Real Change

Real Change Plot Summary

Introduction

The sky outside was darkening with thunderclouds as I settled into my chair at the community center. Around me, twenty strangers gathered for a workshop on mindfulness and social change. The facilitator asked us to share what brought us there. One by one, people spoke of feeling overwhelmed by the world's problems, burned out from activism, or simply lost in their desire to help. A woman in her sixties with silver hair spoke last. "For decades I've worked in refugee resettlement," she said, her voice steady but tired. "Lately I've been waking up at 3 AM, paralyzed by the feeling that nothing I do matters." She paused, looking around the circle. "But I keep showing up anyway. I just need to find a way to keep my heart open without breaking." Her words captured the essential tension many of us experience: how do we stay engaged with a world in pain without becoming overwhelmed or numb? How do we transform our anger into courage, our grief into resilience, and our awareness into meaningful action? These questions lie at the heart of mindfulness practice, not as an escape from reality but as a way to engage with it more fully. Mindfulness isn't just about finding personal peace—though that's important—but about developing the inner resources to stay present when everything in us wants to turn away. Through mindfulness practices, we discover that our capacity to be with suffering—our own and others'—is precisely what enables us to transform it. We learn that small actions performed with great love can ripple outward in ways we may never fully comprehend. And perhaps most importantly, we realize that we're not alone in this work—that our interconnectedness is both the truth that sustains us and the vision that guides us forward.

Chapter 1: The Path of Awakening: Finding Purpose in a Chaotic World

On a bright Tuesday morning in February 2018, Samantha Novick received news that changed her life forever. A gunman had opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida—her alma mater, where her mother still taught. Seventeen people were killed and seventeen others wounded. Her mother survived, but the community was devastated. In the aftermath, Samantha found herself drawn to action in a way she'd never experienced before. "It's like we were suddenly and unexpectedly hit by a huge meteor that left a giant crater in the middle of our lives, our community," she explained. "Some were hit directly, like those students who were in the building or saw things no person, let alone a young person, should ever have to see. People lost friends, spouses, children." The enormity of the tragedy could have been paralyzing. But instead, Samantha and others in the community discovered an unexpected wellspring of purpose and agency. "A bunch of us just grabbed shovels, if you will, and did whatever we could to try to fill up the hole," she said. "As time goes on, we see that the hole is never going to be filled. It's just not. But if there is anything I can do to help one person or to further the cause of non-violence in any way, it would be irresponsible not to act." What's striking about Samantha's story is the paradoxical nature of her awakening. The very pain that could have shut her down became the catalyst for her engagement. "I don't think I'm being entirely altruistic," she admitted. "Because it's also been helpful for me. There seems to be a sort of a self-serving purpose behind throwing yourself into activism, because it helps you heal. It feels good to not just sit there and stare at the hole." Shantel Walker experienced a different kind of awakening. After working at Papa John's Pizza in Brooklyn for almost twenty years, enduring erratic hours and unlivable earnings, she joined strikes and street protests that brought national attention to the plight of fast-food workers. In 2013, she joined Fight for $15—a nationwide movement that later succeeded in increasing the minimum wage in New York City and elsewhere. "A lot of people don't get ahead in society because they are only worried about themselves," Shantel observed. "Sometimes, you've got to not worry about yourself so much. You've got to worry about mankind and humanity. You've got to think if we don't all do something today, what is tomorrow going to bring? If I can't live on what I'm making now, how will it be for these kids around here in the next five or ten years?" This shift in perspective—from individual struggle to collective purpose—represents a profound awakening. When we move beyond our narrow self-interest and connect with larger concerns, we discover reservoirs of energy and determination we didn't know we possessed. Our lives become infused with meaning not despite the difficulties we face, but because of how we choose to respond to them. The pain of the world isn't something to avoid—it's a doorway through which we might discover our deepest calling and most authentic self.

