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Sharon Salzberg

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59
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2017-11-03
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2017-11-03
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  1. “Well, I'm on Twitter a lot. At Sharon Salzburg, and my website is SharonSalzberg.com, and you can actually reach me through there as well.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Apparently said somewhere the problems that we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. It sounds very, I sound like, and I bet he did say it. And it's an amazing statement. I think about that really a lot. I hope people, I mean, my deepest hope is that people will do the good that's in front of them even if it feels very small because the problems right now can seem insurmountable and massive. And we just have to step by step do what we can.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Yeah, I mean, I do find this. Thank you, and I do find this such a time of. Grief in the part of people and rage, and so many people say to me, I can't bear who I've become. I'm continually in rage. My hope is always that love be a part of the conversation and that we, in a way, I guess that's why I'm glad the book came out when it came out because it's so easy to think of love as being weak and saccharin and all of that. And it's so easy to think the only strength we have is vengefulness and hatred. And I hope we just keep looking at that altogether and understand that we can fight and struggle and we kind of have to because what a time, but it can come from a different place and it's kind of got to come from a different place. I know that quotation from Einstein is a little suspect because you can never really source it where he's...”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “And that really became my mantra. Life is not forgotten me. I'm still a part of life. Life is not forgotten me. And maybe, you know, that first class I did in Asian philosophy was the beginning of that. You know, like everybody suffers. This is a part of life. Life is not forgotten you. You haven't been abandoned. And so when I feel that I don't really feel it often, but if I feel the intimations of that re-emerging, it's all about connection.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “And it was one of those moments where I thought, I thought I worked through this. You know, I thought this was done. And through a whole process, a lot relying on him and his trust in me and the practice and just being in nature and things like that. I really saw that despair was like the severing of connection, that faith was like connection, like love, which I'm also defining as connection. So I'm realizing I'm kind of back there again. So I realized that everything I could do that would renew my sense of connection and kind of bring me to that sense of Not being soled, not being severed from life itself. And there was at the time this passage from Rilke came up in my mind, something like, do not be frightened if a sadness greater than you've ever known before comes up before you. Life is not forgotten you.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “And then she said, Well, you're going to have to tell a despair story in your book. And I said, I'd really rather not, you know. I did and it's a story. We started this conversation talking about my mother dying when I was nine. And in the book, Faith, I talk about this time. In the 90s, so that's 30 years later more, I was meditating. I was in Australia on an intensive My Burmese teacher, Said Upanita, who had gone to Australia to teach. Of nowhere, I was kind of back there. I was nine years old and not knowing what to do, not knowing how to get help and the terror and the anguish and the whole thing. It was just there.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Combination. I did write a book called Faith and Faith in the Buddhist tradition is not It's not like a commodity you have or you don't have, and if you don't have enough for the right kind, you're condemned. It's more a process. It's a journey. And it's a journey. Faith is almost defined as offering your heart, being able to be fully present with something, moving off of the sidelines into the center of possibilities, that movement. And it's only aided and strengthened by questioning and doubt and wandering doubt the right kind of doubt, you know, like wanting to see the truth for yourself. So I was working with this freelance editor friend on the book and saying, well, you know, from the Buddhist point of view, doubt is not the right kind of doubt that insistence on questioning is not the opposite of faith. So she said, what's the opposite of faith? And I said, despair.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Know now it's like so tempting there's so many opportunities and you could go so many, I could go so many places and reach so many different kinds of people. It's like, wait a minute, take a break.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “So there's just a lot of that. Yeah, I mean, I say yes to too many things. I'm tired. And I'm a night owl anyway. If I'm asleep by one, that's a good thing. If I'm asleep by three, that's a bad thing. I just had this book came out and I was traveling like crazy, and I'm so happy I'm getting on another airplane for a few weeks. And there's this great temptation in this moment in time because I remember coming back from India in 1974 as a meditation teacher because one of my own teachers had told me to teach. And in those days, if I was at a party or some social situation introduced as a meditation teacher. People would kind of sidle away that's weird, or they'd say, you know, did you meet the Beatles when you were over there? And I'd say, no, sadly, they went when I was in high school, but.