EP 166: The Intersection of Neuroscience and Contemplative Practices | Sharon Salzberg

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you.

Care about from a unique perspective.

100% ownership for each and every circumstance.

We face in life, day in and day out. Hi.

Welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is your host, Fleet Maul.

And I'm thrilled to be here today.

With longtime friend and colleague Sharon Salzberg, one of the best known mindfulness teachers in the world and really the beloved teacher of the loving kindness practices or meta practices from the Theravada Buddhist tradition that have been of so great a benefit to so many. So with Sharon, we're really exploring, exploring mindfulness and, and what we how we understand mindfulness from a current modern psychological and neuroscientific perspective and, and then really delving into the power of loving kindness practice to transform our inner psychology, transform really how we experience ourselves and how we experience the world and how this can set us up for really thriving in life. So Sharon Salzberg has written, she's a best selling author with four or five best selling books. One of her more recent books is Real Life, Shel Said, the well known book called Loving Kindness. She's really considered the leading expert on the loving kindness practice. So really how to transform, how to really befriend ourselves, how to become our own very best friend and transform our inner psychology, one that's really positive and setting ourselves up for really our best life. So listen into this conversation with both beloved mindfulness teacher Sharon Salzberg and I'm.

Really happy to be here with Sharon Salzberg. How are you, Sharon?

I'm well, thank you.

Oh, it's great to do this with you and I'm so happy you could be part of our summit. So thank you very much for that. I'm going to share your bio with folks and then we'll get started. Okay?

Sure. Great.

All right. Sharon Salzberg is a meditation pioneer, world renowned teacher and New York Times bestselling author. Sharon she is one of the first to bring mindfulness and love and kindness meditation to mainstream American culture over 45 years ago, inspiring generations of meditation teachers and wellness influencers. Sharon is a co founder of the Insight Meditation society in Barrie, Massachusetts and the author of 12 books, including New York Times bestseller Real Happiness now in its second edition and her seminal work Loving Kindness. Her 2023 release, Real Life the Journey from Isolation to Openness and Freedom and is now available from Flatiron Books in hardcover, ebook and audiobook formats. Her podcast the Meta hour has amassed 6 million downloads and features interviews with thought leaders from the mindfulness movement and beyond. And you can find all about Sharon's work@shonsalzberg.com so Sharon, with your background as a longtime dedicated practitioner of meditation, mindfulness, the contemplative life, and a world renowned mindfulness and meta teacher, this must give you some insights into the human mind and human behavior. So what have you learned along the way about how you know some of the dynamics of our mind and how meditation and mindfulness can influence that?

Well, I should say first of all that when you say meta, you mean M E T T A, Right, which is kindness.

Yeah, the loving kindness practice, right?

Yeah.

Well, you know, I went to India when I was 18 years old, so my whole formulation as an adult and understanding the mind and emotion and my emotional landscape was all based on the meditative experience. I was doing meditation before I ever went to therapy, for example, or practiced much introspection in other ways. And it wasn't only the meditation. It was also really the kind of approach of the Buddhist perspective which I consider a psychology more than a philosophy or a religion. And from that perspective, it's quite interesting, you know, that consciousness, for example, is considered to be pure knowing. Like we know a sight, we know a sound, we know a thought, something like that. And then there are all these little filters, these mind states that affect how we know. Do we know with hatred? Do we know with love? Do we hear a sound with regret? Do we hear a sound with delight? And so that just became the map for paying attention from within and beginning to understand. Oh, it's different. And the consequence of that was really a kind of confidence in understanding the world and myself. That was different from maybe the stories I'd been told. Like vengefulness is strong, you know, like never give up a grudge or something like that. But when you actually look at your experience.

What you feel in your body, what's happening in the emotional landscape as you hold on to that grudge is not so strong, it's pretty brittle, it's pretty breakable. Or many of us have been taught things like compassion, loving kindness, generosity, gratitude. They're kind of stupid, you know, they're sentimental and they make you weak and be full of regrets about giving too much away or whatever. But when you really look at your experience directly, you think, no, that's it. That's a whole other source of strength I could be tapping. And so it's this amazing adventure.

So one of the well known quotes from from the Buddha is the mind is the Forerunner of all things. And from what you're talking about, I mean, we, we could say, well, that's thoughts. Although thoughts come and go, they're pretty ephemeral. But when they become mind states, that really does start to influence how we're perceiving the world and how we show up in the world. So is that kind of what that's referring to, those mind states that begin to really filter our experience and then really determine who we're being?

