Sharon Salzberg is a meditation pioneer, world-renowned teacher, NY Times bestselling author of fourteen books, and co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts.
577: Starting Where You Are: Lovingkindness for These Uncertain Times
Sharon Salzberg
In this episode of the Mindful Mama Podcast, Hunter Clarke-Fields talks with Sharon Salzberg, meditation pioneer, bestselling author, and co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society, about practicing mindfulness and lovingkindness in today’s fast-paced, hyperconnected world. Sharon shares why so many of us feel disconnected and overwhelmed — even when we’re not alone — and how lovingkindness can gently restore a sense of connection, resilience, and belonging. They also explore Sharon’s new children’s book, "Kind Karl", and how parents can model compassion and emotional acceptance for their kids without adding more to their already-full plates.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
Why distraction leaves us feeling fragmented and disconnected
How lovingkindness supports emotional resilience and mental health
The difference between everyday stress and deeper overwhelm
How to practice compassion when you feel depleted or shut down
Ways parents can model kindness without “doing more”
How Kind Karl helps kids talk about big feelings without fixing them
A simple lovingkindness practice families can try together
Ep 577- Salzberg
Read the Transcript 🡮
*This is an auto-generated transcript*
Hunter (00:00)
You're listening to the Mindful Mama podcast, episode #577. Today, we're talking about starting where you are, loving kindness for these uncertain times with Sharon Salzberg.
Welcome to the Mindful Mama podcast. Here it's about becoming a less irritable, more joyful parent. At Mindful Mama, we know that you cannot give what you do not have. And when you have calm and peace within, then you can give it to your children. I'm your host, Hunter Clarke-Fields. I help smart, thoughtful parents stay calm so they can have strong, connected relationships with their children. I've been practicing mindfulness for over 25 years. I'm the creator of the Mindful Parenting Course and Teacher Training. I'm the author of the international bestseller, “Raising Good Humans”, “Raising Good Humans Every Day”, and the “Raising Good Humans Guided Journal”.
New year, new you, maybe a kinder you. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm really glad you're here. And this is a powerful episode. Sharon Salzberg comes back to the podcast. Sharon Salzberg is a meditation pioneer, world renowned author, New York Times bestselling author of 14 books, and co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. She is author of one of the texts I use as required reading in my Mindful Parenting Teacher Training program- “Real Happiness: the Power of Meditation”- which I love. So if you want a good book about meditation, that's my favorite. We're going to be talking about why so many of us feel disconnected and overwhelmed, even when we're not alone. This is us parents, right? And how loving kindness can restore a sense of connection, resilience, and belonging. So join me at the table as I talk to Sharon Salzberg.
Welcome back to the Mindful Mama podcast, Sharon.
Sharon Salzberg:
Thank you so much.
Hunter:
I'm happy and honored to have you here. Okay, so I wanted to talk to you. You have a new children's book. I want to talk about that, but I want to talk to you a little bit about the state of the world because I don't know, you've taught meditation for decades and I wonder if, what do you notice that is uniquely challenging about practicing mindfulness in today? Like with the fast pace and the hyper connection and things getting sort of- all of us getting a little more distracted by our phones and the devices and the news, et cetera. Well, I think distraction is the word, right? The internal experience of that distractedness is feeling fragmented. that's what people describe. They also describe a kind of almost resignation or disbelief that their lives can change, that life can change, that if they're trying to make a difference in the world that it can have any effect.
Sharon Salzberg (03:07.978)
It's not a really easy time for a lot of people. And yet, you know, I think we're moving toward value and community and not feeling so alone, kind of disciplined around those devices, as you say. Even things that, you know, I hear parents say, we're not going to have any phones at a meal. you'd think, that's kind of obvious, right? But not so. And I think there's a real earnestness about understanding the effects of how we've been living.
Hunter:
Yeah, I feel like we're like the frogs in the pot, but you know, the water is slowly boiling, getting hotter and hotter, and we're starting to realize it now. I mean, yeah, I think as far as I can tell from talking to lots of people, it seems like we're really starting to realize it, and particularly, you know, parents, of course, are really alarmed at what's happening with our kids, right? But with ourselves, right? We're like, “I keep looking at this rectangle in my pocket constantly”.
