Sharon Salzberg's Blog

From the beginning of my meditation practice in 1971, I was very moved by a sense of the Buddha as an integrated being. Most of us can easily experience our lives as somehow fragmented, split apart. We might feel perfectly filled with complete lovingkindness, strongly in touch with the radiant essence of our being when we're alone, but as soon as we're with people, it's very difficult. Or we might feel fine when we're with other people, but feel terrified when we are alone. We might feel one way at work, a different way in the context of our families. Our lives can easily be experienced as split up into these little bundles, whereas for a being like the Buddha, it is seamless. There are no parts, there's no division, there's no fragmentation. His life is of one piece with threads of wisdom and compassion guiding his actions whether he's alone or with others, whether he's wandering through India or being still; whether he is teaching or meditating, it is at the root of his being. It is all of one piece. I found that tremendously inspiring. I felt so fragmented. I knew that integration was exactly what I wanted.



The Buddha said, "From time to time, the enlightened one is born into the world an arahat, fully awakened, abounding in wisdom and goodness, happy, with knowledge of the worlds unsurpassed as a guide to those willing to be taught, a blessed one, a Buddha. By themselves they thoroughly understand. They make this knowledge known to others. They proclaim the truth, both in the letter and in the spirit, "lovely in the beginning, lovely in the middle, lovely in the end," abounding in wisdom and goodness, happy. What a wonderful sense of a possibility!



This Buddha, our Buddha you might say, arose in India in this world around 563 BC. He sat under a tree in Northern India and became enlightened. He came to birth as a human being, just as each of us has. This was perhaps accentuated for me by being in northern India, the land of the Buddha. I could take a short walk and be at the spot where, as bodhisattva, a being aspiring to enlightenment, the Buddha had the milk rice that fortified his body after so much extreme self-denial. And of course, day or night, I could go to the tree. The presence of the Buddha was intimate and everywhere, as though visiting the land of one's ancestors.



As a human being, the Buddha's questions, his very compelling questions, were about the nature of life. It's as though he were asking, "What does it mean to be born into this human body, to be so vulnerable and dependent as an infant, to grow up, to grow older whether we like it or not, to die, unbelievably enough, even as we see all others die around us?" and "What does it mean to have this human mind which seems to veer constantly from one extreme to the other, always changing, so that we might wake up in the morning delighted to be alive, full of faith, really happy, and by the afternoon we're freaked out, we're frightened, we're angry, we feel guilty, we question our very right to be happy. It seems incomprehensible to us. And then at night it's something different again."



What does it mean as a human being to look for happiness, peace, joy, that is not confined within the body, within that changing mind? Is there a quality of happiness, is there a kind of peace that is not a compounded thing subject to change, to destruction, as conditions change? He had questions in effect that are very similar to our own. As he phrased the call to awakening for himself, he said, "Why should I who am subject to birth, old age, sickness, death, sorrow, and suffering, seeing the danger in these things, why should I take refuge in that which is also subject to change, to death, to sorrow, to suffering? Let me find that which is changeless, which is deathless, which is without sorrow, which is unborn and undying, that is a true refuge." And in fact this is what he found. He found a true refuge.



We say a human being sat under a tree 2600 years ago, motivated by compassion, brought there, moved there on a wave of moral force. There was no other place he could be. Throughout the night as he sat there, which was a full moon night, the full moon in May, he saw the conditioned nature of suffering, sorrow, grief, loss, and death. He traced it back. He traced it back until he came to ignorance. He saw his own and others' countless past lives stretching back over many ages and eons of the world. He saw in effect the spectacle of the whole universe, beings being born and dying in accordance with the laws of nature. He saw the cyclic path of all beings, the unfortunate and the illustrious and the rich and the poor, all beings tossed about on these waves of birth and old age, sickness and death. As the night went on, he saw the means of liberation. He saw suffering, the cause of suffering, the end of suffering, and the path to the end of suffering. At the first light of dawn, just as the star Venus broke in the morning sky, he saw through the very last trace of ignorance in himself and was completely enlightened.



