You Are Not as Alone as You Feel Sharon Salzberg on loving kindness, connection, and the antidote to fear

How many other people have to do their job well for you to do your job well.

She points to the commute and the bus driver, the engineer, the car mechanic, to the technology behind it if you do not commute, and to the food we eat without growing any of it ourselves. The point is plain. Our lives are realistically part of a network, even when we feel completely alone.

We are culturally tuned to feel we will feel better about ourselves if we can only put other people down. Sharon calls this a culture of degradation.

She says it is particularly strong in the university, where it comes bundled with hyper competitiveness, a constant putting down of others, and a great deal of loneliness right alongside it.

As an experiment. Be willing to step out of the ruts that feel so familiar, go into work, and maybe express some appreciation for somebody.

She sees all of dharma practice this way, not as a doctrine to adopt but as a small test to run. Do the reflection, she says, and see what happens.

Sharon, Jack Kornfield, and Joseph Goldstein had co-founded their retreat center in Barre, Massachusetts in 1976.

When they heard the Dalai Lama was coming to nearby Amherst in 1979, they were young and bold enough to write his private office and ask whether he might visit them too. To their amazement, a letter came back saying yes.

Sharon was standing far in the back on crutches, a broken bone in her foot, certain that if she moved forward she would fall on her face.

The Dalai Lama got out and did something she has seen him do many times since. Almost as if he had radar for who in a crowd was suffering most, he cut through a hundred people, took her hand, looked her in the eye, and asked, "What happened?"

He could not undo the broken bone or make her any better with the crutches. What dissolved was a different layer of suffering entirely.

The horrible feeling of being so alone, so unseen, so stuck in the back simply lifted. She realized compassion was not about fixing the injury. It was about being fully seen.

A young man said he had meditated for about two weeks and simply could not do it, that he had no capacity to grow, learn, or become more loving or mindful.

The Dalai Lama looked at him and said plainly, "You're wrong." He spoke about a capacity for growth that may be covered over and hard to find but is never destroyed. Afterward, people told Sharon it was bad pedagogy to tell anyone they are wrong. The young man, for whom it was exactly the right message, got an enormous amount out of it.

Harsh self criticism. We bring our oldest patterns straight into the meditative process.

She has watched people in genuinely hard situations, facing difficult diagnoses, still turn on themselves, and her instinct is to say: give yourself a break, look at what you are going through.

Loving kindness, and the understanding that we can grow in other ways.

Rather than punishing ourselves, we can learn to begin again. That resilience, the capacity to start over, is where she has seen the practice help the most people.

As a grand experiment for which none of us provided our informed consent. So much of it is simply outside our control.

The one thing we have at least the possibility of influencing, he says, is our own mind. That makes it a really good place to start.

Appreciation. Bring to mind someone who has been helpful to you, hold them in your heart, and just observe what happens.

It is very accessible. No special place and no special posture are required. Borrowing a phrase and renaming it, he says we can do it everywhere, all the time.

Because it sounds arcane. You would not overhear it at the next table in a coffee shop, except maybe in a hyper religious context.

Her concern is that the phrase makes the quality seem removed from day to day life, and precious in the negative sense of the word.

Love is complicated and often conditional, a kind of medium of exchange: I will love myself as long as I never make a mistake. It can be that fragile and breakable.

Friendship, the classical translation, implies a mandated action, like going to the movies or spending time together. Sharon wanted a word that did not obligate any particular behavior.

Connection. Your heart can be genuinely full of loving kindness for someone while wisdom and discernment say do not go there, it is not safe or not appropriate.

Connection captures the warmth without the great fear that developing metta means you now have to say yes, or smile, or give in. As she puts it, we do not have to do anything.

A short practice to set their motivation: to be of benefit, and to want whatever comes of the conversation to help people.

Cort noticed they had skipped it and asked Sharon to lead a version, so listeners could get a little experiential taste of what they had been talking about.

Anyone who had some role in your being here right now. Someone who told you about the practice or the science, read you a poem, or played you a piece of music.

There was some opening somewhere. You may never have met the people who come to mind. You can be inspired from afar. This moment, she says, is a confluence of connection, relationship, influence, and interaction.

First, the Board of Regents of the State of New York, whose scholarship let her go to college, which led her to India on an independent study project, which is a big reason she is here now.

