your life. But I’ve heard people say, and I think Philip Glass has said, the very same tools that he applied in art were the tools that helped him and that he applied in his practice. Do you find that to be the case?

Meredith Monk: Definitely, absolutely, because I think that art has to do with being open to listening, and I think my art always had a lot of space in it and a lot of quiet and a lot of stillness. Also, I think the idea of each piece being another world that you are literally trying to say to it, “Make yourself known,” and it’s coming through you has a lot to do with the meditation process of just letting things come through and not starting with any expectations at all.

James Shaheen: Your most recent project is Indra’s Net, which is an experiential performance work that focuses on the principle of interconnectedness. So can you tell us a bit about this project and what inspired you to create it?

Meredith Monk: Well, I think for the last fifteen or twenty years, I just became very aware of trying to make art that really provides an experience of sacred space and very direct experience. So I’ve made a piece called Mercy. How does one make a piece called Mercy, Impermanence, Songs of Ascension? It’s really in a sense contemplating principles, and then somehow the piece evolves from that, but I realized that it was a beautiful integrative process with my ensemble as well, they’re amazing people, to make pieces about something that you can’t make a piece about. Because how do you make a piece about impermanence? It’s an oxymoron. So the last series of pieces, and Indra’s Net is the third of a trilogy, have to do and had to do with our relation to nature. The first one was called On Behalf of Nature, and it was very inspired by Gary Snyder’s article that he wrote that was called “Artists and the War against Nature.” I think it was in Tricycle. I was so inspired by that. One of the things that I thought was so beautiful was his notion of the ancient shamanic tradition, that there were two branches of it, and one was telling the truth, and the second one was evoking energies or beings that cannot speak for themselves, and he said through dance and music, and I was thinking, “This is amazing.” Because in a way, every piece I’ve ever made has to do with nature in one way or another, but how does one center on that idea, and what do you do, really? Because I was thinking a lot about ecology, of course, at that time and our Earth, and the way that I work, I don’t use a lot of words in my music, and actually, my work is very interdisciplinary, so there’s a lot of movement. I use film a lot or video and staging and lighting and very visual kind of work. So I didn’t think that my work would really be right, for example, to do a kind of tract about don’t throw away your plastic or that kind of direct confrontation with our environmental challenge. With Gary Snyder, what really interested me and excited me was I just felt that I could evoke the processes of nature, and in a sense, it was a kind of a piece that was an elegy for what we’re in danger of losing, a contemplative piece and very abstract in a way. But at the same time, I would want people to leave with just that sense that what we have is so precious. Our moments are so precious.

James Shaheen: Right, we recently had the novelist Ben Okri on the podcast to discuss the role of the artist in times of ecological crisis. So I’m curious, how do you think about the role of the artist in these times?

Meredith Monk: Well, as I said, I think each artist has got to find a way of being a benefit to sentient beings. What is the way that I as a person can evoke something that will be maybe inspiring to people or will be something that’s very truthful? I go back to early culture where people were making ritual forms entreating nature, in a sense, you could say, with a relationship to something really happening during that ritual or that form. And so we don’t quite have that in all of our Western European tradition. But I would like to have that deep sense of people, again, just really feeling appreciative of what we have and how precious that is. So the second piece in this trilogy was called Cellular Songs. I was going deeper into the fundamental unit of nature, which is a cell. I had started working on music for two other women and me, Katie Geissinger and Allison Sniffin, these very complicated little a capella pieces where you didn’t know who was singing. And at the same time, I was reading a book by Siddhartha Mukherjee called The Emperor of All Maladies, which is a history of cancer starting from ancient times. What I was very inspired by was his description of the fundamental way that a cell works, which is very interconnected. It’s very interdependent. It’s cooperative. It’s not competitive. It’s very complex communication. And I thought, well, that is a wonderful metaphor of What a society could be. And then at that time, the political situation, Trump was coming up, and I was sensing a real patriarchal impulse coming back up in the society, and so I decided that I felt that it would be important to do the piece with five women as a society of care rather than conflict, of generosity rather than selfishness, of gentleness rather than violence. So it was a wonderful piece to work on, and now the third part of the trilogy, which is Indra’s Net.

James Shaheen: Could you just say quickly what Indra’s net is so all of our listeners will know?

Meredith Monk: Indra’s net is a legend in the Hindu-Buddhist tradition. I think that these stories are like teaching stories. They are legends that embody spiritual principles, and this one embodies the principle of impermanence. The story is there was an enlightened king, and I think in the Hindu tradition, he’s a deity. He built a net that covered the whole universe. And within each intersection of the net is an infinitely faceted jewel that reflects all the other jewels. So you really feel that anything that you do affects everything else. And the thing that’s also beautiful about it is I remember my original visualization was that all the jewels are the same, but actually not. Each jewel is unique, and yet we are all connected. So that was very inspiring to me on many levels: spatially, how could I work with this musically, and then just this idea in the world that we’re living in now.

Sharon Salzberg: That’s so beautiful. I’d never really thought about each jewel being a different cut, so to speak.

Meredith Monk: I learned that later, and that was so amazing. I started thinking about it ten years ago, how would I do this? I worked on music during the teens, and then I started rehearsing. I was teaching at Harvard in the spring of 2020, and they gave us This wonderful building that’s an arts lab building, and I started working with my ensemble. And lo and behold, after one week, there we had a pandemic, and I was thinking, “Am I too late with this idea of interdependence, because we’re all experiencing this?” Sometimes I think that an artist is a kind of antenna of the society, and you’re sort of doing warnings, you know, “Wake up a little bit” kind of thing. But I thought, “Oh, my gosh, I’m too late.” But then I realized, no, this piece hopefully is a kind of antidote to the pain that people are going through and then also a wake-up call that we’re all going through the same thing, and this is a great opportunity to understand how we all are one and that all these conflicts and politics and everything are such a waste of time. I mean, it’s just a waste of time.

Sharon Salzberg: Well said. Meredith, you’ve compared making art to jumping from the edge of a cliff, and you say that being an artist is learning to tolerate the fear of the unknown. Can you say more about the relationship between your art and the space of not knowing? How do you work with mystery and uncertainty?

Meredith Monk: I’m terrified every time. You know, there are two different ways of thinking about making art. Some people make, in a sense, a more product-oriented way of doing things. There’s nothing wrong with that, finding something and then refining it. But my way has been always to try to start from zero as much as possible and to try to learn to tolerate the unknown. And it’s really hard every time. But I think one of the things that’s very interesting about it, well, it’s a beginner’s mind idea. I think what’s really interesting about it is that that’s what the process is. It’s tolerating being in the unknown. What happens with me is I feel incredible fear after all these years, sixty years of making work, and then I just start, and I say to myself, “Be playful, Meredith, remember playfulness,” and I just start. And then a tiny little clue, it’s all a bit like being a detective, a tiny little clue will come up, and then I get kind of interested in that, and little by little, the interest and curiosity takes over, and the fear is not there so much.

James Shaheen: Meredith, you’ve written that the process of creation is a process of uncovering, listening to what a given work of art wants and letting that unfold naturally. I found that interesting. Can you say more about your artistic process?

Meredith Monk: Well, I think every piece is very different. Pieces have different sources. Sometimes it will be more the music, and then I’ll go into rehearsal and try to do staging and the piece doesn’t want it, for example. Sometimes I have a visual idea, and then is there music that’s part of this? So that’s part of the unknown. I’m so grateful to be doing something that I love all these years and also to have mystery, to affirm mystery and magic in this world, because I feel that everything is so filled in for all of us. I mean, it’s so addictive, and to remember that you can’t see everything and you can hear everything and you can’t label everything is a wonderful thing. What I find as I go along is there is a certain point, I mean, I can trace all the work, you know, the shoemaking, you know, I’m at the piano, and I can remember this particular material came up and I’ve worked very, very hard. But what I find is that at a certain point, the piece itself does make itself known and there’s this magic, you could say birth of an entity, like the entity makes itself known. It just becomes so miraculous actually.

James Shaheen: You also write that your process involves long periods of waiting for curiosity to overtake the terror of the unknown. What is that waiting like, and how has this practice of waiting influenced how you pay attention to the world around you?

Meredith Monk: Well, I think the thing that was very interesting about the pandemic, I’m sure you’ll agree, is that we were living every day in the unknown. And what’s in the back of our experience, that we are living in the unknown moment to moment, became the foreground. There was a correspondence between working on an art piece, but the way we were all living was we did not know what was going to happen from one minute to the next. In a way, that was a great opportunity to be aware that we are living in the unknown. We do not know. The pandemic was a very interesting time for me. My creative energy was really flowing, and I was determined to somehow keep on working on Indra’s Net and bring it to life in however way I could, and we did not know how long this pandemic was going to last. Maybe I would have to find a completely new form for this piece. Maybe it wasn’t even going to be a performance piece. Maybe it was going to be a video piece or something like that. And that was very interesting. I found that it freed my mind a lot. And then of course, practice during that time became something that was so enriching and so healing. Practicing, really sitting, was so healing, and I found a wonderful community online that I’m still going to every day to sit. And that was very, very healing for me.

James Shaheen: Well, I suppose we really were living moment to moment in the unknown, but maybe it also highlighted that we in a certain way always are. Talking about Indra’s net, as Sharon has often pointed out, just the intensity of the sense of interconnectedness. You know, this virus kind of connected us all. Sharon has often spoken about that. But you also say that when you’re stuck on a piece, you’ll say, “Please make yourself known”—I love that, sort of like abracadabra—and then try to stay out of its way. What is it like to stay out of the way?

Meredith Monk: Well, I think part of it is just knowing that it’s not that important. I mean, it is and it isn’t. The failure is OK. Because I think that’s a lot of our fears about everything that we do in our lives. It’s sort of like, really in a way, does that really make that much difference in the universe, and aren’t we going to learn a lot from that? So it’s trying to get through that and just know that you can have certain kinds of trust, one way or the other. I think being an artist involves faith, as does being a human being. We were talking about that the other day in the meditation group about the faith that there is Buddha nature, the faith that underlying everything, there’s Buddha nature or basic goodness, That’s a kind of faith, particularly in this dark world.

James Shaheen: Talking of faith, in an interview with Tricycle several years ago, you spoke about fearless listening, I imagine that takes faith too, or listening with all of your being. What have you learned from listening fearlessly?

Meredith Monk: I think that applies to both making a work and also performing. I always say performing is a prototype of the possibility of human behavior because we’re so in tune with each other. If one person’s having a hard night, everybody’s pulling, you can tell by just the first note that comes out of someone’s mouth or their face. I mean, we know each other so well, and it’s really such a generous and vulnerable situation. I think live performance is such a beautiful, beautiful experiential situation in life because we are that vulnerable. We could fall on our faces or anything could happen. And I think being in the same room with an audience and the energy is going back and forth between us and the audience and their energy is coming back is something that I really want to affirm in my life because the live situation is very different than the screen, very different from the media. Something is really happening. I mean, that’s the same when you are in the room with a teacher giving a talk where energy is real. I don’t think that the screen will ever be able to replace that, and I hope that in the future that people will really know the power and the beauty of that.

James Shaheen: I’m so glad to hear that.

Sharon Salzberg: I’d like to pick up on a couple of phrases that you use, which I found kind of stunning, the first being “The piece doesn’t want that.” In a funny way, it reminds me that I had an acupuncture treatment the other day, and the acupuncturist put three needles in my ear, and they kept falling out. And then she’d try again, and they’d fall out. She finally said something like “Those points don’t want it.” I didn’t know they had a say! It’s just kind of the aliveness of everything and the aliveness of the created piece, which is also creating at the same time.

Meredith Monk: Well, what’s really interesting is sometimes it also involves throwing away the thing that you love the most, which is so hard. “Oh, I love that section,” and then the piece doesn’t want that, and so then you have to throw it away, and then everything falls into place. So pain is part of the process, and I think that that’s OK. I just feel like you’re really making a commitment to go through that, and you do come out the other side. That’s part of our lives.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, it’s also very connected to the other phrase, which is this idea of getting out of the way, which reminded me of when I was writing a book called Faith and I was many times very stuck. It was quite hard. I was talking to the writer Susan Griffin, and she was kind of coaching me, and she said, “You’ve got to stop thinking of yourself as the person writing this book and think of yourself as the first person who gets to read this book.” Best piece of advice.

Meredith Monk: That’s wonderful. What I always say to my students or young people is it’s actually not about me at all. It’s not about us. It’s about what’s coming through us, our inspiration, and it’s what we have to give.

Sharon Salzberg: And especially I found writing about topics like love and faith. If it were me, I would get very kind of highfalutin, you know, too puffed up, and it would just be all wrong and be terrible, actually.

Meredith Monk: How do you do that, Sharon? How do you write about love?

Sharon Salzberg: I try to get out of the way and stay grounded.

Meredith Monk: Wonderful. Your work has meant a lot to me and many, many people. And very helpful.

Sharon Salzberg: Thank you so much. So you’ve written that the experience of creating is as close to meditation as anything you can think of, particularly given the combination of focused attention and open relaxation to whatever arises. So can you say more about that connection between your meditative practice and your creative practice?

Meredith Monk: Well, the creative practice takes longer. It’s not as heightened a consciousness of that. You almost have to think back over the process of making something to realize that you’ve kept on staying open at the same time you’re focused. But performing really is that. I guess in our lifetimes, we have a handful of performances that you remember where you are truly one with your material. There’s no you. It’s like you are truly one with your material. You’re absolutely pinpoint focused and at the same time very, very relaxed and open to what’s going on in the moment. And I think that is the beautiful thing about performing is it’s so present. You’re in nowness. And in those performances, the judge, the observer, the guy or gal in your mind that’s going “You’re flat” or “You’re slow” or whatever is not there. It’s kind of a miracle. There is a little voice going “Wow” in the best sense of the word. But in some of my pieces, there’s one piece called “Hocket,” which is a duet, and it’s really fast. A hocket in music is that each person has one note, and then you throw those notes back and forth, and it makes a melody. So you’re just going one person, the other person, one person. It’s like a moving meditation. If you have one thought that comes into your mind, you’re off. You’re out. It’s like musical chairs. That’s another example of how now you have to be, how present, because you’re just in your body. You’re just one with your body and the material.

Sharon Salzberg: There are so many things that you’re saying that really do describe making art as a kind of spiritual practice, including in writing they say, “Kill your darlings,” like the phrase you’re so proud of and you love more than anything, and then your editor says—

James Shaheen: The best is always cut off the first three paragraphs.

Meredith Monk: Oh, torture.

Sharon Salzberg: There’s a lot of letting go. When you talk about performing, you know, I would think one of the most interesting things must be when you’ve kind of flubbed it or you’ve made a mistake, having to just continue on or come back.

Meredith Monk: You have to forgive yourself. That’s the first thing. You have to forgive yourself. Something again, in that “Hocket” piece, wow, you know, so here’s the thing. You’re going, note, note, note note, note. It’s going really fast. And then you’re looking at this person like a deer in the headlights because one person’s made the mistake, then you’ve got to figure out with your eyes, “Are we going on or are we going back?” You know, after doing it a thousand times, it’s still deer in the headlights. So the mistakes are very interesting. And if I’m doing solos, I think it was Thelonius Monk who said, “Make something out of your mistakes.” So my ensemble also knows that if I make a mistake, I’ll repeat it a few times. That’s another strategy. But it’s also again helping that other person, just moving on. Actually, in the last performance that I did in New York, I was struggling. I went off stage, and I said to two of my wonderful colleagues, “Ugh, I had such a hard time.” They said, “Delete that. It was incredible.” And then people came up to me and said, “That was so incredible. You were on fire. You’re a rock star.” And then I realized, you know what, we are the last person in the world to judge what happened. How dare we even think that we’re a judge of the experience? Because sometimes you can have a performance where you thought, “Oh, that was so wonderful.” And then when you listen to it, it’s like, “Oh, my goodness, what was that?” So I think that’s a great lesson for us in our lives that we just have to just do, give, be.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, you’ve talked about trusting the emptiness, both in meditation and in music, and the practice of coming back again and again. So is this tied together to what we were just talking about?

Meredith Monk: Definitely. The processes are so similar. It’s just a matter of how much time each of those processes take. But basically, I think the process is the same, very much the same.

Sharon Salzberg: You described making art as a bodhisattva activity where the inner transformation and growth that result from dharma practice flow into the work, and the work in turn becomes an offering. Can you say something more about that transformative process?

Meredith Monk: I feel in these late years of my life, I’ve been more aware in a very conscious way of how much my practice has gone into the work. I would say that as a young artist, I didn’t think of them in such an integrated way. That gave me pain because I felt that I have my art practices over here and my dharma practice is over there. My teacher is Ani Pema Chödrön, and she said, “I never knew that you were struggling with that, Meredith.” Little by little, I feel that I really see how the dharma practice is like a ground or a foundation, that the spirit of that underlies every piece, in a sense, and that I’m very aware of the time I have left on earth that I really want to make art that has a healing aspect to it and that really gives people some sense of affirming life. I really want that. So there was a funny story that was related to Pema saying that to me, because we had had dinner and it was one of her teachings that Omega. The next day, there was a young woman who asked a question. She said, “Well, I’m a painter, and I’m afraid if I meditate, then my art is not going to be good anymore because my art comes from my pain and my neurosis, and I’m expressing myself,” and Pema said, “Well, I know somebody that could answer that, Meredith.” And I was like, “Oh, no, help.” There were 600 people there. I said, “Well, you know, to tell you the truth, I’ve really found that my practice has just made my art grow more.” I think that that’s a myth, also, that we have in the Western European tradition that you have to cut off your ear or you have to be a person that’s suffering. We all suffer, but I mean that the neurosis is what feeds the artwork. And I really don’t believe that.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I’ve heard that in one form or another from many, many vocations and livelihoods. People in some competitive field of business will say, “I’m afraid of losing my edge, I’ll get complacent.” Certainly, I’ve heard it from artists and creative people over and over again, like, “I’ve got to be in turmoil, that it’s only from enormous pain that great art can come.” And so I’ve really thought about that a lot, because it’s such a prevalent question. First of all, it is extremely Western, so it’s very parochial in a certain way, it’s just a certain point of view. And it also has limitations because many artists will talk about love and connection and so many things.

Meredith Monk: Exactly. There’s a difference between committing to pain that, of course, is going to exist in the creative process. But there’s a different kind of awareness, I think, when you practice because I think that chaos and turmoil is actually kind of unconscious, whereas I think when you practice, of course, there’s going to be the pain of something not coming up easily. You’re going to have to work hard. I mean, you’re committing to work really hard. The other part of that is also that I feel that they’ll always be dark aspects of my work, too. I feel like It’s very important that work also has sadness as well as joy, that it has some sense of a reflection of this world that we’re living in and not some kind of tweet, tweet, heaven, heaven, everything is great. I don’t think that is good art, really. So it has all those qualities within it. And I’ve also always felt that even calling something a comedy or tragedy, like, for example, I use humor a lot in my work. I love comedy. I feel like you can do a very deep piece. Years ago, I made a piece about World War Two, but there was a very comic section in that. If you go to Shakespeare, in the middle of a tragedy, there will always be one moment where there’s kind of the release and universality that comedy has. So I think that’s the thing is that a work of art can have that richness of the different centers of our being. It can have a full range of emotion. It can have the spiritual awareness. It can use our intellect. It can be physical. It can deal with perceptual modalities. In art, we’re dealing with the senses. So it can be that rich as a kind of affirmation of not only the artist but of all of us as human beings, our possibilities of the richness of our experience. Hopefully, it’s a prototype for that.

Sharon Salzberg: Actually, you’ve described the paramitas, or different qualities like love or wisdom or patience, or these qualities known as perfections in Buddhist teaching, influence the different stages of your artistic process. I’m wondering if you can say some more about how you work with these qualities and how they inform your art.

