This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Working with Doubt ~ Diana Clark. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Diana Clark at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Good evening, welcome, welcome. I hope you guys are all doing well with the rain. Mixed feelings about the rain. [Laughter] We need it, I appreciate it, but you know, discovered that blue skies are kind of nice too.
Nevertheless, I want to start with this poem that is written by somebody who read some of the poems of the Therigatha1. Some of you might know the Therigatha is the oldest literature attributed to women in the history of humans. This literature that’s written by women, attributed to women, and we partly know it’s written by women because it has a lot of feminine aspects. It talks a lot about motherhood and husbands and stuff like this. Thousands of years old, it’s in the Buddhist Canon.
There’s a poet who read some of these poems—I should say this literature is poems, they are Awakening poems. It’s part of the tradition that after you have an Awakening experience, sometime you would have a little poem to describe it. So I’m not going to talk about the Awakening poems precisely, maybe I will on another night, and they have been spoken about a number of times here at IMC. If you’re interested, you can find them on Audio Dharma.
But a poet who read these poems wrote his own poem inspired by what he had read. The title of the poems are about the woman, the woman’s name. So this one, the woman’s name is Vasetthi, we can translate that as “victor,” you know, somebody who wins, has victory, something like that. These poems are written in a contemporary style and in a way that a modern practitioner could relate to them, unlike the ones that are thousands of years ago. Sometimes they read like they’re thousands of years old.
Okay, so this is Vasetthi, and the poet is Matty Weingast. The poem goes like this:
When everyone else was meditating, I’d be outside circling the hall. Finally, I went to confess. I’m hopeless, I said. The Elder nun smiled. Just keep going, she said. Nothing stays in orbit forever. If this circling is all you have, why not make this circling your home? I did as she told me and went on circling the hall. If you find yourself partly in and partly out, if you find yourself drawn to this path and also drawing away, I can assure you you’re in good company. Just keep going. Sometimes the most direct path isn’t a straight line.
I’ll read this again. I kind of like this poem very much, there’s so much in here, and I’ll unpack it a little bit.
When everyone else was meditating, I’d be outside circling the hall. Finally, I went to confess. I’m hopeless, I said. The Elder nun smiled. Just keep going, she said. Nothing stays in orbit forever. If this circling is all you have, why not make this circling your home? I did as she told me and went on circling the hall. If you find yourself partly in and partly out, if you find yourself drawn to this path and also drawing away, I can assure you you’re in good company. Just keep going. Sometimes the most direct path isn’t a straight line.
This is describing a practitioner, somebody who had this hesitation about the practice. She was convinced that she was hopeless and that she had to do something different. Like, “Okay, I’m just circling outside, I need to do something else.” But something that’s beautiful about this poem and about this practice is this practice isn’t asking us to be somebody that we’re not. We don’t have to completely reinvent ourselves. And if you find yourself circling—circling the hall, circling the practice, or maybe sometimes for me, I feel circling is like this vacillation or hesitation or just kind of feeling a feeling of stuckness, just going around and around.
So the teacher gives her this instruction, “Well, just keep circling. Nothing stays in orbit forever.” Because I think what the teacher is pointing to here is so often when we have this feeling like, “I’m hopeless,” then we just abandon the practice and go do something else. We just stop. If we feel like, “Okay, maybe other people can do this, I can’t do this.” There’s this way in which sometimes we have this feeling like, “You know what, I can’t do it. I don’t even know what they’re talking about, what’s being pointed to. Maybe I used to be able to meditate, but now I don’t.” Or maybe, “Everybody else seems to know how to meditate in the hall, but I’m not, I can’t,” or whatever it might be.
We might have some of these ideas about how it should be, and we’re noticing how our experience is, and it’s not matching up with the ideas of how we think it should be. And then that gets expanded to, “Just because my experience doesn’t match my expectations, it means somehow that I’m failing. I’m hopeless,” she says in here. And all that’s really happening is you had expectations and you’re having experiences, and they don’t match. That’s all that’s happening. But we’ve really just turned it into a big thing, this commentary about our worthiness as practitioners, or maybe it even goes beyond to the practice as a whole or something like this, or some other ideas that we might have.