Well, it's like having a strong habit. And so it's kind of fascinating to notice, and I think it fits in well with many schools of Western psychology. So, for example, from within that framework, one might have a strong tendency toward what they would call delusion, which in that context means being kind of spaced out, maybe going numb, not letting yourself feel too much, or being a little vague about things, which is very much my type, more than any of the other types that they describe. And so one of the consequences of that, one of the problems with that is that you're then reliant on someone else's vision of what's happening, what's real, in order to kind of get awake, you know. And so I have many stories and many experiences of me doing just that. And yet, you know, that was probably taken up by me in a very wise way in some really challenging circumstance in my life. I know it was. And it was a smart thing to do for a little while when I had no other options, perhaps, or none that I could see. And that doesn't mean I want it to be my go to place forever. But what we're invited to is not to disdain those habits or mind states, or be judgmental or harsh about them, but to develop a different relationship to them so that we can recognize them, realize we do have options, and in many circumstances perhaps reach for one of those options.

I completely agree with you that I think Buddhism and the teachings we have is much more of a psychology than a religion or a philosophy even. And it's amazing what a thorough, well worked out psychology and mapping of consciousness and mapping of mind and mind states was developed.

2500 years ago, or even if it developed and elaborated over the next 500 years or so, still a long time ago. And I don't even think in the, in, you know, in the height of Greco Roman culture, they had beautiful philosophy, obviously Plato and Socrates and Aristotle, but they weren't really developing a psychology of the same kind. And it wasn't as well thoroughly mapped out in terms of how the mind really works. And we didn't see begin to see that in the west until the 20th century, really. So it's pretty amazing that such a thorough mapping out of the mind goes back that far. And.

So, you know, humans have, in terms of practices like mindfulness meditation, other contemplative practices, the loving kindness practice, and so forth. Humans have known for millennia that these practices are incredibly effective, that they have lasting benefits, that they can lead to really profound states of liberation and so on. And so we don't really need Western science to confirm that or affirm that. At the same time, you know, it is kind of interesting that Western science and neuroscience in particular is confirming and affirming a lot of what these traditions have been telling us about these practices for several thousand years. And.

You know, I'm wondering whether maybe, you know, and, and we have colleagues who are Buddhist practitioners, or at least mindfulness practitioners who are doing some of this research. People like Richie Davidson, Judd Brewer, Misa Jha and others are many, many, many researchers. And there's literally thousands of scientific studies have been done on mindfulness. And.

I'm wondering whether at the very least, this can maybe refine some of our understanding of these practices and their impacts or even maybe help us adjust and refine some of our teaching methodologies. At the very least, it's opening a lot of minds to these practices because they see the sciences there. So I'm just curious about your thoughts about, about, you know, what we've seen in the last couple decades of all this research on these practices and how that's impacting this realm of meditation, contemplative spirituality, and so forth.

Well, at the very, very least, you know, as you say, it's tremendous benefit, I think, of those researchers, people like Jon Kabat Zinn, who formulated mindfulness based stress reduction.

As almost like the, the early translators of old, you know, who brought the teachings from India to Tibet, for example, and, and the Buddha's recommendation was always teach in the local idiom. So what is our idiom? You know, and I, you know, like many people of a certain age, you know, I remember the day when, you know, you'd say mindfulness and nobody would know what you're talking about or have not the Vegas idea or think you were weird or. When I first came back from India in 1974, and I would be introduced or introduced myself at a party or some social situation as a meditation teacher, people would often kind of like, that's weird, you know, or occasionally somebody would say to me, did you meet the Beatles over there? I'd say, no, sadly, they went when I was in high school, and different lineage anyway, but.

And nowadays, I think, largely because of the research, it's a whole other world in terms of people being curious and at least thinking about maybe approaching it and seeing for themselves, you know, if it's of any benefit. It's been a whole revolution, which I really. I really lay on that ability to explore scientifically. I think there are a lot of questions, you know, in terms of.

One'S goal. And also I think it's incumbent upon everyone, both contemplatives and scientists, to.

Understand we can learn a lot from a lot of sources. So in terms of the learning, I was reminding Richie just the other day, we were in a zoom panel together of many panels we have been on, where I've had a perennial question which was, let's say you have a great meditation master who is renowned worldwide for their tremendous loving kindness and compassion, and you pop them into an FMRI machine and ask them to do a compassion meditation, and the wrong part of their brain lights up. Do you then say, maybe our instrumentation is not refined enough? This is just a beginning, baby. Pioneering science. Maybe we have a long way to go. Or do you say, guy has an undeserved reputation.

Every time because we do this a lot? Richie would say, science must always be humble. And I remind him of that 20 years later, just the other day. And I think it's true for all of us. We need that kind of humility to feel. I don't look to science to authenticate, as you say, meditation and even the methodology.

In addition to its outreach, potential, and realization. I think of it often in terms of the stumbling blocks people have. For example, say, having a daily meditation practice, which is not that easy.

