Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Susan Piver. Susan Piver is a Buddhist teacher and the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including The Hard Questions and the award-winning How Not to be Afraid of Your Own Life. She teaches workshops and speaks all over the world on meditation, spirituality, communication styles, relationships, and creativity.
In 2011, Susan launched the Open Heart Project, an online meditation community with nearly 12,000 members who practice together and explore ways to bring spiritual values such as kindness, genuineness, and fearlessness to everyday life. Susan is a contributor to the Sounds True anthology Darkness Before Dawn: Redefining the Journey Through Depression. She’s also the author of a new book called Start Here Now: An Openhearted Guide to the Path and Practice of Meditation, a book which presents meditation as something more than the self-help technique du jour—meditation instead as a path to love, joy, and courage.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Susan and I spoke about her experience of the darkness of depression having a softening effect. We talked about the connection between meditation and an openhearted way of being, and why it’s so important to her to teach meditation in a Buddhist context instead of in a secular context. We also talked about how to work with resistance in meditation practice and what it means to Susan to live each day with bravery. Here’s my conversation with Susan Piver:
Susan, you’re a contributor to a collection of essays that Sounds True has recently published, called Darkness Before Dawn: Redefining the Journey Through Depression. Even though you and I have known each other for, oh, probably a couple of decades actually, before I read your contribution to Darkness Before Dawn, I didn’t know that you were someone who dealt with depression in your life. So, right here at the beginning of our conversation, I wanted to find out what it’s like for you to come out—if you will—in your writing and teaching as someone who has really been challenged by depression. What’s that like for you—this taboo topic?
Susan Piver: Well, I feel happy to talk about it, which may sound strange. But, I don’t feel like I’m talking about it for anyone’s benefit but my own. [Laughs.]
So, I’m just curious about it. Being able to write about it is a chance to really let that curiosity expand. I personally respond best to teachers when I feel like they’re probably not pretending and also who don’t hold not-pretending as a kind of flag that they wave all of the time.
So, anyways, I feel completely OK about it. I don’t feel shy about it. It’s just something that’s there, so I know that that is the case for so many people. It’s just kind of ordinary.
TS: The book Darkness Before Dawn focuses on this question of redefining the journey of depression—not just thinking about it as some condition that needs a medical solution, but understanding it in a broader way and a nuanced way, even as part of the spiritual journey. So, I’m wondering: for you, how do you frame depression in your life? How do you think about it?
SP: Well, for me, fortunately, the kind of depression that I’ve always experienced is short of a medical emergency. So, once it steps over that line, of course that’s a whole different topic. I know that you and I are not talking about that kind of depression.
But, the short-of-medical-emergency depression—when it’s happening, of course it’s terrifying. It’s horrible. It’s deadening.
But at the same time, I can’t help but notice that the darkness of depression has a kind of softening effect. It lowers my resistance to other people’s presence and their feelings. It seems to actually increase my ability to be insightful about other people’s suffering. It makes me cry more, but I also feel—I believe and find—that when any kind of acute period is over, I’m also able to laugh more.
I don’t want to sound trite, but there’s something about depression that brings along with it a capacity to both laugh and cry more—and feel more, and create more, and love more. If you can soften to it, it creates an opening to something very rich and human.
So, I see it as my strange friend who comes and goes—and who is rarely invited. But, when he or she appears, I feel like, “OK. Well, this is my guest now. How can I be hospitable to this presence?” You know what I mean?
TS: Yes. Yes. I’m curious: why do you think that depression is, in general, a taboo topic—something people often don’t want to admit that they suffer from?
SP: I think—especially for us, I’d say, in the United States in particular—it’s taboo because we suffer from what I call “image poisoning.” [This] is the sense that the way things appear is the way they are. There’s a real hesitance—or refusal even, in some instances—to just look at things below the surface. Our culture—this is all obviously just my opinion—is just built on accomplishment, productivity, efficiency, achievement, beauty, youth, accomplishment, money, and things that move very, very fast.
Depression does not move very fast. It is incompatible with productivity and physical perfection and accomplishment. It just is incompatible with those things.
So, I think people feel like if there’s depression in the room, we have to take our eye off of this happy, perky future that we all seem to be aiming towards. This could be an obstacle.
That’s how it seems to me. But, I think in other cultures it’s not that way. It’s particular for us, I think. Does that make sense?
TS: It does. I think you’re pointing to something really important and a real huge bias in our society that has us all lopsided and strange—and running around with smiley faces.
SP: I know men and women equally get depressed. But—it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman—there’s a kind of masculine bent to our view of how an ordinary day should be spent and what the accomplishments of a lifetime should look like. [It’s] that they should start small and build to some kind of crescendo.