Meredith Monk: I don’t even know how to get it because I’m still working on that. But I can tell you, patience, for example, is one. I feel like basically, I’ve been quite an impatient person in the short run, but in the long run, I’m very, very patient. So I’m working more on the impatience in the short run, trying to remember the long-run patience because I’ll work on something for a long time. I’m very slow. And yet, in the moment, sometimes I’m maybe sometimes too quick. Again, that has a lot of aspects to it. Generosity is the sense that what you’re doing is an offering. I saw a beautiful video of a friend, Babette von Low, who was the head of the Buddhist channel in Holland, which no longer exists, but she’s a remarkable person. She gave me a video that she did of Dilgo Khyentse’s wife, who was an herbalist, a Tibetan herbalist. She went through paramita by paramita, how the paramitas helped her in her process of making herbs, like patience of finding the exact plant, the generosity of making those herbs. Each paramita had a specific function in her process of making herbs and being a doctor. I thought that was just so beautiful.

James Shaheen: Meredith, it’s interesting that you describe performance as an act of renunciation, where a performer gives up the visual modes of seeking attention and love in favor of immersing themselves in the material and becoming, to use your words, “a conduit of fundamental energies and impulses that are beyond discursive thought.” This might seem counterintuitive since we might view a performer as seeking attention, and this seems very far away from renunciation. Can you say more about that?

Meredith Monk: There are certain modes of performance where you’re doing that kind of mode to get that instant love, like Broadway shows, for example. I mean, that’s kind of part of it. It has a more instant gratification aspect to it. But with my group, and we’ve worked on it so much, and It’s just a remarkable group of people, each person unique, great creative minds, and very interested in their own ways. They’re not all Buddhist practitioners but really evolved people. A lot of our work is very ensemble oriented, and there is something when you give up, it does have this renunciative aspect. I can’t tell you the deep joy that that brings. A more quiet, deep joy. It’s just the most extraordinary thing to be part of something like that where we’re all in the same place at the same time sharing and together.

James Shaheen: It seems also related to getting out of your own way. It’s renouncing self in a way.

Meredith Monk: It really is. It’s a very quiet performance style. It’s definitely not a show off kind of style at all. It’s really more, as I said, becoming one with the material and then trusting the material and trusting that that material, that music or the movement or whatever the means is, is being received by these human beings that are in the same space at the same time, and then we are also receiving energy from them. So it’s like a figure eight or an infinity sign of energy.

James Shaheen: Yeah, as I was telling you before we started, I had just seen the concert version of Indra’s Net, and that definitely comes through in that.

Meredith Monk: Indra’s Net is a particularly ensemble piece. The amazing thing with that “Hocket” piece that I talked about or Indra’s Net or any piece that we’re working on, energy wise, there’s a kind of sense of leaning in the best sense of the word. It’s sort of like passing, leaning, sharing. How many experiences do we have in our lives like that?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I would think that Indra’s Net of all pieces should have to display the interdependence.

Meredith Monk: Exactly.

Sharon Salzberg: I mean, if that was not doing that would be really odd.

Meredith Monk: That would be kind of odd. And yet, at the same time, it’s a group of human beings, it’s a community. But as we talked about the jewels, each person is so unique. I’ve always wanted to have people feel that they also have that space to shine, hopefully every person in that piece, including the orchestra, which is an orchestra of young people, and they also had such an amazing experience, because usually in the classical music world, they’re just sitting in the pit, and they’re given a score, and that’s it. But they were so much part of creating the piece as well. They got their voices in there. That’s the same with my ensemble. I come in with the material, but I’m very open to 2hat they have to say about it. So I think that all of us as human beings are creative in one way or another. I was saying during the pandemic when I had these doubts about “Is art really that valuable,” which I really believed even more and more that it is during the pandemic. But those moments of doubt came up, and I realized I would be a really bad nurse. So I think that we give how we can. And if it’s given in love, it doesn’t matter how it manifests if it’s given in love.

Sharon Salzberg: That’s very beautiful. I loved during that time seeing clips of nurses and doctors singing and dancing in the corridor. Art is what we reach for for a vision of a bigger picture and a sense of way.

Meredith Monk: I was hoping that what I was doing was helping people. I did a lot of classes during that time, which was very moving, where people from all over the world could take the workshop, and I did a lot of lectures to young people in colleges and I did a lot of interviews because I felt as an older artist that I wanted to inspire the young people to not give up. At that time, we had no idea where it was going, and some of the young people were like, “Well, we don’t have a future.” And I was so fortunate to come up at the time that I did when there was a community and art was really valued, so I wanted to do the best I could with that. I think that we don’t know how it has impacted our lives, and all the more reason to really keep practicing and practicing, really trying to have as wide a view as possible and realize how precious life is.

Sharon Salzberg: You also discuss how very early in human history, the voice brought people together and formed communities and social bonds. How do you see your art today in terms of fostering community and connection? I want to say I resonated so much with your description of your life during the height of the pandemic because mine was so similar. I counted on and found so many riches in my own meditation practice. I was teaching an enormous amount online, and I was so struck by asking people in the chat to say where they’re signing in from, Germany, Abu Dhabi, Australia. Oh my god, what time is it there? It was such a strong sense of community. So I’m wondering if you would like to say something about fostering community and connection.

Meredith Monk: I was continuing with a deep commitment to teaching. I teach at Garrison every year. We do a workshop called “Voice as Practice” and it was wonderful that everybody was able to come. We did do one live again last December. It was really touching. I love being there. It’s a beautiful place. I feel very committed to somehow sharing the joy of making music together and doing movement, affirming the body together in groups. We’re doing something called the lineage project, which is more like how does this music get passed on or the movement get passed on to younger generations, not so much legacy, but more what is our lineage? It’s not only the music itself but the way we think about making art, and it seems like very young people have a lot of longing for this way of thinking about things. Everything’s commodified in this world, and everything’s filled in, and we’re all addicted to these devices and the distraction. How can we make a counterbalance to that? I sense that the young ones, there’s a real longing. So that’s something I’m thinking about a lot now. People in my ensemble are fantastic teachers, and each one of them is very unique. Some of them are more movement oriented, some of them are more vocally oriented and musically oriented. How can we work on a way that this energy gets passed on and this way of thinking about things gets passed on?

James Shaheen: Well, I really do wish we had more time, but Meredith Monk, it’s been a pleasure. We like to close these podcasts with a short guided meditation, so I’m going to turn it over to Sharon.

Meredith Monk: Thank you so much. It has been an enormous pleasure.

Sharon Salzberg: Thank you, both of you, so much. It’s a real joy to be with you. So why don’t we sit together for a few minutes. You can sit comfortably. Feel the energy in your body, whatever it might be, eyes open or closed, however you feel most of these. Let’s start by listening to sound, which is so prevalent. Maybe loud, maybe very subtle. Notice the difference between receiving what is happening and holding onto something or pushing it away. See if you can have the sounds, unless you are responsible for responding to them, wash through you.

Bring your attention to the feeling of your body sitting, whatever sensations you discover. See if you can feel the earth supporting you and space touching you. Usually when we think about touching space, we think about picking up a finger and poking it in the air. But space is already touching us. It’s always touching us. Here, too, we just need to receive it. The same with the feeling of the breath, just the normal natural breath wherever you feel it most distinctly, nostrils, chest, or abdomen. Find that place. Bring your attention there and just rest.

I remember those times in my early practice, I was so hypervigilant that I would say to myself, “You’re breathing anyway. All you need to do is feel it.” Let the breath come to you. Just this one breath. You don’t have to be concerned about anything that’s gone before or even the very next breath. Just this one. So thank you.

James Shaheen: Thank you, Sharon, and thank you, Meredith.

Meredith Monk: Thank you so much.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Life As It Is with Meredith Monk. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks and Life As It Is are produced by As It Should Be Productions and Sarah Fleming. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

James Shaheen: Hello and welcome to Life As It Is. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Pamela Ayo Yetunde has worked as an activist, lay Buddhist leader, chaplain, pastoral counselor, practical theologian, and teacher. In each of these roles, she has witnessed how our humanity has been distorted and how distraction and delusion keep us from our true purpose of caring for one another. Drawing from Buddhist and Christian teachings on mutuality and liberation, Yetunde believes that we need a compassion revolution to counter the rising tides of oppression and exploitation. In her new book, Casting Indra’s Net: Fostering Spiritual Kinship and Community, she explores how contemplative practices can help us adopt one another as kin. In today’s episode of Life As It Is, my co-host Sharon Salzberg and I sit down with Ayo to talk about how we can become caregivers to our community, what she has learned from Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of mutuality, and how rituals can support us in cultivating community and connection.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with activist and teacher Pamela Ayo Yetunde and my co-host, Sharon Salzberg. Hi, Ayo. Hi, Sharon.

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: Hi, James. Hi, Sharon.

James Shaheen: It’s great to be here with you both. So Ayo, we’re here to talk about your new book, Casting Indra’s Net: Fostering Spiritual Kinship and Community. So to start, can you tell us a little bit about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: Well, the book, in a way, is a pouring out of my heart. It comes out of observations that there’s so much strife, hatred, and violence in our society, glorification of guns, an unwillingness to do anything about it. And I also am feeling very optimistic that we have within ourselves the ability to turn it around. So this is just my little offering to encourage people to be their best selves, to tap into those aspects of themselves that want goodness, that is about goodness, and to live into that goodness.

James Shaheen: I was wondering, for our listeners who don’t know, if you could tell us what Indra’s net is.

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: It’s my understanding that Indra’s net is a concept that comes out of ancient Vedic teachings, where it was believed that Indra, the god, had a net that was used to capture his enemies and punish them in something that they could not escape from. Over time, in other places, Indra’s net has become a way of understanding our interconnectedness and our interdependence, as well as our goodness and that we have the capacity to reflect one another’s goodness back to each other and rely on one another to make it through the hardships. And so when I talk about casting Indra’s net, I’m talking about each one of us pouring out the love from our hearts into the net for the benefit of all.

James Shaheen: So what was originally a weapon has been transformed into something demonstrating our interconnectedness.

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: Yes.

James Shaheen: You know, the name of the book is Casting Indra’s Net, but you also talk about netcasting in a Christian context. Can you tell us about what netcasting means?

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: If there are folks who aren’t familiar with the story of Jesus and his disciples in a boat, they’re wondering, “How in the world are we going to capture the fish that we need to feed all the people who we want to feed?” They have this little bitty net. Jesus tells them to cast the net to the right of the boat, “Throw it in the water, just throw it in, and let’s see what happens.” So because they were believers, they did what he asked for them to do. They threw the net to the right of the boat and captured so much fish that it was a miracle because the net was so small they should not have expected to catch as many fish as they did. So I interpret that story as a story about abundance. When I think about casting Indra’s net, really what I’m thinking about is a practice, again, of lovingkindness in its abundance. So this lovingkindness is not limited by my one body, even imagining one person, a person I like or love, a person I don’t know, a person I hate. It’s at that level when in the practice, you imagine that you are in the field of lovingkindness and that all beings throughout space and time, throughout the universe, throughout the multiverses, that this field of lovingkindness is without bounds. So the practice of casting Indra’s net is really about imagining everyone and everything is in the field, yourself included.

James Shaheen: When you talk about abundance, I also think of the fishes and loaves. The more that is given, the more abundant the supply.

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: You know, James, you reminded me, when I was young, growing up in the church, I would often hear that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and I never believed that. I never believed that until I began practicing Buddhism.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I didn’t really get the fishes and loaves until I started practicing the paramis, and generosity came up and I thought, “Oh, that’s what the fishes and loaves meant.”

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: Yes. Yes.

James Shaheen: You work as an activist, a lay Buddhist leader, chaplain, pastoral counselor, practical theologian, and teacher, and you write that in these roles, you witness both the ignorance and enlightenment that we’re capable of. You say that what concerns you most is how our ignorance is exploited to a point that distorts our humanity. Can you say more about this?

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: Yes, I think we all have seen the embrace of lies, alternative truths, so to speak, alternative facts, and the danger of embracing those alternative realities on our very lives. Just think about the recent past when COVID hit the United States. Under the former president, there was an unwillingness to tell the truth about how dangerous this virus was. And so the embrace of ignorance, even in the fights we see amongst parents and school boards, parents and librarians, and the violence to have certain books removed is worrisome. And so I think what I’m trying to do also in this book is just help people stand up for truth.

James Shaheen: You say that our values are exploited, that our humanity can be distorted. Can you also say something about that?

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: Well, let’s begin with what we think we’re entitled to. Some people think that based on their heritage, their racial heritage, that they are entitled to this country, and that race-based entitlement then dictates how other people should be treated, typically, as less than human. And if we can, through the media largely, be convinced that people who don’t look like other people are therefore less human, then they will be treated with disrespect, oppression, violence. And I think we know, those of us who have paid attention to how genocide goes down in various countries, oftentimes, it begins with othering. The press is used to convince people that that other group of people is about to attack, or they are scum, and therefore, those of us who aren’t them need to be about the business of eradicating them from the planet. And I believe the United States, what we’ve seen, the United States is no different than any other country. Our beliefs can be distorted, and we can be turned against each other.

Sharon Salzberg: It’s so compelling hearing you speak, and I was thinking my Jewish genes are shuddering in recognition. And yet you write that you believe that our true nature is to care for others, yet distraction and delusion keeps us from this natural impulse. I know sometimes it’s so hard when we open to the suffering, which is so important to open to, to actually remember, if we, in fact, do believe that our true nature is something else. So can you say more about this true purpose and what leads us astray?

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: I just think maybe as a human being who was cared for by other human beings, who could only be who I am today but for the care of other human beings, and I don’t know any other human being who has been raised in any different way, that this is just part of our nature, to care for each other. And then somewhere along the way, we forget. We forget that this is what we need. Or we think that only other people are responsible for providing that type of nurturance to others. The teachings on lovingkindness teach us to not discriminate against others, that all of us, human and nonhuman, are in need of this love and kindness.

Sharon Salzberg: You describe this book as a plea to humanity to see each other as kin, to create a world where we adopt one another as relatives. It’s like the epitome of lovingkindness. Can you say more about what it means to adopt one another and to realize our kinship? Because we know it can’t possibly mean that you like everybody or you’re going to bring them home for dinner or even come into their presence.

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: Exactly. Well, we all come from families. Chances are we all have had an experience of having been hurt in the family, not being seen, not being heard, not being supported by family members. And yet they are still family. Some of us have had experiences in choosing our families, families of choice. And so we know that we can make commitments to one another, we can bond to one another, we can attach to one another. Regardless of our DNA, we have that capacity. We have interspecies families. We have cats and dogs, some people have rats, others have ferrets, some have birds, and we treat them like we treat our human family. Some people would say maybe they treat their dogs better than they treat their cousins. Nevertheless, there are many experiences where we adopt, and we adopt because we feel a deep love, not necessarily a like, but a deep love. And we can expect that any entity we are in relationship with will cause us some distress along the way. We cause each other distress, and we experience distress. That is just part of the human condition. As we know, that’s what Buddhism teaches, right? The Buddha didn’t want the distress, did everything that he could to avoid it, realized that he couldn’t, and then proclaimed the middle way. The middle way is not about being joyful all the time. It’s about being able to abide with things that disturb us and things that don’t disturb us. And so we have the capacity, it’s been proven over and over, we have the capacity to adopt one another, regardless of the fact that Sharon, you are Jewish. It doesn’t matter to me that you’re Jewish. You can be my kinfolk. James, I don’t know how you identify. It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter to me. As someone who has adopted a child, I know that these things don’t matter. What matters is love.

Sharon Salzberg: That’s beautiful. You know, you’re reminding me that you draw from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” where he describes us as living in the “inescapable network of our mutuality.” I wonder if you could say more about what you’ve learned from that vision of mutuality and how does it relate to Indra’s net?

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: I can say about mutuality that when I feel it, I feel whole, I feel connected, I feel appreciated. I feel like we can have an exchange of equals, and I already know we are equal. As equals, there are going to be times where I’m going to need to reach out because I’m vulnerable, and there are going to be times where you need to reach out because you are also vulnerable. I’m not saying that our relationships have to be tit for tat, reciprocating one act of kindness with another act of kindness as if we’re tallying up our kind acts. But what I’m saying is that I recognize you, I believe that you recognize me, and there are certain things that we are both going to experience, all three of us are going to experience, all human beings will experience, and then we also have the particular things that only a few of us will experience. This is the nature of being human. And again, if we just go back to the nature of being human is to care for one another, and there’s no shame in that. Oftentimes, we don’t get it right, and I always encourage people, try not to dwell in the fear of not doing it right, but err on the side of compassion and then apologize if you don’t get it right.

Sharon Salzberg: That’s great. You know, you say that our task is to reflect our mutuality with as little distortion as possible. So can you say something about what gets in the way?

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: What gets in the way…so many things. One is our self concept. That gets in the way. There’s a part of us that is, some would say that has to be, a little narcissistic in order for us to get out of the bed in the morning and believe we can accomplish anything, which still kind of clouds our view of others. But when we become so self-absorbed, making sure we get everything we want when we want it, how we want it, then you can’t see anybody else. You can’t feel anyone else. It’s not possible to feel the resonance of another, even when you’re in the same space. So this is one of the beauties of Buddhism, the philosophy, the psychology, the practices, is to practice decentering yourself so that other people can have space. And when we decenter ourselves, then that creates the capacity to mirror one another better.

Sharon Salzberg: Beautiful.

James Shaheen: You know, I’ve discovered that one way of not seeing the other is by being really, really busy. And it’s a kind of self-absorption that closes me to feeling anything for anyone else. One lesson you emphasize is the importance of being in dynamic relationship with those we believe to be our opposite. So often, it’s difficult enough for those we consider to be our kin, but those we consider to be our opposite. What does it look like to cultivate such a relationship, and how can contemplative practices support us in doing that?

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: Yeah, it’s really interesting about opposites. Within the human species, is there really an opposite?

James Shaheen: Probably not.

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: I don’t think so. So to think of it that way, to speak of it that way, which we do and have for generations, is a distortion. There are no opposites within the human species. We come in different forms, but there’s not an opposite. So if we can think of ourselves as a continuum, I guess you can put it that way, of a species. And it does bother people that there aren’t opposites, male and female, Black and white, young and old, these dualities that we tend to live in and become distorted by. If we could allow ourselves to get out of that busyness, James, that you’re talking about, that busyness that distracts us from our very being and just sit with ourselves and sit with ourselves over and over again and especially bring meditation into the equation, I hope that what we find is that many of the things that we think about ourselves really are just constructions, constructions of our own minds, constructions created by society, and we have greater capacities for things that our personalities prevent us from imagining. Living in a more contemplative way I believe allows us to see other people beyond the social constructs we’ve created and have projected onto them.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I think the centrality of contemplative practice is everything. It used to be I had to find myself in extremis before I could open or I was just too tired to do anything but stop, and the contemplative practice for me seems like a choice to stop rather than being forced to stop.

Sharon Salzberg: So throughout the book, you describe the ways that our society is trapped in the rising tide of white supremacy, which you refer to as white existential angst or white existential paranoia. What do you mean by white existential angst, and why do you prefer to use that term instead of white supremacy?

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: Well, I don’t believe in the concept of white supremacy. That’s the first part. I do believe that some people believe that they are better than others, but I don’t believe it. I never have. So my question is, as a Buddhist practitioner, as a spiritual practitioner, what’s beneath that? What’s beneath all this bravado that is so destructive? And I think finally, we’re getting to some truth. When you can get white nationalists to march without hoods on, now we’re getting to some truth because we can see their faces. And when we can go from white supremacy language to replacement theory language, now we’re getting somewhere. You fear you’re going to be replaced. That is an existential fear. And it is a fear that actually transcends race. Many people believe that they are going to be replaced one way or another. So I would like us, because we do share this planet and we do share resources, we share neighborhoods, let’s be in conversation about what really matters. What really matters is our fear. And what if we could say to one another in a way that wasn’t so hyped up, where our nervous systems weren’t so hyped up that we can’t hear each other, what if we could relax and say, “Ah, I get it now, you feel insignificant, I can support that, I can support your significance because I see you. You are in the field of lovingkindness.” I get it. I know what it’s like to feel insignificant. As a matter of fact, as a Black person, it is a constant stream that we have to counter in order to live lives of significance. So I get it. And that’s why I prefer to use this terminology rather than white supremacy, because the use of that term I don’t feel is really getting us to the root of the issue.