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Yeah, thank you. For the first five and a half hours, I was fine. And then I just got so irritated. I was so impatient. I felt so miserable. And just then this woman came up to me and said, Are you Sharon Salzburg? I thought, great, you know? It's potentially on the floor. Only come three hours ago, it was fine”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Right now, yeah, I guess that in a minute, but first the story occurred to me that I was sitting in, it was actually the San Francisco Airport, and my flight was delayed for six hours. Six and a half after the delay for six and a half hours”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Have great conditioning toward numbers, you know, it's got to be this many people or it's got to be as many people per recording or something like that. And as I get older, which I have somehow I think who cares, really? Just think of that one person.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “I feel really privileged. I feel incredibly lucky in my life. The things I get to talk about, the things I get to explore with people and their willingness to be vulnerable and honest and the methods that were given to me. And I'm able to pass on that I find really viable and useful and life-saving in many cases. I ask myself, is it enough if one person or three people or I have 100 people in front of me and only three people want to take it to some depth or whatever it is? Is that enough? And I actually really kind of feel it's enough because it's so amazing when somebody says to you with that kind of sincerity, oh, your work has really made a difference. People recognize my voice now because of recordings. It's really a beautiful thing. And so I like anybody, you know.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “I've kind of redefined it a lot in my own life in that I know now, you know, like meditation, mindfulness is extremely popular and a lot of people talk about scaling, you know, like let's have a big impact on a lot of people or even a small impact on a lot of people. But a lot of people part is what's critical for a lot of folks. When I think about it, it's not really so much that way for me because”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “And it was perfect. I love that story. And then I was unfortunately quite late with the book. And I kept getting delayed because of me. And finally, it was a little over a year ago. I was in England about the Citer retreat. I was just about to press send. It was a day early from the final, final deadline. I felt really proud. Oh, I'm a day early. And I was just about to press send when I remembered that story. And I thought, did that make it in there? You know, did it stay in there through all these changes and editings and stuff like that? So I looked and I had not.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “I recently read a book called Real Love, and the process of writing the book, we really try to crowdsource in a way. I wanted to hear a lot of people's stories and insights about love and some of that I tried to do online. A lot of it I did meeting with groups. And the very first group I met with was in New York City. People just were talking about their experiences of love. The trajectory of the book, the structure of the book, is that the first section is about love for oneself. The second section is about love for another, whether that's a parent or child or a lover or whatever. And then the third section is about love for all beings. So I just said, let it rip. I don't care which section you're talking about, but help me. Tell me what love means to you. Tell me some stories. So we got through a good part of the evening and this guy raised his hand. He said, most people think of a good reason.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Usually, other people see it more in us first before we see it in ourselves. And I've had many people come to me and say no, it's a stop. And I think anything was happening. But my kids came to me and said, please don't stop. You're much better. The ultimate point is to look at our lives, maybe not right away. Others will tell us if we're changing. But then when we are really seriously assessing, do look at your life. That's where it matters. And, you know, I think it's in our lives that we really, we do see the benefits if they're there to be seen. And that's where they matter. So that's where it should be.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “So that's the first thing I say if you're trying to assess your practice, and you should. You don't want to do something forever, not knowing if it's making a difference, but don't look at that, say, 20 minute period a day when you're formally practicing. Look at your life. That's what we're going to see it ultimately. I mean, you don't see it right away. You're totally right.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “I think that's really true. And I tell a story sometimes about a friend who came to me in New York City and took me out to lunch and he said, this is like a confessional lunch. I said, really? He said he had been doing loving kindness meditation. That was just his particular Methodology. He said, I've been doing loving kindness meditation for about three years now. And I want to say that my experience when I sit each day or when I'm on retreat doing that practice is not that different now than it was three years ago when I started out, but I'm like a totally different person. I'm different with myself. I'm different with my family. I'm different ethically. I'm different with my community. And then he looked at me and he said, is that enough? And I said, yeah, I think it's kind of enough, you know, really.