:: May/June 2004 Volume 3/Number 3

Sitting Down With
Sharon Salzberg

By Julie Deife


photo: Marcia Lippmann

A student of Buddhism since 1971, Sharon Salzberg has been leading meditation retreats worldwide since 1974.  Author of Loving Kindness, The Revolutionary Art of Happiness and most recently Faith, Salzberg was in Los Angeles this past winter leading a retreat at Loyola Marymount University.  Julie Deife interviewed her following the retreat.

Julie: Why did you write the book on faith?

Salzberg: I began looking deeper to see if there was a value or a quality that was even more fundamental to me than love and compassion and I came up with faith. Another reason was because as I made that investigation or explored within and I came to realize the primary nature of faith in my own spiritual practice and would talk to people about it, I found so much negative reaction.  I realized that the word itself is so differently interpreted, I felt like I wanted to help redeem the word and bring it back to a usage that gave it enough respect.

Julie: Is your belief in rebirth and karma based on faith?

Salzberg: To some extent. It is also based on intuition or my best guess. I mean who knows, really? It is a way the universe makes sense to me, that there is not just this one life and that we do cycle through many forms of existence. In the Buddhist teachings, unquestioning belief in rebirth is not that important. Karma is important. Our ethical responsibility is important. You don’t have to believe in an esoteric sense of karma as the reason for behaving ethically; you just have to believe that your acts are consequential.  People practice Buddhist meditation techniques quite ardently without belief in rebirth and that practice is the most important thing.

Julie: You said that one of the benefits of loving kindness meditation is that we can experience a healing of self. What is it that we are healing?

Salzberg: I don't know if I said, "healing the self." It is really not a very Buddhist phrase.  There is certainly healing of the way we view ourselves and a recognition from the Buddhist point of view, that we each have a tremendous capacity for love, awareness, connection and wisdom and that is in effect Buddha nature. Most of us don't think of that when we think of ourselves. We think that if we really knew who we were it would be a pretty big problem. I was in Dharamsala many years ago at a conference with the Dalai Lama in a group of psychologists mostly and I had the opportunity to ask him a question: "What do you think about self hatred?" He looked at me and said, "What's that?" The psychologists and I tried to explain and he was mystified, saying things like "is it some kind of nervous disorder?" "Are people like that very violent?" Finally he said, "How can you think of yourself that way...you have Buddha nature?" So what we heal is a habit of denouncing ourselves, and thinking so little of ourselves, and not understanding that we have the capacity to really be free.

Julie:  In Faith you mention the memory of your mother's death coming back to you unexpectedly and vividly in one of your meditations and that your teacher told you to just be mindful of the pain. Can you explain why and how this helped you?

Salzberg: Mindfulness means the quality of awareness that is experiencing something just as it is and in a way with an open heart. What we usually do, when something is painful, is one of two things: try to push it away… we feel ashamed, upset or dismayed that this painful emotion or memory has come up, or we get lost in it and build on it. “I am always going to be alone because I am broken inside.”  We draw certain conclusions about ourselves based on what we are experiencing. In Buddhist terminology it is called proliferation: we take what is happening in the moment and we expand it until it takes over our whole world. Mindfulness is said to be the way of relating to what is going on that avoids both of those extremes. So we feel the pain that is there - it is not like we are papering it over or pretending that it is not there - but we are not adding to it by this immensity of projection. Even pushing it away is adding to it. Also, see its true nature, because however much it hurts it is also changing all the time. While we are lost in a painful state we forget that, but when we really look at it, it is always coming and going.

Julie: Can mindfulness be applied to treating obsessive or addictive behaviors?

Salzberg: The classic sort of ills that the Buddha described are: greed, hatred (or anger) and delusion. Anger and fear are considered in the Buddhist psychology the same mind state. Those are the primary ills that meditation is healing. One of the reasons that we get into addictive patterns is boredom. We are not particularly trained in our society to feel very connected and alive unless something is quite intense. We continually reach out for greater levels of stimulation and intensity in order to have that feeling of being alive. Yet if we were really paying attention to a simple thing like a breath or a cup of tea or the feeling of a breeze, we would have connection without seeking a new object or a new experience all the time.

Julie: In your practice of yoga with John Friend, can you interface your philosophy of Buddhist meditation with your practice of yoga?

