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| Lost and Found
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| One of the world’s leading spiritual teachers and writers, a passionate proponent of the Buddhist tenets of mindfulness and lovingkindness, Sharon Salzberg, co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts, has finally found peace.
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Sharon Salzberg’s childhood was encoded to silence and characterized by loss.
There was the death of her mother when she was only nine. Her father
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left home when she was four, briefly returned when she was 11, tried to kill himself and then spent the rest of his life in the mental health system.
The little girl stored her enormous grief, anger and confusion deep inside, tacitly observing the rule of silence invoked by the adults around her, who, though caring, never openly addressed her family tragedies.
She suffered in silence until as a college sophomore Salzberg took a course in Asian philosophy, which was actually a course in Buddhism. She was riveted by the Buddha’s teachings, compelled by two concepts in particular.
“One was his open, unashamed, unafraid acknowledgment of the suffering in life. There had been so much pain in my early life, and so much silence surrounding it, in my family and in the world around it. I felt isolated, ashamed of my suffering. Now here was the Buddha saying out loud what I had never heard before, ‘There is suffering in life.’ I felt liberated by that statement. Secondly, the Buddha said everyone could do something about the suffering in their own minds: not just the lucky people or the talented people or those of good backgrounds—really anyone who used the tools available to transform their minds. It was a breathtaking vision of inclusivity, which inspired me to feel maybe that meant even someone like me. Within a few months I left for India to learn how to meditate.”
It was 1970. A few days before she was scheduled to leave, Salzberg attended a talk given by a Tibetan Buddhist teacher named Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. She asked him for his advice about where she should go in India to study Buddhism.
“All of the questions were laid out in a huge pile in front of him, and mine happened to be the first piece of paper he picked. He read it aloud, was silent for a few moments, then answered. ‘In this matter,’ he said, ‘you had perhaps best follow the pretense of accident.’ That was it – no addresses, no maps, no handy monastery guidebook. His advice proved invaluable; as there were so many times I didn’t know where to go next. I had to remain open to surprises, had to be willing to take just the next step even when I didn’t know what the one after that would be. I was often afraid, and confused, but I’d remember my original intention, and take one more step.”
The Buddha attained enlightenment under a tree in India.
Salzberg, (www.sharonsalzberg.com) who has made a critical contribution to Western awareness of Asian meditation techniques and philosophies, attended her first meditation course in Bodh Gaya, the village that grew up around the tree. She was 18 years old and pre-disposed to self-hatred and self-judgment through the conditioning of her childhood, wanting most in the world to be someone other than who she was.
“If anyone were to have asked me what I most wanted out of being there, I would have responded, ‘I'm practicing so that I can have the love of a Buddha, so I can love other people the way the Buddha did.’ I was fundamentally seeking the ability to love myself, first of all, which I wasn’t quite as aware of. On this path I have learned so much about genuine love and compassion for myself and others. I’ve learned a lot about letting go, and about being able to begin again no matter what has happened. It is this spirit of renewal, of being kind to oneself and others that I continually urge in others. I think it is the road to true happiness.”
Transformed by the experience of meditation Salzberg was prepared to be a student forever when one of her teachers suggested to her that she should teach meditation in America.
"I was astonished and immediately protested, ‘No, I can't do that. I'm not at all qualified.’ She smiled and answered, ‘Yes you are. You really understand suffering. That's why you should teach.’
Teaching didn’t come to her naturally—okay one-on-one, Salzberg was terrified to speak in front of a group, deferring to her teaching colleague Joseph Goldstein who encouraged her to take a more active role.
“I began to give talks, and to take a stronger role, but the real turning point came when I started to do much more lovingkindness practice. As I looked out at an audience, rather than seeing a great big ‘other’ out there poised to judge me, I felt some sense of connection to them as people, even if I didn’t know them personally. My hero in this regard is the Dalai Lama, who has said, ‘I’ve never met anyone I consider a stranger.'”
When Salzberg refers to lovingkindness, she is essentially talking about the art of friendship, a kindness that begins with self and ultimately extends to embrace the greater world.
Predicated on realism, expressed as compassion, lovingkindness is the antithesis of undiscerning sentimentality.
