YouSaid · the spoken record

Sharon Salzberg

lines on the record: 59
first: 2017-11-03
most recent: 2017-11-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“His name is Chokyam Trumpurum Pate was his first trip to the United States, and I don't know who did his tour. He ended up in Buffalo, New York. He later became the founder of Naropa Institute and Shimbal Publications, all kinds of things. But this was his first trip, and he was giving a lecture, not at my university, but at a nearby college. This was maybe three or four days before my friends and I were going to leave for India. And we didn't know where we were going to go. I just know I wanted to study meditation. So we went to his talk and they asked for written questions. And I wrote out the question, like, where should I go? I'm leaving in a few days. India, I want to study Buddhist meditation. Where should I go? And he had this big pile of questions in front of him.”
2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I had not. I was just teaching a class here earlier today. I said, you know, I'd never even been to California before I went to India. I grew up in New York City. I went to school in Buffalo. There had been one family trip to Florida in my youth. That was it. And then I was on a plane.”
2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're everywhere now, but there was an independent study program at the school and I created a project. I said, I want to go to India and study meditation. And they said, okay, so off I went.”
2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it contains suffering for everybody. And that was like a huge liberation. And then I heard in that class that there was actually something you could do about the suffering in your life, not the suffering of circumstance, but all the ways we hold it, the ways we, you know, we can have pain and we can hold it in isolation or we can hold it as feeling part of the human family or we can have rage or we can have compassion. And there's so many options. And I heard there was this stuff you could do. There were actual methods or techniques called meditation. And if you did them, you could be happier. So I was going to school in Buffalo, New York. I looked around Buffalo, didn't see it anywhere.”
2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Didn't start too early. Exactly, you know, I couldn't do that. So I took this class and it was really in that class that I encountered Buddhism for the first time, really. I mean, I had known, you know, I was the 60s, so it was all kind of round in a way, but it was the first time I really heard what the Buddha taught. And the first part that was incredibly important, given everything I'd been through, was just the teaching about suffering, that suffering is a part of life, that it's not just me. It's not something to be ashamed of and feel I'm aberrant, I'm different, you know, which of course is what I primarily felt my entire life. It's like I'm different. You know, people have two parents. People have sane parents. Other things are going on for other people, but not me. But all of a sudden, it was like I was part of the human family that life is not always pleasant. It doesn't always go our way. It's not that it's grim or horrible, but...”
2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I went to college when I was 16 when I was a sophomore, I took an Asian philosophy course and honestly looking back as far as I can tell it was kind of like happenstance, you know, like it was on Tuesday and fit in with my schedule. I had a philosophy requirement. Let me do that one.”
2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Health system where he stayed for the next significant number of years before he died. And it was part of that. That was kind of my recollection because I was sort of part of a family system where this was never ever really talked about. And so I had, as one can imagine, all of these feelings inside. And I didn't know what to do with them. And people had always told me, oh, your father accidentally took an extra pill. You know, he just didn't remember that he'd taken sleeping pills already. And it was only when I was in college, like years later, that I thought, wait a minute. That's a lot to have happen so that you then end up in a mental health facility for the rest of your life. And it took a lot to figure out, oh, people, of course, were trying to protect me. They were trying to keep me happy, keep me going. But it was on the basis of denying what I actually was feeling. And so it was very destructive.”
2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When my parents had divorced when I was four. My father, as far as I can recall, was really like my hero. You know, he was the love in my life, and then he was just gone. He'd completely disappeared and there was no contact whatsoever. From the time I lived with my mother after they split up and her siblings from the time I was four to the time I was nine. At that point, after she died, I ended up living with my father's parents, whom I hardly knew. And that was the first time that contact was reestablished between us. He didn't reappear in my life. My actual physical presence until I was 11. And by that time it was clear he'd suffered really severe mental illness. He was drinking. He was gambling, and he was really lost. He came back when my grandfather died when I was 11 and was in the house for about six weeks when he took an overdose of sleeping pills and then entered the”
2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, my mother died when I was nine, and it was that night when I was nine that my mother started hemorrhaging. I was alone in the house with her, and I ended up getting an ambulance and she went to the hospital and she died about two weeks later. It was much later when I was writing a book called Faith, which was kind of like my faith journey, that I looked back over my life from the time I was born till the time I went to college at 16. And I realized that I had lived in five different family configurations along that time. And each one of them had been altered by trauma or death or some kind of really terrible circumstance.”
2017-11-03 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #277: Sharon Salzberg, World-Renowned Meditation Teacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT