This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Undistracted; Poetry of Practice 4 (3/5) Touching the Heart of Everyday Life. 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.
I wanted to say something in general about poems. I’ve said this a little bit before, but there’s this way in which poetry can be a doorway, an entry point to shifting our relationship to experience. I’m fascinated by how poems use the same old words we use all the time, for the most part, but it’s their arrangement. It’s the way that there are line breaks in a poem, which is different than how we would often write with prose. This encourages a different way of engaging. It shakes up expectations. For example, there isn’t a period at the end of each line; instead, the words flow to the next line, and the punctuation is placed in its own way. We have to lean in and pay a little bit more attention because things aren’t exactly as we expect them to be.
It’s this power of us having to pay just a little bit more attention, and the words not precisely meeting our expectations, that I think is part of the power of poetry. It can not only point to practice with its content, but it’s a way of practicing to read poetry itself, independent of what the content is. In that way, I think poetry can be quite powerful. Maybe it helps us to be more aware, more connected to what’s actually on the page—or in my case now, what’s actually on the screen as I’m reading.
So, here is an invitation to let the words wash over you as I drop in a poem during our guided meditation this morning. Please don’t feel any sense that you have to get it, that you have to like it, or that it has to be some profound experience. Just let it be what it is, and it’ll be what it is for everybody. I don’t want to have this tyranny of poetry being supposed to elicit some particular response or be a support for practice or anything like that. Can it just be what it is, including, “Yeah, I don’t get it”? There can be such a wide range of experiences. I know some of you are putting things in the chat that it’s helpful, and I appreciate that. I find it helpful. But I also want to acknowledge there are plenty of people who are kind of scratching their head going, “Yeah, whatever.” I used to be one of those people. Maybe some of you know I’m trained as a research scientist. I used to hate poetry. I thought it was silly.
If you haven’t already, please take a meditation posture.
Allow the attention initially to tune into the sounds around you. If you’d like, you can even open the eyes for a moment, just to orient to the location where you are. There are sounds, there are things in the visual field. You’re here. Things are just as they are.
Closing the eyes. And again, connecting with any sounds, not in a way that you have to label them, identify them, or figure them out, but receive them. Receive the sounds. We don’t have to push them away.
Then, tuning into the experience of the body as it’s in this location. I like to start with feeling the pressure against the body, the pressure where the body meets the sitting surface. That contact. This is often an obvious sensation once we turn our attention to it. It helps support a sense of groundedness, connectedness—the foundation upon which we’re meditating.
A bit of a body scan, starting with the sense of contact with our sitting surface: the back of the legs, the feet, the buttocks, the back. The sensations don’t have to be otherwise; they just are what they are.
Staying in the torso, can there be some ease in the belly? Maybe some warmth and tenderness. The chest, holding and shielding our tender hearts. Can there be a little bit of a softening? For some of you, this might be just this tiny movement of the shoulders going back behind you that brings just a tiny bit more openness in the chest.
The lower back does so much work for us. For some people, it’s uncomfortable, painful. Some people don’t even notice. Whatever your experience is, can we tune into the lower back with some kindness? The upper back, the shoulders, the face. Bringing a sense of aliveness to the body, a sense of presence.
And resting attention on the sensations of breathing. Ordinary, always available breathing. Maybe I should say always occurring, not always available if we’re lost in thought.
Inhabiting the breath, the experience of the body moving as it breathes.
Now I’d like to drop in a poem. Again, you don’t have to figure it out, don’t have to do anything with it. Just receive and allow the words to wash over you. Maybe you like it, maybe you don’t. That’s not the point. Just a new experience, hearing a poem.
It’s called “No More Same Old Silly Love Songs” by Neil Carpathios.
When the radio in my car broke, I started to notice the trees. I began to stop exaggerating the color of leaves, how the reds and oranges needed no wordy embellishment. I started to open the window and smell the wet pavement after morning rain, crows on the phone line, their blackness and stubborn dignity. I even noticed my hands gripping the wheel, the small dark hairs, the skin, the knuckles, and the perfect blue veins.
I’ll repeat the poem. “No More Same Old Silly Love Songs” by Neil Carpathios.
When the radio in my car broke, I started to notice the trees. I began to stop exaggerating the color of leaves, how the reds and oranges needed no wordy embellishment. I started to open the window and smell the wet pavement after morning rain, crows on the phone line, their blackness and stubborn dignity. I even noticed my hands gripping the wheel, the small dark hairs, the skin, the knuckles, and the perfect blue veins.
And you be with whatever’s arising in this moment.
Thank you. Thank you for your practice.
Maybe I’ll start by saying a number of years ago, quite a few years ago, the radio in my car broke, and it only played cassettes. This gives you a sense of that era, right? This was the cassette era. So, I put a cassette in the car radio, and I listened to that single cassette for at least a year. Every time I was in my car, just the same cassette over and over and over again. It’s quite something when I think back on that.
When I reflect back on my life, I can see that there was a way in which I was kind of disconnected from myself, from my life. I was just trying to be so busy, busy, busy all the time, and trying to do, do, do, and feeling like whatever I was doing just wasn’t enough and I had to do more. It’s quite something when I think about this. To be honest, there was a certain amount of comfort in listening to familiar music over and over again. I knew the words to every single song, you can imagine. But there’s a way in which just listening to the same thing, driving to work the same way every day, this type of thing encouraged a type of autopilot, just going through the motions.
I like to say that poems are a way of encouraging us to connect. Maybe the word is connect with the words, because it’s not the usual way of words, the usual way that we communicate. And so we kind of have to bring a bigger portion of ourselves in order to feel into what the poems are pointing to. I would say that’s part of the power of poetry; they are very clearly pointing. The content is just used to suggest a direction, suggest an orientation. It’s not so much that the literal words themselves are what the poem is about.
So maybe there’s this way that we can allow poetry to really support us, orient us to just be, to feel into, to be connected, be embodied. In the guided meditation, I offered this poem. I’ll say it again, it’s “No More Same Old Silly Love Songs” by Neil Carpathios.
When the radio in my car broke, I started to notice the trees. I began to stop exaggerating the color of leaves, how the reds and oranges needed no wordy embellishment. I started to open the window and smell the wet pavement after morning rain, crows on the phone line, their blackness and stubborn dignity. I even noticed my hands gripping the wheel, the small dark hairs, the skin, the knuckles, and the perfect blue veins.
I don’t know, there’s something that makes me want to smile every time I read this poem.
Generally, there’s just so much in our culture that is designed specifically to distract us. There’s this way in which it pulls our attention away from what’s actually happening. We might say that to live with some mindfulness or to experience some mindfulness and awareness is a way in which we can feel more relaxed, feel a bit more restful. But it’s also enlivening and energizing. Because instead of being pulled or dragged into thoughts and just entertainment, infotainment, dragged into tomorrow, dragged into the fear of what the media often wants us to feel—outrage or fear or something, they know that these human conditions are what get people to click more, right? This is their business model.
But we might have our own concerns or distractions completely independent of the media. There’s this way it can be energizing or enlivening to actually be connected with what’s actually happening in that moment. There’s a way in which we might say that feeling disconnected from our life experience is a way of suffering. You could say it’s a type of dukkha1, this feeling as if everything is behind some glass, or that we’re only touching it with a 10-foot pole. Again, using metaphors and imagery perhaps to help us point to that we’re not often really with our experience. Instead, there’s this way in which we’re disconnected, in the same way that I would just be listening to the same song, driving the same route to the same job, doing the same thing. There’s this way in which this kind of autopilot can show up.