Chapter 2: Transforming Anger: From Destructive Fire to Constructive Energy

Mallika Dutt founded Breakthrough, an organization that uses popular culture and community engagement to advance gender equality and social justice. But her journey began with rage. More than twenty years ago, she was visiting a friend in an Indian hospital when she passed through the burn unit. There, she encountered women who had been doused in kerosene and set aflame by husbands and in-laws—victims of "bride burning," a horrific form of domestic violence used as retaliation for unpaid dowries or suspected infidelities. The outrage she felt witnessing this systemic brutality became the fuel for her life's work. Breakthrough has since made a tremendous impact in India and beyond. Yet even as her organization flourished, Mallika found herself struggling with the very anger that had propelled her forward. "I don't know how to turn the anger off," she confessed during a conference panel. "I need to learn to dial it down. And not just me. It is manifest in my organization, in my relationships. I need to be able to develop a different relationship to it." Heather Yountz, a Boston lawyer focusing on immigration cases, shared a similar challenge with the transformative yet potentially destructive power of anger. "When I was younger, my anger scared me," she said. "I didn't know how to harness it, and it would become something that would often start one way and then end up out of control." Over time, she developed a different relationship with her anger. "With experience, I have found that anger is a focusing emotion for me, and I can use it well to make my points in rapid succession. If I'm in court and I'm angry about what's happening, I find I'm sharper in some ways." Yet she also recognized the costs when anger overtakes her. "Anger is like holding a hose that's running on full blast. If you're able to hold on to it, you're doing great. But the second you loosen your grip, it just goes all over the place." This tension between anger's energy and its potential to consume us presents a profound challenge for anyone working for change. Marc Solomon, who spent fifteen years working on marriage equality, found meditation to be transformative in his relationship with anger. "After coming out, I was just feeling so much rage," he recalled. Following a lovingkindness retreat, he experienced a breakthrough: "It felt like it was the first time I saw that I really had the ability to direct love and to feel love toward myself and toward others in a bold and honest way, and it really changed my life." What these stories reveal is that anger itself isn't the problem—it's our relationship to it. In Buddhist psychology, anger is likened to a forest fire that burns up its own support. The fire can destroy the host—us. But when we can be mindful with our anger, acknowledging its message without being consumed by it, something remarkable happens. The energy of anger can be transformed into discerning wisdom and courage. We learn to extract the insight (seeing clearly what is wrong) and energy (the motivation to act) from anger, while letting go of the destructiveness, fear, and tunnel vision it often carries. This transformed energy becomes a powerful force for change—one that can sustain us for the long haul without burning us up in the process.

Chapter 3: Embracing Grief: Building Resilience Through Adversity

Emmett Fitzgerald was twenty-five when he deployed to war-torn Congo to do humanitarian aid work. Despite the intense and unsettling conditions, Emmett kept returning for six-month tours. Later, when the 2010 earthquake devastated Haiti, he went there to run a camp for displaced persons, dealing with storms that wrecked the camp and prompted a cholera outbreak. He kept diving into disaster after disaster, putting his emotional life on hold. "I'd be visualizing a cardboard box and I would put the emotional stuff, the relationship stuff, the personal stuff in it and then that would be put away while I was in work mode," he explained. "I found it very hard to align the two pieces of myself." Eventually, after Haiti, Emmett collapsed. "I lost a bunch of weight. I was smoking for the first time in my life, and I got back [to London] and found that I really had a taste for whiskey even though it had never been my thing. I now had a taste for sitting alone in my apartment smoking cigarettes and listening to music and just not wanting to engage in any effort." The breakdown culminated in panic attacks. "I had one on Christmas Day in my parents' home. I was surrounded by my big Irish family, by everybody I love, on my favorite day of the year, and yet I found myself deliberately excusing myself from the room, trying to be away from people because I couldn't stand the effort of being sociable. My heart was racing. I could hear the blood in my fucking ears. It was cacophonous." Emmett's story illustrates what happens when we try to outrun grief. The pain doesn't disappear—it accumulates, eventually overwhelming our defenses. It was only when he found his way to yoga and mindfulness that he began to discover resilience. "You're thinking it's all your fault and you need to be able to deal with this on your own," he said, "then a yoga and mindfulness teacher releases the pressure. It was a little shaft of sunlight. A little moment of clarity in your head and the anxiety stops. Meditation just helped me to acknowledge and just sit with how I was feeling and not constantly try to change it or do something that would justify it." Lynn Nottage, the playwright, describes a similar breakthrough in her own creative process: "I had to go inside of myself in ways I was not prepared to do and confront my own sadness and my own sense of loss, and then figure out a way to translate those emotions to the page. I chose to do it through metaphor, but it was a very difficult process." Joel Daniels, storyteller and activist, speaks to this evolving relationship with pain: "The older I've gotten, the more I've been able to lean into being vulnerable, because it feels most honest to me. I see pain for what it is. I'm resting with it. I acknowledge it. I'm a next-door neighbor with it. I know this pain is eventually going to move away." These stories highlight a profound truth: resilience isn't about avoiding pain or grief but developing a different relationship to it. When we acknowledge "what has happened has happened," as the Dalai Lama simply put it after 9/11, we create space for genuine healing. This acknowledgment of our sadness, pain, and loss is where real change is born. As we respond to our own pain with more presence and compassion, our capacity for responding to the pain of others increases dramatically, as does our sense of connection and care. Resilience accretes over time as we develop a habit of courageously being with pain without freaking out. We learn to bend but not break, to wobble without falling, to take one small step toward allowing whatever helping hands are coming toward us to reach us.

