This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Welcoming What We Wish Away ~ 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 nice to see you all and it’s nice to practice together.
Tonight, I’m going to start with this bold statement: earthworms are often underappreciated. They do this work of aerating the soil and creating little tunnels that allow air and water to move through. They also eat some of the organic material and essentially recycle it, leaving behind castings. The interesting thing is that earthworms, of course, are underground so we don’t see them. They’re doing this work, improving the quality of the soil. This planet probably wouldn’t work as it does if we didn’t have these things underneath the ground that we don’t see and that we often simply don’t appreciate.
Ajahn Chah1, who was one of the elders in this tradition—for those of you who know, Jack Kornfield practiced with Ajahn Chah in Thailand—talked about this “earthworm wisdom.” This is the idea of doing practices that can really make a benefit in your life but often go unnoticed, like they’re underground, not so obvious and not seen. And yet, what a difference it makes. I myself don’t work with soil, I don’t have earthworms, but this is my understanding: what a difference they make in terms of the quality of the soil.
So, what is meant by this idea of earthworm wisdom? I just like that expression; I think it’s kind of fun. There’s a lot we could say that fits under this banner, but what about this idea of just simply caring for ourselves?
Sometimes we come to Buddhist practice, or maybe any spiritual practice, with this sense that things should be different, that somehow we are lacking, that something’s wrong with us, something is broken. We have this sense of being inadequate or insufficient in some way, and then we come to practice with the idea that we have to fix it. We’re a problem, or there’s a part of us that’s a problem that has to be fixed.
What’s fueling this, what’s underneath it a little bit, is this sense of “not enough.” Something’s wrong. I wish it weren’t this way. Everything would be so much better if it weren’t like this, if I didn’t have this quality or this behavior or whatever it is. So, there’s this flavor, subtle or obvious, of aversion—wishing to undo some part of ourselves, maybe to excise or remove or get rid of or somehow transform or change. There’s this slight feeling of, “Ugh, I wish this could be different. Why is it like this?”
So perhaps we undertake meditation. (And I’ll just say for those people that I see putting on warmer clothing, the air conditioning comes out of these vents right here. So there are these microclimates. Under the stage is the warmest place when the air conditioning is on. Thank you, Jim, for changing the temperature there.)
There’s this inner climate that sometimes shows up, of wanting to get rid of things. I would say some of this earthworm wisdom is, instead of this idea that we have to get rid of and change and fix because there’s something wrong or inadequate, what if there’s a sense of care that’s born out of a respect and honor for our experience? Because we care about ourselves. Let’s have some warmth. This doesn’t have to be obvious or giant or big self-aggrandizement or something like this. Instead, what if it were just because we have some respect for ourselves, and that’s what’s fueling some of this practice? Like, “Yeah, maybe I’m going to work on this because I care about myself, and I anticipate that my life will unfold in a way that brings more and more happiness if I do this. I’ll be able to bring more and more good into the world. I’ll be able to support more people.”
What if that’s what’s underneath, what’s fueling our practice, instead of this self-improvement project? What if it’s a care and respect for ourselves and for others? I’m not going to sit here and say that I didn’t start my practice with this idea of care and respect. It definitely was a self-improvement project. So I think it’s most often what brings us to practice, but there can be this recognition, this tilting in what fuels our practice, especially the longer that we have a meditation practice.
So what is something that can support this shift away from a self-improvement project and towards something that’s born out of care and respect and honoring of ourselves? There are a number of ways we can do this. One thing I want to talk about tonight is the idea of Mettā2 practice. Many of you will be familiar with this word. Mettā is often translated as loving-kindness, or I often think of it as warm-heartedness, goodwill, benevolence, care. These are some of the other words we could use for it.
For those of you who don’t know, at IMC, Monday through Friday from 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m., there’s what we call “Happy Hour” on Zoom. It’s all about cultivating this. For years, I taught this a couple of times a week—this warm-heartedness, this loving-kindness. And there are people that have been going every day, five days a week, since the pandemic. So, what is that, almost five years now? And they talk about how their lives are different and transformed and changed from just regularly showing up for one hour on the weeknights.
So, what is this kind of practice that we’re doing at happy hour? This loving-kindness, Mettā practice. In a big broad brush, there are three elements to this practice. One is to bring to mind an individual that we wish to extend goodwill to. We always start where it’s the easiest. So often, we start with a lovable being for whom there’s already a sense of care. Some people use kittens or puppies or grandchildren or babies. I know somebody who uses squirrels. It doesn’t matter what it is. So there’s an object or an image of an individual.
