Krista Tippett: Hello, and welcome. In some sense, what you’ve just entered is a care package, as much as a course. We have been given so much to carry. We have experienced losses vast and small. We’ve scarcely been able to metabolize all of this. And we are now in the state, not of a post-pandemic world, but a kind of semi-pandemic world in which uncertainty is a primary experience.

As we are going to learn and understand, and understand better how to work with in the sessions that follow, uncertainty is something that our minds and bodies are distinctly ill-equipped to handle. One of the words that has come to me in this time about how I have felt is “unmoored.”

But on the other side of all of that, we have also — each of us alone and as a civilization, as a people, as a species — been given so much to see and to learn, so much to grow into. We can scarcely muster the energy and the stamina to meet the promise of that, as much as the challenge. So I want to think about what follows here as a mini-retreat, but conducted in the middle of life. Can we find rest and ease and nourishment, some renewal of a sense of agency, but with great kindness towards ourselves and others?

We’re going to open this first chapter of the course with Sharon Salzberg as our teacher, our companion. She is one of the great teachers, one of the great spirits, who brought Buddhist teachings and meditation and mindfulness practices into mainstream Western culture in a new way in the 1960s and ’70s.

The spiritual intelligence of Buddhism’s traditions has become a great gift of our time, and a gift that has been received gratefully by people who are engaged in many religious traditions, and people of no faith or previous spiritual practice at all. I really see it as an offering to the 21st century. The spiritual intelligence of this tradition has converged with what we’ve been learning at the same time about our minds and our bodies, ways we are investigating consciousness.

What is often less understood than the offering of mindfulness — which is everywhere, in forms that are both profound and less profound — is that behind that, there is this deep, psychological acuity about the challenge of being human.

At the essence of that is simply stating the truth of suffering in human life, which sounds basic, but so much of our culture is about distracting us from that truth. Alongside that, there are these insights into the way our minds collude in our suffering. And there is an offering of what I think of as spiritual technologies — really, tools for living, for knowing ourselves, for activating the higher capacities of our thinking, and for activating compassionate action.

The teachers who make that connection are the ones whom I appreciate and follow. And Sharon Salzberg is absolutely at the heart of that movement. She is often called in as a teacher, a guide, a spiritual companion, at places where people in our societies are meeting the edges of life and of suffering. She’s had a presence to the people of Parkland, Florida, since the school shooting there, and you’ll hear her mention this as an example.

Perhaps not surprisingly, like the time in which we live now, Sharon’s own early life was marked by really very severe fragmentation and chaos and loss and repeated collapse. In this, in that fact of what she was given and who she’s become, I see a signature of every wise and graceful life, every wise and graceful person I’ve interviewed across the years; this strange and redemptive truth that we don’t become wise in spite of what happens to us, but through it.

Sharon heard about meditation when she was 17. At 18, she went to India, knowing that it was something that perhaps she could use. The specificity that she adds to that notion of creating a wise and graceful life is that, whatever happens to us, it’s the relationship that we cultivate to what happens to us that shapes who we are, through it and beyond it and with it. And that is such a resonant skill for the world we inhabit now — this roller-coaster world.

So I want you to enter a bit of my conversation with Sharon that I had in 2020. I was telling Sharon, when I spoke with her, about some notes I took about something she said in one of those sessions she was teaching. And it was this: She said that she feels like the patterns inside her are like weather patterns, “that my inner world has its own inherent weather patterns, as does the external world, the recognition that I’m not in control, and that gray days don’t mean I’ve done anything wrong; that all the ups and downs, lights and darks, are part of who I am, part of who we are.”

I read that back to her, and said it feels helpful in so many ways; specifically, in helping me relate to the roller coaster of the days and the weeks, and in creating a mentality that I don’t have to always attach so much significance to every bad day.

So here is how she replied to that question, to that observation of mine:

Salzberg: We can be so harsh with ourselves. Once, I talked to a student, and she was saying, “I should be better. I should have more equanimity. I should be calmer. I don’t know why I’m so upset.”

And I said, “Well, I’d really like you to write down everything that’s happened to you this year” — this was a long time ago — “everything that’s happened to you this year.” And she chose to draw it out, instead of writing it.

And I was like, “I want you to take a look at this. Your cat died. Your house burned down. You’ve had a hell of a year. This is hard. It’s hard.”