I think about the science of habit formation and how some really exciting young Tibetan teachers are trying to understand that so they can help people have an easier time developing the habit of meditation along with the other habits that we might have. That's very exciting to me, but we all need to understand that goals can be different as well. I was once on a stage with another researcher, Barbara Fredrickson, who does a lot of research. It's a loving kindness meditation. And Barbara has since changed her mind about what I'm about to describe. But at the time, she was saying that, well, when you do loving kindness meditation in the classical way, you're offering phrases of loving kindness and support to various categories of being, starting with yourself. So you may be silently repeating things like, may I be safe, be happy, not as like beseeching, but as gift giving or offering. And so you move from yourself to somebody you really care about on through various categories till we come to all beings everywhere. So Barbara was saying that she felt it was important for somebody to have some kind of positive experience in doing the practice within a couple of weeks or they may be too discouraged to continue. And that that was difficult because so many people have difficulty offering loving kindness to themselves. And I said to her up on the stage, I said, why don't you change the order? Like have them start with somebody that's easier, you know, your puppy, your child, whatever it is. And she said, I can't do that because I'm interested in the research where it has to be totally, totally replicable. Everyone has to be doing the same thing in the same sequence. And. And I said I would change the sequence in a second with like a living, breathing human being in mind, you know, who just needs a kind of alteration because there are, there are underlying principles to this which in that practice include doing it the easiest way possible. It's not a practice that we benefit from struggle in any way. And Barbara has changed her mind since then. But I just sat there thinking we have different goals actually and we may approach things very differently.

Yeah, absolutely. One of the things I've been involved in in research over the years with our prison work, our mindfulness based prison programs and you know, I tend to really synthesize a lot of things and you're building a whole program, you're bringing a lot of different things that you know, are effective, know can be impactful and you know, you don't know what that tipping point is for anyone, individuals, but researchers, they want to identify that one thing in there. That's the thing that's making the difference. Forget about the rest of that. We're only going to pay for you to do this one little thing here because that's the active ingredient. So there are different goals driving research often. I agree with you that the science on habit change I think is one place that's really worth looking into in terms of helping people develop a practice. And I've also found the science on embodiment and interoceptive awareness, greater awareness of the internal landscape of the body, be really helpful in terms of how I teach mindfulness and helping people have more of an experience earlier on, that's going to help them keep going. So I think there are some things there.

So.

This summit is all about exploring various approaches and methodologies for rewiring the brain. That's the Name of the summit for healing trauma, healing attachment wounds for as well as for optimizing overall health and well being, life, performance, happiness, longevity, and so forth. And so I know that you teach mindfulness and meditation, loving kindness practice, so more in the context of the dharma than in neuroscience, as we've been discussing and. But I wonder if you could talk about what you've seen. Maybe we'll start with mindfulness and then, then we'll go circle back to loving kindness, what you've seen in terms of some of the lasting impacts for yourself and others over time with, with consistent mindfulness practice. Because if you do see lasting effects that become stable, then one could assume based on current science, that there is some rewiring of the brain going on from what we now know about the brain. So I'm wondering, what do you see in terms of lasting impacts that become, you know, sort of sustainable?

Well, one thing I feel I've clearly seen, both myself and so many students at this point is.

It'S almost like a change in the holding environment or the internal environment within which various things come and go. It's sort of like externally. It reminds me of the story of this woman, Kate Bastrop, who's a chaplain and works for the Forestry service in Maine. And she was sent out on a call to be with his family, where their young child had wandered off in the woods and was later found safely, you know, and unharmed. But they didn't know that at the time. And so she's sitting with the parents and the mom says something to her like, how kind of the forestry service to send you to us to keep me from freaking out. And Kate said, oh, in contrast, I'm here to be with you while you freak out, you know, instead of avoiding a challenging feeling. And what a circumstance, of course, you know, you'd have that. It's the surround, it's the atmosphere, it's the way it's met. That's the kind of the whole point. And so over time, what we see with practicing mindfulness is that some of the same thoughts or patterns or emotions may arise or you may have like a chronic physical pain condition. So the sort of manifestation of what's happening could be the same, but it's met in a completely different way. So how do we ordinarily meet a challenging feeling, either physical or emotional or whatever, with shame, with bitterness, perhaps with blame, with a sense of kind of fatality, like, this is all I will ever feel for the rest of my life, or this is going to become this and this and this and this, you know, with kind of projection and learning not to do all of those what we call add ons, but to be with the experience more as it is, in a kinder way, with more balance, gives us a sense of space and perspective. And within that, we may see many different options for taking action or seeking change or something like that. But it's not that the very thing, you know, the fear, the whatever it might be is never going to appear again, but. But we will have a totally different experience. And so my favorite example of that is probably my friend Sylvia Boorstein, who describes herself as a recovering catastrophizer. She says she's 86 now, and she says, I'm the kind of person who I'll call one of my adult children and they don't answer the phone, so the worst must have happened. And sometimes the worst does happen, of course, but not every single time. And. And she said, it never occurs to me. They might be taking a shower or they fell in love. They don't feel like talking to their mother. And so rather than like checking it out, you know, she'll just start spinning. So that's why she got into meditation practice, was because she was haunted by that sort of anticipatory, unreal anxiety. And so.