Then there’s this felt sense of connection that you feel with this lovable being. It might be really subtle, and it might not even be there, and it’s perfectly fine whatever it is.
Then the third aspect is to say phrases that we repeat in the mind. Just like with mindfulness practice where we have mindfulness of the breath and then the mind wanders and we come back to the breath, with loving-kindness practice we use the phrases as an anchor. We have a phrase, the mind wanders, and we come back to the phrases as a way to stay with this connection, with this warm-heartedness, this goodwill, this benevolence, this care that we have for others.
This practice of loving-kindness is not about convincing ourselves of anything. It’s not an effort to pretend or plead or demand that there’s this warm-hearted feeling. Instead, it’s just creating the conditions for that which is already inside of us to arise. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t, and that’s okay. In fact, that’s what’s expected. It’s more just the intention of inclining the mind and the heart again and again towards connection and warm-heartedness with others. It’s quite amazing. It’s a beautiful practice.
So, it’s about tapping into something that’s already inside of us. We’re not denying or pretending that there’s a lot of awfulness in the world. We are not just putting on rosy glasses and hanging out with unicorns and butterflies or something like that. It’s just this practice of this continued orientation towards goodwill for others.
It’s more than just a feeling, though, when we do this practice. It’s not like we’re trying to cultivate something that feels “ooey-gooey” (I’ll just use that as a technical term). Instead, what can often happen is this sense of openness and spaciousness and ease and warmth. As I’ve said, it’s not always there, but when we’re practicing, it doesn’t matter so much what exact emotion we’re having. It’s more like we’re planting seeds. Through neuroplasticity, we’re just bringing the mind back again and again and again towards this goodwill, this wishing well for others.
I talked about it as being warm and maybe spacious and open, but it can also have a quality, when this warm-heartedness, this Mettā arises, of being a little bit bubbly, a little bit energetic, like an uplift in the heart. It can be soothing in this way. It can be calming. It can be very gentle, and it can also be like, “Wow, shazam!” It can be a little bit of that, too. It’s beautiful how there can be just such a big, wide range.
Some of the classical, traditional phrases that we offer with loving-kindness—and there’s nothing magic about these particular words, you’re encouraged to find variations that speak to your heart—when we start with the lovable being, for example, the phrase that we would say is something like: “May you be safe. May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you live with ease.” It’s just this way for us to connect and encourage this warm-heartedness. As I said, this is not so much a prayer. It’s not an invocation to any other being. It’s just a wish, an invitation for others.
This idea of loving-kindness is that it expands out into all beings, and importantly, it includes yourself. Having loving-kindness for ourselves turns out to be often not so easy. A lot of people will tell me when I’m teaching a Mettā retreat, “Okay, I can do it for all kinds of people, all these beings, all these situations, yeah, but for myself, it’s not so easy.” And then they just kind of ignore it and focus on doing it for everybody else. But this idea that care for oneself is pretty important. It’s this foundational practice, I would say, that allows us to meet the world with some warm-heartedness as opposed to trying to get something from other people all the time to fill holes that we feel in our hearts and minds.
There can be some resistance to having loving-kindness for oneself. This sense that it feels selfish: “I should have loving-kindness for other people, not for myself.” Or maybe there’s this sense that, “Yeah, if people really knew some of the thoughts that I’ve had or some of the things that I’ve done, they wouldn’t think that I’m worthy of loving-kindness or care.” So somehow they feel like they’re not deserving.
I just want to say that we often have resistance to so many experiences, not only resistance to loving-kindness for ourselves. There’s this way in which we are, maybe in a subtle or obvious way, saying, “No, I don’t want this experience. No, make this go away. No, this isn’t what I wanted. I didn’t meditate wanting this experience. Make it be different, dang it.” This can often show up.
This idea of resistance, it’s a natural response to uncomfortable experiences, and it just stems from our wish to avoid discomfort. It’s this urge to push away or deny or minimize the experience. And resistance, I’m using this word that says “no,” but it can also just show up as distraction. This way in which we are creating stories or narratives, getting lost in fantasy, with things that we’re remembering. Maybe there are even ideas like, “Oh, I can’t handle this,” and off we go into something else. Off we go with our minds, or sometimes we just literally get up and do some different activity in order to distract ourselves from whatever is being experienced that’s uncomfortable.