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “And there's also there are kind of intentionalities. It's like we can remember our deepest intention. Like what do I want to have come out of this conversation? What would make me happy? Do I want to be seen as right? Do I want to grind them into dust? Do I want to be helpful? Do I want to resolution? And that'll give us a lot of information about where we're really coming from and if it's to have a resolution to find a way to work together, whatever it might be, or even to finish dinner together, then that might counsel being quieter and not being so forceful or finding another way of saying this is what I feel instead of this is the way the truth is, things like that. And if you, in fact, want to grind them into dust, that will be a different path.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “And then you have choice, and we also practice in mindfulness being able to hang in there with the anger, you know, without having it take us over and also without being ashamed of it or afraid of it, without finding it. We have a more balanced relationship to it, and we can hang in there. It's almost like the storm moving through your body. And then you decide how you want to act. Because often we do have to act, and we should act. But maybe that very email is not going to get you what you want. Maybe it's better to wait a moment and see what else emerges, something like that.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “I mean, I think there are lots of levels to that. One is getting really acquainted with what's happening in your body. It's like you feel the beginning of the anger, not like after you've sent the email or lashed out, but you can feel it really emerging.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Conviviality like let's have dinner together or let's go to the movies together. I want to spend time with you and love in that sense of Metza does not mean that at all it actually doesn't even imply a certain action. It's an inner space of connection. We acknowledge our lives are connected, that everybody counts, everybody matters doesn't mean I like you. It doesn't mean I want to spend any time with you. It doesn't mean I'm going to cease fighting you in your agenda, but not from a place of hatred, you know, and it's connection. That's really what it's about. And so those practices of, say, loving kindness meditation are about connecting more deeply to ourselves and connecting more deeply to others.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “And it's commonly translated as loving kindness, which I think has a flavor of the actual meaning, but it's a kind of problematic term because nobody really uses it. Like you wouldn't really necessarily expect to go to a coffee shop somewhere and hear the conversation at the next table, including the word loving-kindness. It maybe is a little saccharin or removed from day-to-day life. I've had scholars and translators come to me and say, just say love, stop being so cutesy. You know, you mean love, but love is so complicated and can also be frankly a medium of exchange. Like, I would love you as long as following 15 conditions are met or I would love myself as long as I never make a mistake. And it's so fragile. It's so breakable. It's not really what meant to mean. It's the literal translation I also have a problem with, the literal translation is friendship. And for me, friendship implies”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “Well, I think it has lost a lot of meaning because we use the word love from everything from, you know, I love the color of that cabinet and I love frozen yogurt to I love you. And there are so many associations with love. It's like, and one of the questions you posed before, you know, if you are a person who's kind of a type A person and you're brought into a room and say, we're going to do a meditation on love. You know, it tends to be a little mausiating for a lot of people. And because we often associate love with weakness, with giving in, kind of smiling, with, you know, it's just this frivolous smile. It's not connected, maybe to very deep feelings of pain or anger or edge or ferocity or intensity or the things that are really a part of us. The word in Pali, the language of the original Buddhist text is meta-meta.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “What do we pay attention to? And who do we pay attention to is a fascinating question. Who do we look right through? Who doesn't count? Who doesn't matter? Who's like an object for us? And this is one of the places where that neutral person is really interesting because they're just the shopkeeper, just the dry cleaner or whatever they are. Very easy to objectify, very easy to look through. So what happens when we look at them instead of through them, which is in effect what we're doing in the practice? How do we pay attention? Are we really there ever? Are we, you know, talking to a stranger and thinking about our email and whatever else we need to do? And can we actually arrive? And that is exactly the same movement we do in the concentration meditation. It's like we realize we're a million miles away. We come back. What's it like then when you're really listening?”