Letting Go as an Act of Self-Compassion—with Sharon Salzberg

When Sharon Salzberg was teaching at a meditation retreat, a student asked her: Has anyone ever died of restlessness in meditation? Sharon said: Not from one moment at a time of it.  “We have physical pain, disappointment, restlessness, and anxiety,” Sharon shared. “Whatever it is, we tend to compound it, not only: This is what I'm feeling right now. But, this is what I'm going to feel like next year. Everything congeals and feels permanent and heavy.  But, when we realize that it's one moment at a time of it. Then, we can explore. What we see is that even though something may last over time, within itself it’s moving. It’s changing and flowing. It’s in the live system. As a friend with a severe chronic pain condition said: "I found the space within the pain.”  How do you discover the space within the pain?  As a renowned author, teacher, and meditation pioneer, Sharon has made a transformative difference in my internal dialogue; Most significantly, in helping me avoid being overcome by my emotions. (My most repeated Sharon phrase is: The point isn’t not to have the emotion. It’s not to be overcome by it.) In our conversation, we explore how to discern the add-ons to our internal narrative, let go of those that don’t serve us, and cultivate compassion towards ourselves and others.  Sharon describes mindfulness as skills training. With sustained practice, these tools become ingrained; Surfacing to help you question your thoughts and redirect your energy in the moment. “Situations are complex,” she added. “But, if we’ve practiced that skill, we remember to go back into the body and feel what we're feeling. We cultivate a certain sense of balance—That's the skill.” If you feel inspired to listen to our past conversations, you can tune in here: The Cultivation of Freedom and Happiness and The Journey from Contraction to Expansiveness

While preparing for my interview with Dr.Thema Bryant, I was struck by an exercise she shared. During a podcast, she invited listeners to fill out the prompt: “I miss me who…” I was surprised by how quickly a simple prompt awakened dormant longings; And, eager to learn how to rediscover the lost parts of ourselves.  In reflecting on her journey, she shared: “In healing, I return to the truth of myself.” Her sentiment captures why the prompt stood out to me: Too often, we wait too long to embody our essence—or never do it at all.  In our conversation, Dr.Thema leads us on our path back home. As a renowned psychologist, professor, minister, author, and sacred artist, she’s the perfect guide. We discuss how to identify what keeps you from feeling inner peace, rewrite the stories that cause you to settle, and learn to live with ease. Spiritually, she shares surprising insights on how to connect with the divine and why that too is a journey of homecoming. 

The first time I read my favorite poem, On Prayer, this stanza stood out to me… For what is prayer but the expansion of yourself into the living ether?      And if it is for your comfort to pour your darkness into space, it is also for your delight to pour forth the dawning of your heart.      And if you cannot but weep when your soul summons you to prayer, she should spur you again and yet again, though weeping, until you shall come laughing.      When you pray you rise to meet in the air those who are praying at that very hour, and whom save in prayer you may not meet.      Therefore let your visit to that temple invisible be for naught but ecstasy and sweet communion.      For if you should enter the temple for no other purpose than asking you shall not receive:      And if you should enter into it to humble yourself you shall not be lifted:      Or even if you should enter into it to beg for the good of others you shall not be heard.      It is enough that you enter the temple invisible. Kahlil Gibran introduced me to the concept of emptiness. Still, I was always curious how one “enters the temple invisible.” I was given a window into that journey through my dear friend Pico Iyer’s new book, Aflame: Learning from Silence. It is a stunning reflection of his own experience becoming invisible across 34 years and over 100 stays at the New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur. Here’s how he describes this awakening… “So why am I exultant to find myself in the silence of this Catholic monastery? Maybe because there's no “I” to get in the way of the exultancy. Only the brightness of the blue above and below. That red tailed hawk circling, the bees busy in the lavender.  It's as if a lens cap has come off, and once the self is gone, the world can come flooding in, in all its wild immediacy.”  We all crave this quality of presence; A yearning one of the monks captured when he said “the longing itself is the ecstasy.” “Simone Weil said that the danger is not that there’s no bread available. It’s that we won’t acknowledge that we’re hungry,” Pico says. “In other words, we're driving along the 405 freeway and we know that something's missing. But, we say: ‘Oh, it doesn't matter. I'm in a good job. I'm taking care of my family. It’ll take care of itself.’ We drive right past that ache and longing that speaks for something lost and forgotten.  The monks will tell me, or anyone who visits, that what you get at the hermitage is recollection; Meaning it's not a discovery and it's not revelation. It's recollection in the sense of collecting all of the scattered pieces of yourself and remembering something that you know deep inside of yourself, but that you forget in the rush of your everyday life.” The thread that weaves our conversation has become a guiding principle for me: When you spend time in stillness, what you need finds you. This hour is a rich exploration of the beauty of surrender, why silence is the most trustworthy answer to any question, and how to be present when the muse appears. As Pico writes: “It’s never possibility that’s not present. Only me.”

