This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video As If the World Depends on It ~ 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 website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
Good evening, welcome. It’s lovely to see you all here.
I wanted to start with a little bit of a poem today that, in some maybe not completely direct way, kind of honors this idea of people dying in wars and the wish for wars to end. Those of you who have been listening to me for a while will not be surprised by the poet; it’s Rosemary Wahtola Trommer. This poem is called “Because.”
So I can’t save the world, can’t even save myself, can’t wrap my arms around every frightened child, can’t foster peace among nations, can’t bring love to all who feel unlovable.
So I practice opening my heart right here in this room and being gentle with my insufficiency. I practice walking down the street heart first, and if it is insufficient to share love, I will practice loving anyway.
I want to converse about truth, about trust. I want to invite compassion into every interaction. One willing heart can’t stop a war. One willing heart can’t feed all the hungry. And sometimes, daunted by a task too big, I tell myself, what’s the use of trying?
But today, the invitation is clear: to be ridiculously courageous in love, to open the heart like a lilac in May, knowing freeze is possible, and opening anyway. To take love seriously, to give love wildly, to race up to the world as if I were a puppy, adoring and unjaded, stumbling upon my own exuberance. To feel the shock of indifference, of anger, of cruelty, of fear, and stay open to love as if it matters, as if the world depends on it.
This is a beautiful poem, and there are lots of things I could say about it. A few things I want to pull out this evening is that we could say that part of meditation practice, in a gross generalization but in a way that can be really helpful to think about, is this movement from just concepts and ideas and living in our minds to actually being present for our experience—what’s actually happening this moment. Instead of all the thinking that’s going on and the ways that we think it should be and being disappointed how it’s not, that kind of thing.
She has this in the poem: “So I can’t save the world,” and then she continues, “so I practice opening my heart right here in this room.” This idea of “I can’t save the world”—in some ways, the world is just an idea in our head. We don’t experience the world; we experience whatever’s being experienced in this moment. And so she’s practicing to bring her heart, to bring her love, to just what’s actually being known in this moment.
We could say all of this meditation practice is about this. It’s about noticing all the ideas we have about what should be and what shouldn’t be, who we are, who we aren’t, those people over there, how they should be different, or how I should be different. You know, all these thoughts that we have, just noticing that they’re just thoughts, it turns out. And what are thoughts? They’re insubstantial, ephemeral. How many quadrillion bazillion thoughts have you already had? In contrast to hearing the voice, feeling the pressure against the chair or the cushion, maybe there’s an emotion that’s being experienced at this moment. So we could say that this is one arc of this poem, one element that’s being expressed.
But I appreciate that she also talks about this feeling of insufficiency. This feeling like, “whatever I’m going to do, it’s not going to be enough.” This sense of being inadequate, not quite enough, maybe not good enough. And of course, those are also thoughts, but there’s a way in which we can really grab on to those particular thoughts and make them feel like, “well, these ones are true. Those thoughts about the snowman I had earlier today, that was just a thought, but this feeling of inadequacy, that must be true.”
She says, “I practice opening my heart right here in this room,” and then the line continues, “and being gentle with my insufficiency.” So there’s this way of being gentle with one’s feeling of inadequacy or insufficiency. She’s not talking about being filled with shame. She’s not talking about pretending like it’s not there. Just acknowledging, “yep, there’s a feeling of insufficiency, like I can’t do enough or I’m not enough in some kind of way.” There’s some power in just saying it, “yeah, this feeling is here.”
This turns out to be so common. It was a big wakeup call for me when, as part of my training to be a Dharma teacher, I was sitting in on practice discussions that another teacher was doing. Just to see how person after person after person on retreats would come in, all the details different, but all of them sharing this flavor of “I’m not good enough.” It was really heartbreaking to realize how many people are having this feeling.
We could say, well, maybe it’s not surprising. There are so many messages we get from our culture, from our family, from our upbringing, education—there are all kinds of reasons. And there’s also maybe even this way in which we see these messages that promote individuality, like, “I have to do it all by myself, I got to make it happen, and I want this and I don’t care what you want.” I’m exaggerating a little bit, but there’s this message that in order for you to succeed, you’ve got to go out and do all kinds of stuff. Or if you aren’t like that, or if you say, “I need to honor and respect my actual experience right now,” there’s a way it can sometimes seem selfish if you’re not out there trying to save the world or end the hunger that she talks about in this poem. So there’s been a way in which we’ve often been dismissive of what’s happening to us, our inner life, our specifics, in a way that kind of undermines our sense of worth, our sense of being okay, our sense of being adequate or sufficient.
With Buddhist practice, some of you may be familiar with this idea that we don’t have to wait for chance, or we don’t have to assume that we have to have had a different childhood or something in order to feel okay inside. Instead, this is something that can be cultivated. In fact, we would say it needs to be cultivated, and it’s a tremendous benefit for one’s life to cultivate this feeling of warm-heartedness, this feeling of goodwill, not only to ourselves but to others and to all beings. This expanding out of the feeling of care and warmth and goodwill and respect. In Buddhist practice, this gets developed to universal dimensions, having this without limits, without exceptions, without distinctions, just having this orientation of goodwill.
For some of us, we might hear something like that and think, “Oh, isn’t that cute,” and it might feel saccharine or artificial or ooey-gooey in some kind of way. But there is this way in which we can train the heart and the mind, and that it does have this natural orientation towards goodwill or warmth or care or love and kindness or respect. You can choose which word you like the best.
Often this is called metta1. Metta often gets translated as loving-kindness, but it’s not a single thing. It’s not like a single feeling where we’re like, “do I have it or do I not have it?” like it’s this binary switch. More, it’s like maybe sometimes it feels like it has some warmth and gentleness, or maybe sometimes it feels bright and energetic, or maybe sometimes it has this quality of healing and caring for ourselves or for others. Maybe it has a soothing quality to it, just this warmheartedness. Or maybe even that’s going too far; maybe it’s just this softness and openness.
When I first started practicing with metta, with loving-kindness, I started to notice all the ways in which I wasn’t feeling loving-kindness. All the times and places I got irritated or annoyed with myself, with other people, were kind of really highlighted. It was uncomfortable; it was hard to see that. I thought I was a nice person, but then I started to notice everything that wasn’t metta started showing up. This turns out—I didn’t know it at the time—but this is a standard part of the practice. It’s not a mistake. It can feel like, “Oh, I must be doing this wrong,” but it’s part of the purification, the cleansing, the opening of the heart and mind.
Some of you will be familiar with this idea of loving-kindness practice. Briefly, I’ll say that it’s a different meditation practice. As a brief aside, I will say Monday through Friday, 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. is what we call “Happy Hour” that’s happening on Zoom. So 5 days a week, this type of meditation practice is being taught. On the IMC website, you can find a link there. I taught that for a number of years; it was beautiful, all these people coming to open the heart.
Briefly, I’ll describe that practice. You start where it’s absolutely easiest to feel warm-heartedness. For many people, this is kittens or puppies or babies—like generic kittens, puppies, babies, whatever has that feeling for you. And then you maybe connect with this, what we can call a “lovable being.” This could be an actual kitten, puppy, or baby that you know, maybe a grandchild. Or maybe there’s somebody in your life that’s really helped you—often it’s like coaches or mentors or teachers, somebody that has really touched you in some kind of way that you easily have a sense of appreciation. Bring them to mind.
And then to help the mind and the heart kind of soften and stay connected, we repeat phrases: “May you be safe. May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you live with ease.” These aren’t prayers as much as just this intention, this wish for goodwill for this person. And that could be it. It could be that simple. Just stay where it’s absolutely easy, sending goodwill to this lovable being.
Many of you will be familiar with going on to all these different categories, but what I’ve discovered from teaching this and with my own practice is if you just stay where it’s easy, it just naturally overflows into the other categories. We don’t have to force ourselves, because sometimes then it feels too contrived and constrained. Instead, it can be really helpful to just connect with a lovable being.
