This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Being Independent of What is Unhelpful ~ 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. I so appreciate meditating together; there’s something just really wonderful about it, no matter what’s happening. So, thank you for that.
I had the great good fortune these past few days last week to be doing some hiking in Southern Utah, and it was just so beautiful. It was just so wonderful. There are a number of reasons why I thought it was wonderful, but part of it is just being away—being away from screens, being out hiking, away from some of my usual responsibilities, but also just to be outside with the trees and rocks and nature, quote-unquote.
And I noticed, though, even though there was so much appreciation and so much happiness about just being outside and walking—so simple, just walking—I noticed that I felt a little bit more of this ease when I was on those trails where there were fewer people. When there were a lot of people and it was crowded on the trails, I was still happy to be outside and doing that, but when I was on a trail where there weren’t so many people, there was another level of ease. It was maybe a little bit easier to tune into some of the beauty or the quiet, the simplicity, this sense of naturalness. For me, when there weren’t so many people, I’m just now thinking about it, maybe there was a certain amount of ease that could arise. I tend to be more of an introvert; maybe some of you that are extroverts are thinking, “That doesn’t sound fun.” That’s okay, too, right? We don’t all have to be exactly the same.
But maybe there’s this way that being outside in a way that feels easeful is similar to being inside when there’s a big storm going on—rain or hail and wind or something like that—and you’re inside feeling cozy. Maybe there’s a fire in the fireplace or hot chocolate or something like this, a feeling of coziness. Or maybe there’s this feeling when you’re in a setting with a lot of people—a conference or a big party or a wedding—and sometimes it feels really loud, like, “Wow, this is a lot.” And then you step outside because you just need a little bit of quiet before you go back inside.
So I’m pointing to this idea of separating ourselves. It doesn’t have to be all the time, but removing ourselves, separating ourselves from whatever is happening. We might even say that this is part of what retreat practice is about: to kind of separate yourself. And that’s a big part of the power and the potency of retreat practice—that we’re away from the usual distractions. There are no electronic devices on retreats, and there are so few decisions to be made and things to take care of.
But even when I was on retreat—and I’ve done a lot of retreat practice—I was also trying to figure out, “Where can I be away from all these people?” So it’s kind of funny; it’s just something that I would do. I’m just remembering a friend of mine, unbeknownst to me, also had the same idea, kind of like, “Oh, I want to be a little bit more isolated, in a little bit more of a quiet place.” I would think, “Okay, well, after lunch, I’m going to go in the meditation hall because nobody else is in the meditation hall after lunch.” That’s usually a time when people are doing other things—resting or helping take care of the dishes or whatever it might be. And I thought it was funny that a good friend of mine, I would find there also. Like, “Oh, you’re here.” And then I’d think, “Oh, well, maybe I’ll do walking meditation over here; nobody goes over there.” And then I’d be over there, and oh, there’s my friend. So, just this recognition that some of us just have this tendency. Not everybody has that; I’m just sharing some of my own experiences.
I’d also like to say that the Buddha talked about this, or he pointed to this idea of sometimes—not all the time, but sometimes—to be a little bit more separate, to be a little bit more isolated from what’s happening. I can imagine that in ancient India, from what we know primarily from the Buddhist literature, people lived in large groups, commonly. Big family groups, multiple generations living together, or the monastics lived in monasteries a lot of the time. They also didn’t always live in monasteries; they would also be wandering and would be off on their own, too. So I don’t want to say that’s exclusively what was happening.
But there are a number of times in which the Buddha would give this kind of instruction: “Don’t delay. There are the roots of trees, there are empty huts. Go meditate.” The “roots of trees” in India refers to trees that have these really large root systems that would be kind of above ground, and they’d be really big. So they’d be like a big root here and a big root here, so you could have your own little space. So, his encouragement on occasion was to go, to sit, meditate, be separate from others.
There’s a Pali word that denotes this, and no need to remember this Pali word, don’t worry. The word is viveka1. The reason why I’m bringing it up is because there are a few different ways in which we could understand this word, and I’d like to talk about that tonight—this idea of separating, or to separate, or being separate, or separation. I like this idea of maybe thinking of viveka as being independent of what is unhelpful. It’s kind of clunky language, but maybe we could understand it as not being tangled up in entanglements, being separate from difficulties. Just this way in which maybe we can find some distance and not get lost in what’s unhelpful.
