This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video From Craving to Contentment ~ 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. It’s nice to see you all. It’s nice to sit together.
Tonight, I wanted to talk a little bit about the holiday season. It’s not uncommon to see or hear references to this idea of a “wish list”—this idea of things that are wanted. This exists year-round; we often have wish lists. Amazon has a little wish list, and many of these online things make it as easy as possible for you to just clickity-click-click, and there you go. You can make a list of all the things that you wish you had, that you wanted.
Perhaps in particular this time of year, there’s this valorization of desire. It’s really held up: “What is your wish list? What do you want?” Whether that’s because of the New Year, because of Christmas, or for other holidays, what is this sense of what we want? Or maybe it can be interpreted as, “Well, what should I give you so that you’ll be happy?” or “What am I going to give you so that I’ll be happy, so that I’ll feel good about myself or something like that?” This intersection of desires and objects being exchanged and happiness.
Or maybe we could just say this time of year highlights the beauty of opportunities to reflect on and maybe act on those people that we care about, that are important to us or part of our lives, and to express care, love, and appreciation in whatever way that shows up. I was helping my mom with her Christmas cards—my family celebrates Christmas—and it’s really sweet. She’s been sending Christmas cards to these same people for 50 years, and there’s a little newsletter that goes with it: “This year we did X, Y, and Z.” It’s a beautiful, beautiful gesture, I think. And of course, she receives some too, and it’s nice.
This idea of what you want or desire often gets a bad rap in Buddhism, this idea that desire just leads to suffering. I remember years ago when somebody discovered that I was a Buddhist practitioner, the first thing they wanted to say is, “Oh yeah, I heard that Buddhism doesn’t like desire, but how crazy is that? I mean, you can’t even desire to not have desire, or you can’t desire to be awakened.” I was like, “No, no, no, it’s not like that.” But that was their idea on the outside looking in. And certainly, when we first start practicing, maybe I had that idea too. I can’t remember this idea that somehow we should be free of all desires. That’s not quite how it works.
So today, I’d like to unpack a little bit this idea of desire and partly how it can be a big support for our path to greater freedom, peace, and ease, as well as how it can be problematic.
Maybe I’ll start by saying, of course, in the very broad sense, desire is just a natural part of the human experience: the desire to eat when we’re hungry, the desire to use the bathroom when the body needs to eliminate waste. These are just natural things that happen. We also have leanings, we might say, or inclinations or aspirations, or this going in a particular direction. Of course we do. We’re not trying to get rid of this or deny it or somehow turn ourselves into machines. That would be awful. We’re not machines; we’re humans, and we have human bodies and human temperaments. That’s just the way it is, and it’s a beautiful thing.
But there’s also a way in which we have cravings and addictions and some clinging that are harmful—harmful to ourselves, harmful to others. That’s part of the human condition too, very often. The Buddha, of course, didn’t teach that all desires should be eliminated. These healthy ones—the desire for food or connection, or the desire for not causing harm, or the desire for greater ease, greater freedom, greater peace—of course, those should be cultivated and worked with. Instead of trying to eradicate all the ones that we feel like, “Oh, I shouldn’t feel this way,” can we understand them and transform these desires into something that can be helpful?
As you might imagine, classically in the Buddhist tradition, desires are put in two camps: those that are helpful and those that are not helpful. Kusala1 is the Pali word I’m translating as “helpful.” Our experience of it is as helpful. There are all kinds of other English words that we could use, but I’m going to stick with this idea of helpful—helpful for more ease in our life, helpful for more peace, helpful for more freedom, helpful for more equanimity, all kinds of things that we really want in our life.
The helpful ones, we could say, are those that are aligned with well-being, that contribute to well-being. Maybe that’s just a simple way to think about it. And it’s not only well-being for ourselves but contributes to well-being for others. I am making a distinction here between well-being and pleasure. Well-being is a sense that promotes health and balance and some stability and spaciousness, as opposed to just pleasure that leads to wanting more pleasure and can lead to heedlessness and things that make our life go awry.
Not only are they promoting a sense of well-being, but they’re characterized by the experience of some spaciousness or some lightness. I mean, this is such a small example, but today while I was out for a walk, apparently the conditions are right for lots of mushrooms to pop up. It was just so fantastic. I’m walking like, “Whoa, wow,” and some of them were just ginormous, these huge white mushrooms. I just took delight in them. Walking a little further, I saw some that were a different color, and they were so small, they were so cute. I just felt my heart like, who knew that underneath the ground were all these rhizomes of these fungi? And then there was this desire to see how many different types of mushrooms are here. So while I’m walking along, I’m keeping an eye out, and it was just fun. It just made me appreciate, “Wow, these are here all the time under the soil, and we just don’t see them until it’s dark and rainy.” I don’t know exactly what the conditions are, but apparently the conditions are being met right now, at least in some places. So this desire to feel that delight again when I’m seeing all these different mushrooms, different types, different colors, and in different places. There’s this sense of lightness and a little bit of an uplift, we might say, associated with that. It’s a harmless desire, and maybe that’s a silly example, but we could say the desire for spiritual growth, the desire for liberation from suffering, or we could say the desire for not causing harm to ourselves or to others, to live an ethical life, one in which we’re being sensitive to the impact that we’re having on others and in the world. That can show up in so many ways.
In contrast, we could say this unhelpful desire is the one that we might use the expression “craving” for, that falls into, “I got to have it. I got to have it. I don’t care about all this other stuff, I got to have this.” This craving has an association with a contraction in the body and this compulsion that’s moving us forward towards, “I got to get this.” Cigarettes, shopping, gambling, alcohol, food—it’s amazing the things that we can crave, the things that we can really want and have this sense of, “Okay, as soon as I get this, then I’ll feel better. I just got to get this.” I don’t care how I feel right now; I’m not noticing how uncomfortable it feels. I just got to get this thing, whether it’s a brownie or drugs or whatever it might be. There’s no end to the things that we can become addicted to or just crave.
Not only things that we’re addicted to, but there’s a way in which we can crave or cling to material possessions. This idea that there’s some object that, “Okay, as soon as I have this, then that’ll be a source of lasting happiness.” We don’t use that language, but that’s what’s underneath it. We think not only will it be pleasurable for a moment when I get it, but it’ll be a source of lasting happiness.
So I want to just do a little experiment with you, a little exercise here, because exploring desire can be an enormously helpful, very powerful way to find more freedom. Not always easy, not always comfortable, not always fast and neat and tidy, but powerful.
Let’s just bring to mind something you want. It could be something significant, like objects—a car, a house, a different place to live—or maybe a relationship if you don’t have one right now. Something significant to you, like a different job or to live in a different place. Or it could be just something minor or small, like a grande skinny half-caf pumpkin spice latte with two pumps, extra hot. It’s impressive, right, all these things that your favorite barista can serve you. So it can be whatever you want. It could be a long-term goal like a degree, a certification, paying off loans, something like this. Or it could be something just fleeting, like, “You know what, I didn’t have enough dinner earlier, and I’m kind of hungry, and I’m thinking of having some burritos or some cookies,” or whatever it might be.
So just bring to mind something that you feel like you would want. And maybe just feel into what it feels like. “Oh yeah, I’d like to finally get a new car that can impress the neighbors and demonstrate that I’ve finally made it financially, or a car that demonstrates that I’m ecologically minded, I’ll get an electric car,” or something like this.
Then just notice how your mood changes when you start thinking about, “Oh yeah, as soon as the loans are paid off, or as soon as the grandchild is born,” or whatever it might be. There’s this way in which when we start to think about what we want, there’s often this little bit of an uplift. There’s this way in which a sense of sadness or heaviness might shift to, “Oh yeah, it’s going to be great as soon as I get this thing that I want.” Can you feel into that? This maybe a sense of uplift that happens. Maybe there’s a sense of some tension going away, or maybe there’s some sense of a little bit more calm as you’re fantasizing about how great it’s going to be when what you want finally has arisen, you have it.
There’s this way in which you might feel lighter or happier or maybe even more connected. Because when there’s a sense of a future promise of something bigger that’s about to happen, it somehow can make our life seem promising and exciting. It can make it have some juiciness to it in some kind of way. This can be a nice feeling. It’s not surprising that we are often lost in fantasies about what we’re going to have. We don’t call them fantasies, but this is completely 100% fantasy, right? What you were just thinking about is not here right this moment.
So there’s this way that maybe we can stay with this thing we want, noticing how the mind and the body kind of like to have this sense of wanting. But now, can you have a gentle inquiry: what is the subtle belief that is underneath it? Like, what do you think will happen once you obtain whatever it is that is the object of your desire? I’m assuming that there’s this implicit belief that achieving it will improve your life. I think that’s a reasonable assumption. But can you be a little bit more specific? “I want a promotion because then I will earn more money and have more respect.”
And then when we say that, it’s often really subtle, this sense of lack. “I don’t have enough money. I don’t have enough respect. They should respect me more. I should have more money.” And that doesn’t feel good, to have that sense of lack. Or maybe, “I want to have a bigger place to live, a better place to live, because then I can invite people over and I can have parties, and there’ll be room for lots of people, and then I won’t feel so lonely.” Maybe it’s like, ouch, to feel into the sense of loneliness or the sense of lack or whatever it might be.
Often, it’s these subtle feelings of things not being quite right, “I want more,” that’s actually fueling our desires. But if we can recognize what it is that’s fueling these desires and be with it as best we can, this will lead to greater freedom. This will lead to greater peace and ease, not just getting one more thing, whether it’s the promotion, whether it’s the degree, whether it’s the cupcake. Because it’s so easy to live our lives just chasing one desire after another. Our whole life could be nothing but this, just trying to get the next thing. “I got to feel better, I got to feel better.” And we’re just completely ignoring this dukkha2, this sense of things not being right. This can be subtle or it can be really loud.
This is not easy. It’s not comfortable. It’s not fun. But there’s a way when we just simply acknowledge, “Oh yeah, there’s loneliness. I feel lonely.” Can we acknowledge it and still have some uprightness and feel the loneliness, maybe in the body—the heaviness in the shoulders or tightness in the chest, maybe some pressure behind the eyes? And then can we just say, “Loneliness feels like this.” We don’t have to say it should be different. In fact, it’s just the way it is. Humans feel lonely sometimes. Even people who are very gregarious and extroverted and are surrounded by people, they feel lonely sometimes. Can we normalize and honor and respect our experience instead of thinking, “I should be different. Look at all those other people, they have lots of money, surely they’re happy.” How many really rich people do we know that are in the media all the time and are clearly not happy? You can see by all the weird things that they do. If they were happy, they would not be out there doing that weird stuff.
So there’s this way in which recognizing desire brings some uplift, and part of this uplift is recognizing that in the present moment, we can just recognize the illusion of this fictitious bliss. This completely fantastical thing that, “Okay, as soon as I get that, it’s going to be fine.” Let me say it a different way: our present moment experience will never be as wonderful as this fictitious bliss. It just won’t. Here’s one key reason, there are a number of reasons, but here’s one key reason: this little thing called anicca3, impermanence. Things change. The Buddha pointed to this as well, right? What we gain, we eventually lose, including this hedonic treadmill. Something that makes us happy stops making us happy. There’s this way in which joy turns into sorrow, and sorrow turns into joy as well. Things are changing. That’s just the natural way things are. But in our fictitious bliss, it’s just like, “Okay, I’m going to get this and it’s going to be a source of lasting happiness, full stop.” It’s just not going to happen that way.
There can be a little bit of a relief to realize, “Oh, it’s not that I’m failing. It’s not that I’m doing everything wrong that I had these fantasies, these ideas about how things should be, and I’m not quite as happy.” This is my story, I’ll say, of how I find myself here, having a PhD in Biochemistry and yet here I am being a Dharma teacher. How did that happen? And I’m a very slow learner because I went to school, am hyper-educated, and was a biochemist. I love biochemistry, but somehow, having a lot of professional success, and yet, “Oh yeah, that didn’t quite make me happy.” And I’m a slow learner because then I went back to graduate school, thinking, “Okay, I just have to learn something else,” and became, you know, in Buddhist studies and I have another graduate degree in Buddhist studies and then realized, “Oh yeah, okay, that didn’t quite make me happy in the way that I thought it would either.” For me, it was this idea that I just have to learn more. It’s not surprising, coming from my family background.
So how many things have you just thought, “Okay, well maybe that wasn’t the right car or it wasn’t the right whatever it is.” It can be a relief to think, “No, actually our ideas about things, they’re…” I kind of like this word “fantasies,” which is a little bit pejorative, but the truth is they’re just thoughts. They’re just ideas. They’re just imaginations we have. They have a place, they have a role, but our actual experience will never match. Sometimes it’ll be better, sometimes it’ll be worse, but it’ll never match what we’re imagining. Maybe we’ll be happier, it’ll be more pleasurable than what we were imagining, but it will change. This is something about fantasies that they don’t really take into account.
So what are wants? This is part of working with them or being with them or honoring and respecting them. They’re just simply a thought that’s arising from an underlying belief. They’re just thoughts. Often they’re very quiet, maybe we’ll call them beliefs that are not articulated so clearly as thoughts, but they’re completely insubstantial. These ideas that promise a different, imagined future. But when we look at our desires, what we want, we can kind of look underneath to see, “Okay, what are the underlying beliefs? It will make me feel secure. I’ll no longer feel afraid. People will respect me. Other people will love me.” And then we can just pay attention to that. We’re complex beings, humans. We have all these things under there, and so much we don’t want to acknowledge. But paying attention to our desires and what’s underneath it, can we be with that?
Sometimes it can be helpful to drop the labels. “Yeah, I want to be loved. I feel unloved.” Can we feel that in the body and then drop the labels and just be with the bodily experience? “Right now it feels like this. It feels heavy. It feels really tight. It feels like wanting to hide,” or something like this. So we might reflect on, are we trying to escape from something? Are we trying to reject a part of ourselves? Are we dismissing a part of ourselves? Is there something we’re trying to avoid? And then just to be with the experience, to stop avoiding as best we can. Even if it’s just for a fleeting moment, just to acknowledge it. Can we hold the space for this, for the bodily experience, for the belief underneath that was, “I want to be loved,” and then the bodily experience that’s associated with wanting to be loved? Can we just be with that, hold the space with it?
This will lead to greater peace. This will lead to greater freedom. This will lead to liberation—a liberation from being pushed around, from always chasing our desires, chasing the next thing. “Okay, well as soon as I get this next thing, it’s going to be fine.” We have those ideas when we’re young, until we get a number of things and we realize, “Oh yeah, I’m still not happy.” It doesn’t help for somebody like me to be sitting here and to be saying, “Oh yeah, it’s not going to be satisfying.” We all have to have that experience ourselves. But as we get older, we realize, yeah, what I thought was going to make me happy wasn’t. The pleasures that we seek, they evaporate quickly, and we overestimate how much happiness they will bring. This is part of the human condition.
What I just described is not easy. It’s not fast. It’s probably exactly what you don’t want to do. Instead, it’s so much nicer to think, “Okay, as soon as I get this car, or as soon as I retire, as soon as I move to that other place…” Our lives are filled with these things that we can want. But here are some things to do to make it easier or to be a support.
Bring curiosity to desires. This is a starting place. “Okay, I really do want this half-caf extra hot pumpkin spice latte, skinny, with two pumps.” [Laughter] Thank you. So just bring a curiosity to it. We’re so often focused on the object, that thing out there, but can we bring some curiosity to how it feels? We can have curiosity about that thing, but also what’s our experience? We have this idea it’ll be soothing, it’ll be comforting, I deserve it, it’s the holiday season. I did go into the particular coffee shop’s website and try to get some ideas here, and they have like gingerbread lattes, peppermint lattes. It’s quite something for the holidays. So bring some curiosity to, “Why do I want it? What is the experience of wanting it like?” Often, we’re completely disconnected from our experience. Instead, we’re thinking about what we’re going to have. “As soon as I get that, that’ll be great. I’m going to maybe share it with a friend, we’re both going to get something and spend some time and I can connect.” And like, “Oh, okay, there’s this idea of comfort and wanting to connect.” So just bring some curiosity to that experience.
The second thing that we can do, which is really important in our lives, is can we just in general, in small little gestures, cultivate contentment? There are times in our life when things are just fine. Maybe we’re going for a walk and we just notice there’s mushrooms, there’s a little bit of delight. Everything is just perfectly fine. Nothing has to be different. And just to acknowledge, “Right now, nothing needs to be different.” There’s this way in which we can honor and respect those human experiences of contentment, as it orients the mind and the body towards, “Oh yeah, this is possible.” It doesn’t require that we get everything that we want. It’s about appreciating whatever is arising there in the moment.
There’s this way that contentment can feel like the booby prize. Like, “Okay, if I can’t get what I want, okay, I’ll practice contentment.” But it turns out that freedom is radical contentment. Freedom is feeling like, “Yep, it’s okay.” It’s not being a bliss blob. It’s like, “Yep, everything’s okay.” This is what freedom is, because the lack of freedom is being pushed around by our desires. “I have to get this, I have to avoid this other thing,” or whatever it might be. We don’t talk about freedom in this way. We tend to think that freedom means that we can have whatever we want, but it’s actually a radical contentment. Like, everything is okay. It’s not pretending like there isn’t pain. It’s not pretending like there aren’t terrible injustices and oppression in the world. It’s not pretending that all that doesn’t exist. It’s just recognizing this moment, just this moment, it’s okay.
And maybe my life situation allows me to help others. Maybe my life situation right now has a tremendous amount of difficulties, and I need to pay attention to my responsibilities and what I can do to alleviate some of those difficulties. And maybe I have this inclination, this wish to help others, but I can’t support others as much as I’d like right now. Right now, I need to also pay attention to what’s happening here. But I have the contentment that right now, this is okay.
So cultivating contentment allows us also to be with desire, because we start to really understand that, “Oh, I don’t have to get everything I want in order to feel okay.” And not only that, with this contentment is a little taste of freedom, maybe it’s a big taste of freedom. I know when I first heard this idea of contentment, it didn’t sound so appealing, but now I love it. It turns out to be so great. I’ve done a lot of meditation and had a lot of meditative experiences, but there’s something about contentment that is enormously satisfying. And this is what humans really want: contentment, satisfaction, a stopping of that nagging, “Oh, I got to get something else, it’s not quite right.”
So, desire, wish lists… we might have a wish list, that’s fine. If you find that you really want something in particular, an object, you can use that as an opportunity to understand yourself a little bit better. Look into what is the underlying belief that’s fueling that desire, that want. And can we just honor and respect that? It can be a way of finding more ease in the moment. Or maybe you have a desire for world peace, for yourself to not cause harm to yourself, to not cause harm to others. Maybe you have a desire for having compassion and loving-kindness and these types of wholesome desires. Celebrate that, cultivate those. And can we cultivate contentment as a way to help us have the steadiness to work with desire, so we’re not just automatically falling into desire after desire.
So I’ll stop there and I’ll open it up for some comments or questions. Thank you.
Anybody have something they’d like to say or make a comment on?
Questioner: Hello, great talk. Thank you. So in my experience, when I practice with contentment and desire, sometimes, but not always, I can’t quite distinguish between a wholesome contentment and a not-so-wholesome apathy or disinterest or disengagement. Or on the flip side of the spectrum, distinguishing a wholesome ambition—the kind of ambition that produces excellence in relationships or career or art—from unwholesome, egoic desire. So contentment or ambition, yeah, distinguishing wholesome from unwholesome, I wonder if you have any thoughts on that.
Diana Clark: I do. This is a great topic. I could give a whole other Dharma talk on this. So I’ll give some bullet points here. One is, I use this feeling for myself, and you can kind of translate it into something that makes sense for you. It doesn’t necessarily work for everybody the way I’m describing it, but things that are supportive, like wholesome, they have a sense of spaciousness. I’m doing this with my hands. There’s this, as opposed to a contraction. And contraction feels like literally sometimes the muscles are tight, the shoulders up near the ears, or there’s a furrowing of the brow. But sometimes it’s subtle. There’s a feeling in the torso, like in the gut or in the heart area, there’s this tightness. So the wholesome, supportive has this general sense of openness and ease. So I’ll say that’s one thing.
A second thing that is a little bit more cognitive is if there is a certain clinging to particular outcomes. “I’m doing this in order that this happens.” Of course, we do things, we often have an idea about what’s going to happen, but there can be a way in which it’s, “I got to get this,” and then we’re not in touch with ourselves or any harm we’re causing to others or to ourselves or anything like this. Instead, we’re just so focused on getting this thing, dang it, whether that’s ambition.
There can also be a way that subtle contentment that is not helpful turns out not to be contentment. It turns out to be this apathy or disconnection or something. There’s this subtle way in which the outcome is, “I don’t want to feel,” as opposed to, “I feel this contentment.” And so that outcome is often subtle, but if there’s this apathy or disconnection, there can often be a lot of avoidance behaviors, like we’re distracting ourselves with something, or there’s some fogginess. We’re just not clear, we’re just kind of disconnected, spacey, or something like that. So spaciousness versus constriction, and clinging to particular outcomes as opposed to, “Oh yeah, this is the next right thing to do. I imagine it’s going this direction, but I’m just doing the next right thing to do,” is what I’m focused on. Is that helpful?
Questioner: Yeah, that’s helpful. Thank you. I also kind of wondered about energy level in there as well, where contentment, if it’s really relaxed, there isn’t a great drive or compulsion to act. If you’re with spaciousness, ease, relaxation, there can be a nice contentment in a settling in, such that you don’t feel any particular urge to go and create a great work of art or create a great project at work or overcome a hurdle in a relationship. You’re just so relaxed and at ease. So I wonder about that energy, where does that energy come from?
Diana Clark: Perhaps I want to challenge this, actually. I want to challenge this idea. I think with contentment, for me, it kind of frees up energy that otherwise is associated with trying to avoid things or something like that. When things are happy, then it’s also like inspiration. There are new ideas for art or for… it’s often when insights can arise, like, “Oh, right. Okay, this problem can get solved by doing X, Y, or Z,” and then off you go. So there can be some energy with this too, because often when there’s a strong drive, what’s fueling it sometimes is some discontent, right? It’s like, “Okay, this has got to be different,” so the drive comes from that. So there can be energy with contentment as well.
Questioner: Cool. Yeah, very interesting landscape. Thank you.
Diana Clark: You’re welcome. Well, maybe I’ll end this evening. I want to say something cute about wish lists, checking it twice… I don’t know. Just this idea that desire is just part of our experience, and is there a way that we can use it to support greater freedom, peace, and ease for ourselves and for others. So thank you. And on my wish list is for you all to have safe travels home and a nice New Year’s is next week, so a nice holiday season if you’re celebrating holidays. Thank you.
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. It’s nice to see you all. It’s nice to sit together.
Tonight, I wanted to talk a little bit about the holiday season. It’s not uncommon to see or hear references to this idea of a “wish list”—this idea of things that are wanted. This exists year-round; we often have wish lists. Amazon has a little wish list, and many of these online things make it as easy as possible for you to just clickity-click-click, and there you go. You can make a list of all the things that you wish you had, that you wanted.
Perhaps in particular this time of year, there’s this valorization of desire. It’s really held up: “What is your wish list? What do you want?” Whether that’s because of the New Year, because of Christmas, or for other holidays, what is this sense of what we want? Or maybe it can be interpreted as, “Well, what should I give you so that you’ll be happy?” or “What am I going to give you so that I’ll be happy, so that I’ll feel good about myself or something like that?” This intersection of desires and objects being exchanged and happiness.
Or maybe we could just say this time of year highlights the beauty of opportunities to reflect on and maybe act on those people that we care about, that are important to us or part of our lives, and to express care, love, and appreciation in whatever way that shows up. I was helping my mom with her Christmas cards—my family celebrates Christmas—and it’s really sweet. She’s been sending Christmas cards to these same people for 50 years, and there’s a little newsletter that goes with it: “This year we did X, Y, and Z.” It’s a beautiful, beautiful gesture, I think. And of course, she receives some too, and it’s nice.
This idea of what you want or desire often gets a bad rap in Buddhism, this idea that desire just leads to suffering. I remember years ago when somebody discovered that I was a Buddhist practitioner, the first thing they wanted to say is, “Oh yeah, I heard that Buddhism doesn’t like desire, but how crazy is that? I mean, you can’t even desire to not have desire, or you can’t desire to be awakened.” I was like, “No, no, no, it’s not like that.” But that was their idea on the outside looking in. And certainly, when we first start practicing, maybe I had that idea too. I can’t remember this idea that somehow we should be free of all desires. That’s not quite how it works.
So today, I’d like to unpack a little bit this idea of desire and partly how it can be a big support for our path to greater freedom, peace, and ease, as well as how it can be problematic.
Maybe I’ll start by saying, of course, in the very broad sense, desire is just a natural part of the human experience: the desire to eat when we’re hungry, the desire to use the bathroom when the body needs to eliminate waste. These are just natural things that happen. We also have leanings, we might say, or inclinations or aspirations, or this going in a particular direction. Of course we do. We’re not trying to get rid of this or deny it or somehow turn ourselves into machines. That would be awful. We’re not machines; we’re humans, and we have human bodies and human temperaments. That’s just the way it is, and it’s a beautiful thing.
But there’s also a way in which we have cravings and addictions and some clinging that are harmful—harmful to ourselves, harmful to others. That’s part of the human condition too, very often. The Buddha, of course, didn’t teach that all desires should be eliminated. These healthy ones—the desire for food or connection, or the desire for not causing harm, or the desire for greater ease, greater freedom, greater peace—of course, those should be cultivated and worked with. Instead of trying to eradicate all the ones that we feel like, “Oh, I shouldn’t feel this way,” can we understand them and transform these desires into something that can be helpful?
As you might imagine, classically in the Buddhist tradition, desires are put in two camps: those that are helpful and those that are not helpful. Kusala1 is the Pali word I’m translating as “helpful.” Our experience of it is as helpful. There are all kinds of other English words that we could use, but I’m going to stick with this idea of helpful—helpful for more ease in our life, helpful for more peace, helpful for more freedom, helpful for more equanimity, all kinds of things that we really want in our life.
The helpful ones, we could say, are those that are aligned with well-being, that contribute to well-being. Maybe that’s just a simple way to think about it. And it’s not only well-being for ourselves but contributes to well-being for others. I am making a distinction here between well-being and pleasure. Well-being is a sense that promotes health and balance and some stability and spaciousness, as opposed to just pleasure that leads to wanting more pleasure and can lead to heedlessness and things that make our life go awry.
Not only are they promoting a sense of well-being, but they’re characterized by the experience of some spaciousness or some lightness. I mean, this is such a small example, but today while I was out for a walk, apparently the conditions are right for lots of mushrooms to pop up. It was just so fantastic. I’m walking like, “Whoa, wow,” and some of them were just ginormous, these huge white mushrooms. I just took delight in them. Walking a little further, I saw some that were a different color, and they were so small, they were so cute. I just felt my heart like, who knew that underneath the ground were all these rhizomes of these fungi? And then there was this desire to see how many different types of mushrooms are here. So while I’m walking along, I’m keeping an eye out, and it was just fun. It just made me appreciate, “Wow, these are here all the time under the soil, and we just don’t see them until it’s dark and rainy.” I don’t know exactly what the conditions are, but apparently the conditions are being met right now, at least in some places. So this desire to feel that delight again when I’m seeing all these different mushrooms, different types, different colors, and in different places. There’s this sense of lightness and a little bit of an uplift, we might say, associated with that. It’s a harmless desire, and maybe that’s a silly example, but we could say the desire for spiritual growth, the desire for liberation from suffering, or we could say the desire for not causing harm to ourselves or to others, to live an ethical life, one in which we’re being sensitive to the impact that we’re having on others and in the world. That can show up in so many ways.
In contrast, we could say this unhelpful desire is the one that we might use the expression “craving” for, that falls into, “I got to have it. I got to have it. I don’t care about all this other stuff, I got to have this.” This craving has an association with a contraction in the body and this compulsion that’s moving us forward towards, “I got to get this.” Cigarettes, shopping, gambling, alcohol, food—it’s amazing the things that we can crave, the things that we can really want and have this sense of, “Okay, as soon as I get this, then I’ll feel better. I just got to get this.” I don’t care how I feel right now; I’m not noticing how uncomfortable it feels. I just got to get this thing, whether it’s a brownie or drugs or whatever it might be. There’s no end to the things that we can become addicted to or just crave.
Not only things that we’re addicted to, but there’s a way in which we can crave or cling to material possessions. This idea that there’s some object that, “Okay, as soon as I have this, then that’ll be a source of lasting happiness.” We don’t use that language, but that’s what’s underneath it. We think not only will it be pleasurable for a moment when I get it, but it’ll be a source of lasting happiness.
So I want to just do a little experiment with you, a little exercise here, because exploring desire can be an enormously helpful, very powerful way to find more freedom. Not always easy, not always comfortable, not always fast and neat and tidy, but powerful.
Let’s just bring to mind something you want. It could be something significant, like objects—a car, a house, a different place to live—or maybe a relationship if you don’t have one right now. Something significant to you, like a different job or to live in a different place. Or it could be just something minor or small, like a grande skinny half-caf pumpkin spice latte with two pumps, extra hot. It’s impressive, right, all these things that your favorite barista can serve you. So it can be whatever you want. It could be a long-term goal like a degree, a certification, paying off loans, something like this. Or it could be something just fleeting, like, “You know what, I didn’t have enough dinner earlier, and I’m kind of hungry, and I’m thinking of having some burritos or some cookies,” or whatever it might be.
So just bring to mind something that you feel like you would want. And maybe just feel into what it feels like. “Oh yeah, I’d like to finally get a new car that can impress the neighbors and demonstrate that I’ve finally made it financially, or a car that demonstrates that I’m ecologically minded, I’ll get an electric car,” or something like this.
Then just notice how your mood changes when you start thinking about, “Oh yeah, as soon as the loans are paid off, or as soon as the grandchild is born,” or whatever it might be. There’s this way in which when we start to think about what we want, there’s often this little bit of an uplift. There’s this way in which a sense of sadness or heaviness might shift to, “Oh yeah, it’s going to be great as soon as I get this thing that I want.” Can you feel into that? This maybe a sense of uplift that happens. Maybe there’s a sense of some tension going away, or maybe there’s some sense of a little bit more calm as you’re fantasizing about how great it’s going to be when what you want finally has arisen, you have it.
There’s this way in which you might feel lighter or happier or maybe even more connected. Because when there’s a sense of a future promise of something bigger that’s about to happen, it somehow can make our life seem promising and exciting. It can make it have some juiciness to it in some kind of way. This can be a nice feeling. It’s not surprising that we are often lost in fantasies about what we’re going to have. We don’t call them fantasies, but this is completely 100% fantasy, right? What you were just thinking about is not here right this moment.
So there’s this way that maybe we can stay with this thing we want, noticing how the mind and the body kind of like to have this sense of wanting. But now, can you have a gentle inquiry: what is the subtle belief that is underneath it? Like, what do you think will happen once you obtain whatever it is that is the object of your desire? I’m assuming that there’s this implicit belief that achieving it will improve your life. I think that’s a reasonable assumption. But can you be a little bit more specific? “I want a promotion because then I will earn more money and have more respect.”
And then when we say that, it’s often really subtle, this sense of lack. “I don’t have enough money. I don’t have enough respect. They should respect me more. I should have more money.” And that doesn’t feel good, to have that sense of lack. Or maybe, “I want to have a bigger place to live, a better place to live, because then I can invite people over and I can have parties, and there’ll be room for lots of people, and then I won’t feel so lonely.” Maybe it’s like, ouch, to feel into the sense of loneliness or the sense of lack or whatever it might be.
Often, it’s these subtle feelings of things not being quite right, “I want more,” that’s actually fueling our desires. But if we can recognize what it is that’s fueling these desires and be with it as best we can, this will lead to greater freedom. This will lead to greater peace and ease, not just getting one more thing, whether it’s the promotion, whether it’s the degree, whether it’s the cupcake. Because it’s so easy to live our lives just chasing one desire after another. Our whole life could be nothing but this, just trying to get the next thing. “I got to feel better, I got to feel better.” And we’re just completely ignoring this dukkha2, this sense of things not being right. This can be subtle or it can be really loud.
This is not easy. It’s not comfortable. It’s not fun. But there’s a way when we just simply acknowledge, “Oh yeah, there’s loneliness. I feel lonely.” Can we acknowledge it and still have some uprightness and feel the loneliness, maybe in the body—the heaviness in the shoulders or tightness in the chest, maybe some pressure behind the eyes? And then can we just say, “Loneliness feels like this.” We don’t have to say it should be different. In fact, it’s just the way it is. Humans feel lonely sometimes. Even people who are very gregarious and extroverted and are surrounded by people, they feel lonely sometimes. Can we normalize and honor and respect our experience instead of thinking, “I should be different. Look at all those other people, they have lots of money, surely they’re happy.” How many really rich people do we know that are in the media all the time and are clearly not happy? You can see by all the weird things that they do. If they were happy, they would not be out there doing that weird stuff.
So there’s this way in which recognizing desire brings some uplift, and part of this uplift is recognizing that in the present moment, we can just recognize the illusion of this fictitious bliss. This completely fantastical thing that, “Okay, as soon as I get that, it’s going to be fine.” Let me say it a different way: our present moment experience will never be as wonderful as this fictitious bliss. It just won’t. Here’s one key reason, there are a number of reasons, but here’s one key reason: this little thing called anicca3, impermanence. Things change. The Buddha pointed to this as well, right? What we gain, we eventually lose, including this hedonic treadmill. Something that makes us happy stops making us happy. There’s this way in which joy turns into sorrow, and sorrow turns into joy as well. Things are changing. That’s just the natural way things are. But in our fictitious bliss, it’s just like, “Okay, I’m going to get this and it’s going to be a source of lasting happiness, full stop.” It’s just not going to happen that way.
