How To Stay Politically Engaged Without Losing Your Mind | Sharon Salzberg
Sharon Salzberg, co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society and author of "Real Change," discusses integrating political and social engagement into meditation practice. She explores how mindfulness can help cultivate compassion, manage anger, overcome feelings of powerlessness, and moderate social media use to stay engaged without losing one's mind.
Deep Dive Analysis
18 Topic Outline
Politics and Meditation: Engagement Without Losing Your Mind
The Buddha's Perspective on Politics and Innate Dignity
Intention Versus Impact in Action and Social Revolution
Buddha's Teaching on Causes and Conditions for Peace
Meditation Enhances Effectiveness and Engagement in the World
Improving Interpersonal Communication in Activism and Difficult Conversations
Cultivating Agency and Patience When Facing Despair
Broadening the Definition of Social Action Beyond Protesting
Dalai Lama's View on Art and Artist Transformation
Deconditioning Individualism and Recognizing Interconnection
Meditative Techniques for Working with Selfishness and Ego
Understanding and Transforming Anger in Social Engagement
Compassion as a Stronger Force Than Anger
Strategies for Moderating News and Social Media Consumption
Intersectionality and Interconnection: Both/And Perspective
Achieving Exquisite Balance in Sustained Campaigns for Change
The Importance of Remembering Joy for Resilience
Inner Work Propels More Skillful Outer Action
8 Key Concepts
Innate Dignity
This Buddhist teaching emphasizes that every individual possesses inherent worth and a rightful voice, regardless of their awareness or actions. It translates into the importance of participation, such as voting, as a reflection of this universal dignity.
Intention vs. Impact
While intention refers to the motivation behind an action, impact is its actual consequence. The Buddha's teachings highlight intention as a crucial factor in understanding the energy and karma of an action, though modern critiques also emphasize the importance of impact.
Causes and Conditions
This principle involves looking deeply at the underlying factors and circumstances that lead to a particular situation or problem. By understanding these root causes, one can take more appropriate and effective actions rather than merely reacting to symptoms.
Agency
Agency is the feeling of being able to move forward and take action, even if the action seems small or the outcome uncertain. It involves stepping off the sidelines and into the center of possibility, fostering a willingness to try and make a difference.
Doomscrolling
This term describes the act of continuously consuming negative news or social media content, often leading to feelings of overwhelm, anxiety, and being fixated on how bad one feels rather than the actual situation of others.
Intersectionality
Originally from the legal world, this concept refers to how various aspects of a person's identity (e.g., gender, race, disability, caste) can combine to create unique experiences of status, advantage, or disadvantage in society.
Interconnection
This is the understanding that all lives are fundamentally linked, and individual actions have far-reaching effects on others and the world. It challenges the illusion of separateness and highlights our mutual dependence.
Exquisite Balance
This refers to the ability to combine profound compassion and wisdom in sustained engagement. It means putting full effort into helping while accepting that ultimate control over outcomes is not in one's hands, and focusing on one's inner transformation.
9 Questions Answered
Meditation can make you more effective and engaged in the world by fostering a deeper sense of connection, cultivating agency, and helping you discern the truth of situations, enabling you to contribute more skillfully to positive change.
Meditation helps cultivate compassion and equanimity, allowing you to accept what you cannot control and align your actions with your best intentions. This leads to more specific, skillful communication focused on resolution rather than proving oneself right.
Combine compassion with equanimity, realizing that nothing happens without a first step. Focus on your intention and take small actions, even if they seem meager, rather than being rigidly attached to immediate results or expectations.
By becoming quieter and paying more attention, you can observe the reality of interconnection – how your actions affect others – and gradually decondition the belief that it's 'every person for themselves'.
Mindfulness allows you to observe these patterns without condemnation, asking 'What is this feeling?' Loving kindness for oneself also helps create a compassionate space to forgive imperfections and understand the causes and conditions behind these habits.
It's important to feel anger without fighting or resisting it, but also without getting lost or overtaken by it. While anger can provide energy and honesty, recognize that chronic anger is devastating and that forces like compassion are ultimately stronger for sustained engagement.
Recognize when you are 'doomscrolling' and consciously stop. Create a structure to replace that time with practices like loving kindness, which helps you stay engaged without becoming overwrought or fixated on your own emotional distress.
Joy provides crucial inner wherewithal, energy, and perspective, replenishing you so that you can look at painful things without crumbling, feeling overwhelmed, or becoming ineffectual. It helps sustain resilience through challenging times.
The ability to be kind to your own pain is the root of empathy, allowing you to resonate with others' suffering. It also provides information (e.g., helplessness beneath anger), which can channel emotions into wholesome action and foster a more skillful, less reactive approach to the world.
56 Actionable Insights
1. Cultivate Compassion for All
It is wise to cultivate compassion even for people you find deeply objectionable, as this helps in engagement and maintaining mental well-being.
