This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Leaning Toward the Tender ~ 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.
In some of the previous talks the last few weeks, I’ve been talking a little bit about metta1, this quality of the heart, this warm-heartedness that we can cultivate and develop, and can have a really giant impact on our life. One of the premises is that we can connect to a feeling. I like this expression “warm-heartedness” because it’s vague enough that all of us can find our way with it and not think that it has to be one perfect, exact thing.
So we can touch into, feel into, experience a sense of warm-heartedness. And then as a purposeful, intentional practice, we can just expand so that this warm-heartedness—this care, respect, love, benevolence, goodwill, whatever words you want to use—impacts others more and more. More people, bigger and bigger circles, radiating out until it goes for all beings. There’s just this sense of care and respect for all beings.
Something very beautiful about this. This actually is possible. Absolutely, it’s possible. We might sound like, “Oh, that sounds nice, but that was like thousands of years ago, people sitting under trees. It’s not how it is now,” or something like that. No, it absolutely is possible.
But something that’s implicit with this is as this warm-heartedness starts to radiate out to more and more individuals, of course it’s going to meet individuals who are suffering, who are having difficulties. Of course it is. There are so many, and ourselves included, that are having difficulties in this world, in this life, at this time. We might even say in some ways it meets everybody who is having difficulties, right? We have this first noble truth that there is suffering. There’s just whether it’s the most obvious or more subtle.
So when this loving kindness, this metta, radiates out and it meets suffering, it just naturally gets converted into compassion. The Pali word is karuna2. I heard this from a dharma teacher years ago who said that when metta, loving kindness, meets dukkha3, suffering, the love child is karuna, compassion.
So this idea that metta and suffering—and I’m using this word suffering to represent the biggest range you can imagine, from the most terrible, horrific, awful thing to this really subtle sense of something’s not quite right. So this one single word for this big, wide range.
I’d like to talk a little bit about compassion, karuna, tonight. We can say that it’s just the heart’s natural response. We can cultivate it certainly, but it’s the natural response when we’re not lost in self-preoccupation. Because often we are; we have our own suffering. And so our universe, our world, kind of collapses into, “How can I get rid of this suffering? How can I take care of it?” And when we’re in the midst of that, it’s difficult to meet the suffering elsewhere with this open warm-heartedness. And that’s perfectly fine. There are phases of our life, there are seasons of our life in which there are great difficulties. And maybe the practice then is to have compassion for ourselves, for our own difficulties. So it’s less this idea of radiating out, but more just moving inward.
So when we’re not really busy with trying to fix or solve some difficulty that we’re having, this is just the natural response when we encounter difficulties that other people are having. And so it’s this, born out of this care and respect, this wish that, “Oh, may that suffering be lessened. May that suffering go away for other people and for ourselves. May there instead be some comfort or some ease.”
I want to unpack this a little bit because there’s so many different ways in which this can be maybe misunderstood. Because there are versions of this that we find just in general, not in Buddhist teachings, that we feel like, “Oh yeah, okay, I know this.” But I think the Buddhist teachings are pointing to something as importantly different in a way that is really touching and supports a sense of freedom.
As an example of what I’m pointing to or referring to, recently I taught a retreat a few weeks ago, and as sometimes happens, there was sometimes crying that would happen during the dharma talks. There’d be somebody that would be crying. It’s not so unusual sometimes, right? We go on retreat and then when we finally are removed from everything that distracts us, grief, just the bottled-up grief, shows up. It’s perfectly fine. It’s okay.
So I would say what the compassionate thing to do is, if there’s somebody who is crying, is to not rush over there with a box of tissues. Because there’s this way, if we’re bringing a box of tissues, where it’s like you might be subtly saying, “You’re making me a little uncomfortable with your tears, and here, can you please stop?” Or there’s this way like, “It’s not okay that you’re crying,” or “Your tears are somehow not welcome here.” But there’s this way if we let people be—they can get up and get tissues themselves, right? They’re adults, we don’t need to infantilize them—but it’s also a way of saying, “You’re okay, and it’s okay that you’re crying.” We’re not going to run up there and try to fix it and make it be better. This is not cold-hearted. This is born out of respect and care, and it’s done in this container in which there’s a lot of respect and care. And so for these individuals, they talked about how life-changing it was to actually be able to meet some of this grief that was arising and to allow it to just be held by the community and by them, maybe in some ways held in the hand of compassion, in the palm of compassion.