I think she still has some of the same thoughts, but she's totally different with them. So she said to me the other day, she said, I have a new mantra. So I said, what is it? And she said, not every bus ends up in a ditch.

You know, and so we can greet our even deepest habits and the things that haunt us the most differently. And then we have, we have a lot of space.

It sounds like the practice over time.

Gives us, changes our relationship with our own mind and gives us a way to work with it.

Yeah, yeah. And that feels stable, you know, it's not, it's not so circumstantial. So.

Yeah.

Well, let's talk about meta or loving kindness practice. So can. Can with consistent practice of this, of loving kindness, can we actually really become more loving, more compassionate, more altruistic in a sustained way, not just as we're doing the practice, but really over time that it actually changes how we are in the world, that we actually are more loving, we are more generous, altruistic, compassionate and so forth?

I think we are. And in fact, one of the challenges with doing that kind of practice is that the results show up much more in our lives than it does in, say, the anomie. She would say Mishi ja would say 12 minutes a day that you practice, but I'll say 20, you know.

Much more than that little period when you're sitting on a cushion or you're dedicating your time specifically to the practice. I once had a friend who'd been doing loving kindness practice for about three years take me out to lunch in New York. And he said, this is going to be like a confessional lunch. So I said, oh, what? What'd you do? And he said, well, I've been doing loving kindness practice for about three years now. And whether I'm on retreat or I'm just sitting at home, that's my practice. And I can't say that my experience.

Three years later is all that different when I'm meditating than it was in the beginning. But he said, I'm like a totally different person. I'm different with myself, like when I make a mistake. I'm different with my family. I'm different with my community. I'm different ethically. And then he looked at me and he said, is that enough? I said, yeah, I kind of think it's enough, you know, but we. We tend to look at that very specific little period, like, am I flying it? Or whatever it is that we want. And it may not be there, but we find. And I also don't think loving kindness is necessarily emotional, which is another trap. You know, it could be like that moment when you realize, I haven't been listening to this person at all. Let me really be here. And you open and you're surprised by them. You know, in some way, you've been holding on to some rigid idea of who they were. It's not necessarily who they are. Or you realize I'm kind of impatient. I want this person to finish talking to me in the elevator. You know, I'm in New York, so that's never done. But, you know.

And you realize maybe they have no one else to talk to. You just kind of relax and. And you're there, you know. But doesn't mean the person's going to be your best friend or you feel these huge waves of. Of the emotion we call love. But you feel connection. And out of that connection comes a kind of caring, like maybe. Well, maybe happy.

We.

We get curious about somebody rather than withdraw and just find them an annoyance or. Or especially, I think they're all the many, many beings we just look through out of habit. We don't look at. We just can't. We dehumanize. They play some function in our lives. That's who they are. And when we realize that and we just generate a little loving kindness, and it's like, oh.

Wow. People tell me, and I think it's true, that zoom is a perfect vehicle for that because you get all these little boxes and you can just look at people and silently think, maybe happy. And you too, and you as well, be happy, be peaceful, and then see what happens.

That might be an antidote to zoom exhaustion. Good thing to try.

Yeah. And, you know, our colleague Richie Davidson, some of his research has pointed to that some of these qualities that are being cultivated in both mindfulness, loving kindness, practice, insights, presence, mindfulness, altruism, generosity, and so forth, are actually. They've identified that these are contributors to a felt sense of well being, and they've actually identified neural substrates so that if you practice these things, you're going to develop these qualities and your overall sense of well being is going to increase over time.

I think he's wanted to do research, too. I don't know how you design it.

On not only the effect within yourself, which I think can be experienced very directly and powerfully, but kind of your effect on the environment around you. Do people relax more around you? They feel less threatened or less. They have to prove themselves. They're more accepted. It'd be an interesting experiment.

Absolutely it would. There seems to be a. Maybe not always linear, but certainly some relationship between who we're being and what shows up in our lives. So your new book, Real Life the Journey from Isolation to Openness and Freedom, you speak about the contracted states that we find ourselves in. And I wonder if you could talk about that. That's kind of the opposite about what we were just talking about. Openness, generosity, altruism, compassion, love and kindness. So we often find ourselves contracting. I wonder if you could talk about that.

