This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Beyond Labels: Experiencing the Aliveness of the Present Moment ~ 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, especially if this is your first time here at IMC, a warm welcome. I’ll just say briefly that on Thursday nights, Tanya Weiser teaches here. It’s a little bit different style, a little bit more interactive, a little bit more guidance, I think, with the meditation. And then on Sunday mornings is Gil Fronsdal, the founder, and on Wednesday mornings often is also Gil too. So, if you look at our calendar, there’s a lot of stuff happening here, and you’re welcome to all of them. There’s a few things that are happening that are like year-long courses that we’re in the middle of, and I think those aren’t on the calendar. So if it’s on the calendar, you’re welcome to come.
And then I feel like I should say, Happy New Year, right? Happy New Year, everybody. I was thinking about this whole idea, maybe you’ve had this thought too, of “New Year” is kind of funny. It’s a little bit arbitrary. Like, okay, Tuesday and then Wednesday, but all of a sudden it’s a different year. And these concepts, these ideas that we put on certain things… for me, today feels like the new year. The first Monday in January kind of feels like, “Oh, this is the beginning of the new year.” But, you know, calendars are handy. Having names for years, weeks, months, days is handy. It’s helpful, so we use them. It’s very useful.
But I think many of us recognize that these are just concepts, right? I mean, if you were to write 2024 on a date for something, the experience is exactly the same, right? Whether you’re writing 2025 or 2024, the experience is the same of when you’re actually doing it. Maybe in the same way that when we have three-day weekends, sometimes Tuesdays feel like Wednesdays, or maybe Wednesdays feel like Tuesdays. Whatever. The experience doesn’t change. If all day long you thought it was Tuesday, but it was really Wednesday, you still felt hungry at noon, you still felt like you should take the dog out for a walk at a certain time, or whatever. The experiences are the same, but it’s just these concepts that we put on top, which are useful and helpful. And so much about meditation is actually to help us see this distinction in a particular way, maybe in a deeper way—this distinction between experiences and concepts.
I brought along some props. I don’t often do this, but I don’t know, I just felt like somehow doing this. Okay, so here we are. We have a very helpful office supply: a binder clip. This humble binder clip, very helpful. It’s nice. I use these sometimes when I still use paper for a lot of things. I like paper. I grew up using paper, so I like paper. Okay, this is a modest binder clip. And then here’s a pen. It’s just an ordinary ballpoint pen. We could say the pen is bigger than the binder clip. There’s no trick question about this. This is very straightforward. There’s nothing tricky about this. This one’s bigger, the pen. The binder clip is smaller. We’re just looking at size, just physical size. One’s big, one’s small. Big, small. Nothing tricky here, until we do this little magic trick.
Tada! What was big is no longer big when it’s compared… we have scissors here, which are bigger. So now what we were calling “big” is now maybe “middle-sized.” You’re like, “Diana, we’re not in kindergarten. What are you doing?”
These concepts that we add, they’re not inherent to the thing. There’s nothing about this pen that is inherently big. It’s just big when it’s compared to something smaller, and it’s middle-sized when it’s compared to something bigger. But how often do we think that the concepts that we apply to something are inherent to this thing, to this person, to this group of people? “Them over there, those are the people that are bad or good or something like this.” Concepts are something that we’re adding on top of a red, skinny thing that makes a clicky sound and has ink on one end of it. We’re calling this a pen. It could also be a chew toy if a person were a dog, or I should say, for a dog. It could also, if I were to throw this at somebody, maybe it could be a means to get their attention. It’s no longer serving as a pen, right? Or if I was trying to describe what the color red was, this could just be something else. There’s nothing inherent in these labels. I was saying the label “big” wasn’t inherent. The label “pen” isn’t inherent in this.
There are so many ways in which we’re using words and concepts, which are so useful. We need them. But it’s not the same. The map is not the territory. We’ve heard this expression. The words that we’re using, the language that we’re using, isn’t the same as the experience, isn’t the same as what the objects are.
So in the simplest terms, we can say a concept is maybe like a label that we put onto something, and it makes it feel… we might mistake or conflate that label with the actual object. In some places, this makes perfect sense. Like if I were to say, for example, “Insight Meditation Center” is a concept, right? What is Insight Meditation Center? Is it this bell? Is it this statue? Is it this building? But then what about the emails that go out, or the people that practice here, or whatever it is? “Insight Meditation Center” is kind of like a concept. Very useful.