But I think it’s true what you said, on every level, from the most immediate and direct to the biggest, biggest level. When we talk about equanimity in Buddhism, it can sound really boring and something like indifference, but it’s not. It’s being able to hold everything, the dark and the light, and having a mind and a heart big enough and spacious enough to hold it all.

I recently had this experience, reflecting on an earlier experience I had, where I’d gone to Parkland, Florida, not too long after the school shooting, to teach. Someone in the room raised her hand, and she said, “I feel really weird, because I’m having an incredible experience, learning about mindfulness and practicing meditation and being with you, and I know the only reason it’s happening is because that horrible thing happened.” And she said, “I don’t know how to get over that, to be with this.”

I said, “I don’t know if we ever get over it, so much as we learn to hold them both at once.”

I recently saw her, when I was doing these panels, and she was on one of the panels. And I said, “Do you remember that conversation we had?” She said, “Not only do I remember it, I think of it every single day, and that we can learn to hold it all at once.” And she used the word “equanimity,” because that’s what I had used, even though it’s a little bit of an odd term for us. And she talked about the yin-yang symbol, where the dark is in the light and the light is also implicit in the dark.

And that’s really our task: to somehow be able to hold it all in a way that will allow us to not only survive, but go on in a way that we can stay connected and help others, as well.

Tippett: Something else that you’ve been teaching and writing about — there’s a simple mantra that you keep repeating, which is, “Some things just hurt.” And also that we actually need energy — I don’t think this is the same thing as what you just said, but it feels related, to me — that we need energy, to be present, to be with the pain, to find the space in the pain. And that also means that we have to give ourselves a break and that we have to actually allow — not just allow and see as optional, but that we have to take renewal where we can find it.

Salzberg: We have to.

Somebody made me a set of cups that say “Some things just hurt,” which I really like a lot, because I think that is part of the same pattern. There’s so much thinking that one could buy-in to that has us feel, well, I shouldn’t be suffering. It’s only because I have the wrong attitude. It’s only because I’m not advanced enough. It’s only because I’m thinking wrong that this hurts.

And I don’t buy that at all. I think some things just hurt. And what an unjust thing to say to ourselves. This shouldn’t hurt? Really?

But what we don’t need is the extra suffering. It’s the ways in which we feel like, This is the only thing I’ll ever feel for the rest of my life, or, I am the only one, or, I should’ve been able to stop this; this is all my fault.

And those things, we don’t need. That’s where a good bit of our work is: to relinquish that.

[music]

Tippett: I so recognize that description of how harsh we can be on ourselves. I can be so harsh on myself. And I see others I love, others I respect, struggling with their own expectations of themselves.

The invitation here is not to deny the enormity of what we’re struggling with, in large ways and small — the grieving we have to do, collectively as well as individually. That’s a helpful mantra: “Some things just hurt.” And some things hurt so much that we can’t see beyond them. That is real and true, and that needs grieving and mourning and lamentation and time.

The invitation here is to see and name and honor what you’ve been living through, what you are living through, still, and to use some simple practices and techniques to come into a different relationship with what is.

If you listen to On Being, you’ve probably heard me say this before, and you may hear me say it again in these courses: my definition of spiritual life at its best is, “befriending reality.” As a practical exercise — and we will focus on this in part two, in the Pause — a beginning to make, for your journaling through this course, is to just write down — or, as Sharon said she invited that young woman to draw out, to illustrate — everything that’s happened to you in this season in the life of our world. I suspect that, as you move through days with this question, that list will grow: of losses, fears, stresses, growth, gifts, learning, questions that have arisen that do not have answers, sources of hope, sources of despair.

It’s a strange and mysterious spiritual truth that when we take in what is hard, take in the reality in all its complexity, it actually helps us be more present to that hardness, be more present to ourselves, generously and gently. It helps us do that, make that move that Sharon talked about: holding the dark and the light of life together at once, bringing them into some kind of relationship with each other. This is a move, actually, not just towards becoming mindful, but becoming whole, with all the complexity of ourselves, as we meet a world that so longs and desires wholeness even as it shows pain and fear through fracture.

I will be with you in the Pause for the rest of this week, and in the next Wisdom Practice when you’re ready to continue.