Support for On Being with Christa Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute, helping build the spiritual foundation for a loving world.

Fetzer envisions a world that embraces love as a guiding principle and animating force for our lives,

a powerful love that helps us live in sacred relationship with ourselves, others, and the natural world.

Learn more by visiting Fetzer.org.

I've been in conversation with Sharon Salzburg since this show began.

In the thick of pandemic isolation and racial reckoning, I invited her to mull over the matter of being alive and finding meaning amidst rupture.

She is one of the most esteemed teachers of meditation in the world, and she's credited as one of the founding three who introduced Buddhist practices into mainstream Western culture in the 1970s.

It's psychological acuity, contemplative depths, and practical tools for living.

Sharon helps far-flung people apply these in everyday life and at extreme edges of reality.

She's had a sustained presence to the families of Parkland, Florida, since the school shooting there.

And what I have gained from her continues to resonate now as I reflect backwards and look ahead.

How do we continue to walk forward and even find renewal along the way?

What sustains us?

How to hold on to a sense of what is whole and true and undamaged even in the face of loss?

These questions anchored a virtual retreat I signed up for in 2020 with Sharon called Shelter for the Heart and Mind.

It was at once grounding and energizing and has accompanied me through all of the highs and lows that have followed and have yet to come.

She is a master at revealing the interwovenness and the how-to of caring for the world while learning kindness towards ourselves and equanimity as a form of strength.

Certainly if I heard the word equanimity long ago I would have thought that's really bizarre, was that me?

And so many times we think it means a difference but it really doesn't do such a huge capacity of our hearts to see what we're going through, to see what others are going through.

And to just have this kind of perspective of there is change in life and there is light in the darkness and darkness in the light and we're not avoiding pain because some things just hurt.

It's like fundamental but we're holding it in a way that it's like the love is stronger than the pain even.

And then we can really be with things in a very very different way.

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