But when we hear this idea that okay, this is when the warm-heartedness meets suffering, meets dukkha, it wouldn’t be surprising if there was also a feeling of, “I don’t know, I’m not so sure. I have enough of my own dukkha, thank you very much. I don’t want to be meeting other people’s or what’s in the world.” There can be a way in which maybe there’s some hesitation or some trepidation about this, even the whole notion of meeting dukkha with an open heart, with a warm heart. So we might feel some unease about it.
Part of this hesitation about meeting suffering with an open heart is because we’re bombarded by the media with all kinds of injustice or disaster or tragedy or something. There’s just one after the other. This is a little bit of their business model. It works because people get activated and want to read more or something like this. But there’s also this way in which often the way the media presents the stories, there’s this sense of sensationalism. They’re getting sensationalized, of course they are. As well as there’s this speed, like there’s this one after the other, so we don’t really have a chance to catch our breath and get grounded if we feel like we’ve been a little bit activated by something. We don’t really have an opportunity to reflect or touch inward. Instead, for myself I should say, I kind of feel like, “Oh wow, yikes.” Reading the news is something that sometimes feels like an assault in some kind of way.
So partly the speed of it doesn’t allow us this opportunity to catch our breath and get grounded when this happens. But not only that, the stories are really emphasizing this sense of division, the sense of us versus them. It’s like, “Okay, those people over there did something.” And there’s a way in which it’s difficult to connect with those people over there. They’re getting othered. It’s like, “Oh, there’s this ‘they,’ and maybe if they had done things differently, they wouldn’t have been in this problem,” or “There’s something about them that maybe they’re not even worthwhile having compassion for,” or “Maybe we should blame them,” or something like this.
So I just want to normalize that sometimes when we hear “meeting suffering,” we feel uncomfortable, partly because of the media. And I’m using this word “media” as a gross generalization, and of course there are exceptions, but I just want to normalize any hesitation we might be feeling.
So how can we work with this? One is just obviously limit your media intake. You don’t need me to tell you this. This is a natural thing I think many of us would do. But something that I started to do that I found really helpful is to have some curiosity. “Okay, is there an us-versus-them narrative? And who is the ‘us’ and who is the ‘them’?” And just to find that, like, “Oh yeah.” So to bring some curiosity to it, that kind of pulls out some of the authority of it. Like, “Oh yeah, okay, they are othering these individuals and wanting us to be over here and these other people over there.” So that could be one. Just get curious about this us-versus-them narrative where it shows up.
And then, don’t underestimate any small acts of kindness you might do for yourself or for others. When we feel ourselves maybe a bit overwhelmed by what’s happening, take the grocery cart all the way back to the front of the grocery store, so maybe it’s easy for the next customer or the person whose job it is. Or smile at the barista and make a quick eye contact or something like this. These small acts of kindness really help to make a difference.
I’m going to read a short poem here. It talks about this idea of compassion and these small acts of kindness. It’s by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer4 and it’s called “Sometimes Like Today We Remember.”
Sometimes, like today, we remember that everyone, even that driver in the white jeep who cut in front of you. Yes, even the elegant woman in the dairy aisle and the man who seems lost on the library steps and the child sitting alone on the bench. Yes, everyone has a story. fears and hopes and something to learn and someone they love and someone who’s hurt them and someone they long to hold. And though their stories are mostly invisible, they’re always more complex than whatever we project and they’re every bit as real as our own.
The woman in the dairy aisle smiles at you. And though she is wearing diamonds in her ears, she looks lonely. Or is it you who is lonely? Is it all of us? All of us longing for someone to truly see us. And that driver you’re cursing. Don’t we all sometimes feel as if we need to move forward any way we can? And that boy on the bench. Notice the empty seat beside him. Perhaps you could sit there too in the sun. Who knows what might happen next.