And, it is taught, we too can be enlightened, every one of us. We can be completely freed from the bonds of limitation and conditioned confusion through our own endeavor, inspiration, effort and development. There is a path, and we can traverse it.

Article first appeared on Huffington Post August 1, 2008.

Recently I led a workshop with my friend, Bob Thurman, on working with your enemies.

The workshop was in Washington DC, which seems a particularly apt place to explore the consequences of being stuck in a tight worldview of "us" and "them"; many would say it is a notable spot to examine the corrosive effects of habitually relating through fear, anger, and alienation.

I started by telling a story about a time I was on a train going down the Hudson Valley to New York City, and found myself sitting between a woman having a moderately loud conversation on a cell phone, and a man growing increasingly agitated at the volume of her call. As the ride went on, accompanied by the steady sound of her voice and the minute details of her plans, he wiggled, and grunted, and muttered, then finally exploded. "You're making too much noise!!" he yelled at the top of his lungs.

I looked over at him and thought, "Well, so are you!"

What came to my mind next was the quotation widely attributed to Albert Einstein, "The significant problems we face can not be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."

It takes strong insight and often a good deal of courage to break away from our habitual ways of looking at things, to be able to respond from a different place. Risking a new level of seeing enables us to try out new behaviors, like not shouting back or reflexively seeking revenge. Instead we might use ways of communicating that clearly convey our feelings without damaging ourselves or those around us.

To work with how we feel about a perceived enemy doesn't mean to succumb or give in, to be stupid or careless. There are those who are harmful, sometimes terribly so, and we need to do our best to protect ourselves and those vulnerable from them. But it does mean an enormous adventure of consciousness, a readiness to step into new terrain, to be right at the edge between those we include, care about, feel responsive to, and those whom we wall off, exclude, automatically reject. It means taking an honest look at what really constitutes power and strength.

Shouting to drown out someone else's noise, returning belligerence for belligerence may be automatic, but it is exhausting. Inflexibly categorizing those we encounter as good or bad or right or wrong helps us feel secure, but if we look around, we realize that relating in that way doesn't allow us to really connect to anyone, and we are in fact quite lonely.

Perhaps, instead of adding to the din by yelling at the woman on the train, a new way of thinking would mean protesting loud cell phones on public transportation, and working to rectify injustice, and watching out for those we are responsible for -- but in a way that listens, that lets the world come alive beyond categories of us and them and self and other, a way that explores fresh ways of seeing.

If we are willing to go to a new level of thinking, we discover that we are capable of so much more than we usually envision.

Imagine if we dropped our rigid need to be right, our easy perpetuation of what we are used to, our compulsion to take the easy way and just be like other people, and actually tried to practice what the Buddha taught: "Hatred will never cease by hatred, it will only cease by love."

It would be a whole new way of living: vibrant, creative, and perhaps quite surprisingly effective.

This article first appeared on Huffington Post July 13, 2009.

After the metro bombing in London, in July 2005, my initial response echoed most of those around me: sorrow for lives lost, some anxiety about getting on a subway in NYC, distress at the state of a degenerating world.

This was all natural, but remained strictly within "us versus them" thinking.

Willa, my then 7-year-old godchild, had another perspective. On being told what had happened, her eyes filled with tears and she said,

"Mom, we should say a prayer." As she and her mother held hands, Willa asked to go first. Her mother was stunned to hear Willa begin with, "May the bad people remember the love in their hearts."

Willa's startling wisdom often takes me to another place, and a new perspective. She is now 11, and a fantastic artist, a burgeoning actress, a poet, and an imp. It's pretty hard to imagine life without her.