Yeah, and I've had interesting conversations with Judd, for example, Judd Brewer, who uses those same words of contraction and expansion to talk about different states. Well, I think classically, you know, there's certain states not when we feel them or even perhaps feel them intensely, but when we become overcome by them. Right. When we really start drowning in them, that just shut us down. Grasping, feeling, I don't have enough. I am not enough.

That leads to a kind of addictive tendency, right?

Fear.

Intense, intense anger. You know, it's not that it's bad or wrong. I'm not saying we should judge ourselves or condemn ourselves, but just look at its nature. And again, it's not feeling it or even feeling it intensely, but when we're lost in it. So if you think about the last time you were really angry yourself, really, really angry at yourself. Let's just bring it up for a moment.

It's not a time where you're also thinking, you know what? I did five great things the same morning. Those five great things, that they are gone. Right?

We're.

We're kind of locked down in some way. I am bad. I am wrong. I am terrible. And so what would it be like to admit a mistake.

Look at making amends or lessons learned.

Using the energy of the distress to seek change, but not sort of spinning out and all that burning and condemnation and. And shut down. I'm always this way. I'll always be this way. Right? And so that's really the path. It's. It's saying, yeah, there's. There's so many states where. When we are lost in them. And delusion is another one my favorite, you know, where it's just like this sort of chronic sense of, let's just take a nap and deal with it later, maybe, you know.

And. And so we. We discover for ourselves what our own habits may be and. And.

Really finding that fine line. You know, you don't want to be judging what you're discovering, but instead realizing that if I'm lost in this state, it's like I stop breathing. You know, talk about embodiment. I don't see options. I'm stuck. I'm trapped. And that is different than being determined and one pointed. And all of which could be great. You know, it's. It's very much that feeling of being trapped. And we can look. When do I feel most trapped?

Well, when someone finds themselves really stuck, you know, and they've really been kind of hijacked by strong.

Mind states or emotions and. Or even just thought patterns that are really. And we know that trauma can do this as well, that it kind of locks us into a fight or flight or shutdown kind of situation. What practices have you found most helpful in terms of helping somebody kind of release that and begin to reopen again?

Well, I think it's both sides of things. Like, another traumatic response that we hardly ever hear about is tendon befriend.

Where.

We'Re not necessarily in fight, flight, freeze, or faint. They keep extending that modality, but there's a sense of joining with others, not being so isolated, attend and befriend. Like when I was in New York City in March 2020, I just gotten here after traveling, and anxiety was really building and illness was really growing, and it was. It was really a hard Time here, and.

I was teaching and somebody. It was a situation where the speaker would sit in the audience until they were formally introduced. Then you get up on the stage so they're still sitting in the audience. And someone was sitting next to me and high, high anxiety, really suffering. So I began offering some possibilities, all of which can be useful, by the way, one of which, which I'm sure people have talked about.

Is having your out breath be longer than your in breath, so that the parasympathetic nervous system will take over from the sympathetic nervous system and your, your whole being will start to kind of chill more. So she wasn't interested in that. And so I said, well, you know, loving kindness practice is a significant kind of healing agent in times like that.

And she wasn't interested in that either. So I just looked her and I said, is there anyone you can help? She lit up and she said, yeah, you know, I have like this elderly neighbor and maybe I could slip a note under her door and offer to get her groceries or something like that. And I thought, oh, look at that. That's very interesting. So there are many practices. If we practice a kind of mindfulness, and there are many ways of describing it, which means not trying to undo the, let's say the fear that's come up, but surround it in a certain way with presence, with balance, with kindness, then we will discover many things.

And we won't be driven by the fear into maybe reckless behavior or shutting down what could be really good possibility for us.

So there are lots of ways of describing that. Mindfulness. One way we do it is using the acronym RAIN R A I N. Recognize what's happening with fear. Acknowledge it, like feel it in your body.

Investigate it like these, these emotions tend to be very complex. Like what else is cooking, you know, regret, putting yourself down. Just watch the fear movie in a way, and then non identification or nurturing, like be kind to yourself anyway, even though what's going on is difficult. And then things will shift, they will just change all on their own. Very strongly too. One of my Tibetan teachers, Sonny Rinpoche, he has this practice equals handshake practice, which is really kind of the same thing. Like he calls those states our beautiful monsters. And he said, approach it, shake its hand. Like it's everything really. We've been saying, like you, your awareness is stronger actually than this state. The state is just visiting. It may be really intense, you may visit a lot, but it's still just visiting. You can be there and as you know, like a very.