Before my interview with Katherine May, a Mary Oliver quote resurfaced that felt representative of Katherine’s work: “This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attentiveness.”  Katherine’s books, most recently Wintering and Enchantment, are testaments that the quality of our attention transforms the quality of our lives.  “I firmly believe that the depth of attention we crave can only happen if we let ourselves slow down," she says. "Most of the time, we are speeding so far past everything that we don't have a chance to engage with it. When we can change pace and make space in our lives for more things to come in, then there's a handshake we can make with the world around us. We can go up to it slowly, meet, and observe it with all of our senses.”  This is Enchantment, as she describes it—“the ability to sense magic in the every day, to channel it through our minds and bodies, to be sustained by it.” At its heart, it's an invitation for a new way of being.  Katherine guides us to shift from living on autopilot to discovering the aliveness of each moment. Here, we discuss reconnecting with the intelligence of the body, the power of unlearning, and what the forest teaches us about prayer.  Photographer credit: Alexa Loy Dent

Rabbi Sharon Brous was on her way to lead her community, IKAR—a Jewish community she founded 20 years ago with a new vision of how faith can center and connect us—in the sacred ceremony of Tashlikh, when she stopped to buy index cards and sharpies. It was an unexpected stop, given the day’s holiness: Every year between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the two holiest days of the year, the Jewish community visits a body of water to release their sins, or anything they don’t want to carry into the new year, into the water. Still, Rabbi Brous was reflecting on the dying wishes of her dear friend and community member, Erin, and had a question for the community.  During her final days, Erin wrote that each of us has an innate sense of who we’re called to be. Yet, despite that knowing, too often we construct reasons to delay fulfilling our calling. On the brink of her own tragic death, Erin asked—What if we don’t have forever?—and urged her community to live urgently. When Rabbi Brous delivered her message to the IKAR community, overlooking the Pacific Ocean for Tashlikh, she asked: What are you waiting for? The question—What are you waiting for?—is the through-line of each topic we explore in this rich conversation about her book, The Amen Effect; From getting quiet enough to hear divine wisdom and cultivating our spiritual strength, to accompanying each other through joy and sorrow and, inspired by the Jewish ritual of being thankful for 100 blessings, creating our own system of blessings.  As you settle into this conversation, consider a yearning that exists deep within your heart. What are you waiting for to pursue it? What is one step you might take to move towards it today?

“When we are paying attention, we see how much love holds us invisibly.” This is the line that stayed with me most from Anne Lamott’s new, and 20th book, Somehow: Thoughts on Love. I read it during a stressful weekend and it illuminated the beauty of my family and friends’ care. As Anne says, “humanity is another synonym for God.” Anne’s gift is her rare ability to combine spiritual wisdom and laugh out loud humor into an operating manual for life, even, and especially, amidst its imperfection. In our conversation, we explore our ongoing journey to find our center and cultivate the sense of peace we deserve to reside in. Editor’s Note: I was moved by Anne’s definition of love in our conversation and couldn’t resist sharing my favorite part here… “There's a beautiful line in the Hebrew Bible…It talks about deep calling to deep. That could be the waterfall calling to the stars, but it could also be the deepest part inside me, inside my heart, calling to you; Calling to the redwood tree outside my window, the daffodils that just came up yesterday. Love is an energy…It’s everywhere we look."

Quentin Tarantino once said “I want to risk hitting my head on the ceiling of my talent.  I want to really test it out and say, ‘Okay, you’re not that good.  You just reached the level here.’  I don’t ever want to fail, but I want to risk failure every time out of the gate.”  This bold and farsighted perspective is a key ingredient that Eric Potterat and Alan Eagle highlight in their work with and observation of a wide-ranging group of elite performers across business, extreme sports, and the militarily. In their book - Learned Excellence:  Mental Disciplines for Leading and Winning from the World’s Top Performers - they share the five principles that anchor their approach towards perpetual excellence.  While the principles themselves may not surprise you, the discipline and execution prowess of the outliers we discuss will inspire you to reimagine your own pursuit of greatness.  Here’s a glimpse of the topics we explore: The distinguishing characteristic that makes elite performers singular. The role that biology and/or genetics plays in achieving excellence? The five principles of Learned Excellence. How negative self-talk can be a performance multiplier? The myth of one’s potential. Why ‘Growth Mindset’ is an incomplete discipline? The role your breath plays in helping you embrace adversity.