Chapter 4: Self-Care: Nurturing Joy While Working for Change

Rachel Gutter founded the Center for Green Schools, a dream job that allowed her to transform schools into places that put students in touch with nature. Yet despite her passion for the work, she began to notice something wasn't right. "I had so much drive around the opportunities to transform schools, and yet I didn't hold enough space for myself. I wasn't living a well-rounded life. More and more, that started to take its toll." She recognized the growing inauthenticity in her leadership: "I want you to live a three-dimensional life, I want you to take vacations, I want you to get off your screens at night—while also being a leader who believed work/life balance was for everyone else, didn't take her own vacations, and would send an email at 10:30 p.m., making my employees think they were supposed to respond at 10:32." Rachel's experience highlights a common pattern among changemakers—the tendency to neglect self-care while advocating it for others. This disconnect not only affects our well-being but ultimately undermines our effectiveness. "When I realized I was becoming less and less equipped to be a good leader for my teams," she said, "I was able to give myself permission to spend more time inwardly focused." Rev. angel Kyodo williams Sensei, founder of the Center for Transformative Change, draws a crucial distinction between self-care and self-indulgence: "I'm always asking people who are working for social justice, 'And what about you? Are you not part of that group of people who are suffering? And would you permit the people in your life to run themselves into the ground?'" She points to a fundamental contradiction in how many approach change work: "If that's what we're practicing is to run ourselves into the ground in order to have justice, at what point will we practice something different? Because whatever we practice is what we will practice." Shelly Tygielski, a mindfulness teacher and community organizer, emphasizes the importance of designing a wellness plan—what some call a coping bank—to prepare for activist burnout. She also advocates building a self-care community, a small network of individuals who will hold you accountable for your self-care plan and intervene when you're in burnout mode. Ady Barkan, diagnosed with ALS at age thirty-two when his son was only four months old, shared a touching reflection on finding joy amid profound suffering. After receiving a hug from his young son Carl, he wrote: "That was the best hug I've ever had... Because when the daily grind of living a nearly paralyzed life becomes too much, when I am exhausted and depressed and hopeless, I want to return to that hug. That's also the only way, I think, for all of us to persevere through the atrocities and the hate and the lies... We have to hold on to the precious beauty, to the moments of triumph, and fight in the hope that there are more victories to come, more beauty and love in our future." The wisdom emerging from these experiences is clear: self-care isn't selfish—it's essential for sustainable impact. Joy isn't a luxury—it's fuel for the journey. When we nurture ourselves, we build an inner reservoir of resilience that allows us to persist through challenges without burning out. We come to understand that taking care of ourselves is an inextricable part of taking care of the world, and that small moments of beauty and connection aren't distractions from our work but vital sources of renewal that make our continued engagement possible.

