Enlightenment often sounds like a lofty, unattainable goal. But mindfulness teacher and author Susan Kaiser Greenland believes we can find enlightenment in every moment. In her new book, Real-World Enlightenment: Discovering the Magic in the OrdinaryDrawing on a range of wisdom traditions, she presents practical tools for easing anxiety and tapping into our innate goodness.
In a recent episode Life is as it is, Tricycle‘s editor-in-chief James Shaheen and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg spoke with Kaiser Greenland about why she thinks we already have what we need to be free, the power of getting out of our own way, and how to stop taking yourself too seriously.
JS: You say that enlightenment can sometimes sound unattainable, and explain that real-world enlightenment is something we can all experience in our everyday lives. So what do you mean by real-world enlightenment?
SKG: I think we’ve all experienced what I call real-world enlightenment. It’s a moment when our ego disappears and we connect with one of the qualities that are always with us: consciousness, love, compassion, wisdom. Everything disappears and we suddenly feel like we’re part of something much greater than ourselves. This is not a conceptual experience, it’s something we actually feel. Without training, it usually comes as a surprise, but with training, practice, and motivation, we can develop the ability to fall into such moments more frequently.
SS: You structure the book around what you call the “golden thread,” a universal theme across wisdom traditions that connects to psychological and emotional freedom. Can you tell us more about this golden thread?
SKG: The Golden Thread is named after an educational psychologist named Jerome Bruner, who spoke of a golden thread woven into the curriculum. I loved this phrase because when I worked in schools and worked with parents, we talked about universal themes that are common to all kinds of wisdom traditions: kindness, patience, how everything is connected, and how everything is made up of multiple, shifting, interdependent components.
I love the idea of the golden thread because it’s woven everywhere. If we can see that this thread is everywhere, we can tap into it even in moments of chaos. And that’s the goal of real-world enlightenment. There are mindfulness-based strategies that can help calm and soothe your nervous system even when you’re feeling very chaotic, and by tapping into these themes, you can go deeper in an instant.
SS: You say that one of the most fundamental principles of the wisdom tradition is that goodness is present in everyone, and that in Mahayana Buddhism this goodness is considered to be the source of enlightenment. So how can we build the capacity to recognize and embody the inherent goodness within ourselves?
SKG: Goodness is available to us, whether it’s here from the beginning or there are seeds of goodness that we can cultivate and nurture. This idea of going out of our way to bring out goodness or to discern goodness in others is an important part of my experience of practicing Buddhism. The idea is to discern goodness even in actions that on the surface don’t seem all that good. But if we dig a little deeper, we find that good often comes from a sense of love and compassion that seeks to alleviate suffering, even if the action is not skillful.
“We tend to get in our own way when it comes to finding freedom.”
The second approach that’s important to remember is regulating your nervous system. When your nervous system is activated, it’s very difficult to get out of your way. When you become aware of that activation and use mindfulness-based strategies to calm yourself down and reduce your fight-or-flight response, you can become more open-minded and actually begin to surrender to the goodness, joy, love, and compassion that’s always here.
SS: You also say that we have what it takes to be free. What does that mean?
SKG: It is these qualities that we all have within us that we need to be free. We tend to get in the way of finding our freedom. Speaking for myself, I have suffered from anxiety my whole life, so anxiety gets in the way and limits my freedom. I think I am helping myself, but in reality, that is not always the case. [doing so]To achieve psychological freedom, all we need is to be able to tap into our inner qualities of mindfulness, balance, compassion, love and playfulness, which will free us from our own emotional baggage.
JS: You say that one of the themes you explore is renunciation, which you say is the first step towards freedom from suffering. So how do you understand renunciation, and what does renunciation look like for an average person?
SKG: Renunciation sounds like giving up something. Who wants to give up something? But renunciation is actually one of the most amazing forms of peace I’ve experienced in my practice. This is one of the teachings of Mingyur Rinpoche that I really appreciate: the idea of letting go without giving up. This allows us to be more open to experience and to see it in a different way than if we limited our perception by our expectations of the outcome.
There are many other kinds of abandonment. One of the great things about growing older is that we all learn. [renunciation]For better or worse, when energy levels drop, we may have to let go of things that we were previously reluctant to let go of. For me, at least, the effect of letting go has been a great sense of relief. It’s hard because it goes against habitual patterns, but if you can weaken or eradicate those patterns, or if you find yourself in a situation in your life where you have to let go, you may see the benefits.
JS: One of the Tibetan words for renunciation Nge Johncan be translated as determination to be free. Can you explain this phrase in more detail? What is our determination to be free?
SKG: Well, I think what we are determined to be free of are these habitual patterns that prevent us from seeing things as they are, that prevent us from seeing the world as a much vaster, much more interconnected, much more ever-changing, much more mysterious, much more joyous place than we sometimes make it out to be.
Even under the best of circumstances, our perspective is very narrow. So when we see a dog or a cat or a bat or a dolphin capturing something in our environment that we completely miss, it humbles us about what our all-too-limited human perception can perceive and capture. The idea is to decide to break free from what’s inside of us that makes us absolutely certain about things. We decide to break free from our limited perspective so that we can break it down and start seeing things a little differently.
This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.