2. Practice Self-Loving Kindness
Cultivate loving kindness for yourself, as it forms the foundation for self-forgiveness, the ability to begin again, and understanding the causes and conditions of your actions.
3. Recognize Interconnectedness
Get quieter and pay more attention to see the reality of how interconnected our lives are, and how individual actions have consequences for others.
4. Examine Your Intentions
Recognize that the intention or motivation behind your actions is a significant part of their energy, so understand where you are coming from and what is guiding you.
5. Align Actions with Values
Employ mindfulness to understand your motivations, identify your core values (‘North Star’), and strengthen them through your interactions.
6. Include All Feelings in Practice
Do not shut down or shut out feelings like anger, frustration, or powerlessness; instead, engage with them and include them in your meditation practice, even political feelings.
7. Mindfully Investigate Feelings
Use mindfulness to switch your meditation object to a difficult thought pattern or attitude, observing it with tenderness and asking ‘What is this?’ without condemnation or prolongation.
8. Sit with Your Own Pain
To truly resonate with someone else’s situation and feel empathy, cultivate the ability to be present with your own pain and recollections of similar experiences.
9. Compassion Stronger Than Anger
Understand that compassion is a stronger force than anger for sustained, intense, and effective work in the world.
10. Fight with Compassion, Not Hate
Engage in struggles with compassion as your motivation, which means you can fight for what’s right without resorting to hatred.
11. Prioritize Personal Transformation
Consider that the greatness of your actions, including social engagement, can be measured by your own transformation in the act of doing them.
12. Effort with Acceptance
Cultivate an ’exquisite balance’ by putting tremendous effort into helping, while simultaneously accepting that you cannot control the outcomes.
13. Take the First Step
Realize that nothing happens without taking that initial step, so move forward and take a shot, even when the path ahead seems unclear.
14. Do the Good at Hand
Engage in the good that is directly in front of you, no matter how small or meager it may seem, as this is the only way for change to occur.
15. Measure Success by Love
Reframe your measure of success by focusing on bringing sincere and powerful love into every situation, rather than solely on immediate, tangible outcomes.
16. Act Based on Values
Move beyond mere reaction and choose to act based on your deeply held values and what you deem important.
17. Inner Work for Skillful Action
Engage in inner work and cultivate the ability to be with uncomfortable feelings, as this process propels you into more skillful and effective external action.
18. Embrace Possibility, Take Chances
Practice ‘faith’ by moving off the sidelines and into the center of possibility, taking a chance and showing up for what needs to be done.
19. Analyze Causes and Conditions
Instead of just punishing or reacting to problems, look deeply at their underlying causes and conditions to find more appropriate and effective solutions.
20. Dispassionate Truth Discernment
Employ a steady, dispassionate way of looking to discern the truth of things and see more clearly what is actually happening.
21. Cultivate Inner Wherewithal
Develop inner resources and resilience to sustain your engagement with suffering without crumbling, feeling overwhelmed, shattered, or ineffectual.
22. Actively Embrace Joy
Consciously take in and admit joy, allowing yourself to feel it, as this restorative practice replenishes your energy and enables you to face painful things without being lost in them.
23. Practice Gratitude, Enjoy Good
Identify what you are grateful for and what is good in your life, then allow yourself to truly enjoy these sources of joy.
24. Hold Joy and Suffering
Cultivate the ability to hold both joy and suffering simultaneously, recognizing that life can be a grind but also contains moments of happiness.
25. Avoid Despair and Overwhelm
Do not allow yourself to hate what you’re going through, despair, or feel overcome by difficulties, as these states serve nobody.
26. Acknowledge Anger with Dignity
Allow yourself to feel anger without fighting, resenting, or resisting it, recognizing that there is dignity and integrity in acknowledging your feelings.
27. Avoid Anger Overwhelm
Be mindful not to get lost in, overwhelmed by, or overtaken by anger, as allowing it to determine all your actions can be devastating to yourself.
28. Honor Truth-Telling Voices
Collectively honor the voice, even if it comes from anger, that insists on looking at unpleasant truths or issues that have been studiously avoided.
29. Channel Helplessness to Action
When you encounter feelings of helplessness, use it as a reminder to do one small, wholesome thing, like helping a neighbor, to channel that energy into action.
30. Meditate for Greater Engagement
Utilize meditation to enhance self-awareness, compassion, and a sense of connection, which can make you more effective and engaged in the world.
31. Foster Interconnection
Establish a profound sense of connection to others, as this naturally moves you to look for causes and conditions, look more deeply, and try to ease pain in the world.
32. Consciously Apply Meditative Wisdom
Consciously apply the wisdom gained from meditation to address feelings of a lack of agency, such as ‘I could never do enough’ or ‘I could never be enough.’
