Sally Quinn Washington Post February 4th 2025
I woke up the morning of Nov. 6 with a sinking feeling. Turning on both my phone and TV, I learned to my shock that Donald Trump had been elected.
I was in denial for several days, my stomach in turmoil. Then, I realized what I was really experiencing: grief. I looked up Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. I moved on from denial to anger to bargaining. What could I have done to prevent this from happening? I should have been out on the streets protesting the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling and ringing doorbells. What kind of poor excuse for an American was I, not to have acted?Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter
Then, I got severely depressed. I took an antidepressant and called my old shrink. (A lot of good that did. He was as depressed as I was!) How was I going to live with my deepest fears? When was I going to get to acceptance?
That’s when I turned to meditation.🎤
I had joined a Zen sangha (community) outside Boston the year before. It’s led by Robert Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University, co-author of “The Good Life” on happiness and the director of the famous Grant Study, the Harvard Study of Adult Development. The sangha meets every Monday at 7:30 p.m.
I was not new to meditation. But this sangha was different. It was a weekly commitment. I enjoyed attending via Zoom. As the election neared, the hour was sometimes the only clarity I found all week, even when some of the chants made no sense to me at all. One, the Heart Sutra, completely baffled me: “Nor is there pain, or cause of pain, or cease in pain, or noble path to lead from pain; Not even wisdom to attain! Attainment too is emptiness.”
When we discussed it, everyone else in the group seemed to understand. I finally got up the courage to say, “I don’t get it.”
Everyone laughed, and, at first, I thought they were laughing at me. To my relief, a lot of them didn’t get it either. Waldinger laughed, too, and patiently explained the meaning of the sutra. I listened carefully, but, to tell the truth, I still didn’t understand it.
I flashed back to many years ago, when the Aspen Institute had a small lunch for the Dalai Lama. I persuaded my husband, Ben Bradlee, to go, reluctantly. The Dalai Lama, who had written for On Faith, the blog I ran for The Post, was an adorable man, dressed in sleeveless saffron robes. He spoke to us through an interpreter about Buddhism. He was a very jolly fellow and giggled much of the time. At the end of the Dalai Lama’s presentation, Ben sat back in his chair and in a loud, growly voice said, “I don’t get it.” Everyone burst out laughing. (The irony about Ben was, he might have been the most practicing Buddhist I knew. He worked in the woods for eight hours a day when we went to the country, chopping wood, clearing and burning brush. He called it mind-emptying, which is basically meditating. He said it was the only way he made it through Watergate.)
At first, I found the sessions weird. Waldinger — who admitted he had found it weird in the beginning, too — would do a quick, pithy reading, and then there would be chanting and bowing and bells and candles for 10 or 15 minutes, then wooden claps, a quick break and a 25-minute sit. I learned early on the importance of breathing. We know that when you get upset or agitated, you should take a deep breath. This is especially true of meditation. If your mind is going crazy, you can chant your mantra and concentrate on your breathing until you calm down. It really works.
I found the ritual soothing. Afterward, Waldinger would often give a dharma talk, followed by a discussion, final vows and a roundtable of what we had gotten out of the session. It was a bit Peter, Paul and Mary for my taste.
But I had an odd sensation of feeling secure in this sangha. My brother Bill is a practicing Buddhist and meditates daily. He is one of the most peaceful, loving people I have ever known. I had been reading a lot about the effects of meditation, and I wanted to experience those effects. So I kept at it, turning down other invitations for Monday nights so as not to miss a session. I liked the dharma talks and the koans (riddles) and the discussions. The sits were not boring but relaxing, though I didn’t find them enlightening in the beginning. Every few weeks, Waldinger would have short breakout sessions with each of us. It was basically a five-minute shrink session that I got more out of than most 50-minute shrink sessions. During these sessions, I achieved what I thought was enlightenment, though Waldinger convinced me that should not be a goal since most of us will never really achieve enlightenment — in this life anyway.
