• Introduction: Shelly Tygielski is the author of “Sit Down to Rise Up” and founder of Pandemic of Love. She’s recognized for her work in trauma mindfulness and self-care.
• Life Events: Shelly shares her life experiences, including moving from Israel to the US, being kidnapped at age two, and going blind at 27.
• Humanitarian Work: She discusses her recent visit to Poland to aid Ukrainian refugees and her work with various organizations to provide relief.
• Meditation Practice: Shelly practices Metta, or loving-kindness meditation, and emphasizes its role in expanding compassion and understanding towards others.
• Pandemic of Love: Shelly details the founding and impact of her global grassroots mutual aid organization, which has connected millions of people and facilitated significant financial aid.

Full transcript, edited for readability:

Introduction: Bearing Witness at the Ukrainian Border

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. My guest today is Shelly Tygielski. Shelly is the author of “Sit Down to Rise Up” and founder of the global grassroots mutual aid organization, Pandemic of Love. A trauma mindfulness teacher and Garrison Institute fellow, she has been called one of the 12 powerful women of the mindfulness movement by Mindful.org. So welcome, Shelly. Great to have you.

Shelly: Thank you so much for having me. I’m very happy to be here today.

Rick: You were just in Poland helping with the Ukrainian refugees. What was that experience like?

Shelly: It took me just a few weeks to even re-enter back into society after coming back. It was incredibly overwhelming to the senses. Even for somebody who is a practitioner of meditation, mindfulness, and has this root of a contemplative practice, it was a lot to take in. I really felt like it was important for me to bear witness because I’m raising money, and I think I have a fiduciary responsibility, but I also felt very called to rise up, to go and see exactly how the operations are running and where I could be of service in the most impactful way.

Shelly: One of the things that struck me the most being on the ground, being at the border of Lviv — the volume of people. I couldn’t wrap my head around the sheer volume of individuals crossing over. Think about if you are at a Rolling Stones concert, packed in a huge stadium, and there’s only one way out through the same gate. And every 30 minutes, there’s another concert letting out. That was the best way I could explain it. Mostly women and children, women of all ages, a ton of mothers, children of all ages. And the starkness — the fact that there were no men around — was really just a bizarre thing to witness.

Rick: Because they all had to stay and fight. The Ukrainian men between 18 and 60 pretty much had to stay there.

Shelly: Correct. I was there with my 20-year-old son who was on spring break from UC Santa Cruz. He said, Mom, I’m going to come with you. And I said, are you sure you don’t want to go to Mexico with your friends? He said, no, I’m going to come to Poland. It was really impactful for him to recognize how fortunate and privileged he is to be a 20-year-old in the United States, whereas if he was 20 and in Ukraine, he’d be on the front lines right now.

Selfless Service as a Spiritual Practice and the Power of Human Connection

Rick: Swami Vivekananda said, “Unconditional love and selfless service are the best life.” Selfless service and compassionate action are foundational to every spiritual tradition. And it’s not only good for the people you help — it’s actually a powerful spiritual practice for the people who engage in it.

Shelly: Right. Exactly. I think it is the entry point to the heart. It’s the best way for us to connect on a very humane level — to trigger those mirror neurons, to really tap into the deepest parts of ourselves and have true compassion and empathy for other individuals. That is the best way I’ve ever known to connect with individuals who I was taught to think of as the other. What’s been proven to me over and over again through Pandemic of Love — where we connect individuals on both sides and they have to have a human connection in order to transact — is that at the end of the day, we’re all just made of the same fabric. We’re all human. And if we can strip away all of the stories and all of the conditioning that has been layered on to us, we can see each other for what we really are, which is just essentially a soul and a heart.

People come into meditation thinking we’re trying to make ourselves more comfortable. But meditation is really about being able to sit with immense discomfort and to help propel us into uncomfortable spaces.

Shelly: There’s a lot of people who are stuck in that kind of inner work loop — this hamster wheel they can’t seem to get out of. People who have 42 certifications and go to every retreat and have done 72 ayahuasca ceremonies and are still searching. The inner work is important, but connecting it to the outer world is incredibly important too. There’s got to be that connection if we’re going to create those transformational shifts on a mass scale.

Metta Meditation and the Expansion of the Heart

Rick: You’ve been practicing loving kindness — Metta — for many years. Did you resonate with Metta because you were already that kind of person, or did the practice make you more compassionate?

Shelly: I think actually the latter. I would have had a selectively compassionate heart. One of the most tangible examples I can give is that when I got a divorce from my ex-husband, I had a lot of bitterness, anger, and judgment about the way he was showing up. He was my difficult person. The way loving kindness practice works, you say these phrases — May you have joy and happiness. May you be free from suffering. May you have peace no matter what life brings to you — and you send these affirmations to individuals, starting with someone easy to love, then an acquaintance, then a person who is difficult.