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “So the loving kindness is almost like asking yourself anything else happened today, like any good within me. And it's not to be conflict avoidant and pretend we're perfect or anything, but it's that kind of singular, obsessive look at what's wrong that we want to broaden. And so we want a little airtime for the rest.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “But it's actually very powerful. So the question is, do you want to make the experiment or not? Or is it just off-putting that you'd rather, which some people feel? But it is, I think, all about paying attention differently. So, for example, in looking at yourself, if you're the kind of person who at the end of the day you sort of evaluate yourself, like, how did I do today? And if you're the kind of person who you pretty well only remembers the things you did wrong. Mistakes you made and check.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “Well, I think it's because it trains our attention to be different. It's like we're paying attention differently. For example, if you were doing it in a formal sequence and you may in the retreat, I'm not really sure, you start with offering loving kindness to yourself and then you move on to those people that you like, you know, and you keep on moving through, like those you feel neutral toward. Maybe somebody who plays a role in your life that you see now and then you move on to offering loving kindness to more difficult people for you. And then finally, all beings everywhere, all of life. I think the reason it works and it does work. And I also know it's easy to be cynical about it. It sounds so schmalty. It does send ridiculous. I know that”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “So ignited me that it became something I got very devoted to. And that's threaded throughout, both the self-compassion. We have to feel for ourselves to be able to do the first two concentration and mindfulness as well. And then there are distinct practices which are just devoted to the deepening of loving kindness and compassion.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Unlike the kind of world's maxim that we're afraid of the unknown, I find that I'm really afraid when I think I do know and it's going to be really bad. And it's all the stories I tell myself that really get me going. And even in the midst of that, if I remind myself, you know what? You don't know. Then I feel relief. I feel a sense of space. And, you know, we look at our desire and we say, look how much loneliness there is in there. We look at our anger. We say, look how much sadness there is in there. And wherever we look, we see into change that, look at that. I thought it was so forever. I thought that was all that I ever felt. But look at that. It's always changing. And so all of that just kind of naturally arises from paying attention. And then the third kind of thrust of the skills training in meditation is loving kindness or compassion. And that was the last meditation that Goink introduced in my 10-day course. It was just an hour or so, but it...”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “And then there's mindfulness, which actually is an extension of that where we not only pay attention to the single object, like the breath, but we pay attention to our emotional world and what's coming up predominantly and our bodies and what we're feeling and all kinds of things with that same. Why we say mindfulness is the basis for insight. We understand so much more about everything. And one example is I often talk about sitting and looking at my own fear, trying to be as mindful as I can, which means not condemning it and also not diving into it and having it take over. And I feel I've seen a lot. So, as one example, I felt that”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “There are kind of three main thrusts of the tradition which were reflected in my first retreat. The first is concentration where we try to settle our attention and have it be more stable and get more centered. So that usually means choosing an object, whether it's the breath or a mantra or whatever it is in our case. It's usually the breath. And settling your attention on that object and then simply returning every time you realize you've wandered. Over time you get a sense of, first of all, a tremendous amount of energy returning to you because there's an awful lot of energy that could be available to us but isn't because it's scattered all over the place. And we keep gathering it and returning it and do feel the kind of empowerment of that. And also a kind of integration of our being. It's like all that scatteredness is also a kind of fragmentation and we kind of bring it all together.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “So I would pad it some. I wouldn't just try to do Niaman's day. Usually I say 20 minutes a day more if you can just because the first five minutes or so in a daily sitting tend to be the most distracted, like what's at sound? And I think it's my refrigerator. Do they still have refrigerator repair people? I don't know. Maybe I need a new refrigerator. Do they still have sears anymore? I don't know. And it's almost like this discharge of tension for the little bit. If you can hang in there, you'd get a chance to go deeper having discharged all of that. It's just more fruitful in a way if you can do 20 minutes. But if you only have three, I'd say do three. Everybody says it's the everydayness of it, which seems to be the most potent thing.