One of these examples could be, just as I described, finding a place that supports a meditation practice. And sometimes that place might be separate from others, out in the woods, in your room. Here at IMC, maybe we’re not all separate from one another, but maybe you’re separate from what’s happening at your workplace or your home or on the freeways, whatever it might be.
In the same way that there might be this physical separation—finding a location that is more quiet and settled—there can also be this mental separation, creating the conditions that also allow for this more quiet and settled state, finding a place in the heart and mind that is quiet and settled. Maybe being separated from these difficulties that, of course, arise when we meditate. When we sit down, it’s not always unicorns and rainbows; you don’t need me to tell you that.
Traditionally, this idea of being separated from mental difficulties points to the hindrances. These are five obstructions, difficulties, things that are getting in the way of being even more settled, of having even more calmness. These hindrances are said to be the doorway, the gateway to samadhi2. Samadhi we can understand as a sense of collectedness with a sense of well-being, the sense of being unscattered, undistracted, and with a sense of well-being, like, “Oh yeah, this is just being here.”
I’ll just say a few words about these hindrances. For me, when I first learned about them, I was so happy. It made me so happy because it felt like such a relief that thousands of years ago, somebody was talking about the difficulties I was having in meditation. This meant, “Oh, this is just a human thing. This is just what happens when humans try to sit down and meditate.” It doesn’t mean that any of us are failures. It doesn’t mean anything about us as meditators; it just means that we’re meditating.
With a really broad brush, we could say the hindrances are these energy states or forces in the mind. There’s this typical list of five. The first two relate to what I like to call pushing or pulling. This can show up in so many different ways, but there’s this kind of pushing, like, “Get away from me, I don’t want this.” Aversion. Maybe there’s a little bit of hostility in there, too, a little bit of ill will, like, “Just get away.” Or there can be this pulling: “I want more, I want more, give me more. I need more of this experience,” or more of some experience that I’m thinking about. This we could say is desire. So, this pushing and pulling. Sometimes when we meditate, you can see people lean forward a little bit if they are really in their meditation practice and they’re really wanting something. This can show up in our body as well as in what the mind is doing. I haven’t seen aversion show up as much as people pulling back, but there can be this sense of, “Oh, ew, I don’t want that.” That’s kind of the feeling. So those are two of the hindrances: pushing and pulling, we could say aversion and desire.
There are also two more hindrances that are related to the amount of settledness or energy. One is this feeling of not enough energy, right? Kind of like falling asleep. It’s obvious when you feel like you’re going to fall asleep; this is not so uncommon in meditation practice. And then the other one is like, “Oh my gosh, if I have to sit here any longer, I’m just going to go crazy.” There’s this sense of, “I just want to jump off of my seat and do anything—go organize the socks,” you know, something like this that feels like it’s more important or more urgent. So there are these two: low energy and high energy. Low energy is given the expression sloth and torpor, and high energy is given the expression restlessness and worry. I’ve given a whole series of Dharma talks on these; I’m just doing a broad brush right now. I know I say this often when I’m giving Dharma talks, “Oh, I should give a whole series on these,” and I often don’t do that even though I have that idea, but I think maybe I will. I’ll spend a little time; these are good things to really explore.
So that’s four. And then the fifth one is this sense of vacillation, like, “I don’t know, maybe I should do this. Well, I don’t know, maybe I should do this over here. Well, wait, maybe I’m not sure.” This kind of indecisiveness, this vacillation, this hesitation, not really being engaged. Sometimes that shows up as, “Okay, I’m going to be mindful of the breath. Oh, but my knee hurts. Okay, I’ll be mindful of the knee. Oh, I really don’t like the knee. Okay, I’ll do loving-kindness practice. Oh, but this is hard. Okay, well, maybe I’ll do visualization practice.” You spend your whole meditation practice just jumping from practice to practice. That is this vacillation, this hesitation to really just settle in, which is often called doubt. And there’s a lot that can be said about doubt; I think I gave a talk not too long ago about it.
