Dead Set on Living

by Chris Grosso

  • First, notice what sensations are arising in the belly—and by sensation, Chelsea didn’t mean hunger, but rather things like rumbling or pain or tightness or tenderness or numbness.

  • From those sensations, ask yourself what you need. Is there a need for rest? Is there a need for soothing? Is there a need for food?

  • The third part of the meditation is to become aware of your reactions to the sensations.

  • Finally, we reach a point of considering what action we can take to respond to the sensations with compassion. Ask yourself if there is anything you can do in the next few moments to address the needs showing up in your body. If you noticed a need for food, it might be to eat a meal. If you noticed a need for rest, you may need to take a nap. If you noticed a need for presence or acknowledgment, it might be to sit quietly with yourself and just check in.

  9

  A HAPPINESS THAT ISN’T GOING TO SHATTER

  CONVERSATION WITH SHARON SALZBERG

  Besides being one of the most respected and celebrated Buddhist teachers in America, Sharon Salzberg has influenced my spiritual development and that of many others, particularly in regard to finding what she calls “true” happiness. I spoke with Sharon to dig into what it means to be truly happy—an elusive thing, since few of us are typically taught that we’re capable of happiness or that we even deserve it. Sharon flips the script, demonstrating how happiness—true happiness—is attainable for all beings. It’s something we can achieve beginning right this minute, no matter whether we’ve led a life of perfection or we’ve fucked up so many times that we’ve lost count.

  I wanted to start with a definition of happiness. Often it’s something we seek in misguided ways when we engage in any sort of addictive behavior. Sharon took the meaning beyond a superficial pursuit of pleasure or conflict avoidance. “When I talk about happiness, I mean a sense of inner resource or wherewithal that allows us to be resilient, allows us to face adversity. And when I talk about real happiness, the ‘real’ refers to something we can access that’s not dependent on conditions.” In other words, we can access it even if the weather isn’t good, we don’t have money in the bank, or Stranger Things gets canceled. (God, please don’t let that happen for a very, very long time, though, okay?) “We can access it, but we’re not usually trained to look within. We’re usually very experience-oriented, and we also tend to be intensity focused. Many of us need a sense of intensity to feel alive, so we’re endlessly seeking.”

  That made sense to me. In my own case, seeking intense experiences like mystical union with God—or simply just not waking up going through withdrawals (talk about intense)—had led me in many different directions, and not necessarily good ones. Although there have been times when my quest brought me toward the spiritual, there have been others when it’s led me to drugs and alcohol for instant gratification and escape from painful emotions. Real happiness sounded like something more than that, but it has been very elusive for me and for so many people I talk to—those new to recovery, those who’ve been on a healing path for some time, and, of course, those who have struggled with relapse. I wanted to know more about the way happiness does or does not manifest in people’s lives.

  For Sharon, it all comes down to conditioning. “We’re not taught that we’re capable of happiness, that we deserve happiness, or that we can find it outside of particular channels of experience.” For me, that meant an endless pursuit of booze and empty sexual encounters and snorting shit up my nose. “We tend not to look at the quality of our presence as playing any role in our dissatisfaction, because mostly we’re looking at our experiences. ‘Was it intense enough?’ So we’re caught in a spiral.”

  I knew that spiral all too well. Drink cheap vodka. Snort cocaine (or Ritalin if I was broke) to keep it going. Drink more cheap vodka. Possibly throw up. Possibly find a female to come over. Possibly both. Wake up and do it all over again (and then some). Add a shitload of guilt and shame into the mix, and that was my existence off and on for many years. We get caught, we spin around, and either we find our way out or we don’t, through means such as meditation, mantra, yoga, service work, and myriad other ways. So often, though, even after we’ve experienced life out of that spiral, we still return to self-defeating behaviors. Even those of us who have self-care tools, who’ve been in recovery, who’ve been on a spiritual path or in fellowship, forget or refuse to use their resources during difficult times. I was still trying to wrap my mind around that.

  Sharon thinks returning to the spiral is probably inevitable, because nothing in life is a straight shot. “We don’t have a great breakthrough and then it’s smooth sailing from then on. We’re always needing resilience and starting over and making an adjustment after making a mistake, which may not be that big, but we’re still making mistakes and must begin again. Or maybe we do make a big mistake and must begin again. That’s the rhythm of life.”

  Then she said something that reverberated with me. “There are certain kinds of pain that are hard for us to sit and be with. The impulse is to be anywhere but in the face of that.” Once I returned home after the hospitalization I wrote about in the introduction, the reality of everything that had happened began to set in. My marriage was over. I’d gone back to drinking. I’d nearly died again. I experienced a sincerely significant trauma waking up in that hospital bed, strapped down and unable to breathe past the tubes in my throat. I felt like I was supposed to turn toward the pain and sit with it. That’s what we’re taught on this spiritual path, right? To lean into the pain? But it was just too much. I would sit for a moment or two in meditation or work with a compassion practice, but I just couldn’t do it.