Depression makes you go in circles. You disembark from any conveyance that proceeds in a linear fashion and you just start wandering. Just like with any wandering, you may get in trouble, you may discover something that you hadn’t known was there, you may end up somewhere.
But, there’s this quality of journeying in depression that is the focus. In our everyday life, journeying is seen as some sort of thing to be gotten through in order to accomplish a certain end. There is no accomplishing of an end in depression. There’s just a kind of funny journeying. Not funny-haha obviously, but strange.
TS: The title of the essay that you contributed to Darkness Before Dawn is “The Sadness in Bliss.” That’s a curious title. I’m wondering if you can unpack it a little bit.
SP: Yes. Well, I’ll tell you where that came from, but I can’t unpack it because I don’t really understand. But, it is an extraordinary contemplation for me and I hope for anyone who encounters this notion.
This is something I heard. I heard this from a student of Chögyam Trungpa during a public talk. Someone asked him, “What does bliss feel like?” He said, “To you, it would probably feel like pain.”
That was a really arresting moment to me when I heard that. “To you, it would probably feel like pain.” So, all notions of it [meaning] you are untouchable, implacable, “non-attached” —whatever that means. [It’s] that pain doesn’t hurt you, that sorrow doesn’t affect you, that discomfort doesn’t make you uncomfortable. You’re in some sort of super happy state all the time. He’s saying, “It actually would feel like pain to you.”
To me, in my attempt to unpack it, there’s some sort of whole-hearted and whole-bodied journey into the heart of compassion in a relative sense—relative compassion. [It’s] that it’s without hesitation. So, your heart opens so thoroughly to this world [and] to all beings—to the animals that suffer, to the people that suffer, to your own suffering—that you kind of blow through hesitation and resistance to sorrow.
That state could be called “total pain.” But, perhaps it is also bliss. I don’t know. That’s what I got on that.
What do you think? Can I ask you?
TS: Sure. Well, when I heard that statement—”To you, the experience of bliss,” (to an average mortal or whatever you might call it), “would be pain,”—what I thought was that bliss itself is probably so roaring, so intensely alive—vibrating at such an incredible volume of intensity—that it would probably hurt. It would probably be experienced as pain, because you wouldn’t be able to process it or metabolize it or feel it. It’s just so huge.
So, it would actually hurt—kind of like too much love or attention would actually hurt, because you couldn’t take it. You couldn’t process it. Something like that.
So, anyway, that was where I went with it when you said that.
SP: Yes. I’m thinking along the same lines—that there’s some kind of utter commitment. Where I differ from you is not that your opening would be so intense that it would start to hurt. I would change that.
I think of it as: the opening would be so intense that what you call bliss, I call pain. You would be feeling it, but you would think, “Oh—what is this? This must be pain.” But actually, it’s bliss. You’re mistaking it. [This] is sort of one of the things it made me think.
TS: Yes. It seems like, in your work, this—I might call it “the redemption of sadness” or “seeing the value of sorrow and sadness.” [This] is something that is really important to you. I wonder if you can talk more about that—why that’s so important to you.
SP: Yes, thank you for asking. It’s the reason that I was so happy to be invited to contribute to this book.
I guess, growing up, I always heard, “Why are you so serious?” or, “There’s nothing to be sad about. Everything’s fine,” or, “Why don’t you just smile?” It just seemed so stupid to me. It’s such a stupid way to be.
I have spent so much time in my own inner world in a state of sadness of some kind. I just started to think, “This can’t be only a problem. There must be something to mine here. There must be something of value.”
So, I’ve written also a lot about heartbreak—heartbreak from romantic love. When your heart is broken, when you’re in a kind of depth of sadness, you feel everything. There are no walls that you can put up. You just crumble immediately.
So, you feel everything—your own joy and sorrow, and also the joy and sorrow of everyone you meet. You know without doubt that the only thing that matters actually is love when you’re in a state of deep and profound sadness or heartbreak. Only love matters. In our world—you and me—someone who can feel everything and knows that love is the highest value is called a bodhisattva. So, it kind of puts you ass-backwards into this kind of bodhisattva-like way of being.
All the advice of the self-help books about sadness—especially from romantic causes, interestingly—sort of fall along two lines. One is, “You go girl!” Just chill out and be awesome and don’t forget you’re awesome. That person wasn’t good enough for you.
OK. That’s cool. I don’t know that it’s that helpful, but yes—you are awesome. You could have fun. Don’t forget those things and so on.