Sharon Salzberg: You link it to the concept of dukkha or suffering in Pali language, the language of Buddhist texts, and you write that the suffering of insignificance and the clinging to entitlement, which I think is a brilliant phrase, the suffering and significance and the clinging to entitlement create a toxic mix of emotions that can pit us against one another. Can you say more about how white existential angst is a form of dukkha? I mean, you said it so well, and I think it’s so hard to realize in the moment and so important.

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: I can’t talk about it from a lived experience because I’m not white. I can’t speak of it in that way. But I can just say that you know the suffering when you see it. To be enraged against a whole group of people or groups of people who have nothing to do with your life, don’t even know that you exist, but you are enraged because of their very existence, you think that you’re owed something, by whom? Who owes that to you? How are you going to go about getting that? What are you going to take in order to get it? And as Buddhist practitioners, we know, however you get it, the happiness or having it is not everlasting, so It’s going to be a temporary experience. The violence that comes out of this mindset is tremendous. Scores of people die because of this mentality. So I am heartened by the fact that people can enter into this mindset and can also exit from it. We’ve seen that in our lifetimes. So I hope that all those causes and conditions for helping people exit from race-based entitlement and the suffering of insignificance, that people find their way out, and when they come out, that we are there to forgive them and, as Buddhist practitioners, help them find refuge in goodness.

Sharon Salzberg: It reminds me of this time I was on the stage speaking in Berkeley, and there was a large number of speakers in this particular event. The stage was really packed with people, some from the US, some from Tibet, and somebody asked a question. He raised his hand, and he said, “I know from looking within myself that when I act recklessly, I cause more harm. It’s coming from a place of pain. But I look at some of these people like politicians, and they seem so self-satisfied. They don’t look like they’re in pain. They just look like they’re having a fine time.” And he said, “I just can’t get there and have some compassion.” It was so interesting to me because all of these people on the stage, no one said a word. But you just suggested something that can be really quite hard to do, like looking underneath the violence, underneath the action, underneath the hatred and sensing the pain that is there, which is the only way to have compassion.

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: And the lack of purpose. I mean, I think one of the things, unfortunately, that the previous administration provided for some people is now they have purpose. They feel like they are patriots. They feel like they are standing up for their president, their former president. They are willing to go to war, willing to enact a coup, an insurrection, and go to prison. What bothers me the most and what led me to write this book is that I think every day, well-meaning people like us have been swept up into something that we never wanted to do, we’re never prepared to do, we’re not raised to do. And that concerns me.

James Shaheen: In response to this, you suggest that we need a compassion revolution, and part of the compassion revolution is learning to face the reality of death. Can you tell us more about your own journey to working as a hospice volunteer and, later, a chaplain?

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: I never heard of hospice until I had a cousin who died in hospice. And I was in law school, so I was preparing for a completely different path. So in my last year of law school, my cousin’s dying. He died in hospice. Before he did, I got a chance to spend four days with him. And I was surprised that I was able to do that. Nothing in my life that I was aware of prepared me to do that. And I wanted to be the kind of person who could be a hospice volunteer, to be able to sit with people who I didn’t know, because they were alone and they were dying. So that was actually ten years before I actually became a hospice volunteer, because I kept telling myself, “Ah, I can’t do that, I’m not ready.” I was living in San Francisco at the time and through a series of events finally said, “OK, the time has come. I am going to volunteer with hospice.” I didn’t know anything about Buddhism. I didn’t know anything about Zen. But in San Francisco, there’s a place called the Zen Hospice Project, which is now called the Zen Caregiving Project. But at that time, it was the Zen Hospice Project. This was back in the olden days where we had phone books. So I took out the phone book. I went down the list of hospice organizations and called each one of them. And Zen Hospice Project was the only one that offered a year-long training program. and I knew I would need as much training as possible. That’s how I came to do hospice work: through the Zen Hospice Project. Eric Poché was the incredible volunteer coordinator. And then one thing led to another. So I use those teachings, that experience, in my work as a pastoral counselor. As a Zen practitioner, we are often reminded that this life is precious, and it’s short and not to be squandered. So I try to remember that in my life and in my work.

James Shaheen: It’s interesting that when we do contemplate our own deaths and the brevity of our lives, we’re more likely to feel compassion for others. Do you think that’s fair to say?

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: Yes. What about for ourselves, though? Is that where you are going?

James Shaheen: Yeah, that’s the hard one.

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: We know our stories oh so well. We have so many regrets: oh, if we had done it this way, or we should have known better, or this or that unresolved issues. But it’s worth it. Even if we were to practice self-compassion not for ourselves but for the possibility of improving our relationships with others. That’s a good enough motivation.

Sharon Salzberg: So you suggest that we broaden our understanding of caregiving to a communal and national level, learning to become caregivers to our community so that we can move, in your words, from brutality to mutuality. Can you say more about what it looks like to apply a spiritual care approach to society as a whole. And I’m also curious, because of this last conversation, how one deals with burnout in such a vast kind of vision.

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: Well, as someone who has burned out, I had a significant burnout over twenty years ago. I can say from that experience, I just got on autopilot, and I would just say “yes” to everything. I was moving at a very fast pace. I lost contact with my actual experiences, my actual emotions, my actual feelings. Going back to what James was talking about being busy, it was just being so busy but also, I would say, fulfilling a situation that I set up for myself. I had set it up, and it was working. And so I had to show up for what I had set up until I couldn’t anymore. So I have vowed to never burn out again because the recovery was so long. I understand, Sharon, the concern about having such a vision for caring for the world, knowing that actually living that day by day by day could wear us out. So I’m not talking about being like a chaplain in a hospital that is populated by the world. But what I do mean is, as a chaplain, one of the things that I’ve learned is that when we are working in public, pluralistic settings, which our world is, we are to treat people not based on our own proclivities but based on the fact that each person has their own story, has their own history, has their own culture, has their own commitments, and has their own causes and conditions that has led them to being ill. They are in a state of vulnerability, and so are we. But from chaplain to patient, it is understood that it is the patient who has chosen not to be in the situation, and the chaplain has chosen to be in the situation. Therefore, the chaplain has more power, if you will.

In order to reduce the chance of abusing that power, we bracket the power, if you will. We bracket the power. We recognize that we are vulnerable. Hopefully that leads us to be humble and therefore open to all these people who have come to this place through their own journey. We are not able to care for everyone all the time. But we can adopt a posture of nonharming toward almost everyone. And that’s what I’m suggesting we begin with: all of us adopt the posture of nonharming, recognizing that most of the people who are ill are not actually in the hospital. That’s for acute situations. Most of the people who are ill are in the world. And so why not treat the world as a place of healing and ourselves as an agent of healing? And the communal part is that we don’t do it by ourselves. We’re not superpeople, right? We’re not superheroes. We are people just like everyone else. And the more we can create communities of care where we share the responsibility of caring with each other, the greater chance we have of living our best lives, our most connected lives. And that is another way of casting Indra’s net.

Sharon Salzberg: And I think what’s also important coming from this conversation is just the reminder that we’ve got to be in the net too, you know. It’s not to the exclusion of ourselves because that is such a strong temptation. I’ve seen so many caring people who are doing the work taking care of people in society, and it’s so hard to think of oneself and restoring and repair and resilience, like I just need a break, or I need to breathe, o4 I need to have some compassion for myself for a moment.

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: That’s what I love about organizations like CaringBridge, for example, making it easier for us to care for and about each other and build communities of care where we can share the responsibilities.

James Shaheen: Ayo, you were speaking earlier of feeling insignificant, but you also write about the fear of vulnerability, which I see as related, and you write, “rather than meet the needs of vulnerable people, we are increasingly blaming them for being vulnerable,” sometimes even believing their vulnerability to be contagious. I don’t want to be around this person, I may end up this way too. Can you say something more about our fear of vulnerability and how it closes us off from others and ourselves?

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: James, I’m thinking about the things that were said, especially in the previous administration about immigrants, that they were coming here to take stuff from us, again, that entitlement thing. No discussion about the conditions that they were leaving. Now, I know, personally, I don’t like moving, and I can’t imagine that I would like being forced to move because the conditions are such that it’s too dangerous to live where I live. I was an asylum officer out of law school. In that role, I interviewed people from all over the world who had fled their countries of origin because they were either being politically persecuted or they had a reasonable fear that they would be politically persecuted if they stayed or if they were returned to their country. So people come to the United States for a variety of reasons. But many people come to the United States with nothing, only the clothes on their back, their children on their hips, walking miles through forests and dangerous places to find themselves here, then put on a bus and take into some other part of the country as a political message to others. So back to vulnerability, people come in very vulnerable places. We have been invited by some to close our hearts, and our borders and other things to prevent people from coming in and quote unquote taking our things. When they do come, it is a reminder, though, of our own vulnerability. Situations can change rapidly, and we could very Well be on the receiving end of needing to leave this country. I know that’s not how we have lived in the past. But given the rise in violence in this country right now, given the threats to different groups of people, at what point will we say it’s too dangerous to live here?

James Shaheen: On the theme of vulnerability, which we’ve been discussing, you draw from the Christian parable of the Good Samaritan, where Jesus defines our neighbors as those in need. Can you say more about what this parable has taught you about our mutual vulnerability? 

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: Yeah, so I grew up in the United Methodist Church, and this is a very powerful story to me and one that resonates in Buddhism, this radical generosity. I was also taught, though, that you should never question the minister. The minister somehow is an anointed person who knows more than anyone else in the church knows and has been chosen by God to deliver God’s word and therefore should never be questioned. So this parable of the Good Samaritan is a lesson also on who’s actually doing the good work here. Just because a person is a minister or religious leader, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to do what is necessary to take care of someone who is basically on the road dying. The lawyer asked Jesus, “How do I inherit eternal life?” And Jesus goes on to tell a story about the Samaritan. So it’s my understanding that Samaritans were mixed-race Jewish people but who were ostracized by other Jews. So they were a very distinct group. Why did Jesus choose to tell a story about a Samaritan and then shift the consciousness of this lawyer, this person asking the question, from valuing the religious leaders to valuing a person on the quote unquote margins of life? So that’s the shift. By centering the person on the margin, the one who expresses compassion, the one who tends to the wounds of this person and then takes the person to an inn for them to be taken care of by the innkeeper, leaving a little bit of money in order to help the innkeeper take care of this person and then promising the innkeeper that they will come back and check on this person. To me, that is a great story about how we engage in communal care for one another and that it is everyone’s responsibility to do it. And because there is this thing called a bystander effect, that we try to get out of the paralysis of being a bystander, regardless of who we are, regardless of whether we have the status, the power, the privilege of a leader, or we are on the margins, we can care for one another. Now, whether there’s eternal life afterwards, I can’t speak to that. But I can say this: that the life that we have would be best served by acting in compassion in that way.

James Shaheen: You mentioned community, and it plays a central role in your view of healing. And you draw from the Book of Job in describing how humility and forgiveness can help restore a deeper sense of community and kinship. What can the Book of Job teach us about how to be in community with each other?

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: Well, I’m pausing because I love the Book of Job, and I could go on and on. And I also know that a lot of people have read only parts of the Book of Job and rely on other people to tell them the juice in the story so they don’t have to read it because by reading it, then you have to read all the lamentations from Job, all the complaining, the pain, the suffering. You have to even practice patience just to read the Book of Job. But how about this, let’s just say that even the practice of patience in reading the Book of Job can serve the reader in a very beneficial way because what we often want from people who are suffering is for them to not suffer. If they’re not suffering, then I don’t have to hear it. I’m not called to attend to it. I don’t suffer myself. I hope through our practices, through our conversations with one another like we’re having right now, that we grow in our capacity to abide with each other in our most difficult moments. It’s our ability to do that that gives us faith and hope in humanity, which I think is waning these days. I want to be able to call out in my suffering and believe that someone will hear me and attend to me. And so in the Book of Job, one of the lessons that one can learn is that the release and relief from suffering comes from in part the community reordering itself to make that relief and release possible.

James Shaheen: One thing I wanted to add about Job is that you talk about his healing not coming through community only but his surrender to stillness, and his contemplation helped repair his relationships with his friends and his community. So how can surrender and contemplation support the process of communal repair and healing?

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: Oh, that is so good. If I think about the Book of Job, I think that maybe, we’re just interpreting a story, but at a certain point, someone from the community said, “You’re not going to get what you want this way. You need to be still.” And I’m guessing that in my interpretation of the story, Job knew that was true. Sometimes when we complain, this is not a judgment about the reason for the complaint. But when we complain over and over and over, the complaints also start escalating, and it’s just spilling over. We’re consumed with our pain. At a certain point, we might recognize, OK, this is not really healing. I’m not resolving anything, I’m just caught up in an obsessive compulsive cycle of complaining. So maybe I should just be quiet. So I’m just going to sit down, I’m going to sit down, I’m going to be quiet and try to get a handle on myself, try to get a grip. I want to get a grip on myself. And there’s nothing wrong with getting a grip on ourselves. I mean, frankly, the only person who can get a grip on us is ourselves. And it is an act of self-compassion to bring ourselves into some modicum of self-control, When we do that, when we still our minds and still our bodies, and people might say, “I can never be still, I’ve got too many thoughts,” it’s OK. Still your body and let the rest follow in time. It’s through stilling the body and stilling the mind and closing our mouths that a different understanding of our situation can arise because now we’re no longer blaming anyone. We’re recognizing and we are feeling into the responsibility we have to care for ourselves. And I think that when we use stillness in that way for that purpose, ideas will come. Wisdom will come. And when we stop blaming other people, people can relax around us. And when they relax around us, the dynamic tends to be we can relax around them. And when we are relaxed with each other, we can imagine a different future and cocreate that together.

James Shaheen: So you draw from the Christian practice of communion, which you see as a ritual in cosmic belonging and place, and you write, “When we are invited without conditions, without discrimination, to gather together in humility to honor the sacred and that which is greater than us, the interpenetration of our collective vibrations can give us the physical sensation of oneness, kinship, or communitas.” So how can rituals support us in cultivating a sense of community and connection?

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: Ritual, for me, is a way of touching into an aspect of myself that is beyond words and beyond my conventional ways of conceptualizing things. It’s full of symbols, objects, sometimes music, maybe dance, and it’s with others. We have an understanding. Based on previous experiences with this ritual, we have an understanding. And so I’ve engaged in a variety of rituals throughout my life in different traditions. Communion is one of my favorite rituals. One of the most transforming rituals I’ve ever experienced was at a people of color retreat led by Thich Nhat Hanh at Deer Park Monastery. Four or five hundred of us were taking the precepts together, and it was full of pageantry and a love beyond description, a devotion beyond description. So I have rituals that I do at home, when I’m by myself, rituals that I engage in when I’m at sangha, and I really advise people to start a morning practice with a ritual that opens them up to the world that they are going to enter into. They can begin imagining their colleagues, if they work with others, especially their most troublesome colleague, and send them some lovingkindness. I’m going to enter my workplace today with lovingkindness. Ritual means a lot to me. It helps center what is important to me to start my day.

James Shaheen: You know, it’s interesting you pick communion because when I was growing up, that was the one ritual that made me feel light and connected and whole. Growing up, I lost that. But I found that again in Buddhism. Chanting is always something I enjoy doing in the meditation hall when I’m at IMS. Everybody chanting together with one voice, it’s quite beautiful.

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: Right, and when we are in the prayer position, the meditation position, there’s something about that submission that has an ego-altering effect.

Sharon Salzberg: One of my favorite sayings these days is that it’s hard to be a human being because It’s hard to be a human being. And you write that as human beings, we’re continually in the process of becoming human. What does it mean to be perpetually becoming human?

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: I’m thinking about relationships, mostly. That’s what I’m referring to. The more we relate with one another across our differences, real and perceived, and do it well, and by well, I mean, “Oh, I learned something in that, or I made a friend in that, or I have a new neighbor I can reach out to, or when they reach out to me, I’ll be willing to lend a hand,” whatever. That’s what I mean. When we grow in our capacity for diversity, we are open to including people who we didn’t include in the past, then we are becoming more human. We know we are beings, but we’re growing in this capacity to be human, humane, kind, nurturing, parental, grandmotherly, grandfatherly, all of that. That’s what I mean.

James Shaheen: Ayo Yetunde, it’s been a great pleasure. Thanks so much for joining. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of Casting Indra’s Net, available now. We like to close these podcasts with a short guided meditation. So which of you two will take us out with a short guided meditation?

Sharon Salzberg: I vote for Ayo.

James Shaheen: So Ayo, would you mind taking us out with a short guided meditation?

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: I invite you to allow yourself, your body to be comfortable and well supported right where you are. Together, let’s take a few deep breaths in and out. In and out, in and out. Bringing a sense of gratitude just for the ability to breathe, and to be still.

Now, bring a feeling of lovingkindness to yourself, and see if you can allow that feeling of lovingkindness to envelope your entire body. Head to toe, toe to head, throughout your entire body, immersed in the feeling of lovingkindness. And in that feeling of lovingkindness, allow yourself also to bring the feeling of compassion. Allowing this compassion to be mixed in this field of lovingkindness throughout your entire body, fingertips to fingertips, chest, pelvis, legs, loving kindness, compassion throughout your entire body. Gratitude for love, kindness, and compassion. Now bring sympathetic joy into your energetic field with a slight smile on your face, feeling joy, celebration for all the successes. Maybe it’s a new birth. Maybe it’s a good death. Maybe it’s a graduation, an anniversary, a good act. Sympathetic joy mixed in there with the compassion and lovingkindness. And as we bring our meditation to a close, let’s take a deep breath in and out and allow ourselves to feel equanimous on all sides of our bodies, top, down, left, right, middle in balance and at peace with all that is.

James Shaheen: Thank you, Ayo, and thank you, Sharon. It was great to be here with you both.

Sharon Salzberg: Thank you.

Pamela Ayo Yetunde: Thank you both. What an honor.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Life As It Is with Pamela Ayo Yetunde. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks and Life As It Is are produced by As It Should Be Productions and Sarah Fleming. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

James Shaheen: Hello and welcome to Life As It Is. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. In today’s episode, I’m joined by meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg. Sharon is normally my co-host on this series, so it’s a special treat to be interviewing her today. A world-renowned meditation teacher, Sharon is the founding teacher at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. In her new book, Real Life: The Journey from Isolation to Openness and Freedom, she weaves together Buddhist psychology, her own experiences, and insights from a variety of contemplative traditions to examine how we can live with greater creativity, connection, and joy. Through exploring the forces that keep us trapped in constriction, she lays out a path toward what she calls “real life,” or a life of spaciousness and freedom. In today’s episode of Life As It Is, I sit down with Sharon to talk about what it means to live a real life, how we can break free of our habitual patterns, and how expansiveness makes love more available to us.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg. Sharon is normally my cohost, so it’s a special treat to be interviewing her today. Hi, Sharon. It’s great to be with you.

Sharon Salzberg: It’s great to be with you. 

