This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Contentment in a Restless World ~ 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. Nice to see you all.
Last week, I had the great opportunity to go for a hike down off of Skyline Boulevard, maybe you guys know it. It was just quite something. It was walking on the ridge and looking down into Silicon Valley, like, “Oh, look, there’s that place and that place.” And then walking a little bit further and seeing, “Wow, look at the fog coming in off of the Pacific.” It was just beautiful. It was just so beautiful.
And this was a park, you know, that’s freely offered. Just drive up, park your car, put your shoes on, and off you go. I just felt like my heart just filling up with so much gratitude, so much appreciation, just for this simple thing of spending time outside, having these views, and having the opportunity, the capability, the capacity. I won’t always have this. I haven’t always had this capability to walk some distances, and just this recognition that the fullness of the heart, of the appreciation, and maybe the nourishment in some kind of way of the beauty, just created the conditions in which there could be something else. Like, it stayed with me for quite some time, just this feeling of being filled up, like, you know, not needing anything more.
So it’s with that as a little bit of a backdrop that I kind of chose what I’m going to talk about tonight. And also with this recognition that I’m offering one little piece of the Dharma, one little angle in. There could be another time in which I’m approaching it from a different place with a different emphasis and different pointings. Maybe I’ll do that next week, I don’t know, we’ll see.
But to start us off, I’d like to read a poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer1, of course, right? For those of you who’ve been here, well, you know that I really appreciate her poems. And I’m interpreting this poem that she wrote after meditating out in nature. The title of this poem is “On a Day When Stillness Seems Possible.”
On a day when stillness seems possible, and the river is a long white stroke of roiling and continuous surge, and the grass gone to seed wavers in the wind, then stills, wavers, then stills, and the swallows spiral, the leaf shadows spangle, and the ants braid a path across the stones, but I rhyme today with the Cottonwood trunks, my own body unmoving in the breeze. It feels good in this moment to be more tree than cloud, more silence than song. So easily the stillness opens me, softens me. How simple, really, to do nothing. How is it I so often resist? There is no no in me now I do not notice. Stillness has made a home in me, and there seems to be nothing the stillness refuses. Come, it seems to say, there’s room here for everything. It opens me wider. The world rushes in.
I love this idea, “I rhyme today with Cottonwood trunks.” What a playful way to think about, “I feel I’m more aligned with these trees that are a bit more stationary.” Isn’t that great to think about oneself as just, “I’m rhyming with something,” as opposed to, “I’m like this.” There’s a rhyme here. There might rhyme with a whole number of things, but right now, there’s maybe kind of like an alignment.
And then this idea: “Stillness has made a home in me, and there seems to be nothing the Stillness refuses. Come, it seems to say, there’s room here for everything.” So this idea that there can be some settling, some stillness, some quiet, and this quiet is not from barricading oneself, separating oneself, tucking oneself away from anything that might be disturbing. Instead, the stillness is saying, “Yeah, the stillness is here. It doesn’t matter what’s coming, doesn’t matter what’s being experienced.” There can still be this stability and steadiness that allows the world, that is with the world, not pushing it away, not demanding that it be different. She says there’s not a “no” inside, but instead just allowing some settledness.
So there’s this way, maybe you’ve encountered this, that with meditation, there can be these moments of some of this stillness. And I might call this some contentment, some sense that we don’t have to change anything right now. We don’t have to express anything right now. We don’t have to run away from anything right now. We don’t even have to assign some special meaning to the experience. We can just be with what’s being experienced with some stillness. We can let things be.
So this idea of contentment, this feeling that everything is okay, a sense that things don’t need to change right now. And maybe this contentment is without this agitation of needing more and more and more, and without the agitation of, “Oh no, things have to be different. This isn’t good enough. This is inadequate. This is insufficient. This is not good enough.”
Sometimes the sense of agitation may be subtle, and sometimes it might be obvious that we experience in our daily lives or that we experience in meditation. And in the same way, contentment might be subtle. It might be just a small little corner of our experience, or it might be obvious, if you happen to have the good fortune to be out for a hike and seeing some views and feeling your heart being filled up with appreciation or whatever it is might be for you. Maybe it is a meditation session that allows some of this stillness to be experienced.
This whole idea, though, of contentment, for some people, this idea is actually kind of a dangerous idea because there can be this way in which we think, “Well, if there’s any contentment, then that must undermine any effort to make things better.” Then there would just be this passivity, there would be this way in which we would just sit around and eat bonbons or something all day, this type of thing.
There’s this way that we might feel like, “Well, if there’s some contentment, then we won’t be out there fighting the good fight. We won’t be out there working with the terrible oppression and tyranny and injustice.” Right? This stuff is out there, we see it. And so people feel like, “No, there can’t be any contentment because then people will just allow the status quo to get worse and worse and worse.”
So there are certainly things that we should not be content with. But there’s a way that we can allow this stillness, some sense of contentment, to fuel us, to support us while we work with some of these things that aren’t right.
And certainly, our economy depends on people feeling like they have to have more, right? So there’s this discontent, and like, “No, no, no, no, you need more. You clearly you need more.” And so there’s this sense of, “Well, go out and purchase things or work long, hard hours.” You know, this kind of nonstop, keep buying stuff, keep working. And so we might say that this idea of just to experience and allow some sense of contentment is a radical thing to do.
I know certainly in my earlier professional life, contentment certainly was not promoted or suggested. Even if I had said that to my boss, it probably would not have gone over very well. “I’m very content with how things are,” you know, even if I had done really well or something like this. So there’s this way in which contentment can be such a support for our life, but often it doesn’t have this sense of that it’s supported by our general society or something like this. And that’s okay. That’s okay.
So I want to say that contentment, maybe I want to just be explicit about this, it’s not about complacency. It’s not about just tolerating. It’s not about this resignation. It’s not about passively accepting everything. It’s more about, you know, allowing the… for me, it kind of feels like the heart is filled up. Like there’s a sense of enough.
But there’s a way in which even the whole notion of contentment can feel like a booby prize, too, right? We feel like, “No, no, no, I want that big, flashy, bubbly, big happiness. I want that champagne corks popping off and bubbling things or something like that.” And if you have that idea, then contentment doesn’t sound very interesting at all.
Or maybe you have this way that if you just find yourself always wanting more and more and more, and that there’s a certain amount of craving, whether it’s on the internet, click, click, click, click, click, and you just find yourself finding more, looking for more information or some figuring something out. Or maybe the whatever those short little videos are that they kind of feed you one after the other, so that before you know it, hours have gone by. If you have that kind of idea of like, “No, no, no, I like this more and getting stimulated so much,” then contentment, just the idea of it could feel horrifying, right? Because it’s not about that.
Or maybe you have this way of showing up where you feel like complaining or grumbling or things aren’t this way. I didn’t realize I used to be a person that complained a lot. I didn’t recognize this. I don’t complain so much now, but I just thought that was what people did. I mean, I don’t know, I just thought… I don’t know what I thought, actually. I just complained a lot. Things were never quite right. And if this is your way of showing up, then this whole idea of contentment also just feels like, I don’t know, like you’re failing in some kind of way or something like this.
And then maybe I’ll also say, if we’re filled with aversion to others, there’s a way in which contentment can feel like, “No, no, no, I can’t feel content because then there’s a way I’m… it kind of feels like I’m letting them get away with something.” Like my agitation is somehow affecting them, which, you know, of course it doesn’t, logically, when we think about it. But there can be this way, “No, no, no, if I experience contentment, somehow I’m… that’s not being loyal to my aversion to an individual or something like this.” And often we’re just not recognizing the toll that takes on us, how taxing it is to always be agitated.
So contentment is really related with happiness. We could say it’s a version of happiness. But happiness in the usual parlance, not the Buddhist way we might talk about it, but again, out there, what the media might say or magazines or social media or something like this, might say that happiness is a lot about getting what you want. Whereas we would say contentment is more about not wanting. So it’s more like this shift in this perspective, whereas you might say happiness is more like a shift in ownership, that you now have something that you didn’t have, or you got rid of something that you didn’t want.
So there’s this way in which contentment is this absence of craving, this absence of things needing to be different. Because there’s this way when we really feel like, “Oh, I need something,” whether it’s an object, an experience, recognition, attainments, you know, whatever it might be. Whenever there’s this feeling like, “Oh yeah, I definitely need something,” there’s this way that we can fall under this enchantment that, “Well, as soon as I get whatever it is out there,” there’s this way that whatever it is out there kind of gets sprinkled with some magical thing that thinks, “Okay, well, as soon as I get that, then I’ll be happy, and it’ll be a lasting source of happiness.”
So there’s this way in which contentment is pointing to this absence of craving, and craving is this feeling of insufficiency. And so it’s letting go of this… or is it an act of letting go? It’s allowing this insufficiency or inadequacy or something like this to not blossom, to not take hold of our minds and hearts and think that something magical out there is going to be a lasting source of happiness.
I mean, I’ve said this before, if there were things out there that were lasting sources of happiness, you would not be here on a Monday night in a meditation center. You would be happily with whatever it was that brought you the lasting source of happiness, right? But there’s a way in which we kind of forget this. “Okay, well, just the next thing is going to work.”
So this idea of contentment, as I was alluding to earlier, this practice is not just about being content with everything, but it’s about having a wise relationship between contentment and discontentment, if we want to say that. There is a time for contentment, and there’s also maybe a time for, we could say, some wise discontentment. And that is to be with our suffering, to notice, “Oh yeah, there are difficulties.” Some of them are subtle, some of them are obvious, some of them are really quiet and we don’t even notice them until maybe there’s a certain amount of stillness. Maybe we don’t notice them until we are rhyming with a cottonwood tree and we start to feel some of that agitation.
So there are definitely times to be actively addressing some of our suffering, actively addressing some of our craving, actively addressing some of our attachments, or to acknowledge and work with and be with some of this discontent. And is there a way that maybe we could say, can we be content that here we’re offering a practice in which we can do that? In which we can be with some of the difficulties. Mindfulness is part of the Eightfold Path, which can help find us, support this way to more and more ease, more and more freedom. There’s this way that we can meet our difficulties and notice what’s actually happening, to be with the reality of the moment as best we can, holding it, being with it.
So what are some of the ways that we can cultivate some of this contentment that allows us to hold, or maybe creates the conditions in which we can hold some of the difficulties, that our capacities increase?
One way we can do this is during meditation or just in our daily life. We can just ask ourselves sometimes, “What in this moment, in this precise moment, is truly lacking?” Not in a conceptual way, like in this precise moment, just to experience in and for the moment. We might feel like, “Well, I’m alive. I have a breath.” Those of us in this room, it’s not super hot, it’s not super cold. We hopefully have a feeling of safety. Hopefully, we have enough food. So this way of inquiring, “Well, what is it that we really need? What do we sense that we’re lacking, if anything? And what do we feel like we need? Can we do with less? Can it be okay to have less?” Sometimes we might have less. Can that be okay? Can we honor our commitments to non-harming, not harming ourselves, not harming others? Sometimes with craving, that creates the conditions in which there can be harming in subtle ways and obvious ways.
So it’s not a personal failing when we have craving, when we recognize, “Yeah, I guess there isn’t anything that I technically lack, but I still want more chocolate brownies,” whatever it might be. It’s part of our conditioning, as I was saying earlier, to really have this sense of, “You need more.” And so we can just recognize that often this feeling of needing more, we don’t have to take it personally. So we could just ask, “In this moment, this precise moment, what is truly lacking?”
We can also explore, when do you feel the least content? What are the conditions in which you’re feeling the absence of contentment? Maybe when you’re in a hurry, or maybe when you’re on a spending spree. That can be as easy as click, click, click, or it can be like an impulse buy near the cashier. “Oh, I already spent this much money, I might as well buy this. Oh, wow, look at this. Okay, I’ll put this in the basket as well.” When do you feel the least content? When do you feel that you need more and more? It could be maybe when you’re on the internet. Sometimes I find that the internet can have this forward-leading momentum. It’s kind of designed to do this, right? It’s hard to just go on there, look at one thing, and then turn it off. So maybe that’s when you feel the least contentment, when you’re reading an article or something and it has some links in there, and then you’re just like, “Oh, well, maybe I’ll follow that link,” and then you go to this, that, whatever it might be. So that’s something else we can do to support a sense of contentment, is just get curious about, “Well, when do I not feel it? When do I feel the least amount of it?” And that could just be some information for you to recognize, “Well, if I want contentment in my life, just be sensitive to these areas, how I’m showing up to these areas, how often I’m doing these activities.”
I would say, as maybe that poem that I read at the beginning suggested, meditation can be a way in which to cultivate some contentment, to allow some of this stilling or this settling of the agitation of wanting more and more. This could be a way that could be support. And also, the meditation can help us to maybe touch into, experience, have insight about, understand better our desire. Like, what is it that we feel like we need or that we want? Or maybe it’s our aversions. What is it that we feel like we just can’t tolerate and can’t be with, and it’s making us feel discontent with what’s happening?
There’s also this way in which meditation, if we have this commitment to stay meditating for a certain amount of time… maybe all of you have had this experience. Maybe there’s a time when you’re meditating and there’s this grip of, “I really want something. I don’t want to be meditating. I want to be doing something else, anything else.” Maybe there’s this way in which we have this commitment like, “No, I’m actually going to wait until the timer goes off or the bell rings or whatever it might be.” So meditation is also an opportunity for us to discover, can we be at ease in the midst of wanting? In the midst of, “Yeah, okay, craving, really a lot of desire, a lot of wanting is here.” And it feels like this, it feels like maybe a leaning forward in the body, or maybe the mind starts to have a real focus away from the present moment experience and more on the object, like, “Oh yeah, as soon as I get this thing or I do this thing,” it’s all about something that’s going to happen in the future, and you’re kind of disconnected from what’s happening right now. So meditation is a way in which you can start to notice that, where there’s this movement towards just thinking about the future.
And then the last thing I’ll say about something that can support this contentment, this cultivation of contentment, is maybe some gratitude practice. This isn’t specifically a Buddhist practice, but there’s something about just having appreciation. It just makes it so much easier to have some contentment and to be present with what’s happening. So there’s this way in which maybe to appreciate the good things that others have done for you, that you have benefited from. For some people, they keep a gratitude journal. I’ve heard from a number of people that has been really transformative for them to regularly do that.
Or maybe there’s also a practice of appreciating what you have by imagining how your life would be if you didn’t have some things. It’s like just mentally subtract some things and how your life, how would it be different? This is a way that maybe you can support some sense of gratitude.
And then maybe it’s also helpful for gratitude to acknowledge and honor and respect some of the difficulties you’ve had in your life too. You don’t have to dwell on them, but just to recognize like, “Yeah, you know, it has been a journey to get to this moment here.” And there’s this way that kind of appreciating that there have been some rough patches, maybe really, really difficult things. Maybe you’re in the midst of a rough patch. I’m using this word “rough patch” as something minor, but maybe you’re in the midst of some really tragedies in your life, in your family or something like this. But it can be helpful to maybe sometimes think or honor and respect that, “Yeah, okay, there have been these in my life. Maybe I am experiencing one right now.” And is there this way that can help us appreciate things that maybe without that framing, we would be dismissive of or not even acknowledge? Food is an obvious one. If there have been times when there wasn’t enough food, and then when you do have food, you just appreciate it. It’s quite something if you had times when there wasn’t food.
So I think I’ll end with reading this poem again. It’s called “On a Day When Stillness Seems Possible” by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer.