But, the other kind of books are, “There’s something wrong with you and you caused this to happen. You attracted it by having some kind of unresolved wound. Until you resolve that wound, you are going to attract this over and over again.” I don’t think that’s helpful. I don’t think it’s true, and I don’t think it’s useful at all.
Further, all of the books are about how to get and keep love. None of them are about how to give love. But, when your heart is broken or you’re in this state of profound sadness, the moment you start to give love to someone else by just simply turning your attention to them, taking them in, and letting yourself be touched by their presence—whether you like them or not—that’s what I call love—a sense of empowerment begins to return.
So, instead of trying to fix it, my interpretation of the Buddhist teachings is [to] stay there and stabilize yourself in the state of sadness or heartbreak. Then you’ll really be doing something amazing. You’ll be capable of a lot.
So, rather than fixing it—which I never seem to be able to do, so I guess that’s one reason why so much of my writing and thinking has been about sadness and depression and so on. I never can fix it. And then when I found these teachings that were like, “Actually, you know, don’t fix it. It’s a source of power. It’s not a problem, and here are some practices by which you can stabilize yourself in this openhearted/broken-hearted state,” I thought, “Well, I guess I must be a Buddhist, because I really want that. And I want to share it with others.”
TS: [In] your new book, Susan, Start Here Now: An Openhearted Guide to the Path and Practice of Meditation, you make a connection between the practice of meditation and this openhearted way of being. I wonder if you can explain that connection for our listeners.
SP: This explanation is based on personal experience and observation that when you practice meditation and you place your attention on the object—which is the breath in the case of my book and my practice—and then your attention starts to stray into thoughts—that will always happen—you just sort of let go and return attention to the breath. In this very simple process, you are doing more than just paying attention to the breath in the sense that you are softening toward your experience. Whatever arises—”Oh, I’m awesome. I just had some genius idea,” or, “I’m a horrible animal. I just had the most barbaric thought,”—it doesn’t matter. In all cases, you simply let go and reconnect with the sense of spaciousness, and [then] return your attention to this flow of breath.
So, you sit with your experience from moment to moment, from breath to breath, it’s horrible and it’s terrible and most often it’s just sort of boring. But, you stay. This is also called “softening.” You soften toward yourself, which is an astonishing and radical act.
Then it seems that, because of the way we are constructed as human beings, that softening toward self automatically rouses a kind of softening toward others. When you soften toward others and you know how to deal with the fear of that at least somewhat, you further soften to this world—to your world—and your ability to lean in to your experience in the Pema Chödrön context of that phrase. [Inaudible.]
So, your heart opens through this very simple practice of breath awareness meditation. It happens that your heart opens. When your heart is open, all these other things that we were talking about earlier—laughing, crying, loving, having insight, being creative—those things come too, as well as more sadness and more discomfort. So, it’s called—I would say—”being human,” as opposed to superhuman.
So, that’s why I connect meditation to openheartedness.
TS: Now, I’m curious what you think about—I don’t know if you’ve had this experience—meeting people who are tremendously openhearted and who have never meditated. What might be going on there? I’m curious what your thoughts are.
SP: Yes, I don’t know. Karma? Excellent parenting? Good luck? I don’t know.
I’m jealous of them. I’m happy for them. I’m happy for our world if they exist. I’m delighted and thrilled to speak to people like that.
But, I am not one of those people myself. I have to cultivate it.
So, there are those who come by it naturally and those who don’t. It’s a good practice for those who don’t.
TS: Yes. Then, I guess another related question is: I have met many people who have meditated a lot but don’t seem particularly openhearted. I don’t know if perhaps they’re approaching their meditation in a non-softening kind of way or—I’m curious to know what your thoughts about that might be.
SP: Yes, that’s interesting. I think it’s totally possible to use meditation as a self-help tactic. I’m not saying that these people that you have met are, because I don’t know them. But, I’ve met [those type of] people too.
My guess is that there’s some kind of an agenda connected to the practice. Of course, we all come to meditation because we want something. Nobody is like, “My life is perfect. I think I’ll just learn to meditate.” It’s because there’s some pain—there’s something to be met that is hard to meet. That’s great.
Some people come to it because they want less stress and a better night’s sleep, and some people because they want to become enlightened. All of that is completely cool—but not while you’re practicing.
I think sometimes the over-application of an agenda to meditation kind of drains the magic. There are things that I think help keep it in the realm of the spiritual—or the sacred or whatever you want to call it—that rouse more readily this quality of openheartedness.
There’s always just karma and psychology that one can’t explain in the way people are. I guess the point I want to make is: it could be self-help or it could be a path to awakening. It’s a matter of your intention and motivation, I would say.