Vast oversimplification of another Tibetan practice would be invite the fear into dinner. You know, don't let it have the run of the house, because that's dangerous. But you don't have to be so freaked out. You don't have to be so ashamed of what you're feeling. You are stronger. Your awareness, your essential qualities are stronger than. Than the fear. And so I use that example once when I'm teaching, and somebody in the room didn't like it. So I said, okay, how about inviting, like, your beautiful monsters or your demon in for a cup of tea? And they didn't like that either. So I said, okay, how about a cup of tea to go? And they said, that's okay. So there's some measure of okay, we're here together.

That we can do.

That's great. That's great. There's a famous story from the Tibetan yogi, Saint Milarepa, where these demons moved into his cave and he tried every strategy in a book to get rid of him. And he was a great adept. He had powers. He couldn't get rid of them. And then he finally. It dawned on him to make friends with them and serve them some tea. And.

They finally left. So when we do find ourselves stuck in this contracted state, by that time we've already been kind of hijacked in a sense. I'm wondering. It seems like we're almost always moving back and forth in this kind of spectrum from openness to contraction. And I'm wondering with regular, consistent mindfulness practice that we might be aware of that at a more subtle level. So we start to pick up, even when. When we just begin to start to contract, we just begin to experience a little fear, anxiety or something, and. And maybe having that kind of mindful and being curious about that, like being able to labor it. Be curious about. Being curious about, oh, I find myself opening, or, oh, this I'm starting that. Actually, that awareness might make us a little less likely to be hijacked.

I think that's absolutely true. It's often a question of timing, because by the time we might notice what's going on, it's already been amplified by, this is never going to change. I'm the only one who ever feels this. You know, all these other things that happen. I will say also, I think that's the foundation, it's the absolute foundation of all the work that then follows. But if. If we can do it, and it takes kind of understanding that you're not being hypocritical, you're not trying to force Anything or coerce anything. We also can stretch sometimes, you know, like. Like loving kindness is a practice of stretching for many of us. It's not our first instinct. Someone's, like, talking to us in the elevator and annoying us.

But if you have a kind of curiosity about it, and again, nothing coercive.

Then you might. Well, let's just say this example. If you have the habit of assessing yourself at the end of the day, like, how did I do today? Let's say you have the habit of pretty well only remembering the mistakes you made and what you did wrong and what you could have said better and how you didn't show up in that place. Let's just say so much so that you think about that comment you made during the meeting and it's like your whole sense of who you are and all that you'll ever be just collapses into that stupid comment. It's almost like asking yourself, anything else happened today? Like, anything good, any good within me or absent that, like, wishing yourself well, may I be safe and may I be happy. And seeing what happens from that. So it's not moving from a true place, like all that condemnation to a phony place it shouldn't be. It's moving from a true place to another true place that tends to get very little air time. So we kind of consciously stretch. Like, what do I have to be grateful for? Anything.

Just to see what that terrain is. Like where all those people we encounter, like in the supermarket or all those places, and. And we don't really look at them, consciously look at them or make a resolve. I'm gonna thank three people today for some little service. And so kind of put yourself in a situation where you're just experimenting. Like, what's it like when I do this? And. And it brings a. A tremendous kind of balance.

And so many of us suffer from fairly negative internal environment. Like, we're really hard on ourselves, constant self criticism. And it doesn't make a lot of sense if you reflect on it. Like, who. Who's going to be our best friend if not us? I mean, we are our closest companion for this lifetime. But, you know, there's a lot of things behind that. The psychology of the negativity bias and all kinds of evolutionary, biological things that kind of set us up to. To be that way. Fortunately, it doesn't have to stay that way. It sounds like your friend that invited you out for the confessional lunch who've been doing a loving kindness. Practice consistently wasn't really having any big experiences during a practice, but he did notice that his internal environment, his relationship with himself had become somewhat kinder or friendlier.

Yeah, yeah, absolute. His relationship with others, his family, you know, his community and so on, you know, very much a change.

Yeah. So, you know, in terms of our, you know, how we function in life and you know, being able to perform well in life and you know, have relatively not happy all the time, but relatively happy, fulfilling lives and be successful in relationship and, you know, the dealing with the challenges of our lives, it seems to be helpful to have a fairly flexible and adaptive mind, like psychological flexibility and being able to roll with things and be creative. And so I'm wondering if you could talk about how some of these practices can increase that kind of flexibility, our willingness to kind of pivot and change and see things differently and kind of roll with the things. Because especially in these times it seems like maybe it's always been this way, but we seem to be in very uncertain times these days. And so it would seem to be really helpful the more of that kind of flexibility and adaptability activity we could have.

