How to Stay Engaged without Burning Out

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Life As It Is. I’m here with my cohost, Sharon Salzberg. Hi Sharon.

Sharon Salzberg: Hi James.

James Shaheen: So today we’re going to try something different. It’s a bit of an experiment. For the next few episodes, Sharon and I will be talking about specific themes that have been coming up for both of us in our practice. And we’re going to focus in particular on navigating our current social and political climate. So today we’ll be talking about how to stay engaged without burning out. Then later in the podcast, we’ll be joined by Daisy Hernández, a journalist and Tricycle contributor who wrote a piece for Tricycle last August called The Buddhist Journalist. But before we start talking about burnout, I’d like to start by talking about its antidote, which is an easily misunderstood practice in Buddhism, equanimity. So first, Sharon, could you give us a Buddhist definition of equanimity? 

Sharon Salzberg: I’ll give you a personal definition of equanimity, hopefully reflecting the Buddha’s teaching. I think it has many aspects. It basically means balance, and in the context of mindfulness practice or awareness practice, it’s the balance that brings wisdom. You know, it’s not indifference. It’s not coldness or callousness, which is the common confusion, but the ability to be present with what is happening without immediately reacting, holding on, or pushing away. This creates the possibility of wisdom, of learning. You know, if we have a certain emotion, like anger or anxiety, and we’re completely freaked out as soon as it comes up, there’s not going to be a lot of learning about its nature, its characteristics, what makes it up, the fact that it’s ever changing, things like that. So in that context, equanimity is the balance in relationship to whatever’s happening. So we’re not freaked out by it, we’re not holding onto it or overcome by it, but we’re sort of in this place in the middle, and that is what allows wisdom to arise out of mindfulness in the context of a practice like loving-kindness or the cultivation of compassion in our lives. Then equanimity still means balance, but I think it’s coming from the other direction, which is bringing forth the balance that is born of wisdom. It’s bringing forth wisdom or perspective or insight. So for example, trying to help a friend who’s got a lot of self-destructive behavior. We try and we’re present and we’re hopefully creative and really communicating and things like that. And the wisdom tells us we’re not in charge of the universe, that we can’t control someone else’s choices or decisions. And so equanimity really balances out the compassion so it doesn’t become burnout.

James Shaheen: You know, you mentioned indifference, and I’ve seen people react to the word equanimity with accusations of indifference. I think that what’s interesting, and it’s something I’ve spoken with you about before, is that with wisdom, we have the discernment to know what it is that we’re able to do and what is simply beyond our abilities or power. And I think that’s such an important thing because, you know, I can sit here and stress about the state of the world, but I can’t do everything, and I can’t fix everything, so identifying those smaller things that I can do rather than imagine myself saving the world is a really important component of the equanimity or the wisdom that comes from the equanimity one practiced.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I used to myself, and I’d like to ask you about your relationship to the word balance. Even coming to understand the translation upekkha or equanimity as balance, I felt a kind of disdain for the word balance, like it meant mediocrity, like not really caring enough or not having a kind of fierce attention to what we might try to change. It took a long time to realize it didn’t really mean that at all. So let’s say you are a caregiver, and by caregiver I mean someone who in their personal lives or their professional lives in some ways is on the front lines of suffering. It might be that you’re not like a hospice nurse, but you are trying to affect change in some system in life which is bearing down on other people, say. And so the balance could look like—I don’t mean work-life balance, which I think may be impossible anyway, but first of all, the balance could be balance between some compassion for yourself and compassion for others. It could be the balance between just what you’re describing, doing everything you can to affect change and with the wisdom that I’m not in control of the universe, and things may not happen on my timetable. Any effort is not fruitless, even though it’s not maybe bringing instant gratification in this wonderful result. I think it was on November 6th that Rebecca Solnit sent out an email message, in which she said something like, “You may not be able to save everything, but you can save something, and everything you can save is worth saving.” So I think we do get into these kinds of incredibly overwhelmed states because we do care. It’s not coming from any other place, but we need the balance in that caring so that we understand limits, so we understand things might take time.

James Shaheen: You know, I think the hardest thing is to accept those limits. I think letting go of outcomes once you’ve taken your action is a difficult thing. And I think of, and I might have mentioned this before, thirty podcasts ago, I don’t know, but you watch someone who’s bowling, and once the ball leaves their hand you see them twisting in all sorts of shapes trying to get the ball to go this way or that, but really, in fact, its trajectory is set. And I feel like that sometimes, twisting myself into all sorts of contortions to make something happen the way I want it to. But it’s out of my hands, and I’m not saying give up or be passive, but just again, that wisdom to know what you can actually change and what you’re powerless over.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, how do you react to the word balance? How do you respond to it?

James Shaheen: Well, I could always use balance. I tend to be a little bit of an extremist, so a little bit of boredom in my life would be a very good thing. I think balance is something desirable for me. I never thought of it as something boring. Clarity and balance, those are things I really wanted and, and struggled to have, and it’s funny, the more I struggled, the less I had it, which brings up something else. I think of meditation now. And certainly we cultivate equanimity, or upekkha, through meditation. There’s a particular practice, and maybe when we close you can lead us in that practice. But often in the face of great change and a sense of urgency that we need to take action, meditation and the cultivation of equanimity can seem like an indulgence. But in fact, I would be far less effective in my life and to those around me, far less generous, far less kind, far less willing to take social or political action, however I choose to engage, if I did not have that practice. Coming at it with some equanimity, clarity of mind, and peace is a far more effective way to avoid burnout than anything else I know. Can you say something about meditation and the cultivation of equanimity?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I think there’s a kind of self-knowledge or self-understanding, insight into the nature of things, that even underlies the willingness or interest in doing something like meditation practice in turbulent times, you know, when suffering is highlighted and much more apparent than it may be to many people. Not everyone. You know, some people are quite clear-eyed, because of their own experience or how they’re treated or how they themselves are related to it. But in times like that, especially if you’re trying to make change, something like meditation can seem ludicrous, and so it takes some understanding. It’s just as you described, like where does resilience come from actually, and what about a long-term effort? And what about being open to suffering, but also to joy? You know, it seems so stupid, but if we really look, we see, oh, my own happiness, my own well-being, it’s like a sense of inner abundance or at least inner sufficiency. And if you’re going to be generous with your time, with your effort, with your energy, if you’re going to try to make a difference, you need some inner wherewithal. You know, you can’t be exhausted forever and still make that kind of effort. And so you have to think, where does that come from, that sense of resource inside? And it can come from surprising places, you know, to us. Like when I said “take in the joy as well as the suffering,” something like that, it seems so ridiculous, but what about when we don’t do that? You know, what is nourishing us? And what about community and not feeling so alone in a kind of embattled state? And what about practices? Actual practices like meditation, which will help us be more centered, have more clarity, take a breath now and then in our efforts, and build almost like a muscle or a reservoir of resilience so that our efforts can be sustained. And I think for me, of course, meditation has been the key component in learning how to be centered, learning how to take a pause, learning how to hold many things at once. Another meaning of equanimity is having a spacious enough mind to be able to take in the joy and the sorrow and the pressure and the possibility of change and the people who are causing harm and the people who are trying to help and just having a big enough perspective so that we see the world more as it actually is and not just a narrow slice of it.

James Shaheen: You know, you asked me about balance, and now that I’ve had some more time to think about it and listen to you, I think of the 1980s when so many of my friends were ill. It was during the AIDS epidemic, and I remember running from hospital to hospital and burning out and then withdrawing altogether. So when you talk about balance, I had to find a place in the middle. What can I do, and what am I not able to do? And what do I need to do for myself? Because not taking care of myself did not allow me at times to take care of others, or to do it less attentively because I was exhausted and burnt out. So today I feel a similar kind of a need for balance. I either swim in the news of the day and despair, or I withdraw altogether. So the point of this, really, of our discussion is how to stay somewhere in the middle. And I think one of the things that we need to be able to do is first to even recognize whether we’re on one side or the other, or that we’re out of balance. So you’ve done a lot of work with people in the health professions who have burnt out. How does one recognize? Because sometimes we can be burnt out, and we don’t even know what that is. We think, “I’m exhausted, I’m depressed, I’m whatever.” But we don’t realize it’s burnout. What are some of the signs?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I think it’s a continuum, you know, and we can be incredibly exhausted, but we feel like we’re able to recover, and then there are times we just feel we can’t recover, that it’s too bone deep. And what I especially look for in myself as well is that sense of despair, which is a word you’ve brought up several times now. It’s not just that the effort is so tiring, it’s that it’s meaningless after a while, that things just lose that sense of impact even if it’s that small slice of action we can take that actually channels our energy into feeling like “I have done my best in this moment,” or “I’ve let someone else not feel so alone,” something like that, and that kind of perpetual feeling of it’s never enough, it’s meaningless, nothing counts. I would say that is real burnout.

James Shaheen: You know, it’s interesting, maybe I’ll go out on a limb here, but sometimes if somebody were to tell me that this frantic state is an opportunity, I would be very annoyed, but if I come to that conclusion, it’s very useful. For instance, as just an example, I have sciatica right now, and I was steeped in self-pity and self-recrimination—what did I do and why me and all of this. And all of a sudden I realized this is an opportunity for practice. Now, if somebody told me that, I would be annoyed, but I came to it on my own and I said, OK, this is an opportunity for practice. You know, it doesn’t seem like many people in the country are too happy, whether they’re on the right or the left, you know. How might we see it as an opportunity to practice equanimity? Or is that just pushing people too far?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I certainly wouldn’t tell somebody that because just like you, I wouldn’t really appreciate it. But, I mean, it is part of that appreciation, but I think it’s also we can use self-knowledge to help us set limits rather than a sense of perfectionism or not being good enough, like “I’m not strong enough to watch the news, therefore it’s terrible,” or “Everybody must watch the news day in and day out. Otherwise, they’re not at all informed, they’re escaping.” But I think self-knowledge is really important. So as I’ve shared sometimes with people, one of the reasons I stopped watching the news was because my own childhood was filled with secrets and information not disclosed, and so one of the most triggering things for me of all is watching what I consider to be deceit or gaslighting, and it doesn’t bring me to a state at all where I feel like I can either serve myself or serve others, which have kind of become the same thing. And so I realized I have a limit. I don’t have to force myself and say it would be great practice. You know, it probably would be, but not if I can’t really use it as practice.

James Shaheen: Right. Yeah, I understand that. I mean, I think that what I discovered in watching the news when I was in the depths of that was I was hearing the same thing over and over and over again. It’s a twenty-four-hour news cycle, and it became a cause for outrage. I sort of became acclimated to that outrage, and it fed itself and it became a bit of a habit, and I had to make the decision of why am I watching the same story over and over again told from different perspectives, all meant to outrage me equally? And I thought, I am responsible for what I consume. And for me, television news was not where I was getting information that I found especially valuable. And so I continue to read, I continue to stay up on the news, but I limit the time I spend doing that. So I try to stay informed and responsible and engaged, and sometimes there’s a leak and all of a sudden too much comes in of the same thing, and then I find myself pulled again. So it did become an interesting practice for me, I realized. I’m not going to say that for other people, but for me it became, what happens when you don’t stick to this rather tight regimen of news consumption and then moving on to do something useful otherwise?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, that’s the beauty and the power of mindfulness, right, is that very question: What happens? What happens when I do this for the fiftieth time? You know, what happens? And what happens when I see the impulse and let it go? What happens when I cultivate a sense of compassion? What happens when I nurse that hatred and I go over and over and over? Because it’s up to us. Just like you say, it’s really up to us to make those choices, and we do it over and over again. It’s not like one and done, you know, but that’s the beauty of the state of mindfulness is that it’s not imposed by some system of thought or ideology that we have to behave in a certain way.

James Shaheen: Yeah. I think there’s news consumption and there’s also action, social or political action that one can take if one is so inclined. Not everybody has to do everything, and that’s something that Joseph Goldstein said to me once that really stuck. Not everybody has to do everything, and my actions are carefully chosen. They tend to be smaller actions. Hopefully cumulatively with others, they’ll make a difference, but I don’t know that they will, but it’s the action itself that is part of my practice anyway, but having a right-size sense of my own agency is important. Otherwise, I develop a savior complex and think I’m supposed to make it all right, which is ridiculous. But it does happen to people.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I want to take that comment in two different directions. One is Joseph Goldstein, as you know, we live in a duplex in Barre, Massachusetts, and he just sat a very long retreat in his own house, and before he went into sitting, he had also stopped watching the news, which he used to do perpetually. And so then he came out of this long retreat the other day, like several months worth of retreat, and he came over to my side of the house, and it was kind of like, I don’t know how much he knows, you know, and what should I say? I don’t want to completely blow him out of the water. He’s only not been silent and deeply meditating for like an hour and a half. Maybe he doesn’t have to hear all these months worth of news right at once. So there was this very funny, kind of odd, you know, how much do I titrate this? And what are the high points? And the other direction that came up in my mind was a conversation I had with bell hooks when I was working on this book, Real Change, which was a lot about people taking their inner wisdom and the force of loving-kindness and things like that into action, into socially engaged action of some kind. And bell said to me that she didn’t really like the term social action all that much because for some people it might imply only picketing, marching, protesting. And she looked at me and she said, “What about art?” You know, that’s a whole manifestation of one’s values. It’s a very radical thing to manifest your values in those ways and not to just kind of succumb to a common narrative or a storyline that’s being forced. So what about art? And that became a real opening for me, both in writing the book and in looking at life and thinking there are lots of ways of manifesting and taking action, and maybe we don’t need to feel so limited, which is another kind of broad perspective on things.