Rob Burbea2, who was a dharma teacher, did a number of dharma talks and retreats on metta, and he had this expression that I really appreciated about it. He said, “We don’t have to be a squeaky-clean metta machine.” This idea that when we hear these ideas of loving-kindness, we might have this idea that it feels robotic, we repeat phrases and wish goodwill, and maybe it seems a little unreal or unrealistic. But there’s a way in which it allows our personality, our uniqueness, to be a part of it. It’s not like we’re just marching along to a particular drummer in exact step. It allows us, it honors our own humanness, our own potential for having big, beautiful hearts.
Importantly, this metta practice, we start where it’s the easiest and then sometimes, intentionally—often, not always—turning towards ourselves: “May I be safe. May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I live with ease.” It turns out this is really difficult for a lot of people, this whole notion of just caring for oneself or sending love for oneself is uncomfortable. But there’s a way that it can make such a giant difference.
As I said before, some people feel like, “Oh, that’s selfish, I should only be doing it for others.” But we could say that having a relationship with ourselves of care and warmth, then we stop demanding it from everybody else. Just think how your life is different if you don’t feel like you always have to be met with care and warmth and love. Just think how your life would be different if you had this healthy, positive regard for yourself. You’d be willing to take risks, learn new things, you’d be creative because you’re not so much afraid of fear. You don’t have fear of failing, like, “Okay, that creative thing didn’t work. That’s okay. I’m still okay.”
What would it be like to just love others freely? Maybe they reciprocate love, and maybe they don’t. But just love what’s lovable about people, and then you’ll find that people start to show you their most lovable aspects. It’s quite something. There’s a way in which what we expect from people, they often are showing us, not in the obvious ways that we’d think, but it’s quite remarkable. Don’t underestimate how powerful this can be to have this positive regard for ourselves.
Not only does it help our life unfold in a different way, but it becomes a foundation from which we can give to others. It becomes a foundation from which we can grow from or build from. So rather than it being about what we think we deserve or what we think that we’ve done or not done, it’s this recognition that we exist, we’re here, and that’s good enough. It turns out that’s good enough. It’s not like we have to achieve and attain something. And this is definitely a gift to others, not demanding this love from them.
Importantly, this warmheartedness towards ourselves helps us meet our resistance to so much of what’s happening in our life. It’s not uncommon for us to meet our experiences with this subtle or obvious “no.” “I don’t want that. I don’t want to feel that pain in my knee. I don’t want to feel hungry. I don’t want to be too hot. I don’t want to have a boss that’s like this. I don’t want this, I don’t want that.” So much of our life is saying, “No, no, no, no.”
And often this “no” is thoughts, because we’ve thought up in our mind—completely 100% made up in our minds—how things should be. And then we lay that on top of what’s actually happening, and they never match. I’m saying the word “never”—rarely. What’s made up in the mind rarely is precisely matching what’s actually happening. And then what’s made up in the mind somehow seems to be the authoritative version, and there’s this way we’re saying “no” because it doesn’t match.
This practice is about saying “yes” to what’s actually happening. What’s actually happening is sometimes uncomfortable. What’s actually happening is frightening. What’s actually happening is sad. What’s actually happening is beautiful or joyful and lovely as well. But there’s something when we stop fighting with things and being disappointed in them and saying no to them, and just meeting them like we saw in this poem, there’s this relief of just putting down the burden of always trying to make things be different.
I am not saying to be passive. I am not saying don’t have goals and work towards them. I’m just saying notice how often you’re saying “no” in subtle and obvious ways. And doing this loving-kindness for ourselves helps us say “yes” to what’s happening, the uncomfortable experiences, because let’s be frank, a large part of life is uncomfortable. It doesn’t go exactly the way we thought. Sometimes it goes better, and sometimes it’s just different.
I want to say a little bit more about resistance. There’s this way about acknowledging the resistance and becoming familiar with the experience of resistance, this way in which we’re saying, “No, I want it to be different.” If we can say “yes” to the resistance—like the resistance doesn’t have to go away, just say “yes” to the resistance because that’s what’s happening in the present moment—it turns out this can be a gateway to more and more freedom. This is definitely a gateway to a way in which your life can have much more peace and ease. This way of going into the resistance can be a portal into so many of the ways in which we’re saying “no,” and they begin to soften. Maybe we’re choosing what we’ve been rejecting in some kind of way.
Sometimes the reason why we’re saying “no” is because maybe there’s an aspect of ourselves or something we’re really trying to avoid because it’s uncomfortable. But saying “yes” is a way in which things can kind of be more collected. We don’t have to try to excise those uncomfortable parts, and they start becoming together, and a sense of wholeness starts to get created and experienced.
So loving-kindness for oneself really can make this giant difference in our lives. It might seem sappy, and I like this word saccharine, but it turns out to be really powerful to help us meet what’s arising.
You might say, “Okay, well that sounds nice, but is there a way that we can do this? Because really, it’s not so easy necessarily.” I know for me, the first time that I did metta, I thought, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, give me the real stuff.” I wanted to do some insight practice, and insight practice is absolutely important and is an integral part of this path toward freedom. But I would say there will be a limit to how far you can go with insight practice if there’s not also a certain amount of willingness to open and soften the heart.
So how can we do this? Can we just have a little confidence in the notion of practicing with loving-kindness? It’s very much like planting seeds in the soil. We often don’t see when seeds in the soil are starting to germinate, and they do their first part of growth right there in the soil. We don’t see them. In the same way, loving-kindness practice—wishing goodwill for the lovable being, “May you be safe, may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you live with ease”—you can feel like, “Really, is this all I’m going to do?” But there’s a way in which it kind of conditions—we could use the expression neuroplasticity—this continued reorientation. And it gives the mind something to do other than ruminating about terrible, unhelpful things. So many of our thoughts turn out to not be as helpful as we wish they would be.
What helps this metta to expand and to have a big impact in our life? It’s a little bit of confidence or trust in this idea that even though we can’t see that the seeds that were planted are immediately sprouting, it doesn’t mean that they’re not having an impact. And if it feels like, “Well, this is kind of dry and mechanical, I’m not so sure about this,” or even if we feel, as I said earlier, that everything that wasn’t loving-kindness started to come up—all this anger, I couldn’t believe it, and this hatred. I was so surprised by it. I was on a retreat and I had been practicing for some time with loving-kindness, and I was very sheepishly telling the meditation teacher, and she’s like, “It’s okay, it’s okay, Diana, just keep going, just keep going.” And I trusted her, and I did, and it made a big difference.
So even if what’s coming up is the opposite of love and kindness, can you hang in there with it and not jump too much into judging how things are, like, “Ah, this doesn’t work,” or “I don’t like it,” or something like that? Because maybe what’s going on under the radar isn’t seen and felt.
You might say, “Well, what’s the relationship between loving-kindness practice and insight practice?” I’ll just say briefly, different people practice it different ways. There have been seasons of my practice that I’ve done it differently, but some people will start the first part of their sit—they’ll do 5, 10, 15 minutes of loving-kindness practice and then do 15, 30 minutes of insight practice. Or there’ll be some people who will just start with insight practice, or I’ll say mindfulness of breathing, and then realize, “Oh my gosh, the mind is crazy, all over the place, and I’m really agitated and restless.” And so then they’ll just switch to loving-kindness practice, which has a calming and a soothing effect. And some people will just say, “Okay, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I’ll do loving-kindness. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, I’ll do mindfulness of breathing.” Or you just do a whole sit one or the other. So you can play around with it, explore with it, and you’ll start to see that if we have this loving-kindness practice, it really starts to impact the insight practice. There’s this warm-heartedness that starts to show up with whatever is being known, whatever is being seen with our meditation practice. It just starts to unfold in a much more smooth, helpful way.
So I’m going to read this poem again, maybe in this context after hearing this. This poem is called “Because” by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer.