Salzberg: Yes, very much so and partly because of the kind of understanding he brings forth and transmits in his teaching. For example I was with him at a retreat and I was by far the least experienced yoga student in the room. He was demonstrating a pose and he made some funny movement in the midst of it and then he carried on.  He asked everybody, when he came out of the pose, what had just happened.  All of these people offered some Sanskrit name for what he had done. Finally he looked at me and said, "What happened?" And I said, "I think you fell." He said," You’re right, I fell and then I started over." That is so similar to what I teach in meditation. Meditation is not a question of clutching your attention onto the breath and trying to keep it there but of being able to begin again and begin again, having let go when your mind has strayed.

Julie: How do you interpret the phrase "letting go"?

Salzberg: I think that when we talk about letting go, it isn’t necessarily a decision. If you see that you are going around and around the same area, out of great love and compassion for yourself you might say, "I’ve been down this road before." And then we actually practice letting go. Letting go doesn’t mean throwing something away out of aversion or dislike. It's as if you experience that your fist is really tightly clenched, holding onto something and you relax it and come back to a more natural state of balance and ease. It is not a violent act. If you go back to what I was saying before about proliferation, if we see our mind starting to accelerate, and we see a pattern happening, we can drop it and say "I don’t need to go there."

Julie: Why don’t we let go of things we've noticed may be hurting us?

Salzberg: Sometimes we do let go, but the letting go is also very temporary. We let go but then grab on again because letting go is entering new terrain. It’s a movement into the unknown. We know what it is like to hold on, we know what it is like to suffer even and sometimes we hold onto the suffering because it is so familiar. It is almost like a pulsation. We let go for a moment, then we grab on again, then we let go, then grab on again. And those moments of letting go actually count. It is not that they are wasted just because they didn’t last. That is how we learn and how we change.

Julie: Would you please comment as to why Aung San Suu Kyi is one of your heroes?

Salzberg: She is somebody who has lived and suffered for her own convictions and she is extremely courageous. As the leader of the democracy movement in Burma she spent more time in prison or house arrest than out of it over the last 15 years or so. She lives the teachings of the Buddha as a woman, as a political figure in a very powerful way. When she says something like "the only real prison is fear and the only real freedom is freedom from fear" you know that is not an empty statement. To go through terrible experiences and to come out of it thinking about the value of loving kindness because you yourself were not treated with any...I think is a mark of an extraordinary human being.

Julie: If I am sitting in meditation and I want to learn about, for example, anger in my life, how is that possible?

Salzberg: If you are sitting with anger, from the meditative point of view, what is important is not why you are angry and what you can do about it or whether you are right or you're wrong or the other person is right or wrong. What is important is exploring the nature of anger. You are exploring what it does in your body; you are exploring its nature, the mood, and the changing nature of it. So the exploration is analytical in a certain way, but the analysis is from being mindful of the experience.

Julie: When we are trying to do good things and we want to see results, how do we evaluate ourselves, especially if things aren't happening as fast as we want them to?

Sharon: From the Buddhist point of view it is understood that we need to act from the best intention that we have and as skillfully as we can. But the result in terms of being able to affect somebody or certainly in terms of being thanked or being praised for what we have done, that is really outside of our control. Rather than landing our sense of integrity in that arena, like "Did they smile enough when I gave them the book?" we base how well we've done on our intention and the skillfulness with which we've acted. How the person reacted is another place where we really practice letting go or equanimity. It is not like we don't at all care, because that would be inhuman. But how much do we care. Do we continually define who we are based on someone else's reaction? Because if we do, we are in a lot of trouble.

Julie: Do you think prayer as a healing modality works, and if so how do you think it works?

Salzberg: I think it works. I'm sure it is a hard thing to measure in a scientific sense. But I think it works in the way that loving kindness works, as an energy, as people devote themselves to positive energy through the force of concentration or prayer. It is not like having a casual nice thought; it is the act of ones devotion to the kindness that builds up the energy. It's an energy that transcends time and space. It can affect others, but "can" doesn't necessarily mean it will affect others and that is why we talk about equanimity. It's like giving someone a gift. You don't know how they will be able to receive it or if they will reject it. That doesn't mean it isn't a real gift. So that is the understanding within the Buddhist tradition.

Julie: What do you see as the greatest threats to our society?

Salzberg: I don't think we know how to be afraid. I think that many of us are so uncomfortable feeling fear that when we start to feel it, we will do anything to avoid the feeling and that is when people surrender good judgment and will do many foolish things. And, I think that people need faith so that they can make a difference and not feel apathetic or resigned or overcome. We need to participate in society and the voting and being part of the political processes and have tremendous conviction that we can make a difference.

For information about Sharon Salzberg's work and retreats please go to www.dharma.org or www.loving-kindness.org.