So there’s this way in which these hindrances—these five: desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and worry, and doubt—are operating whether we are aware of them or not. But it’s maybe helpful to think of them as a spectrum; it’s not binary, either you have them or you don’t. They can be really subtle, and sometimes in our meditation practice, as the mind does start to settle down, we start to see, “Oh yeah, there’s a little bit of restlessness that was subtle that we hadn’t noticed before,” or, “Maybe there’s this desire that we hadn’t really noticed before.” And so part of meditation practice is just to see all these versions—the obvious versions and the not-so-obvious versions—of these hindrances. We don’t have to take them personally; it just means that we’re humans sitting down to meditate. But they don’t happen only in meditation; they happen in all of our lives. So these are obstructions that happen in all these different ways.
This idea of separation and viveka as being a doorway into samadhi—settledness with a sense of well-being—is that as these hindrances start to soften, these five universal qualities that everybody has to some extent (unless you’re completely awakened; I don’t know what a completely awakened person has, I’m imagining they don’t have these), as this separation, this seclusion happens, then there can be just this sense of maybe ease and contentment, a real, deep sense of that kind of a feeling. So separation from these hindrances is what we might call a different type of viveka, this mental viveka, mental separation.
But there’s also this way in which viveka, or even this word “separation,” we could say is like “to separate.” “Separate” implies this recognition, “Oh, there can be more than one.” We can put things in this pile and put things in that pile; it’s not just one thing. And in this case, what’s being pointed to is: can we separate, can we distinguish, can we discern what is helpful from what is not so helpful? I talked about this viveka as being this independence from what is unhelpful. It helps to know what is not helpful, and this we learn with practice. Sometimes it’s obvious, and sometimes it’s not so obvious.
And we could say, “Helpful for what?” We could say helpful for finding greater happiness, finding greater peace, ease, and freedom. What’s helpful for creating suffering? Oh, you know, it’s helpful to know these types of things too, right? What leads to suffering? Reading all kinds of news right before meditating is probably not so helpful, right? Then the mind is just going. And you learn that. Maybe if you find yourself doom-scrolling, you think, “Oh yeah, right, I’m supposed to go meditate,” and then you meditate and you realize the repercussions of the doom-scrolling or whatever it was you were doing. I think we’ve all done our share of these types of things.
I remember that early in my meditation practice, when I would be driving to the meditation center to do something just like what we’re doing tonight—a sit and a talk—I would play the radio really loud and sing along in my car. But then I noticed that as soon as I sat down, all those songs just showed up again in my mind, and I’d be meditating and just, “Oh no,” just these words of the songs, and I’m trying to get rid of them, but they would stay. So I stopped listening to the radio when I was driving to go meditate, just to see if that could help not have all those songs playing in the mind while I was sitting.
So there’s this idea of viveka as separating what’s helpful and what’s not helpful. We can say that’s part of Right View, part of the Noble Eightfold Path. I’ll just say briefly, again, a broad brush of that is knowing what leads to suffering and what leads to the ending of suffering, and to use that as a perspective, as a framework as we move through our days, through our lives. Just this sensitivity to, “Oh yeah, this is causing suffering, this leads to suffering,” and, “This one doesn’t.” For me, spending time hiking didn’t lead to more suffering; it brought a lot of happiness.
There’s this idea of discernment, but there’s also something else that this separation or distinguishing points to that the Buddha talks about, and that is to notice the contents of the mind: what is present in the mind and what is absent in the mind. Some of you might be familiar with this; it’s the third foundation in the Satipatthana Sutta3. If you don’t know what that means, it’s perfectly fine. It’s just this pointing to how there are these unwholesome roots, we might say, some of these foundational, really—I like this word “roots”—often unseen and underneath, but they’re allowing all kinds of stuff to sprout up. Greed, hatred, and delusion are the classic, traditional roots.
You’ll notice that I talked about the hindrances; for example, desire is an expression. We could say the root is greed, and it shows up as the hindrance of desire. We could also say that there’s this hatred, and maybe it shows up as the hindrance of ill will, but it could also be anger, it can also be disdain for others, it can also be a certain amount of arrogance. So there are these roots that give sprout to all kinds of things that turn out to not be so helpful. And then delusion, we can say there are a number of ways we can talk about this, but delusion is sometimes just being disconnected from whatever is happening.