So we might say that one of the functions of mindfulness is to connect us with life, to be intimate with life, have us be embodied, have us inhabit our lives. And we grow to actually love this connection, this intimacy with our experience, because we start to feel like, “Oh, this is my life.” We start to feel like we belong. We start to feel less disconnected, less dukkha. And that’s a priceless feeling. There’s a preciousness to this connection. And then we start to have a feeling like, “Oh, this is what it means to live life.” Instead of feeling like, “Wow, another year has passed us by,” or “another season has passed us by,” we start to feel like, “Oh yeah, I’m living life.” It doesn’t mean that all of our preferences are being met. It doesn’t mean it’s easy. It doesn’t mean it’s pleasant. It just means that we have a sense of aliveness.
There can be a way in which there’s this deadening and maybe even a certain dullness that can arise. As we start to practice mindfulness, just being with what’s being experienced, there can be this way in which we wash the dullness from the senses. Maybe some of you who have been on meditation retreats, whether they’re online or in person, you might have had this experience. I know I’ve had this experience many times, where the grass really does look greener, and the sky really does look bluer, and the food is fantastic. It’s quite something how with a meditation practice, the sense of dullness that’s been over our senses gets washed away. It’s like the windshield gets cleaned. Like, wow, things are ordinary, but there’s a beauty in the ordinariness.
And with that, there’s also this sense of connection, the sense of beauty, and also the support of aliveness that arises, the sense of brightness. And then as we pay attention to walking, the breath in the body, what’s being heard, what’s being seen, where the hands are on the steering wheel. We could say that with mindfulness practice, there’s a sensitization that starts to occur. We start to feel connected, and there’s a sense of aliveness. I don’t want to say that it’s all joy and happiness, because sometimes what we’re connected to is painful. It really is. I don’t want to pretend like it isn’t. There is really terrible stuff that happens in people’s lives. Or even if it’s not an obvious event, there’s this low-grade, constant feeling of things not being quite right.
With practice, though, there’s a way in which we can feel like we’re alive, we’re living, we’re connected, we’re embedded. And there’s a way in which that feels like a certain amount of freedom. As I said, I’m not saying everything’s good all the time. There can be tremendous joy, no doubt. But sometimes we’ve disconnected because there’s uncomfortableness, and the way forward often is just to be with this uncomfortableness. But as we start to connect, as we start to be sensitive to what’s actually happening, as we start to stop distracting ourselves, then there’s a feeling of perfection.
Oh yeah, things are this way because there’s no other way they could be. They’re this way because causes and conditions came together. It couldn’t be otherwise. I don’t like it necessarily, but I can appreciate the beauty and the lawfulness of what’s being experienced. A sense of perfection. And there’s a way that the heart sings when it aligns with the Dharma2. The Dharma.
Oh, here we go. Here’s this poem: “No More Same Old Silly Love Songs” by Neil Carpathios.
When the radio in my car broke, I started to notice the trees. I began to stop exaggerating the color of leaves, how their reds and oranges needed no wordy embellishment. I started to open the window and smell the wet pavement after morning rain, crows on the phone line, their blackness and stubborn dignity. I even noticed my hands gripping the wheel, the small dark hairs, the skin, the knuckles, and the perfect blue veins.
I love how this poem kind of starts with external senses and then comes closer and closer, more and more intimate. It went from the external all the way, we might even say, to the internal: “perfect blue veins,” noticing the perfection of what’s being experienced. How could it be otherwise?
So thank you. Thank you for another day of exploring the poetry of practice. Wishing you all a wonderful rest of your day. And may you notice the perfection that arises in each moment, without making that feel ooey-gooey, without making that feel like the tyranny of trying to find the perfection, without it feeling oppressive. And you just notice, “Yeah, of course things are the way they are. How could it be otherwise?” Thank you.
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It refers to the fundamental unsatisfactoriness and painfulness of mundane life. ↩
Dharma: (In Pali: Dhamma) In Buddhism, this term refers to the cosmic law and order, and also to the teachings of the Buddha. It can be understood as “the way things are.” ↩