This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video From Stagnation to Clarity ~ 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. It’s nice to see you all. It’s so great to practice together. I hope it’s nice for you guys too, that we’re just sitting together. There’s something really beautiful about it.
Tonight, I wanted to talk about how sometimes there can be a feeling that we’re just kind of stuck. Maybe we don’t have a sense that we’re really going anywhere. Maybe we don’t even have a sense that we should be going anywhere, but we have this feeling of, “Okay, maybe we are meditating regularly, but there’s not a feeling of vitality or movement or juiciness or richness.” Maybe there’s a sense of dryness about it, or maybe there’s this feeling that we’re just not going anywhere.
I know that I often keep a notebook of some of my ideas that help inform my dharma talks but also my practice. There was a time when I looked at this notebook, some time ago, and I realized I was thinking and worrying about that years ago also. And here I am. So there can be this way in which we feel like not much is happening.
If we look at it carefully, we can often notice there’s this slight disconnection, this slight separation from our actual experience. Instead, we’re lost in our thoughts, lost in concepts, lost in ideas, lost in speculation. We think we’re meditating and we think we’re practicing just like we have before, but often it’s because there’s something we want to avoid. So we disconnect just a little bit, and that little bit is a way in which we just end up spinning in our mind and not really going anywhere. We’re not connected to what’s actually happening in the present moment; it’s more that we’re thinking about the present moment or thinking about the practice.
What I’m pointing to here is a subtle difference. It can be easy to not recognize it, but maybe one clue can be the role that words have. If there’s a lot of words, whether they’re sentences, chapters, or novels, there’s a way that the words can take us away from the experience: feeling the pressure against the body from the cushion, feeling the temperature of the air, feeling the tension in the shoulders, whatever it is that might be experienced.
Sometimes, what I’m describing could fall under the hindrance that we call vicikicchā1, or doubt. Doubt is this way in which there’s this vacillation; the mind is kind of spinning, not quite engaged. It’s not that we’re completely absent, but we’re not completely engaged either. Maybe we have some reservations, or as I said, we’re trying to not feel something, but in order to make sure we don’t feel that, we don’t feel anything else either. Or we just have this indecisiveness or maybe a sense of suspicion, like, “This isn’t quite right,” or “I shouldn’t be doing this,” or “I can’t do this,” or something like this—things that have that flavor of not being sure, not being committed to the practice, hesitating.
If we do pay attention, we might see that there’s this family or a loose collection of thoughts that’s often being experienced. There’s a kind of certain direction or orientation that’s happening in the mind. When I’m teaching about doubt—it’s one of the five hindrances, recognized thousands of years ago by the Buddha as something that can get in the way—I’ve talked about how an antidote, a way to work with this, is investigation. To kind of roll up our sleeves and get in, like, “What’s actually being experienced?” or “What am I unsure about? What questions do I have?” and try to nail them down.
But sometimes this whole idea of investigation turns out not to be so helpful. Sometimes it’s great and exactly what’s needed and can help provide the traction that’s needed to have a sense of vitality and juiciness and aliveness in our practice. But sometimes investigation can just lead to more thinking. We could say that more thinking was the problem to begin with, and then we say, “Oh, just investigate,” and that gets interpreted as thinking. Then we’re just thinking upon thinking, instead of really getting engaged.
So I’d like to offer something tonight that is a little bit more specific, something that can maybe provide some direction on how to gain traction when we feel like we’re stuck or a little bit disengaged. I’m not sure exactly what the words are to describe it.
Maybe I can summarize it at a really high level: to bring in this notion which is called sampajañña2 in Pali. It has a really clunky English translation: “clear comprehension.” I guess it’s good enough. The jañña is related to ñāṇa3, which is knowing. Pa is like really knowing, and sam is also kind of like knowing. So we’ll just say “really knowing.” Clear comprehension is how it often gets translated, and it’s very similar to mindfulness and can often be synonymous. In the suttas, some of you might be familiar with this, they talk about sati-sampajañña, mindfulness and clear comprehension. But when you really look in the suttas, it’s really difficult to tease them apart, like what exactly is the difference.
However, maybe 800 years after the death of the Buddha, there were some people who were writing commentaries, interpreting the teachings of the Buddha. They wrote a tremendous amount, defining the terms and providing the backstory for some of the characters in the stories. In these commentaries, they flesh out this idea of clear comprehension, which I think could be useful in this scenario when we feel like things aren’t quite going, or don’t have traction.
In the commentaries—so this is not the words of the Buddha, but almost a thousand years later, still quite some time ago, more than 1500 years ago—they defined clear comprehension and put it into these four categories. I would like to unpack these a little bit as a way to help us maybe get engaged. I’ll just introduce one category at a time.
The first one is to have this sensitivity or to tune into the purpose of what I’m doing. “Why am I doing this?” Whatever it is you might be doing, this is something you could be doing in meditation, but it also could be in your daily life. Sometimes what we think is the purpose isn’t the purpose. For example, you find yourself standing in front of the refrigerator with the door open. “Now, why am I here with the door open?” You might say, “Well, because I wanted to open the door of the refrigerator, and so I did.” Okay, that’s one answer. But there could also be, “Well, I don’t want to feel loneliness, so I’m just distracting myself by looking in the refrigerator.” “I don’t want to feel this sadness, so I’m making a snack.” “I’m going to go to the grocery store later and I’m just going to take inventory of what we have and what we don’t have.” Right? There are all these different reasons. Or, “I’m going to cook dinner for my family. I love them, I want to take care of them, this is part of what I do.”
There are so many reasons why we might open up the refrigerator. This is just one example, but if we’re going there because we are trying to avoid something else, using it as a distraction, then often we won’t really be tuned in to what we’re doing there. So if we can ask ourselves, “Well, what is my purpose here?” this can be a way in which we get engaged. Maybe we say, “Because I want to distract myself because I feel awful.” That is fantastic. Even just to say, “Because I feel awful.” Sometimes even just to say it out loud and to recognize, “I feel awful, I don’t want to feel this, and I want to distract myself,” that is being with what’s actually happening. Wanting to distract is good practice. To just be with what’s happening—wanting to distract is what’s happening. We’re not saying that you have to feel the terrible thing. That will arise in its good time; it’ll get metabolized when it’s ready to get metabolized. But maybe you could just recognize, “Yeah, I don’t want to feel sadness anymore. I don’t want to feel loneliness anymore. I don’t want to feel whatever it is. I’m standing in front of the refrigerator with the door open.”
Another place in which we could use this idea of purpose is with our speech, with what we’re saying. We could have this quiet, in-the-background sense of, “Why am I saying this?” Is it because I want to impress this person? Is it because I want them to like me? Is it because I’m trying to help them? I see that they’re in some distress and it’s making me uncomfortable, and I don’t want to feel that, so I’m just going to try to make them fix their problem so that I’m no longer distressed. Or maybe I’m talking because I love them and I want to connect with them and care for them. Or maybe we just find ourselves speaking impulsively and we don’t even know why we’re talking. This is a great way to get connected with ourselves, to ask, to have this query: “Why am I saying this?” This has been a practice that I’ve been doing for some time. I don’t always remember, but wow, it’s really powerful. Really powerful to just notice what motivates our speech. Sometimes we just feel like we need some attention. That’s okay, but can we maybe just acknowledge, “Yeah, I’m feeling disconnected and so I’m talking to connect with people,” or to show how much I know.
If we find ourselves complaining or explaining, that’s often a way of avoiding, just like standing in front of the refrigerator snacking. If we’re complaining and explaining, I think there’s one other “-aining” but I can’t remember it right now. But if we find ourselves doing that, we’re also feeling disconnected from ourselves and wanting to distract ourselves. So we could just ask, “Why am I saying this?”
Or maybe we can ask ourselves this when we sit down to meditate: “Why am I meditating? Do I have a purpose in mind for this?” Even if it’s the same answer every time, there’s a way in which just asking the question, “Why am I doing this? What is the purpose here?” can be powerful. You might find answers like, “Because I want to find more ease and freedom in my life,” “Because I believe that more calm and steadiness is available,” “Because I recognize that my day unfolds differently if it includes meditation.” And even if you find that you’re saying the same thing again and again, there’s just this orientation towards “Why am I doing this?” Because there can be a way in which we think, “Okay, I’m doing this again because I’m supposed to. I’ll put the timer on and I’ll sit here.” There’s this way that we’re just not really showing up. We’re sitting on the cushion, but we’re not really showing up.
We only have so much energy in this life, only so much time in this life. It can be really helpful to align with what’s important for us. What do we want to spend our life energy on? What do we want to spend our time on? These reflections or contemplations about “What is the purpose, and is it aligning with a purpose that I want?” can be useful. Maybe we find ourselves watching Netflix an awful lot. Is this what I want to do with my life? Netflix wants you to.
Maybe these are types of questions to ask when we’re out for a walk or in the forest. It can be nice sometimes to drop in some of these questions, like, “What is important for me?” and “Are the things that I’m spending my time and energy on aligned with them?”
The second aspect of clear comprehension is this notion of suitability. We might ask, “Is it the appropriate thing to be doing? Does it fit the situation? Is it the right response? Is what we’re doing suitable?” whether this is on the cushion or in daily life. The obvious, or maybe I should say cliché, example is trying to get water from a rock. If you want water, why are you going to the rock and pounding on it? You should be pounding on a coconut or cutting up an aloe vera or going to the stream.
How this might show up in meditation—I’ve seen this when I was teaching what we call “happy hour” a couple of days a week. It’s still going on, 6:00 to 7:00 p.m., online, Monday through Friday. For a few years, I was teaching this a couple of times a week. It’s loving-kindness and compassion practices, heart practices. I would have a little Q&A at the end, and I was so surprised how people were really sincerely wanting to cultivate warm-heartedness, really wanted to cultivate some softness of the heart. And then in the questions that they would ask, they would be so mean to themselves: “I can’t do this,” “I’m a terrible meditator,” “Something’s wrong with me.” There would be this way in which they’d be so mean to themselves and not even recognize it. We’re trying to cultivate kindness and warmth and openness, and yet they spent the whole time beating themselves up. It’s easy to do this, right? Especially if beating oneself up is a familiar thing and we just think it’s the normal way to be.
It can be really helpful just to ask, “Is this suitable?” The way that we’re approaching this, whatever it is we’d like to do, are we approaching it in a way that’s suitable for us? Recognizing that all of us, of course, are individuals. We have different strengths and different life situations, are in different seasons of life, have different energy levels, different health. This is what it means to be a human; these things change throughout our life. We can just ask ourselves, given the circumstances of our life, “Is the way that I’m approaching what I would like to do suitable? Are we putting in the right amount of effort—too much effort or not enough effort?”
Just even asking the question, even if the answer isn’t quite clear, can be really helpful. It’s a way to get us engaged again with our life, with our meditation practice, with whatever’s happening.
Buddhist practice, this movement towards greater and greater peace and freedom and ease and well-being, is not a linear path: step one, step two, step three, step four. I mean, sometimes we teach it in certain steps, but that’s not how it goes. Nobody’s life goes in a straight, linear way to perfect enlightenment. There are always things that need to be revisited. Maybe there’s a domain of our practice which is really unfolding and blossoming, but maybe there’s a domain in which we feel kind of stuck. Maybe we have some of this doubt that shows up, some of our inner critic shows up, and we find ourselves revisiting this again and again. But there can also be times in which there’s some real openness and spaciousness and ease. We might be cycling through that. So this question of suitability doesn’t mean that we have to say, “Well, I should be on step three now because I was on step two,” whatever step three might be. Instead, it’s just this recognition that given who we are and the direction we’re trying to go, is our response appropriate?
Having said this, there’s also a way in which we can recognize that trying to spend time figuring out “What is the meaning of life? What is my purpose?”—that’s not what I’m pointing to here. There can be some questions about this, like, “Well, what is my purpose?” There isn’t one answer to this, and if you’re looking for one clear-cut answer, you may find yourself swirling around looking for that or waiting for that. There can be a way in which we have some clarity, and it feels like the answer is somehow to support others or to bring some more ease and well-being into the world, but that gets expressed in so many countless different ways. So I don’t want to suggest that we have to find this one meaning or purpose.
This idea about suitability, of course, can get carried into our daily life. Maybe we’re with the same group of people, the same family members, for example. So a very similar setting, might even be in the same location, but what’s suitable? Well, if we’re having a remembrance or a funeral or honoring the death of somebody, what’s suitable there is different from what’s suitable for a sweet 16 birthday party with the same people in the same location. It’s very different. So just for us to have some sensitivity: “What is this moment asking for? What is this situation asking for?” And that’s an interesting way to put it: “What is it asking for?” as opposed to “What do I want?” If we’re just going to always be pushed around by our preferences, what we like and what we don’t like, then we’re going to often be spinning our wheels, just chasing our preferences. It turns out they don’t get satisfied. You might have noticed that. There’s this hedonic treadmill, right? We’re always just looking for the next thing.
The third dimension of this clear comprehension that could help us if we’re feeling stuck or not quite engaged is this idea of the domain. The word in Pali is gocara4, and it literally means “cow walking” or “cow walk.” So we can understand it like pasture. We would say, “What is our domain?” Where is it that cows hang out and are nourished and protected? We would say, “Where are we nourished and protected? What is our domain? What is our pasture? Where is a good place for us to hang out?” literally and figuratively.
Figuratively, the Buddha pointed to these foundations of mindfulness: bringing some attention to the body, feeling tone (vedanā5), mind states (citta6), and what we’ll call dhammas7. The types of things in the dhammas category are the five hindrances, the Four Noble Truths, the Seven Factors of Awakening. The recommendation of the Buddha is that the domain is to be with your experience within those four categories. All of your experiences—the bodily experience and the mental experience, if we could divide it those two ways—all of that gets covered in these foundations of mindfulness. So the domain points to just being with these channels of experience, whatever is being experienced. It doesn’t mean it’s what we want to have happen or what we intended.
We might have sat down and said, “Okay, I’m going to do mindfulness of the breathing, suitable for my desire to have some settledness so that I can have some better well-being.” And then we discover when we sit down that our back is just killing us. Then we discover, “Okay, I’m not going to do mindfulness of breathing. I’m going to be with this uncomfortable experience in my back,” and then noticing how the mind is wanting to make lots of stories about it. Well, that would be an example of using the domain, just being mindful of these four avenues of mindfulness.
But maybe it’s easier to say what’s not nourishing, and that is just this mental proliferation, just the way that the mind can spin and spin. This is what I’m calling doubt, this hesitation, this vacillation. That’s not nourishing. So instead, we should spend our energy, our life energy, and our attention on what is nourishing.
And then the last category of clear comprehension is non-delusion. I’m like, “But how does that work?” When we’re having delusion, we don’t know because we’re deluded. So there’s this way in which we could just say it’s about being aware of our thoughts, just having some awareness of thoughts and not to get pushed around by them. To recognize that sometimes when we’re going to go to a new place, meet a new person, be in a different situation, or even if we’ve been to it before, we are often fabricating a story about how it’s going to be. Or maybe we are rehearsing a conversation we’re going to have with somebody. It’s perfectly appropriate to plan, but there’s this way in which we are just cooking up this whole scenario 100% in our heads. And then when we get there, of course, it never goes the way that we thought it would. Never does. Am I allowed to say the word “never” there? I’d be surprised if it does, precisely the way we thought it would.
So this non-delusion is to recognize, “Oh, this is just a story I have about how it’s going to go,” and to recognize the story-ness of the story, instead of thinking, “Oh yeah, this is actually how it should go,” and then when things start to go differently, start to complain or feel frustrated because our expectations aren’t being met. This non-delusion is to recognize, “Oh yeah, I have a story about this. I have these ideas, and it’s just a story.”
Or maybe there’s this way that we can look at our thoughts. With some meditation practice, the mind can be settled and we can just notice when thoughts are arising and see them as, “Oh, wow, look at that,” instead of getting lost in it. And then we can reflect: we didn’t make that thought arise. We didn’t do anything to make it arise. We didn’t control the content of it. We didn’t control the duration of it. We didn’t control the thought that followed that thought. These things are just arising. And with this recognition of how we aren’t controlling them, there can be this realization that that’s not who we are. These aren’t inherent to who we are as individuals. We are not our thoughts, even though so often we feel like we are. There’s a way in which we feel connected to them, but just to notice how we aren’t doing anything to have them arise—that can be some non-delusion. To not take our thoughts so personally, thinking that we’re making them happen or not making them happen.
So this idea of clear comprehension—purpose, suitability, domain, and non-delusion—these are four different ways, four different levers, maybe four different approaches that we can bring to our experience, either on the cushion or off the cushion, as a way to help get re-engaged, as a way to help us bring some aliveness, maybe some vitality to our practice, and maybe undo any sense of stuckness. This stuckness sometimes is in the form of doubt, not 100% of the time, but sometimes this sense of doubt is what the stuckness is. So maybe in this way, there can be this movement from stagnation to clarity, this movement of maybe a stuckness to non-stuckness.
And with that, I think I’ll open it up and see if there’s some questions or comments. Thank you.
Questioner 1: I remember when I played quarterback in high school, and after throwing an interception, sometimes the coach would leave me in the game and just say, “Keep playing.” It showed a kind of faith in me as the quarterback. I’m wondering what role faith has in all of this, because your intuition is very shy, right? It doesn’t want to get smacked away. So what does faith have in helping that to come forward?
Diana Clark: I thank you for asking that. That’s a great question. I would use the word a certain amount of confidence, but faith is actually a great word too. I think you’re right, it takes a certain amount of faith and confidence to even, for example, engage with what I was saying and to stay in there. Yeah, thank you for bringing this up. I think it’s a great point.
Questioner 2: Yeah, thanks for the talk. It’s given me a lot to think about. I think personally, one thing it reminded me of or got me thinking about is struggling with the concept of softness of heart. So I’d love to hear a little bit more about that. It’s kind of a relatively new topic for me in addition to the insight pieces that we normally get. But how to develop a softness of heart would be of interest.
Diana Clark: Okay, maybe I’ll say briefly about it. There’s a number of different ways you can practice with it. One way that I like to teach is that we start by bringing to mind a lovable being, whether this is an actual being or an imaginary one. So it’s often just like kittens and puppies and babies or grandkids, or somebody with whom we have an uncomplicated relationship and we have this tenderness towards them, some care. It can also be maybe somebody in our past who was a coach or a mentor or a guide that really helped us, and we have so much appreciation for them.
So either of those things, and then we connect. We bring them to mind, imagine them, and we connect with this sense of appreciation or care that we have. And then there are certain phrases that we can repeat to help nurture that connection and that sensation. We just stay there for a little while, and it’s quite simple how if we say it, it just naturally starts to grow on its own if we allow it.
The key is to start where it’s the absolute easiest. People want to start with, “Well, I’m having problems with my co-worker, I’m going to try to have warm feelings towards my co-worker.” But it’s to really start where it’s the absolute easiest and hang out there for quite some time. In fact, it can be a long time. It can be months. There’s something… because often, if I’ve been talking about stuckness, part of sometimes stuckness can be because there’s a part of us that is starving for some of this warmth and care and tenderness. And so there’s a way in which just hanging out with cultivating it—that’s the word I was looking for—cultivating it can be so supportive for us. It really just can bring also some vitality and energy and juiciness to our practice. Is this helpful?
Questioner 2: Yeah, thank you.
Diana Clark: Anybody else have a comment or question? Okay. So I’m wishing you all a wonderful rest of your evening and safe travels home. And may you not feel stuckness, but instead feel some of this juiciness and vitality of life. Thank you.
Vicikicchā: A Pali term for skeptical doubt, one of the five hindrances in Buddhist practice that obstructs the development of concentration and wisdom. ↩
Sampajañña: A Pali term often translated as “clear comprehension” or “clear knowing.” It refers to a state of alert awareness of what is happening in the present moment, both internally and externally. ↩
Ñāṇa: A Pali word for “knowledge” or “understanding,” particularly the direct, intuitive knowledge that arises from meditation practice. ↩
Gocara: A Pali term that literally means “pasture” or “domain.” In a meditative context, it refers to the proper field of attention, which is the four foundations of mindfulness (body, feelings, mind, and dhammas). ↩
Vedanā: A Pali term for “feeling tone,” which refers to the pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral quality of any experience. It is the second foundation of mindfulness. ↩
Citta: A Pali term for “mind,” “heart,” or “consciousness.” It refers to the overall state of mind or consciousness at any given moment. It is the third foundation of mindfulness. ↩
Dhammas: A Pali term with multiple meanings. In the context of the fourth foundation of mindfulness, it refers to mental objects, principles, or categories of experience, such as the five hindrances, the seven factors of awakening, and the Four Noble Truths. ↩