Second, the people whose actions really hurt her. Not the ones she merely found annoying, but the ones who brought her to an edge where she had to find a different way to live or think. They are part of why she is here too.

For months, in nearly every interaction and for no clear reason, he would start blushing, feeling a kind of naked vulnerability. He comes from a long line of visible blushers, so there was no hiding it.

The practice, known as tonglen, was showing him how guarded he had been. Much of how he interacted with people had been a protective mechanism he had never noticed. The raw feeling was simply genuine connection.

An imbalance. It is common to feel we must fix a situation whenever someone else is expressing pain, a hypersense of responsibility where things get distorted.

The remedy is not less sensitivity but more wisdom. The balance of the two she calls equanimity, which can hold correct boundaries and discernment right alongside the caring.

A neutral person is someone you neither especially like nor dislike, often someone you see but look through, like the checkout person at the grocery store.

As you offer them attention and wish them well, something grows inside you over time. One student told Sharon she had fallen in love with her dry cleaner. Not romantically. He was simply her neutral person, and now she walks into the store and it feels like they are on the same team.

At formal events full of important people, the Dalai Lama would leave through a side entrance and stop to greet the custodians, the kitchen staff, and the security people, treating them exactly the same as everyone else.

For Richie it is a reminder that connection is often an emergent property of paying attention. When we are more present and listening, everyday life becomes a series of nourishing moments of connection, rather than something we have to manufacture.

Reviewing the literature for the book he wrote with Daniel Goleman, Richie found evidence that benefits from loving kindness and compassion practice can emerge with fairly short periods of practice, including on standardized measures that do not depend on a person's own self report.

His conclusion about method is that one size does not fit all, and that it is a bit of hubris to think a single path is best for everyone.

First, quietly believing the practice is stupid, a doormat like endlessly smiling at nothing, rather than a powerful way of being.

Second, assuming it cannot be trained, that it is a gift you either have or do not. In fact metta is an emergent property of how we pay attention, and attention can be trained. That is exactly what meditation practice does.

She changes the order, in about ten seconds. Classically you begin by offering loving kindness to yourself, but you do not have to.

She recalls a researcher who felt the sequence had to stay fixed for scientific reasons, even though starting with yourself is the hardest step for so many people. Sharon realized they had two different goals. Hers was the person in front of her, so she simply moves the hardest part later.

Often not in your formal practice, and not as great waves of loving feeling. They show up in your life, which is where they count, because that is where we actually need them.

You notice them in how you speak to yourself after a mistake, or how you meet a stranger. People worry the practice is not working because they look for it in the wrong place. Whether it is working depends on where you look.

In Tibet, Cort notes, mothers are revered almost like deities, so beginning the practice with your mother taps a natural sense of gratitude, connection, and nurturing.

In many other cultures, including the United States, people carry real complexity in their experiences with their parents, so that opening is not automatic. The lesson is to look for where the connection actually lives for you, and start where it is natural.

With a mildly difficult person, someone who brings just a little unease. Not the person who has harmed you most horrifically, and not the figure who has behaved terribly on the world stage, where it is nearly impossible.

People often resist this and want to prove they can do the real thing right away. But the tendency to do the practice in the hardest way possible does not fit this approach. In Burma she was taught to do it in the easiest way possible.

Little ones. Making tea in the morning for his wife. For years, scooping the cat litter as a practice, done as an offering and an appreciation, until what might ordinarily be a yucky chore became something he actually looked forward to.

A small shift of mindset is all it takes to turn a routine act into practice.

Getting food onto a plate takes an extraordinary village, so eating makes our interdependence obvious with almost no reflection. In his and Cort's book they suggest piggybacking new habits onto daily activities like eating.

In that sense eating is an affordance for the expression of appreciation and the recognition of interdependence. Do it a few times a day, every day, and it changes you. His view, now supported by evidence, is that it is easier than you think, because this is our nature and we are simply recognizing it.

Micro dosing loving kindness. You sit down to a meal and spend just a few moments. A friend of Sharon's silently wishes well to every face in the boxes of a Zoom call before the meeting starts.

In an era pervaded by division, Sharon closes on the same note. We do not have to think of some monumental task. This meal, this moment, really makes a difference.