This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Spiritual Resources for Resilience with Sharon Salzberg & Oren Jay Sofer. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Spiritual Resources for Resilience

The following talk was given by Oren Jay Sofer, Sharon Salzberg at The Sati Center in Redwood City, CA on November 07, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Spiritual Resources for Resilience - Sharon Salzberg, Oren Jay Sofer

Introduction

Sharon Salzberg: Thank you. Hi, congratulations almost on the book! I have so much I'd like to ask you, so maybe I'll just start. Given that you're busy anyway, you're serving in so many different ways, and it's so much work to write a book, what inspired you to write this book?

Oren Jay Sofer: I started writing it in 2020, actually, when we had that incredibly challenging series of events unfold, starting with the pandemic. Then, here in the US, George Floyd's murder. Within a few months after that—I don't know if you recall, Sharon—we had this season of really horrific wildfires out here in California. I actually had to evacuate from someplace in the Sierras.

One of the ways I, as many of us who teach meditation, felt like I could contribute was to write about how to face challenges and root ourselves in our inner strengths. It was out of that time that I started reflecting more and writing more about not just meditation, but this whole range of different capacities and qualities we can develop through contemplative practice. There's a part of my heart that feels sad—it's kind of an understatement—that the book is even more relevant today than when I started writing it.

I think a lot of us have a sense that there's something deeply wrong in our world today, whether it's the ecological crisis, the political situation, the wars unfolding around the world, or inflation. There's so much uncertainty about the future, as well as tremendous grief and pain in the present. Given the intensity of the struggles that so many of us are going through, it seems like a time where we really need resources to handle the challenges.

One of the things that I feel like I've learned from you, from our work together and your teaching, is really understanding not just meditation but the whole path as a kind of skill-building practice. I see the book and its offering of contemplative practice as a kind of medicine for the challenges that we're facing: how fragmented so many people feel, how overwhelmed our nervous systems are, and how broken our hearts feel many times. That's kind of what the book grew out of.

Writing as an Exploration

Sharon Salzberg: That's beautiful. You know, when I wrote this book called Faith many moons ago, somebody I had consulted as a writing coach—and one of the many times I was stuck, she said to me (this was Susan Griffin)—she said, "People might think you write a book like that because you're a complete expert on it and you want to impart your expertise. But more likely, you write a book on a topic like that because you're exploring the topic, and the writing is part of the exploration." So I'm just curious what your experience was in terms of it deepening your understanding in the very writing of it.

Oren Jay Sofer: Yeah, exactly. I couldn't have said it better myself. It's exactly what the experience was for me. I can say there are two really important things that I learned—or am still learning—through the writing process.

First, as you know, my first book focuses a lot on communication. For me, that was a progression from what we learn on the cushion and our meditation practice into relationships, being a parent, and having a young child. Now I've really been grappling with the question of how our practice relates to the larger issues of our world, and specifically to social change. I wanted to bridge that gap not just from the personal to the interpersonal, but to the social. So one of the core themes that I explore in the book is not just how we develop inner resources, but how those express themselves. How can our inner cultivation play a role in working for change in the world? This is one key thing that I was grappling with, asking myself, and looking at from many different angles with all the different qualities I explore in the book.

The other thing that the book pushed me to look deeply into was clarifying my own understanding and experience of each of these aspects of the path. What does courage really mean to me, and how have I experienced it? What is its utility in our lives and in our world? What is the value of renunciation, particularly when it comes to issues like the ecological crisis where individual actions aren't going to tip the scales? Does renunciation have value not just on a spiritual and moral level? What's its relationship to working for change? So I needed to look more carefully at the qualities, understand them in myself, differentiate them from a lot of the pop ideas or pat notions we can have about something like kindness or compassion, and get really clear and specific about them.

Your Heart Was Made for This

Sharon Salzberg: That's great. Well, the topic for today's session is spiritual resources for resilience, which is certainly something we are probably all thinking about. You've mentioned some of the challenges that we're living through today—the ecological crisis, war, inflation. I'm wondering if you could say more about the title of your book, which I find very intriguing: Your Heart Was Made for This.