I love these little poems that just point to the ordinariness and this recognition that everybody has a story that’s just as real as our own. And though their stories are invisible, this doesn’t mean that they don’t have them, of course. And so there’s this way in which compassion is a way to meet these stories or to meet these individuals with the fullness of who they are, as opposed to what we’re just projecting onto them.
So along with this hesitation to meet the suffering that’s implicit in compassion, there can also be the opposite. And I’m inspired by a dharma talk that Rob Burbea5 gave, I guess it was probably like 15 years ago now, where he talked about—he has some lovely talks about compassion and metta—and in this talk, he highlighted that in addition to this hesitation, there’s also often a yearning, this wish to have our heart be open and to be touched and to connect. There’s this way in which we recognize that this is part of all of humanity, and to feel connected and belong with others. A belonging that’s not so much “belong to others,” but a sense of belonging just like others have.
So in some ways, this compassion enables us to connect with our hearts, allow our hearts to be open, and even maybe connect to ourselves in a way that sometimes we can just be living our life disconnected, going from one thing on the to-do list to the next. There’s also this way in which when this warm-heartedness is meeting difficulties, there’s this sense of fullness or a sense of completeness or a sense of maybe energy or sweetness. It can be a beautiful experience when we’re just meeting it with an open heart without a sense that anything has to be different. So there’s maybe a part of us that yearns for compassion as well as a part of us that has some trepidation with it.
But I want to talk a little bit about what compassion is like, to kind of flesh this out. I’m using this one word and saying it’s just loving kindness when it meets difficulties or dukkha, but it’s a composite. So it includes this openness or this receptivity or maybe even a resonance with the difficulties that are in the world or our own. So allowing the heart to be moved, allowing the heart to be touched. But when we’re allowing the heart to be touched, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re feeling exactly what others are feeling. And this is where a big difference is with Buddhist compassion as opposed to some other ways that we might think about compassion.
An example might be that your partner comes home in a state, they’re agitated, and they are describing that their boss was really mean to them. Something happened. And so if you are indignant and exclaim, “I can’t believe it that she treats you this way! What are you going to do? We better do this,” and you know, this kind of thing, getting all agitated yourself—that turns out not to be so helpful. And that’s not compassion. Because we could say, well, before in the world there was one person who was agitated. Now there’s two people that are agitated. It’s going the opposite direction that we want to go.
So instead, a more helpful way, instead of joining in and feeling the anger yourself, is to say, “I’m sorry you have to work with such a person. What would be helpful? Do you want some tea? Do you want to go for a walk? Maybe you want some time alone.” Like, this is what compassion is, right? Just to meet them where they are instead of this idea that we have to fix it or make it be something different.
So we could say this openness, this receptivity is kind of like a taking in of what’s happening, the difficulties. But compassion also has the—we could use this kind of language—the giving out. And the giving out is this care, this warm-heartedness, this wish for the suffering to end. It’s born out of care. So not trying to make things different, but to give this care to meet the suffering.
And so one way we might think about this is there’s some taking in of the suffering and there’s some giving out of the care and the warm-heartedness. And actually, we can play with this balance, with this movement. When we’re meeting difficulties in others or in ourselves, we tend to want to focus on the difficulties and the suffering, and we have this negativity bias and all kinds of reasons for this. We feel like we have to fix it, that type of thing. But it’s important to also feel into the care, the warm-heartedness that’s being felt and being expressed by offering the cup of tea or suggesting, “Do you just want some time by yourself?” or “Shall we go out? Should we get some takeout tonight?” or whatever it might be to meet the difficulty of oneself. So, can we lean into maybe the care and the warm-heartedness part of this equation, or this dynamic, maybe I should say, of taking in the suffering and giving out the care?