It’s this fascinating thing that I appreciate so much about Buddhist practice. I had this idea for such a long time, and it wasn’t until I was helping Gil Fronsdal with his book on the hindrances that I really started to understand this differently. We often have this idea: “Okay, I’ll get to the practice as soon as this bothersome thing goes away. As soon as my irritation with my neighbor, my frustration with not being able to find a parking spot, or whatever it might be, as soon as that gets taken care of, okay, then I’ll come back to the practice.”
But it turns out, the practice is to be with the resistance. That’s exactly the way to practice. I like the simile that we find in the Suttas3 where the Buddha describes rain up in the mountains. The little trickles of water start to trickle down, and then they kind of join and become little streamlets that become streams that become rivers that eventually find their way to the ocean. The rain comes together and finds its way to the ocean, but of course, it’s not in a straight line. And of course, it meets big boulders or big obstructions. This water just touches the obstructions and goes around and keeps on continuing. It’s the same way with our practice. We meet these obstructions, and part of the practice is to have contact with them, not to just see them in the distance and then go around them.
So how do we work with resistance? We recognize it and we don’t resist the resistance. Just to notice, “Oh yeah, this is uncomfortable. I wish it weren’t here.” And then just to feel into that wish for it to not be here. That’s the practice. Feel into, recognize, “Oh yeah, I’m irritated. I have this aversion. I want this to go away.”
So instead of fighting the resistance, instead of resisting the resistance, can we welcome it? Can we recognize, “Yeah, this is a natural part of the process.” I would say it’s a required part of the process. If it’s just perfectly easy all the time, then there’s not a learning, there isn’t an expanding of our capacities. It’s just maybe going down a water slide in the summer. It’s just entertainment or fun. Not to say that practice can’t be fantastic and lovely and all those kinds of things, but sometimes it isn’t.
By acknowledging the resistance, we create space for it to be felt and to be recognized. Maybe in the same way that the earthworms under the soil are making space for air and water, for something beautiful to be grown from the soil, to make this soil fertile and able to support a lot of growth.
I’d like to introduce a poem here. I’m on this kick of doing poems. Sometimes I pull together a talk and I feel like, “Oh, that doesn’t feel quite enough. There’s got to be a poem somewhere that’s going to make this better.” So, here we are. I always like poems that have a little bit of whimsy, that are relevant to the topic but have some playfulness or fun or at least some imagery. This poem is called “How” by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer.
Not the tick. No, surely it is not sacred. Do not try to tell me so. These repulsive tiny bloodsuckers. I do not wish to be impressed by their survival. Do not want to respect how they have thrived since the first flowering plants arrived on Earth over 100 million years ago. I do not want to praise their hard protective shells, nor how efficiently they swell, nor the ease with which they sense moisture, heat, vibration. Rather to vilify what disgusts me, repulsive little carriers of sickness, vile little vectors of disease. What joy is there in knowing a tick is so effective and good at doing what a tick was made to do? Could it be greater than the perverse joy I get from my hatred? It is clear my repulsion does not affect the tick. Oh clenched heart, oh clenched fist, where is the line between what I love and what I resist? Is it true there is holiness in everything? How do I wound myself when my heart and hand are closed? Let my prayer not be to fall in love, but to open to the prayer I do not yet know.
“Let my prayer not be to fall in love, but to open to the prayer I do not yet know.” This idea that we want to love some things and hate other things… I appreciate so much how Rosemary Wahtola Trommer is highlighting how much we dislike ticks. And she’s saying, “I don’t wish for love,” not to transform this hate into love, but to be open to something new, open to something else. Open to the prayer I do not yet know.
And I would say that is what care for ourselves allows. It allows us to be open to something new, to greater peace, greater freedom, greater ease. This way in which it stops being “me versus the world” or “us versus them.” Instead, to be open to a different way of experiencing our practice, experiencing the world, experiencing each other.
We can bring this practice of Mettā to resistance in a maybe radical way. This is not the most conventional way that I described earlier, but Rob Burbea4 describes this way that I think is very provocative and very interesting. This idea of bringing Mettā—this wish for others to be happy, safe, healthy, and living with ease—what if we were to do that for all phenomena?
This is not a practice for beginners in terms of Mettā practice. I would say this is something to do if you’ve already started with Mettā practice. Or maybe not. Actually, I haven’t tried this as a beginner, so maybe it works great, I don’t know. But there’s this way in which what I’m about to say can feel a little contrived if we employ the thinking mind too much. But there’s a way in which it can touch the heart and maybe allow something different to arise, something different than love or hate or resistance or non-resistance. It allows for something different, and that is to radiate goodwill towards all experiences, towards all phenomena: to what is seen, to what is heard, to thoughts, and of course to aromas and tastes.