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “It just so happens that last night I was with some friends that were giving a lecture. Dan Goman, Richie Davidson, who's a neuroscientist at University of Wisconsin, Mass, and studying meditation, John Kabitzen, who founded Mindfulness-based stress reduction, and Richie, from the point of view of neuroscience, said that nine minutes a day will actually change your brain. But you have to do it every day. And I often think of retreats, like the intensive retreat as a period of really deepening confidence and clarity about the practice so that you have better tools to actually practice every day. Somebody also made a comment about how it may not be the healthiest thing in the world to think about the least possible amount I need to put into this thing to get some result.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “You know, this is the process. This is actually the path. It's not that I need remedial work. I'm the worst meditator that ever lived. This is what it looks like for everybody. Let me just start over. Start over. It's really very important.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “You realize you blew it, your mind wandered, or in life, maybe you realize you made a mistake, or things didn't really go the way that you wanted them to. And rather than spending the next year and a half castigating yourself about that, you know, it's realizing, okay, lessons learned, or maybe I need to make amends, or maybe there's something I need to do to come back into balance. I need to do that with kindness toward myself. And that makes the process go a whole lot quicker. And it's restorative rather than, you know, if you just blame yourself and you call yourself a failure and you get down on yourself and you judge yourself, it lasts forever and you're exhausted. And it's not really resilience. It's not really the space with which we can start again. So if you start finding yourself doing that in the process of meditating, that's the signal, you know, to remember like this happens.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Yeah, I mean, you know, that's also a great question. I mean, there's several levels to that in the kind of immediate level. What you said is the most important thing. Sometimes we say the healing is in the return, not in never having wandered to begin with. The most important thing is that coming back. In some ways, it's the opportunity to come back that the distraction gives us. And so you can come back, you could need to let go and come back a billion times, and it would be fine because that's the actual training. One of my teachers, the Tibetan teachers, Sonny Rachi, he called it exercising the letting go muscle. So the secret ingredient in that is actually self-compassion, which means that”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “Know how much could you include in that field of awareness? And those things are much more subtle and they're not as satisfying, you know, and they're certainly not as satisfying to talk about. But that's the whole point. So I would really want to know what someone's expectations are. And then, I mean, you can be reassured, like you're going to sit with Jack, who's been teaching for a very long time. And there's not like a cookie-cuttered description of what it's supposed to look like. Maybe for you he'll suggest more walking meditation than sitting meditation. Maybe he'll suggest a more structured approach because that is proving useful for you or maybe a less structured approach. There's so many possibilities.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “The beginning, but then this piece, like this unfathomable piece, just Descended upon me, and then it started like shimmering at the edges and turned into bliss, and there was bliss and peace. And, you know, that's what we want to say. We don't want to say, well, my knee hurt, my back hurt, and I got restless, and I got angry, and they judged myself, and then I fell asleep, you know Truth, really, in truth, not just consolation, but in truth, from the point of view of mindfulness, it doesn't matter. The question is okay, how were you with the sleepiness? How kind were you when you got angry? You know, I'm kind toward yourself”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “Well, my first question is about what is that blank that we're trying to fill in because a lot of people have really intense expectations of what meditation is supposed to do, and they're often wrong. So a lot of people have said to me, for example, I tried that once, I failed at it. And they said, well, I couldn't stop thinking. I couldn't make my mind blank. I couldn't have only beautiful thoughts. I couldn't keep the anxiety from coming up. I couldn't keep sleepiness at bay. And we say, of course, you cannot fail at it. It's impossible to fail at it because you cannot be having the wrong experience. The question is not what is happening, but how are you relating to what's happening? That's the whole terrain of the transformation is how much presence, how much balance, how much kindness, how much compassion are you bringing forth in relationship to what's coming up? And of course, there's a kind of social pressure these days, like if you ran into a friend, you know, what you'd like to be able to say is, well, I had a little bit of restlessness.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “Just like I conk out. And the other voice says there's nothing happening here. Let's make something happen. The next book, the next center, whatever, you know. These fantasies start pouring in, and so it's like a careening almost from sleepiness to restlessness and sleepiness to restlessness. And that will definitely change and it will even out. And you'll have an experience of both energy and calm at the same time. But the most tricky thing is believing the thought that tends to arise that says, oh no, nine more days exactly like this. Which we tend to believe. And if you can remember, don't believe that thought. It's going to keep changing. Just keep going. It will change and you'll feel really much, more completely there.