Sharon Salzberg:
Yeah. Well, I think, you know, those, those years of, the heightened pandemic have taken a toll on, sense of isolation has also come in also, I mean, years and years ago, I was on a book tour and, the publisher had arranged for a driver to pick me up at the hotel that I was, that they also arranged for and take me to the bookstore to do the reading. And, and the driver was a really pretty elderly man. It was like a new career for him. And I waited in the lobby of the hotel. And then he walked in and got me and then we got into the car and he said, I noticed like everyone in this beautiful hotel lobby was looking at their phones. No one was like appreciating like, wow, look where I get to sit, maybe eat your anticipation for the person picking you up or the person you're going to meet or just going out for a meal or whatever. like, it was so interesting to notice what was just beginning to be the norm of not actually taking in where one is and having perhaps a sense of gratitude or appreciation.
Hunter:
Yeah, I noticed that too, when you go places, you go to a special place and everybody is sort of on their phone. And I think it's really making, I think one of the effects that maybe we're feeling is this feeling, this feeling of isolation. And I've noticed that, you know, it's hard to get people out sometimes. I feel like sometimes the phone kind of satisfies this need we have to connect, but in a kind of superficial, not so good way. People are feeling isolated even when they're around others, like in that hotel, right? Like they're surrounded by others and you can feel totally isolated. You go to the gym, you're surrounded by others. Everybody's got their headphones on. From a loving kindness perspective, what's actually happening beneath that sense of disconnection?
Sharon Salzberg:
Well, it's interesting because as you describe it, the device has been like a double-edged sword because it's also allowed, and I think this was really the hope and the belief in the kind of beginning of the wave. It's allowed people who don't have access to much sense of community where they are to find one another. And if you have a particular physical condition, perhaps, know, or set of emotional distress points or something, there were ways of actually finding people and having the community be created in that way. But the consequence, I think, is a combination of the reliance or over-reliance on the digital means of connecting. And what many people point to is the dissolution of ordinary kind of social gatherings. Robert Putnam wrote a book some time ago about the dissolution of bowling leagues, and it is called “Bowling Alone”. And you just think, here were times when people got together in a town. Maybe they had different viewpoints about different things, different political orientations, different lifestyles even, but they got together to bowl together, and they formed friendship that way and not everyone is going to a church or a synagogue or belongs to an organized religion. And so the dissolution of those ways of getting together and the preponderance, the arising of kind of digital means of getting together means that we can be very disconnected and it's going to take a lot of more effort to meet people, you know, and actually have face to face encounters from the point of view of loving kindness. it's really powerful, I think, to look at how many people we might encounter that we look through instead of look at. They maybe play a role in our lives in some way. They perform a service and we tend to, discount them in some way, you know, we object to find them and just to pause and pay attention in a different way- to realize this is a person, we don't know their story, perhaps, or even their name, but they are a person and we can connect in a very different way. And I think that is an internal feeling of fulfillment that we wouldn't ordinarily have.
Hunter (09:13)
You said that people feel disillusioned earlier and I wonder if people, know, sometimes I think like, if it's not something we can see, hear or touch, we discount it. You know what I mean? Like, or we can't record it. You know, I go, I do Scottish country dancing. I love it. It's amazing. No one, everyone's busy dancing. No one records it. So it's almost like it doesn't exist in my room in a weird way because I can't share it with social media or something, right? When people are feeling dissolution, I don't know, how do you help them kind of connect with this idea of like a spiritual practice, not like a loving kindness practice, like a mindfulness practice? How do we get to start to see the value of it or even see the value of a small starting a little bit of it?
Sharon Salzberg:
Well, I think it's an experiment and people at different times are moved to make an experiment. so it really is based on one's personal experience. And so you have to put yourself out there to have the experience. And sometimes that's because we're really stressed out and we're, you know, we feel it and we're looking for something that might help alleviate the stress. Sometimes it's because we're inspired to look more deeply and not just to live on the surface of things. And I think it can be lots of different kinds of elements, but here too, people are doing it on apps. And it needs to, I think, fortify this sense of connection more than remove us from it.
Hunter (11:15)
Stay tuned for more Mindful Mama podcasts right after this break.
Yeah, I think a loving kindness practice was probably ideally kind of situated to that even more so than a traditional mindfulness meditation practice because you are consciously bringing to mind your community, the people around you.
Sharon Salzberg:
Yeah, I mean, it's very much an internal sense because even like before the pandemic, when I would read about an epidemic of loneliness and how social connection could play such a strong role in helping heal from different clinical conditions, all kinds of conditions. And I kept thinking, well, it can't just be a numbers game. You know, like I only have three friends. need eight. Because I know, I think probably we all know people who are not like the life of the party, the kind of introverted, know, but they have a deep, deep sense of connection to others, to humankind or beyond humankind, you know, to living beings. so given that, I kept thinking, well, it must be some internal sense of being part of a whole or a sense of belonging, we all belong to one another. And, you know, we can honor that without flamboyant gestures or anything grandiose, but it's a deep knowing that our lives have something to do with one another and that is the healing.
Hunter:
Yeah, I think that could really come about through a loving kindness practice. Sometimes I forget loving kindness. You I do my mindfulness meditation and I go through stages where I forget it then I teach it to the teacher trainees and I'm like, yes, I remember. You know, I've been on a loving kindness retreat with Sharon Salzberg and I remember that feeling of radiating it out to the whole world and that feeling of practicing it again day in and day out a little bit every day that it really created this sense of, I'm an interconnected web, I am part of a whole.
Sharon Salzberg:
Yeah, very much so. Yeah, it really does. And I think the right way of seeing the loving kindness practice is that it's a switch in how we pay attention. People feel a little like, I don't know about that, kind of uncertain, you know, because it seems so sentimental and kind of gooey and like maybe you're going to force yourself to act like you feel something you don't really feel. And it's not actually like that. It's much more. And the example I tend to use is like if you're the kind of person who at the end of the day thinks back on your days, though to evaluate yourself. Let's say you're the kind of person who pretty well only remembers the mistakes you made and the words you mispronounced publicly and the, you know, the time that you didn't show up in the way you'd hoped, let's just say. The practice of loving kindness is like a stretch. It's almost like “Anything else happen today”? Like, what's the good in me? It's not pretending we're perfect or being conflict avoidance or any of that, but why be so fixated on what's wrong instead of having some sense also of what's right? You know, so we kind of stretch, we stretch the way we pay attention to include not only what's difficult and challenging, because that's genuinely true. But also what's good and what's potential and things like that. And we do that by wishing ourselves well.
Hunter:
I mean, would that be, I mean, something you talk about is like starting where you are. And I was wondering if that would be, you know, for, I'm thinking about parents who are overwhelmed, who are feeling guilty because they, you know, raise their voice and responded unskillfully to their kid and are feeling maybe depleted, maybe resentful, maybe emotionally shut down. When you're in a dark place like that, like how do you start to practice loving kindness if it feels really awkward?
Sharon Salzberg:
Well, mindfulness actually has a role to play there as well. It's, think, knowing what we're feeling before it escalates. You know, being much more in touch with our bodies and our emotional world so that we can perceive what's going on. then, you know, part of mindfulness is balance. It's like being aware and connected to what we're feeling without diving into it and getting consumed by it or hating it and being ashamed of it. You know, so sometimes we, we call mindfulness the place in the middle. It's like, okay, this is happening. And with that amount of spaciousness, we have a choice. So I want to act this way. Do I want to act that way? But the truth is we're going to blow it sometimes, you know, we are exhausted at different times or depleted or overwhelmed. And the art of any kind of meditation practice is the art of beginning again. Like just the other day I was teaching somewhere online and somebody asked me a question that was something like, how do we maintain an open heart? And I said, as I often do, we're not going to maintain it. We're not going to keep it. We're not going to have it all the time, but we're gonna learn how to return to it. We're gonna remember what we really care about. We're be able to be more graceful in letting go and coming back to that more primary intention. And so I would think in a high pressure situation, and parenting is really high pressure. There's quite a bit of that, and it becomes almost like a celebration of being able to come back and say, okay, just take a breath and then respond.
Hunter:
I think that's so hard for people. Like we feel like, I think we're taught by our culture that the idea that we have to come back to this, it's failure. We're supposed to have done it and achieved it and it's gonna be done and it's fixed and et cetera. And to have to like come back and begin anew again and again can feel like a sense of failure to people when we're being kind of taught by our culture to like get her done and then move on, you know?
Sharon Salzberg (20:48)
Well, it does feel like a sense of failure and that's something I think also to examine. I think part of the personal exploration is where does resilience actually come from? You know, what's it made of? And we know that from like an ordinary day, right? There's, could say the stress dynamic, which is really a dynamic, is the pressure, the incident, whatever it is, and then is the resource with which it's met. And if we haven't, slept all night, you know, and we're in some disagreeable or challenging circumstance. It's like so piercing. It's so overwhelming. Whereas maybe we had a beautiful night's sleep and we had a loving breakfast with all these friends or family. And then we go off to whatever situation and the same challenging thing happens. And we think, wow, that person's having a bad day. You know, it's like, we don't paper it over like, fine, you know, it's not fine, perhaps, but we can meet it differently. And we look at the constituent parts of what's that sense of resource made of. Rest is one thing, not feeling so isolated, having some sense of connection is one thing, and developing some inner strengths is also a part of it, which doesn't mean we're gonna be perfect, but if we understand resilience always means kind of blowing it in some way or feeling overwhelmed or getting exhausted and then starting over. That's what it's made of. Then we look at how does one start over? Is blaming yourself and being bitter or ashamed? It's not really a great path to resilience. And we learn that by paying attention.
Hunter:
Yeah, and by noticing, I think now that like I'm 47 now, I think I really did think maybe 15 years ago that, you know, I was like, I think I'm going to get to this place and I'm going to have, you know, I've been meditating for 10 years now and I'm going to get to this place where I have it figured out and I'm going to have all this like wisdom to respond well to all these situations and I have more wisdom, but you know, you're right. Like you do have to constantly renew it, even if you've had a lot of practice. Like I, you know, I think I've now realized coming around the other side to sort of my late forties, feel like, like we never really, you know, we never really get to that place of like, where, we're just like, I don't know where I'm, I, I'm, I've not become enlightened yet, obviously. Where you continue to make mistakes and you continue to have, yeah, you continue to blow it in whatever, in different realms and you continue to be human. it's, think it's, I guess now I think the wisdom I have is like, I'm not that surprised by that anymore, I guess.
Sharon Salzberg:
Well, there's something to kind of being truthful about one's vulnerabilities, you know, and also kind, know, self-compassion is an enormous asset in trying to do anything and, you know, accomplish something, change a habit, learn something new. We think often self-compassion, sort of the way we think of loving kindness, it's like stupid- self-compassion means you have no standards and you're not trying to be excellent or whatever you're doing and it's being lazy. But it's really not like that. It's actually a very effective way to make a change because the amount of time we spend just berating ourselves and calling ourselves a failure and thinking this will never change. This is who I am deeply. It's exhausting, it's demoralizing, and it takes up a lot of time. You know, if we can have some kindness toward ourselves, we can actually start over much more gracefully and keep learning and growing and accomplishing what we want to accomplish. So it plays a big role.
Hunter (25:14)
For people who feel a little stuck on the self-compassion piece, sometimes I say, talk to yourself as if you would talk to your best friend who is struggling like this. Do you have any words that you offer people when they're just like, I am stuck for the words. What do I say in my head?
Sharon Salzberg:
Well, I mean, we have that experience in life, right? We do have perhaps a family member or a friend and we watch them struggle because they've said the wrong thing or didn't accomplish what they'd hoped to accomplish. we, you know, or maybe you're at work and you're supervising somebody. You realize very quickly, it's not that useful to say you're an idiot, because for one thing, it's not giving them the information they need should they want to change. And I'm sure parenting is the same thing, you know? And so we take the time to find the words that both gives the little being or colleague the information they would need and frame it in such a way that we're not throwing them in an irredeemable box and throwing away the key, you know? Like “you are forever more an idiot!” It's not like a wholesale condemnation of somebody. It's pointing out, if you had to do that over again, what would you say? Or, you know, how would you do it?
Hunter (26:43)
Yeah, yeah, think that sometimes I've been really interested in the idea of like IFS, internal family systems, and the idea of parts therapy and just the whole idea like that makes so much sense to me that we, there's like one part of us that made this, you know, was frustrated and acted out and made this mistake that blew it, right? And this other part of us can talk to that part that's struggling in this kind way of like, “Hey, what could we do better next time? You know, you're having a hard time, right?” Something like that.
Sharon Salzberg:
Yeah, I mean the meditative equivalent to that perhaps is when we say if you have a kind of brutal internal critic, internal critic, give it a name, give it a wardrobe, because what you will see is the evolution of a relationship to it. So as I say, I named my own inner critic Lucy based on the character in the Peanuts comic strip, because a friend had rented a house for several of us to retreat in. And when I went into the bedroom that had been set aside for me, I saw someone had left a cartoon on the desk from the Peanuts comic strip and Lucy in the first frame is saying to Charlie Brown, “You know, Charlie Brown, what your problem is? The problem with you is that you're you”. And then poor Charlie Brown says, “Well, what in the world can I do about that?” And then Lucy says, “I don't pretend to be able to give advice. I merely point out the problem”. But somehow whenever I was walking by that desk, my eye would fall right on that line, which said, “the problem with you is that you're you”. Because the Lucy dominant voice had been very strong in my earlier life. And by then I'd been practicing meditation, I don't know, a lot of years. And I saw the result of it, which was right after I saw the cartoon, very soon after a really great thing happened for me. And my first thought was, it ever gonna happen again? And I could greet that thought with, Lucy. And then that followed with, chill out Lucy, just chill. Which is different than you're right Lucy, you're always right. And it's also different than, can't believe Lucy's still here. I'm the worst meditator that ever lived, you know? It's like, Lucy, I see you, I recognize you. I don't have to buy into you, but I don't have to freak out. Yeah. Because you're here and that is really the nature of mindfulness.
Hunter:
I love that. So name your, name your harsher critic to your dear listener. So for parents who are raising kids in this climate of constant stimulation and they feel a lot of pressure because we know, you know, some of the effects of unskillful parenting in the past. So we're feeling all this pressure. What does it mean to, what does it look like to model that self-compassion, to model loving kindness but without adding another thing to do on their list?
Sharon Salzberg:
Well, I don't know if this is adding something to do, but I think one thing is really expressing appreciation for others, you know, and it can be very simple like that person serving you in the grocery store, you know, making it a point of really consciously and overtly appreciating people. And I would also say practicing gratitude. You know, when I was talking to a college professor once years ago and he was very concerned about his students because as he put it, no one posts a picture of their mediocre lunch on social media. know, so it was all competitive and comparative and you know, I've got this miserable looking lunch and look what they're eating and which is all this curated, which we don't often stop and think about. And the antidote to that is a sense of gratitude. It's really, oh, look at this. I've got food, you know, that's pretty great. Doesn't have foam on it or whatever, you know, it's not that fluffy looking, but look at that. And it doesn't have to be like weird, you know, punitive, but I think if one is personally in that space and overt about it, know, vocal about it, it is a great model.
Hunter (31:43)
Stay tuned for more Mindful Mama podcasts right after this break.
I agree. Just appreciating Thich Nhat Hanh used to talk about like, I'm going to appreciate my lack of earache, you know, and that's wonderful. We recently had our bathroom redone after 20 something years at our house and we had to live without a shower for a month. And man, do I appreciate just being able to go in my house and take a shower. It's amazing, but sometimes I think that that would be beautiful to model in the dinner table. I'm so grateful that we have so much abundant food. We don't have to worry about finding our food. And yeah, yeah, that's really beautiful. I love that. Yeah, I love that. So you wrote a children's book- “Kind Karl”. What made you decide to write a children's book?
