Real Life

Real Life Plot Summary

Introduction

Picture yourself standing at the edge of a small, cramped room. The walls feel like they're closing in, the ceiling seems to lower with each passing minute, and the windows are covered with thick curtains that barely let any light through. You've been in this room for as long as you can remember, convinced that this limited space represents the entirety of your world. But then, something shifts – perhaps a gentle breeze moves the curtain aside momentarily, allowing a sliver of sunlight to enter. In that fleeting moment, you glimpse something beyond – an expansive landscape that stretches farther than your eyes can see, filled with possibilities you never imagined existed. This movement from confinement to freedom forms the heart of Sharon Salzberg's wisdom. Through her decades of Buddhist practice and teaching, she illuminates a universal human journey – one that takes us from the narrow straits of grasping, aversion, and delusion toward the spacious realm of presence, compassion, and clarity. What makes her approach so powerful is its accessibility; she doesn't demand spiritual perfection or dramatic life changes. Instead, she offers practical guidance for transforming our relationship with difficult emotions, recognizing our innate goodness, and cultivating daily practices that gradually expand our capacity for joy and connection. The journey she describes isn't a one-time event but a continual process of opening to life as it is – with all its challenges and wonders – and discovering within ourselves the freedom that has been available all along.

Chapter 1: Understanding Our Inner Confinement: The Paths of Grasping, Aversion, and Delusion

When Sharon Salzberg was nine years old, her mother died. During much of her chaotic childhood, she lived with her paternal grandparents – Polish immigrants who were observant Jews. While she followed many household practices with little interest, the Passover Seder was different. Though she didn't fully grasp its deeper symbolism, she felt profoundly moved by the family gathering, the recognition of collective suffering, and the promise that life could be different. The Seder ritual portrays the journey from bondage to liberation, from humiliation to dignity – a metaphor that would later shape her understanding of inner freedom. In Hebrew, the word conventionally translated as Egypt in the Haggadah is "mitzrayim," derived from "m'tzarim," meaning "narrow straits" – a place of constriction, tightness, and limitation. Salzberg explains how each of us lives, at least at times, in our own personal mitzrayim: "the narrow straits of seeing few options, or being defined by someone else who has more power than we do in a situation, or feeling so unseen that we absorb someone's projection so thoroughly we come close to forgetting who we are." This contraction manifests in three primary ways. First is grasping – the endless searching, never having enough, never being enough, and falling into addictive patterns. Second is aversion – manifesting as anxiety, resentment, and a punishing attitude toward ourselves and others. Third is delusion – the numbness to feelings, disembodiment, and holding rigidly to views that provide a false sense of shelter from uncertainty. These states aren't personal failings but universal human tendencies that create a sense of confinement. Neuroscientist Judson Brewer's research supports this understanding. He found that when people experienced guilt, craving, rumination, or anxiety, they activated the posterior cingulate cortex – a key part of the default mode network in the brain. This activation correlated with a feeling of contraction: "The experience of anxiety, of guilt, of craving, of rumination – all of these – share literally an experiential component of contraction. We contract, and we close down." When this becomes chronic, we live increasingly in a world of tunnel vision, missing the joy and possibilities right in front of us. The journey to freedom begins with recognizing these narrow straits and changing how we respond to them. It involves surrounding states of constriction with spaciousness, ease of heart, and kindness. Moving from fixity to freedom isn't a one-and-done accomplishment but a path we travel repeatedly, fueled not by obligation but by the happiness of discovery, the relief of openness, and the joy of realizing what we might be capable of.

Chapter 2: The Ministry of Presence: Being with Difficult Feelings and Circumstances

Kate Braestrup serves as a chaplain to search and rescue workers in Maine. Once, while sitting with parents of a missing six-year-old child, the mother said to her, "It's so cool that the warden service has a chaplain to keep us from freaking out." Braestrup responded with profound wisdom: "I'm not really here to keep you from freaking out. I'm here to be with you while you freak out." She explained that her role wasn't to take people's suffering away but to be present with a loving heart as they grieved, laughed, suffered, or sang – a ministry of presence. This approach mirrors what mindfulness meditation helps us cultivate for ourselves – an inner council of forgiveness, compassion, and openness in the face of our own pain. Salzberg shares how when she first began meditating at eighteen, she was unaware of the separate threads of grief, anger, and fear within her unhappiness. As meditation helped her look more clearly inward, she became unsettled by what she found. She once confronted her teacher, S.N. Goenka, saying accusingly, "I never used to be an angry person before I began meditating!" Goenka simply laughed, reminding her that meditation was revealing what was already there, while giving her tools to forge a new relationship with difficult emotions. One key instruction changed everything for her: "Practice looking directly at difficult feelings, and practice having equanimity, or peace of mind, toward them." At first, this seemed ridiculous to her – how could looking at painful feelings possibly help? But when she finally tried it, she discovered that by not pushing away challenging feelings, she could discern different strands defining her relationship to them: shame, self-judgment, fear, overidentification, and isolation. These habits had cluttered the available space in her heart and mind. The practice of RAIN (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Non-identify) became a powerful method for creating a larger, lighter, kinder space for any emotion. Recognizing an emotion helps us move from "I am angry" to "I am feeling anger." Allowing means relinquishing the add-ons like shame or resistance. Investigating brings curiosity to our experience. Non-identifying reminds us that whatever we're feeling is part of common human experience, not the entirety of who we are. Psychiatrist Dan Siegel's concept of the "window of tolerance" describes our optimal, calm arousal level where we can experience emotions within a context of safety, presence, and balance. When overstimulated, we enter hyperarousal (anxiety, panic, fear) or hypoarousal (exhaustion, numbness, disconnection). The journey from constriction to expansion involves widening this window, increasing our capacity to hold emotional experiences without becoming overwhelmed. This approach doesn't mean we never take breaks from difficult emotions. Sometimes we need rest or to place our attention elsewhere. The point isn't to suffer endlessly but to create enough space to understand our emotions without being defined by them. As we learn to cradle both the immense sorrow and the wondrousness of life simultaneously, we discover a power of love nestled within us, waiting for conditions to come together for it to spring forth.

Chapter 3: The Light Within: Uncovering Our Innate Capacity for Goodness

When bell hooks spoke to National Public Radio in 2000 about love, she described it as something far broader than romantic sentiment: "I'm talking about a love that is transformative, that challenges us in both our private and our civic lives... Everywhere I go, people want to feel more connected. They want to feel more connected to their neighbors. They want to feel more connected to the world. And when we learn that through love we can have that connection, we can see the stranger as ourselves." Salzberg had met hooks by that time and become friends with her. The idea that love, not war, could be the North Star of a society resonated deeply with Salzberg, leading her to India and a personal exploration of lovingkindness meditation. Though often referred to as an emotion, Salzberg draws a bigger picture of love – one that sometimes appears conventionally emotional and sometimes does not. She sees inclusion as a face of love – when we gather our attention to more completely see someone and hear what they're saying. She sees recognizing our interdependence as a face of love – not the same as liking each other, but realizing our lives are inextricably interwoven. Compassion, too, is a face of love that recognizes suffering with tenderness and poignancy: "Would that I could just go poof and relieve you of all pain. But life just isn't like that." While judgment is monolithic and fixed, compassion is complex and expansive. It accommodates the reality that we operate within the fragility of life and personal imperfection in nearly every moment. We learn we can open to suffering – our own and others' – without getting engulfed by it, and that loving presence is the most healing force of all. Salzberg shares a story of when she was teaching in New York City and scheduled to have dinner with a friend uptown. In the cab heading to her friend's apartment, she received a message saying her friend wasn't feeling well and thought they should skip dinner. After the cab turned around, her friend clarified that nothing was physically wrong – something painful had happened that day, and she didn't want to "ruin" Salzberg's evening. Salzberg's response was immediate: "I'm a Buddhist. I'm not brought down by someone's suffering." With her friend's agreement, they resumed their plans, spending a simple, undramatic evening together. In Buddhist psychology, the Pali word "tejas" has many meanings – heat, flame, fire, light, splendor, radiance, glory. Tejas is brightness, a potent energy, a strength and power of luminosity. This light exists within us, not because we are unique or special, but simply because we exist. Often overlooked or mistrusted, it is always there. The journey from constriction to expansion lies partially outside time and space – we can traverse that seemingly daunting distance with a thought, by remembering what we really care about, or coming back to our essential selves. This journey is not about abandoning the flow of life but rather about entering it more fully. We needn't be fooled by the layers of fear, craving, shame, and confusion covering over our inner light. It is never more than partially covered, and while it may feel remote, it is always accessible. Like hardy plants that can endure neglect but thrive with care, our latent luminosity can survive half-hidden, yet when nurtured, it can blaze forth, leading us toward connection, openness, and freedom.

Chapter 4: Expanding Our Daily Experience: Awe, Gratitude and Self-Respect

When we think of awe, we usually imagine encountering something vast and thrilling that's beyond our full comprehension. In this state, we're rapt, fully present, with no part of ourselves left out, no thoughts scattering to our ordinary distractions. Salzberg recalls her experience seeing the musical Hamilton on Broadway when she was feeling discouraged about a book she was writing. Watching Lin-Manuel Miranda perform the show he had created, she sat in awe thinking, "You wrote this. This all came out of your brain." For herself, she realized, "You can never just turn something in, or compromise in that way. Everything you do you have to do with 100 percent of your being." Her friend still teases her because when he asked if she wanted to go to dinner after the show, she got a strange look on her face and said, "I have to go home and write." The experience had transformed her relationship to her work, lifting her from a constricted state of discouragement to an expansive sense of possibility and commitment. Awe need not only come from grand experiences. Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest who created Homeboy Industries, the largest gang intervention program on the planet, puts great stock in awe directed toward people: "The ultimate measure of health in any community might well reside in our ability to stand in awe at what folks have to carry rather than in judgment at how they carry it... Judgment creates the distance that moves us away from each other... Awe is the great leveler." Everyday experiences – a child's laugh, a student's determination, a gesture of kindness – can move us to awe and change how we live. Researcher Barbara Fredrickson describes how positive states like awe and gratitude aren't just feel-good indulgences but serve as the basis for a broadened scope of awareness. They allow us to develop our consciousness to include a wider array of thoughts, actions, and perceptions. According to Fredrickson's "broaden and build" theory, positivity opens us to consider possibilities otherwise hidden from view. It even improves our peripheral vision! "Your positivity and your openness feed on and reinforce each other," she says, "creating a buoyant upward spiral within you." Gratitude, in particular, can quickly shift us from stress to a calmer state. Linda Stone, a tech thought leader who coined phrases like "continuous partial attention" and "email apnea," shared a revealing story with Salzberg. While demonstrating a breathing technique to manage anxiety during a presentation, Stone remained stressed despite her efforts, with her biofeedback device showing "red" indicators. When she switched approaches and focused on feeling embodied gratitude toward someone in the audience, people gasped as her readings immediately shifted to "blue" – indicating a relaxed state. For Stone, this powerfully demonstrated how emotions like gratitude, especially when experienced in an embodied way, can counteract stress more effectively than techniques alone. Pride – not as conceit but as healthy self-respect – is another expansive quality. It emerges when we honor our accomplishments or recognize our capacity to grow and change. Salzberg recalls when the Dalai Lama visited the Insight Meditation Society in 1979. A young meditator expressed discouragement, saying, "I don't think I have any capacity for developing insight or compassion." The Dalai Lama looked surprised and responded simply: "That's just wrong." He went on to explain the potential that exists inside every person for growth. This message has stayed with Salzberg whenever she encounters someone assuming defeat before they even try, reminding her that discouragement is just a set of thoughts and feelings that can be examined mindfully like any others.

Chapter 5: Recognizing Connection: Moving from Isolation to Belonging

Connection is a profound human need. Salzberg distinguishes between solitude and loneliness – solitude can enhance personal growth, while loneliness includes feelings of being abandoned, discounted, not belonging. Loneliness can be like what Tibetan Buddhism calls the "bardo," the intermediate state between death and rebirth, where we feel we've been erased or stranded in an adjunct world, unacknowledged and disconnected. Our society has seen a surge in loneliness due to declining participation in social structures, increased atomization, outsized emphasis on individualism, and overreliance on technology. Salzberg shares a story of a woman in New York City who told her, "What I miss the most are the random conversations I might have with someone sitting next to me on a bus or waiting in line at the grocery store... Now everyone's face is buried in their phones. No one talks anymore." During the COVID pandemic, Rev. Cathy Bristow responded to isolation by creating a 24-hour free phone-in service for medical professionals, staffed with volunteer chaplains, therapists, and healers. As she told Salzberg: "Like so many people during the pandemic, I became so constricted. I thought, What can I do?... And then I thought, Well, wait a minute. I can do something." Volunteers would answer calls saying, "I'm here for you," offering five minutes of deep listening, prayer, meditation, or breathing exercises. Some would even sing if callers wanted that. This created "circles of caring" during a time of profound disconnection. Salzberg suggests that connection is ultimately an inner state. Even when physically alone, we can practice lovingkindness meditation to generate a sense of connection. She shares a story of a friend hospitalized with COVID who was resentful when given a roommate. Unable to sleep, her friend decided to do lovingkindness meditation for hours, silently repeating phrases for his roommate: "May you be happy; may you again be healthy; may you have a peaceful heart." When they first met the next day, the roommate said, "There's such a calm, lovely energy coming from your side of the room. It helped me a lot." This reveals the subtle yet powerful layers of connection possible beyond physical interaction. Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard's research on how trees communicate through underground fungal networks provides a beautiful metaphor for interconnection. Through what's playfully called the "Wood Wide Web," trees share resources, send warnings, and support each other in times of stress. Hub trees, often larger and taller, serve as centers of connection, generously sharing water and nutrients with smaller trees. As Simard writes, "When Mother Trees—the majestic hubs at the center of forest communication, protection, and sentience—die, they pass their wisdom to their kin, generation after generation." Similarly, the Buddhist image of Indra's net depicts the universe as a net of infinite proportions where at each intersection point sits a multifaceted, reflective jewel. Each jewel reflects all other jewels, including the reflections held within those jewels. To look at ourselves is to discover all beings; to look at others is to see ourselves. This vision of interconnection reminds us that we don't lose ourselves when we connect with others – we find ourselves. We find the voice within that isn't overcome by fear or unworthiness but recognizes a bigger sense of possibility. As Anne Lamott shared with Salzberg, a child once told her mother who was trying to comfort her, "I need someone with skin on." Lamott's understanding is simple: "All I know of God is Jesus and Mary, who I adore... The message is, to me on a daily basis, get thirsty people water, teach little kids how to swim, and be God with skin." This sense of purpose gives us a path, even if we sometimes fall down or get distracted. We have a way to follow toward a life that is less disconnected, much happier, and much freer.

