The Reboot Podcast

When suffering surrounds us, personal, collective, and historical, how do we make meaning without being defined or hardened by pain? In this candid and compassionate conversation, Jerry Colonna invites his teacher and dear friend, Sharon Salzberg, to explore “the end of suffering” and the transformative power of wise hope, compassion, and agency, especially in turbulent times.

Rooted in Buddhist wisdom but accessible to all, Jerry Colonna and Sharon Salzberg discuss what it means to relate differently to suffering, without denying its presence or being overtaken by it. Together, they reflect on the paradox of holding both pain and joy, and the importance of not confusing suffering with punishment or personal failure.

Show Highlights

“If suffering is universal one degree or another, why is it that some or how is it that some people seem to emerge bitter and isolated and resentful, and other people actually do emerge, if emerge is the right word, with incredible compassion and love and a sense of being part of a whole?”-  Sharon Salzberg

“Things can be really bad and harrowing in life, and to be able to recognize that and not deny it and not pretend that’s part of it. But we also have to have a sense of the possible because everything is changing all of the time. Life is change. It’s movement. And so rather than being defined by the terrible situation or the painful feeling, we feel it, we’re authentic with it, and we have this sense of renewal or beginnings or the light that might also be present.” – Sharon Salzberg

“The idea of karma is really that actions are consequential. So, how we are responding to what’s happening right now is planting a seed for the future. And that’s the action that we can take.” – Sharon Salzberg

“I think we are genuinely all impacted, but we like to look away, you know, and pretend that we’re immune in some way, you know, because it’s comforting. We’re not going to be in perfect control of the unfolding of life. And we look at many, many causes and conditions when we can discern them.” – Sharon Salzberg

“The vulnerability, the fragility of life, is really pretty equally distributed. Any one of us can pick up a phone message and have a different life than the one we had before. That’s how things are. In all directions, wondrous and beautiful as well as really terrible and shocking. It’s that unreliability of life, the constant change, and the insecurity. We share that.” – Sharon Salzberg

“Hatred in the end can destroy us. And it is like in the Buddhist psychology compared to, and I don’t mean just feeling it. I mean being embroiled in it, overcome by it, defined by it. Anger or hatred is likened to a forest fire which can burn up its own support, which is our bodies, our nervous system, our families, our happiness, our own happiness.” – Sharon Salzberg

“It feels like compassion and overcoming our own guilt, our own shame, our own helplessness, our isolation, our sense that this is only happening to us. All of these things are about wisdom. It’s about responding to suffering with wisdom.” – Jerry Colonna