Real Change

How can we create meaningful, lasting change in a world where suffering, injustice, and chaos seem ever-present? In Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World, meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg argues that true transformation—whether personal or societal—begins with awareness and compassion cultivated from within. She contends that while action is necessary, action without mindfulness and emotional balance perpetuates burnout, anger, and despair. Real change, she insists, comes when activism and mindfulness meet: when the heart fuels the hands.

Salzberg builds her argument around a timeless Buddhist insight: we are not in control of everything that happens, but we can control how we meet what happens. She explores how mindfulness and lovingkindness help us respond to both our private suffering and our collective crises with clarity rather than overwhelm. Drawing on her decades of teaching meditation and her deep involvement in social movements, Salzberg weaves stories of activists, educators, survivors, and caregivers who found resilience through awareness—a doctor treating neglected diseases, a parent surviving unimaginable loss, or an aid worker facing burnout. Through these voices, she shows how compassion and equanimity are not retreats from the world’s pain but radical tools for engaging it.

From Presence to Action: The Core Argument

At the heart of Real Change is the insight that our internal states mirror and shape the outer world. When we act from greed, anger, or delusion, even good causes falter; when we act from steadiness and love, our actions become medicine rather than contagion. Salzberg’s message echoes Thich Nhat Hanh’s idea of “engaged Buddhism”—that mindfulness is not for mountaintops but for the marketplace, the protest, and the family living room. She integrates ancient Buddhist teachings like the Eight Worldly Winds—gain and loss, praise and blame, pleasure and pain, fame and disrepute—with modern stories of resilience and activism. The key, she argues, is balance: the ability to hold joy and sorrow, hope and grief, engagement and acceptance simultaneously.

A Spiritual Toolkit for a Turbulent Age

Throughout the book, Salzberg introduces practices that help you stay present and compassionate amid turmoil. She teaches how to cultivate agency in the face of fear (chapter 2), transform anger into courage (chapter 3), move from grief to resilience (chapter 4), and nourish yourself without guilt (chapter 5). Later chapters explore interconnection, clear-sightedness, and equanimity—qualities that sustain long-term engagement without despair. Her guided meditations, such as lovingkindness and equanimity phrases (“I care about your pain, and I cannot control it”), provide readers tangible ways to anchor awareness in daily life.

Each of these teachings reflects key Buddhist principles reframed for modern activism. Like the Dalai Lama’s “simple religion of kindness” or bell hooks’s idea of “love as a practice of freedom,” Salzberg’s mindfulness is practical and revolutionary. It’s about reclaiming presence when the world demands panic. “Change,” she writes, “is not just what we do, but how we do it.” Her counsel is especially resonant in times of crisis: pandemics, inequality, ecological upheaval. In such times, mindfulness is not withdrawal—it’s resilience in motion.

Why It Matters Now

Salzberg wrote Real Change during an era of global uncertainty—political division, climate anxiety, and pandemic isolation—but her message transcends its moment. She invites us to ask: What does it mean to stay awake and compassionate when the world feels overwhelming? What if mindfulness could fuel social justice instead of numbing us to suffering? In answering these, she reframes activism as a spiritual practice and meditation as an act of courage. Her stories—from the civil rights movement’s songs of hope to children meditating in Baltimore schools—illustrate that awareness and love are not luxuries but vital resources for anyone working toward change.

Across eight chapters, Salzberg leads readers through a journey: finding agency in times of paralysis; turning anger into clarity; embracing grief as connection; replenishing self-care; awakening to interconnection; seeing through bias to systems; cultivating equanimity; and finally, acting with love and wisdom. She closes where she begins—with presence. “The most precious gift,” she echoes Thich Nhat Hanh, “is our presence.” From this presence, real change grows—like grass in Hiroshima after devastation. This, Salzberg suggests, is both an ancient truth and a modern necessity.

Salzberg begins the journey of real change with agency—the deeply human sense that you can choose and act meaningfully even when life feels beyond control. She asks: What allows one person to act while another freezes in fear or despair? Agency, she argues, is the bridge between awareness and action, between compassion and courage.

Stepping Forward: The Statue of Liberty’s Lesson

For Salzberg, the Statue of Liberty embodies agency: her lifted torch symbolizes welcome, and her raised foot—midstride—signifies movement. Like Lady Liberty, you too can become an emblem of compassion in motion. Action doesn’t have to be grand; it can begin with a single step taken in alignment with your values. The crucial shift is from feeling powerless to realizing you always have something you can do—choose kindness, speak up, take rest, show up.

Stories of Awakening

Real stories bring this principle alive. ALS activist Ady Barkan turned the loss of his physical mobility into a movement for health care justice. Samantha Novick, a Parkland survivor, transformed personal pain into community activism. Each exemplifies what Salzberg calls “the fire of agency”: the decision to turn toward suffering rather than away from it. Similarly, Shelly Tygielski’s journey from a sheltered childhood to mindfulness-based activism shows how caring for one’s own awareness can ripple outward into collective healing.

(Psychologist Albert Bandura defined agency as belief in one’s capacity to influence outcomes—self-efficacy. Salzberg extends this definition beyond ego into spiritual territory: agency as choosing presence and compassion even when results are uncertain.)

Obstacles to Agency

The greatest barriers, Salzberg notes, are internal: shame, self-doubt, and learned helplessness. When institutions or conditioning tell you your voice doesn’t count—as in Ken Frazier’s account of apartheid South Africa’s silenced Black men—you internalize powerlessness. Meditation, she says, can unlearn this conditioning. By observing limiting stories as passing thoughts, you rediscover possibility. “You are not your story,” she writes, “and stories can change.”

Freedom in Caring

The chapter closes with a radical claim: caring itself is an act of liberation. Whether you’re organizing for justice like fast-food worker Shantel Walker or simply offering presence to someone suffering, you move from helplessness to aliveness. Salzberg likens this to her own turning point—leaving a life of numbness for India, where she discovered meditation. Like Lady Liberty, she stepped forward carrying a new light: the belief that awareness and compassion are the true instruments of freedom.

Anger, Salzberg argues, is neither enemy nor savior—it is energy that can destroy or liberate us depending on how we relate to it. She reframes anger not as something to suppress but as “the bodyguard of woundedness,” quoting Lama Rod Owens. When harnessed with mindfulness, anger becomes moral clarity and courage—a fire that lights the way rather than burns down the forest of our hearts.

When Anger Awakens Us

Salzberg shows how social justice movements often begin in outrage. Cesar Chavez’s labor activism, Mallika Dutt’s campaign against dowry burnings, and ACT UP’s fierce protests during the AIDS crisis—all were born of anger at violation and neglect. Anger, she writes, “can reestablish boundaries when dignity is denied.” Yet when unexamined, it quickly becomes toxic resentment, the “re-sentiment” that cycles pain endlessly.

The Buddha’s Fire Metaphor

In Buddhist psychology, anger is a forest fire that burns up its own support unless transformed through awareness. Mindfulness of anger means feeling its heat without adding fuel. Salzberg offers practical techniques: sense anger in your body, name it (“This is anger”), observe it shift, and remember it changes. This awareness turns reactivity into discernment—a moment of choice. Anger seen clearly becomes discrimination, the wisdom that says, “This behavior is wrong,” without hatred for the person.

Courage in Action

Her examples show anger’s energy transformed into compassionate courage. Immigration lawyer Heather Yountz channels fury at injustice into sharp courtroom focus, not vengeance. Buddhist priest Paco Luagoviña admits, “I’ll be angry until I die—but I don’t define myself as angry.” Instead, he directs his outrage into organizing protests for Puerto Rico. From him, Salzberg learns that feeling anger doesn’t make you violent; being conscious of it makes you effective.

The Long View

Finally, she invites a humbler perspective: “Some things are more than a one-generation fix.” Marc Solomon’s decades-long work for marriage equality reminds us that righteous anger must be paired with patience. Like Gandhi and King, sustained change requires transforming outrage into steadfast love. When anger matures, it becomes courage—the strength to act without guarantee of results, again and again.

If anger is fire, grief is water—tears that cleanse and connect. Salzberg reframes grief not as weakness but as praise, quoting Martín Prechtel: “Grief is how love honors what it misses.” By acknowledging that 'some things just hurt,' she rejects both denial and romanticizing of suffering. True resilience, she insists, doesn’t erase pain but learns to move with it.

Recognizing the Truth of Suffering

Salzberg begins with the Buddha’s First Noble Truth—there is suffering—and reinterprets it as radical permission to feel. She tells of a traumatized soldier diagnosed with PTSD whom she and Rodney Smith guided through mindfulness and self-compassion. When they reframed his symptoms as grief rather than pathology, healing began. Naming grief humanizes pain; it reminds us we are not broken.

Acknowledgment and Acceptance

The Dalai Lama’s phrase “It happened,” spoken about 9/11, became Salzberg’s mantra of acceptance. Acceptance, she explains, is not apathy—it’s the ground from which we take the next step. Zen teacher Joan Halifax calls trauma “a given, not a gift.” By meeting pain honestly rather than forcing silver linings, we restore integrity. This honesty transforms despair into resilience, much like activist Myles Horton’s long-view courage during decades of civil rights work: “The future is ready to be changed.”

Resilient Compassion

Resilience, Salzberg suggests, grows like muscle through repeated bending, not rigidity. Like her physical therapist celebrated her wobbling as “the intelligence of balance,” life teaches similar flexibility. Joel Daniels speaks of forgiving himself for not always responding with love—proof that resilience isn’t perfection but recovery. And through mindfulness, journalist Dahr Jamail learns to grieve the planet’s decline without paralysis: grief becoming gratitude for life itself.

Connection Through Loss

In one of the book’s most moving moments, Salzberg quotes Desmond Tutu: “It is the hard times that knit us more closely together.” Fred Guttenberg, who lost his daughter at Parkland, calls grief a strange club of love. From shared sorrow arises solidarity—the soil of compassion. When we no longer fear our grief, we realize life has not forgotten us. It is holding us, even as we break open.

After exploring pain, Salzberg turns inward to replenishment. “We all long to feel at home,” she writes—at home in our bodies, our minds, our purpose. Self-care, far from selfishness, is what sustains compassion in action. Without tending to our own well-being, our activism and love collapse under exhaustion.

The Myth of Martyrdom

Injustice often seduces caring people into overwork, guilt, and burnout. Quoting scholars Cher Weixia Chen and Paul Gorski, Salzberg calls this the “culture of martyrdom” in activism. Leaders like Rachel Gutter, once a workaholic environmentalist, recognized that preaching work-life balance while ignoring her own needs was hypocrisy. True leadership, she found, includes rest and authenticity.

Practicing Happiness

Through simple tools—reflecting on what restores you, listing stressors and responses—Salzberg asks readers to discover their unique sources of renewal. For some, it’s mountains or stardust; for others, cycling or song. She quotes Rev. angel Kyodo williams: “Whatever we practice is what we’ll continue to practice.” If we practice depletion, we’ll perpetuate it; if we practice presence, we’ll embody it.

Joy as Resistance

Joy, Salzberg insists, is not indulgence—it’s defiance. She recounts how Bernice Johnson Reagon’s protest songs in the civil rights movement “took back the air in the room.” Like the Freedom Riders who “marched singing,” joy strengthens rather than denies truth. Friedrike Merck’s story of finding healing in meditation and choir singing underscores that beauty reawakens courage.

Balancing Compassion with Boundaries

Drawing on neuroscience (Tania Singer’s studies) and Buddhist psychology, Salzberg differentiates empathy from compassion. Empathy feels with and exhausts; compassion feels for and sustains. The key is equanimity—the capacity to care deeply without drowning. Her advice is simple but profound: give from overflow, not depletion. In doing so, you come home to yourself not as a small self, but as a steady source of love in motion.

In one of the book’s most expansive chapters, Salzberg examines interconnection—the truth that everything we do affects everything else. Quoting Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching of “interbeing,” she writes, “We share this planet, we share this life.” Awakening to this reality dissolves alienation and fuels compassion-based action.

Seeing the Web of Life

Salzberg uses vivid metaphors—a tree sustained by clouds, sunlight, soil—to illustrate how nothing stands alone. When you see that a piece of paper contains the rain and the logger’s labor, it becomes impossible to act without mindfulness. This perception enlarges empathy beyond personal feelings into ecological and social awareness.

Facing the Empathy Gap

Education scholar Pedro Noguera calls modern disconnection a “crisis of connection.” Salzberg traces its symptoms: prejudice, loneliness, hyper-individualism. She reminds us that mindfulness reconnects us by teaching us to “look through each other’s eyes,” as the Cleveland Clinic’s video asks. From this perspective, difference becomes relationship, not threat.

From Isolation to Teamwork

Coach George Mumford’s work with NBA players exemplifies this shift. His mantra—“the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack”—captures Salzberg’s central vision: you thrive when others thrive. Interconnection turns competition into collaboration, turning “me” into “we.”

Expanding Without Losing Boundaries

Acknowledging interdependence doesn’t mean erasing individuality or permitting harm. Salzberg shares how the Dalai Lama advised maintaining loving boundaries even with an unsafe parent—love “from a distance.” Compassion doesn’t mean letting others violate us; it means refusing to turn our pain into hate. In this balance, she finds the promise of a healed world: not uniformity, but unity grounded in awareness.

Real change requires clear seeing—recognizing how bias and assumption distort our perception. Citing Mahzarin Banaji’s famous riddle of the surgeon mother, Salzberg shows how unconscious beliefs shape even compassionate minds. Mindfulness, she argues, trains us to notice these mental habits as they form, creating freedom to choose instead of react.

Mindfulness and Clear Comprehension

In Buddhism, mindfulness (sati) is paired with sampajanna, clear comprehension. Awareness without understanding can’t transform; insight without awareness lacks grounding. Together, they build discernment: ‘Is my action aligned with my deeper purpose?’ Salzberg links this to racial justice scholar Rhonda Magee’s inquiry into embodied identity—using mindfulness to examine privilege, race, and assumption with compassion instead of guilt.

Looking at Causes and Conditions

Thai activist Sulak Sivaraksa advises, “If you want to end the sex trade, look at agricultural policy.” Salzberg uses this to illustrate systems thinking: seeking the roots beneath the symptoms. The same insight drives Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement and Bhikkhu Bodhi’s focus on education for girls to end hunger. Seeing clearly means widening your lens until the personal reveals the structural.

From Judgment to Curiosity

Playwright Lynn Nottage’s mantra while writing Sweat—“replace judgment with curiosity”—embodies Salzberg’s approach. When we examine our assumptions without defensiveness, we open creative possibilities for change. Whether confronting bias in ourselves or systems, curiosity softens shame into insight.

Awareness as Collective Intelligence

Clear seeing culminates in what Salzberg calls “network looking”—perceiving how lives and systems intertwine. With educators, activists, and philanthropists like Ellen Agler and Erica Ford, she illustrates mindful systems change: tackling root causes, not symptoms. The result is a leadership style defined by humility, collaboration, and empathy—“managed ego,” in Jeff Walker’s phrase. This clarity, born of mindfulness, is the vision behind every real change.

In her final chapter, Salzberg unveils the crown jewel of mindfulness: upekkha, or equanimity—a dynamic balance born of wisdom. Equanimity, she insists, is not indifference but full-hearted presence that can hold both joy and pain without collapse. It is what allows compassion to be sustainable and activism to endure.

The Gyroscope of the Mind

Salzberg likens equanimity to a gyroscope—spinning steadily, flexible yet centered. Its strength comes from a stable core: meaning and values. Stories like Joshin’s transformation from hardship into service show how inner purpose becomes this axis. With such a center, life’s winds can tilt us without toppling us.

Holding Everything

Equanimity is the “heart as wide as the world,” able to hold tragedy and wonder simultaneously. When Parkland survivor Samantha Novick asked how to move from despair to joy, Salzberg replied, “You don’t—you hold both.” Like Joanna Macy’s teaching that pain for the world contains love for the world, equanimity embraces paradox. It’s the maturity of peace that doesn’t depend on circumstances.

Action Without Attachment

Citing the Buddha’s metaphor of crossing a flood “without hurrying or lingering,” Salzberg shows how balance enables effective action. We do what we can while releasing obsession with results—sowing intention and skill, not control. This mindset prevents burnout, captured in T.S. Eliot’s line she loves: “For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

Presence as Activism

Equanimity culminates in one practice: showing up. Whether sitting silently beside a dying father, teaching mindfulness to aid workers, or cooking a forgiving meal, presence itself becomes transformation. “The most precious gift we can offer,” writes Thich Nhat Hanh, “is our presence.” With equanimity, Salzberg concludes, we rediscover that peace and power need not oppose each other—they are the same steady light we carry into a turbulent world.