Becoming Wise is supported by the Fetzer Institute.

I've had hundreds of big conversations, and my conversation partners share wisdom I carry with me wherever I go.

Robert Thurman and Sharon Salzberg are icons of American Buddhism, and they are joyful longtime friends.

They challenge us to reframe our anger by seeing love for our enemies as an act of self-compassion.

This is Becoming Wise. I'm Krista Tippett.

Something that I think about a lot is that, I think, you know, say in Christianity, this is often discussed as there's the problem of evil or, you know, great enemies.

And even maybe in our culture, we tend to focus on these dramatic, you know, drama-sized enemies, you know, the bully or the catastrophic danger or the murderer.

But, you know, something that I'm aware of in real life, day to day, I think so much pain and suffering is caused by, I don't know what I would even call maybe the near outer enemy, right? Not the villain out there, but the people close to us, you know, in workplaces or in families or in friendships.

I mean, it's like people are vulnerable and it's those people who have a power, such

a destructive power to do damage in those circumstances.

And where do these beautiful

teachings start to speak there? I think that's so crucial. I want to say something about that

middle place, learning to stop hating. Yeah. Apart from, because the word love is so loaded. And

what does it mean? Our fear, of course, is that it

means something very passive and complacent and I'm going to let people hurt me and I'm going to

let them oppress other people and I'm going to be a dormant. It's a very nuanced and subtle

quality. It's very hard to see love as a force as a power rather than as a weakness, but that is its reality.

So that middle place is very compelling, whether it's a colleague at work who's sort of annoying or it's somebody who disappoints us, just in the neighborhood or our community, or it's the villain even, to have some recognition that the way we can be

consumed by hatred or even just an obsession, you know, that habit we can have of going over

someone's faults again and again and again, it's the same list, but we'd like to go over it again,

you know, three more times. And the way we give over so much of our energy to someone else

in this kind of negative or destructive way. And, you know, whether it's a minor annoyance

...