James Shaheen: Well, we’re here to talk about your new book, Real Life: The Journey from Isolation to Openness and Freedom. I’d like to ask you what we always ask our guests: Can you tell us a bit about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Sharon Salzberg: Sure. Well, Real Life is part of the Real series. I seem to have a number of books with the word “real” in the title, which I wasn’t too sure about. But actually, it was partly listening to Bob Thurman speak and some of the things that I began to just appreciate how when we’re real, we’re in line with the truth of things. When we’re unreal or we’re seeing the world in a distorted fashion, it’s like the equivalent of insisting change is not happening or secrets are or not dragging us down, something like that. And so I appreciate that concept a lot. So this particular book came into being while I was here in Barre, Massachusetts in relatively strong isolation during the pandemic. I watched this show on YouTube, I think it’s still up on YouTube, called Saturday Night Seder, which I just loved. It was one of the first productions, I think, ever made where the writers were not in the same room together and recorded on Zoom and so on, and amazing world class singers and incredibly funny, incredibly moving, I learned a lot. And it reminded me that symbolically, taking it totally out of geopolitics, but symbolically, the word Egypt means a narrow place, a constrained, confined place, and so the journey is one from being confined, being constrained to one of openness and freedom. And I thought, oh, that’s a great arc for a book. I really liked that because I get to explore when do we tend to feel the most constrained, and what do we do about it? Fear, our shame, things like that. When do we tend to feel the most open and expansive? Well, lovingkindness and gratitude and things like that. How do we get there? What do we take with us on the journey? These were all things that were all great to explore.

James Shaheen: Yeah, when I was listening to you just now, it sounds like often, and I think everyone can identify with this, we live in a kind of quiet denial of our lives. And in the book, you remark that there are times that we feel like we’re merely bystanders to our own lives. What does it mean to be a bystander to our own life?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, the quotation that people tend to use a lot is from James Joyce, who said, “Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.” We can live a short distance from our bodies, from our emotions, from our responses to everything in life. It kind of loses its texture and its flavor, and we’re just getting by, we’re just living, living out a day. And then there’s the big surprise at the end that we have to let go of it all and die. And so rather than that, to have a powerful sense of living fully and living in accordance with our own North Star, whatever that might be, the guiding principle we would really like to wrap our lives around so that whatever happens to us, we have something that we’re relying on. something that we’re guided by. It might be something as simple as lovingkindness as a principle so that we want to make every conversation we have, say, at work, with a colleague, with a client, something that is expressive of that force of lovingkindness, regardless of whatever else is happening in the workplace. And so we have a sense of meaning in our lives.

James Shaheen: You also write that we sometimes are at a distance from our own sense of agency, that we have a diminished sense of agency, and you say, and I’ll quote you, “we are seized by the conviction that our words or our actions couldn’t possibly be meaningful, that we don’t count as much as others do, that we should just shrink back and dwell in the long-occupied constraining box we are accustomed to—so familiar even if cramped and confining.” Can you say more about this? Why do we tend to shrink back into our familiar patterns when they’re so constraining?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, sometimes, this is something that I tend to explore in the book as well, at times those patterns were useful for a while. It was smart in a lot of circumstances for a lot of people to, in effect, leave your body and not acutely feel everything that was happening to that body. But you don’t necessarily want these to be your steady state. What was useful or appropriate or even a tremendous survival skill when you were younger, perhaps, and genuinely helpless without a lot of agency may not serve you at all. And yet, it’s the ready habit. It’s the thing that comes up right away. And so even within some of our most corrosive habits is often some kind of jewel that if we can capture, we’re not so beholden to the rest of it. So with anger, for example, the jewel is said to be a kind of incisive intelligence, like being willing to name what’s wrong. And I think in a lot of ways, sometimes as a community, we kind of count on the angry person, like everyone else in the room is studiously avoiding looking at, say, the hole in the carpet, and that person is saying, “Look at that hole in the carpet,” so there’s a jewel there. But when it’s constant, chronic dissatisfaction, never seeing the good, only seeing what’s wrong, wears a person down, and it’s not effective, it’s not helpful anymore. And so we can look at all of those habits, not to condemn ourselves for them or feel we’re dreadful people because we still have fear, we still have greed or whatever, but to understand that they’re not serving us, they’re not serving anyone around that we care about. So let’s try to notice them quickly and be with them in a different way so that they don’t overtake us.

James Shaheen: As you’re talking, I’m thinking about the phenomenon of, say, a person being released from prison and finding freedom utterly disorienting, and when reading this part of the book, I had to ask myself, well, do we really want to be free? Or is it safer to resort to those old habits? So I find that very interesting. There is a certain fear of freedom, too. Is that fair to say?

Sharon Salzberg: I think it’s very fair to say. It’s very interesting that you point that out. I think it’s safer in a way in that it’s more familiar. But is it really safe? And that’s what we get to do as people practicing introspection, whether it’s meditation, or journaling, or some form of therapy, that we get to look. We are fed, most of us, so many distortions and so many myths. Is it really true that endless fixation on vengefulness makes us stronger? Really? Let’s take a look. Is it really true that love and kindness are like the stupidest things in the world? You know, really? Let’s take a look at that.

James Shaheen: Right. You explore ways that our early conditioning can train us to believe that very little happiness is available to us. And I think everyone has experienced this, this sense that this is hopeless. So why is this, and how does a path to liberation counteract this conditioning?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I think path to liberation, for the most part, is based on an underlying idea that, as human beings, not because we’ve done something special to deserve it or we have to earn it in some way but just innately we have potential to grow, to change, to learn, to connect, to care. And certainly within the Buddhist tradition it’s taught us that potential, that capacity is never ever destroyed. It may be and usually is quite covered over and hard to find and hard to trust, but it’s absolutely there. And so it’s a whole worldview and a view about ourselves that encourages us to practice, to experiment, to explore, to question things for ourselves. And it’s very different than the inertness and leaden qualities. It’s maybe why one of the quotations from the Buddha is “One who is heedful or one who is mindful is on the path to the deathless. One who is mindless or heedless is as if dead already.” We just go around in this dreamlike existence. We don’t even notice until we do.

James Shaheen: And when we do, we’re touching on I think what you refer to as real life as opposed to being a bystander to our own lives. Can you say a little bit more about real life? Because I think everyone has a sneaking suspicion or sense that there is a real life to live and that they’re not living it, there’s this separation, and then sometimes we are living it, and there’s sort of a sense of flow. Just say a little bit more about what you mean by real life.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I think it can be pretty simple. It’s a sense of connection, a sense of belonging, and it might be momentary, which has to be OK. It’s not like myself in my early practice, I thought, “OK, it’s kind of hard now, but I’ll have a great breakthrough experience, and after that, it will be smooth sailing forevermore.” I don’t think it’s really like that now. We go up and down and we fall down and we get up and things like that. But in those moments when we are really present, it doesn’t have to be something glorious happening. We have a sense of connection. We have a sense of care. We’re not lost in assumption, we’re not lost in our projection into the future. You know that story I tell often about teaching with Joseph Goldstein and sitting in a kitchen somewhere, having a cup of tea with him, and somebody came into the kitchen in some distress and said to Joseph, “I just had this really terrible experience,” and Joseph said, “Well, what happened?” And the man said, “Well, I felt all this tension in my jaw, and I realized what an incredibly uptight person I am and how I always have been and I always will be.” Joseph said, “You mean you felt a lot of tension in your jaw?” And he said, “Yes, and I’ve never been able to get close to people, it’s never going to change.” And I was watching them go back and forth and back and forth, and whatever the man said, Joseph would say, “Well, you mean you felt a lot of tension in your jaw?”

James Shaheen: I’ve been on that end of the conversation.

Sharon Salzberg: And so finally, Joseph said something like, “Why are you adding a miserable self image to a painful experience? It’s painful enough to feel the tension in your jaw, but now you’re going to be alone for the rest of your life, which is just like a concept. It’s just an idea.” And so we live in that world, and is it exciting to be with attention to your jaw? Not so much. But that’s real. That is actually happening. That’s in the moment. Maybe we’d have a little more compassion for ourselves rather than all that proliferation and projection if we just engaged in a different way.

James Shaheen: In terms of getting to real life or finding ourselves living a real life, you draw on the symbolism of the Passover seder to describe the journey to real life from confinement to openness and freedom, and you talk specifically about the shared suffering to the aspiration for a better world in the Passover story. Can you walk us through this journey within the context of the Passover seder? I found that very interesting.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I think one way of understanding the story of the seder is it’s everybody’s story, really. It’s not just Jews in that time and that place. It’s everybody’s story of coming to try to deal with affliction, deal with conditions that we cannot so readily immediately change. And yet we want the energy to keep trying. We want to make that journey externally often as well as internally. And so realizing what will truly help us be resilient, what will help us have energy to see a possibility. I’ve often said I feel like we live in a time of kind of blunted aspiration. We don’t dare to imagine being actually happy or feeling free, a lot of compromises, a lot of settling. And we don’t necessarily have a vision of what our lives might look like. And so That’s important. It’s not the same as greed. And people often confuse the two, like, Well, I shouldn’t want to be happy, because That’s greed or craving or something like that. But it’s not necessarily. It could be the greatest wisdom. And it depends on where it’s coming from, what it’s combined with, things like that. It could be greed in that, if you insist, well, like in my early practice, where I had This idea that good practice meant sitting bathed in brilliant white light, and I didn’t have any white light. I had some really great experiences, even some really great and painful experiences, but they were important. But nothing was good enough because it wasn’t white light. That’s greed. But having a vision of a life of not being so burdened by the past or caught up in just old habit, having a world where you see possibility, where you remember change, where you can be kind to yourself, as well as to others, that’s a pretty good aspiration.

James Shaeen: You know, it’s funny, the old Chinese argument between the two schools, sudden enlightenment and gradual enlightenment, and I think that there are times when sort of serendipitously, you drop into what feels like real life or what you’re describing. That just happens. But it’s also incremental. It’s a series of choices we can make. In fact, you write that “the journey becomes more about what choices will lead me to greater integration and wholeness than anything else.” So on a daily basis, throughout 24 hours, we can make decisions, what points toward peace, or what you refer to as a greater integration and wholeness, or not, and it can build a kind of momentum toward real life. Does that make sense?

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I think one of the implications of what you just said is that the grid by which we evaluate or look at forces in our own minds or we look at others doesn’t become good and bad or right and wrong or good and evil. It’s what leads to suffering or what leads to the end of suffering. So what’s skillful and what’s not skillful? I was just talking to somebody about self-compassion and how stupid we can think it is and often do. People say that to me all the time: That’s just being lazy. That’s losing a sense of excellence. That’s losing all standards and principles and the only way to really get ahead and do well is to push and be incredibly down on yourself when you fail in some way. But really, no, this actually isn’t true. And apparently, there’s a good deal of science and research being accumulated, or I’m told by researchers, that kind of harsh punitive environment, either internally or externally, will spike people’s performance but briefly, then you crash, that the best way to sustain an effort, change a habit, learn something new is actually self-compassion. It’s like you blew it, give yourself a break, lessons learned, start over. That’s how we actually get things done. And that’s not something most of us have been taught.

James Shaheen: Well, whatever the truth about that is, being down on myself and being my own worst taskmaster is an unpleasant place to be. In fact, it pretty much describes the confinement in what you refer to as contraction. So you mentioned earlier that the word traditionally translated as Egypt, mitzrayim, literally means narrow straits. So often we find ourselves in places of constriction or narrow-mindedness, something I also associate with being hard on oneself and defining yourself so narrowly. Can you say more about what you’ve learned about contraction, especially the dangers of staying in this narrow place?

Sharon Salzberg: I think, going back to my favorite grid, those habits of harsh self-judgment and really being punitive and being rigid about characterizations of others, like they are that way and they always will be or I am this way and I always will be, it’s not skillful. It’s not going to be onward-leading. It’s not a force for making a wholesome change. And what we’re looking for is change. You know, I have the habit of not listening to people, and they know it, and I want to change that. But is haranguing myself for 48 hours every time I notice that going to actually be an effective way of changing it? No. Sorry to say, because it comes so easily, I’m so used to it, but it doesn’t work. And we do feel confined. An example I sometimes use is the teaching where you feel like you’re locked in this tiny little dark room with no way out, and something happens so that that door swings open, and you don’t know exactly what’s on the other side, but it’s a bigger world. Suddenly, there’s a sense of possibility, of options, this creativity where there never was before.

James Shaheen: This obsession that the culture seems to have with self-improvement, “I don’t want to be this way anymore, therefore, I won’t be,” that doesn’t work. But rather, I do do these things, but there are other options, too. That’s why you’re mentioning options. And the door sometimes swings open because we give up. We say, “OK, I’m also this.”

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, yeah. And also their ways of working with all those states, which, ironically, in a way, don’t start with trying to beat them to death.

James Shaheen: Yeah, the ego doesn’t go down without a fight. You get the same force back that you put into it. So in contrast to contraction, you describe expansion as “the potential for openness, spaciousness, clarity, and freedom that exists within each of us.” Can you say more about what happens when we move from contraction to expansion? I think you’re touching on that when you talk about the door opening.

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah. And I think one example is when a person or culture makes certain assumptions about us. They tell a certain story about who we are, and we believe it. It’s like we take it up totally, and we’re defined by the way others seem to see us, and then something happens so that you don’t feel so invested in that, you kind of step away from that. You think, Who am I actually? What do I care about? Is that story true? Maybe it’s not true. I told a story about myself, as you know, for many years, that I could not give a talk publicly, I just couldn’t speak publicly. I thought I would look stupid and my mind would go blank and I’d just be sitting there, and so my poor colleagues, especially Joseph, had to give all the evening talks at every retreat we taught because I was terrified. But that’s like a story. And when I could step away from the story, I could say, what do I think people are gathering for? Is it true that I can’t fulfill that? No, because I decided people were gathering for a sense of connection more than a brilliant, erudite, flawless rendition of something. OK, they’re not here to sit in judgment of me. We’re just here together. And then I could do things I never dreamt I could do. And so when we step away from these old narratives, and we take a fresh look about what brings happiness, what increases suffering, how alone we actually are, how connected we are, in truth, who we are, everything shifts.

James Shaheen: So you write that expansiveness, and I’m going to quote the book again, “leaves room for our fundamentally loving hearts to uncoil and lead us onward.” Can you say more about how expansiveness makes love more available to us?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I think it would go back in a way to that sense of capacity that, at least according to the Buddhist tradition, we all have a capacity for love or connection or care. It doesn’t mean we like everybody by any means. It doesn’t even mean we like anybody. But that kind of fundamental sense of realizing our lives are connected. And often there is a kind of, if not strict lovingkindness, there’s a kind of compassion that grows when we recognize, wow, everyone is so vulnerable. It’s not like we all have the same measure of suffering because we don’t, but just the sheer insecurity of life, the vulnerability, the fragility is something we all share. And it’s a poignancy to life. And we all don’t have control, because for everyone, conditions need to come together for something to arise. It’s like you can look at your friend who’s suffering mightily, and you can have a really good insight about what they need to do to be in a better place, and you cannot make it so. You just can’t. Would that we could, but we can’t. And so there’s a kind of poignancy we come to that looking at anybody you realize, “Wow, look at how some people define happiness, which is just dominating others. Look at how disconnected some people are. I encounter them for the three minutes that we’re in conversation, they live inside that energy bubble. It doesn’t look like a very attractive place to live.” And it can be a tough, tough life too, for so many people. And yet people get through. We survive. Often, it’s a combination of awe at the human ability to get through and in some cases to get through with compassion and care for others and also just the poignancy of life. It just shifts what our priorities are and the ways we see things and what we care about.

James Shaheen: You mentioned the phrase “to get through” a few times, and yes, often we do need to get through. But I really liked the anecdote you told about Joseph and his notion of an inner Wyoming. Why don’t you say something about that? Because it seems to me that always available to us, there is this freedom or spaciousness available.

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, well, that is the perfect story because it shows both sides. Joseph and I were visiting some friends in Houston, and we’d all gone out to this restaurant to pick up food to bring back to the house to eat, and we’re just chatting to the kid who’s working behind the counter. He said to Joseph that he had never been outside of Houston. And his complete dream in life is to someday get to Wyoming. And so Joseph said, “What does that mean to you? What do you think you’ll find there?” And he described this place where there’s a big, open sky and feeling free and you can breathe free and you’re unconfined or unconstrained, so much openness. And Joseph said to him, “There’s an inner Wyoming too, you know,” and the kid said, “That’s freaky,” and he walked away. So I think we see both sides that for some there’s a conviction that it’s there and we can access it, and for others, it’s like, “What are you talking about? That’s so strange.”

James Shaheen: So throughout the book, you explore the ways we yearn for something beyond traditional successes and accomplishments. So interestingly, you write that it’s not the yearning that causes the trouble. Instead, it’s our tendency to search in the wrong places. So can you say more about this yearning for happiness and how it can actually support us in our journey to a real life?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, this comes back to another Buddhist idea very much related to this inner capacity that everybody really wants to be happy, and happy not in a superficial sense but in a deeper sense. We all want a feeling of being at home somewhere in this life, whether it’s the body, the mind, with our families, with friends, the planet, somewhere, a sense of belonging, and no artifice, no pretense of being better than we are, or more eloquent than we really feel, just as we are. And we all long for that, but we’re not, generally speaking, looking in the right places. So the problem, as somebody once put it, is bad aim. We think the problem is wanting to be happy, and that’s what I was saying earlier, that people often say that’s craving, that’s greed, but it’s not. It’s science. It’s looking at life and seeing, wow, if I’m generous, I actually feel a kind of joy that’s different when I’m enslaved to my fearful thoughts. They’re different. There’s different paths, they have different consequences, the giving or the withholding. And we can observe that. So it’s through the force of attention that we get to see oh, yeah, there are actually ways we can craft our lives. It’s like our lives themselves become our own creative medium for a great deal more happiness.

James Shaheen: When I was reading about looking for happiness in the wrong places and that the yearning itself was perfectly legitimate, I was thinking, Jung, I think, described the problem drinker as somebody in a misguided search for spiritual fulfillment. And it’s very interesting, that you’re mistaking the things that actually harm you for those that would liberate you.

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s some views of something like drinking or any sort of addictive tendency which would be exactly that. It’s a spiritual yearning of some kind that’s gone awry because of the object that’s being sought.

James Shaheen: So though we might yearn for a deeper sense of happiness, we often get caught by our patterns and conditioning, as we were just talking about, and more specifically, you describe the three hindrances of Buddhist psychology as patterns that hinder our ability to live fully and respond to the world around us in meaningful ways. Can you walk us through these three hindrances, though, because I find it very helpful to categorize these misguided paths that we take. So we can start with grasping. What are the typical behaviors associated with grasping? And how can it narrow our sense of where happiness can be found?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I should say, first of all, that it’s not the sheer arising of these states that’s the problem. It’s when we’re seduced by them, when we take them to heart, and especially when we act motivated by them. Then we’re in trouble. But the sheer arising is just what’s happening. Feeling we should have been able to stop that or that we’re bad or wrong because I still feel grasping, I still feel hatred, or whatever. Again, it’s not skillful. It’s not onward leading. You can’t control what comes up in your mind, which is something one of my early teachers, Munindra, said to me very often. I guess I needed to hear it very often. He basically said to me, “Why are you so upset about this thought which has come up in your mind? Did you invite it? Did you say, at 3:15 I’d like to be filled with self-hatred, please? No. When conditions come together for something to arise, it will arise. But that doesn’t mean you feel passive because how we relate to that force that has come up in our minds, thought, feeling, whatever it is, is everything.”

