Sharon Salzberg - You Can Do Anything You Want to Do

 

So, it was almost 45 years ago that I found myself walking up four flights of stairs in Calcutta, India. I was going to see one of my most beloved meditation teachers, a woman named Deepama. Deepama is like a nickname for Deepa's mother. I had spent some amazing time in India under her guidance and the guidance of others. I formed a tremendous group of friends. I was happy, I was learning, I was discovering. And so, I decided that I was going to go home to America briefly and do the kinds of things I needed to do, so that I could go back to India and spend the entire rest of my life there happy. 

 

So, I was telling her my plan, when she looked at me and she said, “Well, when you go back to America, you're going to stay there and you're going to start teaching meditation.” And I said, “No, I'm not.” And she said, “Yes, you are.” And I said, “No, I'm not.” And she said, “Yes, you are.” And I said, “No, I'm not.” The thought was ludicrous to me. I didn't feel at all capable. I thought I would fail at it. It was beyond my comprehension. I'd only been practicing meditation for about three years. I was 21 years old, and I just couldn't even imagine that I was qualified to do a thing like that. She just kept looking at me sorrowfully like, “Yes, you will.” 

 

So, my path to Calcutta did not begin in Buffalo, New York, but it took some strong turnings in Buffalo, New York. I grew up in New York City, in Washington Heights, and I went to college at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In my sophomore year, there was a philosophy requirement, and I decided to take an Asian philosophy course. And honestly, as far as I can tell, a lot of that was happenstance. I looked at the schedule, I thought, oh, that's convenient. That's on Tuesday. I'll do that one. [audience laughter] And it completely changed my life in two ways. One was, first of all, here was the Buddha saying right out loud, “There is suffering in life.” This is a part of everyone's life, not to the same degree or the same style, the same type, but everybody lives in a world of insecurity, of not knowing, of going up and going down, and not getting what we want sometimes. All of that. 

 

And I, like many people, had a family system growing up with a lot of chaos, a lot of confusion, a lot of loss, a lot of difficulty. And like many people, this was a world where nothing was ever spoken about. And so, this strange ambient silence surrounded everything. I didn't know what to do with all those feelings inside of me. I felt so different, I felt so alone. Here was the Buddha saying, “You're not alone. This is not weird. You're not weird. This is a natural part of life. Life has not abandoned you in the fact that you've been hurting.” So, that was enormously liberating for me. 

 

And then, in the course, I heard that there was such a thing as meditation, that there were methods, there were techniques, there were tools you could actually use that could change how you lived. You could be happier. You could be more at peace. I just conceived this enormous, mysterious, passionate desire to learn how to meditate. So, I looked around Buffalo. Remember, this is a long time ago. This was before there was a yoga center in every corner. This was before mindfulness was a thing. This was before you could google mindfulness and get all these articles. This was before you could google anything, right? [audience laughter]  

 

Then I heard that the university had an independent study program. And if you created a project that they liked, you could go anywhere in the world, theoretically, for a year and then come back and do your final year. So, I created a project. I said, “I want to go to India and study meditation.” I went off in 1970, in the fall, with my student loans and my scholarships, looking for a meditation teacher. I didn't really know where to go to begin with, but I thought I'd heard that the Dalai Lama lived in this little town in Himalayas called Dharamsala. And I figured, well, he probably knows how to meditate, [audience laughter] so, I'll go there. That's where I'll start. 

 

There was a meditation class there, in fact. But you know those situations where things are just not working. This didn't work. I went to the class and there was a reputedly extraordinary teacher, but the translator was out of town. He'd gone to the dentist, who was at the other end of India. So, okay, they said, “Come back in two weeks.” I said, “Okay, I'll come back in two weeks.” I went back in two weeks and the teacher was out of town for something or other, so, I came back. It was just like that, over and over again. Once they were both out of town, I don't know where they went. [audience laughter]. 

 

But the yearning, the desire did not abate in me. It was in the next place that I heard about an intensive 10-day meditation retreat that was about to happen in a town called Bodh Gayā, which is a town in northern India, that it's like a little village that has grown up around the descendant of the tree, they say the Buddha was sitting under when he became enlightened. And this course was described in a way that was exactly what I was looking for. Nothing very philosophical. It was not abstract. It did not involve a belief system. It did not involve belonging to something or rejecting anything else. It was like the straight stuff, like how to. So, I went there. And in fact, it was an amazing experience. 

 

It was very difficult for me at first. I remember the very first instruction in meditation we received was, sit down and feel your breath. Just sit and feel your breath. And I thought, that's stupid. [audience laughter] Where's the magical, esoteric, fantastic technique that I came to India for? [audience laughter] I could have stayed in Buffalo to feel my breath. [audience laughter] And then, I thought, well, how hard can this be? This will be like nothing, you know? I would speculate, what will it be like 800 breaths or 900 breaths before my mind starts to wander. And to my absolute shock, it was like one breath [audience laughter] and I would be way, way, way gone. Lost in the past, lost in the future and then would come that moment, like, “Oh, the breath.” 

