This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: No Certainty; Poetry of Practice 4 (2/5): Live the Life That Chooses You. 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.
So here we are with our second installment, the second day on this idea of “Poetry of Practice.” I can’t believe I’ve done this three other times, but there’s a way in which poetry touches us in a different way than just the more didactic teaching. I like to do didactic teaching, I’ve done plenty of it, but I also like to use language in a different way.
Poems can be a doorway to another world where we’re using ordinary words, but their arrangement evokes something a little bit different. This arrangement of words that maybe includes a rhythm, maybe it points to a possibility or some wonder or some openness, which is so much about practice, can be a tremendous support for our practice.
So with that as a very short introduction, I will lead us in a guided meditation and I’ll drop in a poem. It’ll be the same poem as yesterday because, as some of you know, my talking about the poem afterwards got all garbled due to a mistake I made with the technology.
Just an invitation that when I drop in the poem, you don’t have to figure it out. You don’t have to understand it. You don’t actually have to do anything. Maybe just allow it to touch you. And maybe it does, and maybe it doesn’t. And can that be okay?
Okay, so here we are with a guided meditation. Taking a meditation posture, a big deep breath as a way to connect to the body, connect to the experience. Allowing yourself to settle in. It can be with a big exhale, can be a little bit of a letting go.
We’re here in this moment, this location. What would it mean to feel connected to the sitting surface you find yourself on at this moment? Whatever that surface might be—cushion, chair, bed, couch, floor—feeling the pressure against the body. We’re grounded and connected. There’s a way that feeling connected to our sitting surface can serve as a base so that we’re not getting pushed around and lost in thoughts.
Can you be in a meditation posture and know that you’re in a meditation posture? What is the experience of being in this posture?
Maybe a little bit of a body scan, just noticing any obvious areas of tension, tightness, contraction. They’re welcome too. You don’t have to try to get rid of them. Around the eyes or the mouth, common places to hold tension. The shoulders, letting the shoulder blades slide down the back. The chest, letting it just soften and open, de-armor itself. And the belly, our beautiful bellies. Bringing in some appreciation perhaps, and some ease.
Again, feeling our contact with our sitting surface, feeling connected, grounded. We’re here.
Then resting attention on the sensations of breathing, whether that’s the movement of the chest or the belly, or maybe the feeling of air going in and out of the nose. Wherever feels comfortable for you, just resting attention there.
What if meditation weren’t a self-improvement project? Instead, it was just an opportunity to land here.
I’m going to drop in a poem. You don’t have to figure it out. You don’t have to understand it. You don’t have to appreciate it. You don’t have to do anything. Maybe it lands, maybe it doesn’t. That’s okay. Maybe there are parts that shimmer for you. Maybe there isn’t.
This poem is “Prescription for the Disillusioned” by Rebecca Del Rio.
Come new to this day. Remove the rigid overcoat of experience, the notion of knowing, the beliefs that cloud your vision. Leave behind the stories of your life. Spit out the sour taste of unmet expectation. Let the stale scent of what-ifs waft back into the swamp of your useless fears. Arise curious, without the armor of certainty, the plans and planned results of the life you’ve imagined. Live the life that chooses you, new every breath, every blink of your astonished eyes.
I’ll read it again. “Prescription for the Disillusioned” by Rebecca Del Rio.
Come new to this day. Remove the rigid overcoat of experience, the notion of knowing, the beliefs that cloud your vision. Leave behind the stories of your life. Spit out the sour taste of unmet expectation. Let the stale scent of what-ifs waft back into the swamp of your useless fears. Arrive curious, without the armor of certainty, the plans and planned results of the life you’ve imagined. Live the life that chooses you, new every breath, every blink of your astonished eyes.
And we allow the freshness of each moment to be experienced.
So, I’ll talk a little bit about this poem. Again, for those of you who weren’t here earlier, I made a mistake last time. That’s why I sounded like chipmunks on speed, I heard a number of different descriptions of it. So, my apologies.
I’ll just say a few words about poetry: it allows language to touch us in a different way. And I would say so much about meditation practice is about opening up to different ways. It’s not our usual way of being in the world. It’s not our usual way of maybe interacting or feeling into our experience. And there’s this way also, like maybe the rhythms of poetry have this beauty to it that maybe our regular self-speech or the speech that we do with others is different.
The poem for today, “Prescription for the Disillusioned,” is the same one as it was yesterday, and I’ll talk about it again differently today. I’ll read it again.
Prescription for the Disillusioned by Rebecca Del Rio
Come new to this day. Remove the rigid overcoat of experience, the notion of knowing, the beliefs that cloud your vision. Leave behind the stories of your life. Spit out the sour taste of unmet expectation. Let the stale scent of what-ifs waft back into the swamp of your useless fears. Arrive curious, without the armor of certainty, the plans and planned results of the life you’ve imagined. Live the life that chooses you, new every breath, every blink of your astonished eyes.
I think this poem is lovely, and it’s a really good description of a meditation practice. I appreciate that it’s titled “Prescription for the Disillusioned.” So what does it mean to be disillusioned? Often it means that we’re disappointed. Perhaps something we had been looking forward to turns out to not be as good as what we were expecting. Perhaps yesterday there was a dharmette that you were expecting to be comprehensible, and it turned out to not be comprehensible. And maybe there was this disillusionment, this disappointment.