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “But of all the elements of the retreat, it's almost always one of the things people point to is the most beautiful because it's like for once in our lives we can really fully be ourselves and we don't have to present ourselves to others and think about their experience versus our experience. Am I witty enough? Am I strong enough or anything? We can just be. And it's a beautiful, beautiful gift to give to oneself. I'd also say the first few days of a retreat, like the first day and a half, let's say, are usually pretty rough. Even if you have tremendous experience in meditation and in retreats, it's just an adjustment period. It's like, I, you know, 40, some years later, 45 years later, if I go into an intensive retreat, the beginning is usually, you know, I say there are two voices that arise inside my head. One voice says, there's nothing happening here. It must be time to go to sleep. So even if I slept for 10 hours.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “I mean, there are a few things. One is the thing most people feel trepidation about seems to be is the silence. And people show up and they say, I don't think I can be silent or my partner doesn't think I can be silent. Or one woman came and said they're doing a bedding pool in my office. They don't think I can be silent.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “Meditation, my personal meditation, and also in terms of my teaching and writing. So that was like the 10 days. It was really like an immersion. And it was a tremendous time of discovery. Not only did we forge lifelong friendships, because here it is all these years later. That was January of 1971. Then I did my first retreat. And I just saw Dan Goldman last night, for example. We are tremendous friends, this whole group of people. It really was about learning. It was about discovering in the lab, the vehicle was our”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “Well, there was a teacher named SN Goenka who had just left Burma. He was teaching intensive 10 day meditation retreats where you were basically Meditating under his guidance all day, he'd give one lecture at night. We had certain silent days and silent times, and he would just keep modulating the instruction until we'd come to the end. So we did meditation first on feeling the breath and just basic concentration and then kind of scanning your attention through your body, feeling these different sensations. And then the very last thing that he taught was a loving kindness meditation, which many years later became sort of my main”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “His work, but in those days he was a graduate student in psychology at Harvard, and he was studying meditation. For some reason, he was delivering a paper at this conference. So I went to his lecture and he said at the end of the lecture that he was on his way to this town called Bodgaya in northern India he was going to do an intensive ten day meditation retreat which was like an immersion course free of cultural baggage and really the direct stuff. And I thought that's it and it was it. So I followed him to Bhagaya.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “Translators out of town try again later, you know. It just wasn't happening. And I went to a Tibetan restaurant one day, and I overheard a conversation. These two women were saying that there was going to be an international yoga conference in New Delhi. And I thought, oh, great, I'll go there. That's where I'll find my teacher. And I went there and it was a really dispiriting time where the low point was probably when these yogis and swamis were up on the stage pushing and shoving against each other to be the first to grab the mic and speak. And I thought, oh man, you know, I should have stayed in Buffalo. This is terrible. And actually, Dan Goleman, who is now very well known for his book Emotional Intelligence.”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “It means that, and I think it also meant for me was stay close to your intention. Know like my intention was so strong and my yearning was so strong that it really saved me in a way staying close to that because there were naturally some disappointments along the way and ways I couldn't imagine how things were going to turn out. Like I started out in Dharmsala in India because I knew the Dalai Lama lived there. I'd heard he was a Buddhist. There were amazing teachers and opportunities there, but it was one of those situations where it didn't quite work like I'd go to a meditation class. Because remember, I was really into the practical how to. What's the stuff that's gonna help make me happy? And I'd go to this meditation class and they'd say, well, Teacher had to go to the dentist at the other end of India and come back in two weeks”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “Pulled it out and he read it out loud and then he was silent for a moment and then he said I think you had perhaps best follow the pretense of accident. I think you had perhaps best follow the pretense of accident. And that was it. It was like no addresses, no handy monastery guidebook, you know, nothing Just follow the pretense of accident. It's exactly how it happened”

    2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT