Replay: Real Love

20.01.04 Real Love Hour.mp3

SM Sarah McConnell

AS Ausio Sample

SS Sharon Salzberg

JB Jonathan Bartels

OH Oliver Hill, Jr.

00:00:00

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SM In her new book called Real Love, Sharon Salzberg, one of the world's leading authorities on love, shows us it's not just an emotion we feel when we're in a romantic relationship. It's an ability we can nurture and cultivate. When that idea about love came to her, it was a real breakthrough.

SS I had thought of love as kind of on the outside of me. It was like a package or a commodity in the hands of someone else. And if they were to give it to me, I'd have love in my life.

SM I'm Sarah McConnell and today on With Good Reason. I talk with Sharon about Real Love and how she used meditation to help her get there. Later in the show, another kind of mindfulness where nurses and doctors and others take a moment after a patient dies.

AS And I didn't realize it was going to help us, our patients, even though they're dead, but their family. I didn't know was going to help the social worker in the room, the medical secretary in the hallway, the security officer that was standing by the door.

SM But first, Sharon Salzberg is the co-founder in 1974 of the Insight Meditation Society in Barr, Massachusetts.

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She's also a New York Times bestselling author of many books on love and meditation, including, among others, Loving Kindness, Real Happiness, Real Happiness at Work, and her 2003 memoir entitled Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience, which draws on her troubled childhood. I talked with Sharon in the With Good Reason studio in Charlottesville as she was attending the Virginia Festival of the book. Sharon, your new book, Real Love, is filled with ways we can find and keep finding love for ourselves. What sort of love are you talking about? How does this love differ, perhaps from other conceptions of love we come across?

SS Well, actually, the book almost entirely arose from one line in a movie. The movie was ëDan in Real Lifeí, it was maybe 11 years ago, something like that. And there's one person in the movie who says ìlove is not a feeling, it's an abilityî. Love is not a feeling. It's an ability. And I actually I quoted it. I got into some trouble with one of my editors who said, of course, love is a feeling. It's the feeling we yearn for. We you know, we construct so much meaning around. And so, of course, love is a feeling in the conventional sense. But I became really entranced with the notion of love as an ability. It really represented a lot of what I had experienced around meditation practice. I have gone to Burma in 1985. I did an intensive three-month period of meditation and it was the kind of meditation that really is dedicated to the deepening of qualities like love and compassion. And in the course of that retreat, I realized that there'd been some shifts inside of me and that before then I had thought of love is kind of on the outside of me. And it was like a package or a commodity in the hands of someone else. And if they were to give it to me, I'd have love in my life. And if they were not to give it to me or take it away from me, I'd have nothing. And in contrast to that, when I began to sense love as an ability or a capacity, it meant it was mine. It was within me. And before then, it was almost like this image of the U.P.S. person standing on my porch, looking down at the address on the package and say, ìI don't think soî. And walking away, I go, wait a minute. Then I have nothing. And in contrast to that is realizing it's within me. Other people may enliven it or threaten it, but the ability to love is mine. And that was that was hugely empowering.

SM Are some people born with more ability than others?

SS I don't think some people are born with more ability. I think some people's life circumstances such that it's you know, it's nurtured, they learn to trust that they have very different sense of what love is than - I remember being at a conference and there was just something about some percentage of the speakers. And I kept thinking, what, you know, what's different about them? Then I realized they all had, like, supremely happy childhoods. And if I thought oh that's different. I would almost center it around a particular quality, which is known sometimes as sympathetic joy, which is the ability to have happiness and the happiness of others, rather than feeling so jealous or envious or ripped off, you know, that somebody is doing well and you feel like, oh, they've now taken up all the happiness in the world and there's not going to be any left for me. And some people have that quality just naturally. It's like something good happens for you, and they're so happy for you. And it feels so beautiful. Other times, other people, they may smile, but you really get the sense they'd be just fine if it all went away for you. And it feels so terrible. I think about those people who have - that seem to the quality naturally. And that kind of generosity, the spirit - that comes from somewhere. For most of us, it doesn't come naturally, but it's something that we can evolve, and we can grow. We do actually, by challenging certain assumptions, like is happiness really a limited commodity in this world? Few have more. Does that mean there's less for me and, you know, kind of ways we hold it. We can really challenge those.

SM What sort of experience did you have growing up?

SS I had a very disrupted experience growing up. By the time I left for college at the age of 16, I had lived in five different family configurations and each one of them had ended by some kind of death or loss or trauma. You know, I live with my parents ëtill I was four. Then they broke up. Then I lived with my mother. So I was nine and she died. And then I lived with my father - you know, so I sort of went on from there, so I left home to go to college. And two years later, I left for India.

SM Did you go to college because you were advanced academically?

SS Yes.

SM Did you feel a great deal of support of love growing up?

SS No. I mean, I think that there was, in all fairness, there was love available, but I was too distraught and confused and overwhelmed to just sort of take it in.

SM Isn't it amazing how none of us really can understand when we're children, what our parents are going through? We just experience it. And we might have some layers of insight, but for the most part, we don't get it or appreciate why we're not getting all we need. But they're really going through junk.

SS Yeah, it's the life, you know. I mean, that's what I was writing Faith and as I was writing about my mother's death when I was nine. It's like, oh, suddenly it struck me like she died at the age of 36 or 37. Like, this is really her story.

SM Were you feeling needy? Were you feeling, where am I going to get someone to see me and fill me up?

SS I - I wouldn't say I was that conscious, you know, that that I had that kind of clarity. I just knew that there was something out there that would be better. That could be better. You know, it didn't look like Ozzie and Harriet, on the TV. You know, it didn't look like the family you learned about in school. And certainly, I was not the only one who had things that could never be discussed. And we all suffered. I think the consequences of that. So it was tremendous for me, actually, when I went to India and began meditating because it was like a move toward integration. Realizing, oh, all these things are part of life. It's not just me. You know, I don't have to feel so weird and isolated and different and apart because I'm unhappy, or because it's ñ these really sad things happen. It's just a part of life. And it's kind of like we're all in this together. I didnít feel so marginalized anymore.

SM How, back then, did you get from entering college at 16 to India?

SS Well, when I was a sophomore, I took an Asian philosophy course and it completely changed my life. And I was in the context of that course that I heard about meditation in a sense that I heard there were some very real tools that people used to be happier. So I created a project, so I said I want to go to India and study meditation. And this was 1970. And they said, okay. So off I went.

SM What was it about Asian philosophy that immediately arrested your attention?

SS Well, there - it was a two parter. One was within the Buddhist tradition. There was a real clear emphasis on the fact that suffering is a natural part of life. So that translated to me right away. It's not just you. And then on top of that, there was the realization that while you can't like, even life out, you know, so that it stops having ups and downs, and triumphs and tragedies. We can relate to all those things very differently. And have a sense of peace and clarity and love and compassion, no matter what's going on. And that is not in the hands of someone else, that really is in one's own hands. Like, how am I relating to this experience and how am I related to that experience? And that's where the idea of meditation came in. And it's very clear that meditation, even as described way back then, you know, is not about adopting a belief system. It wasn't about believing a philosophy or dogma. It wasn't about calling oneself something. You know, I'm a Buddhist or a Hindu or rejecting anything else. It was - it was really about training one's mind and it seemed like it could be done if I could only find the thing, you know, and find the instructions. So, I set out looking.

SM How does meditation get us to love?

SS Again, in several different ways. The beginning is a kind of self-compassion because if we're doing the meditation properly, we're not doing it as a way of judging ourselves and, you know, being down on ourselves and blaming ourselves. And that's kind of where it begins. And then there's a quality of love or loving kindness that comes to meditation just from seeing more clearly. First of all, with others, you know, if you're in a conversation with somebody and you're really not listening and you're really not present and youíre thinking about the email you need to write, or whatever it is and you realize that and you kind of gather your attention and you really arrive. That's exactly the same thing we're doing in meditation, right? We're gathering our attention and we're really arriving. And then we can listen. You know, the - the way we pay attention will determine the quality of connection, which is a kind of love, just that sheer connection. Realizing, oh, our lives have something to do with one another. And we see that increasingly as we practice meditation, these kinds of connections, that everybody really does want to be happy. Everyone has some element of vulnerability to loss and to change and the kind of rigid sense of self and other and us and them starts to dissolve some. And we realize, oh, we are kind of in this together, look at that. There's a whole stream of methodologies that are about strengthening love and compassion in meditation, not in a phony way, which is what everyone fears, like I going to force myself to pretend, you know, that I like you. But it's more based on this sense of belonging and everybody belonging in a way, even if we don't like somebody, we wish them well.

SM How do we trust the love that we give to ourselves as we start to practice feeling entitled to that love, and not falling back into despair like you are saying; it's going to go away, it isn't real, I don't really deserve it?

SS Well, part of that is almost literally learning how to deal differently with our thoughts. For example, if you're the kind of person who looks back at your day at the end of your day, almost to kind of evaluate yourself and let's say you're the kind of person who pretty well only remembers the things you did wrong and the mistakes you made and what you could have said better. Let's just say it's almost a process of asking yourself, has anything else happened today? Like anything good? And it's not that you're trying to paper over the problems or pretend they don't exist. It's not all that happened. You know, it's just habit. So let's spend a little time on what will have to be grateful for. What is the good within me? Where did I try today? That's a kind of good thing.

SM You have come across so many people who are in pain, who do need love, they need self-love, they crave affection and to be seen. What have you learned through seeing that much pain and that much striving?

SS I think people are incredible. I think, you know, the - the degree of survival and tact is pretty high actually, given how much people go through.

SM Do you get jaundice to it?

SS No, but I get exhausted, of course, you know it - and that leads to its own kind of cynicism, I guess. You know, so I think anybody that's some kind of helping, serving, caregiving profession, you know, that - that interests me quite a lot, because a lot of the people I work with have a tremendous amount of empathy. But they're burning out for some other reason, you know, so let's look at that. And we do look at that. You know, it's really hard and really important to combine, say, compassion with wisdom. Like, I will do everything I can to try to help you, and it's not my universe to control. I can't make your decisions for you. Would that I could, youíd be a lot better off. But life just isn't like that. And so it's not the same at all as apathy or giving in, but it's some kind of balance. Like, I will do everything. But if I start calculating, you know, the wins and losses and how quickly are you healing and, you know, I'm lost because we're just never going to be in control, of someone else's evolution in that way.

SM If you're not somebody who meditates, what advice might you have that you think you know is still very useful way of seeing ourselves?

SS Yeah, well take a walk, you know. It doesn't have to be like a formal pretzel-like pose, you know, where we are meditating. But you know one of the underlying principles: set some time aside for yourself. It's not selfish. It's not self-centered. It's like survival. You don't have to be sitting in meditation for that. Notice the difference when you get a good night's sleep and when you don't and how you react to the same little stupid thing. Look at your mind and get in the habit of letting go of certain thoughts. Like, if you're about to say something to somebody and then you think I'm so stupid, they don't want to hear from me. That kind of thought is well worth letting go of. You know, let's just go ahead and say it. So you make these little forays into experiments in your life.

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SM Well, Sharon Salzberg, thank you so much for sharing your insights and With Good Reason.

SS Thank you. Thank you for having me.

00:16:05

SM Sharon Salzberg newest book is Real Love. This next story is also about love and about the power of just taking a moment. In this case, it's a particular moment that's been dubbed The Pause.

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SM It's to relieve that heart-sick feeling that doctors and nurses and orderlies get after a patient dies, or maybe even the no-feeling they experience as the gurney is rushed out of the room and things are quickly cleaned and tidied up for the next person. The Pause brings them together for a few minutes at the bedside, to think about who that person was, whose mom or son or fiancÈ, and how special they are. It began with Jonathan Bartels, the palliative care liaison at the University of Virginia Medical Center. I talked with Jonathan about how it all got started. Jonathan, you facilitate resiliency retreats. What's resiliency, what do you need to promote resiliency for medical people?

JB It's amazing. I think E.M.S. paramedics, first responders, nurses, physicians, have all gone into the field because they are driven to offer care. But nowhere in the training was there a point where you were taught to care for yourself? Lots of people get wounded and they're not taught how to heal themselves. They're not taught even to recognize when they're starting to be wounded. And so that promotes burnout within the medical profession. We have superheroes all through medicine, but no one's wearing a cape. No one has superpowers. Yet, the general population thinks, you know, you - you gotta handle this. This is what you do. And sometimes it hurts. It's like jumping in water and jumping out and thinking you're not going to get wet. We all have to dry off. We all have to take care of ourselves. And resiliency and resiliency training is there to help us both identify when we're wet and identify ways to dry ourselves off.

SM What are some of the teachings that you pass on to the others that the rest of us might try applying to ourselves?

JB It's really, really simple. It's things your grandmother taught you that we've forgotten. Each resiliency practice is like a piece of straw. And we take multiple pieces of straw and lay them down so that when we fall, we can land on them. And those pieces of straw are things like mindfulness, meditation, yoga, narrative writing and journaling, active listening, going out in nature, eating right, breathing, taking care of ourselves and recognizing when we're hurt, recognizing the signs that our body tells us before our mind hears that we are in a situation that we should be more tender towards ourselves. I'm not a professional at this, but I'm someone who has crawled across broken glass and seen myself bleed. And so I know what it means to suffer. And I know what it means to burn out. And I know what it means to come out on the other side.

SM So how did The Pause come into being? It started with you and something you saw another person do after the death of a patient.

JB Yeah, was a - I'd seen a chaplain do something one day and that - she had stopped a whole room. We had just tried to resuscitate a patient and it didn't go well. Anyone who's seen a resuscitation, sees what we do. We detach and we do our job. So that person in the bed becomes a body that we have to bring back to life. And when we can't and when we don't, which sometimes happens, what we do is - is we have to call it and end it and say, I'm sorry, there's nothing more that can be done. Often, we would walk away and move on. And when I saw the chaplain do was stop people. I heard her language, which was God in Judeo Christian. And I thought, it doesn't speak to everyone in that room. There's so many people here who come at faith and spirituality from a different standpoint. How do we capture that? And I think there's a danger in imposing a belief system onto someone after they've died. It's an imposition that that person can't say, hey, I'm OK with that or I'm not. And so what I did was start this thing called The Pause. The next time we resuscitated a patient, I asked for the room to stop and I asked permission from the trauma attending. I said, can we take a moment and just honor this patient in the bed? Could we take a moment to honor the life that was lived? The person who was loved, the person who loved other human beings, but do it in silence and hold that space so that each of us can do it in our own way, but hold that space together in a communal way.

SM Were people surprised when you first asked for this?

JB Oh, my God. It was wild. I remember this physician, Dr. Mutter, who is now an attending in the E.R., came up to me and said, thank you, because that spoke to me. When someone does a prayer, that doesn't. But what you just did, did. And then others started replicating it and started doing it because they knew it was right. And I didn't realize it was going to help us, our patients, even though they're dead, but their family. I didn't know I was going to help the social worker in the room. The medical secretary in the hallway. The security officer that was standing by the door. The families that are outside in their community, you know, when it when an E.M.S. person rolls up and they have to pronounce - for them to see an E.M.S. person stand and honor. Shows real love and compassion. And it's the act, it's not what they say.

SM So how did it become a thing? It's now capital The, capital Pause.

JB It - it became a thing, because people replicated what we did. I've said this before, you know, doesn't everyone do this? People were like, no, I said well they did. Because you remember when the - the space shuttle blew up? Remember that, we were watching that as kids, and I remember sitting there watching that. And then the space shuttle blows up and then all the airways say we are going to hold a moment of silence for these people. So this is not new. But what I did was I wrote an article about it and it gave people permission to do it themselves. It spread all over the country. Dear friend of mine did a presentation for me recently in South Africa. It spread to Australia, Ireland, Canada, England, and another place, Spain. The Cleveland Clinic has adopted it. They did a pilot and then they implemented it across their whole health system.

SM It's interesting you said it also helped us, not just honor the person that otherwise we have to move so quickly away from, but honor our work, honor the efforts that we put towards saving this life.

JB Yeah, it was, you know, seeing after you walk out of room, after you walk out of your room, after a child has died. And I went out in the hallway and this patient was yelling at me and they had no clue. What I had done in that closed room and part of me felt an aggression, you know, I just walked away from something. And it's a nightmare I've to carry. And I come out to be treated like this. And then I realized they didn't know, they don't know. And they're sick and they count, and their sickness is just as important as what Iíd done behind that closed door, because they needed care. And I had to - to learn to switch and put that - and approach it differently.

SM You know, when you started as an orderly somebody decades ago in the 80s, you couldn't have had any idea that you would end up as something of an expert on death and dying.

JB No one gets out of here alive. And it's amazing that we live our lives and pretend that it won't happen to us and it will. And so for me, it's a natural process of living. B.J. Miller is a - is a huge palliative care physician. And B.J. says that dying is not death. Dying is a part of living. You're alive until you take your last breath. Your alive, until your heart stops. You're alive, until your mind no longer works. And so it is simply the end of a life. But it's still part of that life, just as birthing is a part of life as well.

SM What has - what has your experience with meditation, mindfulness, contemplative practices brought to the care of patients that you've encountered?

JB There's nothing more raw and more real, than being with someone who's dying because the veneer of all the B.S. is taken away. You have to bear witness when you practice with people who are dying. And bearing witness is bringing that essence of what we practice in in meditation and mindfulness, which is I accept what is in front of me. I accept the good, the ugly, the beautiful and everything in between. And I don't judge. And I allow it to be. And I allow myself to let go, when I have to let go. Just like you let go of your thoughts during your practice. You see your thought. You recognize it. Identify it. And then you release it and let it go. Just like your breath.

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SM Jonathan Bartels is the palliative care liaison at the University of Virginia Medical Center. This is With Good Reason, we'll be right back.

00:28:00

SM Welcome back. This is With Good Reason. How do you go about finding yourself the core of who you are? Especially if your identity was forged very early on? As a child, Dr. Oliver Hill Junior was caught up in a legal battle for school integration. It was the 1950s and his father, Oliver Hill senior, was an outspoken lawyer and activist who helped desegregate public schools and changed the course of American history. So did Oliver Junior, he was one of the first African American students to integrate schools in Richmond, Virginia.

OH Growing up as a Black child in the segregated South automatically created this opportunity for introspection, because you would have to think about things like your identity and why it was so threatening to others and who you are going to be.

SM So when he went to Howard University in the late 1960s, the nation was in turmoil and experiencing revolution. It was then he encountered Black political though.

OH So I kind of discovered this whole other world of thought. The only thing I knew about Africa at the time was what I'd seen in a Tarzan movie. And so this was, you know, kind of a great awakening of my Black identity. And I embraced it fully.

SM Until he didn't. He says he began to see his Black militancy in things like taking over the administration buildings on campus as yet another faÁade.

OH You know, taken off one identity and now adopted this one. But now this was still started to seem limiting to me. And so for a while, there was a real crisis. My old way had been kind of discarded. And this new identity was starting to lose some of its luster. And it was in that moment of angst and searching and wondering, that I first started to encounter meditation.

SM He encountered meditation under the guru of the Beatles. And he became a teacher of meditation himself. After college, he spent six months training on the Spanish island of Majorca, along with, among others, the Beach Boys.

OH It was a total immersion kind of experience. I mean, we would meditate for eight to 10 hours a day for six months. And when I came out of that, I was a transformed individual. I was not the same person.

SM Today, Dr. Oliver Hill teaches psychology at Virginia State University and advocates for bringing mindfulness and meditation into the classroom. He spoke with me about his journey of self-realization, beginning when he was a child desegregating a school in Richmond.

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OH I was 12 years old and this was the seventh grade and there were about 20 of us in that class. The previous year, there'd been two girls who integrated that school and they really kind of paved the way. You know, it was a very intimidating experience, but in some ways I had been prepared for it, because being who my father was, he kind of anticipated that was going to be involved in this integration process. And so for years, they had been kind of preparing me for dealing with racism. And mainly I was thinking of racism as somebody else's problem, somebody else's weakness. It wasn't about me. It was about them. You know, that - that had a pretty protective kind of effect, although, you know, I was still the product of 1950s America. And so you never saw a Black face on television or in the movies. And so for me, the idea was someone with a white face, the hero or whatever.

SM Were there 20 of you in the same classroom or just 20 of you heading to the school?

OH There were 20 of us in the school. And so the first day I remember, I got a ride to school with my father's law partner, Henry Marsh, and it was this really intimidating building with a large staircase going up and nobody else was around. I walked up there by myself and into the building and into the principal's office. And then all 20 of the Black kids were there in the principal's office. And then they marched just out two by two into different home rooms. And so the other kids were already in there. So, you know, this is the first year of junior high school, which is already fraught with all kinds of issues and problems. And so, then you walk in and all of these eyes looking at you as they kind of bring you into the room, two by two. But it was an interesting experience, it was the first time because of segregation, the first time having much exposure to dealing with white kids at all. And there was still pretty much total social segregation. I mean, we - we tend to sit with each other in the cafeteria. And there wasn't any interracial dating or partying or anything like that. Although by the time we got to high school, which was three years later, I was on the football team. And so I did get a chance to start to rub shoulders with other kids on a basis other than just being in the classroom. And that helped a lot.

SM A lot of times we go through a quiet trauma. Did you feel that that was your experience there? That there was not the sort of spitting, or name calling, or classic racist attitudes, and yet it was trauma?

OH Yeah, there was some of the spitting and name-calling, too. But for the most part, you know, Virginia wasnít in Mississippi. And so I never felt like my life was threatened. But there was a lot of subtle kinds of pressures. I can remember in the seventh grade, in - in the Virginia history class, looking at the textbook is description of slavery as its most benign kind of institution where, you know, we were members of the family and everybody was just so loving. And, you know, it's such a shame when they had to get put out after slavery. You know, I had a counternarrative at home. And so, you know, I was immediately kind of challenging that that narrative. Yeah. Just the subtle kinds of racism of just being the other not being the norm, does kind of create a certain trauma. So by the time that I graduated high school, I knew that I wanted to go to a historically Black college, because I just wanted a different experience. And so I ended up at Howard University.

SM What did that feel like after so many years in this other world?

OH Yeah, it felt like I was finally back in a comfortable environment. You know, I was with people that looked like me, that acted like me, that had similar kinds of interests. So it was very heady experience. And the political Black Power movement was just starting and how it was like the center, the hub of that activity. And so every week there'd be some fiery speaker, Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown talking to the students. And the students themselves were very active. So everybody was reading books by revolutionaries and everybody was having discussions. And then we eventually rose up to protest mandatory ROTC. This was during the era of Vietnam. I mean, Howard is kind of an interesting situation because this is a historically Black college, but it's controlled by the Congress and the Congress appropriates money for it. And we were interested in turning Howard into what we called a Black university, rather than just an imitation white university.

SM Would you say you were a radical young man?

OH Oh, I definitely became radical. In fact, I never pledged to a fraternity because I wanted to be relevant. You know, I wanted to do things from Afrocentric kind of perspective. And again, that lasted for a little while. But, after a while, it wasn't enough to satisfy that longing that had started when I was a young boy about this idea of searching for self and identity and finding out who I really was.

SM Why wasn't it enough?

OH Because it was just another suit of clothes, you know, I had taken off one and put on another. But I wanted to find out what was under those clothes. Who was at the core of my existence?

SM Why was that such a burning desire? What - what had triggered that dissatisfaction and therefore angst?

OH Well, I think growing up again in the segregated South, you know, youíre kind of always put in situations where you have to question yourself or question society. And so that process of questioning just continued for me as I got older. And I think these are questions that almost everybody has. But they're easy to put aside. You know, maybe until weíre - weíre facing death or something. And then they come up again. But - but I think in general, people have a curiosity about existence. Why are we here? Why is there something rather than nothing? What's behind all this? You know, what - what are some ultimate truths in terms of what humans can - can get to?

SM So what did you do after the six months you spent in this intense environment at Majorca off the coast of Spain?

OH So I came back and started teaching transcendental meditation. This was early 70s, and so meditation was still pretty exotic, and people really didn't know anything about it. And so I did that for a couple of years and I got married and had a child. It was very difficult to do that full time and feed a family. So I decide to go back to grad school. I went to grad school in psychology because I thought, again naively, that psychology might be the discipline that would talk about things like human consciousness. That was not the case. In fact, consciousness was kind of a taboo topic that at that time. So I kind of had to stay a little closeted in terms of my interest in meditation and those kinds of things. But while I was there, I did have one faculty member, this was at the University of Michigan, who was an ally, who was a meditator and who had a guru, the swami from India. In fact, right down the street from University Michigan, there was an ashram. I was his teaching assistant and the course was called Psychology and Religion. It was huge. Thereíd be four or five hundred kids in there every semester. And what we would do is to take small groups of those kids down to the ashram to learn how to meditate. And so while there, I was exposed to this teacher's name was Swami Muktananda, who, if you looked at a picture of him, looked like a jazz musician. He would have these dark glasses on this kind of cap on the side of his head.

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OH There was something about that environment that was just intoxicating and it was satisfying a need that I didn't realize I had. And there was a need for developing the emotional side of my nature, my journey in meditation, up to that point, I've been kind of a head trip. But meeting this other teacher - first, I just fell in love with him immediately. It was just something about him. He had no pretense. He was just totally present. And I just felt these waves of love, kind of come out of me just spontaneously.

So that element, that hard element of that emotional nature, is an integral part of this search for the deeper self, and I think it adds, you know, if you read any Eastern philosophy, sometimes they talk about things like detachment and non-judgment. And it sounds very clinical and very, you know, distant. But this other approach, sometimes it's called bhakti yoga or karma yoga, where you are involved in selfless service and you are involved in giving back to your surroundings, your community as you are working on even your own self-realization, there's a growing connection between you and your environment, and between you and the other people.

And I think also is the case that we all have kind of this common core and we can recognize in each other. And so when you encounter people who've been through similar experiences, whoíve delved into their own depths of consciousness, there is this kind of natural affinity. This, almost like a tuning fork effect, where you bring a tuning fork next to one thatís vibrating, and it vibrates at the same frequency. You know, you kind of have that his instant connection.

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SM Where did this take you after Michigan?

OH Toke me back to Virginia, actually. I came back and became a psychology professor at Virginia State University. For a while, I was focused on my career as this experimental psychologist, doing lab research in traditional topics in psychology. But then eventually I started to get interested in finding ways to integrate these two sides of my life. You know, my intellectual side, and my empirical side as a scientist, and this deeper side as a meditator and as a seeker.

SM You know, we've seen a wave recently of mindfulness across the nation. People on Wall Street are meditating. What do you make of this sort of secular movement and practical application of mindfulness?

OH Yeah, it's possible to criticize that, but it's also possible to recognize that this was an important first step of getting the knowledge of meditation out there into the world. So we do tended to - to focus on the instrumental use of meditation and take it out of its larger context. You know, the philosophical and cultural context that gave rise to these practices. And so one of the things that I've been starting to do more lately, to try to find ways to add context to these practices. So the idea of seeing yourself not as this isolated individual, but seeing yourself as embedded in this ocean of consciousness, this ocean of humanity. You know, we - we know a lot about the physical effects of meditation and the psychological effects of meditation. But what I'm interested in now, is seeing if there's some way to take it out of, say, a religious or spiritual context, but talk about some of these underlying eastern approaches in ways that Westerners can understand and not feel threatened by in terms of a threat to their own particular religious sensibilities. And particularly in terms of teaching it in the classroom.

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A secular Vedanta, a secular description of reality that conveys this idea that there's a oneness to existence, in that the abstraction of Western science, the analysis is secondary. What is primary is the whole. And what is secondary is the part. And so our tendency to want to understand things by breaking them up into parts is the antithesis of that. To have some understanding based on this idea of unbroken wholeness.

SM Can you teach unbroken wholeness?

OH Probably not. You can use analogies. I mean, one analogy used a lot of the idea of the ocean and the wave. So the wave could represent individual consciousness, and in many ways, each wave, you know, has its own uniqueness, its own individual existence. But the reality is that all the waves are nothing but the expression of this one ocean and really only the ocean exists. The wave is just an abstraction on the surface of the ocean. So the analogy is that consciousness is like the ground of being. And so our individual minds are individual awarenesses, are like waves on the surface of that underlying ocean of consciousness. And coming to that realization changes one's perspective. It removes the sense of otherness, in terms of other groups, other ethnic groups, other countries, other religions. You know, it - it gives you a more universal perspective, a sense of being able to relate to anybody, anywhere.

SM As the nation is grappling with this sense of divisiveness. Does it help you find another way to see across the divide?

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OH Yes, it's helped tremendously. Sowing division like we see happening in our political leadership these days is the exact opposite of this, and you can see the kind of anxiety that comes along with that, the fear of the other. This kind of universal perspective removes that fear. You have a sense of not-threat from something that's different, but you can see it as a compliment, something that adds richness to the tapestry of life. But I have to say, too, though, that it's not just a kind of airy fairy, ëwell, you know, we are one. We don't have to challenge anything. We have to challenge injustice because it's all going to work outí. I mean, it's not that kind of philosophy at all. In fact, it gives you a clear vision of what might need to be changed, in a way that doesn't create more othering. The idea that you can engage in political activism without demonizing the opposition, because that just sows seeds for further division later on.

SM Can you see a way now, where someone has used this to very good effect?

OH I would almost guess that if you did a poll for who people consider to be the most effective agents of social change in the 20th century, for example, people would tend to name Gandhi, King, and maybe Nelson Mandela. All three of them had that kind of quality where they were able to engage in this rigorous social action in a way that did not demonize the opposition, in a way that did not create more separation. And I think all three of them engaged in contemplative practices.

SM So what now about a nation in the grip of fear, whether it be over - whether it be over the rise of white supremacy or the perceived threat from Black Lives Matter? How might this inform once perspective on those?

OH Yeah, anything that we can do that removes the sense of the foreignness of the other, you know, telling stories, telling everybody's story, so that you can see the humanness of the other person. Some of the real changes in - in social attitudes over the last couple of decades, like for things like gay marriage, came about by seeing people on television and kind of recognizing that, oh, yeah, this is just a regular person. And removing that that tendency to want to see them as non-human, or sinner, or demonizing some other kind of way. So I think telling stories is one way that we can bridge those gaps. Having conversations across political persuasions and religions is very powerful. Truth and reconciliation, having a chance to be heard and to hear, you know, the person waving the Confederate flag probably doesn't think of himself as a racist. He has his own reasons for this connection to the Confederate flag. So it's important to listen to those and also important for him to hear how that Confederate flag might make an African-American feel, so that he can honor his heritage without creating anxiety in his neighbors. But we need more of that kind of thing.

SM If you were creating a curriculum across the racial divide on this, what might it look like?

OH If it were an academic curriculum, I think it could be a series of readings that would help to understand the psyche of different cultural groups. And so that could be a course, that could be a series of lectures, that could be a series of documentaries. I can remember the impact that the Roots had back in the 70s when everybody was watching it. That kind of shared experience is very powerful. It's a powerful way of - of bringing about change.

SM Are we on the cusp of a movement where contemplative practices are becoming much more widespread?

OH Oh, for sure. You know, thinking about when I started and where we are now is like night and day. I mean, there's hot yoga. There's - everybody has a yoga mat. Everybody knows about mantras and meditation and relaxation and the need for it. It's become pretty mainstream. In terms of the impact intellectually, though, I think this movement that's been going on for the last 20 years, contemplative education, I think is going to make a big change. You know, I mean, I think UVA is a good example of that, where you have these contemplative practices integrated into the teacher preparation program at the career school, integrated into the hospital, integrated into the mindfulness center on campus. I think these are going to have really transformative impacts on students to give them this more holistic kind of prospective. That, I think that is a prerequisite for changing the world.

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SM Oliver Hill, thank you for talking with me.

OH My pleasure.

SM Oliver Hill is a professor of psychology at Virginia State University in Petersburg. Major support for With Good Reason is provided by the law firm of McGuire Woods. Support also comes from Smithfield, a global food company committed to providing food in a responsible way, so consumers can share meals and memories with family and friends. SmithfieldFoods.com. With Good Reason is produced in Charlottesville by Virginia Humanities. Our production team is Allison Quantz, Elliot Majerczyk, and Kelley Libby. Jeannie Palin handles listener services, and our intern is Georgianna Reed. To get the podcast, go to iTunes, or to WithGoodReasonRadio.org. I'm Sarah McConnell, thanks for listening.