Willa was born in China, adopted and raised in the U.S. by 2 of my closest friends. Their family came instantly to my mind when I heard about the trailer for the upcoming movie, Orphan, about an older adopted child who turns out to be evil and wreaks havoc on her new family. The original trailer featured the unbelievable tagline: "It must be hard to love an adopted child like your own." Really?

For all the Willas who might have sat in a movie theater somewhere, seeing that trailer, I apologize for the folly of adults. I apologize for our tendency to be unthinking and insensitive, to create and recreate an "other" over and over again. Almost by definition, the "other" is an object, not a person, and so anything might be said about them or done to them, and it doesn't count, it doesn't matter.

That kind of objectification lies at the heart of cruelty, heartlessness, and so much casual indifference.

Can one just say anything at all about children without it counting? There are millions of children around the globe who are or were once parentless due to circumstances completely beyond their control - do their feelings really not matter?

Can one then do anything at all to children without it counting as abusive, or hurtful, or consequential? Really?

Can one say anything at all about families, with our own definition of a "real" family counting as absolute truth, and a different construct of a family being deemed inauthentic or unworthy or lesser? Who gets to decide when and how a child becomes your own? What distant entity owns that right?

My heart aches for the pain caused by the attitudes we so often perpetuate, the assigning of "otherness" we so often engage in to exclude someone.

As recipients, we all know when we confront the ignorance of others of who we are, and we all know the temptation to dive into that person's or group's definition of us and cloak ourselves in it, to know ourselves as not belonging, and inferior and left out.

"Don't do it Willa," I keep thinking. "Don't believe that about yourself and your family!" But then, it is quite possible she wouldn't.

We should say a prayer.

Original Article

When I first returned in 1974 from studying in India, I’d commonly find myself at a party or in a social situation where someone would ask me,

“What do you do?”

When I replied, “I teach meditation,” I’d more often than not hear them say “Oh,” as they sidled away.

The implication of their reaction was very clear: “That’s weird!”

Nowadays, largely because of scientific research into meditation’s effect on the brain and immune system, and the pioneering efforts of clinicians to study the effects of meditation on all areas of life where the quality of our attention makes a difference (such as depression, anxiety, addiction and healing), the most common response I hear when I say, “I teach meditation,” is “I’m so stressed out, I could really use you.” I am also amused to sometimes hear, “You know, my partner should really meet you.”

A more disconcerting, and fairly common response is, “I tried meditation once. I realized I couldn’t do it. I failed at it, because I couldn’t stop thinking.”

But in actuality, since it’s in the nature of the mind to wander, it is not that you are failing at meditation if your mind does not stay on the breath or mantra or whatever object you are trying to focus on.

Meditation is not a matter of trying to stop thinking or make your mind go blank, but rather to realize when your attention is wandering and to simply let go of the thoughts and begin again. It is a way of changing our relationship to our thoughts, so we’re not so consumed by them, with no sense of space. Having a newly spacious relationship to our thoughts brings both peace and freedom.

This classic meditation approach is designed to deepen the force of concentration. If you consider how scattered, how distracted, how out of the moment we may ordinarily be, you can see the benefit of gathering that energy, gathering your attention. We can reclaim all of that energy, which could be available to us but usually isn’t because we throw it away into the past, into the future, into judgment, into speculation.

Over time, we gather all of that attention and energy to become integrated, to have a center, to not be so fragmented, so torn apart. So even though we might take a very simple object, an ordinary object, like the feeling of the breath to focus on, as we practice it has the effect of really bringing us to a sense of wholeness, a sense of empowerment.

Here’s one reason why focusing on the feeling of the in and out breath is a classic foundational exercise in meditation: The breath is very portable. If we can practice being connected, being aware, when we’re sitting formally, when we say, “Oh now I’m going to be meditating,” we can also be practicing standing in line impatiently at the grocery store, sitting anxiously in a doctor’s waiting room. Anywhere we are breathing we can be meditating.

It’s private, free, ours.