James Shaheen: OK, so now we’ll bring in Daisy Hernández, a journalist and associate professor at Northwestern University and Tricycle contributing editor. Daisy, thanks so much for joining us.

Daisy Hernández: Thank you for having me.

James Shaheen: How are you doing? Are you in Chicago?

Daisy Hernández: I am in Chicago where at the moment it is sunny. Fingers crossed that it stays that way.

James Shaheen: Oh, well we could use some of that here. It’s very cloudy. What’s it like in Barre, Sharon?

Sharon Salzberg: It is rainy, rainy, rainy. I’m surprised you don’t hear it pouring down.

James Shaheen: Well, maybe we should have gone to Chicago for this one.

Daisy Hernández: Or we could all meet at my Mom’s place outside of Miami.

James Shaheen: That would be nice. So Sharon and I have been talking about the role of Buddhist practice in navigating the current social and political climate, particularly in helping us stay engaged without burning out, always a challenge. And we thought of you as a good person to talk about this with since so much of your work as a journalist requires you to witness and document so many stories of suffering. So to start off, could you tell us a bit about your background as a journalist?

Daisy Hernández: Sure. So I began as a journalist I guess more than twenty years ago, but let’s not count, and started with daily reporting at the New York Times of all places, so daily reporting in the New York City area covering the day-to-day tragedies of a city, fires, murders, death, and also gardens and community gardens and things like that as well. And then I worked for many years at a magazine on race and politics called Colorlines, and that was an incredible experience writing about specifically those topics, both as an editor and as a journalist, usually writing around the intersection of race and other experiences. And then I did my last book project, which was a seven-year book project, where I was writing about racial health inequities with one particular disease that disproportionately affects Latinx immigrants in the United States. So that required many years of interviewing people about the worst moments in their lives when they got sick and when their children got sick and also the medical care professionals who are working with them and advocating for them. And I continue writing op-eds and other pieces like that.

James Shaheen: Well, Daisy, if it makes you feel any better, I started over forty years ago.

Daisy Hernández: That does make me feel better. I’m the baby here.

James Shaheen: Yeah, exactly. So you recently wrote an article for Tricycle last August called “The Buddhist Journalist,” and you talk about how it was through your work on your most recent book that you first brought your Buddhist practice into your work as a journalist. So can you tell us a bit about how this happened? How did your practice help you to stay present with the suffering of people you were interviewing? And I ask this question also because you mentioned in that story about the old school journalist who said, “We used to drink, you guys are all about self-care,” and I remember early on in my career, that’s actually what people did. There were hard-nosed, hard-drinking, mostly male journalists, who had an attitude about self-care or bringing anything that they might consider soft into the process. So can you talk a little bit about that?

Daisy Hernández: Yeah, that was definitely my training or what I still saw being modeled by the older generation was a stoicism to their approach to writing and to working as a journalist. And that wasn’t an option for me because I have alcoholism on both sides of my family, so I knew where that was going to go. But it was a conversation that happened very informally. I was basically seeking out an informal mentorship relationship and saying, “OK, I’m finding this really hard. What are you doing to take care of yourself?” They were like, “Take care of yourself? Oh, that’s your generation of young people with wellness, ha ha ha,” and so I think, like many other people, I started to find my own way through trial and error. Sometimes it was creating more space for myself before and after doing an interview, doing meditation, sitting before and after. What I didn’t notice is that a lot of the Buddhist practices were coming into the work as I did it. So in the way that I would listen to someone, I felt a lot of affinity to when we’re sitting, doing a listening meditation, for example, and then one day it really came to a head because I was interviewing a woman who had this disease called Chagas that can lead to really severe cardiac complications, including killing a person. It’s transmitted through an insect, but it can also be transmitted through pregnancy. And so I was interviewing this woman named Janet about her baby having been born with this disease, and this was just the most horrific time in her life when she didn’t know if her child was going to survive what was going to happen. And because of Buddhism, I found myself being able to sit in silence with her and not rushing into the next question, and that’s also basic trauma-informed journalism is that you don’t rush into the next question, you know, you create space, and so I knew that, but I found myself also, her grief was so powerful and I felt it so deeply, and so I found myself doing the tonglen practice where on the inhale you’re taking in everything that’s painful and difficult, and on the exhale, breathing out goodness and love and loving-kindness and just gentleness. I didn’t do it intentionally that day, but it gave me a great sense of strength in that moment to be able to continue the interview with her. And then afterwards I thought, wow, there’s trauma-informed journalism, but what about dharma-informed journalism? And of course this is going to apply to all sorts of work. So, yeah, that interview with Janet was definitely a turning point where I saw that although I had not received encouragement to bring my dharma work and my journalism work together, they did have a relationship and needed to have a relationship.