On a day when stillness seems possible, and the river is a long white stroke of roiling and continuous surge, and the grass gone to seed wavers in the wind, then stills, wavers, then stills, and the swallows spiral, the leaf shadows spangle, and the ants braid a path across the stones, but I rhyme today with the Cottonwood trunks, my own body unmoving in the breeze. It feels good in this moment to be more tree than cloud, more silence than song. So easily the stillness opens me, softens me. How simple, really, to do nothing. How is it I so often resist? If there is a no in me now, I do not notice it. Stillness has made a home in me, and there seems to be nothing the stillness refuses. Come, it seems to say, there is room here for everything. It opens me wider. The world rushes in.
Thank you. I’ll open it up to some comments and questions on this idea of contentment.
So how much of finding peace is the inner equilibrium versus your external life? Like, for example, marrying the right person, having the right job, you know, things that bring fulfillment. How much is the inner and how much is the outer in terms of being at peace?
Yeah, this is a great question. So right, all of us, we’re trying to have the outer, marry the right person, have the right job, and these kinds of things. But I’m sure you’ve noticed we don’t get to control the external things, right? Even though you marry the right person and have the great job, it doesn’t mean tragedy doesn’t strike somebody else in your family, for example, or something. So this practice is pointing to where can we find the peace, this equilibrium, that doesn’t allow us to get off balance when tragedy does hit, when things aren’t working in the external world. So we work with the external world, but we also work with our relationship to the external world. And that relationship is where we can find the peace. Are we always demanding that it be different? If so, that’s, you know, it’s exhausting and agitating. So thank you. Thank you.
You mentioned how you used to complain a lot. I remember a time when I got angry a lot, and I would not have said I was an angry person. I would have thought just the opposite. And then if I got so angry that I couldn’t deny it, you know, I still diffused it by saying, or discounted it by saying, “Well, of course I’m angry. These people over here are behaving like that. Of course I’m angry.” I didn’t understand.
Yeah, yeah, right. It takes this self-understanding is such a big part of practice too, right? These things that we understand about ourselves. And it’s not… I think it might have been Gil I heard say once, it’s a self-understanding, and then these things that we understand about ourselves is rarely good news. It’s like we have this version of ourselves and then realize, “Oh yeah, like I didn’t think I was a complainer.” I realized, “Oh yeah, I’m complaining a lot.” It wasn’t until somebody pointed it out to me.
Oh, wow, you’re right. So and when they pointed it out, did you say, “Oh yeah, you’re right,” or did you resist?
I complained! “Of course I’m complaining because this isn’t right and that isn’t right.” [Laughter] Right. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Bill.
As you were saying the word contentment over and over again, I thought maybe contentment is a dose of self-actualization. And, you know, as you’re younger, maybe you’re content not as much as you are when you get older. Hopefully, hopefully the path will take you to a place where when you’re older, you can feel more content and perhaps self-actualized. Just a thought I had.
I see. And Stan, I missed the verb. So contentment and self-actualization, but I missed what you were saying.
I think they’re synonymous, a dose. I think I said a dose of contentment is a dose of self-actualization.
Oh, so you think like maybe with maturity and some… yeah, if you’re on a path, whatever that path is, and a maturation process. Just a thought.
Yeah, it’s an interesting thought. So are people content when they’re young, when they’re in high school, when they’re in middle…?
They have doses of contentment, doses. Yeah, but then they have this feeling of wanting to get out there and do something. It’s more like this when you’re younger.
I see, I see. Yeah, this very interesting idea, kind of the relationship between like psychological health and contentment. Yeah, it’s an interesting idea. And maturity. Yeah, thank you for bringing that up.
Anybody else have a question or comment?
Thank you. Just thank you.
Yeah, thank you.
Okay, I feel content. So I’m wishing you a wonderful rest of the evening. And if you like, you’re welcome to come up here and talk to me afterwards here. And drive home safely. Thank you.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: The original transcript said “Rosemary traumer.” This has been corrected to the likely intended poet based on the poem’s title and style. ↩