With this compassion, there’s also this listening, just this learning to listen. Listen to what others are saying as they’re describing their difficulties, but also just learning to listen to ourselves. Because chances are, within ourselves, there might be this voice of kindness and care, this voice of reason, but there also might be a voice of, “No, no, no, no, that’s awful. I don’t want to hear that.” Or maybe there’s a voice inside of us of a three-year-old having a temper tantrum, “No, no!” or something, whatever it might be. Just to recognize that within ourselves, there’s a myriad of reactions that are happening, and just to listen and honor what’s happening, our internal experience, without feeling like we have to jump out there and express them and do something about them. But just allow the fullness of who we are to be there without thinking that we have to have perfect compassion or something like this. Compassion that’s cleaner and cleaner gets easier and easier the more and more we practice. But it takes practice. This isn’t something that we can just do all the time.
So how do we cultivate this? How can we make it so that it’s easier and easier? And this is from Ajahn Amaro6. He’s a senior monastic who used to be the abbot of a monastery in Northern California, and now he’s back in the UK. And he’s pointing to something that I think is really helpful. This idea that when this care meets this difficulty, we are not creating an imagined goal in our mind. “Okay, we got to get rid of this suffering. In order to do that, you have to tell that person this, and then I’m going to send this email, and then we’re going to do this.” You know, we don’t have this vision or this idea of how things absolutely should be, and then we’re going to push in some kind of way to make that happen. That’s not compassion. That is trying to fix a problem.
Which doesn’t mean that problems sometimes don’t need to be fixed. But compassion is to meet what is, the difficulty, to listen to the other person, to ourselves, and then allow the appropriate response to arise. And that appropriate response might be, “More listening is needed. It’s not clear.” Or the appropriate response might be to ask a question of the person who’s describing, or if you see something that’s happening, maybe to spend more time and just offer presence.
So it’s this: instead of creating the way in our mind, which is completely fabricated, right, the way in which things should be, and then manufacture, engineer, manipulate, change in order to make that happen, instead it’s meeting what is. And maybe what arises is some clarity, like, “Oh, here’s what would be helpful next.”
For me, this was a big teaching when I first started in my role as a dharma teacher on retreats. I’ve talked about this. On retreats, all the participants have one-on-one meetings with the teachers. And a mentor of mine said to me something that turned out to be really helpful. He said, “It’s a trap, Diana, if you think that you have to solve their problems or fix things for them,” even though people will show up and they’re like, “Here’s a problem, fix it.” Of course they are. I can’t blame them; I probably did my share of this too with these practice discussions. And then maybe my job is to say, “Oh, look, here’s a problem,” and then just hold the space and meet them. And very often I’m thinking like, “Oh my gosh, I have no idea what’s supposed to happen here.” But it does. It arises. It’s amazing. It’s really amazing how what needs to happen next arises. I don’t have to go make it happen. If we just create the conditions, it arises.
And this is not so easy always because we’re so conditioned that we want to fix things. Of course, we do. And we probably spend a big portion of our days fixing things. And we may even get paid money to fix things or get approval from our spouse or partner when we fix things, you know, this kind of stuff. But there’s this way in which can we just meet things with some open-heartedness? Because there’s this way in which we might have this feeling like, “Oh, if I don’t jump in and try to fix it, then they’ll think that I don’t care.” And so, to express care by being fully present, to express care by meeting them as best we can wherever they are at that moment, instead of thinking like, “Oh, actually you should go tell them this or do that or something like this.”
It turns out so many of us just want to be seen and heard. And when we can actually see and hear somebody, don’t underestimate how meaningful that can be. And they might start to feel or see things differently just by being heard.
I’m not talking about alienating ourselves from this feeling of suffering so that we can just listen to others. I’m talking about really touching into this warmth and care that all of us have but sometimes needs to be cultivated, partly because the media and the society that we’ve created doesn’t really emphasize cultivating compassion. Instead, there’s a lot of blaming and us-versus-them, you know, the opposite of compassion, I would say.
So what are some of the ways that we can cultivate this? There’s a very intentional meditation practice where you start with metta. You start with loving-kindness, and you start where it’s easy. Often this is kittens, puppies, babies, you know, this type of thing where we feel like we can connect with them and have some warm-heartedness. We bring that to mind, allow that, feel that connection, and hang out there for a while. It’s kind of like making sure that we’re filled up in some kind of way.
