Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Loving kindness is the antidote to fear. And that's maybe the primary thing I've seen in myself and have witnessed in others, that if you're coming from a loving or compassionate place, that motivational sphere, that intentional sphere gets transformed to a place of connection. So what you do, what you say, how you act, maybe largely then be coming from a place of connection.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Hi, I'm Deborah Rosman and a warm welcome to our listeners. Each month for the Ad Heart podcast, I have the privilege of interviewing individuals who are contributing to the creation of a more heart based world.
This month I'm talking with Sharon Salzberg, a world renowned teacher, co founder of the Insight Meditation Society and author of 13 books, including the New York Times bestseller Real Happiness and her seminal work, Loving Kindness. I love that term. Sharon's popular podcast, the Meta Hour, has had over 7 million downloads and features interviews with thought leaders from the mindfulness movement and beyond. Sharon is one of the leading proponents of mindfulness. Welcome, Sharon.
[00:01:21] Speaker A: Thank you so much.
[00:01:24] Speaker B: You know, you wrote the book Loving Kindness 30 Years Ago.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: Oh my gosh, has it been 30 years?
[00:01:31] Speaker B: It's been 30 years. But it feels more important than ever these days in a world polarized with anger, hate and disrespect. And many people wonder how we're going to change that downward trajectory that it looks like we're on. So talk to us about that and Loving Kindness.
[00:01:49] Speaker A: Well, I think one of the most difficult things is even believing that that's a path, you know, it's a path for us out of kind of what I call the triumph of hatred and the prevalence of ill will and the feeling we'll be feeling better about ourselves if we can only condemn others and all the kinds of characteristics of our time in a way. And to even believe that love or loving kindness, heartfulness is not weakness. It's not, it's not going to make us kind of, you know, bigger people pleasers and sort of sentimental that it's really a power that I think is the most significant and most difficult step. And then it's a process of learning some skills, you know, and putting them into place. But we need to do that first.
[00:02:40] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you know, HeartMath was founded by Doc Childry and about 30 of us who were long term meditators at that point and realizing we wanted to create a research lab to see what the physiological correlates were, if they're warning between love, kindness, care, compassion, the heart qualities, as we call them, spirit and the physical body nervous system, see if we could create A simple system that didn't need any ideology or belief or rituals, but just science approving what you're saying, that loving kindness is a power.
And you know, we found the physiological state of coherence occurs in the heart's actual rhythmic beating patterns. When we feel and radiate love or loving kindness or other genuine warm hearted feelings like gratitude has to be sincere. But then that heart rhythm coherence empowers us to regulate our reactions, our autonomic nervous system, it lifts the vibration of our emotional state and goes signals through the vagal nerve all the way to the frontal lobes where we can perceive a bigger, more wholeness picture.
So we're trimming, trying to get the word out. Like you're saying this is a power, this is not some self victimizing, weak modality. And certainly we really, we really also find that when people practice it consciously they find those abilities.
So what have you found when people actually practice loving kindness? What do you hear?
[00:04:18] Speaker A: Well, I've experienced personally, you know, complete transformation really of, of myself and, and certainly I've been teaching it now for, if I wrote that book 30 years ago, I've been teaching it for 40 years now, you know, and tremendous transformation. You know, they say since I came out of the Buddhist tradition that the Buddha first taught loving kindness is the antidote to fear.
[00:04:44] Speaker B: Right.
[00:04:44] Speaker A: And that's maybe the primary thing I've seen in myself and have witnessed in others that if you are largely coming from a place of fear and what you do or what you say or what you hold back from doing or saying, that motivational sphere, that intentional sphere gets transformed to a place of connection. So what you do, what you say, how you act may largely then be coming from a place of connection. And that's, that's the primary thing I've seen and it goes all the way from intense fear to, I've, I've taught a lot of loving kindness practices to people who are performers of some kind, who have stage fright, who tend to get up on that stage and look out and think there are a bunch of others out there waiting to judge me and put, put me down. And it through the practice of loving kindness that becomes more like, oh, here we are together, yeah, kind of feeling, you know. And so because of that transformation, people we find our lives are different. But I want to emphasize that it doesn't mandate a certain kind of behavior. It's not to say that if you're coming from a loving or compassionate place, you have to say yes, you know, you have to lend them More money, you have to let them move back in. You know, our actions are also based on discernment and wisdom and context and things like that. But the reason why we are acting is what gets changed.