For me, I feel a little bit sensitive to this idea that in this poem it says, “Finally, I went to confess.” This word “confess,” I feel like it doesn’t feel like such a good word. Instead, maybe it could be like, “I just went to talk to somebody about it,” or “I mentioned this to somebody,” or “I shared it with myself instead of hiding it in shame.” Like, “Oh, I’m actually really a terrible meditator. Everybody else is okay, but I have this shameful feeling about a way that I am.” That’s not what we want. The truth is, meditation is not always easy. It takes practice. Sometimes if we had a really busy day and our minds are really busy, or if we have some emotional stuff that is coming up—and our life is filled with emotional stuff that comes up, this is what it means to be a human—then maybe our mind just doesn’t settle. And can that be okay, instead of making these grand conclusions? “I’m hopeless.”
There’s something else that I’d like to talk to that this poem is pointing to, in one interpretation. There’s lots of interpretations we could do here, I don’t want to say there’s only one, but here’s one. This whole idea of circling and this feeling like, “I’m not going anywhere, I’m just going around and around,” points to this hindrance of doubt, skeptical doubt. Some of you might be familiar with this idea that there are these five classical things that get in the way of meditation, things that are like barriers or obstacles or hindrances2—hindrances to getting settled, hindrances to feeling connected to ourselves, hindrances to feeling connected to other people and to our life.
And one of these five is doubt. This is something that, for me, I take comfort in. Thousands of years ago, they were talking about this. Humans had troubles meditating back then too. So doubt is one of them. I’ll just mention the other ones, I’m not going to talk about them: desire, this really wanting something. I notice I do this with my body because it kind of feels like this, like we’re leaning forward, “I got to get something.” The other is aversion, like, “Oh, get this away from me, I don’t want it.” The third is restlessness, this just feeling like just twitchy and you want to jump out of your skin kind of feeling. The fourth is sloth and torpor, which is just this real tiredness, like falling asleep, sometimes literally falling asleep. And the fifth one is doubt.
So I want to talk a little bit about doubt and how to work with it. And I would say of these five hindrances, doubt is the one that has the biggest impact on us, and it’s the one that gets maybe seen as the most difficult to see and can, as I said maybe earlier, just get us to abandon this whole idea of practicing.
There’s this idea of doubt, there’s a number of ways we can talk about it. And one is this feeling like, “I can’t do it.” Like it seems like other people can, or the teacher talks about it, or the dharma book talks about it, or I heard my friends talk about this, but I don’t know. I just don’t know what they’re talking about because it doesn’t match what experience I’m having or something like this.
So it’s not uncommon, I would say in the modern West, for this phenomenon to arise, and in particular, we can see it in something like this with meditation, and that is the inner critic gets activated. This inner critic, this feeling like whatever I’m doing is not quite right, it’s not enough, or it’s not good enough, or it somehow is inadequate. And then that kind of bleeds into, “I’m inadequate and I can’t do it.” And right in here in the poem, she’s saying, “I’m hopeless.” There’s this little voice that’s like that, and we believe it, right? It’s not only that it’s a little voice that’s showing up, but somehow we think it’s the truth. It’s not the truth. I’m telling you, it’s not the truth. But it doesn’t matter what I say, you have to have this own experience. Just hearing me say that is not going to be necessarily helpful.
But there’s this way in which we can undermine our capacity or our capability or what we’re able to do, our ideas about ourselves, by this voice that shows up. We might call it, some people call it like a subpersonality, maybe like this companion that shows up on occasion saying, “You’ll never make it,” this terrible voice, and that we believe.