Well, for me, in some funny way, it comes back to one of the first things I ever learned in meditation practice, which was a real shift in perspective. So the first instruction I ever got, I gone off to India to learn how to meditate and after a few months entered this intensive 10 day retreat led by SN Goenka. And the very first instruction he ever gave was sit down and feel your breath. Just feel the sensations of, of your Internet breath. And my first response, which I've often talked about, was, that's really stupid. You know, like, where's the magical, esoteric, fantastic technique that it's going to change my whole life? I came all the way to India and then I thought, how hard can this be? You know, what'll it be like, 800 breaths, 900 breaths before my mind starts to wander into my absolute shock? It was like one breath or maybe half a breath and I'd be gone and I'd be way gone. And I kept hearing, but I never believed in the beginning that the really important moment was after I was gone. I've been lost. I'd fallen asleep, or I'd gone to la la land for a while. And then came a moment where I realized, oh, it's been quite some time since I last felt a breath. So in the beginning that was the invitation to jump on the train of self judgment and just tear into myself forever. But what I kept hearing was practice letting go gently and starting over. You can't start over.

Right. Nothing's been ruined, nothing's been lost. You can begin again. And so I slowly began practicing in that way. And I realized, oh, that is the root of resilience. And how many times a day in ordinary life do I actually have to do a course correction? I've made a mistake and I have to start over or I've fallen down in some way and I have to either pick myself up or let others help me up, start over. And like, we're always beginning again. And so rather than holding on rigidly to anything, that became what Sonya River J. Called exercising the letting go muscle. Right. Just doing it again and again and again and again. Actually, in a way that wasn't about giving myself a lecture, you know, it's time to let go or anything like that. It became like this muscle pattern. Like, okay, I've been having a conversation. I haven't listened to a word you said. I realized that let go. All those thinking about email stuff, I'm back. I'm back fully and. And completely. And realizing I have. I might have to do that 50 billion times. That's not a sign of failure. That's actually a skill to be able to let go and start over. And for me, it actually comes back to that lesson one, you know, again and again. Because, you know, we tend to think of a path as very linear, like lesson one or 101. Done with that. I've moved on. But we're always kind of cycling back.

Yeah. Wow. That. That ability to just always recognize that there's always a fresh start in every moment. We can make a fresh start really simplifies things and could open things up so much for us, and it's sometimes hard to get there. We just feel the weight of what we think is going to happen, what we thought just had happened, all our thoughts and opinions about that and our identity around all that, and to be able to just stop and go, okay, a new beginning. Wow, very powerful. So it sounds like a lot of what you're talking about, in a way, you began in that Goinka retreat and, you know, working with your breath and so forth, that we're. We're really talking about training the mind. And, you know, based on current neuroscience, we. We could assume that we're also rewiring the brain or reshaping our neural architecture in the process of that. But there is some ability to actually train the mind. I mean, we learn. We're training the mind and we learn. We develop new capabilities of working with our mind from these practices.

Yeah, well, you Know, I'm also old enough so that, you know, when I was studying science in high school or something, there was no notion of neuroplasticity, like after what, the age of 25 or something like that, unless you had a dire circumstance and it was only downhill, you know, that it wasn't a question of development or evolution in a positive sense. And that's totally turned around.

And I think, you know, when one is emphasizing rewiring the brain, what we're really saying is.

This is a question of real embodiment. It's not a question of giving yourself a lecture, of forcing yourself some circumstance. Like I don't really feel like listening, but I, you know.

Things shift, things change. Our values change, our priorities change, our sense of comfort and discomfort changes. It starts to feel less and less comfortable to be in a tirade, you know, for example, it doesn't feel powerful at all.

It doesn't feel uncomfortable the way we once feared to be generous, you know.

And so we learn and I think sometimes the hardest part of it all is.

Taking that step toward trying to make it real, to trying to practice something, whatever it is, you know, because it's like baby steps and we fall down and we have to start over and that's not that comfortable. Or maybe we think it's not for me, it's for everybody else. But to sort of claim the possibility for oneself seems to me to be, you know, often quite difficult and, and just essential.

So some of the audience.

Are not currently, they don't currently have a classic mindfulness meditation practice or loving kindness practice. And, and they, you know, they're, they're very interested in this idea being able to train the mind and rewire the brain and we're improving their life outcomes, their health and well being and so forth. What might be a good way to get started? I mean, I'm, I know your books have practices within them and there's so much out there today, but how might somebody get started?

I mean, there is so. There are so many ways. I think.

Their books are absolute. You know, I think.

One thing, I mean, many of the scientists who are part of this community will, will say Richie or Amishi.

That in their labs they have found that you don't have to be formally meditating 18 hours a day to get some result. You know.

Amisha, you'll say 12 minutes and, and because we're all friends, you know, often in some kind of discussion, often teasing, and I say, well, I don't know if you go for the bare minimum, you know, like every time or gee, that's, that's very American. Like, what's the least amount of time I can put into this thing and get what I want?