An advantage of why this might be helpful is because it reduces our tendency to resist our experiences. If we are actively sending them goodwill, our experiences, then we’re not actively resisting them. Maybe there’s a little mixture there before the Mettā takes hold, but even to have a shift in our relationship to our experiences really opens up possibilities.
It’s also a shift away from our personal preferences. If we’re going to have this Mettā practice for our experiences, whatever they are, that really starts to highlight, “Oh, yep, I don’t like that. I do like this, I don’t like that, I don’t like that, I do like this.” You know, just how our whole lives end up being about our preferences. And this is a way to ask, “How can we just meet what life is bringing us?” This is the type of care that can really be transformative.
So an example would be—and as I said, this is not the conventional way of doing this, and if we think too much about it, maybe it just starts to feel too artificial. The invitation here is just to allow the mind to take the back seat and the heart to take the driver’s seat. We could say phrases like: “May this sensation feel welcomed.” Allowing the space to simply exist, instead of the way in which we’re always trying to push away or change or shove or manufacture, manipulate, engineer, create our experiences. Instead, for the experiences that are already here, already being experienced, could we say, “May this experience feel welcomed”? Wow, what a shift that is.
Or, “May this sensation be allowed?” This really highlights all the ways in which we’re not allowing it.
Or, “May this sensation feel cared for.” This way of treating our experiences with respect and care, kind of like honoring what’s actually happening. So often we’re lost in our head with our expectations: “This isn’t what I wanted. I thought it was going to be like this and it should be like that.” This is often what the mind is doing. And this is a radical way to say, “May this experience, may this sensation be welcomed, may it be allowed, may it be cared for.” And then maybe this idea: “May it feel at ease,” because feeling at ease allows it to arise and pass away and be released. Because this is what sensations do. This is their nature: to arise and pass away and be released. It’s only when we get tangled up in them, and the tangling up often shows up as resistance. This way in which we are often saying, “Well, I want it to be a little bit different here.”
So this is kind of a different idea: May this sensation feel welcomed. May this sensation be allowed. May this sensation feel cared for. May this sensation be at ease. Then it can arise and pass away, which is the natural course of things. Things are arising and passing away all the time. Of course they are. But there is truth to this statement that what we resist persists.
We could direct this towards, maybe even more practically, the hindrances.5 Some of you might be familiar with this perennial list of five ways in which obstructions show up. One is desire: this way in which we are scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, looking for something, or shopping for something, or maybe looking at our social media, craving some connection. Can we have some care for that experience? And maybe we can recognize that all that desire is just wanting to really feel met and seen. And if we say, “May this experience be welcomed. May this experience be allowed. May this experience be cared for. May this experience feel at ease,” it is a way in which we are meeting ourselves instead of waiting for something out there to meet us.
Or maybe there’s this aversion or ill will, resistance to a person, a situation, an institution—anything, right? It’s endless. We can have aversion to anything and everything. But there’s this way that it kind of tightens the heart, there’s this constriction. Maybe having some Mettā for this experience can uncoil that tightness, can bring some spaciousness and ease into the heart.
Or maybe there’s sloth and torpor, this feeling like practice is slogging through molasses—slow and heavy and sticky. Can we have some Mettā? Can we direct Mettā towards that experience?
Or maybe there’s restlessness. Maybe there’s a way in which you sit here and then you’re just going through the to-do list. “Okay, as soon as I leave here, I got to stop by the grocery store. Remember to pick that up because I’m going to do this tomorrow. And oh yeah, when am I going to get the oil changed in the car?” There’s all this kind of stuff that we might be doing when we sit down to meditate. That sense of restlessness, or maybe we just want to leave, like, “Oh, just get me out of here.” Can we bring… can that experience be welcomed? Can that experience be allowed? Can that experience be cared for? Can that experience have ease?
And then the last of the five hindrances in the traditional list is doubt. That might be, “Is this even helping?” whatever practice we find ourselves doing, whether it’s loving-kindness or mindfulness. Is there a way that Mettā can meet the doubter? Maybe there’s this tightness or hesitation or vacillation that we feel in the heart. Can that experience be welcomed, allowed, cared for, and have some ease?
This idea of meeting resistance with loving-kindness is a way to help create the conditions that maybe fertilize the soil in which something really beautiful can grow. Something that’s different than the “me against the world” or our incessant trying to just get everything right out there in the external world.