So I’ve done a number of talks on the inner critic. It occurs to me I haven’t done one maybe recently, so maybe that’s an idea to do one. But there’s this way in which this has like a harsh tone, this voice that’s telling us that we’re not doing it right and whatever our experience is, it’s not the right experience. And then I’ll just say briefly here, if you find that you’re swimming in this inner critic that’s really putting you down, one thing you could do, if you can remember this, is to just ask, “How am I right now?” Because we don’t need to be critical of the critic, right? That just perpetuates it. We don’t have to try to get rid of it, we don’t have to make it wrong, we don’t have to turn it into a problem to get solved. Instead, just ask yourself, “How am I right now?”
And that kind of turns into your experience at this moment. And that’s this movement towards how you’re feeling. That could be your bodily experience or your emotional experience. That movement, that orientation towards asking that question, “How am I right now?” is a way that is more like a movement of care. It’s a movement of some wisdom too, and that really can undermine the inner critic. So I can, like I said, I can give a whole talk on this, but that’s a short version. This feeling of like, “Oh, I can’t do it,” and just like, “Well, how am I right now?” You might say, “Well, actually I’m agitated.” And then you could say, “Well, how does that feel in the body?” Agitation feels like restlessness, like my legs want to move, for example, like I want to get up and do something, or I want to distract myself. And then as best you can, can you then feel the distractedness? And then here you are, right in the middle of practice. This is what practice is. It’s just being present for our experience, even if that experience is not what we want, even if it’s unpleasant.
So doubt can show up as this experience of the inner critic putting ourselves down. It can also show up as doubt in the teachings. Like, “Well, I don’t know, those Buddhists, they seem like they are austere, or they don’t seem like they have enough fun, or they’re just sitting quiet. What good is that?” I don’t know, we can have all these stories about this practice and whether it’s going to support us and help us have a life that we want, a life that has more joy and freedom and peace and ease. Or of course, we can start to have a doubt about the teachings, maybe the practices, the teachings, and the teachers. Like, “Does she really know what she’s talking about?” This is a legitimate question, right? I think if somebody’s going to sit up here, you’re allowed to wonder, “Well, I don’t know, does she know what she’s talking about? Does anybody know what they’re talking about?” You know, those Dharma books and whatever the Dharma talks that you hear.
So doubt shows up in these different ways: oneself, the teachings, the practice, the teachers. And one way that you can know it’s doubt is there’s this feeling of hesitation or vacillation, or I’m doing this with my hands, going around and around in circles, because there’s this way in which we feel like we’re not really going anywhere. We’re just feeling kind of stuck and we’re just maybe moving around trying to get lost in our thoughts and figure things out and thinking about them.
And one of the consequences of this, of this, “Well, I don’t know, should I do this? Is this the right practice?” Or maybe it shows up in some particular way when you’re sitting down for meditation. You’re like, “Oh gee, yeah, I’m kind of agitated. Maybe I’ll just count my breaths to really get settled.” And then you realize, “Oh gee, I can only get to number two. Well, maybe I’ll do some loving-kindness practice.” And then you do loving-kindness for a few minutes and then you think, “Okay, well, I don’t want to do loving-kindness, I’m just going to open it up and do open awareness.” And, “Oh, that sound. Oh, that dog. I can’t believe that dog is barking again. I’m going to write a nasty note to the neighbor. Maybe I’ll go do that now. No, I’m not going to. Okay, I’m going to go back to Metta practice.” So we spend our whole time really just going from one practice to another to another to another and never really settle down. So that could be a way in which this doubt shows up too, is like not really knowing which practice to do, and instead we’re just trying to put out perceived fires.
So doubt is, I would say, it’s rarely recognized as doubt initially. It’s just seen as agitation or some kind of hesitation. Maybe there’s a holding back or a way in which we’re not really engaged with what’s happening. This is one of the consequences of doubt, is we’re no longer really present with what’s happening. Instead, we’re lost in thoughts. In fact, we could say that doubt is a loose collection of a family of thoughts that are not onward leading. Instead, we’re just kind of stuck, going round and round.