If you wish to explore meditation, this is a way you can begin:

You can sit comfortably. You don’t have to feel self conscious, as though you are about to do something special or weird. Just be at ease. It helps if your back can be straight, without being strained or overarched. You can close your eyes or not, however you feel comfortable. And notice where the feeling of the breath is most predominant, at the nostrils, at the chest or at the abdomen. Rest your attention lightly, in just that area.

See if you can feel just one breath, from the beginning through the middle, to the end. If you’re with the breath at the nostrils, it may be tingling, vibration, warmth, coolness. If at the abdomen, it may be movement, pressure, stretching, release. You don’t have to name them, but feel them. It’s just one breath.

And if images or sounds, emotions, sensations arise, but they’re not strong enough to actually take you away from the feeling of the breath, just let them flow on by. You don’t have to follow after them, you don’t have to attack them, you’re breathing. It’s like seeing a friend in a crowd, you don’t have to shove everyone else aside or make them go away, but your enthusiasm, your interest, is going toward your friend, “Oh there’s my friend. There’s the breath.”

But if something arises ? sensations, emotions, memories, plans, whatever it might be ? that’s strong enough to take your attention away from the feeling of the breath, or if you’ve fallen asleep or get lost in some incredible fantasy, the moment you realize you’ve been distracted is the magic moment. Instead of judging yourself or berating yourself, see if you can let go of the distraction, and gently return your attention to the feeling of the breath.


See Original Post

As surely everyone knows, a few days ago President Barack Obama released to the press the long form copy of his birth certificate. The long form had the same information as the short form, which he had released years ago, and reiterated the same truth. Anyone who comprehends that Hawaii is in fact a state in the United States of America knows that same truth -- Barack Obama is a natural born citizen, and a legitimately elected President. I agreed with New Yorker editor David Remnick , who, while appearing on television, directly named the questioning of the president's birth place as a conscious form of race baiting, and I considered that day a very sad day in this country, illuminating a great deal of divisiveness, bigotry, and ignorance.



Strangely, on that same day, for the first time in my life I received a message of hate via email. It came in on my website account, with the subject line, " Stinking Jews." The first line was, "We don't need Jews in Buddhism," and went on to describe Jews as greedy, stinking, and ghouls.



I'm not sure on what authority the writer was stating that Buddhism doesn't "need" any Jews. A lot of Buddhists (and Jews) would be very surprised to hear that Jews should be excluded from exploring the ethical teachings, the meditation methods, and the compassionate dimensions of Buddhism. I remembered during his inaugural address, President Obama called this a nation of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and non-believers. I was standing there in the freezing cold, in that crowd of millions, and murmured, "What about Buddhists?" At the very same moment, the man standing next to me, a total stranger, murmured, "What about Buddhists?" Later, on a political website I enjoy following, the same point came up, and someone commented, "Well, between Jews and non-believers, he covered an awful lot of American Buddhists."



And on the day President Obama released his long form birth certificate, and I received the hate filled email, while I was meditating I had quite a Martin Neimoller moment. Neimoller's well known poem, describing the dangers of political apathy, recalled his experience in Nazi Germany:



First they came for the communists, �and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.��

Then they came for the trade unionists, �and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.��

Then they came for the Jews, �and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.��

Then they came for me� and there was no one left to speak out for me.



Being born Jewish, I personally don't make it past the third line to face the loneliness and terror of the last. But everybody in this country, even if you are not a communist or trade unionist or Jew or person of color or immigrant should take heed: hatred fostered doesn't tend to die out; creating an "other" whose life isn't seen as meaningful sets a fire that can burn wild and devastate many, including yourself; fear is easy to fan and hard to quell. Staying silent in the face of bigotry resolves nothing -- eventually there will be no place to hide. We can confront lies with the truth without demonizing anyone, and we have to, or ignorance gets stronger and stronger. We can stay connected to the dignity of our being no matter what trash comes our way, and we need to, for our own sake and to model a possibility for others. When we see someone else getting knocked down and we feel privileged and immune, we need to remind ourselves to guess again -- life just isn't like that, all tidy and static, without cycles of vulnerability and change. We don't know whose turn will be next, while we do know that without a legion of truth-tellers, it will be someone's.