Chapter 6: The Clarity of Vision: Seeing Our Conditioned Patterns and Breaking Free

In various schools of Buddhist teaching, the true nature of the mind is described as free, unconfined, expansive – like the sky. Its spaciousness is immense, unspoiled by cloud formations or storms moving through it. And just as light permeates the sky, our minds are permeated by the light of awareness, manifesting as clarity. As we pay attention with fewer preconceptions and more willingness to come close to our experience, much gets illuminated. We can not only inhabit our lives more freely but understand them more fully: What brings us suffering? What releases us from suffering? When are we strong? How alone are we, really? Along this journey, we encounter questions like "What do I most deeply want?" and "What would I benefit from letting go of?" We aren't engaging in relentless self-scrutiny but willingly exploring with joy at our ability to make choices. One meditation insight is known as "knowledge and vision of what is path and what is not-path" – discerning what we can trust and rely on. In formal practice, this reminds us not to be distracted by shiny things but to keep paying attention until we abide in equanimity. In daily life, this clarity helps us recognize certain impulses: "I've been down this road before. This resentment/grasping/endless self-criticism is wrapped in such shiny paper, but I've seen its ultimate bitter unfolding. I think I'll let it go." As clarity dawns, we begin to destigmatize pain. Bell hooks once said that "one of the mighty illusions that is constructed in the dailiness of life in our culture is that all pain is a negation of worthiness, that the real chosen people, the real worthy people, are the people that are most free from pain." But as educator Parker Palmer notes about autumn, "If I look more deeply, I may see the myriad possibilities being planted to bear fruit in some season yet to come... On the surface, it seemed that life was lessening, but silently and lavishly the seeds of new life were always being sown." With clarity, we become kinder to ourselves as we journey. Poet Diego Perez (known as Yung Pueblo) shares how meditation transformed his approach to himself and others: "Before I started meditating, my heart felt so rough... It wasn't until meditation taught me how to deal with myself gently that I was then able to bring that gentleness into my everyday affairs with my family, with my wife, with my friends." We also begin to see how we've been conditioned. Therapist Steve Dansiger, who developed a trauma treatment protocol combining Buddhist mindfulness with EMDR therapy, explains how unprocessed trauma affects us: "When someone who has unhealed, unprocessed, maladaptively stored traumas encounters a new event that has some of the flavor, the sounds, the sights, the affect, the perspective of the old event, it then turns it into this new, in-the-moment, terrible event. Without a narrative, without a time stamp." Through therapeutic processing, these memories can lose their emotional charge while still being recognized – like "a black-and-white picture" that's "about five feet away." With clarity, we see that actions have consequences. Though our worldview may become vast as the sky, our actions matter deeply. As the 8th-century Buddhist master Padmasambhava advised, "Though the view should be as vast as the sky, keep your conduct as fine as barley flour." Every aspect of our lives connects to every other aspect, making integrity essential. Perhaps most profoundly, clarity reveals the truth of change. We often fall into extreme views – either believing there is something solid to grasp in a changing world or thinking nothing matters at all. The Middle Way avoids both extremes, showing us that everything arises yet has no substance. The world is shimmering, translucent, happening – yet insubstantial and fleeting. The Buddha compared life to a rainbow, an echo, a dream, a drop of dew on a blade of grass, a flash of lightning in a summer sky. This deeper glimpse into change offers us a tender, exultant beauty to every moment, even as we recognize its fleeting nature. As Yung Pueblo told Salzberg about healing and creativity: "When you reverse that process and you start pulling back all those layers and unbinding all these knots in the mind, you get a natural emergence of creativity that comes out of nowhere... There's a new creativity you can use to look at old problems in your life and come up with new solutions."