[00:06:31] Speaker B: You know, I look at it through the lens of energy. You know, hard energy, especially coherent hard energy, lifts us above, we rise above a lot of that incoherent fear based emotion. And then we can perceive, like you're saying that we're connected or there people are not to get us, but it's like we have to lift our vibration above that or we get stuck in, in the loops of fear and worry and stress and loving kindness. Like you said, it has to be empowered by our heart, by our care, by our intentionality, and then the energy shifts. I think it's so important to be looking at a lot of this through the lens of energetics. And, you know, you also wrote a book whose title I like, A Heart as Wide as the World, you know, where you talk about how our own happiness is found in the capacity to open our hearts to others, allowing us to face whatever the world offers us with wisdom and compassion.
And I think if you look at the world of energetics, you look through that, you can see how the potential of the heart energy and our connection really can lift us and maybe lift society past all of this.
You know, the message is so resonant with HeartMath and why we call this the ad heart podcast theme.
In fact, Doc Childry, myself, our head researcher, Roland McCready and Howard Martin, we all wrote together the book Heart Intelligence to talk about our research, but also what we perceive in terms of the need for love in humanity to achieve its potential. We need to learn to get along. And it doesn't look like we're getting along when you look at the world, but the mind without the heart hasn't been able to pull this off. Like Doc Childry said, we've tried that through the ages and it hasn't worked. And our hearts can help bring about a new respect for our personal cultural differences.
More people are awakening to this. We can't sidestep the importance of our heart's care. How do you see this? How do you see a heart as wide as a world being applied today?
[00:09:03] Speaker A: Well, I'm sure you've heard this already, you know, but that split between the mind and the heart is a particularly Western concept. If you look at the languages of Asia, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Chinese, it's one word, you know, and I've, I've seen, you know, of course, Western students Talk to, say, Burmese or Tibetan meditation teacher and say, how can I get out of my mind into my heart? And what they are hearing is, how can I get out of my mind into my mind? Or how can I get out of my heart into my heart? Because it's one word, you know. So we have grown up with a kind of duality or split that doesn't actually exist in those languages, which I find very interesting, you know, so from their point of view, we're not trying to replace something or unify something. It's already united and, you know.
[00:10:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:04] Speaker A: Sort of misperception. And it's interesting you bring up A Heart As Wide as the World because that was my second book, and for a while it had a different title. I can't even remember what it was. And I was sitting listening to someone else give a lecture, a discourse, and they used the phrase, a heart as wide as the world. So I. I thought, that's it. That's what I want to call the book. So I. I called the publisher and I said, I want to change the title. Which they were not that happy about. It was. We were well on the way of the process. They already had covers designed and whatever, but they finally said yes. And that meant we quickly had to find a new cover.
So the image, of course, A Heart As Wide as the World, is something expansive, vast, open. And this is a long time ago. They were sending me by mail all these different possibilities of a cover. And one of the possibilities was. I don't remember the name of the painting, but it was some Van Gogh painting which is like a big yellow sky and these little crumbled huts on the bottom. And in my mind, it looked like a scene of total devastation. I said to someone, that should be the COVID of the Grapes of Wrath or something. It's so terrible. But I showed it to a friend, and she took one look at it. She said, that looks like a world that could use some love.
And while that particular image did not become the COVID that phrase has stayed with me now for decades. This looks like a world that could use some love. So that's the pivot point. As you say, single love is a superpower.
And the idea of expansion, it's a state of openness. It's not necessarily a certain particular emotional feeling which narrows it too much, I think, you know, then we discount other manifestations of the state of love. But it is this kind of openness that is connected, you know, that's very vibrant and alive.
And I'd be so curious to See all your research about the, the nature of that experience through science. But it's, it's really about being unconstrained, unconfined in some way, right?
[00:12:28] Speaker B: There's so often when stress builds, it feeds back on the heart and we feel constrained and then to try to fix it. The mind is always trying to fix things.