TS: I’m curious about that “rousing of openheartedness.” I think that’s actually what I’m really curious about. How in your life—whether it’s on the meditation cushion or in your life in general—[does that happen] for you?
SP: How it happens for me? It’s surprising. While I’m meditating—and I’ve been practicing for over 20 years—it’s really pretty boring, to be totally frank. I think, like everybody, I’m sitting there going, “Oh, breath, breath. I wonder what’s for lunch? Oh, my toe just hurt. I wonder if I have cancer of the toe. What if I hadn’t said that thing 12 years ago? OK. Breathing, breathing . . .” That’s pretty much what it’s like when I’m doing Shamatha Vipassana practice.
Yes, sometimes there’s more spaciousness and sometimes there’s less. But, during practice, I never quite know what the hell I’m doing—except I apply the technique as well as I can.
But, when I look back over my life, I see that everything has changed. There’s some mysterious mechanism at work that magnetizes with—I don’t know what—more love, more insight. But not while I’m meditating.
I don’t know if that’s even the question you were asking, but for me it’s in my personal meditation experience—in my actual life—I see that it just happens. If I ever try to make that happen, it doesn’t work. It happens. It’s a super-trustworthy practice.
Also—and I think I said this in Start Here Now—I was talking to my meditation instructor. This was probably 10 years ago. We were at Shambhala Mountain Center in Colorado, and a recording was going to be made in a room in a building that had heretofore only been used for certain sacred practices. But, it was deemed the best acoustics.
So, permission was granted to use this room that was only used for a certain practice to make a recording for people who don’t do that practice—for whatever reasons. I was involved in helping make the recording happen. I was talking to my meditation instructor, who just happened to be there. I said, “Is it OK? Can we just do this? How do we not screw up the whole sacred thing that’s happening in there—the mystery of that practice? I don’t want to just barge in on something that I can’t even see.”
He said, “Oh, no. It’s no problem. It’s simple, Just make offerings, request blessings, and dedicate the merit.” That’s all he said.
But, to this day—probably a decade later—I still find that those three steps are very, very profound: making offerings, requesting blessings—which doesn’t have to be religious or weird—and dedicating the merit or offering the value of your practice to this world. [This] seems to keep the practice on the openhearted path as opposed to the self-improvement path. Do you know what I mean?
TS: Well, clearly, in all three of those steps, we’re connecting to something bigger than ourselves. There’s this connection—this opening. Yes.
Tell me what you mean by “making offerings.”
SP: Well, if you walk into a meditation shrine room or church, there’s usually some kind of table with things on it. In the case of a Buddhist shrine room, there could be bowls with food in them or rice or scented water or flowers or pictures, incense. All that stuff. Those could be called offerings. They tend to focus on the sense perceptions.
But if you are not a Buddhist or not religious, it’s no problem. You can still make offerings. That’s a sense of rousing in yourself just a sense of who you are right now. Do you feel happy? Do you feel sad? Do you feel full because you just ate? Do you feel grumpy [or] bored?
Whatever it might be, just how do you feel right now? Let there be a sense of offering that. That itself is also a kind of opening. You offer yourself to your practice like you would offer yourself to a conversation with someone you love. Show up, basically, and open yourself to it. That’s a good way of making an offering.
It is a kind of opening and a kind of gesture of generosity at the same time. Practices really blossom under such gestures.
TS: Now, let’s say someone listening is saying, “I’m offering to what, or to whom? What am I offering to?”
SP: [Laughs.] Yes. You offer it to whatever you want. If you’re a Christian, you could offer it to Jesus. If you’re an atheist, you could offer it to nothing. If you’re a Buddhist, you could offer it to your teachers or so on.
But, I think it’s totally fine. You could offer it to the highest wisdom. You could offer it to the spirit of the Earth. You could offer it to something you don’t know, but that you think or hope might be there. You could offer it to God if you believe in God. Whatever you hold the highest. If it’s a mystery, that’s even better.
So, I’m not talking about beliefs—which tend to create obstacles in spiritual practice—but just a sense of connecting with what you love, what you aspire to, what you feel in your heart or your body. There’s an aspect—or the essence, even—of goodness itself, even if you can only touch on it in your mind for a moment. A teeny-tiny connection can then let the offering be to that.
Sometimes, it just feels weird and awkward and you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s sort of a superficial thing. But, sometimes, some days it isn’t. It’s a practice in and of itself.
TS: You know, Susan, as I know you’re aware of, many people today teach meditation outside of any “spiritual context.” It’s become secularized and it’s being taught in corporations—et cetera et cetera et cetera—simply as, “The practice of mindfulness will benefit you in XYZ ways.”