“The meditation practice of lovingkindness is one where we cultivate a quality of attention that looks not just at the mistakes we’ve made and our flaws, but also looks at the good within. It is a quality of attention that begins to notice the kind of people we generally look right through like the checkout -person at the supermarket. We cultivate inclusion rather than exclusion, a recognition of how interconnected our lives are, rather than a position of ‘us’ versus ‘them.’”
According to Salzberg, there are many ways in which to meditate and enjoy the rewards of a practice that can potentially lead to greater self-awareness, enhanced perceptions, and liberating personal insights through concentration and renewed focus.
At its heart perhaps meditation is about learning.
“I have experienced so much transformation of my own personal suffering through the meditation practice that I have remained inspired to teach it. And I am touched by the vulnerability and openness consistently displayed by people coming to learn, and the courage and compassion they so often show in their own lives. I feel like I have witnessed such a huge slice of life through people’s triumphs and also their sorrows. Between talking to adult children needing to take care of a parent with Alzheimer’s, parents struggling with drug addiction or incarceration or autism or death of their children, people experiencing regular old loneliness and depression, I’ve never been allowed to forget that life can hold a lot of pain, and that we need to reach out to one another and have a vision of life that includes everyone in a field of lovingkindness.”
Although others—particularly those whose experience of meditation began and ended with the Beatles’s highly public dalliance—might be tempted to label her an idealist, Salzberg sees herself as a pragmatist, or more accurately, a realist.
“Professor Bob Thurman of Columbia University describes the Buddhist path as basically one of realism. It is certainly not nihilistic, though it is often depicted that way. I went through so much loss and disruption as a child—at one point I figured out that I had lived in five different family configurations before I left for college at the age of 16—it was easy to feel that nothing was safe, or would work out well, far easier than being an idealist. Over the years of my meditation practice and study of the Buddha’s teaching, I saw more of the many faces of change. I realized the truth of constant change wasn’t just about loss, tentativeness, insecurity, and the fleeting nature of life. Change is also about unforeseen doors opening, about creation and beginnings and possibilities. I think that seeing both sides, rather than just one, of a law of nature like the truth of change fosters realism.”
When people asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, Salzberg, a devoted reader since childhood and a contributing editor to Oprah Winfrey’s O magazine, inevitably answered that she wanted to be a writer. When it came time for her to realize her ambition, however, she was troubled by uncertainty and a lack of confidence in her ability.
She finally overcame her reluctance and Lovingkindness, the Revolutionary art of Happiness was published in 1995, followed by Faith in 2002, (both books are available at Amazon.com).
Work constitutes an enormous part of her life—a life filled with many close and abiding friendships. In addition to her teaching and writing, she is working with domestic violence shelter workers in an attempt to view the ways in which meditation might help with trauma.
“People who work in those types of settings often experience what is known as vicarious trauma. We hope to eventually take the program to many different layers of the helping professions, such as those who work in refugee camps.”
Salzberg’s search of discovery expressed through meditation has irretrievably altered her world view.
“After my mother died, her name was rarely brought up in front of me again. The whole society seemed to collude with this, as though death were something unnatural, aberrant. When I went to India in 1970, I was startled to see the whole panoply of life openly displayed—birth, death, grieving, rejoicing.
”Meditation opens one to a comprehensive look at change. We see the beginnings of experience, and also the endings. We see the creative, renewing aspects of this body and mind, and also the ephemeral, fleeting nature of all things, internal and external. One of the main goals of spiritual life, and therefore meditation, is to prepare one for the inevitability of death. This isn’t a depressing exercise, but something that frees us of the burden of conventional denial and fear.”
Maybe more than most, Sharon Salzberg can point to her life as possessing the qualities and characteristics of a classic quest. At this point in her journey, far from done, she has found a measure of serenity.
“The Buddha said, ‘There is no higher happiness than peace.’ Like many people, I needed to go through a process of maturation to even understand that statement. We are taught all the time that excitement or acquisition or beating out the competition will provide our greatest happiness.
”And of course understanding that statement is a crucial step, but it is just one step in a process of actualizing it. I feel at home in peace now. I don’t always dwell there, but I know it is where I want to be, where I feel most comfortable –and most important, when I depart, I know how to return there.”
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