Sharon Salzberg:
It's so cute. He's so cute. My first book was called “Lovingkindness” came out in 1995, published by Shambhala Publications. And they have fairly recently started a line of children's books. So they approached me and they have an author, Jason Ruhl, who's almost like he's done many children's books for them, so they hired the illustrator who lives in France. We never met, we never talked to each other, you know, who did an incredible job. And it was really fun for me because it was challenging. And I realized there were things like, you know, in doing loving kindness practice, there are some practices at the end, like loving kindness for kids and a gratitude practice and so on- that it was important to be concrete. So for example, in doing loving kindness practice, you might call someone to mind and silently be repeating phrases like, may be safe. And so we started out with, well, what does safe feel like? What do we mean by safe? It's like if someone holds your hand to help you across the street when it's busy and crazy, that's safe. That's what it feels like. So needing to do that was a challenge for me and it was quite wonderful. And Karl is just the cutest thing and has a bad temper and a bad time. And his sort of turning point was when he made a mistake in spelling in school. And then went just down with these slots like nobody likes me and I'm stupid. And he had to learn as we all have to learn to put those thoughts in a cloud and let them float away and see the truth of things, which is not stupid, you know, and so on. And then he practiced being kind to himself and then kind to others and things went much better for him after that.
Hunter:
Yeah, that's a great synopsis. And I think Karl really confronts the things that kids confront- like his anger, he has some bad behavior, and then he's feeling some loneliness. So how do you think it supports those conversations that parents can have with kids? How can they talk about it using the book?
Sharon Salzberg:
Yeah, what are the things that Karl does when he gets sad, when he gets better, when he's not throwing crayons or running out of the classroom? Sometimes he jumps up and down on his trampoline. Sometimes he uses every single crayon in the box. And sometimes he just cries. And those are all okay. So I think that's the conversation. And then at the end, the emu spills paint on him in an arts and crafts class and he gets a little bit angry, but then he remembers it was just an accident. Let me be kind. And he ends with the resolve to do one kind thing a day. And, that's part of the conversation, you know, like what's the kind thing we're going to do today.
Hunter:
I love this book and I love, you know, it reminds me of like other great books for children. And I wonder, you know, one of the things actually I have clients that struggle with sometimes is kids who are having a hard time coping with things, having a hard time coping with their, you know, their outbursts, intense emotions. It's hard because parents, of course, are wanting to help them figure out ways to process these feelings. And it can be hard to come at that from a place of acceptance, right? Like in a way, like we're trying to fix the feelings and make them go away. Can you talk a little bit about kind of approaching difficult feelings with the attitude of trying to make it go away versus the attitude of trying, of accepting those feelings?
Sharon Salzberg:
Well, there is a gap between what we feel and how we act. And that's the place we're really intervening, right? To say, okay, you feel really angry. What are we going to do with the anger instead of hitting that kid? And I've often described my favorite definition of mindfulness actually came from an article I read a long time ago in the New York Times about the introduction of mindfulness. was one of the early times mindfulness was being taught in a classroom. And this was a fourth grade classroom in Oakland, California. And so the kids are like nine or 10 years old, right? And the journalist asked one of the kids, what is mindfulness? What is mindfulness? And the kid said, mindfulness means not hitting someone in the mouth. That's what mindfulness means. And I thought, that is a great definition. Because what does it imply? It implies you know you're feeling angry when you start to feel angry. And also you have a certain relationship to the anger. You don't like dive into it and get consumed by it. And you also don't try to hide it or repress it because then you'll just explode. You know, it's like saying, yeah, this anger, this is what I feel. You know, this is what it feels like in my body. What am I going to do with it? In that space, I like to think of that kid thinking, it's somewhere in the mouth last week, didn't work out that well. Maybe I'll try my words or whatever it might be. It's almost like validating the feeling as a feeling and having enough space to figure out how do I want to bring it to life? How do I want to act right now?
Hunter:
Yeah, I think this requires like this requires parents to model this, right? To not just talk about something you have my dear child, but as something that I also struggle with, right? And to, and it's, I think that's really hard because there's a lot of pressure in our culture and our society to be this perfect role of the perfect parent and to always be calm and people come to mindfulness practices and loving kindness practices to help them calm down and to be always regulated and things like that. so to admit or accept that we also have the anger and the frustration, it feels like a failure to a lot of people.