And then we bring to mind somebody. Often we don’t start with the people that are closest to us, but we start with somebody that we have a lot of respect for, care for, and bring to mind some difficulties that we might know that they’re having. Or if we don’t know, then we can just tune into the fact that all humans have difficulties. All of us are vulnerable. Our feelings get hurt, our bodies age, and our bodies get injured. And sometimes we don’t have energy to do what we want. There are so many ways that are not obvious to other people, but in which there is always some dukkha.
So connect with somebody we care about, recognize and acknowledge the difficulty that they have. And then you can say these two phrases: “May your difficulties ease. May you experience peace.” We would just repeat this. “May your difficulties ease. May you experience peace.” So it’s this tuning into this wish for their difficulties to diminish or even go away.
This idea about compassion is really a natural thing that arises. All of us have this. Sometimes it shows up easiest with little kids. But just imagine what the world would be like if all of us had just a little bit more. Maybe like in this poem, the person in the jeep, the person in the dairy aisle, the person sitting on the library steps, the person on the bench, right? These are just people like me and you, just ordinary individuals. Can we just start there, wishing them some ease, whatever difficulties that they might have? And there’s this way when we do this, we often feel connected to them in a way that can be really nourishing and supportive because we’re having difficulties too. We have the same vulnerabilities that they have. There’s this way of recognizing the common humanity that all of us are having difficulties that can be a support, this sense of connection.
So I’ll close by reading this poem again by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer.
Sometimes, like today, we remember that everyone, even the driver in the white jeep who cut in front of you. Yes, even the elegant woman in the dairy aisle and the man who seems lost on the library steps and the child sitting alone on the bench. Yes, everyone has a story, fears and hopes and something to learn and someone they love and someone who’s hurt them and someone they long to hold. And though their stories are mostly invisible, they’re always more complex than whatever we project. And they’re every bit as real as our own.
The woman in the dairy aisle smiles at you. And though she’s wearing diamonds in her ears, she looks lonely. Or is it you who is lonely? Is it all of us? All of us longing for someone to truly see us. And that driver you’re cursing. Don’t we all sometimes feel as if we need to move forward any way we can? And that boy on the bench. Notice the empty seat beside him. Perhaps you could sit there too in the sun. Who knows what might happen next.
Thank you.
Questioner (Susan): Thank you, Diana. It’s so completely relevant for my life, what you said. I think quite young I developed the equation inside myself that I had to fix things and embarked on a long career of fixing things. Eventually, I became a nurse, and that was a pretty valid translation of that. And I was so satisfied being a nurse, being able to go in and sensitively feel how to fix the discomfort or the anxiety. But then when I moved to this country, I stopped nursing and I worked as a mental health case manager. And that was very tricky. Sometimes I had to move in like the fire brigade and fix things. Mostly I had to be open and listen very sensitively so as not to put the person off. And it was very, very tricky. And I had a wonderful moment once when a very extreme woman, who had a rumor that maybe she had even murdered somebody, said, “You know, you’re just such a Suzie Sunshine. Just wipe that off your face.” Oh my goodness. And I learned so much from her in the end. We had such a wonderful relationship. It’s fantastic how we can learn. I could go on and on, but thank you.
Diana Clark: Thank you, Susan. Yeah, it is tricky in terms of, I mean, sometimes it’s completely appropriate to be fixing and that is our role and our job. And then, can we do it with compassion? Thank you.
Metta: A Pali word meaning loving-kindness, friendliness, benevolence, and good will. It is one of the four sublime states (Brahmaviharas) in Buddhist practice. ↩
Karuna: A Pali word meaning compassion. It is the natural response of the heart when loving-kindness (Metta) comes into contact with suffering. ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” The original transcript said ‘duka,’ which has been corrected to the proper spelling. ↩
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: An American poet. The original transcript mentioned “Rosemary Tramer,” which has been corrected. ↩
Rob Burbea: A prominent contemporary dharma teacher in the Insight Meditation tradition. The original transcript said ‘Robba,’ which has been corrected based on context. ↩
Ajahn Amaro: A senior Buddhist monk in the Thai Forest Tradition. The original transcript said ‘Ajan Amaro,’ which has been corrected. ↩