So I can’t save the world, can’t save even myself, can’t wrap my arms around every frightened child, can’t foster peace among nations, can’t bring love to all who feel unlovable.
So I practice opening my heart right here in this room and being gentle with my insufficiency. I practice walking down the street heart first, and if it is insufficient to share love, I will practice loving anyway.
I want to converse about truth, about trust. I want to invite compassion into every interaction. One willing heart can’t stop a war. One willing heart can’t feed all the hungry. And sometimes, daunted by a task too big, I tell myself, what’s the use of trying?
But today, the invitation is clear: to be ridiculously courageous in love, to open the heart like a lilac in May, knowing freeze is possible, and opening anyway. To take love seriously, to give love wildly, to race up to the world as if I were a puppy, adoring and unjaded, stumbling on my own exuberance. To feel the shock of indifference, of anger, of cruelty, of fear, and stay open to love as if it matters, as if the world depends on it.
To love as if it matters, as if the world depends on it. So I think I’ll close there and open it up to see if there are some questions or comments.
Questioner 1: When I was 21, my uncle was in the Navy, he was a pilot, and I was a really good athlete. I was working out all the time. I was thinking about trying to become a Navy Seal, trying to apply and see what would happen. What ultimately stopped me was I thought, “You know what, I don’t think I could shoot anyone. I couldn’t kill anyone.” So I just said, “Forget it.” My hypothetical question is, for someone who is a Navy Seal and the president has ordered them to assassinate some terrorist leader, can they have loving-kindness for who they’re about to kill, do you think? Or would they have to kind of suspend that within themselves so they could do the mission?
Diana Clark: I don’t know. I’m not a Navy Seal and I haven’t been in that position, so I can’t speculate exactly.
Questioner 1: I love your talk because your talk was why I chose not to do it. I just couldn’t do that. My uncle wanted me to and he was pushing me to, but I said, “You know, I couldn’t shoot someone.”
Diana Clark: And there are lots of avenues of things to do with one’s life other than that. Great, thank you.
Questioner 2: Thank you for the speech. In the middle of the speech, you mentioned that metta, the loving-kindness practice, would help with aversion and that will help us to say yes to reality. I heard about that too on a retreat, but my teacher didn’t talk further. Could you elaborate more on how, like what part of the practice will help us say yes to the reality?
Diana Clark: Yeah. So let’s just make this up. Let’s say that you’re at a dharma talk on a Monday night in a meditation center, and let’s say that you feel like, “Oh, why is this person talking so long? I want to go home.” So there’s a certain amount of aversion. Can you just recognize the experience of the aversion? You don’t have to change what’s happening. How does that aversion get experienced? It’s often like maybe a tightening of the jaw, maybe the shoulders go up, and maybe there’s this sense of restlessness, like wanting to leave. To be willing to even turn towards the aversion is not so easy because so often we have aversion to aversion.
The loving-kindness practice helps us soften up. Like, okay, as she’s saying in this poem, to love the world. Okay, can you just bring this “yes,” love the experience? So what often happens is you have aversion to the aversion to the aversion, and then you have aversion to the aversion to the aversion, and it just goes on. And then at some point, you’re feeling like, “Oh, wait, I think I can meet this experience.” And it doesn’t matter whether it’s the third iteration of aversion or the first or the 300th, but there’s this way with softening the heart that somehow just makes it easier to turn towards it.
Questioner 3: Thank you for this reminder that this practice can help us open to what’s happening and not turn away from it. One way I heard this phrased is “to make fear feel safe,” which I didn’t always understand what that meant, but I think I do now. Thank you.
Diana Clark: Yes, yes. “Make fear feel safe.” This is exactly that. It is to have some warm-heartedness towards what’s being experienced. Thank you.
Questioner 4: Thank you for the beautiful words and the poem. My question is regarding when this feeling of wanting to care for oneself arises, but then there’s this other force that is like inertia or, as you said, just the forces of the world. What type of things can we do to promote this sort of caring for oneself?