Shelly: For over a decade, my person was my ex-husband. I used to sit and send him joy and happiness and freedom from suffering. And that was so, so difficult for me to do because I had so many stories attached to him, so many emotional triggers. Over time, all of that really dissipated. You might say time heals all wounds. I have to disagree with that. I think it’s hard work over time that actually heals wounds.

I send Metta to Vladimir Putin on a daily basis. If you’re having difficulty sending Metta to someone, imagine them as a younger version of themselves — as a baby in a bassinet. It’s just a baby. I can have compassion for this individual who also suffered.

Shelly: The ancient Egyptians understood this too. In the pyramids there’s a hieroglyphic of a scale — on one side a heart, on the other a feather. They were balanced. The idea is that even back then it was understood that in order to be in equilibrium, you had to have a heart as light as a feather.

Rick: It’s interesting that we have that phrase “heavy hearted.” Part of the spiritual journey is the softening of the heart, but it has to be accompanied by inner strength. Otherwise, a very tender, open heart is much more easily wounded.

Growing Up Orthodox, Finding Multiple Doors Into the Same Room

Rick: You were raised Orthodox Jewish, doing very strict regimens. And then you ended up at Tibet House studying with Sharon Salzberg. How did that shift happen?

Shelly: I was raised in an environment where there was no veering from the path — this is what God wants you to do. As an adult, I finally realized that there were a lot of other ways of being in the world, and that not one was right. As John Kabat-Zinn says, there are multiple doors into the same room. I could try door A and door B and door C and see what works for me as an individual. A lot of people say, I tried meditating once and I can’t because my mind is too busy. And I’m like, that probably will never stop. You can’t eradicate all thoughts from your mind. But you can learn to coexist with them and not react to them.

Per chance, the first time I sat in meditation was with Sharon Salzberg at Tibet House in the mid-90s. And suddenly, something shifted. I thought — wait, I can speak to God without words being prescribed to me.

Shelly: Through a conversation with Sharon, I realized I can hold two truths in duality — multiple truths, actually, more than two. And that I don’t have to choose to be one thing or the other, but that I can access that same room through multiple doors. That was a huge shift for me. It was critical to the rest of the trajectory of my life.

Being Kidnapped at Age Two and the Seed of Agency

Rick: You got kidnapped when you were two. And you feel that had a lasting impact on your life.

Shelly: Yes. I credit that story with providing me with a real sense of agency — the ability to rise up, to assert ourselves, and to become or believe we can become an agent for social change, regardless of our circumstances. The short version: my parents came to the United States when I was two from Jerusalem. My mother went to the DMV to get her driver’s license and while she was getting an eye exam, I wandered off. A couple walked out the front door with me. A good Samaritan in the waiting room noticed something was not right and had a choice to make — do nothing, alert my mother, or follow them. She chose the third option: she followed them many city blocks into a housing complex, then ran back to the DMV. Because of that split second decision, I was found hours later.

Shelly: What I realized as I grew up hearing the story is that very infrequently did people think about this good Samaritan and that heroic thing she did with no benefit to herself. And I thought about this my whole adult life — would I have made the same choice? Earlier in my life, I think the answer was really no. Not because I didn’t have agency, we all have that, but really because I didn’t feel worthy. I didn’t feel like I had the right tools or credibility to actually rise up and do something.

Going Blind at 27: Finding the Gift in a Box of Darkness

Rick: Tell us the short version of your having gone blind when you were 27 and the lessons from that experience.

Shelly: I was going through a divorce. My son was a toddler. I was not taking care of myself. I woke up one morning and realized when I opened my eyes that I couldn’t see anything. It wasn’t darkness — it was a whiteout. The disease I have causes white blood cells to rush into your eyes and create this dense, dense fog that you can’t see through. I was diagnosed with uveitis, I was told the leading cause of blindness in people under 40. I was told I was going to be blind by the time I was 40.

Being handed a diagnosis like that — somebody takes an hourglass and flips it over and says, these are the sands, these are the days of your life. It helped me become more present, have a sense of urgency with the way that I live my life.

Shelly: It was really beautiful to be able to see this box of darkness — as Mary Oliver says, somebody once handed me a box of darkness, and it took me years to realize that it too was a gift. One of the biggest gifts in my life was actually being diagnosed with this disease. Fast forward to now, I’m turning 45. A few years ago I actually lost the vision in my left eye. I’m still fighting to keep the vision in my right eye. But it hasn’t stopped me. I still snowboard and skateboard and hike and put myself in the line of beauty as often as possible. Because that’s the gift. That’s the gift of today.