It sort of reminds me of something somebody told me during the terrible beginnings of the pandemic, when everything disrupted and changed, and so many people I knew were dying in New York. Somebody said that his statement of encouragement to himself was, "You were made for this. You were born for this." He offered that to me as a way of bringing up courage and strength. I mean, there is something genuine about it, not just, "If you say this, you'll feel better." What did you mean, and what was your process of really thinking we are made for this, that we are able to navigate these kinds of times?

Oren Jay Sofer: Yeah, I think that's a legitimate question, and what I like about the title is that it is kind of provocative in that sense of "Really?" For me, there's a yes there, and there's a no.

On one level, in a very real sense, our heart—in the sense of our biology and our nervous systems—was not designed for the world we live in today. A lot of evolutionary biologists talk about this. It's a recognized phenomenon that we evolved in small communities with no more than 50 to 150 connections¹, and expected to have certain things in our lives like enough downtime, nourishment from social connection, and a shared sense of meaning, purpose, and place in the world. Modernity has stripped us of so many of these things. We live in a much more fast-paced and complicated world than our nervous systems are built to contend with, let alone the influence of technology, the fragmentation of our attention, or the exposure to tragic news from all over the world at any hour of the day. So on that level, our nervous systems are contending with an environment that is inherently at odds with how we're designed.

So what does it mean that our hearts were made for this? I think for me it means two things. One, it's very consonant with the story you just told. Why do we practice? Why do we have spiritual cultivation? It's not just so that we can feel good when everything's going our way; it's precisely to be able to rise to the challenge when things are really hard. In that sense—on a spiritual, moral, and ethical level—I think our hearts were made for this. Those of us who were born into this time, these are the greatest tasks we will face: to be in right relationship with everything that's unfolding and find our place to contribute in a meaningful way.

The other meaning, which is kind of a play on words with the nervous system interpretation, is that I believe what the Buddha discovered: that our hearts were made to wake up. We were made to flourish and to realize our full potential. One of the things that's been so beautiful about being a parent and being around a newborn is seeing how beautiful the human spirit is when it comes into this world. How loving, how generous, how joyful, how enthusiastic, how curious, how playful! And to recognize that so much of the violence and disconnection that happens in our world is learned through experience.

One of the analogies I like to use is when we're born, we have the capacity to learn any language. Our neurology is primed to learn any sounds, any grammar. In the same way, I feel like our hearts are primed to express all of these beautiful qualities: to embody compassion, forgiveness, empathy, integrity. And the question is, do we cultivate them? Do we live into our potential? It's the kind of invitation and exploration that I engage with in the book: how do we make that journey?

Sharon Salzberg: Was that 150 social connections over the course of a lifetime?

Oren Jay Sofer: I think it's a specific figure, something called Dunbar's number. That's a theory about human evolution that says the size of the band or the tribe, including external connections, is somewhere between 50 and 150. Something about our neurology is designed so that we kind of max out there evolutionarily.

Sharon Salzberg: What would you say to someone who gets on average about 150 emails an hour? [Laughter]

Oren Jay Sofer: [Laughter] Right. Balance, rest. So much of the book goes through all these different qualities we can develop that are rooted in the path but broader than just Buddhist practice. There are practices in each chapter for reflection, for meditation, for action. One of the sections in each chapter is, "If you have difficulties." I feel like so many of the difficulties we have today in terms of developing spiritually, ethically, morally, and finding balance have to do with the external circumstances of our lives. Whether it's the sheer pace of modernity or external circumstances due to structural violence or oppression, how do we contend with those? How do we compensate for those conditions? That is one of the things I try to make real in the book so that the skills can really be practiced.

Courage, Integrity, and Love

Sharon Salzberg: The subtitle of the book is interesting as well. It's Contemplative Practices to Meet a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love. I'm wondering if that was a conversation with your publisher to include love. How do you define contemplative practice, and can you give us some examples of practices that are actually included in the book?