Chapter 5: The Power of Connection: Overcoming Isolation and Division

Pedro Noguera, a Distinguished Professor of Education at UCLA, speaks powerfully about our culture of disconnection: "We live in a society that allows mentally ill people to live on the streets. We incarcerate so many people in America and people accept it as normal. There are so many conditions that are really just, to me, atrocities that we accept." He identifies what colleagues have called the "Crisis of Connection"—the inability people have to identify with the suffering of others when those others are from a different group, race, nationality, culture, or religion. This empathy gap is at the heart of many social problems, yet it's not inevitable. Connection is something we can cultivate. Atman Smith, co-founder of the Holistic Life Foundation (HLF) in Baltimore, has seen this transformation firsthand in his work with schoolchildren. "You can't ask a kid, or anyone who doesn't love themselves yet, to care about somebody sitting next to them, or somebody halfway across the world, or their community, or the planet, or anything, because they're in a hopeless, angry situation, where they're not connected to anything." Yet once HLF gives children tools to care for and value themselves through yoga, mindfulness, and exposure to nature, something remarkable happens. "It's beautiful to see, though, that once they connect to themselves, a light bulb goes off, like, 'Oh, okay. There is something more to this.' And they start to see themselves in other people, and they start to care more, and they start to do more, and it just changes them from the core. And it starts to ripple out." Mallika Dutt's understanding of interconnection evolved through her work on human rights. "I have come to understand that my personal happiness and freedom is connected with the well-being of all communities, all species and indeed, all of Earth. It is from this place of interconnectedness that I seek to align purpose, people, and planet." George Mumford, who has worked with NBA athletes on mindfulness, explains why connection matters: "It's always better together. The whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts. This idea has to come from love; it has to come from openness. We are social creatures and yes, we are better together than we are out on our own." Rob Tibbetts demonstrated the power of connection in the face of tragedy. When his twenty-year-old daughter Mollie was killed in Iowa, and the accused murderer was identified as Mexican, waves of racial hatred and fearmongering followed. The grieving father firmly rejected these reactions, instead addressing the Hispanic community: "My family stands with you and offers its heartfelt apology. That you've been beset by the circumstances of Mollie's death is wrong. We treasure the contribution you bring to the American tapestry in all its color and melody." At his daughter's funeral, he added, "The Hispanic community are Iowans. They have the same values as Iowans. As far as I'm concerned, they're Iowans with better food." These stories reveal a profound truth: our sense of separation from others is an illusion. As neuroscientist Jud Brewer discovered in his research, when we feel contracted—experiencing anxiety, guilt, craving, or rumination—a specific brain region (the posterior cingulate cortex) becomes more active. By contrast, when we are able to dissolve our sense of clinging to a rigid, isolating "self" and a corresponding "other," activity in this region decreases, accompanied by a sense of expansion. This shift from contraction to expansion isn't just subjective experience—it's measurable in the brain and transformative in our lives. When we recognize our interconnection, we don't simply like everyone or approve of all actions, but we do move beyond the destructive "us versus them" mentality that prevents genuine understanding and collaborative problem-solving. We discover that compassion isn't weakness but strength, and that seeing ourselves in others is the foundation of both personal healing and social change.