There can be a little bit of a relief to realize, “Oh, it’s not that I’m failing. It’s not that I’m doing everything wrong that I had these fantasies, these ideas about how things should be, and I’m not quite as happy.” This is my story, I’ll say, of how I find myself here, having a PhD in Biochemistry and yet here I am being a Dharma teacher. How did that happen? And I’m a very slow learner because I went to school, am hyper-educated, and was a biochemist. I love biochemistry, but somehow, having a lot of professional success, and yet, “Oh yeah, that didn’t quite make me happy.” And I’m a slow learner because then I went back to graduate school, thinking, “Okay, I just have to learn something else,” and became, you know, in Buddhist studies and I have another graduate degree in Buddhist studies and then realized, “Oh yeah, okay, that didn’t quite make me happy in the way that I thought it would either.” For me, it was this idea that I just have to learn more. It’s not surprising, coming from my family background.
So how many things have you just thought, “Okay, well maybe that wasn’t the right car or it wasn’t the right whatever it is.” It can be a relief to think, “No, actually our ideas about things, they’re…” I kind of like this word “fantasies,” which is a little bit pejorative, but the truth is they’re just thoughts. They’re just ideas. They’re just imaginations we have. They have a place, they have a role, but our actual experience will never match. Sometimes it’ll be better, sometimes it’ll be worse, but it’ll never match what we’re imagining. Maybe we’ll be happier, it’ll be more pleasurable than what we were imagining, but it will change. This is something about fantasies that they don’t really take into account.
So what are wants? This is part of working with them or being with them or honoring and respecting them. They’re just simply a thought that’s arising from an underlying belief. They’re just thoughts. Often they’re very quiet, maybe we’ll call them beliefs that are not articulated so clearly as thoughts, but they’re completely insubstantial. These ideas that promise a different, imagined future. But when we look at our desires, what we want, we can kind of look underneath to see, “Okay, what are the underlying beliefs? It will make me feel secure. I’ll no longer feel afraid. People will respect me. Other people will love me.” And then we can just pay attention to that. We’re complex beings, humans. We have all these things under there, and so much we don’t want to acknowledge. But paying attention to our desires and what’s underneath it, can we be with that?
Sometimes it can be helpful to drop the labels. “Yeah, I want to be loved. I feel unloved.” Can we feel that in the body and then drop the labels and just be with the bodily experience? “Right now it feels like this. It feels heavy. It feels really tight. It feels like wanting to hide,” or something like this. So we might reflect on, are we trying to escape from something? Are we trying to reject a part of ourselves? Are we dismissing a part of ourselves? Is there something we’re trying to avoid? And then just to be with the experience, to stop avoiding as best we can. Even if it’s just for a fleeting moment, just to acknowledge it. Can we hold the space for this, for the bodily experience, for the belief underneath that was, “I want to be loved,” and then the bodily experience that’s associated with wanting to be loved? Can we just be with that, hold the space with it?
This will lead to greater peace. This will lead to greater freedom. This will lead to liberation—a liberation from being pushed around, from always chasing our desires, chasing the next thing. “Okay, well as soon as I get this next thing, it’s going to be fine.” We have those ideas when we’re young, until we get a number of things and we realize, “Oh yeah, I’m still not happy.” It doesn’t help for somebody like me to be sitting here and to be saying, “Oh yeah, it’s not going to be satisfying.” We all have to have that experience ourselves. But as we get older, we realize, yeah, what I thought was going to make me happy wasn’t. The pleasures that we seek, they evaporate quickly, and we overestimate how much happiness they will bring. This is part of the human condition.
What I just described is not easy. It’s not fast. It’s probably exactly what you don’t want to do. Instead, it’s so much nicer to think, “Okay, as soon as I get this car, or as soon as I retire, as soon as I move to that other place…” Our lives are filled with these things that we can want. But here are some things to do to make it easier or to be a support.
Bring curiosity to desires. This is a starting place. “Okay, I really do want this half-caf extra hot pumpkin spice latte, skinny, with two pumps.” [Laughter] Thank you. So just bring a curiosity to it. We’re so often focused on the object, that thing out there, but can we bring some curiosity to how it feels? We can have curiosity about that thing, but also what’s our experience? We have this idea it’ll be soothing, it’ll be comforting, I deserve it, it’s the holiday season. I did go into the particular coffee shop’s website and try to get some ideas here, and they have like gingerbread lattes, peppermint lattes. It’s quite something for the holidays. So bring some curiosity to, “Why do I want it? What is the experience of wanting it like?” Often, we’re completely disconnected from our experience. Instead, we’re thinking about what we’re going to have. “As soon as I get that, that’ll be great. I’m going to maybe share it with a friend, we’re both going to get something and spend some time and I can connect.” And like, “Oh, okay, there’s this idea of comfort and wanting to connect.” So just bring some curiosity to that experience.
The second thing that we can do, which is really important in our lives, is can we just in general, in small little gestures, cultivate contentment? There are times in our life when things are just fine. Maybe we’re going for a walk and we just notice there’s mushrooms, there’s a little bit of delight. Everything is just perfectly fine. Nothing has to be different. And just to acknowledge, “Right now, nothing needs to be different.” There’s this way in which we can honor and respect those human experiences of contentment, as it orients the mind and the body towards, “Oh yeah, this is possible.” It doesn’t require that we get everything that we want. It’s about appreciating whatever is arising there in the moment.
There’s this way that contentment can feel like the booby prize. Like, “Okay, if I can’t get what I want, okay, I’ll practice contentment.” But it turns out that freedom is radical contentment. Freedom is feeling like, “Yep, it’s okay.” It’s not being a bliss blob. It’s like, “Yep, everything’s okay.” This is what freedom is, because the lack of freedom is being pushed around by our desires. “I have to get this, I have to avoid this other thing,” or whatever it might be. We don’t talk about freedom in this way. We tend to think that freedom means that we can have whatever we want, but it’s actually a radical contentment. Like, everything is okay. It’s not pretending like there isn’t pain. It’s not pretending like there aren’t terrible injustices and oppression in the world. It’s not pretending that all that doesn’t exist. It’s just recognizing this moment, just this moment, it’s okay.
And maybe my life situation allows me to help others. Maybe my life situation right now has a tremendous amount of difficulties, and I need to pay attention to my responsibilities and what I can do to alleviate some of those difficulties. And maybe I have this inclination, this wish to help others, but I can’t support others as much as I’d like right now. Right now, I need to also pay attention to what’s happening here. But I have the contentment that right now, this is okay.
So cultivating contentment allows us also to be with desire, because we start to really understand that, “Oh, I don’t have to get everything I want in order to feel okay.” And not only that, with this contentment is a little taste of freedom, maybe it’s a big taste of freedom. I know when I first heard this idea of contentment, it didn’t sound so appealing, but now I love it. It turns out to be so great. I’ve done a lot of meditation and had a lot of meditative experiences, but there’s something about contentment that is enormously satisfying. And this is what humans really want: contentment, satisfaction, a stopping of that nagging, “Oh, I got to get something else, it’s not quite right.”
So, desire, wish lists… we might have a wish list, that’s fine. If you find that you really want something in particular, an object, you can use that as an opportunity to understand yourself a little bit better. Look into what is the underlying belief that’s fueling that desire, that want. And can we just honor and respect that? It can be a way of finding more ease in the moment. Or maybe you have a desire for world peace, for yourself to not cause harm to yourself, to not cause harm to others. Maybe you have a desire for having compassion and loving-kindness and these types of wholesome desires. Celebrate that, cultivate those. And can we cultivate contentment as a way to help us have the steadiness to work with desire, so we’re not just automatically falling into desire after desire.
So I’ll stop there and I’ll open it up for some comments or questions. Thank you.
Anybody have something they’d like to say or make a comment on?
Questioner: Hello, great talk. Thank you. So in my experience, when I practice with contentment and desire, sometimes, but not always, I can’t quite distinguish between a wholesome contentment and a not-so-wholesome apathy or disinterest or disengagement. Or on the flip side of the spectrum, distinguishing a wholesome ambition—the kind of ambition that produces excellence in relationships or career or art—from unwholesome, egoic desire. So contentment or ambition, yeah, distinguishing wholesome from unwholesome, I wonder if you have any thoughts on that.
Diana Clark: I do. This is a great topic. I could give a whole other Dharma talk on this. So I’ll give some bullet points here. One is, I use this feeling for myself, and you can kind of translate it into something that makes sense for you. It doesn’t necessarily work for everybody the way I’m describing it, but things that are supportive, like wholesome, they have a sense of spaciousness. I’m doing this with my hands. There’s this, as opposed to a contraction. And contraction feels like literally sometimes the muscles are tight, the shoulders up near the ears, or there’s a furrowing of the brow. But sometimes it’s subtle. There’s a feeling in the torso, like in the gut or in the heart area, there’s this tightness. So the wholesome, supportive has this general sense of openness and ease. So I’ll say that’s one thing.