So the Buddha points to: can we notice when greed, hatred, and/or delusion is present? But often it’s not obvious to us; it shows up in so many myriad ways. So there is this way in which we can get to know when greed is present, when hatred is present. These are strong words. Nobody wants to say, “Oh yeah, I had a lot of greed today. I had a lot of hate today.” Nobody wants to say this. “I was deluded for some time today.” But if we can recognize the way these three different roots show up in our lives, the experience of them, this can be transformative. Because this is part of the key to finding more peace, finding more freedom, finding more ease: getting to understand what it is that isn’t peaceful. What’s that experience like?
For example, what is the experience of really wanting something, like really, really wanting something? This can be a fantastic practice in your daily life, on the cushion: just recognize, “Oh, I really want my coworker to do something or not do something.” I know sometimes I would find myself thinking, “Please let XYZ happen,” you know, “not rain tomorrow,” or whatever it might be. “Please don’t let it rain tomorrow, please don’t let it rain tomorrow.” There’s this sense of really wanting something, but it can be fantastic to just notice what that experience is like. How does it feel in the body? It could be this little bit of leaning forward, but there’s also this tightness, and there’s this, “Oh, I really want this to happen.” There can also be a certain amount of energy associated with it. The mind can be repeating, “Please make this happen.” Maybe we don’t have a clear understanding of who we’re asking, but there’s just this sense, “I really want this, please let it happen.”
It’s uncomfortable. These expressions of greed, hatred, or delusion are uncomfortable to experience. In some ways, they might feel nice because there’s energy associated with them, but in the big picture, it turns out to be really agitating. And it’s uncomfortable to recognize that we have these within us. Because what happens is, it’s a kind of delicate experience to say, “Oh yeah, okay, there’s a lot of hatred, aversion, ill will,” and then often the next beat is, “and I’m a bad person because I have that.” This is often what’s happening.
So it can be really helpful to discern, differentiate, separate discernment from judgment. Can we make this distinction between these two? Discernment is helpful. It is this clearer, cleaner way in which we’re seeing, “Oh yeah, this is not so helpful; this is helpful.” If we want to clean dirty dishes, it’s helpful to use soap rather than just adding more grease to the dishwater, right? This is something that’s obvious. There’s not a lot of judgment about it, like, “Oh yeah, I grabbed the wrong thing and didn’t add soap to it.” Okay. But when we see something in ourselves, can we just have the same type of discernment? “Oh yeah.”
Discernment is like a clean way of noticing, “This is helpful,” and this way it leaves us room for this greater perspective, for seeing the big picture. And we can start to see, “Oh yeah, okay, I could see how that’s not helpful,” and it just feels kind of clean. Or, “I can see how I thought maybe it would be helpful, but now it’s not.” In contrast to judgment, which is this quick, reactive, and kind of closed way, and it has this value-laden quality to it. And it’s often associated with the inner critic, this inner critic that shows up and might say something like, “Well, why did I even bother trying to do something? I can’t do something new. I can’t even meditate. I don’t even know why I’m trying,” or, “I can’t change the way my life is going. I’m useless. I can’t do it.” This means that because I’m having these hindrances or whatever experience, this means that I’m just lazy, or I don’t know, these things that we say about ourselves.
So discernment is maybe forward-thinking, is open, and it recognizes maybe that things didn’t turn out the way that you had hoped or the way that you had planned. But then discernment considers, “Oh, how… maybe there are some alternatives here.” And so there’s like a way forward, whereas judgment is like, “This is bad, I’m bad,” and then it’s a kind of closed loop of just these stories that perpetuate it. It’s this way that we kind of get bogged down in mean and nasty things that we say to ourselves. It can be really awful sometimes. This judgment can also be towards other people, but that inner critic—the judgment of other people—often we notice that, but the inner critic is often under the radar because it feels so familiar. It feels like, “Oh yes,” and then there’s a sense of shame. We hope nobody knows this about us. It’s just really toxic and painful.