I've always said that lovingkindness and compassion are inevitably woven throughout meditation practice even if the words are never used or implied, no matter what technique or method we are using.

Everyone's mind wanders, without doubt, and we always have to start over.

Everyone resists or dislikes the thought of or is too tired to meditate at times, and we have to be able to begin again.

Everyone loses touch with their aspiration, and we need the heart to return to what we really care about.

All of this is based on developing greater lovingkindness and compassion.


This has intrigued me from the beginning of my acquaintance with meditation practice: the big life lessons we learn to embody through meditation come in these itty bitty little packages.

If we are trying to settle our attention on the feeling of the breath, for example, and find we have to continually start over after every two breaths opens the door to a bout of distraction, that doesn't seem like a very big deal. But it actually is.

What we are actually practicing is the art of beginning again, not accumulating a tally of more and more breaths before our attention wanders.

As we hone the ability to let go of distraction, to begin again without rancor or judgment, we are deepening forgiveness and compassion for ourselves. And in life, we find we might make a mistake, and more easily begin again, or stray from our chosen course and begin again.

We are practicing this in meditation whether we are working with the breath, or awareness of body or emotions, or doing the formal phrases of lovingkindness practice.



This is the meta-lesson, forged in the crucible of our effort, our openness to trying, the tenderness of our expanding hearts, our laughter at ourselves, our tears, our humility: we can always begin again.

And we will have to.


As the first 28 day challenge based on my most recent book, "Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program," is drawing to a close, this is the thread I see repeated in the words of the participants, as they describe their final week, and the results of the practice:



In "Real Happiness" Sharon tells us about one of her students who thought "the whole idea of lovingkindness meditation seemed hokey and rote to her, but she focused on the phrases nevertheless." I've thought the same exact thing about lovingkindness meditation. It's a group hug, mushy, mawkish. As much as I like the idea of lovingkindness in theory, I've never taken it very seriously. I might say to myself "May I be happy," a few times and think of my mom for a while, but sooner or later -- usually around the time I start trying to extend that warm feeling to some jerk or other -- it just starts to feel silly and I go back to the serious business of trying to develop concentration.



Not today. Today I'm going to try to do some lovingkindness in earnest. Why the change of heart? To be honest, it's because it's been a long week. I've felt defeated and have been harder on myself than usual -- mostly about perceived transgressions against my body. You're not sleeping enough. You're not working out enough or meditating enough. How can you eat so much crappy food? It's endless and it's exhausting. So today I've decided to try to meet that negativity head on and give myself a little love for once.

-- Sam Mowe, Editorial and Web Assistant at Tricycle Magazine


As I was I was doing the dishes on Monday morning I was thinking about who I might think of during Loving-Kindness meditation this week. I was thinking of one person particular, a mother at my children's school who has made some very insensitive remarks regarding my 10-year old's seizures. (I am being really polite here, As one friend asked -- did you hit her?) I was all set to really focus on her when I was set to bring to mind a person whom you might have a difficulty or conflict with. I was ready!


But something happened, she faded far away as did her behavior, but during the sequence where we think of someone we have gratitude for there seemed to be a never ending parade of people that came to mind.


I learned how easy it can be to put all our energy into the negative, even though the positive so far out weighs it. I saw that fear and ignorance have very little power when they are set against the landscape of love and goodwill.


-- Christine Califra-Schiff, Writer


Love is a verb. Like cooking, painting, gardening -- when love is present, there is evidence. When I am loving, I am doing something.


I regularly do the lovingkindness meditation for my Grandmother. Often times I hear and see her saying the phrases for me.


