Meditation: Prioritize your mental health and happiness in self-isolation | Sharon Salzberg

Although everyone is welcome to the Big Think live webinar, today's topic is mindful isolation: how to prioritize your mental health and happiness. I couldn't think of a more appropriate topic to discuss right now. My name is Derek Barris. I've been a Big Think columnist since 2012. I've written about Buddhism very often for the site over a number of years. During that time, I actually have a background in religious studies from Rutgers University, where my emphasis was on Buddhism and specifically how Buddhist concepts are translated when they come from the East into American culture.

So, I think today's guest is somebody who has really led in that discussion for many decades now, and I'm very excited to talk to her. Our guest is Sharon Salzberg. She co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, with Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein in 1974. She has an emphasis on Vipassana and meta methods of meditation, and she is the author of numerous books, including the New York Times bestseller "Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation – A 28-Day Program."

We're going to shrink that 28 days now into the next hour. So, for the next 45 minutes or so, we're gonna be discussing a number of topics. Half of that time will be devoted to Q&A from the audience. So if you have questions, whatever channel you're using right now, please drop it in the chat, and I'll get fed those questions as we progress. Stay around for the whole time because at the very end, Sharon is going to lead a meditation for us, which I think is going to be very appreciated at this moment in time.

So thank you for joining, Sharon. We appreciate it.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, thank you so much. The term mindfulness has been around for a while, but it has so many different connotations. Sometimes people – it's so ubiquitous in our culture now that people sometimes have trouble understanding what that even really entails. So I would love if you can begin with a bigger picture overview of what mindfulness is.

Sure, well, you know, the word is used in a lot of different ways, so it could reasonably be described differently. A very classical sense of mindfulness is a quality of awareness, where our perception of what's happening in the moment is not so distorted by old fears or projection into the future. And here's a perfect example, right? How many of us are not just dealing with the difficulty, turmoil, chaos right now, but we're also adding this tremendous projection into a pretty dismal future?

And actually, we don't know what the future holds, but we're trying to bear it all at once. And so we feel kind of desperate about that. So it's a way of being with our experience, whether it's pleasant or really painful or even somewhere in between. That's forging a different relationship than what we're used to because we're used to adding so much future projection, or there's some things we just don't like to feel. We think, “I shouldn't have this anymore.”

I myself have been meditating for – you were nice enough not to bring this up in the introduction – for 70 thousand years, almost 50 years. And you know, it's a common thought like, “I shouldn't have this anymore. You know, I've been meditating all this time, spent all that money in therapy. Just once, I wish it would disappear, and it's still here.”

So there are many things we experience that we block. We try to block, and many things we feel ashamed of. There are many things we just get overwhelmed by. Mindfulness is really talking about the same stuff maybe happening, but we can be different with it.

Well, it's interesting that you mentioned that the duration of meditation. I remember when I lived in New York about 15 years ago, I took a workshop with Sally Kempton, who had just come out of living in the ashram and was now back teaching meditation after I think 28 years. Somebody asked her, you know, “When you get to that place in meditation where it's just complete Zen and silence, how long does it last?”

Sally looked at them and she goes, “About two seconds.” Exactly. And I think that's really important. Well, let's go back 50 years from now to start with. What brought you to meditation in the first place?