So here, how can we work with it? How can we work with doubt, whatever kind of doubt that it is? One, if you can recognize what’s happening, just like, “Oh, I’m kind of feeling stuck here,” or “hesitant,” or “vacillating,” or something like this. Maybe there’s this feeling of going in circles or hesitation, or maybe there’s some confusion. Or maybe there’s a way in which doubt can get activated as a consequence of maybe just touching into something that’s uncomfortable. Like maybe there’s just a tiny bit of a little bit of loneliness, sadness, despair, and then a lot of anger. Rather than feeling the despair and loneliness, we’ll jump over into doubt. It’s like, “Oh, this practice, I’m not sure what to do.” And it turns out, often we use this type of doubt to distract us from something else that’s really uncomfortable. This is what humans do, right? We don’t like to feel uncomfortable, so we avoid. And part of the avoidance is distraction, right? We have untold ways to distract ourselves. And then when we distract ourselves with doubt, we start to feel like, “No, I’m doing important spiritual work here,” when in fact, we’re just going around and around in circles and not being with whatever is uncomfortable.
So one thing to do is just recognize what’s happening. Recognize either the vacillation or recognize, “Oh yeah, there is that flicker of something that I really don’t want to see or experience.” You can just recognize whichever is available to you at that moment. Chances are, it’ll be most likely the doubt if you don’t want to feel this difficult, uncomfortable experience that’s happening. And then can you just allow it to be there? Can you just allow it to be there? I’m talking about this vacillation that’s happening. What if we don’t make it be a problem? I’m talking about it as a hindrance, but what if we just say, “Oh yeah, there’s this feeling like I don’t really know what to do. I’m not even sure if I can practice,” and just allow it to be there.
And how we can allow it to be there is to feel it in the body. Feel it in the body. All these types of thoughts, they have somatic signatures, they have physical correlates. They may be subtle, they may be obvious. There’s this way that we can get out of the abstract thinking and philosophizing and trying to figure something out, and instead just feel it in the body. Feel the maybe it’s restlessness or uncomfortableness or this sense of not really knowing. I notice like I’m furrowing my brow, like I’m not sure what to do. Maybe we feel there’s some tension in the face. Maybe we feel like that often there can be tightness in the mouth or the jaw that we can be doing when we’re trying to figure something out or make it be a little bit different. Or maybe there’s a sense of heaviness, maybe like the shoulders feel kind of heavy and we feel like, “Hmph, really, am I going to do this?” You know, there’s something like this. To allow it to be there, and one way we can do that is to feel it in the body. Maybe there’s a jitteriness, this restlessness, really wanting something different to happen. This feeling like, “Oh, I want to get up off the cushion.”
And if you feel like, “I can’t, I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about,” or “I just can’t be with the bodily experience. There’s a reason why I’m in the head, it’s because I don’t want to be with my bodily experience,” then we can say, “Well, is there a way that you can relax the body?” Just notice the way that you’re sitting. Maybe your shoulders are up near your ears. Is there a way that you can relax the body and then maybe take a big inhale, and then with the exhale, there’s a way maybe just follow the breath into the bodily experience and just feel the breath. And you’ll feel maybe the shoulders, the chest, and the belly. And it turns out this is where most of our emotions or our experiences are, you know, in the torso and the face, in the front of the body: the face, throat, chest, belly. And often that’s where the breath is too. So if we’re feeling really disconnected and we can’t feel the sensations in the body, you just take a breath and follow the breath into the body, and that can be a way that can help bring the awareness into the bodily experience.
So it doesn’t matter, this bodily experience, where it is. It doesn’t matter what it is. It doesn’t matter why it’s there. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an identifiable emotion or something like that. But instead, it’s this movement towards actually just being with our experience, whatever that experience is. And this is the practice.