So often, we don't know what to do in life. We don't know what to say or how to respond to a situation or person. Sometimes that person is ourselves. Whatever else is being called for, now you can say the phrases with sincerity and certainty. This is your blessing. This is your seal. This is your love made sustenance. This is your love made real.



-- Elesa Commerse, Meditation Teacher Working with Cancer Patients



Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness

My earliest experiences in meditation were in a context of intensive retreats. It happened to be in India, but it could have been anywhere: a group of people gathered with an instructor in a place we didn't leave for 10 days or two weeks, with someone cooking our meals and activities like reading and writing and social conversation left aside for that period. These retreats were like immersion courses -- we were free of all responsibilities other than deepening our own awareness and compassion.



When I got back to the U.S., my friends and I captured the essentials of that retreat experience and began the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Mass. There too retreats are largely silent, and participants, aside from a short chore one is asked to do each day (helping chop vegetables, emptying trash, etc.) are free of other responsibilities.



I once had a friend on retreat whose "job" while there was cleaning a bathroom. His job in the rest of his life was as a musical conductor. It turned out he had to leave the retreat briefly to conduct a memorial concert at Carnegie Hall. He describes a very funny moment, standing on the stage that night, about to conduct a magnificent orchestra in the glorious environs of Carnegie Hall, when he had a passing thought, "I wonder if someone is cleaning that bathroom!"



It is so powerful when we can leave behind our ordinary identities, no longer think of ourselves primarily as a conductor, or writer, or salesclerk, and go to a supportive environment to deeply immerse in meditation practice. And what I have been learning lately is how very powerful it also is when we don't leave it all behind, when we bring a commitment to better understanding ourselves through meditation right into our ordinary everyday identity and jobs and lives.



For the month of February, coinciding with the release of my new book "Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation: a 28-Day Program," we have gathered a diverse group of people doing just that, and chronicling their experience of regularly meditating while still fulfilling the responsibilities of being a mom, or firefighter, or a police officer, or a minister, or teacher. There are about 60 people blogging, and anyone is welcome to join this 28 day challenge at any time, and comment.



It's a paradigm shift for me, and an inspiring one. The meditation traditions I started and have continued practicing have all emphasized inclusivity: anyone can do this who is interested. You don't have to believe anything, adopt a dogma in order to learn how to meditate. This isn't limited to special people, or lucky people, or people of a certain background. But of course economic constraints, information gaps, cultural assumptions all do their own limiting. It's going to take creative forms, new ways of communicating, and all of us challenging our own assumptions to breathe life into that assertion of inclusivity. I have been so moved at the depth of experience, the commitment, and the honesty and kindness of the participants in this challenge, each fulfilling the demands of their ordinary lives, each showing a way forward to new manifestations of practice, community, awareness and love.



Here are just some brief samples from the first week of the challenge:



From Actress Daphne Zuniga:

I wake up, It's the first day! The day my new clarity and calmness will begin! The day I will be helping everything align with my true self and I will begin to align with the Universe's true self! Yay! The day things will begin to bug me less! And things will fall into place better. I'll get what I want with out wanting it too much, just the right balanced amount. It won't take long, since I used to do silent retreats for several days at a time, boy those were the days! Days of miracles, beautiful inner experiences beyond all others... okay, let me get my coffee, my blanket, my Real Happiness book, set my timer, and go sit on the couch.

From a Human Rights Worker in Rwanda:

If I can spend time sitting in a corner area of my floor that I've never sat before, if while sitting there I notice the way the colors of ribbon on the bookshelf interact with each other, if I can become familiar with the sounds of the deafening birds outside my window and the scrape of the mop against the concrete, then perhaps that's good enough for now. If during this sit I begin to make a mental list of the many things I need to do later, then at least moving through that opens up the space and place to see what is underneath.

From a NYC Firefighter:

It has been brutal weather these past few weeks in NYC. A lot of us firefighters are being over worked due to the city's low budget. So even though we were running around all day and night for 24 hours I managed to squeeze in a meditation session while we sat at a manhole fire for three hours.