But, you seem to be drawn to teaching meditation in a Buddhist context and practicing in a Buddhist context, [as well as] keeping that context intact and as part of how you’re communicating about meditation. I’m curious to know why that’s important to you.
SP: It’s funny—when I’ve been giving talks lately, I insist on starting [with] that. I’m sure it’s not very pleasant for the audience, but I’m just going, “Buddha Buddha Buddha!” Like, “Let’s just say ‘Buddha!’ It’s not a big deal y’all. Don’t be scared. We don’t have to strip away the ancient wisdom that’s there with the practice in order to not be scared of the practice. Just put on your frigging big-girl and big-boy pants and look at the fact that this ancient wisdom exists. You might not like it. You might not want to partake in it. That’s cool. But, let’s not pretend that this thing just came out of a lab and is some new life-hack.”
It actually kind of makes me pissed off, so—
TS: No, I know! Get into it! I’m enjoying this. Please.
SP: OK! It’s not some kind of life-hack du jour to become a better whatever. If you, after we are talking, go on your computer and just Google “the mindful” and then just type any letter of the alphabet, you will see The Mindful Artist, The Mindful Anteater, The Mindful Archaeologist, The Mindful Bartender, The Mindful Bus Driver. It just—OK, cool. Let’s all recognize there’s a thing called mindfulness and that it’s frigging awesome, and that science has proven it’s awesome. So, we can all relax with the idea that it’s awesome.
However, the reason I really don’t want to divorce the spiritual wisdom from the practice is, A.) because it’s really useful and beautiful and astonishing and every adjective you could possibly think of, and more; [and] B.) because your practice will not be sustainable without it. I know that may sound like—I don’t know. I’m not trying to be fundamentalist here because it doesn’t matter to me if you believe in anything or not.
But—probably you have had the same experience—I’ve talked to many people in corporations—from even enormous ones—that have put a lot of money and effort and time into trying to create mindfulness practice in the people who work there, and who are finding that it is not working. The reason—I believe, [and] this is my opinion, the opinion of myself—is because there is no path quality to it. It’s presented as a self-help technique that will make you a better leader—and it will! It will totally do all the things that people promise that it will.
But, unless there is some sense of deepening, of path, and of community—of dharma and sangha, however you define those things—it will not continue. That’s my observation. I’m not threatening that. It’s just [that] I see that and I believe that the reason for it is because—even though meditation and mindfulness are being presented as some awesome thing that you can just sit down and do, which it is and you can—at some point, it becomes difficult and it becomes boring and it becomes confusing. Without other people there who also are trying to experience this confusion and boredom with you—or who are experiencing it—you just get lost.
So, I feel in our rush to de-Buddha-ize this practice—which is a Buddhist practice—we are throwing out a shit-ton of babies with the bathwater. The value that could come of the practice is married to the study of the practice, and not just the execution of the practice.
So, it never surprises me when someone says, “Oh, we started a mindfulness program, but it’s not working,” because there’s no path quality. Then people think that—I’m just making all this up; who these people are, I don’t know. Nonetheless, people think, “Oh, well, we can’t say the B-word or we can’t make it religious,” and those are the only two choices: Totally science-based and research-driven, and no spiritual woo-woo connected to it, period.
Or we’re all wearing robes and shaving our heads and chanting, “Om mani padme hum.”
There’s totally no need for either of those extremes because that’s one of the great benefits of genuine wisdom—it applies in all situations. Again, I don’t mean to sound fundamentalist about it, but there’s totally a way—and I sort of have fallen into this as being my life’s work. But, there’s a way to just talk about this wisdom that is not dumbing it down, nor is it religifying it. I know that’s not a word, but it’s just saying what it is.
Then, if you resonate with it, good. Now it’s your wisdom, and just try to do something with it. But, it’s not scary.
Have I ranted?
TS: No, I think you’re clearly passionate about letting the spiritual dimension and the path quality—tell me a little bit more [about] when you use that word. “The path quality of meditation”—making sure that that’s intact. What [does] that mean to you?
SP: Well, when you start to practice, you encounter yourself. It can be confusing and disorienting, because you see how many thoughts you have and how many feelings you have, [as well as] how sensitive you are and how vulnerable you are—because “brokenhearted” is just a synonym for “vulnerable.”
So, you’ll invariably encounter your own vulnerability. That causes many knee-jerk reactions. Without some sense of guidance—and “guidance” doesn’t mean a weird guru telling you what to do every second of the day. It’s actually the wisdom of 2,600 years of people who also felt that vulnerability, and this is what they found worked. Here’s some options for you.
