by NAOMI MORRIS
When Sharon Salzberg returned to New York from her first trips to India in the 1970s, a crinkled cotton blouse was still exotic and people would politely sidle away from her at parties after she told them she taught meditation for a living.
Now even Starbucks sells chai (a milky Indian spice tea), and a landmark Massachusetts General Hospital study released last month has documented that the brain shows positive physical changes — in density of gray matter — after just eight weeks of meditation.
Salzberg, 58, a co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Mass., has spent more than three decades helping Westerners access a daily spiritual practice that originated in Buddhism but is not confined to that faith.
…
Although she was raised Jewish and in certain contexts identifies as Buddhist, Salzberg believes meditation can complement any faith tradition.
“Faith is not a commodity that you either have or don’t have enough of, or the right kind of,” she said. “It’s an ongoing process. The opposite of faith is despair.”
Even her Buddhist teachers did not tout Buddhism as the only way to truth, Salzberg said. She remembers that her first teacher told her “the Buddha did not teach Buddhism; he taught a way of life.” Her second teacher went even further: “The Buddha’s enlightenment solved the Buddha’s problem. Now you go solve yours.”
Los Angeles Times for more
(Thanks to reader)