Chapter 6: Seeing Clearly: Breaking Free from Harmful Patterns

Mahzarin Banaji, a social scientist studying implicit bias, shares a telling riddle: A father and his son were in a car accident. The father dies at the scene. The boy, badly injured, is rushed to a local hospital. In the operating surgeon looks at the boy and says, "I can't operate on this boy. He's my son." How can this be if the father just died? The answer is simple—the surgeon is the child's mother. Yet even today, 80 percent of people don't get the right answer. As Banaji explains, "If 100 percent of surgeons were men, this would not be a bias. This would be a fact. I've talked to doctors who work in hospitals where 80 percent of the entering class of surgeons are women. And they don't get the right answer." This example illuminates how bias functions as a "firewall" in our minds, preventing us from seeing reality clearly. Our brains are wired to make split-second judgments based on superficial differences, activating stereotypes that then act back on our visual system. What we literally see is not a straightforward readout of facial features but a complex construct influenced by our belief system. Anurag Gupta speaks to the real-world impact of these biases: "On average, doctors prescribe lower doses of pain medications to darker-skinned patients, even when the patients are exhibiting the same symptoms and expressing the same pain thresholds." Somewhere lurks a deep assumption that perhaps "darker skin can withstand more pain"—an absurd mythology that no doctor would consciously endorse but that nonetheless shapes medical care. Another prevalent pattern is attribution error, where we explain the negative behaviors of our own group in terms of situational factors ("They were under stress") while attributing the same behaviors in other groups to their inherent character ("It's just the kind of thing that people like them do"). These different attributions lead to vastly different responses—forgiveness and help for some, punishment and exclusion for others—even when the behaviors are identical. A writer friend described his own awakening to bias when a woman he had unconsciously judged as uneducated based on her appearance revealed her sophisticated knowledge of French literature. "She was rather frumpy looking. I automatically assumed she lived in a rural area, probably on a farm. I also pegged her as someone who hadn't had much education," he recalled. "This plain-looking woman, about whom I had rushed to judgment, announced that although she thinks there are some decent translations, she much prefers reading Remembrance of Things Past in the original French." Mindfulness meditation can help dissolve these habitual patterns by allowing us to observe our assumptions as thoughts upon their first arising, instead of noticing them only after they've driven us to action. This creates space to question our assumptions instead of filling all mental space with reactivity. We learn to view assumptions as fluid rather than fixed. Seeing clearly also involves looking for deeper patterns and root causes. Thai activist Sulak Sivaraksa demonstrated this when asked how to combat the sex trade in Thailand. He replied, "If you want to really affect the sex trade, look at Thai agricultural policy. There is a reason those farmers are selling their children. They are starving. Why?" This systems approach helps us move beyond superficial solutions to address underlying causes. Ellen Agler, CEO of the END Fund, reflects: "Sometimes how you solve a problem is as important as solving it. Mindfulness has taught me how to stay with the conversations that have the scary potential to shift the whole way I see myself or the way I'm working." By developing clear seeing—what Buddhist psychology calls sampajanna or clear comprehension—we break free from the limited perspectives that keep us stuck in harmful patterns. We learn to recognize the systems at work, to question whose perspective is central and whose is marginalized, and to collaborate creatively for solutions that address root causes rather than symptoms. This expanded vision becomes the foundation for more effective and compassionate action in the world.