And then the second thing to do, I’m saying just to allow it to be there. So first to feel it in the body, and then the second is to remind yourself that thoughts are just thoughts. They’re just thoughts. How many thoughts a day do we have? How many of them do we remember? How many of them just arise and pass away? I heard written in a book, I think the book was published some time ago and I just stumbled upon this, and it was somebody talking about doing all their thoughts out loud on paper. It was hilarious because they were driving and they were trying to decide what to have for dinner. And they were like, “Should I have this? I don’t know, do I like that? I don’t know, the last time I had it was terrible.” And then you would hear them say, “Get out of the way, buddy! Where did you learn how to drive?” You know, and it was just funny to look at. We think that we have clear thoughts, but we have so many thoughts about all kinds of stuff all the time.
So working with doubt, allowing them to be there, feel them in the body, and remind ourselves thoughts are just thoughts. We don’t have to believe them. They’re insubstantial, of course they are. Like, what are they? They don’t have any inherent existence and they’re not something that we can grab onto and hold or something like this. But some of the thoughts that we have, we might not be recognizing them as thoughts. There might be some of these subtle thoughts of like, “It shouldn’t be this way, it should be different.” That’s just a thought. Or, “Why is this happening to me?” That’s just a thought. We can just let them go. Or, “I don’t deserve this.” You know, maybe we have this idea that it should be better because we’ve been meditating for so long or because of whatever reason, we feel like we should have better experiences. Or maybe like, “I can’t handle this.” Maybe we’re bored, we feel like we can’t handle boredom, or maybe we’re feeling restless and something like this. These are just thoughts. You’ll have other thoughts, you know, the next moment. Maybe some of them get stuck on repeat for a little bit, but there’ll be other thoughts.
Or maybe if not those thoughts that I said, maybe there would be thoughts from a childhood when you’ve had some difficulty, and maybe there’s a flash of something that feels like, “Oh yeah, I’ve had this thought my whole life.” That doesn’t make it more substantial. It makes it more familiar, but we want to give it authority. We don’t have to give it authority. There’s a way in which we can tend to get identified with our thoughts, but we don’t need to be. There’s this way in which thoughts can actually be a type of a prison, a type of a way in which they really trap us into a certain identity about who we are or who the world is and how things should be. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have those thoughts, but not allow them to get stuck there. Just to allow them to arise and then pass away.
And then as soon as you recognize that they are thoughts, then there’s an opportunity to turn back again to the physical experience. You might be having a similar physical experience that you had before, maybe something different. And so this way of undermining the authority of the thoughts by turning towards your physical experience, interrupting the momentum of thinking. Chances are you will not want to do this. Chances are there will be some resistance to go towards the bodily experience. Instead, there might be these types of thoughts of like, “Oh, I have to figure this out. I have to think about it in some kind of way to make it better,” or “I have to solve this problem.” This is often, this thought is often not so clearly articulated this way, but it’s a belief, it’s a view that we have that’s fueling these types of thoughts. Or maybe we have this thought like, “I have to find a way to make this stop,” and we think we’re going to be able to think our way into having different thoughts, but it doesn’t work that way. Instead, just be with the physical experience. The thoughts won’t stop right away, but they’ll just start running out of momentum. They’ll just start running out of authority. They’ll just start becoming less interesting. And instead, we can just be with our bodily experience.
And then once you’re with those bodily experiences, nothing needs to be done. Nothing needs to be done. Chances are there’ll be resistance to this idea also, because we have to figure it out, we want to make something happen. But this whole idea of like, “No, just be with what’s happening.” Maybe it’s a lump in the throat because, I don’t even know why, because for me, sometimes when I’m tuning into the bodily experience, I often have some tightness in the throat, or sometimes I mentioned earlier, the heaviness in the shoulders or the shoulders are up near the ears, or there’s a sense of heaviness. And can we just bring some kindhearted curiosity to that experience? And then here we are in the heart of practice. In the heart of practice, we’re just being with our experience without having to fix it. Instead, it’s like, “Oh, it’s like this right now.” There’s a lump in the throat, and now there’s this feeling of tightness in the shoulders and pressure against the body where I’m sitting. Just being with the felt experience.