Building Community on the Beach: From 12 to 15,000 People

Rick: You started meditating on the beach in Florida, and it grew from 20 people on a windy day into a movement of 15,000 people on your mailing list. Tell us about that.

Shelly: I was in the corporate world for 20 years, rising up the ladder as president of a mid-sized company with 2,400 employees — I like to say in spite of myself. My Sunday mornings were really important to me because they’d allow me to recenter. I would go to the beach and meditate and create that clearing in the dense forest before the Monday rat race. I really missed having community. The quality of meditation when you’re sitting in community is very different than when you’re sitting alone. So I put a post on Facebook on a whim: I meditate on Sunday mornings on the beach, if anybody wants to join me, I’ll do a guided meditation.

Shelly: 12 people showed up on that first blustery day in November 2015. We had such an incredible experience and decided to gather again. Friends told friends who told friends. People walking by on the beach would join us. By May 2016 — just six months later — we had over 800 people. Eventually the community grew to about 15,000 individuals. On a weekly basis we’d have anywhere from 500 to a thousand people meditating together in this idyllic setting on the beach, which you can imagine is incredibly powerful.

What that experience proved to me is that when you start small, if you have the right intention, the ripple effect is guaranteed. That snowball will happen, whether it’s seen to you or unseen to you.

The Hunger Nine and the Ripple Effect of Showing Up

Rick: Let’s talk about the Hunger Nine — those nine men who went on a hunger strike in Liberty City, Miami.

Shelly: In 2019 I was on the anniversary of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting. I heard on NPR about a group of nine Black men in Liberty City — a really rough part of Miami — who were community members that had gone on a hunger strike. Here were these kids in Parkland from middle to upper class families getting all this news time and amplification about gun violence. And yet in Liberty City, they couldn’t even get any coverage if somebody had died on a daily basis due to gun violence.

Shelly: What I realized is that we could bring Parkland to them and use our platform to give them the mic and the stage. They didn’t have the luxury of healing from trauma because trauma was happening on a daily basis. While mass shootings get you 15 minutes of fame on the news, these other communities are just falling to the wayside. What it taught me about showing up is the importance of the fact that yes, some of us have a louder voice or more privilege. We need to be willing to move over and share that voice and use it to amplify what’s happening in the world.

Rick: Tell us about Pandemic of Love.

Shelly: In March of 2020 I felt the same angst and fear that everybody else felt. I also started thinking about people in my community — the kids in Pahokee who relied on free lunch and breakfast at school, elderly people who would be alone and couldn’t get their basic needs. I thought I could channel this fear and angst into action — what I call empathy action mode. I lean into a practice Tara Brach teaches called RAIN: Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture. But I feel like something needs to happen after the RAIN. Two questions: What can I tangibly do about what I’m feeling? And — how do I come from a place of love?

Shelly: I created two simple Google forms and put them on Instagram and Facebook — one for people who need help and one for people who want to give help. Our volunteers match them. Then we step out of the way, and they have to have a human conversation. When I woke up the next morning, thousands of people had responded from around the world. Fast forward two years — we have connected over 2.2 million people and helped them transact directly over $62 million of aid. We exist in 280 communities across 20 countries with over 4,000 volunteers. We’re not a nonprofit. We’re a nonprofit disruptor. There’s no bank account, no overhead. The average transaction is $100. A lot of people doing a little bit amounts to a huge impact.

Inner Work and Outer Action: The Foundation for a Better World

Rick: Big picture question: so many inequities exist in the world. Some spiritual people feel a better world is coming. What are your thoughts?

Shelly: I’ve never lost faith in humanity. I think that inherently most people in this world are good and kind. I think where we’ve gone awry is that people don’t have the tools they need to work through the suffering of human existence. There’s always going to be trauma. There’s always going to be suffering. But our response to that trauma, our self-awareness around it, can change. I am optimistic because with technology and mass communication, if we can collectively get this right — create a social movement for good using that technology, giving people access to tools at a very young age — the world will change.

Shelly: And that goes really to the root of where we began this conversation: connecting the inner work to the outer world. It’s great that there’s got to be a spiritual awakening. But ask yourself — look in the mirror and really be frank with yourself. Am I doing enough? Am I doing enough for my community? Am I doing enough for even just one person a day? Or am I solely focused on just the inner work? If the answer is that you’re solely focused on the inner spiritual awakening, then we’re missing something.

Rick: In that case, you’re building a foundation, but no castle. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. So keep up the good work. It’s so wonderful what you’re doing. Thank you.

Shelly: Thank you so much for this platform. Thank you for using your voice to amplify other voices and to create good in the world and for showing up consistently. I really appreciate you and this community so much.