OK, now you’re starting to work with your vulnerability. Oh, that’s interesting, isn’t it? That tends to also come with greater insight, greater compassion—if that’s what’s happening for you. Well, cool. If it isn’t, that’s also cool [and] interesting.
OK. Now, what tends to happen for most people when they’ve developed some connection to their own vulnerability—their own inability to find ground—is a kind of greater connection to the mystery of their own life. [This] also seems to arise. That comes in things like auspicious coincidences and strange synergies, and also just ordinary insights—seeing things that have always been there, but you’ve never seen before.
Without some sense of how to relate to those things, it all falls apart. There’s no container for it.
So, by a “path quality,” I mean some kind of container. I am a meditation instructor too, and that doesn’t mean that I am a buddha. It just means that I’ve been meditating for longer. So, I can help someone who’s been meditating for less long.
Without that, it becomes super-ungainly. A person invariably thinks, “Oh, this isn’t working. I’m not good at this. Never mind.” It’s very hard to fight that, “Never mind,” because it <em>is confusing. It’s like trying to get one eyeball to look at the other eyeball.
Again, by “path quality,” I just mean some sense of there is a progression in this practice; we know some people who can describe that progression and who can offer you some guidance when you meet this juncture or that juncture. I really believe that’s the difference between a sustainable and an unsustainable practice.
TS: I know, as a mediation instructor, Susan, that you work a lot with people who hit all different kinds of resistances to the practice of meditation—or things they call resistance. I’m curious to know what some of the pith instructions are—some of the key instructions, if you will—that you’ve found helpful. For example, people who say, “I feel drawn to the practice, but I just don’t seem to be able to do it every day. It just isn’t working for me.”
SP: Yes. Well, I would first question if that’s resistance or not, because yes, sure, nobody—we all have trouble with the routine for whatever reason, just like we all have trouble sticking with going to yoga classes. We don’t really know what’s good for us and is good for us, and feels good. And we think, “Oh, why don’t I do this all the time?”
I think that’s normal. I don’t think that’s resistance. Maybe for some people it is, and maybe there’s some ratio of resistance to just ordinary inability to establish a new habit.
But, I think actually with this one thing—I know this isn’t the only kind of resistance, and I could say something about resistance in a moment—but this notion that an inability to practice regularly is because you have some kind of psychological obstacle—I would question that and find out, “Is that true?” Maybe it is.
But, for my students and my world, more often than not what I see is that’s not the whole truth. It’s actually really hard to practice by yourself every day or most days. Some sense of community—you know, I hate that this is true, because I don’t want to be in any community—actually makes the difference.
By that, what I mean is: just go and sit with other people sometimes. Go to some center near you. Or, if you hate that, then just have an arrangement with a friend where, “Hey, let’s sit together from 7 in the morning to 7:15, Monday through Friday.” Just knowing that this other person is there—you might find your [so-called] resistance disappear.
But then there are other resistances that one encounters—everyone, I would say—as the path progresses. That could look like anything, from just feeling bored all the time—and it is boring. I’ll just reemphasize that, because it is.
Or, it’s like a writer’s block. You feel there’s just some kind of obstacle between you and the practice.
The counsel that I have received and I offer is: make that the object of your practice, in a sense. In other words, once again, lean into that obstacle. If your obstacle is boredom, then just sit and be bored. Feel boredom. Where is it in your body? Not the story of boredom, or not the agitation of, “I have so many other things to do. I shouldn’t do this.” Feel that agitation—really let it sort of blossom in your body. Actually let that be the object of your practice instead of your breath.
Feel what you’re calling resistance, which may or may not be. It probably is and it isn’t at the same time. Work with it. Then, when or if you feel ready in any particular practice session, let go of that stuck feeling as the object of your practice and then return attention to the breath as the object of practice. If you need to sort of dance between those two points, then fine.
But, the idea here is: don’t “work” on it. Feel it. Be with it.
Also, in my world, this is called “relaxing.” I don’t mean relaxing like watching Real Housewives—which I also like to do—but it’s [that] being with is the same thing as relaxing.
My teacher, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, said once in a talk that the more he practices, the more he feels that the entire spiritual path can be expressed in one word—and of course we were all on the edge of our seats—and that word was “relax.” It is a very profound and pithy instruction.
So, relax with the resistance and also get some advice. It’s really good to have a meditation instructor. You don’t have to have any beliefs. It’s really good to know someone who knows a little bit more about the practice than you—is what I mean by that.
Does that answer your question?
TS: It does! Thank you very much.