That's when we find the mind is running one way and the heart another and the emotions are tangled up and creating chaos. And I remember you, you reminded me that we had trainers in China and when we were showing our research about the, the brain and the heart, when they're out of sync, the mind and heart and when they are in sync. And he pointed out that the Chinese character is all the same for mind.
But he said that's not the way we're living here in China. You know, it's in our history, but we don't have tools, we don't know how. It's really very mind focused and driven and ambition driven and the heart has not being allowed to express. Well, we know that's what happens in autocratic societies too.
But you know, that's why to me the science, you don't need science to go to your heart, but the science helps give permission to. A lot of people have been so out of to be able to realize they can connect with their heart and reopen the heart from the traumas and the stresses and the heartaches and heartbreaks, that there really is a place and that's where tools such as ours or the mindfulness tools are helping people reconnect with that. You know, our research is showing, it's really interesting that it's a genuine warm hearted feeling, not just the mental concept, but the genuine feeling of care, loving kindness, of gratitude that powers this alignment of heart, mind and emotions. And you can see it through heart rhythm biofeedback and you see the shift in heart rhythm coherence. We know that signals a different pattern to the brain and that creates an energetic conduit for more spirit, larger self, whatever you want to call it, for intuitive guidance to come into the human system. And so that we can connect with that human intuitive guidance system. That's our larger intelligence. We call it heart intelligence because you have to open the heart, as you're saying, to connect with it. And as we radiate love, kindness, compassion to each other and into the planetary energetic field, it makes it energetically easier for more people to connect with their heart. And that's what can start to go viral. That's our vision and our hope. It's just like in your heart, in your family when you're open hearted with your children or your loved ones, your parents, they tend to be more open hearted back unless they're having a bad day and you know, and when we're stressed that communicates energetically and being able to connect with that intuitive guidance is what I as a long term meditator love because it adds such insight and you feel yes, I'm on the right track for today or for what I'm supposed to do. And it draws in what's best for the whole and us included. So what's your feeling about how we're going to create that heart alignment in the world?
[00:16:05] Speaker A: Well, I was actually going to ask you if you found a kind of contagion effect.
[00:16:12] Speaker B: Yeah, we actually have in several ways. One I'll describe at least two. One is that when we're our heart rhythm pattern that's coherent or our emotional state, our vibe as kids call it, we pick up each other's vibes. We actually can see my heart rhythm pattern in the brain waves of somebody not touching but standing three feet away. That's how we're all affecting each other. Imagine yourself in an elevator with a bunch of people and we're all sort of in our own little world but we're all energetically still communicating. Or you walk into a room and the energy so thick, like there's been an argument, but two people and they're not facing you, but you can cut it with a knife. That's in our expression, that's contagion, emotional contagion. And on other hand we see that couples, when they get into heart rhythm coherence have more love and more collaboration, more communication, more deep heart listening, more all the things that make a relationship positive.
And then we have a global coherence initiative where we're actually measuring at HeartMath Institute the effect of when people are in heart coherence non locally in countries throughout the world, how their heart rhythms are synchronized. I'll send you that paper because it was just published and it's like it gives you so much hope that we can, once we wake up and understand the research and we wake up with our care to consciously create an energetic movement.
This heart rhythm coherence for 15 minutes of doing like we did at the beginning of our talk today, of getting into heart synchronization with each other, it lasted more than 24 hours. Between the people afterwards it had sustained effect and we're trying to monitor its impact on the Earth's energetic fields, too, because again, the more we can publish this, the more it gives people hope that we can co create and collaborate. We want to create a movement to help love go viral.
You know, right now there's a whole lot of negativity.
We can create a counter movement of help love go viral that's supported by science, and more and more people are waking up, so we got to do something different. I do think there's a heart movement awakening on the planet. Do you find that too?
[00:18:55] Speaker A: Well, I think this is really fascinating because, you know, I did a great deal of my intensive, structured loving kindness training as a meditation practice in Burma.
And while the main benefit that's talked about is the transformation of your own intentional field, you know, why you would tend to act or hold back from acting in some way, there is also a belief, it's a very traditional culture, that loving kindness is like an energy.