So part of this viveka, this separation, is for us to maybe not get bogged down in the inner critic, but maybe to separate, to be able to notice, “Oh yeah, the inner critic is here. It’s telling me that I’m a terrible person. It’s reminding me of all the things that I’ve done wrong. It’s discouraging me from trying anything new or trying to expand my capabilities in any particular way.”
So here’s something to do if you find yourself bogged down, lost, and weighed down with this inner critic, if you have this feeling of, “This is really strong or present and is pushing you around.” You can just ask yourself, “How am I feeling right now?” That’s it. That’s all you have to do. “How am I feeling right now?” “I feel awful.” “Okay, how does awful feel?” “How am I feeling right now, with this awfulness? I feel stuck. I feel like it’s heavy. I feel like nothing’s ever going to turn out. I feel terrible.” But then you can say, “Well, how does that feel?” Like, “How are you feeling right now?” is a way it starts to maybe turn your attention towards the uncomfortableness of the situation, but then it also is a way in which it brings mindfulness in. “How am I right now? I’m feeling confused, not sure what to do.”
And then there’s this way in which bringing mindfulness in can bring a certain amount of disruption of the momentum. Instead of the inner critic running the show, if we can kind of keep on checking in with how it feels in the body and how it feels in the mind, it’s a way that we can say, “Yes, but how am I right now?” This is a movement towards how we are with some care, with some kindness. It’s a way that interrupts not only the momentum of the inner critic, but it’s also inserting some different energy, some different flavor. It introduces some care. “How am I?” It’s like with care, like how you would ask somebody that you could see, “Oh my goodness, how are you?” It’s this way to connect with and see how they are.
So when you find that this inner critic is up and running, a way we can just tune into the experience, with care—maybe I should say this, with warmth and care as best you can. Because often what will happen is the aversion will have a certain momentum and it’ll start like, “How the F am I? I don’t know,” right? We could have this aversion kind of follow us into that.
So the inner critic can get us bogged down, whereas this discernment allows us to just see things, “Yeah, this is not helpful.” And maybe it helps us to see, “Here are things that can be done. These are issues to be looked at or situations to be managed,” or something like this. So discernment has this movement forward, whereas this judgment, in particular this inner critic, has this sense of being stuck. And so part of this separation is to be able to distinguish discernment from judgment, and then can we separate ourselves from the judgment and allow that discernment to still be there between what’s helpful and what’s not helpful? I mean, we do this all the time, right? With judgment and discernment, we’re kind of flitting back and forth without even recognizing that we’re doing that. But it can be helpful to notice and to tune into, “Okay, what is this? Is there a way that I can separate what’s helpful from what’s not helpful here?”
This viveka with the mind, I talked about knowing the contents of the mind, in terms of what’s present, but also what’s absent. This turns out also to be kind of tricky, to notice what’s not there. We often dwell on difficulties or dwell on things that are uncomfortable, and we overlook some of the beneficial, pleasant states of the mind that are there also. They might be just a small amount, but they are often ignored or dismissed. But when some of these difficulties start to diminish, when we start to become maybe a little more separate from them, we can start to really notice and feel some of these beautiful states of mind.
Here’s a very short poem from Analayo, Bhikkhu Analayo. Some of you might know him. He’s a premier, I would say maybe the foremost academic who studies this tradition, and he’s also a premier meditator. He’s written books and books and books, both on the academic side as well as how to practice. Here’s a very short poem:
Such joy it can be when the mind is free, even if only temporarily.
I kind of love this. It’s a kind of whimsical, fun, playful way to think about it, but he’s pointing to the power of what it can be like when we notice the absence of some of our difficulties. If there was a strong sense of really wanting something and just kind of seeing, “Oh yeah, that faded away,” I didn’t satisfy it, or maybe you did and then the wanting went away. But this sense of noticing when some difficulties are not there can be really helpful and supportive.
So this idea of viveka, this separation, is both to separate ourselves physically—move ourselves into a place that supports some ease and settledness—and also mentally, to separate ourselves from what’s often called the hindrances. And then this whole idea of just to even be able to recognize that things can be separated and maybe put into “helpful” and “unhelpful,” as well as to notice what is going on in the mind, what is present and what’s not present, what’s helpful and what’s not helpful. And then I made this clunky little expression of “being independent of what is unhelpful.” I kind of like this idea of independence. You know, it’s a way of feeling like, “Okay, it doesn’t mean I don’t know what’s unhelpful, but I can interact with it and maybe be with it, but I’m independent of it. I can separate myself if need be.”