A second thing that is a little bit more cognitive is if there is a certain clinging to particular outcomes. “I’m doing this in order that this happens.” Of course, we do things, we often have an idea about what’s going to happen, but there can be a way in which it’s, “I got to get this,” and then we’re not in touch with ourselves or any harm we’re causing to others or to ourselves or anything like this. Instead, we’re just so focused on getting this thing, dang it, whether that’s ambition.
There can also be a way that subtle contentment that is not helpful turns out not to be contentment. It turns out to be this apathy or disconnection or something. There’s this subtle way in which the outcome is, “I don’t want to feel,” as opposed to, “I feel this contentment.” And so that outcome is often subtle, but if there’s this apathy or disconnection, there can often be a lot of avoidance behaviors, like we’re distracting ourselves with something, or there’s some fogginess. We’re just not clear, we’re just kind of disconnected, spacey, or something like that. So spaciousness versus constriction, and clinging to particular outcomes as opposed to, “Oh yeah, this is the next right thing to do. I imagine it’s going this direction, but I’m just doing the next right thing to do,” is what I’m focused on. Is that helpful?
Questioner: Yeah, that’s helpful. Thank you. I also kind of wondered about energy level in there as well, where contentment, if it’s really relaxed, there isn’t a great drive or compulsion to act. If you’re with spaciousness, ease, relaxation, there can be a nice contentment in a settling in, such that you don’t feel any particular urge to go and create a great work of art or create a great project at work or overcome a hurdle in a relationship. You’re just so relaxed and at ease. So I wonder about that energy, where does that energy come from?
Diana Clark: Perhaps I want to challenge this, actually. I want to challenge this idea. I think with contentment, for me, it kind of frees up energy that otherwise is associated with trying to avoid things or something like that. When things are happy, then it’s also like inspiration. There are new ideas for art or for… it’s often when insights can arise, like, “Oh, right. Okay, this problem can get solved by doing X, Y, or Z,” and then off you go. So there can be some energy with this too, because often when there’s a strong drive, what’s fueling it sometimes is some discontent, right? It’s like, “Okay, this has got to be different,” so the drive comes from that. So there can be energy with contentment as well.
Questioner: Cool. Yeah, very interesting landscape. Thank you.
Diana Clark: You’re welcome. Well, maybe I’ll end this evening. I want to say something cute about wish lists, checking it twice… I don’t know. Just this idea that desire is just part of our experience, and is there a way that we can use it to support greater freedom, peace, and ease for ourselves and for others. So thank you. And on my wish list is for you all to have safe travels home and a nice New Year’s is next week, so a nice holiday season if you’re celebrating holidays. Thank you.
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. It’s nice to see you all. It’s nice to sit together.
Tonight, I wanted to talk a little bit about the holiday season. It’s not uncommon to see or hear reference to this idea of a “wish list”—this idea of things that are wanted. This exists year-round; we often have wish lists. Amazon has a little wish list, and many of these online things make it as easy as possible for you to just clickity-click-click, and there you go. You can make a list of all the things that you wish you had, that you wanted.
Perhaps in particular this time of year, there’s this valorization of desire. It’s really held up: “What is your wish list? What do you want?” Whether that’s because of the New Year, because of Christmas, or for other holidays, what is this sense of what we want? Or maybe it can be interpreted as, “Well, what should I give you so that you’ll be happy?” or “What am I going to give you so that I’ll be happy, so that I’ll feel good about myself?” This intersection of desires and objects being exchanged and happiness.
Or maybe we could just say this time of year highlights the beauty of opportunities to reflect on and maybe act on those people that we care about, that are important to us or part of our lives, and to express care, love, and appreciation in whatever way that shows up. I was helping my mom with her Christmas cards—my family celebrates Christmas—and it’s really sweet. She’s been sending Christmas cards to these same people for 50 years, and there’s a little newsletter that goes with it: “This year we did X, Y, and Z.” It’s a beautiful, beautiful gesture, I think. And of course, she receives some too, and it’s nice.
But this idea of what you want, or desire, often has a bad rap in Buddhism. This idea that desire just leads to suffering. I remember years ago when somebody discovered that I was a Buddhist practitioner, the first thing they wanted to say is, “Oh yeah, I heard that Buddhism doesn’t like desire, but how crazy is that? I mean, you can’t even desire to not have desire, or you can’t desire to be awakened.” I was like, “No, no, no, it’s not like that.” But that was their idea on the outside looking in. And certainly, when we first start practicing, maybe I had that idea too. I can’t remember this idea like, “Oh yeah, somehow we should be free of all desires.” That’s not quite how it works.
So today, I’d like to unpack a little bit this idea of desire and partly how it can be a big support for our path to greater freedom, peace, and ease, as well as how it can be problematic.
Maybe I’ll start by saying, of course, in the very broad sense, desire is just a natural part of the human experience. The desire to eat when we’re hungry, the desire to use the bathroom when the body needs to eliminate waste—these are just natural things that happen. We also have leanings, we might say, or inclinations or aspirations, or going in a particular direction. Of course we do. We’re not trying to get rid of this or deny it or somehow turn ourselves into machines. That would be awful. We’re not machines; we’re humans, and we have human bodies and human temperaments. That’s just the way it is, and it’s a beautiful thing.
But there’s also a way in which we have cravings and addictions and some clinging that are harmful—harmful to ourselves, harmful to others. That’s part of the human condition too, very often. And so the Buddha, of course, he didn’t teach that all desires should be eliminated. These healthy ones—the desire for food or connection, or the desire for not causing harm, or for greater ease, greater freedom, greater peace—of course, those should be cultivated and worked with. Instead of trying to eradicate all the ones that we feel like, “Oh, I shouldn’t feel this way,” can we understand them and transform these desires into something that can be helpful?
As you might imagine, classically in the Buddhist tradition, desires are put in two camps: those that are helpful and those that are not helpful. Kusala1 is the Pali word I’m translating as “helpful.” Our experience of it is as helpful. There are all kinds of other English words that we could use, but I’m going to stick with this idea of helpful—helpful for more ease in our life, helpful for more peace, helpful for more freedom, helpful for more equanimity, all kinds of things that we really want in our life.
The helpful ones, we could say, are those that are aligned with well-being, that contribute to well-being. Maybe that’s just a simple way to think about it. And it’s not only well-being for ourselves but contributes to well-being for others. I am making a distinction here between well-being and pleasure. Well-being is a sense that promotes health and balance and some stability and spaciousness, as opposed to just pleasure that leads to wanting more pleasure and can lead to heedlessness and things that make our life go awry.
Not only are they promoting a sense of well-being, but they’re characterized by the experience of some spaciousness or some lightness. I mean, this is such a small example, but today while I was out for a walk, apparently the conditions are right for lots of mushrooms to pop up. And it was just so fantastic. I’m walking like, “Whoa, wow!” And some of them were just ginormous, these huge white mushrooms, and I just took delight in them. Walking a little further, I saw some that were a different color, and they were so small, they were so cute. And I just felt my heart like, who knew that underneath the ground were all these rhizomes of these fungi? And then there was this desire to see how many different types of mushrooms are here. So while I’m walking along, I’m keeping an eye out, and it was just fun. It just made me appreciate, wow, these are here all the time under the soil, and we just don’t see them until it’s dark and rainy. I don’t know exactly what the conditions are, but apparently the conditions are being met right now, at least in some places. So this desire to feel that delight again when I’m seeing all these different mushrooms, different types, different colors, and in different places. There’s this sense of lightness and a little bit of an uplift associated with that. It’s a harmless desire, and maybe that’s a silly example, but we could say that the desire for spiritual growth, the desire for liberation from suffering, or the desire for not causing harm to ourselves or to others, to live an ethical life—one in which we’re being sensitive to the impact that we’re having on others and in the world—that can show up in so many ways.
In contrast, we could say this unhelpful desire is the one that we might use the expression “craving” for. It falls into, “I got to have it. I got to have it. I don’t care about all this other stuff, I got to have this.” This craving has a contraction in the body and this compulsion that’s moving us forward towards, “I got to get this.” Cigarettes, shopping, gambling, alcohol, food—it’s amazing the things that we can crave, the things that we can really want and have this sense of, “Okay, well as soon as I get this, then I’ll feel better. I just got to get this.” And I don’t care how I feel right now. I’m not noticing how uncomfortable it feels. I just got to get this thing, whether it’s a brownie or drugs or whatever it might be. There’s no end to the things that we can become addicted to or just crave.
Not only things that we’re addicted to, but there’s a way in which we can crave or cling to material possessions. This idea that there are some objects that, “Okay, as soon as I have this, then that’ll be a source of lasting happiness.” We don’t use that language, but that’s what’s underneath it. We think not only will it be pleasurable for a moment when I get it, but it’ll be a source of lasting happiness.