So, I had this phrase that I wanted to say: welcoming what we wish away. Often what we’re trying to push away, can we welcome it instead? And Mettā practice can be a way that we can do that. So, I’ll end there and open it up to see if there are some questions or comments. Thank you.
(After reading the poem “How” by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer a second time)
Questioner 1: Thank you very much. That was really interesting and helpful. I’ve been doing a lot of studying about mindful self-compassion, and your talk feels very similar. But one thing that I took to heart is, you know, in self-compassion work, it’s often about really sending kindness to yourself simply because you’re suffering. And you’re talking about sending kindness to the specifics of the experiences of suffering. So it’s like breaking down self-compassion even further, it seems.
Diana Clark: Yes, more of a comment. So this mindful self-compassion is a really powerful practice and can really make a lot of difference in people’s lives, especially because it’s amazing how much of an inner critic we have and how harsh we can be to ourselves. And this breaking it down towards experience is less about the self, which self-compassion is about, and it’s more about just what’s arising. Both of them are beautiful practices. There’s just, as you pointed out, a different emphasis. And maybe self-compassion allows us to just settle down and start to feel more whole and collected and steady in some kind of way, that then makes it easier to send Mettā to different experiences or resistance. So, is that helpful maybe to say that? Yeah. Great. Thank you.
Questioner 2: So let’s say we start off and we start practicing Mettā and we accomplish what you’re guiding us toward. Is it wrong to think of that as a self-improvement? Do you have a sense of what would be the disadvantages of self-improvement? I think it depends on how you define it because you could use it in a way that is very counterproductive, but you could also maybe use it in a way that is helpful. The Buddha, he was a Brahman and he left the palace and wandered around, tried all these different things, and then under the Bodhi tree he woke up to enlightenment, free from Māra.6 Is it wrong to think of that as that he improved himself?
Diana Clark: So technically, I would say it’s not so much that he improved himself, it’s that he saw clearly that there is no permanent self, no abiding self to which all experiences happen. So it was a radical shift in perspective and understanding, rather than just getting better and better, just becoming a better and better version of himself. He like, transformed into something different. But I understand what you’re pointing to.
Maybe one thing I’ll say is this: what’s implicit in this idea of a “self-improvement project” is a) that there’s a self, and b) that there’s something wrong with me. And it just kind of sets up that there’s something wrong with me, and it seems like there’s no end to the improvement that can be done, right? The self-help industry is huge. If you go to the bookstore, those aisles where the self-help books are are big. So, it’s not wrong so much to think of it as a self-improvement project, but there are maybe some nuances or different ways to think about it.
Questioner 2: So you mean that there’s just a better way of expressing that path, the spiritual path, than saying “self-improvement”?
Diana Clark: Yes. My hesitation is more about how it tends to be focusing on what’s wrong. And I’m not saying that everything’s perfect, but it’s just the orientation or what’s implicit in that. Thank you.
Maybe we’ll end there. So, thank you all for your attention. I wish you safe travels home and a wonderful rest of the evening. Thank you.
Ajahn Chah: (1918–1992) A highly respected Thai Buddhist monk and a master of the Thai Forest Tradition of Theravada Buddhism. He was a key figure in establishing Theravada Buddhism in the West. ↩
Mettā: A Pali word often translated as “loving-kindness,” “goodwill,” “benevolence,” or “friendliness.” It is the practice of cultivating a boundless, unconditional wish for the well-being and happiness of all beings, including oneself. ↩
Suttas: The discourses or sermons of the Buddha. They are collected in the Sutta Pitaka, one of the three “baskets” of the Pali Canon, the primary scriptures of Theravada Buddhism. ↩
Rob Burbea: (1965-2020) A prominent contemporary Dharma teacher known for his deep and creative explorations of the Buddha’s teachings, particularly on emptiness and ways of seeing. The transcript said “rampa,” but this has been corrected to “Rob Burbea” as his teachings on applying Mettā to all phenomena are well-known and fit the context precisely. ↩
The Five Hindrances: In Buddhism, these are five mental states that obstruct meditation and hinder progress on the spiritual path. They are: 1) Sensory desire (kāmacchanda), 2) Ill will or aversion (vyāpāda), 3) Sloth and torpor (thīna-middha), 4) Restlessness and worry (uddhacca-kukkucca), and 5) Doubt (vicikicchā). ↩
Māra: In Buddhism, Māra is a demonic celestial king who personifies temptation, distraction, and the unwholesome forces that obstruct the path to enlightenment. The Buddha is said to have overcome Māra’s challenges on the night of his awakening. ↩