I was in my bunker gear sitting in the fire truck, wet and cold. It was quiet so I decided to try and meditate on the breath. I sat comfortably with my back straight and started to focus on my breath. Inhale, exhale, repeat =)

From Police Officer Deb Brown:

One of the things you are expected to be able to do efficiently when you become a police officer is to multitask. New officers will wash out if they can't drive, listen to the radio, look for suspects, witnesses, complainants, victims, criminal activity, monitor the mobile data computer, look for addresses, figure out where they are going and a myriad of other things that can compete for one's attention... So, you train and train at the academy and then hit the street and it can all go horribly awry if you can't multitask. And by 'awry', I mean 'in death.' And like so many things in this career, it is difficult to give up those habits/skills when you take off the uniform. The challenge for me (and I suppose others in law enforcement) is learning to let go and focus on one thing at a time when not on the job.

A few years ago I went to the Walter Reed Army hospital to do an afternoon of teaching meditation for the nursing staff. Just before the class, my friend, a nurse there, took me on a tour of one of the wards. Of course it was extremely intense, even in that brief time: wounded soldiers, anxious parents, young children visiting fathers who were very different from the ones who had gone away, partners coming into the patients' rooms in all kinds of states.



At the end of the tour, my friend turned to me and said, "You know, the nurses who can stay here (and keep serving) are not the ones who get lost in sorrow. The nurses who can stay here are the ones who can connect to the resiliency of the human spirit."



It's awfully easy to get lost in sorrow, long term, big time. Just last week offered up a lot of sorrow, for some quietly, for some publicly, for some with national import, and for some with no one at all to notice. My mother died when I was nine years old; I retain an acute sense of what it is like to be a nine-year-old girl, like Christina Green was in the last year of her life in Tucson. Martin Luther King Jr. would have turned 82 last Saturday; he was assassinated while still in his thirties. Violence and loss circled around and touched many, many lives every day last week -- as it does every week.



How do we come back to the resiliency of the human spirit? I often think that the most important step is realizing we need to. We don't want to be broken, of course, but we often seem to not want to focus on our own healing or happiness -- it seems selfish, unnecessary. But actually our own happiness and healing are what remind us of change and possibility, and form our resiliency, our sustained ability to flourish ourselves and to give to others.



Commonly we find resiliency through connection: to nature, to community, to inner strengths, to a sense of life bigger than the circumstances we see in front of us.



When the Buddha says, "Hatred will never cease by hatred; hatred will only cease by love," he is inviting us to connect to a law vaster and more abiding than our usual tendencies, as is Martin Luther King Jr. when he says, "Somebody must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and the chain of evil in the universe. And you do that by love." When the poet Rainer Marie Rilke says, "Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us," he is pushing us to consider a whole different picture of life than we might be accustomed to. And when President Barack Obama says, "Our task, working together, is to constantly widen the circle of our concern," he is urging us toward a vision that sees ourselves in one another, and dares us toward a moral imagination that gets bigger, not smaller, even when we feel so overcome.

As I look forward to co-leading this retreat, People Who Care for People: Tools for Resiliency at the Garrison Institute, I find myself reflecting on caregivers I know. Some practice caregiving professionally, as nurses, first responders, chaplains, non-profit attorneys; others in their personal lives, as parents, children, siblings, friends. As difficult and pressured as caring for others can be, as tiring and overwhelming as it often becomes, many express a very powerful happiness at being able to serve.



An important element in how we keep going is being able to touch that happiness, broadening our perspective beyond what we see just in front of us, reminding us of our deepest motivation and what we care about most. In a challenging environment, facing our own or others' suffering, we need to draw on inner resources.