 

What I didn't realize at the time was that, in a way, the heart essence of that instruction is the return. It's learning how to let go. It's learning how to come back. It's learning how to start again. It's learning how to be resilient. But I had no concept of that, and yet there was something there for me I could tell. There was some powerful truth in that place in those presentations for me, in that practice. So, I stayed. I stayed, and I kept practicing and over time, I learned much more about mindfulness, the ability to be aware of all of one's experience in a more balanced and open way. I learned about techniques of loving kindness and compassion, where we learn, actually, cultivate the power of kindness not just toward others, but toward ourselves as well. 

 

I did sneak back to Buffalo at one point and did what I needed to do to finish school, which was largely paperwork and then I went back to India. So, that brought me to Deepama's room, some years later, where I was thinking, okay, this is it. This is what my life is going to look like. I just kept saying, “No, I can't do that. I'm not capable. I don't have it. I don't have the ability to do that, to teach.” And then, she looked at me and she said two amazing things. The first was, she said, “You really understand suffering, that's why you should teach.” 

 

My childhood had been really rough. It was really hard. My father and mother got divorced when I was four. My father disappeared. My mother died when I was nine. I was living with my father's parents at that point. When I was 11, he came back. It was the first time I'd seen him since I was four. He was like a different person, really ravaged by mental illness and alcoholism. He was there for like six weeks, and took an overdose of sleeping pills and disappeared. Didn't die, but he never left the kind of mental health system again, and I went to college when I was 16. 

 

I calculated once that by the time I'd gotten to college, I'd lived in five different family configurations, each of which had ended through some kind of death or trauma or something. This kind of suffering was what I felt I needed to heal from, what I needed to get over, what I needed to get beyond. And here was Deepama saying to me, “Go toward it. There's something of value here, not only for you, but for others.” So, that was stunning in that moment. 

 

And then, she said to me, “You can do anything you want to do. If you're thinking you can't do it, that's going to stop you.” I left her little room and I walked down those four flights of stairs thinking, I can't do that. I'm not doing that. And then, I went off to Boulder, Colorado, to visit a friend I had made in India, Joseph Goldstein, who was just starting to teach meditation. While I was with Joseph in Boulder, we received an invitation to teach a one-month long retreat. So, I thought, okay, I'll stay and do that, then I'll go back to India. 

 

The nature of our retreats, the format of our retreats, is that we practice with people during the day. There is one formal lecture every night. Even though my mind had opened to trying, keeping Deepama's words in my heart, I was still incredibly scared. I was scared not only of looking stupid and being a failure and not being up to it, but I was incredibly scared of public speaking. 

 

So, Joseph, for 30 nights had to give a talk. [audience laughter] I would sit literally cowering in the back. What I was most afraid of, was that I'd be in front of a group of people and I'd be in the middle of my talk and my mind would go completely blank. I would just sit there silent as everyone waited for me to say anything. I was like-- I realized that Joseph and I had missed certain elements of the women's movement when we'd been India, because these people kept going up to Joseph and yelling at him, “Why won't you let her speak? [audience laughter] Why won't you let her have a voice?” He would say, “I'd love to have a night off. Go talk to her.” But I just couldn't do it. I was so scared. 

 

This is like months later, because these invitations kept happening. I kept thinking, I'll go back to India a little later. I'll go a little later. As we kept accepting the invitations, and I couldn't speak. And then, I remember that in the context of the loving kindness practice, there was a guided meditation. It was sort of a formal meditation you could lead people through, and I thought, that's it. If my mind goes blank, I'll just go into the guided meditation. Maybe no one will notice that there was that awful gap there for a moment. So, then I could begin speaking about loving kindness and that opened some doors. 

 

And then, one day, I remembered very deeply, Deepama's words, and I realized, you know what? We are gathered here together not for anyone to experience my expertise in something or my brilliance. We're gathered here, because we all suffer, that we can find one another in that vulnerability and in that tenderness. And together, we can go forward toward reshaping our minds and making a different world to the best of our ability, that they're all, in a way, all talks, all presentations. Well, gatherings are about loving kindness. They're about connection. They're about our ability to come together. 

 

I remember not too long ago, I was invited to teach in Tucson. He was teaching in Tucson. The organizers decided they wanted the Dalai Lama to teach in the morning, and in the afternoon and then the evenings, they wanted Western people to teach. So, it was the first night. It was kind of scary. And at that point, there were about 1,400 people in the room. At that point, that was the largest group I'd ever spoken to. He wasn't there, thank goodness, but his throne was right behind me and I could feel it. [audience laughter] And then, it was over. I was so happy that it was the first night at that point, because then I could just go on and enjoy the rest of the conference. 

 

And then, maybe two days later, he was speaking. The way he would do it would be he'd read a passage from a text, then he'd give a commentary on it. As that was being translated, he would go forward into the text. But this particular day, something in the translation caught his attention and he said, “Oh, that's not what I said.” And the translator said, “Yes, it is.” [audience laughter] And he said, “No, it's not.” And the translator said, “Yes, it is.” So, the Dalai Lama flipped back to see the passage that was in dispute. And he said, “Oh, I made a mistake.” And I thought, look at that. If I'd made a mistake in front of those same 1,400 people a few nights before, would I have disclosed it? I don't know about that. And then, the Dalai Lama finished by bursting into the deepest laugh possible. Thank you.