James Shaheen: Yeah. I like the way you described it in the piece and in an earlier interview you did with us, where it’s sort of like dharma and journalism were kept separate the way you keep high school friends maybe separate from college friends. But you did bring the two of them together, and out of that you quite naturally engaged in tonglen practice, the practice of giving and receiving. Do you still do that now? Is it a normal part of your journalistic practice?

Daisy Hernández: Yes, and it also really varies depending on the situation. I wouldn’t say that I only go to tonglen. It really depends on who I’m with, what the interview is, and what’s coming up. So I feel like actually, the attitude and the practice that I bring more now is that when I’m going to interview someone, it’s really like sitting on the cushion. You don’t know what’s going to come up that day. You think you know what’s on your mind and you think you know what the other person’s going to tell you and what emotions are going to come up, what new questions are going to come up. But you really don’t know until you’re there. Each moment has to, each interview has to be beginner’s mind, if that makes sense.

James Shaheen: Yeah. Absolutely.

Daisy Hernández: So there’s sort of a joyfulness that comes with that as well.

James Shaheen: Sharon?

Sharon Salzberg: So in the article you mentioned the secondary trauma that many journalists face from bearing witness day after day to the stories of people surviving horrific situations, and to a much lesser degree I’m sure that many of us can relate to a smaller scale version of this through exposure to so many articles and videos of atrocities around the world. What helps you stay engaged in your work as a journalist while also maintaining a sense of balance?

Daisy Hernández: Well, I will also answer this question in terms of what helps me to stay sane right now because I’m in higher education, which is under attack. And so a lot of the secondary, a lot of the witnessing that I’m doing at the moment has to do with watching colleagues who are losing their funding, watching students who are losing major grants that were going to propel their work as psychologists and scientists and also our international students who no longer know if they are safe in the US. So the witnessing has been very, very intense, and so I have an equanimity checklist, which kind of changes day by day. But at the top of that list is making sure that I’ve taken care of my body, that I’m staying close to as much movement as I can manage day to day, that I am getting to participate with sangha, virtually counts a hundred percent. You know, it changes day by day, but I think I’m doing what a lot of people are doing, which is limiting media consumption and asking myself the question of am I learning something new here or am I on the merry-go-round of despair? I’m currently off of social media. I think that helps a lot. That’s an important part of the equanimity checklist. I’m definitely listening to the Tricycle podcast and your podcast, Sharon, the Metta Hour. I love the anxiety series. Very appropriate at the moment. So I am listening to it a lot. I’m listening to a lot more of dharma than I probably would’ve under other circumstances. And I’m trying to also, I think this is what everyone is doing, two other parts of my equanimity checklist that are important is that whatever action I’m taking today is enough, because it’s so easy to feel like I’m trying to save democracy and nothing’s working, it’s not enough, it’s not enough, but whatever. I took some students out to lunch last week and that was great. You know, we got to have a good connection, good conversation. That was an action actually toward taking care of my community here. And then the other part of it is really noticing what’s good right now. So the fact that in higher education, my colleagues and I are coming together in ways that we haven’t come together before, and we created teach-ins and are just having a lot more conversation with one another about what we can do to support each other. That’s amazing. And as a writer, I feel like oh, you know, it’s just for other people, it’s a different gift or a different skill that they use, but it’s wonderful to be able to do something as a writer as well in terms of, you know, I’m finishing a book about citizenship.

Sharon Salzberg: Oh, great!

Daisy Hernández: I know, right, very appropriate timing. So yes, I’m writing this book about citizenship, and so I also remind myself like, OK, this is part of my action for today. I’m contributing to this larger conversation.

Sharon Salzberg: That’s fantastic. One of the odd things about writing a book is that you start years before the publication date, you know, so what’s on your mind and how does the world change in those two years, and so what a great topic.

Daisy Hernández: I wrote an ending for this book about citizenship last August, and I thought, oh, I have to be a little happier at the end for readers, readers don’t want to be propelled into further despair and suffice it to say, in these months, the ending has dramatically changed and I think will continue to change once more before it goes into production.