That’s sort of the point of the path. So grasping would have forms of infatuation, clinging, craving, always looking for the next thing that will permanently satisfy us, an ability to kind of see a bigger picture. Like I was once teaching in New York at Tibet House, which is really an art gallery. I use this as an outloud example of greed or grasping because I could see some beautiful wall hanging just on the wall some distance away. I couldn’t see the price, but I could see the hanging. This is like an outloud depiction of greed. I said, “I really like that. I really like that a lot. I want it. I have to own it. OK, I’m going to buy it.” And then I thought, “Well, in order to buy it, in order to be able to own it, I probably have to move,” because at that point, I was living in a sublet where I wasn’t allowed to hang anything on the walls. So I thought, “OK, I need another apartment.” I had a tiny little apartment, and I said, “OK, while I’m moving, I’m going to get a bigger apartment. And in a bigger apartment, I’m going to get these special lights for my new wall hanging. It’s going to have a place of its own, it’s going to be really special.” And then I thought, “Well, in order to be able to afford even more rent in New York, I’m going to have to travel constantly in order to earn enough money to be able to afford the bigger apartment. So I will never be in my apartment, I will never see my wall hanging, but I will own it.” So when we’re caught in that state, do we look at what we’re compromising in order to get the thing that we think we need? Are we looking at what we’re giving up? Are we deciding is it worth it? Are we holding onto it like if the light shines on the wrong way or something like that? We completely freak out because it’s not fixed. But nothing is fixed. Everything is changing.

James Shaheen: That’s funny. It’s like the papancha of desire or grasping. You start planning this whole life. You talked about what you would have to compromise, say, or to consider what you’d have to compromise to get it. But also, what are we compensating for? You write that we never feel we’re enough or we don’t have enough, and to work with this feeling you suggest we can ask, “What do I really need here?” Can you say more about that practice?

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, I wonder if, you know how so many things really exist on a spectrum, if we’re all a little bit like hoarders in some way. Maybe we don’t have piles of phone books in our apartment, but there’s a lot of stuff. It’s almost like totems against change, totems against death. Let’s get another one of those, and then I will feel fulfilled, and I’ll feel whole. But really, we can feel whole without it, and it’s better not needing that new experience, not needing that new accolade, not needing that new object. Because once we feel we need it, we’re kind of sunk.

James Shaheen: So after craving or grasping, we have aversion, which you describe as a punishing attitude toward ourselves and others. Can you walk us through the forms that aversion can take, as well as the dangers they may bring?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, they say in some schools of Buddhist psychology that anger and fear are the same mind state: they’re both aversion. They’re both like striking out against what’s happening, trying to declare it to be untrue. So anger is the outflowing, expressive, energized form; fear and all its manifestations are the kind of held in, frozen, imploding form of striking out, that wanting to separate from what’s happening. And again, it’s not that these states are bad, but if you look at anger as one example, and the example I use a lot in the book is shame as a form of anger at oneself, real lacerating self-hatred: Is it onward-leading? Look how exhausting it is, look at how humiliating it is. Do we really feel the energy to seek change, to make amends, or to maybe see, “Oh, yeah, I blew it, how can I go on in a better way?” Well, no, we’re devastated. We feel like we’re the worst person who ever lived, and it’s not just the act, what we said or what we did or what we refrained from seeing or doing, it’s like our whole being is restless in that state. As someone said to me, whom I quote in the book, the brain filled with shame cannot learn. So we really try to look at anger, in all its forms, fear in all its forms, and not to condemn it or to judge it but to see, well, how much of that kind of pattern leads to more suffering and how much leads to the end of suffering? We have a chance here.

James Shaheen: You know, it’s interesting you mentioned shame, because you say that we cannot learn when we feel shame, when we’re stuck in it. Recently, I was in a social situation, and I kind of misrepresented myself, not necessarily even intentionally, but I said things that weren’t really consistent with who I am. And I felt a kind of shame afterwards, like why were you being disingenuous or misrepresenting yourself? Why are you playing a role that really doesn’t suit you? When I was reading this, I realized, if I’m stuck in shame, I can’t learn what it means not to be living a real life, in other words. The learning there was what happens when you’re out of alignment with who you are? What is the result of that? Does it move me closer to real life or further from it? But I noticed the effect of it was to distance myself from others around me and to lose the connection. Can you say something about our ability to learn and how being stuck in shame for even minor things like I just described. It was really minor. It was just sort of disingenuous, and then a lot of shame can come from something very small.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, it does come often from something very small, and it also comes from things that are kind of cultural artifacts, like should I really have been ashamed of living in a tiny little apartment like that? Why should we adopt that attitude that society says you have to have a certain amount? I mean, why is it humiliating when you don’t? It could be something you want to work out of, or maybe you made other choices. I had to learn a new way of languaging everything because in Buddhist psychology, which is much more familiar to me as a system, the polarities are between what we call regret or remorse, which is positive, painful but positive, and guilt. So remorse would be seeing that what you did or what you said caused harm, feeling the pain of it, moving on in a way with a resolve to try to do better or change and in a way letting it go, not in terms of lessons learned but in terms of berating yourself, you just let go of it. And guilt would be kind of being stuck there. I’m so bad. I’m so terrible. And it’s not onward leading. In Western psychology, the polarities are between guilt, which is positive, apparently, in saying that act was really reckless, it was really breaking harmony, that act, that speech, that withholding, not saying anything at that time, was really incorrect. But shame would be like “I am the worst person ever.” So it’s like your whole being is now in the spotlight, not the act, which you may regret and want to change the habit of. Like I’m just worthless, I shouldn’t even show my face. So I had to kind of learn that way of languaging. And you could see why that complete denigration of yourself doesn’t leave you any energy to try to be different. You just want to go back to bed.

James Shaheen: So the final hindrance is delusion, which you describe as a sense of numbness, disembodiment, and resistance to seeing things as they truly are. Can you say more about how we can work with our patterns of delusion?

Sharon Salzberg: I should also emphasize, we work with all the patterns. It’s not just a question of recognizing them and feeling sad. All of these states are completely workable, and we learn a different relationship to them, which is the first and foundational step, instead of falling into them on the one side or hating them on the other. That’s almost the definition of mindfulness. It’s the place in the middle where we can see what’s going on but in a balanced way and is learning happening and is kindness happening and is more spaciousness? So everything is workable. It’s not like this kind of inevitable, forever problem.

So delusion is my favorite of the three because it’s my thing. They do say that we all have a mix of grasping, aversion, and delusion, but sometimes people’s personality structure really favors one over the other, so my thing is delusion. Before I get into grasping, before I get into aversion, or even fear, which I have a lot of, I’ll just space out. I’ll go numb. It’s my favorite place to be. It’s comforting in some way. And it’s also not inevitably onward leading because when we’re lost in delusion, we’re kind of counting on other people to define life for us, to define reality for us, and what’s good and what’s not because we’re just lost in space. So that’s very confining, too, and then it also leads to, when it’s deep and combined in some way with fear, then we want to hold on to anything that seems like it’ll give us a sense of security or knowing. And so that’s where fundamentalism is said to come from from the Buddhist perspective.

James Shaheen: With regard to delusion, you write, “We lose confidence in our own perception of the truth. We feel confused. And if things keep going, we might start getting awfully used to letting others lay claim to the truth.” It’s like when you’re in that state, you might ask someone what you should do, and what you should do would really depend on something on your internal state. You lose your internal compass. So these are all patterns, grasping, anger, delusion, and you suggested that one way of working with these patterns is learning to sit with them in meditation, surrounding them with spaciousness and ease. And that’s not necessarily intuitive because obviously, these patterns emerge because it seems like being in full flight from reality is the way to go. Can you say more about what meditation has taught you about looking directly at difficult feelings and being with them rather than these fruitless attempts to escape them?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I think it starts with an understanding and direct knowledge that those attempts are fruitless. They’re not bad, and they’re not cowardly or some character flaw, but they’re not going to work. They just come back. They come back in some other form. They ambush us in some way. It’s just not going to work. And so we practice looking directly at them, taking an interest in them, rather than having a judgment about them, like what does it feel like in my body? Usually, say it’s desire or craving, we’re so caught up in the object, like, let’s say you want a new car. All your energy, and fantasizing is going toward should I get that kind of upholstery or that kind of upholstery? Should I get that way of playing music or that way playing music? It’s very rare that we kind of pivot our attention back and almost say to ourselves, What does it feel like to want something so badly? What’s that craving made of? Because sometimes we see they’re compounds. These are strong feelings. They’re complex. We look at craving, and sometimes we find a lot of loneliness. It’s not really craving only. We look at anger, and we see a lot of sadness or fear or hopelessness. But unless we make the pivot, we’re not going to learn about the very nature of those forces.

And so that’s part of being mindful is making that pivot. Not what am I angry about and what am I going to do, but what is anger? What does it feel like in my body? We name it, if we can. Apparently, there’s a whole school of current psychology in the West where they call it “Name it to tame it,” and we pay attention to it. We take an interest in it. We remember, as we start to put ourselves down, like, no, that’s not the point. These are painful states; they’re not bad states. We can have some compassion for ourselves in the face of them. And lo and behold, you find things begin to shift. Even though that very state has come up, even though it may come up a lot, you’re so different with it that everything changes from that.

James Shaheen: That’s nice. You also wrote a book called Real Love, and throughout the book, you explore the different meanings of love and the ways that love can support us in moving to greater spaciousness and ease. Can you say more about how you’ve come to understand love? It’s such a packed word.

Sharon Salzberg: It is such a packed word. When I had written the proposal for Real Love and it was being looked at by different publishers, somebody said to me, “The love market is saturated.” What they meant by that was the romance market was saturated: how to find a relationship, how to sustain a relationship, how to end a relationship. But that’s not what it’s about. It’s really more like the fulfillment of that sense of belonging, which comes to connection. It could be actually looking at the supermarket clerk you normally look through and feeling, “OK, here we are. We’re two people in this moment in time, and there’s a genuine sense of connection,” or really listening to somebody instead of just being distracted and thinking about your email, paying attention to yourself, not just the repetitive consuming list of all your faults and all your flaws again and again and again and again, but what else? What’s the good within, what’s the good I’m capable of? Broadening our sense of who we are, but truthfully so, not like make-believe.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you use the phrase embodied knowing of connection.

Sharon Salzberg: I think it is connection. It’s so available and so forgotten, both at the same time.

James Shaheen: You also draw from the Pali canon, the word that means heat or radiance. Can you say more about the sense of radiance or brightness and how it can support us?

Sharon Salzberg: In Real Life, there’s a whole section about tejas or the inner radiance. It’s that inner capacity, and a kind of poetic way of saying it is that it’s illuminating. It’s like a light within. And that part of the book is nestled within, the section begins with a study done many, many years ago, where every resident of a nursing home was given a plant, and half the residents were told, “This is yours to nurture, to water, to put in and out of the sunlight. You have to take care of it.” And the other half of the residents were also given a plant but they were told, “The nursing staff will take care of it. You just enjoy it.” And then those two populations were compared. It turned out that the population that was told, “You need to respond to the plant, you need to be aware of it, you need to take care of it,” were living longer and having fewer ailments and so on and were oriented. It’s long been considered a study in control of your environment and choices and things like that. I heard about it, and right away, I thought that it’s a study in lovingkindness as well, about responsiveness, paying attention, being present with even a plant. And then I go on to write about how some plants are very hardy. They can basically survive if you neglect them, but they actually do much better if you pay attention to them because then they don’t just survive; they flourish. And then I go on to talk about the light within and how it’s kind of the same thing, ignoring it, not wanting to nurture it, not paying attention to it. It will survive nonetheless, but it could also flourish.

James Shaheen: You draw from psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s notion of tragic optimism. Can you say more about tragic optimism and how it can counter spiritual bypassing or toxic positivity? I like toxic positivity. I think it’s pretty funny.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I think more and more people are aware of John Welwood’s great phrase about spiritual bypassing, where we’re not looking directly at the pain and the difficulty and the conflict and the sorrow, but we’re kind of upleveling to “It’s all going to be OK, we’re all one, the universe is perfect,” or whatever it might be. And so it’s like we’re abandoning whole parts of our experience, and we’re not really being whole. It’s both untrue, it’s kind of hypocritical, and it’s unkind often, because it’s something that people do to one another: “Why are you so caught in duality? You should be dwelling in the light,” or something like that. And so rather than getting lost—and it’s very easy to get lost in those places. They seem far more attractive than looking at our pain, for example. But something that really strikes me about that kind of upleveling is that we’re left very alone. When we’re looking at our pain, we have the possibility of finding one another. We don’t want to drown in our pain because it is not helpful. But to face it and to understand it’s never just us, we do find one another. And so we want to avoid that kind of upleveling, if possible, and genuinely be with everything that comes our way, the joys and the difficulties. And so I like that sense of tragic optimism where we’re taking it all in and we’re admitting it all and acknowledging it all and saying, OK, I don’t want to get consumed by the pain, and yet let’s not try to leave it as not worth experiencing in some way.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you also quote the poet Wendell Berry, “Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.”

Sharon Salzberg: Well, that came to me when you and I were doing a podcast with somebody and he quoted that and I thought, “Yes, this is what I need.”

James Shaheen: One practice that can support us in developing tragic optimism is cultivating awe. Can you say more about how awe can change the ways we pay attention?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I think what we actually cultivate is interest or curiosity, and that leads to the emergence of a state of awe. I don’t think of awe in the way it’s normally defined as “I felt so small, I felt so insignificant, I felt so nothing as I looked at the grandeur of the trees or whatever,” but I think it is a kind of belonging sense, and yet it’s not humiliating but humbling: my fretting all day was really essentially nothing. I don’t need to do that. I can open to look at this. Life is so much bigger. And it leads to my potential being so much bigger. Our mutual friend Eileen had a saying. It was something like the smaller the stakes, the bigger the drama, like in an organization where people are arguing over basically nothing, they really argue a lot. They argue more when it’s nothing. You realize, “Oh, I don’t need to do that. Look at how big life is.”

James Shaheen: That’s funny. There’s a line in an Iris Murdoch book, I can’t remember, but she says something like why are the battles in academia so fierce and brutal? And she said it’s because the stakes are so small. I don’t know if it’s fair to describe academic stakes as small. It was about professors. So you and I have focused a lot on this podcast when speaking with others on loneliness and isolation, and you have an interesting take on this. You write that loneliness can be a kind of bardo or an in-between place, traditionally the place between death and rebirth, a place where we feel stranded or erased. Can you say more about the bardo of loneliness? And how is this different from solitude?

Sharon Salzberg: I think it’s very different than solitude. I think we both, maybe we all know people who live in a fair amount of solitude, but they seem very connected in a larger way to others, to maybe all beings, to humanity, to life, to the planet, something like that. And always, even before the pandemic, when I would read about an epidemic of loneliness, or I’d read about different clinical conditions where social connection might be healing for us, I kept thinking, well, it can’t only be a numbers game, like I only have three friends, I need fifteen. It must be some inner sense because of those people I know who seemed to have a tremendous sense of connection to life, and they care so much about others. And something about loneliness, I mean, it could be that it’s a bardo, it’s an in-between state, but we can move out of it in a state of caring. I can remember the day I decided to leave New York and come up to Barre in 2020 was a day I was teaching in New York. I had just arrived back there after traveling in California. And as you know, things were starting to get really bad in New York in terms of the pandemic and lots of anxiety and lots of uncertainty and lots of illness. I was teaching in a place where the system is that you sit in the audience in the front row until you’re formally introduced, and then the speaker gets up on stage. So I was sitting next to a woman who was extremely anxious, and she said, “You know, I didn’t know if I should come,” and it was really intense. And I said, “Well, there are these breathing techniques that actually can be very effective, which are described in different ways, but basically, if your out-breath is longer than your in-breath, then your sympathetic nervous system will give way to your parasympathetic nervous system and your whole being, your nervous system will kind of chill.” So she wasn’t interested in that. So I said, “Well, there’s this practice of lovingkindness where you can just repeat these phrases, and you’ll begin to see this growing connection to all beings everywhere.” She wasn’t interested in that. So I looked at her and I said, “Is there anyone you could help?” She lit up. She got completely radiant. And she said, “I do have this elderly neighbor, and maybe I can slip a note under her door and say, ‘Do you need help getting groceries?’ or something like that.” And I thought, “Well, look at that. That is so interesting.”

James Shaheen: So as we cultivate connection, which is what I think that is when you help someone, it really brings you back to others, you write that we can move into a space of clarity. Can you say more about this clarity? And how does this clarity change how we move through our daily lives?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, any act of generosity in a way returns us even in a flash, fleetingly, to that state of being whole because in the act of generosity, when it’s actually generosity and not martyrdom or something like that, you’re not thinking, “I have nothing, I’m no one, I’m so meager, I’m so defective, I’m so deficient, I’m so bereft, I have nothing.” You’re returned in that moment to that kind of wholeness, and you can make the offering, whether it’s a material offering, or you’re smiling at somebody, or you’re thanking them, or you’re listening, whatever it is. And so those acts are not just for others. They really change us the more that we can dwell on them. It’s the same when we offer lovingkindness to somebody. Whether we know them or not, we’re returned to that inner sense of wholeness, and that’s very important.

James Shaheen: Could you read a passage from the book on this journey to expansion?

Sharon Salzberg: “In a way, this journey from a narrow place to expansion and freedom lies outside of time and space. We can traverse that seemingly daunting distance with a thought. We can travel that length without accruing any mileage at all, with remembering right now what we really care about, or recollecting right now the source of our deepest happiness, or coming back right now to our essential selves. We can explore the terrain of awe, or gratitude, or self-respect, or love. We needn’t be fooled by the layers of fear and craving and shame and confusion covering over that light. We can remind ourselves the light is never more than partially covered, and while it may feel remote, it is accessible, always. Because it is always accessible, we are here, now.”

James Shaheen: Well, Sharon, thank you so much for joining us and being the interviewee on your own cohosted podcast. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of Sharon’s new book, Real Life. We like to close these podcasts with a short guided meditation, so I’ll hand it over to you, Sharon.

Sharon Salzberg: Thank you so much. Now I’m sitting here thinking, “What can I interview James about?” That would be fun. Let’s sit together for a few moments. You can sit comfortably. Close your eyes or not, however you feel most at ease. Let’s just take a deep breath. Let it out. Allow your breath to become natural. You can listen to sounds, whether the sounds of my voice or other sounds, as a way of relaxing deep inside, allowing us to receive the experience, and unless you are responsible for responding to the sound in some way, let it wash through you.

Bring your attention to the feeling of your body sitting, whatever sensations you discover. See if you can feel the earth supporting you. See if you can feel space touching you. When we think of touching space, usually we think of poking the air with a finger, but really space is already touching us. It’s always touching us. We just need to receive it.

Bring your attention to the feeling of the breath, just the normal natural breath. Find the place where the breath is clearest for you or strongest for you. Bring your attention there and just rest. See if you can feel one breath. If your attention starts to wander or you fall asleep, truly don’t worry about it. See if you can let go gently and just return your attention to the feeling of the breath. When you feel ready, you can open your eyes or lift your gaze. We’ll end the meditation.

James Shaheen: Again, thank you Sharon.

Sharon Salzberg: Thank you so much.

James Shaheen: Always fun talking to you. You’ve been listening to Life As It Is with Sharon Salzberg. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks and Life As It Is are produced by As It Should Be Productions and Sarah Fleming. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

James Shaheen: Hello and welcome to Life As It Is. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. It can be so easy to dismiss joy as frivolous or not serious, especially in times of crisis or despair. But for poet Ross Gay, joy can be a radical and necessary act of resistance and belonging. In his new essay collection, Inciting Joy, Gay explores the rituals and habits that make joy more available to us, as well as the ways that joy can contribute to a deeper sense of solidarity and care. In today’s episode of Life As It Is, my co-host Sharon Salzberg and I sit down with Ross to talk about finding joy in the midst of grief and sorrow, the dangers of believing ourselves to be self-sufficient, and how joy can dissolve the boundaries between us.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with writer Ross Gay and my co-host Sharon Salzberg. Hi, Ross. Hi, Sharon. It’s good to be with you both.

Ross Gay: Good to see you. Thanks for having me.

Sharon Salzberg: It’s good to be here.

James Shaheen: Thanks for coming. So Ross, we’re here to talk about your new book, Inciting Joy, which builds on your earlier essay collection, The Book of Delights, which I also very much enjoyed. So to start, how did you first come to write about joy and delight?