So thank you, and I think I’ll open it up for some questions or comments. Thank you.
Questioner: Is sloth and torpor different from feeling sleepy while I’m meditating?
Diana Clark: So there are two different ways we can define feeling sleepy. One is feeling sleepy due to lack of sleep, and there’s one that’s feeling sleepy as a way in which the mind is kind of trying to avoid something, so it kind of shuts down or it just hangs out in this foggy place so it can’t be with what’s over there. It’s very common, both because we’re sleep-deprived and we often want to avoid things. Here’s how you can tell the difference: if you’re doing a meditation period and you’re feeling like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t stay awake,” and you even find yourself doing this type of thing, if the bell rings at the end of the meditation period and you’re like, “Oh great, okay, now I got to go do this, I got to take care of this, I got to do this,” if all of a sudden energy returns, it’s not due to lack of sleep. It’s due to just the way the mind is wanting to not be with some uncomfortable experience. And it’s okay, this happens to everybody. I’ve done a lot of this myself.
Nancy: When you were talking about viveka initially, after your hike in Utah, it sounded more like it was related to taking refuge. And then when you were talking about it further and it became more about discernment, it seemed somewhat different. But is there a relationship between viveka and taking refuge? Are they like the opposites of one another, or in furtherance of taking refuge? Just not sure how to…
Diana Clark: Yeah, yeah, thank you, Nancy, for this. This is a nice idea. So one way I kind of think about it is, you know, taking refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, but we also use this word “refuge” like we create wildlife refuges, right? Where we separate wildlife from other things out there that are going to eat them or poachers or whatever is going to happen, and we put them in an enclosure of some kind. So in the same way, I would say they’re related, this way of, “Yeah, I’m separating and orienting towards what’s helpful.”
Online Questioner: What is the difference between viveka and renouncing?
Diana Clark: Yeah, so there’s a similarity, but renunciation is more about simplicity, and it’s more about… yeah, I would say it’s more an emphasis on simplicity. And of course, there’s a relationship between separating out what’s helpful and unhelpful and just being with what’s helpful and renunciation. So there’s a relationship, but I would say there’s maybe a distinction. Maybe renunciation goes up a step further. It’s more like letting go of what’s unhelpful, whereas I’m just pointing to recognizing that you can make a distinction or discernment, and to do so. Maybe renunciation is the next step. Nekkhamma4 is the Pali word for renunciation. They don’t have any similar etymology, but thank you for the question.
Questioner: The word that came to mind for me, or a couple of different words, was solitude, which to me has a very positive connotation. And then also I was thinking about protection. And I know that the Buddha every day would take time out from meeting with people and take time out during the year to be separate, and that feels like that’s a way to be more balanced, is to take time away to kind of recharge one’s batteries in solitude. And I value that a lot, and nature’s a great place to do that.
Diana Clark: Yeah, thank you. Viveka sometimes gets translated as solitude and sometimes as seclusion also. Yeah, thank you.
Okay, wishing you all a lovely rest of the evening and safe travels home. If you’d like, you can come up and talk to me; otherwise, I wish you well. Thank you.
Viveka: A Pali word that can be translated as “seclusion,” “separation,” or “detachment.” It refers to both physical withdrawal from worldly distractions and mental withdrawal from unwholesome states. ↩
Samadhi: A Pali word for a state of deep meditative concentration or collectedness, where the mind becomes calm, unified, and absorbed. It is a key component of the Buddhist path. ↩
Satipatthana Sutta: One of the most important discourses of the Buddha, found in the Pali Canon. It provides a comprehensive framework for the practice of mindfulness, outlining the “Four Foundations of Mindfulness”: contemplation of the body, feelings, mind, and dhammas (mental objects or principles). ↩
Nekkhamma: A Pali word for “renunciation” or “letting go.” It signifies the turning away from worldly pleasures and attachments in pursuit of spiritual liberation. The original transcript said “N,” which has been corrected to the full Pali term based on context. ↩