I want to circle back with something that you said that really got my attention—which is you offered this phrase, “image poisoning.” [That’s] a phrase I’ve never heard before, but it immediately made sense to me as something we suffer from in our culture—projecting images of ourselves, wanting people to see us in a certain kind of way. I’m curious to know more in your own life, as someone who’s worked years ago in marketing and packaging and presenting—whether it’s products or creating a marketing plan for a website; all of that—how you understand projecting images in a way that’s not poisonous but is positive and has integrity. How do you understand that?
SP: Yes. I think I might have made up “image poisoning” or read it somewhere. But, I think I made it up.
But, again, I got this instruction from my teacher on one of the very first products I ever created—which is probably 15 years ago now, maybe even longer. It was a little book that presented meditations by different teachers—some writings on those practices. I asked him, “Can I do this?” Not, “Will you allow me?” but, “Is it acceptable?”
This was a long time ago, and now there’s billions of books and CDs about meditation—or audio recordings. But, in my understanding, meditation instruction is a transmission rather than an explanation. A transmission’s quality comes from the teacher, who was taught by someone who was taught by someone who was taught by someone. In other words, who is in a lineage. That’s powerful and important, and if it’s just an audio recording, will that transmission quality be preserved?
He then gave me my marketing strategy for the rest of my life, basically—so far. [This] is: when you’re offering spiritual teachings or anything to do with health [and] well-being—I’m adding that—anything that you would like to be helpful to others—which, in our cases, those are our jobs; that’s our wheelhouse—the first step is to create confidence in the mind of the student or the reader or the audience. [This] made total sense, because if they’re not confident in you, then they’re not going to listen to you. They’ll be checking you, whether they’re reading you or hearing you or washing you with soap—or whatever the product is. It doesn’t matter. But, if a person doesn’t have confidence in the person that’s purveying it, then the relationship will not arise.
So, that was the first step. There’s two more. But, the first, oh, you want them to be confident. So, you want what you’re offering to look good—not because you want to be beautiful, but because beauty inspires confidence. And I don’t mean superficial beauty or whatever kind of beauty is appropriate for whatever you’re creating. You want it to be elegant, whether that it’s served down-home elegant or super-sophisticated elegant.
You want it to be spelled right. You want the color combinations to be harmonious or disharmonious depending on what the product is.
In other words, the way it looks is important because it creates confidence. That confidence creates an opening. So, that automatically took packaging and marketing—for me—out of the realm of trends and trendiness.
So, the first step is to create confidence. And how do you create confidence? By offering something real. What is real is something that you yourself know—not that someone told you, not that you read, but you yourself know.
So, that has been a beautiful formula for me as a teacher and also as someone who marketed things and tried to present things, because we are all presenting something. You can do it from a stupid, narcissistic, manipulative way. Or, you could do it—and it might even look exactly the same—from a soulful, caring, refined way. It’s possible. It’s really possible to market and present in a way that’s not poisonous. I find, for me, this formula—establish confidence, offer something real—which is what you happen to know.
So, if it’s offering or trying to present a product—even if it’s soap or something—what do I know? What do I really know? I’m not going to lie. I’m just not going to lie.
So, I may have to look hard to find that thing that I know is valuable. But, I’m not going to stop until I do. If I can’t find it, then it’s just not for me. It’s not my product. I can’t work with it.
So, I find it to be a very spacious but also very clear direction. Does that resonate with you?
TS: Yes, I like it a lot. Thank you. Thank you.
SP: You’re welcome!
TS: I also want to circle back—we started our conversation talking about redefining depression and how to work with depression. In reading some of your writings about that topic, you offer a line from Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche—we’ve referred to him already in this conversation, a meditation master from Tibet. It’s a sentence that I have always found hard to understand, [and] that students of students of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche use a lot. [It’s] this sentence: “Just cheer up.” Just cheer up. Why don’t you just cheer up?
I thought, “Susan’s the person who can explain this to me and help me understand it.”
SP: [Laughs.] Yes. “Just cheer up” really pissed me off when I heard it. I was like, “What the—what are you talking about? Just cheer up. You don’t understand this complicated situation that I’m feeling and the reasons for it. Blah blah blah.” I’m definitely not going to just cheer up. It sounded so superficial and stupid to me.
However, my experience with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche—through his writings and through his students, because I never met him personally—was anything but superficial and stupid. So, I’m like, “Well, this cheer-up thing deserves a closer look.”
I think the short explanation that I’ve arrived at is, “Cheer up,” is the same thing as, “Cut.” Cut. Whatever you’re feeling, cut. It doesn’t mean “slice” or “hack.” It means to kind of let go.
Can you do that? No matter how profound your grief is or how deep your rage or how numb your depression, can you cut, even just for one moment? Can you just not have it? And really, OK, it comes right back. But could you try it again?