So I want to just do a little experiment with you, a little exercise here, because exploring desire can be an enormously helpful, very powerful way to find more freedom. Not always easy, not always comfortable, not always fast and neat and tidy, but powerful.
So let’s just bring to mind something you want. It could be something significant, like objects—a car, a house, a different place to live—or maybe a relationship if you don’t have one right now. Something significant to you, like a different job or to live in a different place. Or it could be just something minor or small, like a grande skinny half-caf pumpkin spice latte with two pumps, extra hot. It’s impressive, right, all these things that your favorite barista can serve you. So it can be whatever you want. It could be a long-term goal like a degree, a certification, paying off loans, something like this. Or it could be something just fleeting like, “You know what, I didn’t have enough dinner earlier and I’m kind of hungry, and I’m thinking of having some burritos or some cookies,” or whatever it might be.
So just bring to mind something that you feel like you would want. And maybe just feel into what it feels like. “Oh yeah, I’d like to finally get a new car that can impress the neighbors and demonstrate that I’ve finally made it financially, or a car that demonstrates that I’m ecologically minded, like an electric car.” And then just notice how your mood changes when you start thinking about, “Oh yeah, as soon as the loans are paid off, or as soon as the grandchild is born,” or whatever it might be.
There’s this way in which when we start to think about what we want, there’s often this little bit of an uplift. This sense of sadness or heaviness might shift to, “Oh yeah, it’s going to be great as soon as I get this thing that I want.” Can you feel into that? This maybe a sense of uplift that happens. Maybe there’s a sense of some tension going away, or maybe there’s some sense of a little bit more calm as you’re fantasizing about how great it’s going to be when what you want finally has arisen. You have it.
There’s this way in which you might feel lighter or happier or maybe even more connected. Because when there’s a sense of a future promise of something bigger that’s about to happen, it somehow can make our life seem promising and exciting. It can make it have some juiciness to it in some kind of way. And this can be a nice feeling. It’s not surprising that we are often lost in fantasies about what we’re going to have. We don’t call them fantasies, but this is completely 100% fantasy, right? What you were just thinking about is not here right this moment.
So there’s this way that maybe we can stay with this thing we want, noticing how the mind and the body kind of like to have this sense of wanting. But now, can you have a gentle inquiry? What is the subtle belief that is underneath it? Like, what do you think will happen once you obtain whatever it is that is the object of your desire? I’m assuming that there’s this implicit belief that achieving it will improve your life. I think that’s a reasonable assumption. But can you be a little bit more specific? “I want a promotion because then I will earn more money and have more respect.”
And then when we say that, it’s often really subtle, this sense of lack. “I don’t have enough money. I don’t have enough respect. They should respect me more. I should have more money.” And that doesn’t feel good, to have that sense of lack. Or maybe, “I want to have a bigger place to live, a better place to live, because then I can invite people over and I can have parties and there’ll be room for lots of people, and then I won’t feel so lonely.” Maybe it’s like, ouch, to feel into the sense of loneliness or the sense of lack or whatever it might be.
Often, it’s these subtle feelings of things not being quite right, “I want more,” that’s actually fueling our desires. But if we can recognize what it is that’s fueling these desires and to be with it as best we can, this will lead to greater freedom. This will lead to greater peace and ease, not just getting one more thing, whether it’s the promotion, whether it’s the degree, whether it’s the cupcake. Because it’s so easy to live our lives just chasing one desire after another. Our whole life could be nothing but this, just trying to get the next thing. “I got to feel better, I got to feel better.” And we’re just completely ignoring this dukkha2, this sense of things not being right. This can be subtle or it can be really loud.
This is not easy. It’s not comfortable. It’s not fun. But there’s a way when we just simply acknowledge, “Oh yeah, there’s loneliness. I feel lonely.” Can we acknowledge it and still have some uprightness and feel the loneliness, maybe in the body—the heaviness in the shoulders or tightness in the chest, maybe some pressure behind the eyes? And then can we just say, “Loneliness feels like this.” We don’t have to say it should be different. In fact, it’s just the way it is. Humans feel lonely sometimes. Even people who are very gregarious and extroverted and are surrounded by people, they feel lonely sometimes. Can we normalize and honor and respect our experience instead of thinking, “I should be different. Look at all those other people, they have lots of money, surely they’re happy.”
How many really rich people do we know that are in the media all the time and are clearly not happy? You can see by all the weird things that they do. If they were happy, they would not be out there doing that weird stuff.
So there’s this way in which recognizing desire brings some uplift, and part of this uplift is recognizing that in the present moment, we can just recognize the illusion of this fictitious bliss. This completely fantastical thing that, “Okay, as soon as I get that, it’s going to be fine.” Our present moment experience will never be as wonderful as this fictitious bliss. It just won’t. Here’s one key reason, among a number of reasons: this little thing called anicca3, impermanence. Things change. The Buddha pointed to this as well, right? What we gain, we eventually lose, including this hedonic treadmill. Something that makes us happy stops making us happy. And there’s this way in which joy turns into sorrow. Sorrow turns into joy as well. Things are changing. That’s just the natural way things are. But in our fictitious bliss, it’s just like, “Okay, I’m going to get this and it’s going to be a source of lasting happiness, full stop.” It’s just not going to happen that way.
There can be a little bit of a relief to realize, “Oh, it’s not that I’m failing. It’s not that I’m doing everything wrong that I had these fantasies, these ideas about how things should be, and I’m not quite as happy.” This is my story of how I find myself here, having a PhD in Biochemistry and yet here I am being a Dharma teacher. How did that happen? And I’m a very slow learner because I went to school, have all this hyper-education, and was a biochemist. I love biochemistry, but somehow, having a lot of professional success, and yet, “Oh yeah, that didn’t quite make me happy.” And I’m a slow learner because then I went back to graduate school, thinking, “Okay, I just have to learn something else,” and became, you know, in Buddhist studies and I have another graduate degree in Buddhist studies and then realized, “Oh yeah, okay, that didn’t quite make me happy in the way that I thought it would either.” For me, it was this idea that I just have to learn more. It’s not surprising, coming from my family background.
So how many things have you just thought, “Okay, well maybe that wasn’t the right car or it wasn’t the right whatever it is”? It can be a relief to think, “No, actually our ideas about things, they’re…” I kind of like this word “fantasies,” which is a little bit pejorative, but the truth is they’re just thoughts. They’re just ideas. They’re just imaginations we have. They have a place, they have a role, but our actual experience will never match. Sometimes it’ll be better, sometimes it’ll be worse, but it’ll never match what we’re imagining. Maybe we’ll be happier, it’ll be more pleasurable than what we were imagining, but it will change. This is something about fantasies that they don’t really take into account.
So what are wants? This is part of working with them, or being with them, or honoring and respecting them. They’re just simply a thought that’s arising from an underlying belief. They’re just thoughts. Often they’re very quiet, maybe we’ll call them beliefs that are not articulated so clearly as thoughts, but they’re completely insubstantial. These ideas that promise a different, imagined future. But when we look at our desires, what we want, we can kind of look underneath to see, “Okay, what are the underlying beliefs? It will make me feel secure. I’ll no longer feel afraid. People will respect me. Other people will love me.”
And then we can just pay attention to that. We’re complex beings, humans. We have all these things under there, and so much we don’t want to acknowledge. But paying attention to our desires and what’s underneath it, can we be with that? And sometimes it can be helpful to drop the labels. “Yeah, I want to be loved. I feel unloved.” Can we feel that in the body and then drop the labels and just be with the bodily experience? “Right now it feels like this. It feels heavy. It feels really tight. It feels like wanting to hide,” or something like this.
So we might reflect on, are we trying to escape from something? Are we trying to reject a part of ourselves? Are we dismissing a part of ourselves? Is there something we’re trying to avoid? And then just to be with the experience, to stop avoiding as best we can. And even if it’s just for a fleeting moment, just to acknowledge it. Can we hold the space for this, for the bodily experience, for the belief underneath that was, “I want to be loved,” and then the bodily experience that’s associated with wanting to be loved? Can we just be with that, hold the space with it?
This will lead to greater peace. This will lead to greater freedom. This will lead to liberation—a liberation from being pushed around, from always chasing our desires, chasing the next thing. “Okay, well as soon as I get this next thing, it’s going to be fine.” We have those ideas when we’re young, until we get a number of things and we realize, “Oh yeah, I’m still not happy.” It doesn’t help for somebody like me to be sitting here and to be saying, “Oh yeah, it’s not going to be satisfying.” We all have to have that experience ourselves. But as we get older, we realize, yeah, what I thought was going to make me happy wasn’t. The pleasures that we seek, they evaporate quickly, and we overestimate how much happiness they will bring. This is part of the human condition.