Sharon Salzberg: That’s fantastic. I’m really looking forward to it. I haven’t told many people. Some people know that one of my early dreams in life and for a very long time was to go to journalism school, which I never did. And I was at Columbia once for an event put on by the journalism school, and I told the very young woman who was registering me for the event, I said, “Most of my life I wanted to go to journalism school,” and she looked at me from her very young years and said, “It’s not too late. Even people your age come.” But I just never put it forth, but it’s a world that fascinates me, needing to be balanced truth seekers, listening, as you say. And as you probably know, when I think of you and when I talk about you, I call you the equanimity lady. When James and I were discussing this particular series and who to invite and he brought up your name, I said, “Oh yes, the equanimity lady.”

James Shaheen: That’s true, Daisy.

Sharon Salzberg: Which may be something you hear for the rest of your life, I don’t know.

Daisy Hernández: Which amuses my partner.

Sharon Salzberg: Right. So could you talk to us a bit about your current understanding of equanimity and how it can be a support in times of change and uncertainty?

Daisy Hernández: Yeah, I went back to read, I wrote an essay for Tricycle about equanimity, and it was interesting to go back and to just be reminded that when I wrote that essay, I felt like we were at such a low point as a country, and there was so much pain and the violence felt relentless, and this was like 2019, so it was sobering to go back and to read that.  I do feel like this is a harder time than when I wrote that essay, and what equanimity is meaning now is that it feels like an incredible opportunity. You know, it feels like an incredible opportunity to be here in this moment, as opposed to where my mind wants to go, which is the catastrophe six months from now, or six years from now, or next week, even. So it feels like it is offering an incredible opportunity to be in the here and now to be with my meditation practice in the here and now, but also to be with my community in the here and now, and so I feel so much more aware of holding privilege at the moment. I just got a copy of my birth certificate. Good news, I was born here, as my mother said. I wanted to make sure because I didn’t really have a legit birth certificate for myself. And in our community, you know, we’re being, I mean, in the Latinx diaspora community, we’re being told, yeah, it’s a good idea to have your birth certificate and carry around your passport and other documentation because if you’re with a group of other Latinos and you all get stopped, you want to have your documentation. So, I feel like right now, equanimity is allowing me to hold the privileges that I have and also the vulnerabilities that I have personally, but also true for other people in my community as well. And sometimes that means that I’m talking with someone, you know, I’m talking with an international student on a student visa who is actually in a very vulnerable position and holding them and listening and giving the best feedback based on what I know. And then other times it’s speaking to a colleague or a good friend who has an enormous amount of privilege but is in a lot of deep despair as well. So equanimity is helping me to stand in that strength and also to fall apart. Can we talk about that? I feel like part of equanimity is like it’s not happening today. Today is not a good day. I want to go back to bed. And actually when I received the email inviting me to come and talk and that we’re going to talk about equanimity, I was like, literally five minutes before I opened that email, I was thinking to myself, “We should start listening to some more talks about equanimity.” So I feel like it’s so important to fall apart and to say, oh, today I need quiet. I need quiet. More quiet. I need a cup of warm tea. I need to just take a deep breath before I go on to the next email or the next phone call or the next protest.

Sharon Salzberg: So maybe we can just recap a little bit of what’s on your equanimity cultivation list: movement, get some sleep, take care of yourself in various ways, and that that’s not selfish or wrong. So do you want to say anything more about that list?

Daisy Hernández: Yes, my equanimity cultivation list. I like that. I was calling it the equanimity checklist, but I like cultivation list. Absolutely. So definitely sleep, rest, good meals, that my cup has to be full. I can give a lot if my own cup is full. I don’t really relate to the oxygen mask and putting the oxygen mask on yourself first. That just makes me nervous. It makes me start thinking about airplanes. But I like that my cup needs to be full so I can give to others. Movement. In my case, I have an adorable little dog, and she does remind me to play catch once a day, twice a day, et cetera. So checking in with her. Reminding myself that the action that I took today, I’m basically doing one action a day. I know some people have three actions a day, five actions a day. I’m doing one action a day. One action is good and is good enough for today. There’s going to be a tomorrow as well. And seeing the good that is happening, because the difficult times are really clear, the difficulties are really clear. So being very intentional to see that I’m having good connections with my friends and coworkers and family, that there is goodness happening. And I think everyone is doing this, but day by day seeing how much news I actually need. And even in conversations with friends, I’m doing a little bit more check-in, like, oh, do I actually have something new to share, new information, or am I just facilitating the merry-go-round of despair with my friends as well? So kind of stopping and just saying, OK, we can talk about other subjects as well, giving myself permission to do that, and I’ll just say usually those of us, I was talking to a friend who’s like, “I’m not doing enough. What else can I be doing?” Usually the people that are asking those questions are already doing quite a bit. If you’re asking that question, you probably are already doing something. So we kind of lose sight of that oftentimes.