Diana Clark: Can you care for that feeling of not wanting to care for yourself? Whether it’s the inertia or, you know, often there’s this sense like, “No, you have to work harder, you have to achieve more, attain more.” There’s so much of that message. Can you care for that feeling? Like, “Oh, yeah, okay. Here’s that feeling. I have to achieve more, I have to attain more. Hello, that feeling. I kind of wish you weren’t here, but here you are.”
So there’s this way we don’t have to make that be a problem. Just to acknowledge it. And it doesn’t mean that we’re not going to stop wanting to achieve and attain immediately, but to not make that be a problem. What happens is things start to just come together, and it’s like, “Oh, yeah, okay, this feeling of drive, achieve, attain, and even sometimes to not take care of myself, okay, that can be part of the mix too. And I also have this feeling of wanting to take care of myself.” Can I honor and respect that there are these two different things that are going on, and can that be okay? Without insisting that one’s wrong and one’s right. And that’s the beginning. It’s like, okay, yeah, it’s a mixture. It’s not neat and tidy. It’s not so obvious sometimes how to go forward with wanting to take care of oneself, but for that to be okay.
Questioner 5: I always feel like I have to fix the world. I have to fix all the things I don’t like that I see in the world, and other people too, of course. That’s how it works. And I can’t seem to get away from that. It’s just this obsession I have. Like if I see a woman walking down the street and she could look so much nicer than she looks, but she’s dressing like a slob and all she has to do is just… you know. It sounds like maybe you know what I’m talking about.
Diana Clark: Yeah, this is quite something. So I have a few things to say about this. Often, the way that we are about what we’re seeing externally is not so different than what’s happening internally. That same kind of voice is often where we think, “Oh, I really should be doing this or that,” and “that person over there really should be doing this and that.” If you look closely, we’ll see these same types of energies.
Questioner 5: So that’s actually me then, and not the other person?
Diana Clark: We’re just one person, right? We’re not like we have a completely different inner life that’s completely separated from our outer life. But often our inner life is really uncomfortable for whatever reasons, so we’re really focused out there, like, “I want to fix things.” And this idea of wanting to fix things is related to wanting to control things. Of course, we want to control the world, because then everything would be fine, right? But it turns out we don’t control other people and we don’t control the world, but we keep trying.
There’s this way, if we can just realize, “Yeah, actually I don’t control this or that or this person or that,” it turns out we control so much less than we think we do. And just even noticing that makes your life go so much easier. Just to recognize, “Oh, yeah, I don’t have to control what’s happening over there,” and to kind of step back and be with our own experience. Because it’s frustrating, because we don’t control things and yet we keep on trying. So these are two big, giant things: the idea of trying to control, and the way that often we’re busy with things out there when what’s in here is really uncomfortable. Or maybe not always uncomfortable, it’s just not a habit to be familiar with what’s happening with ourselves. Sometimes we’ve been socialized to just really be focused outwards.
Questioner 5: A girlfriend of mine is just always trying to fix me, always. So what I should do is just change the subject, right? Because she asks me how I am, I tell her how I am, and then, “Well, you did this, you did that, and have you thought about doing this and that?” I’m becoming like her in a way, and I hate that because I don’t like when she tries to fix me.
Diana Clark: Yeah. And so sometimes what I say if this happens to me, “Oh, Diana, you really should…” and I say, “I know, wouldn’t it be great if you could control everything?” And then I kind of laugh and I recognize, “Oh, yeah, okay, I’m just trying to control you, Diana.” That’s a pretty big responsibility.
So I think we’ll end there. It’s 8:30 here, but thank you all for your attention and your practice. And I’m wishing you a lovely rest of the evening and safe travels home. Thank you.
Metta: A Pali word that translates to “loving-kindness,” “goodwill,” or “friendliness.” It is a form of Buddhist meditation in which the practitioner cultivates a state of boundless, unconditional love and benevolence. ↩
Rob Burbea: A prominent contemporary Dharma teacher in the West, known for his deep and nuanced teachings on emptiness, jhana, and metta. Original transcript said “Rob Burbaya.” ↩