Oren Jay Sofer: Sure. The conversation with the publisher—which is Shambhala—was more about the Your Heart Was Made for This part of the title. I pushed for the parts of the subtitle. Less around "love" and more "a world in crisis," because it felt really important to me to acknowledge a sobering truth of our times. It's not just a feel-good thing. I think it's appropriate to be uncomfortable and uneasy today given everything we're living through. Those three qualities in particular, I honed in on because they feel essential in that order. We need courage to actually turn towards the truth, we need integrity to feel a sense of inner strength to face the truth, and then love is the piece that softens it. That nourishes us with connection and takes us beyond ourselves.

I define contemplative practice in the book as anything that cultivates awareness, reflection, and connects us with a sense of meaning, purpose, or perspective. In the last 10 to 20 years, mindfulness has become so well known, and meditation along with it. I mean, you've been doing it longer than I've been alive! But even in my lifetime, like when I started in the late '90s, meditation was not in the public conversation the way it is today. It's a great benefit to our world that mindfulness and meditation are common terms now. And yet, it feels like there's a real limitation there in not recognizing the breadth of the path and the variety and creativity that's available.

One analogy I've been using is thinking about the difference between running and exercise. I don't like to run, so if I said, "Well, I don't like to run, so I'm not going to exercise," that wouldn't make any sense because there are so many ways to exercise. In the same way, not everyone connects with meditation, but there are so many other ways to cultivate awareness, reflection, connect with meaning, and move beyond ourselves. Art can be contemplative practice, ritual, movement, storytelling, relationships.

Reflection is a practice I rely a lot on in the book. We did a little reflection in the guided meditation at the beginning of the session. It's taking a theme and allowing oneself to explore it in a receptive way, using thought, image, and memory to shape the mind and our inner life. One reflection at the very beginning of the book—to come back to your book on Faith—is a reflection on aspiration and faith. Listening deeply for what's most important to us, what we know or trust in our hearts, and how we want to orient our lives.

Another contemplative practice I use is working with image. Image can be a very powerful way to access different parts of our consciousness. In the chapter on patience, one of the tools I offer is recollecting an image that represents patience. Here in California, we have the old-growth redwoods, these massive trees. Or an image of a great mountain. In the commentaries, they use the image of the shore of a great lake encompassing the energy of anger or hatred.

All of these practices rest upon the skill of training our attention. This underlying insight of the Buddha is that how we use our attention every day shapes our inner life, and we're always practicing something. Developing the skills of attention so we can choose more consciously and steer inwardly around what we're building—what kind of world are we building, externally and internally? That's really where I see the potential for cultivating spiritual resources for resilience. If we develop the capacity to know where our attention is going and redirect it skillfully—not to avoid things that are difficult or painful, but to make conscious choices about when we're engaging with them and when we're nourishing ourselves—we can develop a more rich, robust, and stable inner life so that we have more to offer.

The Emergence of Heart Qualities

Sharon Salzberg: That's beautiful. I used to say my favorite word for many years was "poignancy," talking about the heart of compassion that has that flavor of poignancy. These days, I say my favorite word is "emergent" or "emerging." Meditation is attention training. It's one of the many ways we can do attention training. When people think about training in loving-kindness or training in compassion, it sounds odd and feels cold. But it's really saying that we can train attention, and all of these other things are like emergent properties of paying attention differently. You don't set out and say, "I'm going to be more loving today" in some forceful, coerced, weird way. But you know from experience that if you look directly at people instead of through them, or listen to somebody instead of holding a rigid impression of them in your mind, you're laying the conditions for what may then emerge, which is some sense of connection.

You have an interesting list of emergent qualities. You have 26 chapters in this book, each on a different quality. Many of them I recognize from Buddhist teaching, like mindfulness, energy, concentration, kindness, and compassion. But some are not in the classical lists, like "rest" or "play." How did you choose the qualities?

Oren Jay Sofer: First, I want to comment on that beautiful teaching you just offered on "emergent." It made me think of an interview I heard recently with Rebecca Solnit—actually, I think it was the interview you and James did on Tricycle—where she talked about the root of the word "emergency" being connected to "emergent," and the possibility that opens up when there is an emergency. Just connecting that sense of the emergence of the beauty of the heart through how we pay attention with the emergence of our capacities to contribute and make different choices as we face crises.