‘When we can combine our urge to be happy with wisdom instead of ignorance it becomes a homing instinct for freedom.’ This is one of the insights I was most eager to explore with renowned Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg from her new book, Finding Your Way: Meditations, Thoughts, and Wisdom for Living an Authentic Life. I was curious why, despite devoting so much time to learning about happiness, I continue looking for it in the wrong places. Sharon introduced us to the yearning held within our grasping in our last conversation and I was similarly moved by her wisdom in this one. “In most strongly emotional times, we're not looking at the emotion itself to try to see what’s at the heart of it and understand it more," she says. "We're looking at what the emotion is about; The story, choice, or circumstance. For example, I really wanted to buy a new car. I would spend my time thinking: Do I want that color or that color? Do I want that feature or that feature? I wouldn't pivot my attention to ask myself: What does it feel like to want something so badly? These emotions tend to be very complex. You might look at desire and see a lot of loneliness in there. You might look at anger and see a lot of sadness. If we can make that pivot and be with the emotion, we come to understand many things because that's the right relationship for wisdom or understanding to grow.” Sharon’s question—What does it feel like to want something so badly?—now arises as a moment of pause amidst my own grasping. Then, I reflect on a second question she shared while exploring the Buddhist concept of holding hope lightly: “There are some teachers who would say that desire is not the problem," she explains. "It's that what we want is so small. How about wanting to be really free?” Sharon offers us a new lens to view our life experiences in this conversation. From using physical pain as a model to navigate emotional pain to detaching from our expectations and desire for certainty, her perspective shifts help us navigate our lives with equanimity.

Remembrance is the first step we take with renowned coach and Reboot CEO and Co-founder Jerry Colonna in his new book, Reunion: Leadership and the Longing to Belong. At its heart, it’s an invitation towards deeper connection to our ancestors, ourselves, and each other. Each reader's path unfolds uniquely—through recognition, reconnection, and reclaiming—bringing them to a sense of belonging within themselves. Then, to one of the book’s central questions: How does my sense of belonging influence the sense of belonging I create for others? “I think what is often missing is landing into our own experience; Using our own body, almost as a tuning fork, to tune into what the other person is feeling,” he says. “When we do that, there's this wordless connection that feels both safe and nourishing because we can finally just be ourselves. That, to me, is the essence of belonging.” Our conversation is an exploration of Jerry’s own path to reunion, which takes him to Ireland to visit the grave of his father’s biological mother; To the shade of the cottonwood tree where conversations he had with his father, 30 years after his passing, helped heal their relationship; And, to the “both and” realization he arrives at with his mother, who despite struggling with mental illness, unwaveringly saved $2 a week to buy his brother and him a camera for photography class. Jerry encapsulates his journey by sharing that—“When I reunite with who they were, I move one step closer to my own wholeness”—and invites us to embark on our own. *Editor’s Note: While we experienced some audio fluctuations recording remotely, we’re thankful Jerry’s wisdom remains perfectly clear. Thank you for listening and understanding.

When Parker Palmer was approaching his seventies, he turned to a group of trusted friends to help him understand “what it meant to grow older in this particular dimension of life.” The process birthed one of my favorite questions he asks… What do I want to let go of? And, what do I want to give myself to? Despite articulating it in his seventies, Parker has devoted his life to it as an acclaimed author, teacher, and the Founder of the Center for Courage and Renewal. It’s why, after completing his PhD in 1969, he felt called to respond to racial injustice as a community organizer in Washington D.C. rather than pursue the secure academic path expected of him. “It was a job that met the challenge of my soul and gave that soul a chance to grow,” he says. “People would often ask me: ‘Why are you doing this?’ I remember saying: ‘I can't really explain it to you. I can barely explain it to myself, but I can tell you this: I can't not do it.’ ‘I can’t not do it' became a mantra for me. I started to understand that this is what one calls the soul's imperatives. This is a path that I'm walking because something in me understands that if I don't walk it—if I don't respond to some of the deepest yearnings of my soul—I'm going to lose my soul in the long run. I think [the soul] has something to do with the ‘being’ in human being; And, that our very beings cry out for a way of being in the world, for a service to the world, for something that makes our lives more than just our own. It’s a voice I think we all need to be listening for.” Our conversation is an exploration of how to connect more deeply with that voice. We delve into how to hear what Parker calls our “inner teacher” as well as the incredible practice he teaches for trusted friends to support each other in that process.