James Shaheen: You know, Daisy, I was going to ask you about strategies and using equanimity to avoid burnout. But you said something I found really compelling and that’s that it’s OK to fall apart. You know, we will burn out from time to time, and sometimes, when we find ourselves there, we’re full of self-recrimination or this sense I’m giving up, but just to recognize I’m burnt out and it’s OK, and I’ll have a cup of tea. That’s very wise. So thank you for that.

Daisy Hernández: I’ll tell you one more thing too. This might not be useful, but it is on my equanimity checklist, which is that right now part of what happens for me being in equanimity is when I am there, then I get to feel a lot of grief. You know, there’s so much cruelty happening, and the grief is intense. But I can’t cry when I’m supporting a colleague or a student or someone in my life, like that’s not the moment in which to start crying historically. Maybe it is, I don’t know, but I can’t do it. So I’ve started watching this really corny TV show that’s super sentimental and over the top, and pretty much every episode, I’m not going to name it, but pretty much every episode makes me cry, so it’s fantastic.

James Shaheen: Oh, now I have to know what it is now.

Sharon Salzberg: I have to know what it is too.

Daisy Hernández: I watch twenty minutes, I mean, it’s a longer show, but my recommendation for my equanimity cultivation list was going to be find whatever it is that will help you tap into the tears, you know, because it’s such a physical release, for me at least, and so it’s not necessarily like, you know, it’s like I’m not crying about this corny TV show. I’m not crying about an old school Hallmark commercial or whatever. I know that I’m crying about what’s difficult in our political life in this moment, but to get there, I need a little assistance.

James Shaheen: You know, before you came on, Sharon and I were talking about being overwhelmed by the news and how to navigate, and in another interview you did with us for one of our premium events, you mentioned media consumption guidelines, and I thought, wow, media consumption guidelines. So what are yours?

Daisy Hernández: Don’t listen to the news first thing in the morning. Notice which media form you’re more sensitive to. So I’m more sensitive to radio when I hear than I am to reading, because with reading I can skim along and go further, but when I’m hearing voices, especially voices directly of people who are being impacted, that just has a bigger consequence for me. So I leave that to later in the day. That’s lunchtime or that kind of time. I’ve identified media outlets whose approach I appreciate, either because of the subjects that they’re covering or their consistency to subject matter. I’ve largely stayed away from—this is difficult because I am someone who really adores political commentary, but for right now, I can’t do that very much because it’s getting on the merry-go-round of despair and I’m not getting any new information, but I’m getting a lot of people telling me how terrible it is and how worse it’s going to be. So I don’t find that useful. So it’s better for me. And right now, because I’m working on a book project, I can’t handle a book project and social media, so I’m not doing social media. Once the book is in production, I’ll be back on social media, but if I were on social media, I would definitely have cut-off times, right, not before 10:00 a.m., not after 8:00 p.m., or something like that. And I do it very imperfectly. So if I’m having a little bit of insomnia, like the other night, I was reading some news articles at 10:00 p.m. and I was reading along and saying, “Oh Daisy, you’re going to regret this, you’re going to regret this,” and I’m going further into the article, and I’m like, see, now I’m regretting it because I’m so angry and so upset. And then I get to start all over again and close the app. In late January I signed up for one of the apps where I can block myself on my phone. I can block my access to certain apps so that when I am weak, the app will say, “Are you sure?” and force me to restart the whole phone.

James Shaheen: Right. You know, it’s funny, I heard you also talk about when you were young, you would listen to Spanish news, and a whole different world was described, say, what was going on in Central America at the time that wasn’t reported so much in our media, if at all, or was to some extent, so I took from that a kind of international diversity of news sources, so I started listening to the German news just to see, and I thought, wow, there’s a whole other world out there, you know, or you can listen to any European news station and think, oh, this isn’t the only world, although it’s all working together. It’s just a whole different perspective so you see how limited in a way one’s bandwidth is by watching only one source of news.