And I’m asking this—that you ask yourself out of curiosity, not as a method for changing things. But, can I? And when you can—because you can’t always—but in those instances when you can, a kind of lightening up happens. You just kind of lighten up, because you literally have dropped some heavy burden or some hot coal. So, there’s a sense of, “Oh, cool,” and relief.
I think that’s my interpretation. If there’s one thing I know about Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, it’s that I probably will not ever know really who that guy was. But, this is my interpretation of what he meant—just cut. Experience the cool air you would experience if you walked out of a hot, stuffy room into some beautiful day for a moment. That’s called “cheering up.”
TS: Does that work for you when you’re feeling depressed? Can you do that?
SP: For a second. Yes. I’m not saying I can do it forever, but it’s kind of like a muscle. I can often get confused that it means “ignore” or “disavow.” But, I sort of think of it as a way of taking care of myself. “This is so much. I can’t really carry it. I don’t want to carry it for one more second. Well, OK. Let me just give myself a breath.”
I’m not talking about reestablishing my whole sense of being in a different realm. I’m just saying that while I’m in this realm—whatever it is—can I let go, and what does that feel like? Then, what’s happening now in the next moment, I don’t know.
TS: You also offered an instruction in one of your writings about, “Just cheer up,” which I really liked a lot. [This] was, “Intensify, intensify, intensify.” So, whatever you’re feeling—even before you let it go—intensify, intensify, intensify. And then at the height of this intensification of the feeling state, then drop [and] let it go. I thought that was very good instruction.
SP: Good. Thanks. It’s the same if you ever go to some sort of exercise class. Do people still say “exercise?” Does it have some other, cooler word for it? They go to work out.
Sometimes if a teacher or a therapist—in physical therapy, we’ll [even] say—”Raise your shoulders. Raise them as high as you can. Just hold them, hold them, hold them. And then drop. Let your shoulders drop.”
So, that’s the same exact sequence that you can do with your own feeling state. When you raise your shoulders, you actually increase the tension in your shoulders. Then, there’s a sense that when you let go, “Oh. Fresh blood and oxygen and whatever else happens in a person’s body,” is refreshed.
So, you could try that technique with your inner state. Don’t take my word for it, of course. Just try it and see what it feels like.
TS: Susan, I want to end our conversation talking about a topic that you’ve also written quite a lot about and something I’m really interested in, which is the topic of bravery; being brave in our lives, and what that means to you on an everyday basis—being brave. What does that mean?
SP: It’s a kind of ultimate openheartedness. It’s a kind of ultimate vulnerability. Vulnerability obviously is thought of as a state of weakness, but it’s a state of openness. To me, a warrior—a brave person—is not someone who has it all figured out and knows what they believe and has their techniques for applying those beliefs in every area of life, but someone who steps out the door in the morning—metaphorically—without knowing what’s going to happen or who they are or how things will go. But, [they] are being willing to meet the experience of their own lives literally from moment to moment.
That, to me, is a warrior. That is courage. It doesn’t look like confidence necessarily, in a superficial way. It doesn’t look like arrogance, certainly, or someone who has it all figured out. It looks like someone who is curious and sharp and funny and sad. I like being around people like that.
TS: Tell me—“curious, sharp, funny, and sad.” The “sharp” part I found interesting. What’s the “sharp” part that comes with bravery?
SP: When you sort of let your belief system fade—or your agenda, even. Of course, we all have to have beliefs and agendas, and we’ve got to get things done. Everybody has to be very practical and so on.
But on another level, at the same time, when you can let all of that go, what you’re left with is a capacity to actually be present to what you’re experiencing and what you’re feeling and what is happening around you rather than what you think about those things. Because you are present, you can be sharp, because you know where you are and you know what’s happening. You’re not lost in some other zone.
So, therefore, you have a sense of immediate comprehension. I’m not saying this is me, particularly. But, what I notice is you have this presence of mind, presence of heart, and courage—which is a kind of sharpness [and] a willingness to step into something that you’re not sure of—that only comes from allowing itself to be vulnerable and open.
Otherwise, it’s like a fool’s courage. Does that make sense?
TS: Very much so. I’ve been talking with Susan Piver. Thank you so much, Susan, for the conversation and thank you for being a contributor to Sounds True’s collection of essays, Darkness Before Dawn: Redefining the Journey Through Depression.
Susan has also written a new book called Start Here Now: An Open-Hearted Guide to the Path and Practice of Meditation.
SP: It’s so great to talk to you, Tami. Thank you so much and thank you very much for inviting me to contribute to that compilation. It was an honor.
TS: SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