In structuring the book, I looked at the core Buddhist lists. For the Buddhist geeks on the call here, the Bodhipakkhiyādhammā², that core list of 37 different qualities. I looked at the Five Powers, the Seven Factors of Awakening, the Ten Pāramī³, the Four Brahmavihāras⁴, the Five Jhāna⁵ factors. One of the things that emerged, both in looking at the lists and through my own practice, is an understanding of an underlying template of energy. There seems to be this wave-like pattern: these foundational qualities create stability, initiate energy, reach a peak, and then there's an integration moving towards freedom or release.

I looked at that pattern, pulled out the qualities that seemed most relevant for the world we're living in and the crises we're facing, and thought, "How can I structure these in a way that takes people through that cycle multiple times?" I chose 26 because if you do two weeks for every chapter, you have a whole year. It becomes a yearlong training for the heart.

In addition to the classical qualities, I also thought about what other things we develop in meditation, or that are necessary, whether they're named explicitly or not in the teachings. "Rest" is there, of course, in things like tranquility or calm, but it's not languaged that way. I thought about the medicines we need in our lives today, like rest and play, and the roles those play in working for social change and nourishing our hearts.

Another theme woven throughout the Buddhist teachings that I explore is balance. How do we balance energy with rest? How do we balance resolve with patience? There's a back-and-forth movement throughout the book, both in terms of our individual cultivation and how that moves out into the world through service or activism. We need to bring lightness, joy, humor, and play into our work so that we don't burn out.

Sharon Salzberg: Do you think you ordered them in a particular way, or is it just what happened?

Oren Jay Sofer: Some of it is very specifically chosen, particularly the first part, where I start with attention and go through the five spiritual faculties to lay a strong foundation. The order of the qualities within each part follows that wave-like pattern, but I moved chapters around up until the final draft. After the first part, my hope is that people won't feel bound to the order and will feel free to think, "What is it that I need right now?" and jump ahead to the chapter on rest. Or if there's a particularly challenging ethical situation at work, they can go to the chapter on integrity. I want it to be a resource to meet people where they're at.

Mindfulness and Structural Violence

Sharon Salzberg: I want to read a passage from your book. You write: "Popular mindfulness suggests that the sole source of our suffering is individual and internal, ignoring the vast influence of structural factors such as racism, sexism, and poverty on our well-being and our ability to access our inner resources." My first question is, you phrased it as "popular mindfulness" compared to the classical meanings in the texts. Do you think the classical meaning is broader than that? What role do you see for mindfulness specifically, and contemplative practice more broadly, in addressing these structural issues?

Oren Jay Sofer: I think it's clear the Buddha wasn't trying to restructure ancient Indian society; that wasn't his mission. He was pinpointing the internal experience of suffering on an individual level. But I don't think he's necessarily limiting mindfulness to just that internal investigation. Of course, he talks about applying mindfulness both internally and externally. So there is a broader sense in the classical teachings of how we use mindfulness that gets reduced in popular, secular mindfulness.

As far as the causes of suffering, it's a deep question in how the Buddha defines dukkha⁶. It does seem to me that he is really looking at the individual emotional, psychological, and spiritual experience of struggle and being burdened. The external circumstances maybe get defined more in the context of pain as an unpleasant experience—whether it's physical pain, the pain of war, or the pain of poverty. And yet, I think what's so remarkable about the practice is that it provides an invaluable tool for working for change on a structural level.

One of the ways our practice supports this—and this is perhaps the more commonly understood application—is that it provides a lens to investigate our condition more deeply. I talk in the book about how practice has supported me in understanding and becoming aware of patriarchal conditioning I've internalized, internalized anti-Semitism, or unconscious racism. It's not only mindfulness, but all the other qualities we develop in training our attention—like courage, curiosity, kindness towards ourselves, and the capacity to let go—that support us to look honestly at these things and begin to transform them.

I really love the phrase you're fond of sharing on social media: "Meditation doesn't replace action." Of course, we need more than inward-looking to address structural violence, oppression, and the climate crisis. And yet, contemplative practice has a key role to play. Often, spiritual practice and social change get presented as mutually exclusive. But I see them as supporting each other. Our practice helps us not only to understand and transform the dynamics of oppression within, but to come from a different place in how we work for change. It aligns our means with the end we want to see, so we're not unintentionally recreating patterns of domination, shaming, or exclusion. Then, service and activism offer a vehicle to express our values and another way to create leverage for structural change.