A year ago, disaster struck. I got covid and had a major stroke. When I became lucid, I was hit with more tragedies: deaths of close friends, extreme family medical problems and worries about the state of the country. Hardly able to sit up, I was inspired to return to the sangha two weeks after the stroke. This time, I felt it was working for me. I felt embraced. The bells and chants were reassuring, the dharma talks meaningful, and the meditation itself was an enormous release.
Before I joined, I had been intimidated by the idea that I had to push negative thoughts, or all thoughts, out of my head. I learned that you don’t have to empty your mind, that you can let thoughts come and go, that you can feel anger, sadness, frustration, despair — all the things you feel in your daily life. So I accepted every thought and, as Waldinger advised, tried to “just sit with it.” After a while, some of the chitchat in my brain would disappear. My goal was to empty my mind of clutter, to reach a level in which my mind was still, calm and serene and I could see clearly. My brother taught me to respond to my thoughts rather than to react. But how could I respond to something upsetting in a graceful, calm and serene manner? How could I react without yielding my values, my ethics, my principles? How could I learn to accept rather than deny?
Like everything worth doing, it requires practice. And over time, it gets easier.
One of the things that appealed to me was the Four Noble Truths, the basics of Buddhism: Suffering. The cause of suffering. The cessation of suffering. The path that leads to the cessation of suffering. I wanted to understand how to follow that path.
Waldinger suggests setting intentions rather than goals. One intention is to be “fully alive and fully present for this precious, fleeting existence.” Others are being kinder, caring more about family and friends, trying to relieve the suffering of others, helping them feel good about themselves, paying attention to them. Those are the “north stars” he talks about.
After the election, Waldinger gave a dharma talk. He described how he went to bed early the night before so he wouldn’t have to find out the results of the election, then meditated for hours until he finally got up his courage. His feelings were rage, fear, disgust. He later wrote: “I find myself unsure of how to keep from falling into paralyzing despair in the face of everything that’s happening in our world. I notice myself wanting to indulge in exactly the feelings that are guaranteed to make things worse, what Buddhists call the three poisons — greed, anger and delusion, the root causes of suffering.” It’s a relief to know that even Buddhist priests have the same feelings as we do.
Meditation is guilt-free for me. Judgment-free. There are no real rules to the practice. You can think any thought as long as you want and feel real feelings without feeling shame. You can totally accept yourself as you try (and maybe fail) to accept others. What surprised me about the sangha is that it’s fun. There’s laughter and interesting conversations, and it’s not at all pious or mournful.
People are drawn to meditation to relieve suffering. Our instinct is to turn away from suffering, but it’s important to go toward what is painful in your life. No one gets a pass on suffering. The most important thing to understand is that the main cause of suffering is attachment, because with attachment goes loss. Impermanence also is a cause of suffering. Nothing stays the same, and change is frightening. “If you’re lucky, life won’t break your heart,” says Waldinger. The purpose of meditation is to “sit down, shut up and pay attention.”
It was only after the election that I had sort of an epiphany. I was calmly sitting there with my eyes closed when all of a sudden I thought, “Oh!” I felt awakened. I tried to explain this to Waldinger, but he said it was impossible to explain. Zen meditation, he says, “is experiential. It’s like sex. You can’t describe it.” My epiphany was a moment of clarity. “How do you capture it?” he asks. “It’s opaque to the mind, radiant to the heart. You don’t have to understand everything.”
I know that Zen meditation is a gradual process. It’s like working a muscle. I’m so happy I stuck with it. I find that I’m not as agitated by things that used to upset me. I feel more compassionate toward others. In the five stages of grief, I felt I had finally achieved acceptance.
And then Trump picked Kimberly Guilfoyle to be ambassador to my beloved Greece, where I spent the happiest years of my childhood.
I had a total relapse. It was back to denial for me.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/01/27/trump-meditation-sally-quinn/