So in some ways, these labels are extra, and we don’t realize how often we’re moving through life with these ideas, conceptions, preconceptions, projections, thoughts, beliefs—and these beliefs about ourselves, about life, about other people. And these are just concepts and ideas. They’re not what’s real. They’re not the actual experience.
For some examples, we might have some ideas about ourselves that, “I can’t do that,” or “I’m never angry, dang it! Don’t tell me that!” Which I actually said, apparently, at one time. Somebody did say to me, “Diana, you…” This was a meditation teacher that told me this quite some time ago, early in my practice. Apparently, I proclaimed I was never angry. And then a few years later, this person saw me, and I was really angry. We have ideas about ourselves, right? And then we try to reinterpret our experiences in order to map to these ideas.
In the same way, we might have ideas about other people because they live in that part of the world, that part of the continent, whatever it might be—that part of the planet, that part of the city, that part of the county, that part of the street. Whatever it might be, we might just have ideas like, “Oh yeah, there’s those people over there.” And we might think that they’re great, we might think that they’re terrible, but there’s this way that we’re kind of diminishing their humanity and not recognizing… maybe they’re tremendously generous to their community, to their family. Maybe they are fantastic caretakers for their loved ones or for others. Maybe they’re fantastic caretakers for themselves. Maybe they have a terrible disease, but they are meeting it as best they can with taking good care of themselves, instead of trying to deny and pretend it’s not happening.
I had this experience a number of years ago. I had to have some medical test. I don’t remember what they were testing for, so it must have been negative, whatever the results were. But it required that they were going to put something in my veins and stick me in some type of a scanner. And I’m like, “Okay, well, you know, this is what’s going to happen.” So they hook me up with something—I don’t like to look, so I don’t know exactly what it was—but something in my arm so that they could insert whatever it was they were inserting, dye presumably. And the technician, the person that was doing this, said, “Okay, you’re going to feel a warm sensation after I inject this, and it’s going to feel like you’re peeing your pants.” You’re nodding your head, maybe you’ve had this. I’m like, “Okay, whatever.” I was all interested, like, “Wow, there’s a big machine and I’m going to go in there,” and all this kind of stuff.
They injected it and said, “Okay, you’re going to feel like you’re peeing your pants.” I felt like I was peeing my pants. It was quite something. And they were reassuring me, “You are not peeing your pants.” There’s like this warm feeling, like it just felt like, “Okay, this is what it would feel like if one peed their pants.” And so can you imagine that if I had had that experience and assigned this meaning, “I’m peeing my pants,” then there would have been some maybe some humiliation or embarrassment or shame. I don’t know what I would have said or done, but it would have been a completely different experience than the one that the concept had been given to me: “It’s going to feel like this.” The exact same physical experience could be interpreted as, “Oh, they just put something in my veins that makes this sensation arise,” or, “Oh my gosh, I’m supposed to be an adult and this is happening here, and there’s all these people around here too. I don’t think I can hide this.” Right? The exact same experience can have different interpretations based on what concepts we’re using.
How often does this happen in our lives? “I can’t believe you’re late. You’re always late. It means you don’t respect me.” I’ve had this experience too, where I was thinking, “I can’t believe she’s late, and this person is always late. And don’t they recognize that I had to go out of my way to be here on time, and now I’m having to wait?” And then to hear, “Um, sorry I’m late. I actually got a ticket. I was speeding to get there on time, but then I got pulled over.” And so, you know, it’s not because they were disrespectful. I had this whole story, right, about why this person was late, but no, it was something completely different.
So we have these ideas, we have these notions about our experiences. Sometimes they’re accurate, sometimes they’re not. How do we know? How do we know whether they’re accurate or not? Does it matter whether they’re accurate or not? Is it necessary? What if I was feeling a little bit irritated that this person was late in meeting me, and I just noticed, “Oh yeah, I feel some restlessness, a little bit of agitation. Thoughts are going pretty fast, and a lot of story-making is happening. And I’m feeling agitated in my body a little bit.” It could have just been that. Instead of having to attribute a whole story to my friend, I could have just been with my experience. And then I would have been present for what is actually happening, noticing the agitation. Maybe I could have just said, “Oh yeah, feeling agitated feels like this.” For me, I don’t know why, I feel agitation often in my arms and in my legs. Maybe like there’s a feeling of movement that wants to happen or something. Restlessness feels like that. And that could have been a moment of just being with my experience, and I could have felt grounded in my experience. Restlessness would be happening, but there’s a way in which just to be present with that experience without making stories and attributing meaning to it, to my friend who happened to get a speeding ticket on the way to meet me.
So in the same way, when I’m doing guided meditations, when I’m leading the meditation, I like to use the expression like “notice” or “be with” or “rest the attention on the sensations of breathing.” I like to use this expression, “the sensations of breathing,” as opposed to “the breath.” “Be mindful of the breath.” “Be mindful of the sensations of breathing.” The breath—what is a breath, really? The diaphragm contracts, there’s a little bit more space in the pleural cavity, the lung cavity, and the lungs expand, so air goes in. That’s an inhale. But what is the breath? Is it the movement of the lungs? Is it the movement of the diaphragm? Is it the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide? Is it the feeling of air going in? Like, what is it? “The sensations of breathing” is more like getting out of concepts and ideas and more to the experience.
I’m also often offering three different ways to notice the sensations. You could feel the air going in and out of the nose, noticing how often it’s cool when it goes in. We don’t feel it as much when it goes out because it’s the same temperature as the body. Or we could feel the ribs or the chest area expanding a little bit, maybe feeling the stretch and then the release of the stretch. Or maybe the movement of the belly area as it kind of moves in this direction and then another direction. That’s the feeling, the actual sensations, is where mindfulness can really help us to make a distinction between the concepts and ideas that we have and what’s actually happening.
And the mind likes to—this is part of its job—it likes to make stories and ascribe meaning. This is helpful. We need this in our daily life. But meditation is a time in which we can put aside or put on the back burner all those things that the mind likes to do and just be with what is. And so mindfulness practice is to just be with the experience, in the way that I described, for example, with the breath. But it’s also to notice how our thoughts about our experience are not the same as the experience, or the label is not the same as the experience. The word “the breath” is not the same as a stretching feeling in the ribs.
And you might wonder, “Well, who cares? Does it matter that we notice the difference about this?” Well, I could say in some ways, maybe it doesn’t matter. In many ways, I would say it can make a giant difference. Sometimes we hear this expression in Buddhist circles or Buddhist scenes—actually, I’ve heard it outside in the secular area as well—this idea that pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. They’re pointing to this exact thing that I’m talking about. That okay, there might be this terrible throbbing in the knee. Maybe it’s like this pounding, it feels hot, and it’s kind of in this vague area, it’s in the left knee. But there’s this sense of throbbing with heat. That’s different than saying there’s pain. “Pain” is a label, is a concept that we’re putting on top of it. But wow, as soon as we hear the word “pain,” “I can’t be in pain like this. I can’t sit like this. I have to move my body. I’m going to damage myself. I need to go to the doctor after this and make sure that my knee is okay.” Or maybe we hear this word “pain” and think, “Oh, this is terrible. I can’t do this.” And there was that time that I was in terrible pain when I had that accident, when I fell off my bike when I was a kid, or fell skiing when I was an adult, or whatever it might be. Whenever this word “pain,” we have so many associations with it. Of course we do. Nobody wants to be in pain.
But when we talk about a throbbing experience that’s in a diffuse area on the left knee near the top of the knee, then maybe there’s a little bit of curiosity with it. And we can say, “Wow, this is uncomfortable, but is it getting worse? Is it getting better? Is it moving, or is it just in the same place? Can I shift my posture? Can I move my knee like this? Is it still there?” Right? So then when we are describing the experience, just being with the experience, there may still be pain, but there isn’t the suffering that starts to go with, “Oh my gosh, this reminds me of this, and I have to avoid that, and I knew I should have never come to a meditation center. They’re going to make me be in pain,” or something like this. I don’t know. We have all these stories we add to things. Turns out they’re extra. Turns out the stories are extra.
And so much about this meditation practice is to help us to kind of tease apart the experience from the stories. Often the stories are associated with suffering. Not always, but often. There’s a way in which the label, the concept that we slap onto our experience, often is constricting. It’s just “pain,” and then that just becomes this black box that we don’t want to go near, and it feels like we have to avoid it.
Mindfulness helps us distinguish between the thoughts and… oh, I know where I was going to go here. Whereas sensations are just sensations. Some of them are uncomfortable, some of them are comfortable, most of them are completely neutral. But there’s a way in which if we can focus or tend to incline towards the sensations, then there can be some curiosity that comes. “Oh, wow, what is this? What’s happening?” Like I was describing with this knee. “Are the sensations getting worse? Are they getting better? Are they moving around, or is it just in one small area? Is it kind of a diffuse area?” Then there’s possibility, right? When we are being with the experience, the sensation, then there’s a sense of it being onward-leading, and something different arising, and something new, as opposed to, “Pain. I have to avoid it. This is terrible.”
So when we’re with our experience, just with the experience, we will want to assign meaning and labels to them. This is what the mind likes to do. Can we just notice, “Oh yeah, that’s a label. It’s provisional. This is my current understanding. This is what I’m thinking it is,” without putting… so maybe have it be more like a Post-it note more than something that’s written in a permanent marker. The label that we’re using, it’s just like a Post-it note on it, something like this.
Because there’s this way that when we start to make this distinction between concepts and experiences, then there’s this way in which we can recognize that there’s more freedom available. With sensations, we can be with sensations. Concepts, often we can get stuck in them if we use them to define ourselves or to define others. There’s a way in which things get constricted, and we have to manipulate our experiences in order to cram them into the ideas we have. Like, “You’re a bad person, but I just saw you do a kind thing.” “Oh, well, you only did that kind thing because you must have some malicious intent,” or something like that. Or, “I’m a good person, and actually I was just mean to that customer service agent. I was yelling at them because they couldn’t answer my question. Oh, but they deserved it.” You know, we make up some story of why we want to preserve the sense, “No, I’m a nice person.” We’ll just ignore that I was yelling mean things to that customer service person.
But here are some other things that can happen if we are with our experiences rather than these concepts: we can be more generous with our assumptions. If we’re just using Post-it notes, “I think it’s like this. It’s an uncomfortable sensation. I’m not quite sure about the people that live over there. I don’t know anybody who lives over there.” We can be more generous about our assumptions—our assumptions about ourselves, what we can and cannot handle, whether we are a good person or not, whether it’s important for us to be right all the time. Sometimes we have these ideas, these concepts about ourselves, but if we hold those more loosely, then we can maybe shift some of these assumptions we have about how we should be, how other people should be, what their motives are, what they should be doing. We can be more generous in our assumptions. And wow, life just unfolds better if we are generous in our assumptions about others and about ourselves.
We can have this sense of expansive aliveness if we’re tuned into our experience. While waiting for a friend who is late, just being tuned in like, “Oh wow, restlessness is happening and some agitation, and it feels like this.” That’s our sense of aliveness. There’s some vitality, and like, “Okay, this is what it means to be a human who’s experiencing some irritation,” as opposed to, “You! I can’t believe she doesn’t respect me.” You know, that’s kind of limiting and constricting, as opposed to, “Wow, okay, so I guess this is what agitation feels like right now.” This has possibility, and it’s inhabiting our life.
There’s also this way, if we are paying attention to our experiences or the sensations that we’re having—the sights, the sounds, what’s being touched, what we hear and taste—if we’re tuning into the actual sensations, then there’s this way that it’s easier to start to embrace uncertainty. Because we start to see that experiences are changing all the time. That’s just their nature. They’re always changing. The things that don’t change are our concepts. It’s just ideas that don’t change. Experiences are changing all the time. All the time. Right this moment, you’re having a bunch of different sounds, or you’re experiencing… your body is experiencing different things as you’re moving, adjusting your posture. Maybe, of course, your thoughts are having lots of different experiences. Lots of things are changing. So when we start to pay attention to our sensations rather than just concepts, then we just start to see, “Oh yeah, things are not certain. They change.” And it turns out to be okay, because we’re noticing it on a small scale, like what’s happening one moment to the next moment. There are so many different experiences being had.
And then we start to realize, “Oh, things really are not as certain as we think they are.” They just aren’t. They never were. But we want them to be. We want to feel like we can control things. Of course we do. Of course we want to feel comfortable. Of course we want the people that we love and care about to be safe and healthy and happy. Of course we do. But we don’t get to control nearly what we think we can control. Have you noticed trying to control somebody else? How did that go? [Laughter]
I was driving with a friend of mine not too long ago in her car, and she has a GPS that’s giving instructions, you know, “At the next light, turn right.” But this one is extra. I don’t know what it is. It says, “At the next light, turn right and notice the feeling of spaciousness as you tune into…” something like this. And I found myself getting angry at this thing, like, “What? Don’t tell me what to do!” I felt like this computer AI thing was trying to control my experience. It’s kind of funny. We can’t control others. They get annoyed. I get annoyed when people try to control me, even when AI is trying to control me. Right? It doesn’t work. It just doesn’t. We need to guide children, of course we do. I’m not saying just allow anything and everything to happen. I am saying just notice that we don’t control nearly as much as we think we do.
We don’t even control ourselves. How many of us are exercising the exact right amount we think we should? How many of us are eating precisely what we think we should? How many of us are meditating precisely the amount we think we should? You know, all these things, right? We don’t even control ourselves in the way that we wish that we could or think that we should. It just doesn’t happen. There might be this idealized idea we have about how things should be, but those are just concepts. They’re just ideas. What we have instead are this experience, these sensations, right now.
So learning to distinguish the difference between the concepts and sensations, and choosing to hang out with sensations—which is what mindfulness practice really is about—can really support us in our lives in some ways that maybe weren’t obvious initially when we think about it, or when maybe we took up meditation just thinking we wanted to have some more ease or some more relaxation. But there’s maybe something else I’ll say: being able to separate or recognize the difference between the extra labels and concepts that we’re adding on top of our sensations… I’m not saying we don’t need concepts. We do need them. Sometimes we can completely discard them, though. But what would it be like to use Post-it notes instead of a permanent marker?
Noticing this helps us to understand how we might unknowingly be creating the conditions for our increased suffering, increased difficulties in our lives. Saying to ourselves, “You shouldn’t do that,” or “I can’t believe you did it. You’re such a [fill in the blank].” The inner critic that often arises, and it’s so mean. This inner critic can be so mean, right? That’s extra. That’s extra. But often we don’t even know that’s extra. We just think it’s the truth. We just think that because it’s familiar, perhaps we’ve heard it a lot, that no, this is the way things are.
So recognizing the difference between concepts, ideas that we’re putting on top of our experiences, maybe helps us to understand some of the ways in which the ideas or the concepts that we are using create the conditions for our discomfort or suffering or difficulties. And it turns out that learning this, and looking at the difference between concepts and sensations, and choosing to use Post-it notes for concepts and tune into sensations, turns out to be much more reasonable than trying to get the entire world to behave properly so that you can finally be happy, so that you can finally have what you want. Has anybody tried to get the world to just be different than how it is? Right? It doesn’t work in the way that we wish it would. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t behave ethically and take care of others and take care of ourselves. It doesn’t mean that.
So, New Year’s. Happy New Year’s. New Year’s is a concept. It’s helpful, useful. And meditation is a way in which we can really start to get to know what concepts we are using, what labels we are using that are extra and not needed. Or is there a way that we are just living our life in the mind? I certainly did in my early life. I was very much disconnected. I didn’t inhabit the body at all. Somehow I thought, well, I got rewarded professionally, academically for being in my head. Right? Chances are many of you did too. But mindfulness practice is this invitation to just explore the difference between these two and to tune into the sensations, the experiences.
I’ll end there and I’ll open it up to see if there’s some questions or comments. Thank you.
Questioner: Um, I guess this is more of a comment or personal experience. I notice sometimes, the more I’ve noticed my thinking, I see patterns where I am a little obsessive about situations I can’t control. And now that I’ve noticed this more, I do the thing where I go, “Okay, so how does this feel in my body when I’m doing this?” You know, and it’s like banging my head against the wall. It’s not going to change with what I’m doing. So that’s been helpful to kind of go into the body. And to tell myself it’s okay to not think about it, you know, to put it aside. What’s here right now in the room with me and my physical experience?
Diana Clark: Nice. Nice. I hadn’t really thought about this until more recently, but in some ways it’s kind of fascinating how we have this idea that if I have some internal experience—thoughts like ruminating or just getting a little bit compulsive, or I think “obsessive” was the word that you used in our thinking—somehow we think that our having some interior, inner experience is going to change something that’s happening not there. It’s fascinating, right, how we have this idea. It’s so illogical. It’s so illogical, right? But we do it. “Okay, if I just worry enough, then they’ll be safe,” right? Or, “If I get angry enough, then they will change their behavior.” But you know, it’s just us that’s getting angry or something. So thank you very much for pointing that out. Yeah, thank you. Very human, right? I think all of us do this.
Yeah. Anybody else have a comment or question or something they’d like to share?
Okay, with that, I wish you all a Happy New Year, and it’s nice to see you all, and maybe I’ll see you next week. Thank you.