So working with doubt, and I would say such a big part about practice, whether it’s about doubt or anything else, is just really learning to distinguish between thoughts and physical sensations. So often we’re lost in thought and disconnected from our bodies, disconnected from our physical experience. But just dropping into sensations is always valuable, always valuable, because that’s what’s happening. That’s actually the truth of the moment. And then as we learn to drop into our physical sensations and tune into the truth of the moment, there’s this way that the thinking will just naturally start to quiet down. It’ll just happen naturally. And then there can be a way in which there’s maybe this feeling of the senses being cleansed in some kind of way. Like we can hear a little bit more clearly, see a little bit more clearly, feel a little bit more clearly. When the thinking starts to quiet down, then the experiences of the senses become more clear. And then we can start to see things as they are, not so much what we’re projecting onto them. The sense of whether I like it or I don’t like it, whether this is mine or not, or whether this is going to help me or not, or all these subtle things that we’re projecting onto all the objects out there, including people.
As we start to pay attention to the body, the thinking quiets down, there’s a brightness that comes to our experience. We start to see things closer to how they are, and we start to notice beauty in a way that wasn’t possible before when we’re just busy with what’s happening. Some of the radiance of the beauty of just ordinary things starts to arise. And we start to see, “Oh yeah, things are changing.” That sound arose and now it’s gone. That sensation of the pressure against the body, I didn’t notice it and now I notice it again. Then as we start to notice things are changing, then there’s no longer a feeling of stuckness. But not only that, there’s a feeling of, “Oh, I kind of feel like myself as this stable, consistent thing that’s constant.” But then we just start to notice, “Oh yeah, there’s just all these experiences happening,” and that starts to loosen up this idea of a fixed self to which all experience is happening. And when that happens, there starts to be much more freedom, much more ease and freedom.
So in this way, having doubt, this feeling of like, “I don’t know,” can be really the way forward. Just this way of like, “Well, can we recognize that it’s happening and just allow it to be there?” Allow it to be the physical sensations and to notice some of the thoughts that are there and remember that, “Okay, thoughts are just thoughts. We don’t have to ascribe a truth to them. We don’t have to ascribe non-truth to them.” Can we just let them do what thoughts do? They just come and go, come and go, come and go. We’ll want to grab on to them. As best you can, can you be with your bodily experience instead? And then you’re right in there with practice, starting to see things as they really are, without all the stories. We start to see the beauty, we start to see how things are changing. And this is practice, and this is where we find freedom. This is where we find freedom.
So I talked about how this poem, Vasetthi, that Matty Weingast wrote was inspired by these Awakening poems from these nuns, these women. And in the original Awakening poem that inspired Matty Weingast, she does become awakened. The poem ends with her becoming awakened. It starts in general with her having difficulties and going to a nun, and the nun giving her instructions, and then she becomes awakened. In Matty Weingast’s poem, we don’t see the Awakening, but for me, I feel touched that in the original poem that’s there.
So here’s Matty Weingast again:
When everyone else was meditating, I’d be outside circling the hall. Finally, I went to confess. I am hopeless, I said. The Elder nun smiled. Just keep going, she said. Nothing stays in orbit forever. If this circling is all you have, why not make this circling your home? I did as she told me and went on circling the hall. If you find yourself partly in and partly out, if you find yourself drawn to this path and also drawing away, I can assure you you’re in good company. Just keep going. Sometimes the most direct path isn’t a straight line.
And I’ll stop there and open it up to see if there’s some questions or comments. Thank you.
This idea of circling and doubt and turning what can be a hindrance into the way that leads to freedom, peace, Awakening. That’s the importance of paying attention to our bodily experience, even though that’s often what we don’t want to do. And certainly, we have a culture that fetishizes the body, but the mind is held up in high regard. Of course it is, right? It helps solve problems, create beautiful things. I mean, the mind is a beautiful thing, but there’s this way we can get trapped thinking that it’s the only way forward.