What I just described is not easy. It’s not fast. It’s probably exactly what you don’t want to do. Instead, it’s so much nicer to think, “Okay, as soon as I get this car, or as soon as I retire, as soon as I move to that other place…” Our lives are filled with these things that we can want. But here are some things to do to make it easier or to be a support.
Bring curiosity to desires. This is a starting place. “Okay, I really do want this half-caf extra hot pumpkin spice latte, skinny with two pumps.” [Laughter] Thank you. So just bring a curiosity to it. We’re so often focused on the object, that thing out there, but can we bring some curiosity to how it feels? We can have curiosity about that thing, but also what’s our experience? We have this idea it’ll be soothing, it’ll be comforting, I deserve it. It’s the holiday season. I did go into the particular coffee shop’s website and try to get some ideas here, and they have like gingerbread lattes, peppermint lattes. It’s quite something for the holidays. But bring some curiosity to, “Why do I want it?” and “What is the experience of wanting it like?” Often, we’re completely disconnected from our experience. Instead, we’re thinking about what we’re going to have. “As soon as I get that, that’ll be great. I’m going to maybe share it with a friend, we’re both going to get something and spend some time and I can connect.” And like, “Oh, okay, there’s this idea of comfort and wanting to connect.” So just bring some curiosity to that experience.
And then the second thing that we can do, which is really important in our lives, can we just in general, in small little gestures, cultivate contentment? There are times in our life when things are just fine. Maybe we’re going for a walk and we just notice there’s mushrooms, there’s a little bit of delight. Everything is just perfectly fine. Nothing has to be different. And just to acknowledge, “Right now, nothing needs to be different.” There’s this way in which we can honor and respect those human experiences of contentment, as it orients the mind and the body towards, “Oh yeah, this is possible.” It doesn’t require that we get everything that we want. It’s about appreciating whatever is arising there in the moment.
There’s this way that contentment can feel like the booby prize. Like, “Okay, if I can’t get what I want, okay, I’ll practice contentment.” But it turns out that freedom is radical contentment. Freedom is feeling like, “Yep, it’s okay.” It’s not being a bliss blob. It’s like, “Yep, everything’s okay.” This is what freedom is, because the lack of freedom is being pushed around by our desires. “I have to get this, I have to avoid this other thing,” or whatever it might be. We don’t talk about freedom in this way. We tend to think that freedom means that we can have whatever we want, but it’s actually a radical contentment. Like, everything is okay. It’s not pretending like there isn’t pain. It’s not pretending like there aren’t terrible injustices and oppression in the world. It’s not pretending that all that doesn’t exist. It’s just recognizing this moment, just this moment, it’s okay.
And maybe my life situation allows me to help others. Maybe my life situation right now has a tremendous amount of difficulties, and I need to pay attention to my responsibilities and what I can do to alleviate some of those difficulties. And maybe I have this inclination, this wish to help others, but I can’t support others as much as I’d like right now. Right now, I need to also pay attention to what’s happening here. But I have the contentment that right now, this is okay.
So cultivating contentment allows us also to be with desire, because we start to really understand that, “Oh, I don’t have to get everything I want in order to feel okay.” And not only that, with this contentment is a little taste of freedom, maybe it’s a big taste of freedom. I know when I first heard this idea of contentment, it didn’t sound so appealing, but now I love it. It turns out to be so great. I’ve done a lot of meditation and had a lot of meditative experiences, but there’s something about contentment that is enormously satisfying. And this is what humans really want: contentment, satisfaction, a stopping of that nagging, “Oh, I got to get something else, it’s not quite right.”
So, desire, wish lists… we might have a wish list, that’s fine. If you find that you really want something in particular, an object, you can use that as an opportunity to understand yourself a little bit better. Look into what is the underlying belief that’s fueling that desire, that want. And can we just honor and respect that? It can be a way of finding more ease in the moment. Or maybe you have a desire for world peace, for yourself to not cause harm to yourself, to not cause harm to others. Maybe you have a desire for having compassion and loving-kindness and these types of wholesome desires. Celebrate that, cultivate those. And can we cultivate contentment as a way to help us have the steadiness that we can work with desire, so we’re not just automatically falling into desire after desire.
So I’ll stop there and I’ll open it up for some comments or questions. Thank you.
Questioner: Hello, great talk, thank you. So in my experience, when I practice with contentment and desire, sometimes, but not always, I can’t quite distinguish between a wholesome contentment and a not-so-wholesome apathy or disinterest or disengagement. Or on the flip side of the spectrum, distinguishing a wholesome ambition—the kind of ambition that produces excellence in relationships or career or art—from unwholesome, egoic desire. So contentment or ambition, yeah, distinguishing wholesome from unwholesome, I wonder if you have any thoughts on that.
Diana Clark: I do. This is a great topic. I could give a whole other Dharma talk on this. So I’ll give some bullet points here. One is, I use this feeling for myself, and you can kind of translate it into something that makes sense for you. Things that are supportive, or wholesome, they have a sense of spaciousness. I’m doing this with my hands. There’s this, as opposed to a contraction. And contraction feels like literally sometimes the muscles are tight, the shoulders up near the ears, or there’s a furrowing of the brow. But sometimes it’s subtle. There’s a feeling in the torso, like in the gut or in the heart area, there’s this tightness. So the wholesome, supportive has this general sense of openness and ease. So I’ll say that’s one thing.
A second thing that is a little bit more cognitive is if there is a certain clinging to particular outcomes. “I’m doing this in order that this happens.” Of course, we do things and we often have an idea about what’s going to happen, but there can be a way in which it’s, “I got to get this,” and then we’re not in touch with ourselves or any harm we’re causing to others or to ourselves. Instead, we’re just so focused on getting this thing, dang it, whether that’s an ambition. There can also be a way that subtle contentment that is not helpful turns out not to be contentment; it turns out to be this apathy or disconnection. There’s this subtle way in which the outcome is, “I don’t want to feel,” as opposed to, “I feel this contentment.” And so that outcome is often subtle, but if there’s this apathy or disconnection, there can often be a lot of avoidance behaviors, like we’re distracting ourselves with something, or there’s some fogginess, like we’re just not clear, we’re just kind of disconnected, spacey, or something like that. So spaciousness versus constriction, and clinging to particular outcomes as opposed to, “Oh yeah, this is the next right thing to do. I imagine it’s going this direction, but I’m just doing the next right thing to do,” is what I’m focused on. Is that helpful?
Questioner: Yeah, that’s helpful, thank you. I also kind of wondered about energy level in there as well, where contentment, if it’s really relaxed, there isn’t a great drive, a compulsion to act. If you’re with spaciousness, ease, relaxation, there can be a nice contentment in a settling in such that you don’t feel any particular urge to go and create a great work of art or create a great project at work or overcome a hurdle in a relationship. You’re just so relaxed and at ease. So I wonder about that energy, where does that energy come from?
Diana Clark: Perhaps I want to challenge this, actually. I think with contentment, for me, it kind of frees up energy that otherwise is associated with trying to avoid things or something like that. When things are happy, then it’s also like inspiration. There are new ideas for art or, it’s often when insights can arise like, “Oh, right. Okay, this problem can get solved by doing X, Y, or Z,” and then off you go. So there can be some energy with this too, because often when there’s strong drive, what’s fueling it sometimes is some discontent, right? It’s like, “Okay, this has got to be different,” and the drive comes from that. So there can be energy with contentment as well.
Questioner: Cool, yeah, very interesting landscape. Thank you.
Diana Clark: You’re welcome. Well, maybe I’ll end this evening. I want to say something cute about wish lists, checking it twice. I don’t know. Just this idea that desire is just part of our experience, and is there a way that we can use it to support greater freedom, peace, and ease for ourselves and for others? So thank you. And on my wish list is for you all to have safe travels home and a nice New Year’s is next week from now, so a nice holiday season if you’re celebrating holidays. Thank you.
Kusala: A Pali word that translates to “skillful,” “wholesome,” or “meritorious.” It refers to actions and intentions that are beneficial for one’s spiritual development and lead to happiness and peace. ↩ ↩2 ↩3
Dukkha: A fundamental concept in Buddhism, often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” “dissatisfaction,” or “unease.” It refers to the inherent unsatisfactoriness of all conditioned phenomena. ↩ ↩2 ↩3
Anicca: A Pali word meaning “impermanence” or “inconstancy.” It is one of the three marks of existence in Buddhism, highlighting the truth that all conditioned things are in a constant state of flux. ↩ ↩2 ↩3