Ross Gay: You know, I have a book before The Book of Delights that’s called Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude, and maybe that was the first time that I was very conscientiously writing about gratitude. But it wasn’t until having conversations about that book, which to me has a complicated idea of gratitude. It’s built of odes and elegies. That’s what that book seems to me to be about. But having conversations about that book, people were talking about joy, and it made me start to consider more deeply this idea of joy.

James Shaheen: It’s interesting because a lot of people, when they hear the words joy, gratitude, delight, they just groan. We live in such an age, I guess. But you mentioned a student who said they’d always been told they couldn’t write about joy because it wasn’t serious enough. How do you understand a comment like that?

Ross Gay: I make a joke about a dishwashing soap called Joy, like it’s a kind of lightweight, maybe you’d say consumerist, but definitely not a serious emotion. And that’s not it at all. Joy emerges from the understanding that we live in the midst of profound difficulty, not only but in part. Joy seems to me to be the practices of entanglement. When we’re entering the practices of understanding that we belong to one another, we are not separable from one another, what comes from doing those practices is joy, which is why you can weep with joy, weep sadly with joy.

James Shaheen: I was looking online and watching you read several of your poems, and you do read them sometimes with great joy despite an underlying sense that there’s also pain there. Instead of imagining joy as separate from pain, you suggest that it emerges from how we care for each other through sorrow and suffering. I was especially moved by your description of the end of your father’s life. And yet joy still surfaces. Can you say more about how you came to this understanding of joy?

Ross Gay: It’s beautiful to be talking to you all because I feel like a lot of it comes from contending with a mind that was often troubled. I spent a good bit of time realizing that I was trying to resist, I was trying to fight back something. I spent a lot of time fighting to avoid my sorrow. I spent a lot of time struggling on account of trying to hold back and push away sorrow or isolate myself from my sorrow, which is also, I think, a way of isolating myself from other people. One of the teachings that feels like a life-changing teaching was actually at a mindfulness class at Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia. We were just doing a body scan meditation, and the teacher asked, “How’d it feel?” And one of the students in the class said she didn’t like it. The teacher said, “Well, why not? Are you OK to talk about it?” in that very good teacherly way. This is all new to me. And she said, “Well, it made me sad.” I can’t remember exactly what she was talking about, maybe something to do with her son or something like that. As that was going on in this class of about 30 people there across the circle from me, I realized that I literally couldn’t watch. I literally couldn’t look at them. It was not like someone having a finger cut off. It was like someone saying they’re sad. “I’m sad.” But I couldn’t bear to look at it. I don’t know that I would have noticed it without the lessons from that class, actually. But the thing that I noticed was that in my body, I was having the same exact feeling that I would have when I would go to visit my mother. My father had died. My mother’s partner of 35 years had died recently, and she was really sad. And it was so difficult to be with her in the midst of that sadness. I learned to watch my mind with ways I would try to get out of being with that sadness. And being with that sadness, to me, it’s sort of like, well, that’s called joy. Being with your mother in the midst of her sadness is one of the aspects of joy, I think.

Sharon Salzberg: I think it’s really powerful what you’re saying, actually, because we can have so many conditioned reactions to that sense of sorrow, which is not allowed for many people. We might do just what you described so well: avoiding it, denying it, trying to pretend it’s not there, or the other extreme, being overcome by it and defined by it, not having a bigger perspective. You’re talking about this middle place, which is so incredible, and you use an image of inviting sorrow in for tea, which exemplifies that middle place, and it reminded me of the story of the Buddha inviting the kind of satanic figure in Buddhism, Mara, to tea. But the tea soon turns into a neighborhood potluck full of dancing and raucous celebration. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that image of the neighborhood potluck and the boisterousness that can come from sharing our sorrow.

Ross Gay: I’m glad you brought that up because I think there’s a way that we can become overcome by sorrow. One of my guesses or hunches is that if we don’t reject our sorrow, we don’t reject the sorrow of other people. And if we know that sorrow is not unique to us, maybe we are less inclined to be overcome by sorrow. I think of that potluck itself as a kind of practice of entanglement, and all of the things that happen in that potluck where there’s a group of people who start to have a fermentation crew, and then a coven forms, people are dancing and making kites out of the obituary pages. It feels to me that all of these practices emerge not only because they’re there with their sorrows but actually in a way to acquaint themselves with and be able to be with their sorrows. So when the sorrows get invited in, it’s actually a party where people figure out how to care for each other.

James Shaheen: That was a great way to start that book, inviting everyone’s sorrows in. Like Sharon, I really loved that. You organize the book around two guiding principles, investigating the rituals and habits that make joy available to us and exploring how joy makes us act and feel—in other words, what incites joy and what joy incites. Can you say more about these principles and how they’ve shaped how you see joy as a practice?

Ross Gay: The question that I asked, what occasions or what incites joy, it goes back to that question about the student saying, “Well, I’ve been told that joy isn’t that serious. Why should I be thinking hard about joy?” And to me, what I’ve found to be true is that what incites joy, in fact, is deadly serious, including the fact that we die, the mutual understanding that things change dramatically. We grieve, we suffer, etc. But as far as the other guiding question of what incites joy, as I was getting closer to understanding how to talk about it, it’s these practices of entanglement. What are the things that we actually do in our lives that practice what makes joy? What are the things that we do in our lives that we might not even articulate as joy-inciting practices, experiences, etc. For instance, I talk about pickup basketball. I talk about gardening. I talk about dancing. But I think a lot of these things that I’m talking about are ways that we practice making room for and accommodating as many of us as possible. The other thing is that they’re often these practices where the divisions between us get murky, like dancing hard. The idea of you and me changes when you’re dancing. Anytime you’re growing a garden, what I think of as a very regular practice, not a special practice of the garden, is to share. You got extra zucchini, you share them. Your potato harvest was wild, you share the potatoes. That troubles the idea of you and me, that sharing itself. Obviously, it’s a practice of joy. But it’s also a troubling of this boundary between you and me.

James Shaheen: What incites joy and what joy insights, I can see how that becomes blurred in the way you’ve just described. I’m going to quote you, you say that joy can kindle “wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity,” which in turn can incite further joy. Can you tell us about this transgressive power of joy in bringing us together across boundaries?

Ross Gay: It’s my understanding and my sense that there’s extreme care in, say, a pickup basketball court. There are these radical acts of care, actually, that will happen on basketball courts numerous times during the game. Or if you think of organizing a strike or something, people who might really disagree about stuff really gathering. What does it mean when people who think or have been told they’re not supposed to care about each other really love something together, really come together around something, whether it’s a song, whether it’s a garden plot, a waterway, a road that we don’t want to go through? It feels to me like it’s dangerous, that transgressive joy, that transgressive gathering.

Sharon Salzberg: I’d like to go back to gardening for a minute because it’s very, very different from me. I don’t think I’ve ever kept even a houseplant alive, so I felt like I got some glimmer of an insight listening to you and so I want to go further into it. When you talked about sharing, I thought about how it opens us to insight into so many conditions and giving and receiving, like maybe somebody had a very poor harvest, but it’s not their fault. It’s not like they’re a bad person or a bad gardener. It’s the soil or the rain or something like that. It can really reveal a lot about the nature of connection and also giving and receiving, so I’m curious how you first got interested in gardening.

Ross Gay: Good question. I moved to Bloomington seventeen years ago. I had lived mainly in Philadelphia or Jersey City or places where I hadn’t gardened. My mother grew a couple flowers in front of the apartment where I grew up. Her folks were farmers, and by the time we were five or six years old, they had moved into town and they kept serious gardens. And the people on my dad’s side of the family also garden sort of seriously. I often used to talk about how I first started gardening when I moved to Bloomington,  but the fact of the matter is we grew up where there’s wild raspberries along I-95, and there was a mulberry tree. So there was a kind of relationship with fruit particularly. But when I did move to Bloomington, this is a town where people really garden. My partner is a gardener. That was an influence. I had someone in the first class that I was teaching here who is a really serious gardener who was just talking about it and was so enthused. Another buddy who became a buddy from that class was a serious gardener. And one time I was riding around town in Bloomington and I saw a guy at a community garden turning mulch. I asked him what he was doing, and he said, “We’re turning the compost,” and he asked me to join him. And I joined him. And then I got involved with this community orchard project here in Bloomington, and that’s a really central part of my life now. Just on my way here, I was walking and I bumped into this guy who’s a farmer in town, and we just had a conversation about garlic because he sells garlic and it keeps real good and I was asking him for advice. We had this exchange, this sharing, actually, on the sidewalk. But in a deep way, it was here that it started.

Sharon Salzberg: You refer to gardens as archives of love, records of the people who’ve cared for us by saving and planting seeds. I wonder if you could say just a little bit more about that and interdependence.

Ross Gay: We are in a tech world where we imagine we can invent ourselves out of everything. But the fact of the matter is that so much of what we grow has been brought forward. People had to select the seeds. Seeds are selected. Seeds are kept. Plants go to seed, and people will keep those seeds if they love the plant. And they might love the plant because it tastes good, or it’s beautiful, or it grows in certain conditions that are difficult, or their parents kept it and their parents and their parents. Anytime you’re growing a garden, you’re growing the kind of archive of love. You may not know the whole story of love. Of course you don’t. But you know that it’s the evidence of love. It’s the evidence of care, multi, multi, multi transgenerational care, epigenetic care. You don’t outsmart the earth. You are always the recipient of the kindness of the earth. When you grow good crops, it’s not because you did it. It’s because not only the seeds, not only the soil, not only the rain, not only the light, not only the wind was OK, not only the birds didn’t eat it, not only the chipmunks. All of this stuff has to happen, this interdependence, in order for it to come. You could just as easily have a terrible crop of collard greens as you could have a great crop of collard greens. When we can get our heads around that, our hearts around that, it feels like, oh, yeah, we all need. We’re all in a perpetual state of need. We need the light to be right. We need all of this. We’re constantly the beneficiary of this kind of generosity.

James Shaheen: So talking about interdependence and what you learned from gardening, I have to ask about the dangers of believing ourselves to be self-sufficient, especially when it comes to our relationship to the earth. And you say that “when we refuse to celebrate the Earth’s kindness, we prepare the ground for the Earth to refuse kindness to us.” So what does it look like to accept and celebrate the Earth’s kindness? It makes me think of when you first started thinking about your own sorrow, your inability to share that with others.

Ross Gay: A useful practice is to notice how much of the earth explicitly makes one’s life worth living—or maybe livable, period. You could walk out the door and you wouldn’t get down the block. Let’s talk about the trees. That is not only about what they offer to the creatures and that they make shade and that they take care of the air. There’s a million things that we don’t know. It’s beyond. A useful practice is to acknowledge again and again and again how much we’re indebted to the earth. Maybe you note it: “Oh, yeah. If it wasn’t for that.” One of the sorrows of a certain kind of masculinity is to reside in this dream where you think that everything you do is on account of yourself. We might, in fact, commit incredible harm. We might be incredibly brutal to keep that illusion up. So instead of acknowledging that my water comes from a place, to avoid acknowledging that, I could do anything. I can be incredibly brutal.

James Shaheen: Or the complete isolation we inflict on ourselves when we do that. It’s impossible to live that way.

Ross Gay: Totally. Yeah, it’s a brutality to oneself too. What a lonely life not to be paying attention to the kindness that is offered.

Sharon Salzberg: What a sad echo, what a lonely life. In a later chapter in the book, you catalog your work developing a community orchard, and you write that planting the orchard “revealed a matrix of connection and care that exists not only in the here and now but comes to us from the past and extends forward into the future.” Can you say more about this network of care?

Ross Gay: I remember I had a former colleague here at IU, and he talked about how people would plant black walnut trees and they would take 25 years to grow big enough and they’d plant for their grandkids, maybe. It would take long enough that they get big, and you can harvest them for board wood and pay for someone’s college. It was such a beautiful idea of tending to something for the future. Planting trees is so often that. This community orchard, just to talk a little bit about that project, my friend Amy Countrymen had this idea of a community orchard. She had this phrase “free fruit for all,” and we all got behind that. The idea was, what if we grow an orchard that’s going to be open and you can harvest what you want? We were a bunch of people who for the most part didn’t know each other. I didn’t know any of these other people who I was working very hard on this project with.

But the thing that was so moving to me about it, and it got more and more moving as it became clear to me, is that fruit trees take a while before they get into full production. I teach college. One of the things that college teachers do is they move around a lot. It wouldn’t at all be unusual if I were to be gone by that time. But also, trees take ten years to get into full production. People die in ten years. It felt like we were people who were coming to know each other and were gathering around this idea of these people in the future who we didn’t know who might be able to harvest fruit. That was the reason that we gathered. We liked the idea that in the future, there’ll be fruit here for people. Doing that project also made me aware of how often that has happened for me. Again, to talk about the seeds, people selecting seeds, saving seeds, carrying seeds. That is the evidence, one of the zillions of evidences, of people behaving that way for my benefit. It was just so beautiful and moving to me because I don’t know that I had had the occasion to think as hard and clearly about that as a kind of practice, a kind of practice of thinking about, “Oh, we’re going to make this thing that’s going to care for people that we don’t know and can’t imagine, and the care is going to be really unabstract care. It’s going to be like pears.”

James Shaheen: You know, I guess growing trees takes a lot of patience. I grew up around a lot of fruit trees, and I know how long they take. And you talk about our relationship to time, especially through activities that run counter to our entrenched notions of productive time or capitalistic time. This seems to be a running theme for you, as you devoted a chapter in The Book of Delights to the joys of loitering and taking one’s time, which I remember well. There’s great humor there. Can you say more about how society has conditioned our understanding of time, and can we break out of this model of scarcity and instead view time as abundant?

Ross Gay: I think it’s tricky. I think there’s all kinds of ways. I’ve been thinking hard about how my mother, she’s 82 now and she worked ten hours a day at a job she didn’t care about, and then she had a paper route on top of that. She had the hustle of the broke. My dad too, but I’m thinking about my mom, because my mom is still alive. And there was a scarcity of time for her. She didn’t have a lot of time to kick back, in fact, and now she has a lot of time to kick back. She’s retired. When my dad died, he had good life insurance, and so now her concerns are very different. What does it mean that I have a kind of abundance of time and that there are so many, many, many, many, most people, I would say, who, due to various straight-up economic conditions, have a scarcity of time imposed upon so many of us? So that’s one thing that I would say at first that I sort of think about, and I think about being around my mother where I’m like, “Gosh, she’s so delighted. Oh, that’s right, because she’s not looking at her watch, and she’s not terrified about her bank account.”

The other thing is that I also think there’s a kind of compulsion, period, among so many people to be productive, to be inquisitive, always on the go. That essay definitely made me think or wonder about joy, and also, I think in that essay, I might say mongrel gathering, that kind of transgressive gathering, and also knowing what feels important to us in our lives. It seems like it often happens outside of a temporal compulsion. It happens often when we’re doing nothing. Sometimes that’s when a kind of clarity of purpose or desire or curiosity can arrive.

James Shaheen: It’s interesting, though, because when time is abundant, or when people do have time, sometimes they speak of killing time.

Ross Gay: I wonder, is that term a kind of relationship to what you’re supposed to be doing with your time: “Kill the time until it’s time that you’re making money.”

James Shaheen: Or it’s sort of turning away from that space that opens up the way you might turn away from sorrow, say, or the way you may lack the imagination to sit with that time and let something come up. I’ve experienced it myself. I think most of us have. But you cite W. H. Auden’s famous line that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Yet rather than reading this as a dismissal of poetry, you see it as a celebration of poetry’s ability to make nothing happen, to stop time. Can you say more about the nothing that poetry makes happen and maybe a little bit about what I referred to that we sometimes have a compulsion to kill time?

Ross Gay: One of the things that’s interesting to me about poems is they slow you down, and they require often a kind of contemplative relationship to something. The way I think of poems is that they are extremely bodily. A line of a poem to me is a breath. So a poem is made up of breaths. A poem is a kind of body. And there’s some way that being in resonance with this breathing thing, there’s some kind of absence of getting it done-ness with a poem. But maybe It’s a getting with-ness or something with a poem. Yeah, I’ve loved that line for a long time. Because people really tussle with that line, and they want to argue with it. And I’m like, well, I don’t know if it means that thing that you’re talking about. If we’re making poems, we’re not making bombs.

James Shaheen: I’d like to just suggest that anybody listening who would like to see Ross read his poems, go online and look him up. It’s a real joy to watch you recite those poems. You also describe how you incorporate practices of joy into your pedagogy, particularly as a means of countering some of the strictures and stresses of traditional academia. So how do you invite creativity and joyful exploration into the classroom? If it’s anything like you reading your poems, I want to take a class.

Ross Gay: Well, one thing is that I try to do as much collaborative stuff as possible. I talk about this in the essay. So often, the classroom is a place where you want to distinguish yourself. Because I am thinking about joy, etc., as not necessarily a kind of isolated experience but an experience of gathering and joining, I want to make the classroom a place where we can actually do that. That’s one thing: as much collaboration as possible. And then as much experimentation or play as possible. This relates a little bit to the time question. I feel like usually students who are in college or  students who are in grad school are pretty good at being students. They know how to follow directions and be good enough. In a way, I’m sort of like, well, what if we just threw that out? And what if instead our project was not to be good but our project was to get lost and wander around together? That’s another thing that I try to do in my classes. And another thing that I do in my classes that maybe permits this being lost and encourages us not to want to distinguish ourselves, isolate ourselves, in a way and be solely excellent: I don’t grade. I give everyone A’s in my classes. So I just start off with the idea that we’re just not doing that. That’s not the objective of this class. The objective of this class is care, and it’s metaphor. Let’s work on our care, and let’s try to make good metaphors.

Sharon Salzberg: I want to take this class too.

Ross Gay: You’d get an A for sure.

Sharon Salzberg: I had a moment thinking, God, where were you when I was in college?

Ross Gay: I think a lot of people do.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, another incitement is laughter, and you write that your friend once said that when you laugh, you look like you’re dying. So can you say some more about the relationship between laughter and dying?

Ross Gay: It’s funny, I was taking a walk with that friend, David. David is very funny. He makes me laugh really hard, and I’ll kind of gasp. He was imitating it this weekend in a way that was really cracking me up. But you know, when we laugh, we gasp, we breathe, and we become acutely aware, maybe, of the fact that we’re breathing. Laughter is so often the evidence of our being connected to one another. We make each other laugh, or we laugh together at similar things. But again, because the breath part of it is so important, the gasping is actually a part of breath and a part of laughter, it feels really connected to the fact that we are in the process of expiring in a certain kind of way. There’s the idea of killing. Comedians kill when they make everyone laugh really hard. But yeah, I’m glad you mentioned that.

Sharon Salzberg: You have a wonderful line where you wrote that laughter draws us together by reminding us of the dying we share.

Ross Gay: Yeah, it feels like another one of the ways that we tend to one another’s passing.

James Shaheen: You talked about caring for your father in the last months of his life, and earlier, you told us that you had difficulty holding sorrow. Here, you say that you were terrified of grief. Why were you afraid? Maybe that’s a rhetorical question, but still, it’d be interesting to hear the answer. And what do you think was so destabilizing about the prospect of grieving?

Ross Gay: I think one of the things that grieving does is it makes it very plain that you are connected and you are not this isolated, singular entity but that you are fundamentally permeable, and maybe more than that, you’re fundamentally everything else. And I think that is terrifying. I think maybe it’s more terrifying based on your conditioning. Sometimes I think of growing up as a man or growing up in certain kinds of ways where being moved is not particularly permissible, or being needy, or being made fundamentally other people is not permissible, and grief, being heartbroken, devastated by heartbreak, maybe it’s the evidence of that. I think that’s a thing that I’m regularly contending with: the fact that sometimes I want to protect myself from connection, even though my higher self or a truer self understands that you don’t protect yourself from connection. And to protect yourself from connection is really to be sad. Like we said, it’s really lonely. Grief is the evidence of fundamental connection, and that can be horrifying. What do you all think about grief?