Sharon Salzberg: In many ways, the Buddha did foster social change. When we change our vision of life and develop insight—like interconnection, which is really a function of seeing more clearly and paying attention differently—many things move from that. One's worldview is really important.

Ironically, in the evolution of time, when the Buddha proposed intention behind an action as the seed of moral valence, he was challenging the entire caste system. In the philosophies of that time, what was right and appropriate for a Brahmin male was completely forbidden to the soldier caste or a Brahmin female. Morality was held by one's birth. The Buddha was saying, "That's irrelevant. It doesn't matter what your gender, caste, social status, or skin color is. An act born of hatred will have certain consequences, and an act born of love as its intention will have certain consequences." There was a huge upheaval in that, and it was very threatening in many ways.

These days, in innumerable diversity and inclusion workshops, one hears, "Intention is not the point, look at impact." That makes a lot of sense too, and it fits within the teachings because it's not just the intention; there's also the skillfulness of the execution. But having clarity from the Buddhist point of view causes a revolution all in and of itself.

Oren Jay Sofer: I love that you're making the distinction between the transformative power of the teachings on a social level—like how he structured the monastic sangha to be democratic and egalitarian—and the explicit aim of the teachings in terms of individual liberation. There are those two levels.

Meeting Difficult Emotions

Sharon Salzberg: I want to congratulate you on including the word "crisis" in your subtitle. I know every publisher gets anxious that people will be turned off or fear it will be depressing. One thing I do notice about the book is that there are no chapters on difficult emotions like anger, grief, sorrow, or burnout. Why not, speaking as a Buddhist?

Oren Jay Sofer: [Laughter] I'm pausing because I'm wondering if I should make a joke about avoiding them because I don't like experiencing them!

Sharon Salzberg: That's a good joke, because it's true, we don't like experiencing those things. They are hard. Can you describe the place of these painful experiences in developing resilience?

Oren Jay Sofer: It is so often those really challenging times that call forth our deepest strengths. It's when we're grieving the most deeply that we discover how strongly we love, or when we are the most afraid that we discover our capacity for courage.

The reason I didn't put any chapters on them is because I wanted to take a trauma-informed approach to development, and focus on cultivating the strongest and most holistic ground internally from which to engage with and process those difficult experiences. They're woven throughout the book, but within the context of the antidotes we need to cultivate in order to metabolize them. I talk about those experiences within this broader context of cultivating a robust, balanced heart that can handle the difficult experiences.

The other reason I chose not to have individual chapters on them was that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts in the cultivation of attention. Take grieving. All of these different qualities come into play—like courage, compassion, and patience—to really allow our hearts to go through that process. Or with jealousy, the way generosity and gratitude can dissolve it. Or fear and anger—when we have access to wisdom, kindness, and equanimity, those qualities create a container that can transmute the energies of fear and anger into clarity, energy, and power. They are held in the context of our goodness and strength.

Parenting and Practice

Sharon Salzberg: You've recently become a new parent. I'm curious how that's affected your practice and if it changed anything in the book.

Oren Jay Sofer: Well, I have much less time for formal practice! It has forced me to really live the practice and make the most of small moments of rest, awareness, and connection. While I miss having downtime for formal meditation, I also love the challenge of making every moment practice in a very real way.

It's been incredibly humbling. It's been good for my personality to see all the places I lose patience or get grumpy when I haven't had enough sleep or time to walk in the woods. So, a good dose of humility, and just tremendous wonder and appreciation for the miracle of getting born, and for the immense amount of work parents everywhere do.

In terms of the book, I wrote the first draft while my wife was pregnant, and then I did a very rigorous and challenging edit of the second draft after our son was born during the winter. We weren't sleeping; it was a challenging time. But his presence in our lives taught me a tremendous amount and embodied so many qualities in powerful ways. And maybe the last thing is just witnessing the utter vulnerability and helplessness that we arrive here with, and how it calls forth so much goodness and generosity. Even today, being out in public with him, his purity just calls forth the goodness in others. It's a remarkable affirmation of the beauty and goodness of our nature.