Questioner 1: I guess my doubt mostly shows up in the form of feeling that maybe other people can have these experiences that I’ve heard of, but I don’t seem to be able to get there, kind of thing. Or that maybe people are having these experiences because they somehow believe in these experiences, and maybe I’m just not capable of doing that, of that kind of belief. You hear of these things, of meditative states of deep calm and that kind of thing. And yeah, I guess my doubt is more along the lines of not believing that I can achieve what other people can achieve. I wonder if you can speak to that.
Diana Clark: Well, I’ll say a few things about some of these meditative states. It just seems, and I’ve talked to a number of Dharma teachers about this, and certainly in my role as a Dharma teacher, I’ve seen this too, that some people have minds that work in such a way that they can get settled a little bit easier, and some people they can’t. And often this has to do, not always, but sometimes with how we spend our time. If you’re an office manager or a preschool teacher or running a household with a lot of things happening, then you’re having to take care of so many things all at once, and your mind is really good at going from one thing to the next thing, as opposed to if you’re a mathematician or a theoretical physicist who sits and thinks and focuses. So just how we’ve trained our brains with our livelihoods or how our families are shows up.
And the beautiful part is that we don’t have to have particular meditative states. We don’t have to have them for, certainly for the first stage of Awakening, you don’t have to have some of these really concentrated states. So I’ll just say that some people’s minds just have different capacities. Whether they’re born that way, I have no idea, but it can be just how they spend their time.
And then the second is, I’ll just say this for myself, that my meditation really took a shift where I could settle more when two things happened. One, retreat practice, but it wasn’t retreat practice alone. It had to be retreat practice that included walking meditation. I thought walking meditation, that’s recess, you know, that’s just a break. But it was something when I started to really be attentive to walking meditation and being really embodied that way, I don’t know, then it really carried over into my sitting practice and allowed me to be more embodied for the sitting practice. Concentration turns out to be a lot about being embodied. And not only that, it allows a person to do a sit, walk, sit, right, all day long with some mindfulness. I don’t know, is this helpful?
Questioner 1: Yes, thank you.
Diana Clark: You’re welcome.
Questioner 2: Thanks for the talk. I think it gave me a lot to think about. I think at some point you had mentioned between thoughts and emotions, they have something called like somatic signature or something, that phrase. I’m trying to think about it as an object to meditate on, like trying to determine whether it’s an emotion, a feeling, how is it interacting with my body during a meditation? I wonder if that’s helpful, being able to parse out these somatic signatures, or is the idea that even that’s kind of too far, we should just feel our body and not try and name these and map the signatures? I was trying to understand how to meditate on that.
Diana Clark: Yeah, this is a great question, thank you. I would say it doesn’t have to be so complicated. I would just feel what there is to feel, and we don’t necessarily have to use words because sometimes if we use words and trying to, when I say somatic signature, maybe that or map it to that does feel like a cognitive activity. So maybe I should use different language, but it’s just like, just feel. And maybe you don’t have exact words. Sometimes I know in the beginning I used words to kind of help me stay there, like “feels tight,” “contracted,” “feels congealed,” you know, just to help me stay there. But as I got more accustomed to just hanging out with sensations, then the words kind of went away. But in the beginning, sometimes it’s useful to use adjectives or descriptors as a way to kind of help the mind stay. Is that helpful?
Questioner 2: Very helpful, thank you.
Diana Clark: You’re welcome. Okay, so thank you all for your kind attention, and I wish you all a wonderful evening. Thank you.
Therigatha: (Pali: “Verses of the Elder Nuns”) A collection of short poems in the Pali Canon, attributed to the earliest Buddhist nuns. The poems recount their struggles and eventual attainment of enlightenment. ↩
The Five Hindrances: In Buddhism, these are five mental states that are obstacles to meditation and spiritual progress. They are: 1. Sensory desire (kāmacchanda), 2. Ill will (vyāpāda), 3. Sloth and torpor (thīna-middha), 4. Restlessness and worry (uddhacca-kukkucca), and 5. Skeptical doubt (vicikicchā). ↩