So it's like a gift. You know, you can feel it around a person who has really cultivated that quality. You can feel it in a room when you walk in there. But you know, that offering, like any gift, as you said, you know, someone might be in a bad mood or have a bad incident just that morning, you can't be attached to it being received in a certain way. You know, you need wisdom, you need balance, you need equanimity. But all that said, it can be like a freely given gift. It doesn't mean that it has no impact energetically.
[00:20:10] Speaker B: Right.
[00:20:11] Speaker A: But you can't, you know, insist on it, because then that's a whole other thing than love. Right. That's attachment.
But, you know, it's. It's so different from how most people think of the world that it's not the primary emphasis or has not been. Maybe your research will help that, you know, it's been much more emphasized, the kind of personal, transformative.
[00:20:37] Speaker B: Right.
[00:20:38] Speaker A: Effect. Yet it is. It is very much believed in that kind of traditional culture that it is an energy and that it. It could have that kind of impact. So I'm really fascinated by what you're saying.
[00:20:54] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you know, so interesting, the contrast, because Burma, Myanmar. Right.
[00:20:58] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:21:00] Speaker B: Is one of. The whole country is so politically devastated right now.
[00:21:04] Speaker A: Yeah. It's awful.
[00:21:05] Speaker B: And yet it has this incredible tradition. And you see that in a number of the Asian countries, how it's gotten polarized that way. And we see the polarization in different ways happening in our country here in the United States, but also throughout the world. It's again, from an energetic perspective. It's all part of the shift. As things are more people opening their hearts, there's also the insecurity and fear backlash that creates more of the recidivism into the old and trying to hang on.
That's why those of us who are doing this work are being, I feel, I certainly feel called to. How do we collaborate? How do we create and co create an energetic movement of art, you know, of, of loving, of loving kindness. And it does need a scientific foundation, so. Or else it just sounds like another religion or belief system.
[00:22:07] Speaker A: I think it does. And also the word itself, you know, in a way needs to be redeemed. There's such a, an association of love with romance.
[00:22:17] Speaker B: Right.
[00:22:18] Speaker A: And I remember I was, I had a much more recent book called Real Love.
When I was first sending around that manuscript to different publishers, one publisher wrote back to me and said, well, the love market is saturated. By which they meant the romance market, you know, how to find a relationship, how to keep a relationship, how to end a relationship. But that's not what I meant, you know, particularly with the word love. And, and it's. I think we live in a time where the very word is like degenerated so that we often associate it with being kind of stupid, you know, or infatuated or, or we just don't recognize it as the power that it actually.
[00:23:06] Speaker B: Right.
[00:23:06] Speaker A: So I think redeem the word.
[00:23:09] Speaker B: Yeah, well, we always say love. Look at love as a pie. And the different pieces are kindness, care, gratitude, compassion, joy. They're all frequencies in the love spectrum, so to speak, if you want to use that as a metaphor. But those heart qualities, your feelings, not concepts are what create coherence in the human body and the human system. So it takes it into that cold word, coherence, but it takes the warm heartedness to create that alignment of our inner computer, so to speak. And I think that we can redeem the word love as people understand what it, what its potential is.
[00:23:56] Speaker A: You know, I'm also interested in, in your use of the word chaos which you've used several times as. Yeah, this disruptive damaging force.
[00:24:08] Speaker B: Right. Well, if you end up accumulating stress and overwhelm and anxiety and fear and that drains this energy system of the body, creates chaos in our hormonal immune responses, incoherence in our heart rhythm, which is, I mean if you looked at your heart rhythm when you're feeling stressed or emotionally upset, it's not about good or bad. You just look at it. It's a very chaotic, jagged rhythm. It's like the Parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system is fighting each other. Like you're driving your car with one foot on the gas and one foot on the accelerator. That burns a lot of energy and burns out the car eventually. I mean, chaos is really that discordance going on. But we can learn to shift with techniques very quickly from that. Out of alignment to heart, coherent alignment, and that is driven by breathing, as all the traditions do, but also activating, choosing love or compassion for yourself or another, or kindness or gratitude. Those are energies, they're frequencies that drive the system back into harmony.
[00:25:28] Speaker A: I wonder if there's also like kind of an over romanticization of chaos or, or even pain, you know, because I think of times I've talked to artists of some kind who really believe that their art, the greatest of art, comes out of discordance, out of pain, out of chaos, you know, as compared to coming out of harmony and balance. And I've talked to other artists, certainly from the east, who sense things differently. You know that great creativity can come out of harmony, right?