There’s this way, which is a perfectly natural and normal thing to do, in which we imagine something about how we think something will go in the future. I’d say we probably do this for almost everything. We imagine, and then we’re laying that on top of our experience, and then they don’t match. So we have what’s actually happening, then we have our experience, and they don’t match. And then there’s this way in which we feel disappointed, and then we’re trying to manipulate our experience so that it matches our expectation, kind of forgetting that our expectation is completely 100% imaginary, fabricated, just a collection of thoughts in the mind.
What’s actually happening is what meditation practice is pointing to. And so when we notice this occurring, when our expectations aren’t being met, there’s this way that we can use it as an indicator or an encouragement to practice this recognition. What is it that is causing these imaginary ideas about what the future will be? We could say it’s our beliefs. The underlying beliefs, the ones that we most likely are not aware of, are influencing what we’re imagining. What’s actually happening is what’s actually happening. We don’t get to control that, have you noticed? But we’re trying to somehow control it by placing our expectations on top.
So what are our expectations? What’s fueling them? And part of that are our beliefs. Do we have beliefs that we should be comfortable at all times? Do we have a belief that the world owes us something? Or do we have a belief that perhaps the world is an unsafe place? Or maybe we have this idea that whatever our expectations are, they should just be met, dang it.
So when we find ourselves disappointed, it’s an excellent occasion to just gently inquire, “Well, what were the assumptions I was making? What did I think was going to happen?” Again, we don’t have to make the experience of having expectations be wrong, because that’s natural, and of course we’re going to do it. But what the practice is pointing to is the opportunity to just notice this difference between what’s actually happening and our thoughts about what’s happening. We will always be disillusioned as long as we’re thinking that our thoughts are what should be happening. The practice is pointing to just pay attention to what’s actually happening.
And it could be, as our poet here is pointing to, there’s often some fear that’s underneath that’s fueling the underlying belief. Maybe it’s coloring or coding our beliefs, which is coloring and coding our expectations. Fear of being alone, fear of discomfort, fear of feeling uncomfortable emotions that maybe we feel are lurking just underneath the surface. Fear of death, fear of somebody close to us, a loved one, being harmed or their death. There’s so many different things that can be fueling our expectations, which lead to this disillusionment.
And then the title of this poem is “Prescription for the Disillusioned.” This idea of prescription, we could say, is a recommendation by someone who is deemed to be authoritative. The Buddha was sometimes considered to be a great physician who was treating what ails us, what ails all of us: dukkha1. This single word that stands for such a wide range of experiences, from the mildly irritating to the tragic and horrifying. This single word covers this wide range.
Some people have said that the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths is a way in which this great physician taught the world, helping there specifically in Ancient India, but for us today. We could say the First Noble Truth is the diagnosis: the truth of dukkha. That there’s dukkha when our expectations about what we want doesn’t match what’s actually happening. And then the Buddha talks about the cause of this suffering. We could say it’s clinging, it’s clinging to our expectations or thoughts about how things should be, how we want them to be, how we imagine them to be. The prognosis is good: there can be an end to suffering. This is the Third Noble Truth. And then of course, the Fourth Noble Truth is the Noble Eightfold Path. I won’t go into all the steps of this, but many of you will know that one of them, of course, is mindfulness.
We can summarize the Noble Eightfold Path as practices we do in the world: sila, or ethical conduct2; mental development, like mindfulness and concentration; and wisdom, like view and intention. So the Fourth Noble Truth is the treatment plan that this great physician, if you will, that the Buddha provides for us. This prescription is the Noble Eightfold Path, which emphasizes the importance of being present for what is actually happening, which very often might be disappointment with what’s actually happening. Can we just be with the disappointment? Can we be with the experience of being disillusioned or disenfranchised or just sad about what’s happening?
Instead, our poet is pointing to: “live the life that chooses you.” Can you be with what’s actually happening? And recognizing in what’s actually happening, maybe there’s a little bit of anger. “I want it to be this way, dang it, and it’s not.” So can we engage with life as it unfolds without feeling like we have to wrestle it into submission? Instead, can we meet what’s arising, including not wanting it to arise that way? This practice meets us where we are. And where we are often is feeling disillusioned, disappointed.
I was working with this poem, “Prescription for the Disillusioned.” Sometimes there’s tremendous happiness and joy too, right? I don’t want to make it sound like there’s always this disappointment, but I’m responding to this poem. So I’ll read this poem one more time.
Prescription for the Disillusioned by Rebecca Del Rio
Come new to this day. Remove the rigid overcoat of experience, the notion of knowing, the beliefs that cloud your vision. Leave behind the stories of your life. Spit out the sour taste of unmet expectation. Let the stale scent of what-ifs waft back into the swamp of your useless fears. Arrive curious, without the armor of certainty, the plans and planned results of the life you’ve imagined. Live the life that chooses you, new every breath, every blink of your astonished eyes.
So thank you. Thank you for joining me this morning on our “Poetry of Practice,” the way that we’re using some poems to help bring maybe some freshness to our meditation practice. So thank you.
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It refers to the fundamental unsatisfactoriness and painfulness of mundane life. ↩
Sila: A Pali word that means “ethical conduct” or “morality.” It is one of the three sections of the Noble Eightfold Path and is based on the principle of non-harming. ↩