James Shaheen: I tell you, for a good part of my life I did not know how to be alone and I did not know how to be with other people. Learning to do one helped me with the other. But grief is one of those things that you either break or you open to others. For me, that’s just pretty much how it was. I like the way you say it bespeaks connection, it almost imposes connection on one. But if you’re open to it, it’s the only thing that really saves you, that others are grieving with you.

Sharon Salzberg: Somebody once said something that I think about a lot, which is that grief is love that doesn’t have the normal place to land. The person is gone, or the situation is gone, or the hope that things would work out a certain way is gone. But it was the love that drove it in a way. If we didn’t have love, we wouldn’t be as distraught at loss. It’s almost like grief is a vehicle for joy, not joy that we’re happy something has happened but in finding one another. As you’ve been saying, you’ve written that you’ve come to see grief as the metabolizing of change. And I was intrigued by this definition because I’ve sometimes used that term talking about one of my own meditation teachers, this woman named Dipa Ma, who began her life as a meditator having suffered terrible, terrible loss, and trying to describe what happened to her in her first meditation retreat, she somehow metabolized all that pain. It became compassion.

Ross Gay: Yeah, it’s beautiful. The connection to the love doesn’t go away. And I think that could probably be the devastation. When we talk about being consumed by grief, I wonder if that is sort of like, “Oh, well, the love is gone, or the connection is gone.” But I think the love isn’t gone. And I think there is this question of how we relate to the changing of the love, that we can no longer walk with the person or we can no longer call them on the phone. Metabolize is kind of interesting. I love that it’s profoundly bodily. It’s in our bodies.

James Shaheen: There’s a certain amount of grief you feel that is the residue of love. And that’s a beautiful thing. And that can give rise to joy. There’s also a kind of grief that comes from a sort of attachment that feels more difficult and less joyful, an inability to let go. Those both seem to coexist within the grief, and grief that is a residue of love is what I think you’re talking about. So you also write about grief as a form of atonement, a way to recognize and mark the harm we’ve inflicted. Can you say more about how we can grieve the subtle harms and daily hurts that we cause?

Ross Gay: Yeah, I started thinking about that in earnest when I was in couples therapy. It seems like the condition of being a human being is to be actually hurting other creatures, maybe the people closest to you in a certain kind of way. Learning about couples therapy stuff, not only in this relationship either, not only in my primary relationship, but in all kinds of friendships and everything else, with my mother, in all these other relationships, I’ve noticed this. There are instances where I’ve done something that I might like to apologize for. I’ve hurt someone in some kind of way. And I’m not talking big trauma, but maybe. And there’s a part of me that wants to refuse that, to refuse the acknowledgement of that. And then the refusal of the acknowledgement encourages me to do something else that I would rather not do, as opposed to just saying, “Hey, I think maybe I hurt you, and I’m sorry about that.”

James Shaheen: It’s so much harder to do but so much easier in the end.

Ross Gay: Oh my God, I know, it’s wild.

James Shaheen: And you don’t always hear back what you want to hear, and that has to be OK too.

Ross Gay: I know, I know.

James Shaheen: So we recently had the novelist Ben Okri on the podcast, and he spoke about how when we refuse to face difficult truths about our country’s past, those truths grow and continue to cause harm. You describe a similar dynamic on an interpersonal level: when we avoid acknowledging that we’ve caused harm, we end up continuing to hurt ourselves and the people around us. So I guess breaking the cycle of hurt, then, would be to acknowledge the hurt we’ve caused. Is that right?

Ross Gay: I think so. And I think on a kind of national level, that’s just so obvious. In that essay, I make a kind of analogy between the personal and institutional. If we’re not able to acknowledge the sometimes profound and irreparable damage that we’ve inflicted, then there seems to be a good chance that even the avoidance of acknowledging it is going to lead to the infliction of more brutality, more damage.

Sharon Salzberg: I was wondering if you would be willing to read a passage from the final chapter of your book on gratitude.

Ross Gay: Oh yeah, I’d love to. This is a passage from the last chapter that’s called “The Last Incitement: Joy and Gratitude.” “The luminous, mycelial tethers between us, our fundamental connection to one another, the raft through the sorrow, the holding through the grief joy is, reminds us, again and again, that we belong not to an institution or a party or a state or a market, but to each other. Needfully so. Which we must practice, and study, and sing, and story, and dream, and celebrate. Belonging to each other as though our lives depended on it.”

Sharon Salzberg: Beautiful, thank you. Could you say just a little bit more about joy as a practice of resistance and of belonging?

Ross Gay: Joy is so powerful. It reminds us that we can belong. I feel like culturally, there’s a kind of profound alienation that people are feeling, and I feel like joy itself is the evidence of a feeling of belonging. That feeling of belonging can be heartbreak. It can be a kind of mutual heartbreak or gathering around all kinds of things. But it does feel like it is the evidence of the belonging to one another, the evidence of a feeling of belonging, and that that feeling of belonging incites more stuff by which we understand we belong to one another. The important thing that I’m finding is I want to be able to articulate all these ways that we do this daily in simple ways. I want to be able to articulate and notice the ways that walking down the street, going to get my coffee, or whatever, I’m in the midst of a kind of remarkable care, daily care. The practice is noticing it and articulating it and saying, “Oh, that’s one of the ways we do this.”

Sharon Salzberg: And I’m curious what brings you joy these days.

Ross Gay: You know, I just had a four-hour meeting with a student who’s doing an honors undergraduate thesis. And it was so lovely to see this kid go from writing poems from the way she was writing poems at the beginning of the year till now, to see how delighted she was, it was so lovely. It was so dear. That’s one thing. Being with students is kind of a lucky daily thing for me. The other thing is that I’ve been touring around with this book a little bit, I’ve given a lot of readings. I love giving readings. I love being in rooms with people. And I love this sort of generosity that the people that these readings have. I have these conversations where I come to understand more what I’m thinking about, and it changes every single time that I do it. It feels like I’m entering into joy doing that too.

James Shaheen: Well, this episode has given me a lot of joy. Ross Gay, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of Inciting Joy, available now. We like to close these podcasts with a short guided meditation, so I’ll hand this over to Sharon.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I’m feeling a lot of joy as well. Why don’t we sit together for a few minutes. Close your eyes or not. Just be at ease. Start just by listening to sounds. It can be the sound of my voice or other sounds as a way of establishing a kind of big space in our awareness. Sounds come and go, some we like, some we don’t like. We can just allow them. Feel your body sitting, whatever sensations you discover. See if you can feel the earth supporting you, and feel space touching you. Something I learned as teachers would suggest that instruction and we would all pick up our fingers and poke them in the air is that space is already touching us. It’s always touching us. We just need to be able to receive it.

Feel your breath, which is really the life force. Just the normal natural breath, wherever you feel it most distinctly. Nostrils, chest, or abdomen. You can find that place. Bring your attention and just rest. This breath is not only your own life force, it’s that which connects us, each of us, in this world. With the greatest of appreciation for our time together, you can open your eyes and lift your gaze, and we’ll end the meditation.

James Shaheen: Thank you so much, Sharon. And thank you again, Ross. It was a real delight.

Ross Gay: Thank you. Lovely to talk with you both.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Life As It Is with Ross Gay. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks and Life As It Is are produced by As It Should Be Productions and Sarah Fleming. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

James Shaheen: Hello and welcome to Life As It Is. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Over the course of the past few years, many of us have found ourselves dealing with loss. Yet our contemporary culture often doesn’t allow us the space we need to grieve. Meditation teacher Kimberly Brown believes that mourning takes time, and she works as a grief counselor to support people through difficult and complicated losses. In her new book, Navigating Grief and Loss: 25 Buddhist Practices to Keep Your Heart Open to Yourself and Others, Brown lays out concrete tools to help us become better friends to ourselves as we grieve. In today’s episode of Life As It Is, my co-host Sharon Salzberg and I sit down with Kim to talk about how we can learn to stay with our grief, why it can be so hard to ask for help, and how rituals can help us honor the losses in our lives.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with meditation teacher Kim Brown and my co-host, Sharon Salzberg. Hi, Kim. Hi, Sharon. It’s great to be with you both.

Sharon Salzberg: Hi.

Kimberly Brown: Hi.

James Shaheen: So Kim, we’re here to talk about your new book, Navigating Grief and Loss: 25 Buddhist Practices to Keep Your Heart Open to Yourself and Others. This is a deeply personal book, and you open with your own mother’s death. To start, can you share a bit about your own experience of grief and why you decided to write this book?

Kimberly Brown: I decided to write this book because I had learned and studied in a Buddhist tradition for some time, and many of the practices that I had been taught were very helpful to me during times of great stress and great times of loss. You mentioned when my mom died. This book was really propelled into existence after the death of my friend, Denise. She died four years ago. It was just a painful loss, and it continues to be a loss and a pain. And to fully experience it is to realize that I’m experiencing what all humans are going to experience in one way or another, what all the humans before me have experienced in one way or another, and likely every human that’s ever going to be born. So in a certain way, it allows us, I think, to have an even greater and deeper connection. So not only does it put us in touch with our own grief and our own humanity, it connects us with everybody who’s ever been born, every human, and every human that’s ever going to be born. Through this, we connect with our compassion for ourselves and for each other. It’s just so there. And no matter if you like someone or you don’t like someone or even if you don’t know someone, you can be assured that they will have some sort of loss and some sort of grief in their life.

James Shaheen: I don’t know if I’m going to say this right. But in my case, it broke open my reality or it made my reality bigger, and a lot of the petty concerns I had disappeared. Of course, they came back after a certain point, but there was a moment of freedom from the pettier concerns and anxieties that I had. And like you say, I felt far more compassionate toward others during that period than when I’m caught up with my own concerns. You write that the book is intended to help us become “dear and loving friends to ourselves,” which I also experienced, as we navigate grief and loss. Can you share more about how you’ve learned to become a better friend to yourself in your grief?

Kimberly Brown: So I’ll answer it in two ways: in the sense of anticipating a loss and actually experiencing a loss. When I was with my friend, Denise, when she had cancer for a year and a half and it became evident she wasn’t going to survive it, I had this wave of what I like to call the big no. It wasn’t even a word. But it was just this underlying sense, this unconscious, “No, I don’t want this to be happening.” And I could feel it any time I would think about her or think about the situation. I found myself avoiding and working and doing anything I could to not really be with this terrible thing that was going to happen. I was able to see it, thankfully, I really credit my practices and my teachings, and I was able to say “Kim, it’s OK, sit down and feel this. Sit down and be with what’s arising.” That sense of friendliness that it’s OK to feel this big no and to be able to sit down and really investigate and allow this big no to happen gave me so much more space to not run away from something really painful and hard. And then later, when a loss had happened, after my dad died, I was able to be friendly in the sense of it’s OK to feel like this. I became very forgetful, and my first inclination was, Why am I being so forgetful? What’s going on? Didn’t I get enough sleep? And I was able to again come to myself with this friendliness and say, “Oh, well, you know what? Your dad died. It’s OK. It’s alright.” A lot of it was just mindful compassion, which I equate with friendliness.

Sharon Salzberg: I know we receive messages when we’ve experienced a loss that time’s run out and we should just get over it and get on with our lives. And I know it’s such a strong conditioning in North America and the United States. It’s certainly not necessarily a conditioning everywhere, but it’s ours, you know, to a large, large extent. You write that these messages like “get over it” can be destructive and actually prolong our process of grief, and instead, you recommend a practice you call “Stay.” So can you share more about first, the dangers of trying to skip over grief, and what does it mean to stay with our grief?

Kimberly Brown: Yes, in our culture, we really feel like we should get past it pretty fast. In fact, most companies, I think they give people three days for what they call funeral leave if someone close to you dies. Even though maybe the world is telling us not to, how can we be with ourselves in our grief and allow it to unfold? The practice of “Stay” to me is being able to not look away from what’s happening, to be able to not push away, and to be able to not try to make it different. So it’s almost like getting in touch with all these poisons. I don’t have to meddle with what’s going on, I can just sit and stay with myself. And the practice of staying, it’s a coming back kind of practice, because in my experience of staying with grief or just a sense of loss and change is that I really don’t want it to be happening, and so often my mind will go into some way to figure it out, fix it, and then the reminder, is to just come back to feel it in my body, to notice what’s tight, to notice what’s really here, and to do it with an attitude that it’s OK to be here. There’s nothing at all wrong, which of course is not what I’m being told and not maybe what I believe, but that I can do it, that I can adapt this attitude.

James Shaheen: As you say, mourning takes time. Yet our culture often doesn’t allow us a lot of time and space to grieve. As you’ve said, we get one to five days off work and are expected to carry on as usual. How do you see these expectations about loss playing out on a societal level?

Kimberly Brown: You know, that’s interesting, because we’ve lost so many people through the pandemic. I think I read something like 10% of people lost their grandparents. So it’s mostly young people. One way that we don’t deal with grief and what happens is that we’re operating in a way that we’re not at all in touch with our feelings. So I see a lot of students who think a lot about their feelings. Students will say things like, “I know I’m feeling sad about my grandmother, and I’m just going to love myself more, and these are the feelings that are all coming up.” But they haven’t been taught to actually sit and be with them. So I feel like one of the outcomes of not being in touch with our grief, especially collectively, is A, we can’t learn from it, and B, we become more uncompassionate or unable to be compassionate to ourselves. And so then we become less compassionate towards others too. There’s just a sort of impatience, like, let’s just get on with being productive. I think it really hinders the way we connect with each other when we can’t be patient with ourselves and compassionate with ourselves in grief.

James Shaheen: As anyone who’s experienced grief knows, and that’s everybody or it will be everybody, it can bring up a lot of anger. Can you say more about your own experience working with anger, especially the anger that arises after a loss?

Kimberly Brown: I sort of run angry, so I’m really familiar with it. My experience with anger is often that I’m trying to control something, and in grief and in loss and in change, you can’t control it most of the time. I start to feel like I’m gonna control it all, and then I can’t and then I’m really mad about it. So my father was very sick. During the pandemic, he had a very big health crisis. He was a very old man. I was trying to manage it. He was in Chicago. I was in New York. I was calling the hospital. I was calling his doctors. No one was, in my opinion, responding appropriately. I was getting more and more mad. I don’t always see it right away how mad I’m getting. But when I do, which is usually because I start to notice that I am so tight in my heart and my palms are sweating, my thoughts are racing, what I usually do then is just sit down. I remember sitting on the floor often during these angry times and just breathing and just bringing a sense of friendliness to myself and allowing myself to notice how much I was trying to control. We talk so much about letting go, and I think it’s Jon Kabat-Zinn who says if you could let go, you would have done it a long time ago. So it wasn’t like I sat down and let go. But I sat down and gave myself space to feel that I was trying to control things and recognize that I could maybe just breathe into it and be less clinging and less hard to it. And also, what’s underneath anger for most of us is something, hurt, fear, worry, whatever it is, and so sitting down recognizing, oh, anger is here is recognizing what’s propelling that anger and what’s beneath it. In grief, it’s usually a terrible heartbreak, a terrible, terrible feeling.

James Shaheen: Well, along those lines, you write that anger can be either a wise signal or a misdirected warning. Can you walk us through the distinction, because the way you were talking, it was sounding like it was waking you up to what might be underneath it? What is a misdirected warning?

Kimberly Brown: Well, a misdirected warning, in my example with my dad, I was taking all of this information, and I was misinterpreting it. So I would call and talk to a doctor, I’d call and talk to a hospital, I would try to manage the insurance, and what I took this as was “Oh, my gosh, something wrong is happening. They’re doing it all wrong. There is a terrible danger about to happen because these people are not competent.” That’s what I meant by the misdirected warning: I feel angry, I feel upset, that must mean something wrong is happening. Sometimes nothing wrong is happening. In a bigger view, in terms of grief, in terms of change and loss and death, nothing wrong is happening. This is the unfolding of life, sadly. The wise signal is “OK, I see that I’m upset. I see that this anger is really powerful. And underneath it is something very hurt, and I’m going to attend to it.” But the disconnected warning is “There is something wrong, and I have to fix it.” And yet, the truth is there’s nothing wrong and I may be unable to fix it.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I think that’s a really important point, the sense sometimes that something is wrong. I mean, I think about in my 20s, a lot of people my age were dying, and yes, there was plenty wrong with how, say, our government was responding or others were responding. But the fact that people were actually dying, that didn’t mean something was wrong. It was difficult. But it wasn’t that something was wrong. It was just painful, especially at that age when we least expected it, to accept it. But sometimes crises bring out the worst in people. We saw that during the pandemic, and we saw it a few decades back. It can be so easy to get sucked into anger anyway and displace a lot of grief-born anger and put it on other people. But you write about the power of forgiveness as a “choice to heal yourself by letting go of poisonous emotions that are causing you pain.” Can you say more about the practice of forgiveness? How can it be liberating?

Kimberly Brown: I think for me and for a lot of people I know, there’s a sense that if we remember and hold very tightly to things that happened to us in the past, times we’ve been hurt, times when people have behaved badly to us, times when someone was dangerous and we were really harmed, there’s a sense that if I let go of that, then I am saying that it didn’t mean anything and it wasn’t powerful or upsetting or wrong, even. And forgiveness is a way to be able to say me hanging onto this difficulty, this harm, this trauma even is really causing me a lot of pain. I am feeling angry and maybe even sick and maybe even unable to move forward. So I’m going to choose to forgive.

In this sense, it’s forgive and remember, as many Buddhist teachers say. Forgive and remember. To be able to say I don’t want to feel like this anymore. It’s eating me up. I’m on fire all the time because of this situation that happened that’s in the past. So I’m going to choose to take care of it by bringing kindness and friendliness to these feelings. And I’m going to choose to recognize that that person, whoever inflicted this, perhaps they were wrong. Perhaps they’re even dangerous. And I’m going to choose to recognize that they are another human being, that they made a terrible mistake or they did something awful. I don’t have to be friends with them or even know them. And I don’t have to hate them and wish something ill would happen to them. I had a situation with a friend who died and someone involved with that behaved very badly, as these things happen in families sometimes, and for the longest time, I had a sense that they should be held accountable, someone should call them up and tell them how terrible it was. And finally, through a lot of practice, I was able to say, and I am able to say, well, they did what they did. Me holding onto this is really painful. I don’t know if I wish them well, but I don’t wish them ill anymore.

Sharon Salzberg: Just as tricky, in a way, as the relationship to forgiveness is the relationship to hope. I know that if you’re talking about the nature of the relationship between fear and hope, it’s hard to know exactly what type of hope one means. That word could be used to mean strong attachment and holding and clinging, and it could also mean perspective and not being defined by the circumstances of the moment. So you lay out two types of hope, skillful hope and hope that causes fear. I’m wondering if you can share more about the connections between fear and hope and how we can cultivate skillful hope rather than grasping at particular outcomes?

Kimberly Brown: In many ways, hope is also related to trying to make things happen. Sharon just mentioned the idea of clinging: I really, really want this to happen. I am going to only focus on this outcome—I don’t get fired, my dad recovers—and I put all my effort into it and all my thoughts and all my feelings because I’m so afraid that those things will happen. Not only am I afraid they’re going to happen, I’m afraid of what it’s going to do to me, that I will fall apart, that I won’t know what to do. My mind would run off into all the possible scenarios. So that’s the kind of hope that’s connected with fear. And I think it’s actually the most common kind of hope. Skillful hope requires an openness and a humility to say, “I really don’t know what’s going to happen.” Because that’s the truth. I don’t know what’s going to happen. You can have an idea that it might go this way or that way. But the skillful hope is saying I really don’t know what’s going to happen. I will do my best with my thoughts and my words and my actions to bring about the most beneficial outcome possible. But skillful hope is saying I’m here now, and I’m not sure how it will all unfold. It requires a certain amount of confidence, confidence that however it turns out, I’m going to be OK.