[00:26:13] Speaker B: Well, it goes back to what you're talking in your book on happiness and others. I mean, even if agony can turn into creativity and ecstasy, it's like, who wants that? You know, it's the point of your own intelligence is, let me see what happens when I create from alignment and harmony. It's not boring, it's creative because it's activating higher centers in the brain which are needed for true innovation and creativity. And I mean, we taught in an organization, one of our techniques to a group of people developing patents. This was actually in Motorola some years ago. And when they got their heart, brain, body in sync with this technique, they produce three more patent three times the number of patents in the same amount because their intuition and their creativity was activated. So it's like, what's going to activate that? What activates our own heart's intuitive guidance for our next steps?
I have not seen that come out of chaos. I've seen that come out of deep alignment and coherence.
So, Sharon, what is your heart guiding you to do next?
[00:27:31] Speaker A: Well, I think it's. It's really in this time of what I really do call the triumph of hatred, seeming triumph.
It's to rest firmly on what I genuinely believe to be true, which is the power of love and loving kindness and to keep talking about it and offering the tools. And I feel especially drawn these days and for some time now to the group of groups of people we call caregivers, those who in some ways are on the front lines of suffering in life, either personally, in their personal lives or professionally or really trying to make a difference and are, you know, so often and sadly burning out. Not because they lack caring or empathy.
If anything, it seems to be a, a lack of empathy and caring for themselves. You know, there's an imbalance there.
And working with those groups as much as I can and just doing what I can do it is my. It is what I do, you know? You know.
[00:28:49] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's wonderful. We work with chief nurses and many hospital systems and so they don't burn out. It's all about real compassion that's renewing, not draining.
Wonderful. Well, I look forward to connecting more. And why don't we close this by all doing a heart meditation together, radiating loving kindness and accessing our own heart's intuitive guidance.
Okay, let's focus our attention in the heart.
Just breathe in love and get still in your heart.
When you breathe out, radiate loving kindness into your mental, emotional and physical systems.
See your heart, mind, body and spirit all aligning in harmony and coherence.
Research shows that doing this creates an energetic conduit for your heart's intuitive guidance and love to move through your day to day interactions.
Now with feeling, see yourself practicing our qualities such as loving kindness, gratitude, compassion, patience, ease, forgiveness, any one of these qualities. Practice sincerely increases coherence in your system.
Ask your own heart's intuitive guidance which heart qualities for you to practice today, this week to increase your capacity to love.
Now let's see more people across the planet awakening to the power of practicing heart qualities such as loving kindness and compassion to increase connection and help reduce separation.
Now let's radiate our collective compassionate care to all people and nations suffering from polarization, wars, trauma, natural disasters, famine and other major stressors that draw your heart's care.
Let's close by co creating a reservoir of compassionate heart energy and loving kindness energy that each of us can tap into over the next month whenever we need a lift in spirit or support. Support and listening to our heart's guidance.
Thank you so much.
Sharon. Is there anything else you'd like to share with our listeners?
[00:33:43] Speaker A: No, I'm sorry that for that interruption, but that was. It was lovely coming together. It was lovely practicing with you all.
[00:33:54] Speaker B: And lovely practicing with you me. That's where we're all going to grow together in this new world.
Well, thank you everyone and as a free gift to all our listeners, I want to remind you that you can watch the HeartMath experience, an interactive online video course available for free on the HeartMath website.
And if you haven't done so already, please check out the HeartMath app with a camera sensor that can measure your heart rhythm coherence at the App Store or Google Play stores.
And I want to remind you that the third Tuesday of every month we publish a new episode of the adheart Podcast, so be sure to subscribe so you don't miss our next guest and topic. Take care and remember to be kind to yourself.
Thank you for listening to the Ad Heart Podcast. Be sure to subscribe so you can.
[00:34:54] Speaker A: Catch the latest episodes.
[00:34:56] Speaker B: If you're wanting even more heart inspired content, find us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Look for HeartMath and also the HeartMath Institute. Both organizations are committed to helping activate the heart of humanity.