Chapter 7: Finding Balance: Sustaining Meaningful Action in Troubled Times

Joshin, co-abbot of the Upaya Zen Center, grew up in Brooklyn in a poor family with an alcoholic father. His path to finding balance began with religious life: "When I joined the Dominicans, the vow of poverty was a step up for me. I entered the Dominicans with ten dollars in my pocket, and you had to hand in all your money when you went in. And then they gave me twenty-five dollars back as my monthly stipend." What started as an escape transformed over time: "I developed a sense of spiritual self that was bigger than the hardships of my life. Religious life gave me a sense that I wasn't just that. Even though I left the Dominicans, as I look back at that time, it gave me a sense of meaning. It gave me a way to use my experience, to develop a life of service, to develop a life that seemed to have purpose." This sense of purpose forms the strong core that helps us maintain balance amid life's unruliness. Like a gyroscope that remains stable by spinning from its center, we can learn to be responsive rather than reactive to changing circumstances when we're anchored in what matters most to us. Bernice Johnson Reagon, a civil rights activist and singer with Sweet Honey in the Rock, recalled the danger she and her friends faced challenging segregation in Georgia: "Now I sit back and look at some of the things we did, and I say, 'What in the world came over us?' But death had nothing to do with what we were doing. If somebody shot us, we would be dead. And when people died, we cried and went to funerals. And we went and did the next thing the next day, because it was really beyond life and death." Daisy Hernández, reflecting on James Baldwin's essay "Notes of a Native Son," discovered a profound teaching on equanimity: "I heard in Baldwin's words the emphasis on holding two opposing ideas: accepting the existence of injustice and fighting to vanquish it. I heard, too, the clarion call that equanimity is my 'charge,' my responsibility. That it means keeping my own heart steady, free, and open." Equanimity—the balance born from wisdom—doesn't mean coldness or indifference. Rather, it's the spaciousness that can relate to any feeling, any occurrence, while remaining free. It allows us to feel the full intensity of emotions without being overwhelmed by them. Environmental activist Joanna Macy explains this paradoxical strength: "[If] we can be fearless, to be with our pain, it turns. It doesn't stay static. It only doesn't change if we refuse to look at it. But when we look at it, when we take it in our hands, when we can just be with it and keep breathing, then it turns. It turns to reveal its other face, and the other face of our pain for the world is our love for the world, our absolutely inseparable connectedness with all life." Joshin later shared a powerful story of finding balance while accompanying his estranged father through the end of his life. His father, who had been homeless and alcoholic, was dying of esophageal cancer. Despite his initial reluctance, Joshin visited him: "He detailed his regrets and mistakes, the wrong turns in his life. He told me a story about being homeless in New York and getting a job as a dishwasher at a hotel in Times Square." His father had been offered a promotion but, feeling inadequate, had abandoned the opportunity—a regret that haunted him. "My heart broke," Joshin recalled. "I thought, My father felt inadequate to make sandwiches. I saw the depth of his pain." Though resentment and anger arose, Joshin's practice helped him remain present: "I knew I didn't have to pursue it. I found myself more capable than ever to just be with him as he is." Rather than offering platitudes, Joshin cooked his father a meal his mother used to make: "I made a tomato sauce from scratch, some vegetables he loved, and pasta. I put the meal on the table and poured him a glass of wine. My siblings were all there at this feast. He ate that food like he was in heaven. He glowed with pleasure. He wept at the table. I think he felt forgiven." This story beautifully illustrates the essence of equanimity—the ability to be fully present with both suffering and joy, to acknowledge what is true even when painful, and to respond with wisdom and compassion rather than reactivity. In the Buddha's words about crossing the flood of suffering: "Without lingering, friend, and without hurrying across the flood." Neither sinking into despair nor thrashing in anxious struggle, but moving forward with steadiness and grace, one moment at a time. Mark Coleman, who teaches wilderness retreats, captures this balance perfectly: "To be awake today is to learn how to hold paradox in your mind and to dwell in ambiguity. I have walked through scorched forests. I can look at the blackened trunks and feel a tender grief. And I can also focus on the emerald green shoots that rise out of the ashes. Both are true. Both demand our attention."

Summary

The journey of mindfulness for healing and social impact begins with a simple yet profound awakening—recognizing that our pain and the world's suffering are not separate, but interwoven threads in the same tapestry of life. As we've seen through the stories of activists, healers, artists, and everyday changemakers, the path forward isn't about escaping discomfort but developing a different relationship to it. When Samantha Novick faced the crater of grief after the Parkland shooting, when Mallika Dutt encountered the horrors of bride burning, when Emmett Fitzgerald collapsed under the weight of unprocessed trauma—each discovered that the way through wasn't around pain but through it, with presence and compassion. What emerges from these journeys is a transformative wisdom that can guide our own efforts to heal ourselves and our world. First, we learn that our emotions—even difficult ones like anger and grief—contain essential energy and intelligence when we relate to them mindfully rather than being consumed by them. Second, we discover that self-care isn't selfishness but the foundation of sustainable impact; as Rev. angel reminds us, whatever we practice is what we will practice. Third, we recognize our fundamental interconnection—that seeing ourselves in others isn't naive idealism but the most practical way to address our shared challenges. And finally, we cultivate the equanimity that allows us to hold both the reality of suffering and the possibility of transformation, neither lingering in despair nor hurrying past pain in anxious urgency. The world doesn't need more perfect warriors who never falter or doubt—it needs more whole human beings who have the courage to stay present with what is while working steadily toward what could be. As Joanna Macy reminds us, "The biggest gift you can give is to be absolutely present." This presence isn't passive resignation but active engagement, infused with both fierce compassion and spacious wisdom. When we approach our lives and our work in this way, we discover that healing isn't something we do—it's something we become, moment by moment, breath by breath, action by action. And in that becoming, we find not only the strength to persist but the joy that makes persistence possible.

About Author

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Sharon Salzberg

One of America’s leading spiritual teachers and authors, Sharon Salzberg is cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Barre, Massachusetts. She has played a crucial role in bringing Asian meditation practices to the West. The ancient Buddhist practices of vipassana (mindfulness) and metta (lovingkindness) are the foundations of her work.

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