Daisy Hernández: It’s very similar to our intense emphasis in this country on knowing exactly one language, English, right? There’s very interesting parallels. It’s like your world would be so much richer if we were actually having young people learn more than one language and having access to more than one news source. It’s also like reading novels that were written in other languages other than English. It’s a whole different relationship with language.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I was listening to the German news station, and they took a deep dive into Canadian politics and I thought, wow, they’re right next door, and we’re not taking a deep dive into their politics. So it was very interesting, but I got a lot from that earlier conversation.

Daisy Hernández: That’s fantastic. I’m so happy to hear that.

James Shaheen: OK, Sharon, anything else?

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, I was thinking a couple of things. One is my social media consumption these days largely consists of watching babies eat their first bananas. You know, it’s just all in that light of, what can I handle? What’s good for me right now? What is helping me be the best person I can be or the healthiest person I can be in trying to be with others and care for others? And so some friends of mine heard that and they started sending me photos of their own babies eating bananas for the first time, or an avocado seems to be another famous dish. And I think it just keeps in my mind going back to that same theme of self-knowledge, understanding our own limits, understanding what resilience is really made of, and not being ashamed of our need to nurture ourselves and to replenish and to have that sense of recovery as we continue to go forward. And so that reminds me of just that classical sense of taking refuge. What are we taking refuge in? Where do we find steadiness or support? And so I would just close by asking you that. Where have you been finding refuge recently?

Daisy Hernández: Oh, one of my students has a puppy.

Sharon Salzberg: Oh, so nice.

Daisy Hernández: And my dog is 4 years old, and watching this puppy and this 4-year-old dog interacting, but really it’s like watching the puppy, who also only weighs like five pounds and is trying to be bigger than all of us and it’s just joy, you know? But yeah, it definitely gives me this little refuge that there is goodness and love in the world. That gives me a lot of refuge. And also to be honest, you know, watching my students and my colleagues right now in higher education step up and share their stories and share their feelings is a refuge in the sense of seeing other people’s courage right now does provide this kind of refuge for me. Oh, and I’ll also say one more thing. Last one. I’ll say I’m also taking refuge in people’s voices, and I’m not saying this to brown nose to either of you, but I really like your voices, so it’s great to listen to you on podcasts, and I’m just noticing, you know, oh, who’s doing talks where there’s comfort just in the quality of the person’s voice and obviously the content of what they’re sharing, but also that there is, for me, I’m sensitive to sound and so there’s just refuge in hearing voices that are very kind and loving. It’s just sort of the opposite of what’s happening in the world. So I definitely take a lot of refuge in that.

James Shaheen: Well, thank you so much, Daisy. I like ending on puppies and babies eating bananas. That’s very nice.

Sharon Salzberg: The first banana. That’s very important.

James Shaheen: The first banana, the first avocado. OK. So thanks so much for joining us. We like to close these podcasts with a short guided meditation, so Sharon is going to give us a little lesson in equanimity, I hope.

Sharon Salzberg: Sure. I mean, there’s so many ways of going about this, and one way is just going back to the fundamental exercise that is often the case in meditation where we settle our attention on a certain object, like the feeling, the sensations of the in- and outbreath, although it might be listening to sound. If something else is happening, then paying particular attention to those moments when our attention has wandered, we’ve gotten lost in thought, stuck in a fantasy, or we fall asleep and we begin to freak out and judge ourselves and condemn ourselves in that moment. When we see ourselves doing that, can we remind ourselves, basically, things are as they are, this happened. I can begin again. I can come back to the moment. And so it’s like injecting the force of equanimity right there in what is often a very troubling kind of moment.

So let’s sit together. You can close your eyes or not, however you feel most at ease, whatever object of awareness tends to be that kind of anchor for you, very commonly, although not always, the sensations of the in- and outbreath, just the normal natural breath. Find that object, bring your attention there, and just rest. It’s a kind of balance right there too. You’re not like getting a stranglehold on this object or barely glancing at it. Settle. Rest. Take some rest with a breath. We feel just one breath. And the real art of the meditation will happen in those moments when you’ve been gone, way gone, to recognize that with some balance, some equanimity, to gently let go without judgment and be able to bring your attention back to that object, say, the feeling of the breath. Thank you.

James Shaheen: Thank you, Sharon, and thank you, Daisy.

Daisy Hernández: Thank you, Sharon. Thank you, James.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Life As It Is with Daisy Hernández. Tricycle is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to making Buddhist teachings and practices broadly available. We are pleased to offer our podcasts freely. If you would like to support the podcast, please consider subscribing to Tricycle or making a donation at tricycle.org/donate. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks and Life As It Is is produced by Sarah Fleming and the Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!