Sharon Salzberg: That’s such an important distinction because we suffer so much from clinging and grasping. And maybe the last thing we want is to cultivate it even more strongly, and yet to have despair, to be nihilistic, to think nothing matters, to have no hope is really not a way to freedom either. You also write, interestingly enough, about fear and hope in the context of anticipatory grief, or grief when you know someone’s going to die, and that made me think of my friend, Sylvia Boorstein, one of my colleagues, who describes herself as a recovering catastrophizer. So it’s not even so much, she says, when you know someone’s going to die, because she says in those situations, like a real crisis, I’m like a rock, but it’s when we just fall into a pit of anxious thinking. Maybe our conditioning is all toward focusing exclusively on maybe what we are losing and not the gifts we’ve gotten or many possibilities. But how do you learn to accept the unknowable future?

Kimberly Brown: That’s the question, isn’t it, Sharon? How do any of us learn to accept the unknowable future? I don’t know if I would use the word “accept.” I don’t think it’s wrong. It’s just I don’t know how to do it. I think the best way to be with the unknowable future is just to be as close as we can to right here and right now. That’s what all these practices sort of lead to. They lead us back to here and to now. I think it was the composer John Cage. He had an idea of all you need to do is take the next right move. I think of that often because when I get caught up about, “That’s going to happen, this is going to happen, oh, my gosh, where’s that going to go?,” I sort of come back to my breath, come back to my body, and then I start to notice how I’m having a sense of doing something. When I notice that sense of “What am I going to do, what’s my next action?,” that’s when I come back to now and remember that, what’s the next right move, and the next right move is usually something like noticing my breath, taking a walk, doing some metta for myself or someone else. In doing that, that also helps me have confidence that I’ll be OK and I’ll be able to respond appropriately to whatever is needed at the time.

James Shaheen: I think of myself in that position, and I kept asking, “What am I going to do?” and having the confidence that somehow, since this has been going on for millennia, I will know as just a human being what to do. It got to a point when I was really stumped, it occurred to me to ask for help, and I did and everyone showed up. So after a while it was, What are we going to do? What’s next? That made all the difference?

Sharon Salzberg: You also write about the experience of losing a parent. You describe sitting at your mother’s bedside as she was dying, and you write that you were supported by a practice called “Calling the Lineage.” I was wondering if you could say more about this practice and how it’s supported you. 

Kimberly Brown: Every Buddhist tradition that I’ve studied in and every teacher will talk about lineage. They’ll talk about their teacher and their teacher’s teacher and their teacher’s teacher’s teacher, going all the way back to the Buddha. We talk about the lineage to honor these people that came in for us and to have gratitude for them. But it also connects us to all these other beings that came before us, that we’re not alone. There are lots and lots of others who’ve done it before us, and they will in the future and they are right now. That was very inspiring to me when I first started studying Buddhism, and then I realized too that we all have a lineage, even if we’re not a Buddhist student. Our lineage is all the people that have supported us, all the animals that have supported us, the earth that has supported us. You can go back to even before you were born. There were very likely people who helped your mom while she was pregnant, probably medical people and family and friends. People probably opened doors for her. So you can start to see that we all have this lineage, continued when we were kids. People taught us how to walk and to read. And even if our families weren’t so great, there were teachers and strangers and friends.

If you start to review that lineage, you realize it continues today. Lots of beings are supporting me, and I’m supporting a lot of beings. It can remind us that we really aren’t going through this alone. Like you said, James, you can ask for help. People come out and help you. And I don’t think this is in the book, but soon after my mom died, we had a terrible relationship. I wish I could say otherwise, but it was awful. And after she died, I kind of thought, “Well, I’ll be relieved. We didn’t have a great relationship. Or I won’t be so affected.” But it was very, very affecting. For about six months to a year, I was really, really struggling. My mind was very unsteady, and I really didn’t know what to do at times. A Tibetan teacher had said something like, “When you’re in trouble, you can just call on the buddhas because that’s their job. They’ll come. They’ll help you.” And it seems so silly. I clearly didn’t really believe that sort of thing. But one day, I was on the Upper West Side, I was walking down the street, I was feeling so hopeless. And I thought, “Well, alright, Buddhas, if you’re here, I really need some help.” I walked out of the subway. I was on my way to an appointment with a therapist. From the subway to her door, I encountered first a street vendor who said to me, “Hey, are you OK? Can I give you a cup of tea?” And he did. And then someone else smiled at me. And then I got a text from my oldest friend saying, “I’m thinking of you, are you OK?” And then of course, I got to my therapist. And I still continue to believe that that’s what’s meant by the Buddhas, at least today. That’s how they’re manifesting. They’re from each other, from us. They’re all here right now. And we can ask for that help and really tap into it.

James Shaheen: Just the mere act of asking can change everything. It makes us open to things we might otherwise have missed. But when someone we love is dying, it can be so challenging to say goodbye. Can you share some of what you learned about saying goodbye?

Kimberly Brown: There’s saying goodbye in a literal way: being present at someone’s death, actually being able to express the sense that they’re dying and you’re not going to interact anymore. And that can be something that people really avoid doing, at least in my experience. I’ve known a lot of people who have managed to not show up or come at the last minute when someone’s very sick because it’s so scary to do that, and who wants to say goodbye? So my experience is twofold. There’s this idea of actually being there and being present with this person while they’re going through this experience we call death and being able to wish them well and to perhaps thank them, to touch them and be with them and say, “I love knowing you.” And then there is the sense after someone dies, there’s a long time where I’m still saying goodbye because they feel so present. They’re very much part of me. Something happens every day that I think of my dear friend, Denise. So in this strange way, I didn’t have to say goodbye to her. She is right here. Or I’m constantly saying goodbye to her because I can’t interact with her anymore.

James Shaheen: In fact, it sounds pretty much like the state of grace that you say we can cultivate so that we can offer our full presence in challenging moments. Can you say more about what you mean by grace? Because what you just described seemed to require that. How do we tap into that state?

Kimberly Brown: Well, I think the state of grace, which I have seen a number of times, for myself and for others, when they go through a really profound loss or tragedy, that at least for a period of time, there’s a sense that they are able, we are able, to receive life as it unfolds with a sense of presence, with a sense of gratitude and appreciation. And to cultivate grace, I think it goes back once again to is it possible to do our best to let go of control, to let go of a fearful hope, to let go of resentment or a sense that something shouldn’t have happened? And part of the reason it’s hard to let go of that control is there’s sometimes a sense that we’ll be destroyed if we actually feel the profound loss. I remember maybe a month after my friend Denise died, I was walking down the street, and I thought, “Wow, it would be less painful to cut off my arm than to have this loss.” And at the same time, I wouldn’t want to not experience this grief. It felt like an honor to be able to be a mourner for her and to remember her.

Sharon Salzberg: Throughout your book, you write about complicated family dynamics that can get exceedingly complicated when grief is an issue. I remember someone in my larger community years ago died, and people were not behaving well within the family, within the friendship group toward one another, and I was puzzled. I thought, “It wasn’t like that when he was around, what’s going on?” And one of my friends just looked at me and said, “Don’t you understand? No one knows how to grieve.” We want to avoid it. We push it away. Certainly within families I have seen some very strange dynamics. It’s just so hard for us to feel that pain, to learn how to let go, to learn some skill. You write about the unique challenges that we face when we lose someone who may have been abusive or manipulative, and I’m wondering if you could say something about the range of that kind of complicated grief?

Kimberly Brown: Yeah, it’s all very complicated. And like your friend said, we don’t really know how to grieve. There’s sort of a myth in our culture that when something difficult happens, families will come together—”That’s what we do, we’re family.” And that doesn’t happen a lot. Often, people are really struggling, and they don’t know what to do and behave badly. There’s a couple of ways I think that we can work with people that are behaving badly during a difficult situation. My mom was an alcoholic, and she had a lot of strange friends, as many people with drinking or addiction problems have. She was in the hospital, and this younger man who was a friend of hers who she knew from the tavern said, “Kim, your mom said she was leaving the house to me. I just wanted to let you know this.”

Well, I remember laughing. But the people closest to me were so angry at him. He was so inappropriate, and here’s my mom dying. I think that it’s possible when people are behaving badly to just keep coming back to yourself, bringing your attention to your own heart, your own mind, your own breath, your own body, being able to take a pause. You don’t have to say anything right away. You don’t have to do anything. You can just sit for a minute. And you don’t have to be the one to make anybody else feel better. You can do your best, but other people are going to behave the way they’re going to behave. Using your wisdom to be able to say, “No, I’m not dealing with this right now” or “We can talk about this later” can be really useful.

Now, for someone who’s died who was difficult or abusive or with whom you had a very complicated relationship, it’s very likely you’re going to have what’s called complicated grief. That’s another myth: someone dies and our heart opens and we just feel so bad for them and we can say goodbye, and everything’s at peace now. But that’s not usually how it happens either because what happens when someone dies is you’ve lost any opportunity that you might have to mend this relationship. Even if that really wasn’t going to happen, there’s always that possibility. And you might have to honor a lot of your own deeply felt wishes that things had been different with that person.

In 2012, six months after my mom died, it was the first time I came to IMS, and I did a metta retreat with you and with Gina Sharpe. And it’s really from there on that I adapted that practice for myself. But when I got there, I was really in torment, and I almost didn’t come. My mom and I had this terrible relationship. I felt so guilty about it: I should have been a better daughter. She was very troubled. Why didn’t I help her more? All kinds of stuff. And going on that retreat is in many ways the single best thing I’ve done for myself because I was, at that point, just crying a lot and nothing was wrong. I didn’t have a sense of anything being wrong. And by maybe the fifth day, I realized I was going to be fine. This was a really hard thing to go through, and I was going to be fine. Being able to be with all of that that arises, the regrets and the sadness and the fear, so yes, to this complicated grief, to be really patient with yourself. Don’t have expectations of how your grief is going to go. Ask for help when you need it from friends, from counselors, and just remember that you’re going to be OK. You’re not always going to feel like this.

James Shaheen: In the context of complicated grief, you describe compassion as being able to say “I love you, and no.” Can you say more about this understanding of compassion, being able to say no?

Kimberly Brown: Most of us, me included, I was always taught it’s “I love you, but no” or “I love you, and yes,” with a real emphasis on if I’m a good person, if I’m a giving person, a caring person, a loving, compassionate person, well, then I’m going to do my best to honor everybody’s request to give everybody what they asked for. And yet that is not wisdom. There’s not a lot of wisdom in that. “I love you, and no” is saying I care about you. I don’t have to be defensive about my choices and my wisdom. And saying no doesn’t mean that I don’t love you, that I’m not a compassionate person. In fact, it can mean that I’m using my wisdom to know what’s best for both of us in this moment. I love you, and no, I won’t lend you any money. I love you, and no, you can’t stay on my couch again. The brahma-viharas really emphasize this by including equanimity or wisdom. So we can be compassionate and joyful and loving, and without some sense of balance, some sense of reason and the motivation for saying yes, which sometimes is because we want someone to like us or we want to appear as a good person, that things can get very messy, and we can contribute to things being more difficult. So one of the nicest practices is to be able to say, “I love you, and no,” without feeling defensive and having to explain, but to be able to come from a place of I care about you, I care about me, and no, and that’s OK, too.

James Shaheen: You also talk about grieving for strangers, which is something that surprised me a little bit because I haven’t thought of it quite that way before. So could you say more about this practice and what you learn from mourning the death and pain of people you don’t know?

Kimberly Brown: Every day, we hear about the deaths and the anguish of people that we’ll never meet or never even see, wars and natural disasters and even murders. And there’s a lot of them. I know when I look on social media, I’m scrolling through it, and I might see something about refugees in the Mediterranean who drowned, and then I see something about the war, Ukrainian soldiers, Russian soldiers, deaths, and then I see something about a terrible murder here in New York City, and the way I usually deal with that is to just keep going, to not stop, because I notice that it’s very overwhelming. I feel a helplessness and a sadness for the loss of these beings.

My practice has been to first sit and realize, “Wow, that’s terrible. That loss was terrible for them, for their families,” and allow my heart to open up to heartbreak, and then to give them, like you mentioned, some metta as part of honoring their death, to be able to feel this loss, this loss of a fellow being, and to be able to say, “Well, I wish you well, I wish you peace in your realm. I wish happiness for the people who love you. May you be free from suffering.” And when I do this, I am not doing it as asking God to do something in a mystical way. I’m doing it for me. I’m doing it for my own mind and my own heart so that I make a connection, and I don’t separate myself from what’s going on in the world. So I’m orienting my mind and my heart in a way of connection so that I keep this connection for these beings so that a time may come when I can help them. I can vote in a certain way to affect policies that might affect their life, and perhaps even in another lifetime, I will have a connection with these beings. I don’t have to disconnect from them or be overwhelmed by my grief. I can actually have it.

Sharon Salzberg: You also write about the experience of loss during a crisis, including pandemics, natural disasters, and civil unrest. In particular, you describe the dangers of comparison and the power of moving toward an understanding of shared suffering. How can we move from comparison and judgment to solidarity?

Kimberly Brown: I’m a terrible comparer. I’m always comparing myself to others, and usually in a way, of course, where they’re much better. That comparison really comes up in times of shared suffering, pandemic or blackout or whatever it is, something that we’re all experiencing and it feels like, “Oh, well, my suffering isn’t quite as great as theirs. My loss isn’t quite as terrible as this group or this person who’s struggling.” I think there are two things. I mean, one, of course, understanding that some suffering is really awful. It’s worse than what I’m experiencing in a certain way. There are degrees of suffering and struggle. But also to recognize I am still struggling and suffering as well as these other beings.

I can just talk about New York City. Everybody here struggled and suffered in that pandemic. Now, some people lost a lot. They lost people they loved. They lost their own health. They lost jobs. In our neighborhood, many, many people were out of work. A lot of them were in the hospitality and restaurant business and were really devastated. So to be able to keep that in mind, yes, there are degrees of struggle and suffering, and some people are having a harder time than me, and I am affected and this is really painful and together, we are all experiencing something devastating. I think sometimes with comparison, it just allows us to close our hearts to different people, often ourselves, and instead, we can open our hearts to everybody, ourselves and somebody who seems to be having an easy time and someone who’s having a hard time. Instead, we can say, gosh, we’re all in this, and for those of us who have less degree of struggle, well, how can we contribute? Because we can notice that we have more now and so we have something to give.

James Shaheen: Another theme that runs through the book is the guilt and regret that we can feel after someone passes away, all of the things that we could have done differently or what we may feel responsible for. I also notice that there’s a guilt of moving on: how can I turn my back on this person I loved and find joy elsewhere? That is not perhaps logical, but it’s something that we end up feeling. So you offer a Tibetan Buddhist ritual called the four powers as one way of moving through guilt and regret. Can you walk us through this ritual? How can it help us forgive ourselves? Whether we need that forgiveness or not, it seems to be healing.

Kimberly Brown: I actually learned it as something that you do right before bed. I had a Tibetan teacher, and he would say, “You know, you don’t have to make a big deal about this. Right when you get in bed and you go to sleep, you can review your day and just see, ‘Oh, those are things I did well,’ and be glad about it, and then ‘Those are things that maybe I didn’t do so well, and I would like to not do them again.'” So the same with when we have regrets and feelings about people who’ve died and the ways we could have done things differently. There are four steps: the power of regret, what’s called the power of reliance, the power of resolve, and the power of the remedy. The first, the power of regret, is really just noticing that you can acknowledge an action that was negative, that was unkind, that was impatient. So you’re just saying, “OK, yeah, I don’t have to get all upset about it. But I can recognize I’m human, and I made a mistake, and it wasn’t the greatest thing to say or do.”

The second step is the power of reliance. What you’re relying upon is your true intention. The fact that you can notice regret means that you notice and want to be beneficial, to not harm. So the power of reliance is really relying on that intention, your kindness, your wisdom. The easiest way is just to put your hand on your heart and remind yourself, “I really have an intention, I really have a desire to act wisely, to be kind. I want to be useful and loving and not harm.”

And the third is the power of resolve. This is making this decision. This is making a choice. Teachers have said that the best way to do that is to put it in the form of a vow: I vow not to criticize my son again, I vow not to be impatient with family members. One way you could do it is say that vow three times.

And then finally is the power of remedy. It’s a way to release the sense of guilt or shame or regret. I suggest that you light a candle because that was useful for me. While I’m lighting it, while you’re lining it, say “I forgive myself for making mistakes.” You could choose to apologize out loud to the person that you’ve harmed. It’s kind of a gesture of humility. It’s an understanding that doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person. It just means you’re human and you’re like everyone else. It’s very powerful to me to begin studying with Buddhists because the view is that there aren’t any inherently bad people. There are just a lot of bad mistakes and people making bad decisions and people harming. But it doesn’t mean that we’re bad, which often comes out after someone dies: “Oh, I must be a terrible person for having behaved like that.” And this allows us to let go of that and just be a little kinder to ourselves and recognize we’re just human, like everybody else.

Sharon Salzberg: You close the book with reflections on how we can honor loss through rituals and prayer. Can you share more about the rituals that you’ve developed to honor the losses in your life? And do you have any recommendations for people looking to develop rituals or ceremonies of their own?

Kimberly Brown: It’s interesting because I used to be very much a materialist. I didn’t believe in ritual or any sort of spirituality or prayer. And I still don’t today. I don’t believe in God, and I don’t really know about an afterlife or if we make connections with other beings. But what I’ve realized is that these rituals really help me. They really help orient my own mind and my own life in a certain way. For example, I have a shrine in my home, and it’s just a little shelf on a big bookshelf. It has candles, and it has pictures of everybody I know that have died. And not every night, but at least a couple nights a week, I light a candle and say a little prayer. Sometimes when I walk by that shelf, I say something to those beings. That’s part of my ritual. Also, when I pass a church or a temple, I almost always go in. You can almost always light a candle. I go in, and I do this and I say a prayer for people who have died or people who are still alive. It’s for me. It’s not about God. It’s not about anybody else. It’s about keeping my heart open and recognizing my wisdom and developing a way to orient my actions in every moment. It’s the idea of coming back and reorienting and reconnecting in every moment with what’s beneficial, what’s kind, what’s useful, where can I give, and coming back to that again and again through ritual, which is really powerful and plants a deep seed.

James Shaheen: Kimberly Brown, thanks so much for joining us. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of Kim’s new book, Navigating Grief and Loss, available now wherever books are sold. We like to close these podcasts with a short guided practice, so I’ll hand this over to Kim.

Kimberly Brown: Just take a minute to let go of your device. Set it aside for a second. Close your eyes. Put one hand on your heart, one hand on your belly. Just noticing that you’re breathing. You can notice your breathing by feeling your hands and your body moving. Noticing your feet, your seat, your belly. Relaxing your shoulder blades and relaxing the back of your head. Relaxing your forehead and your cheeks and your jaw. Just giving yourself permission to be here, permission to be feeling your breath.

Let’s take a moment together. I’m going to recite the five remembrances. These are five facts that are true of all human beings. They’re from the early Buddhist tradition from a sutta. I’m going to say it, and then I’ll leave some space so you can repeat it silently to yourself.

The first truth: I am of the nature to grow old. There’s no way to escape growing older.

I am of the nature to get sick. There’s no way to escape getting sick.

I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.

All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.

My actions are my only true belongings, and I can’t escape the consequences of my actions. They are the ground on which I stand.

Noticing your feet, your seat, your belly, and thanking yourself for practicing here today. You can open your eyes and conclude this practice. Thank you so much, James. Sharon, it’s a pleasure to see you.

James Shaheen: Thank you, Kim, and thank you, Sharon. It’s good to be with you both. You’ve been listening to Life As It Is with Kimberly Brown. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Life As It Is and Tricycle Talks are produced by As It Should Be Productions and Sarah Fleming. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!