Chapter 7: Aspiration: The Compass for Our Journey to Freedom

In spring 2021, still sheltering in place in Massachusetts, Salzberg watched Saturday Night Seder online for Passover. The Seder ceremony ends with the heartfelt yearning "Next year in Jerusalem" – a metaphor for escape from narrow straits, from confinement due to being stuck in prevailing stories about ourselves or those we tell ourselves. The fuel for taking that first step toward a new way of living is aspiration. Salzberg reflects on herself at eighteen, feeling fragmented and searching for a narrative thread to tie her life experiences into something meaningful. Something within her flickered, saying that wholeness and connection were possible, that things could be different and she could be happier. This formed into an aspiration to bring that possibility to life, leading her to India to learn meditation. Many people experience themselves as fragmented – perhaps confident with friends but hesitant at work, or comfortable alone but painfully shy with others. Aspiration captures what might connect these fragments and powers the journey to making it real. It differs from corrective goals or expectations, though those might be healing to resolve. Salzberg shares an example of a friend who was told in third grade that his voice was bad and to just mouth the words. Years later, singing lessons helped release him from that comment, and now he sings with joy, making those around him happy through his evident delight. Aspiration also differs from a bucket list of experiences we hope to have before we die. While these might be rewarding or exciting, they aren't necessarily core to our vision of what's truly meaningful. Aspiration is a broad vision of meaning, a North Star by which to navigate, a guide for returning when we've felt lost. Yet it's not hovering disconnected from everyday life – it manifests through our intentions, speech, actions, and choices each day. Salzberg's own aspiration is to live in touch with goodness, to be a force of goodness, to weave a story of life made of love rather than fear. During the pandemic isolation, while she didn't learn Spanish or thoroughly clean her house as planned, she did resolve to be kinder – from rereading emails before sending them to making a point of thanking people whose generosity she might have taken for granted. Having a clear aspiration gave her ballast in a world of constant change and illuminated each crossroads she encountered. Many long for an underlying sense of meaning, something to believe in regardless of circumstances, a navigational force to pull life's disparate pieces into a whole. A commitment to an aspiration like kindness can be the thread running through our successes, disappointments, delights, and difficulties – making our lives seamless. In 1997, Salzberg overheard writer Alice Walker say, "As I get older, I realize that the thing I value the most is good-heartedness." This comment became a touchstone for Salzberg, leading her to explore whether she could be strong and still kind, smart and still generous, compassionate to herself while dedicated to compassion for others. At the end of Saturday Night Seder, actor Harvey Fierstein offered his interpretation of "Next year in Jerusalem": "Next Year in Jerusalem, to me means, next year we will be in our home. And that home will be a world without fear, a world without hunger, a world without poverty and rot... Next year we will be grateful for the gift of life we've been given... Next year the word stranger will be meaningless because next year, we will all be together in our home."

Summary

The journey from constriction to expansion is not a straight line but a spiral path we travel again and again. When we find ourselves in narrow straits – caught in patterns of craving, aversion, or delusion – we can learn to surround these states with spaciousness, ease of heart, and kindness. Rather than fighting against difficult emotions or circumstances, we develop a ministry of presence toward them, creating enough space to understand without being defined. This allows us to recognize the light within that has always been there, covered but never extinguished. The practices that expand our daily experience – cultivating awe, gratitude, and self-respect – are not merely pleasant indulgences but powerful tools that broaden our perspective and build inner resources. They help us recognize our fundamental interconnection with all of life, moving us from isolation to belonging. With the light of clarity, we can see our conditioned patterns more clearly and discern what truly leads to freedom. Throughout this journey, aspiration serves as our compass, providing direction when we feel lost and infusing our daily choices with meaning and purpose. What matters most isn't how quickly we travel or how many times we fall, but our willingness to begin again with kindness toward ourselves and others. As Sharon Salzberg's wisdom reveals, freedom isn't found by escaping life's challenges but by meeting them with an open heart. Each time we choose presence over avoidance, connection over isolation, or love over fear, we take another step on this sacred journey. The wonder of it all is that the destination – that sense of expansiveness, belonging, and aliveness we seek – is available in this very moment, whenever we remember to look for it.

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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