But it's not long. I mean, it's the regularity of it that seems most important. And from my point of view, an important component not only is self knowledge, which I'll get into in a minute, but understanding something about what the goal is. Because so many people think that the goal is to wipe out all thinking or to have a perfectly blank mind and it's not going to happen. And then they feel bad and they feel they failed and. But remember, we're not trying to destroy any experience, but create a different holding environment that can be with the joys and the sorrows in a, in a different way and everything in between.

So some kind of understanding I think is really important. Whether you do that through reading or conversation with friends or a teacher or class or an app, however it comes just to remind yourself, okay, whatever I experience is really okay. And then self knowledge, I think is, is helpful. Like one of the things that Mishi has said to me is I think they found 12 minutes a day, three to five times a week.

Is a, like a good protocol. And I said for me, three to five times a week won't work because for me it'll be Monday and I'll think I'll start on Wednesday, it'll be Wednesday, I'll do three times on Saturday and be done. I never do it. But every day is every day. And so kind of evolving what feels right to you as a short term challenge, Not I'm going to do this every day for the rest of my life, but every day or three to five times a week, if that works for you for two weeks or for a month. It's very finite and you do it and then you check it out. So I want to do it again. So I want to do something different. And when you are assessing, remember, my friend, don't look so much at that 12 minutes a day or whatever. Look at your life. How was I meeting a stranger? How was I giving a talk? The thing I've always been afraid of, public speaking. How was I, you know, how was. What was my experience doing this or doing that?

And that's how we know how about the importance of. You've been very involved in, in the development of a renowned meditation community in Barrie, Massachusetts that started way back in the 70s. And so just the importance of community because, you know, if you have a local center you can go to Somewhere a yoga center, a mindfulness center, some kind of place where meditation done, you might go there regularly because you enjoy seeing the people and you have a cup of tea and you have a good time and you also get your 12 minutes or your 15min or your half hour of meditation in. And also we know even from current neuroscience and what Dan Siegel is calling interpersonal neurobiology, that part of that brain rewiring and the beneficial impacts is also happening in the relational field, not just inside the skull encapsulated brain. So I wonder if you could talk about the importance of community and being able to leverage community to support us in developing a practice.

Well, it is very important, I think, you know, not everybody is going to be able to do that, for example, and I certainly learned that during the pandemic, you know, where I read those chats, you know, and I, you know, so many people were, are in a caregiving, for example, you know, they're in, that's their role in the family. And they can't go off to even that community center, although I wish they could. And.

We can develop that sense of community in many ways, but we have such a tendency toward a kind of isolation, like, I'm the only one who feels this. I'm the only one. And it's never true. We're never all alone, however alone we might genuinely feel. And so being able to share experience, to be heartened by the fact that someone else was falling asleep, meditating, or got afraid that their service could never be enough or whatever it is, it's, it's very encouraging to be able to share and, and be with people in those ways. And so even if it's online, even if it's in your head, you know, because you're reading other people's experiences on an app.

And you're choosing not to maybe, you know, get on that bulletin board, but you're, you're reading them for sure.

Whatever form it's going to take, it's, it's a really helpful thing.

Well, thank you so much, Sean. It's been incredibly rich and, and really appreciate your contribution to our summit. And you know, I, I, I think it's.

I remember in the early days of the neuroscience research, I like a lot of people, I was saying, well, duh, yeah, this stuff works okay, We've known that for a long time. But it is an interesting time to be alive with all these different things coming together now and lots of different languages. And as you said, the Buddha said that people need to study the teachings in their own vernacular. Right. And so part of our modern vernacular is the brain, science and so forth. So does seem to be an exciting time to be alive and But I'm also grateful that we have access to people like yourself who really offer the classic kind of training and that we can, we can have that as a baseline and then see what we can, how we can enlarge upon that. So wonderful. Thank you so much for being part of the summit.

Yeah. Thank you.

And encourage people to check out SharonSalzberg.com and Sharon's latest book, Real Life the Journey from Isolation to Openness and Freedom. That sounds like a pretty good deal. Thank you very much, Sharon. Be well.

Thanks too.

Hello, it is Ryan. And we could all use an extra bright spot in our day, couldn't we? Just to make up for things like sitting in traffic, doing the dishes, counting your steps, you know, all the mundane stuff. That is why I'm such a big fan of Chumba Casino. Chumba Casino has all your favorite social casino style games that you can play for free, anytime, anywhere with daily bonuses. So sign up now at Chumba Cash casino.

Com.

That's chumbacasino.

Com.

No purchase necessary vgw group. Void where prohibited by law 21 + terms and conditions apply.