  That’s when I remembered something I’d spoken about in a workshop I’d given the year before. I told someone who had just lost a loved one and was having an incredibly difficult time with it that it was okay to create space between the pain and her. What I meant by that was that it was okay to not lean into it, to not face it down in that moment. It was okay to distract herself with television or music or whatever felt right to her, because sometimes not leaning into overwhelming pain is the most compassionate thing we can do for ourselves, regardless of what many spiritual teachers say. As I remembered this, I allowed myself to shift away from the utterly terrible fucking feeling of everything crashing down on me at once. I watched some episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and it helped more than meditation would have in those moments. Of course we should be steadfast in watching our emotions, and when some time and space has allowed for softening the blow, go back and tend to the wounds. We must always remember to go back. Always.

  After a couple of days, as I began to feel better, I turned to friends and community to help me get through what I was experiencing. That’s not the case for everybody. Although, as Sharon pointed out, “Even if they do, there’s still a chance that a relapse might happen anyway. Sometimes a contributing factor is a sense of going it alone, and there are also certain behavioral patterns that we may not have the mindfulness to see on our own, but when we are with a therapist or friends, they may see what we can’t.”

  Let’s say we get through the difficult time, we put down the bourbon, toss out the razor blades, stop eating processed foods. There are still bound to be feelings of shame or guilt or remorse and all sorts of negative thoughts and emotions regarding what we’ve gone through, as well as what we’ve done to others. How can we forgive ourselves after we’ve fucked up?

  Sharon had the best answer: common humanity. “It has a lot to do with our sense of common humanity, that even though we’re bearing the burden of what we’ve done or said, we’re not the exception—people make mistakes. It’s interesting, because people don’t tend to come together around vulnerability because they think that’s a weakness, but when we do, we can help each other more and care for one another more because it’s what we share.” What an amazing concept—to reframe vulnerability so that it’s no longer perceived as a weakness, but instead as an opportunity for strength.
“We can have a real awakening as we come to see these things.”

  This made me think of the time I spoke with my friend and colleague Deron Drumm (someone else you’ll meet later in the book). He’d just gone through a difficult experience at work. He lost his cool with a coworker and raised his voice in a way that he hadn’t in many years. As we spoke on the phone after it happened, I could hear how upset he was with himself, so I met up with him for lunch later that day. As he described what happened, he expressed how it oddly left him feeling like he’d relapsed, even though he didn’t pick up a bottle or return to gambling (his addiction of choice). I hadn’t spoken to Deron about my hospitalization the previous year. I had opened up to a few other close friends and a therapist I saw after it happened, but I was still harboring shame, embarrassment, and guilt about the whole thing. As I drove to meet Deron for lunch, I vacillated about whether I should tell him or not. I knew I should, but the embarrassed and ashamed part of me was saying, “No way, don’t do it!” As we sat there eating our salads, Deron allowed himself to be vulnerable and confided everything he felt after that experience. I knew I absolutely had to tell him, and not spare any of the details. That interaction was one of the most open, intimate, and meaningful ones I’ve ever had. It showed me the power of vulnerability firsthand. I mean, I try to be as open as possible in my writing and workshops, but there was just something about the two of us—two grown men revealing their hearts and baring their souls to each other—that truly showed me the power of vulnerability. (It was as if a Brené Brown book had come to life!)

  I loved the idea of vulnerability being a source of strength instead of weakness, but what about shame and remorse? Even after I’d gotten clean and made amends, I still felt remorse. Sharon believes that shame is inevitable. She quoted a beautiful line from the Buddha: “If you truly loved yourself, you would never harm another.” She explained that it had two meanings. “One is that harming another is like harming ourselves, because we’ll live with the residue. The other is that if we’re truly capable of a Buddhist vision of life, of tremendous compassion and wisdom, then to behave in a negative way would take us in a different direction. We need to be able to distinguish between those two kinds of pain, the one that is onward-leading and the one that isn’t.”

  A lot of the people I work with or who have read my books are incarcerated or in rehab or just out. They have limited access (if any) to learning about meditation or other self-care practices, or sitting with a sangha or satsang or any sort of spiritual community. Sharon recommended that people in these raw and often fragile situations, especially those with very limited emotional and spiritual-care resources, start simple—with a basic meditation practice of sitting still and following the breath and paying attention when our mind wanders. “With this letting go and starting over, what we’re learning, even if we’ve never used the words, is a forgiveness for ourselves, a self-compassion.” She described it like weight training—you increase the weight as you grow stronger. And just as is true in weight lifting, there are no shortcuts: “I don’t think you can successfully do the meditation without forgiveness, because you’re going to issue a tirade against yourself when your mind wanders. People freak out on themselves. To be able to let go and start over, which is inevitable anyway, means you’re deepening self-compassion and forgiveness. In Buddhist psychology, we would say there is a difference between remorse and guilt, which is a new notion for most people, but the moral grid is not good and bad or right and wrong—it’s what’s skillful or unskillful. What’s going to help us, and what’s going to bring us down? The notion of guilt just brings us down because it drains us of energy. We feel stuck when we’re identified only with that negativity, and we need to realize that it’s true, it happened, maybe we have to make amends for it or feel the pain, but that’s not all we are.”