Sharon Salzberg:
Well, would reframe, when first of you said always, which is always a little tricky, always be regulated. You know, I would almost reframe what being regulated means because we can't exactly control what will arise, you know, like we can affect what will arise. Like maybe you got enough sleep or maybe you didn't, or, you know, maybe you have 50 other stressors or maybe you don't. can, we can influence things but we can't absolutely control them. Like you can't insist, I'm never gonna be afraid again. You know, I'm never gonna be angry again. Life's not like that. But how are we with that feeling once it arises? I mean, that's sort of more the goal than wiping out the feeling altogether, which is not gonna happen. And so really, it's a skill, you know, cultivating that ability to be with our feelings without necessarily acting them out is kind of more the point. And so that's like a realistic goal rather than feeling I should never have. You know, one of my early teachers, this man named Meninja once said to me, because this was something I really had to learn again and again, he said, why are you so upset about that thought that's come up in your mind? Did you invite it? Did you say it like 315, I'd like to be filled with self-hatred, please? But when conditions come together for something to arise, it will arise. Now what are you gonna do about it? You know, that's the place of the skills training.
Hunter:
Do you have any tips for people to learn to deal with these things skillfully to feel it without pushing it away?
Sharon Salzberg:
Well, I think if you're interested, that's what formal meditation practice is for. It's like going to the gym, you know. It's a little training period. And, you know, I have a friend, Amishi Jha, who has a lab at the University of Miami. Okay, there you go. So then you know, you know, she works as a researcher-
Hunter (44:01)
She's been on the podcast.
Sharon Salzberg (44:09)
-with people bringing mindfulness to very high stress professions like the military, first responders, high performance athletes. every day I think of another category to suggest we could try parenting, you know, and what she says, and probably said on your show is that 12 minutes a session, three to five times a week is actually making a significant difference in people's lives. So nobody is saying you have to do this eight hours a day, you know, sitting in a pretzel-like pose, you know, cross-legged with your eyes closed and shut down the rest of life. It's not like that, but it is, it has to be real, you know, it's actually like a training. Yeah, no funny hand positions are required.
Hunter:
I mean, that's the gold of mindfulness for me is that, I mean, if we could all tolerate our difficult feelings, we have the freedom to respond in ways that are skillful and to have that clarity and that awareness a lot more than we don't. Yeah. Well, I love, I love “Kind Karl” and I love, all of Sharon's books actually. Real happiness for the listener, for Sharon is on my reading list for my curriculum for the Mindful Parenting Teacher Training. You know, for the parents who are struggling in these overwhelmed times, is there one gentle reminder that you wish all of us, maybe adults and children alike, could carry with them? What would that be?
Sharon Salzberg:
Gosh, in terms of a skill, I'd say it's like take a breath. You know, just every now and then pause and then it's okay. I think in a more general way, it's like taking care of yourself is taking care of others. It's really important.
Hunter:
I love that. I couldn't agree more. Sharon Salzberg's new children's book is called “Kind Karl”, and you can find it anywhere books are sold. And of course, I really recommend “Real Happiness”. I think it's one of the best books about meditation. It's super easy to read and very, very accessible. And yeah. Sharon, thank you. Thank you for coming back on the podcast and for all that you do to help remind us to be slow down and be a little kinder to ourselves. Can feel it just talking to you. I'm actually I'm not in the hurry that sometimes I am in. So anyway, thank you for everything you do and thank you so much for coming on.
Sharon Salzberg (47:08)
Thank you so much.
Hunter (47:14)
Hey, I hope you appreciated this episode. Of course, if you like it, tell all your friends to download it so that it supports the team and supports us continuing to do the podcast. Share it on social media: I'm at @MindfulMamaMentor and you can let me know what you thought. And I hope that's brought some light and some ease and maybe a little bit of space and perspective into your day today. I will be back next week to talk to you real soon. Wishing you all the best. Namaste.
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