Q&A: Jealousy, Gratitude, and Loneliness

Sharon Salzberg: We have a question about the similarities in the name of your book and Kaira Jewel Lingo's book⁷, We Were Made for These Times, and the similarity in content.

Oren Jay Sofer: Kaira and I are friends and colleagues, and we were well aware of the similarity of the titles. We talked about it before I settled on the title. Kaira was very gracious and basically said, "I didn't come up with this title either"—she took it from a letter from a mentor to an activist. Some of the similarities are really about the relevance of our practice and the times we're living in. These themes are emerging because it's what's needed.

Sharon Salzberg: Here is another question: "Please talk more about dealing with jealousy. The topic is hardly spoken about by teachers." Often comparison leads not to sympathetic joy, but to the opposite, which is jealousy.

Oren Jay Sofer: A few different things come to mind. One is stepping back and acknowledging the suffering. Just recognizing that we're suffering is so important. Understanding it as a contraction—there's a craving and clinging in the heart. But not to demonize it; to see that contraction as a longing for something we care about. One way of working with jealousy is to try to connect with the aspect of our heart that wants to feel fulfilled, seen, or recognized, and to disentangle the pain of the comparison from what it is that we want that could actually be meaningful.

Another way is to investigate the arising of clinging, so the heart learns how to let go. But that takes resources. Jealousy needs to be counterbalanced and healed with dignity, self-worth, and connection. Gratitude is a huge antidote to jealousy. Recognizing what we already appreciate reminds the heart of its fullness and helps us let go and experience an innate sense of well-being without reaching for something else.

Sharon Salzberg: I think gratitude is a very interesting quality. In terms of confronting oppressive systems, people often say, "Gratitude is the stupidest quality because that's like being grateful for crumbs, instead of standing up and saying I deserve better." But scientists say it's actually quite different according to research. If you practice gratitude, you get filled with energy. You don't feel depleted, impoverished, or exhausted, and you have the energy to try to make a difference. People who practice gratitude really want to pay it forward; they want to see other people get a break and get better treatment.

Sharon Salzberg: Another question: "You talk about how humans evolved to be in communities of 50 to 150. What about those who are lonely and isolated and alone? People who are aging and lonely, or disabled and lonely. Does your book talk about this?"

Oren Jay Sofer: Absolutely. It's one of the challenges of our times that even though we are surrounded by virtual connections, people are lonelier than ever. Part three of the book explores relationship and friendship.

There are several ways we can work with it. One is internally. There's a difference between the experience of loneliness and solitude. Solitude is a sense of deep connection with oneself and the world, whereas loneliness is that absence of connection and the pain of that. We can use internal resources to shift the experience and develop more of that richness inside.

The other avenue is finding moments of connection elsewhere. While it takes time, effort, and good luck to build friendships, we can find nourishment in brief interactions or by taking in the natural world. I remember visiting one of my first teachers, Anagarika Munindra⁸. I asked him if he was ever lonely, and he said, "No, I'm never alone because the birds are my friends, and the trees are my friends, and the sky and the clouds are my friends." We can begin to heal some of the loneliness if we know how to open our hearts and allow ourselves to be nourished by the goodness around us.

Cultivating Patience

Sharon Salzberg: "How does one develop patience with people, especially during conflicts, war, as well as personal conflicts?"

Oren Jay Sofer: As the Buddha said, patience is the supreme virtue. Patience paves the road to freedom. First, we need to understand what patience is. Patience is not gritting our teeth or just hunkering down and bearing something; that is often a kind of aversion or resistance. Patience is actually a certain kind of softening or surrendering inside. There's a really important distinction between that softening and being complicit with harm.

Patience is a very rich and nuanced quality that has an aspect of widening and softening inside that we can cultivate through meditation, as well as a certain strength that's about enduring. We see that on the external level of our lives—that we're able to find stamina, energy, and resilience to stay engaged with something in spite of discomfort, activation, and intense disagreement. Starting to understand the nature of patience and cultivate its different facets becomes a resource for those really difficult situations.