  Man, I loved that. It reminded me of something I’d heard Sharon talk about before: those magic moments of realizing that we’re lost in thought, and how these recognitions are in and of themselves little moments of enlightenment. If every time we fall or return to a self-defeating behavior we catch ourselves and make the course correction that gets us back on track, we can look at what led us off the path in the first place and remember that as we begin again on our voyage of healing, that’s a moment of enlightenment for us. It doesn’t have to be just the big things, either. Little, everyday stuff absolutely counts, too—the way we treat ourselves or treat others. I find it helps at the end of the day to recap what has happened since I woke up, looking to see if I’ve mistreated myself or mistreated others, and if I have, I do my best to forgive myself for whatever unskillful ways I acted, and then, if it’s pertinent, seek forgiveness when the time is right from someone else I may have treated poorly.

  That made me think of another of Sharon’s great insights:

  The mind thinks thoughts that we don’t plan. It’s not as if we say, “At 9:10 I’m going to be filled with self-hatred.”1

  This seems like such a clear way into understanding our minds and how they work, and honestly, who reading these words right now can’t relate? Our day will be going fine, perhaps even great, and then Bam! Completely out of the blue, something, perhaps a song or a smell, triggers a memory—sometimes good, more often bad—and off to the races our minds go.

  Sharon told me that this understanding came from one of her spiritual teachers, who’d say, “ ‘Everything arises due to causes and conditions, and we might be able to affect those conditions, but we can’t ever control them.’ We can’t say something like ‘I’m never going to fall asleep meditating again.’ We can maybe not eat a huge meal and then meditate, or we can try to affect the conditions, but we can’t swear that we’ll never fall asleep meditating again. We can’t say that anger or fear will never come up in our mind again, because we don’t know. I like to ask, ‘What are we blaming ourselves for unfairly? What do we think we should be in control of that we can’t control?’ Once we’ve looked at that, we can recognize how we come down on ourselves because we’re not in control. Then imagine recapturing all that energy we usually spend blaming ourselves and utilizing it on what we can do, which is to relate differently to what’s come up in our mind. Just because we’ve had a thought or a feeling doesn’t mean we have to take it to heart or let it define us.” I’d say the same about any kind of relapse or negative behavior—it’s what we did, not who we are.

  Speaking of who we are, I think our not feeling at home in our own skin is such a big condition for the experience of unsatisfactoriness in our lives. It can lead to various means of aversion—including drugs, alcohol, food, sex, and shopping—to mask the painful emotions. I was curious what Sharon thought about being born into this human form and how we can learn to feel at home in our lives.

  She told me she usually talks about this in the context of the Buddha having been a human being. Because of this, he’d had to face some “very human questions, like what does it mean to be so vulnerable as an infant, so subject to the actions of those around us, and then to grow older and get sick and die whether we want that or not. Could there be a quality of happiness that isn’t going to shatter as the body does its thing? And what does it mean to have a human mind with a cascade of emotions? Maybe we wake up in the morning and we’re frightened, and then we’re glad and then we’re sorry and then we’re full of faith and full of doubt. There’s a constantly changing torrent of thoughts and feelings, and we can’t always stop it and say, ‘Only happy thoughts from now on.’ They say the Buddha as a human being had those kinds of questions. Anything he discovered, he discovered through the power of his own awareness, and so can we. Whatever our questions are, we have that same capacity for awareness and can come to the resolution of our deepest questions about life: ‘What does it mean? How do I belong?’ ”

  That made me think of a quote I’ve always loved from Sharon’s book Lovingkindness:

  No matter how wonderful or terrible our lives have been, no matter how many traumas an
d scars we may carry from the past, no matter what we have gone through or what we are suffering now, our intrinsic wholeness is always present, and we can recognize it.2

  I always wondered exactly what she meant by “intrinsic wholeness.” How is it always present, and how we can recognize it?

  “That’s a belief that as human beings we all have a capacity for understanding our lives, for wisdom, for generosity, for connection, for love, even if somehow it’s been covered over or obscured, or it’s hard to find or hard to trust, but it’s there. Nothing can ever destroy it. Even if we don’t touch it in this life, it’s there—no matter what we may have gone through, no matter what we are yet to go through. It’s the bottom line of who we are underneath all the things we’ve done or the fears we have, or whatever it might be—that’s who we are. When we do something like loving-kindness meditation—instead of, for example, going down the list of our faults, again—we wish ourselves well. Giving a little airtime to caring and compassion, which we don’t necessarily spend much time doing.”

  I still struggle with this, because some beliefs become so ingrained—in my case, the recurring belief that I’m not worthy of good things. I think everyone can relate to struggling with entrenched beliefs—no matter how little truth is contained within them. One thing that brought me closer to forgiving myself and wishing myself well was the Buddhist teaching of interconnectedness. I mean, if we’re all connected, then to some degree, the mental shit storms we all weather must have some effect beyond just this weirdo named Chris Grosso. How could truly understanding interconnection and practicing it help us to cultivate greater compassion for all beings and ourselves?