33. Draw Strength from Others
Recognize that you can draw significant strength from your relationships with fellow travelers or colleagues, especially in challenging endeavors.
34. Practice Compassion and Equanimity
Apply compassion and equanimity in your relationships, especially when people are annoying or frustrating, by not trying to control what you cannot.
35. Clarify Interaction Goals
Before engaging in an encounter or relationship, mindfully examine your true motivations and goals, such as seeking resolution versus proving yourself right.
36. Balance Content and Relationship Goals
During conversations, be aware of two tracks: your content goals (what you want to say) and your relationship goals (how you want to maintain the connection).
37. Challenge Conditioned Patterns
Understand that even strongly conditioned patterns, like individualism or selfishness, do not have to be permanent and can be changed.
38. Recognize Identity Complexity
Understand that everyone embodies a bundle of different identities that can elicit various reactions from others, contributing to their unique experiences.
39. Integrate Identity & Universal Vision
Balance the recognition of individual identities and their unique struggles with a vision of a beloved community where diversity is simply accepted without distinction.
40. Challenge Assumed Centrality
Actively work to loosen the grip of assumed centrality, recognizing that there isn’t one normative type of family or societal structure.
41. Normalize Diverse Realities
Cultivate a mindset that normalizes diverse family structures, hospital staffs, and other societal compositions, rather than viewing them as exceptions needing special mention.
42. Skillful Intention Expression
Cultivate skills to effectively and appropriately express your intentions, beyond just having good motives.
43. Sustain Engagement Strategies
Identify and actively pursue strategies and ways of being that help you sustain engagement in a confusing, misleading, and traumatizing world.
44. Aim for Daily Small Wins
In long-term campaigns for change, set a goal to achieve small ‘wins’ every day, such as writing an editorial or engaging new people, to maintain momentum.
45. Don’t Shrink Back, Vote
Do not shrink back from engagement, no matter how scared you may be; at the very least, exercise your right to vote.
46. Vote to Affirm Dignity
Participate in voting, as it reflects the innate dignity and rightful voice of every individual.
47. Seek Respite from Difficult Content
Acknowledge and honor your need for respite and relief from constantly witnessing difficult or overwhelming current events.
48. Limit Doom Scrolling
Actively work to limit your Twitter doom scrolling to avoid being overwhelmed by negative information.
49. Moderate Social Media Use
Be much more moderate in your social media consumption to avoid being overwhelmed by negative influences.
50. Recognize and Stop Doom Scrolling
When you realize you are doom scrolling, consciously decide that it’s enough and actively stop, letting go of the need to consume more information on the same issue.
51. Structure Time for Practice
Create a structure by committing to replace time spent consuming news or social media with practices like loving kindness, especially when you already know the information.
52. Regular Loving Kindness Practice
Engage in a significant amount of loving kindness practice, as it helps you stay engaged with difficult realities without becoming overwrought or flailing.
53. Shift Focus from Overwhelm
When overcome by painful emotions, recognize that your own feelings are taking center stage and shift your focus back to the situation of others, which is the actual point of engagement.
54. Release Rigid Expectations
Do not hold rigidly to expectations for immediate results, as the dynamic of change is constantly shifting and outcomes are not always immediate.
55. Engage with Cruelty Mindfully
When confronted with cruelty, it’s important not to turn away, but to find ways to stay engaged without being overwhelmed.
56. Connect to Something Bigger
To avoid turning away from difficult realities and stay engaged, connect to something bigger than yourself, such as through loving kindness practice.
5 Key Quotes
Compassion doesn't mean we don't fight. It means we don't hate.
Sharon Salzberg
In Tibet, we believe that a work of art is great according to the transformation of the artist in the act of creating it.
Dalai Lama (as recounted by Sharon Salzberg)
You may see marginal differences between the candidates, but there are plenty of people who live in those margins.
Sharon Salzberg
The odd thing about being overcome by one of those painful emotions is that your own emotion is then taking center stage. That's the most dramatic, intense thing in the room.
Sharon Salzberg
If you put any good therapist up against the wall, they'd be forced to say that it's love, that it's the love in the room, that's the single most healing element.
Psychiatrist (as recounted by Sharon Salzberg)
2 Protocols
Moderating News and Social Media Consumption
Sharon Salzberg- Recognize when you are 'doomscrolling' (continuously consuming negative content).
- Consciously stop the activity.
- Create a structure to replace that time, such as engaging in loving kindness practice instead of consuming more news.
- Remember what you truly care about to maintain engagement without becoming overwrought.
Transforming Anger into Wholesome Action
Sharon Salzberg- Sit with the feeling of anger long enough to observe its underlying components, such as sadness, fear, or a sense of helplessness.
- Recognize the feeling of helplessness when it arises.
- Do one small, wholesome thing, such as talking to an elderly neighbor or helping someone in some way, to channel the anger into constructive action.