Reducing Reactivity (Without Becoming a Doormat) with Sharon Salzberg

2026-02-09

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What is mindfulness really? According to one fourth-grader, "Not hitting someone in the mouth." Legendary meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg joins Rick and Forrest to discuss how we can work skillfully with anger, fear, and reactivity without becoming doormats or numbing ourselves out through the lens of her new children’s book Kind Karl. They explore the protective function of anger, and how we can create more space by relating differently to our thoughts, emotions, and sense of self. Sharon shares a Buddhist lens that links anger and fear, a...

They explore the protective function of anger, and how we can create more space by relating differently to our thoughts, emotions, and sense of self. Sharon shares a Buddhist lens that links anger and fear, and how looking closely at “what’s in the anger” can help us get clarity without collateral damage. Along the way, they talk about the difference between healthy moral anger and the habit of anger, how to extract the positive energy from difficult emotions without getting burned, and how lovingkindness and self-compassion can be active, strengthening forces.

About our Guest: Sharon Salzberg is the co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society, a world-renowned teacher of mindfulness, and author or co-author of 14 books including her seminal work Lovingkindness and her first children’s book Kind Karl: A Little Crocodile with Big Feelings.

Key Topics:

0:00: Intro and Sharon’s new children’s book

1:30: Rick and Sharon’s personal history

3:40: Making abstract concepts direct and simple

6:00: “Mindfulness means not hitting someone in the mouth.”

12:30: Equanimity, reactivity, and our relationship with pleasure and pain

26:48: Healthy moral anger and outrage

34:17: How mindfulness decenters the self

43:53: Decoupling identity from states of suffering

50:23: Dissolving boundaries, self protection, and loneliness

1:03:09: Recap

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