Whether you care for a young child, an aging parent, a difficult-to-understand teenager, a client at work with no clear resolution to their problems in sight, any skillful relationship of caregiving relies on balance -- the balance between opening one's heart endlessly and accepting the limits of what one can do. The balance between compassion and equanimity. Compassion is the trembling or the quivering of the heart in response to suffering. Equanimity is a spacious stillness that can accept things as they are. The balance of compassion and equanimity allows us to profoundly care, and yet not get overwhelmed and unable to cope because of that caring.



I have been involved for several years in a program run by the Garrison Institute, bringing the tools of meditation and yoga to domestic violence shelter workers, and then to shelter supervisors and directors. These people are very much on the front lines of suffering, dealing daily with their clients' issues of betrayal, heartbreak, fear, anger, humiliation. They might be survivors of trauma themselves. They might receive very little institutional support. They inevitably rely on inner resiliency to sustain their work over the long term.



Our premise has been that fostering greater balance of heart and mind is a key to that resiliency, and that one valuable avenue to cultivating this balance is meditation practice. Meditation helps us see our own difficult mind states -- such as anger or fear or a sense of helplessness -- with compassion instead of self-judgment. It also provides a refuge during life's storms by helping us connect compassionately with others, no matter the circumstances.



Especially in times of uncertainty or pain, meditation broadens our perspective and deepens our courage. The spaciousness of mind and greater ease of heart that naturally arise through balanced awareness and compassion are fundamental components of a resilient spirit. They bring us an unusual kind of happiness, one not determined by the conditions we find ourselves in, not defined by the amount of "success" or "failure" we saw in our efforts today. Meditation helps us return, again and again, to this unique happiness.

Last week the Dalai Lama was at Emory University, where he holds a Presidential Distinguished Professorship. Amongst the offerings were a teaching on compassion and an exploration of scientific research into compassion meditation. There was also a discussion with Alice Walker and Richard Gere called "The Creative Journey: Artists in Conversation with the Dalai Lama on Spirituality and Creativity."



This was how it was described:

How do the arts help us to express, or indeed to uncover, our spiritual yearnings and questions or certainties? What do the artist and the spiritual master have to teach each other from their respective disciplines? What is the role of tradition (or, conversely, iconoclasm) in maintaining or renewing art and spiritual life? Is the human being innately spiritual, innately artistic?

The first question began, "In the West many people believe that creativity comes from torment, while in the East there is more of a tradition of great art coming from balance and realization." I myself know that this is true because many meditation students have asked a variant of this, equating edginess, boldness and creativity with inner pain, and happiness with dullness, laziness and giving up. Artists, actors, musicians have expressed some reluctance to practice meditation lest they be content in all the worst ways, lying about in placid obliviousness.



Alice Walker responded in an interesting way, saying that early in her career she had felt that good poetry must come from sadness, a notion that she had picked that up from Langston Hughes. But as she got older, she said, she found that she was just getting happier and happier, and was, of course, still writing. Richard Gere talked about being a lost, angry young man playing roles of lost, angry young men, and how the spaciousness of greater and greater happiness allowed him not to identify with those roles, not inhabiting them so fully, but to play with them, to be flexible.



The Dalai Lama took the conversation to another place, seeming to define beauty as a good heart or wholesome mind state, rather than by any external measure. He recounted that many times he had been brought to a cathedral and asked to admire its artistic beauty, but that that didn't hold a lot of interest for him. He was more concerned with freedom from suffering, with internal states, with motivation and heart space.



I suspect that the Dalai Lama couldn't even imagine the concept that one might cling to suffering for a creative edge or think of happiness as a dulling agent. Happiness in Buddhist teaching is seen as inner abundance, resourcefulness, the wellspring of energy within that allows us to serve, give, offer, create. If we don't ever think we have enough, we're not motivated to give. If we are depleted, exhausted, demoralized and despondent, we don't nearly have the energy to help others, to express, to go forth and try to make a difference. So happiness isn't at all seen as laziness but the foundation of very great activity of all kinds.