This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Disentangling Dukkha: The Practice of Pausing ~ Diana Clark. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Unknown at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Welcome, welcome. Good evening. Nice to see you all. It’s nice to practice together.
So, tonight I’d like to talk a little bit about something that rests at the heart, we might say, of the Buddha’s teachings, and that is this whole experience of dukkha1. I’ll unpack Dukkha in a little bit, but not only the experience of Dukkha, but the possibility of release. We could say this sums up the Buddha’s teachings right there, in one or two sentences.
But to start us off, an image I’d like to offer is that of a tangled ball of thread. These days, I tend to think it’s more like when you reach in to get some of your cords for your devices and they’re all tangled up, or your headphones—remember when you used to wear headphones that actually had cords on them? Sometimes they get all tangled up with the power cords and all this kind of stuff. This idea of a knot, things are tangled up, and then sometimes you try to get them disentangled and it just makes them even tighter. Or maybe you’re trying to find an end in this little knot, this tangle, and you can’t find the end.
In some ways, this is how we might describe the mind when it is tangled up with craving or clinging. There’s this tightness to it and there’s maybe this denseness or contraction. And there’s this way that it’s maybe not so obvious. How do I find my way through this? How can this disentangling happen? What’s the way forward with this?
So there is absolutely this possibility of getting untangled, if we want to use that as a synonym for dukkha. This possibility is not only some lofty goal that we’ll find in the future. It’s not like, “Oh yeah, okay, that sounds nice for some other people at some other time, or maybe for me, who knows, at some other time.” It’s not like that, even though that’s very often how we hold it in our minds.
Instead, there’s this way in which this disentangling is available now, in a small way. And it turns out that these small ways are really important and impactful and have the power to be transformative. And this small way is something that’s deceptively simple: just with pausing. Just with pausing, maybe taking a breath, is this way of just a moment of not rushing forward. A moment of not trying to get this thing untangled.
I know we so often want to just get in there and pull on something, anything, to get this untangled. If any of you have tried to undo a knot recently, that’s kind of how it starts. And then we realize, “Oh, I’m just making it worse,” and I have to slow down here or actually look at it and get a sense of, “Oh, how is this all tangled up?” And sometimes, whereas this isn’t necessarily true for actual knots, but sometimes for dukkha to be disentangled, all that requires is just to stop pulling and just allow an unfolding that naturally arises.
This whole idea of this tangle as dukkha—many of you will be familiar with this as the Buddha’s first noble truth, saying “there is dukkha.” That’s it. It’s that simple. It’s just this one sentence: there is dukkha.
So dukkha is a word I haven’t been translating into English, partly because there isn’t a single word that does a good job of translating it. But we might understand this word as suffering, stress, terrible, awful things, or things that are just mildly feeling like they’re not quite right. So this one single word has this wide, wide range of meanings, from things not feeling quite right in a subtle way to the absolute horrible things that happen. It’s just things not being the way that we want in very obvious ways and in very subtle ways.
And so this first noble truth, “there is dukkha,” is not a call to pessimism, saying like, “Oh, everything’s awful.” Instead, this first noble truth is really a call to clarity. Can we just see some of these knots, these tangles in our life, in our experience, the big ones and the smaller ones? And then this invitation to pause. I’m not saying that we’re not going to ever do anything. I’m just saying pause. Which sometimes is actually the hardest thing to do because we want to jump in there and fix it and make it go away or justify it or get rid of it in some kind of way. It’s quite something how with a certain amount of discomfort, we want to just speed right past that or distract ourselves and not even notice, “Oh yeah, this actually is a tangle here. This is uncomfortable here.”
So we could say that part of dukkha is emotional pain, emotional discomfort that is an unavoidable and integral part of being human. When we care and love others, there are times when they are suffering, they are hurt, there’s loss, there’s grief associated in our relationships with others. I don’t think it’s possible to not have this. This is just part of what it means to have a full, rich life. It’s not always perfect and exactly how we want it. This is one way in which the Buddha is pointing to “there is dukkha,” the first noble truth.
Another way is what we might call optional suffering, optional dukkha. And this is really a big part of what the teachings are about. And that is the dukkha that arises from the clinging or craving or tugging and pulling on something to try to get it disentangled. It’s this way in our refusal to allow things to be as they are, but instead this insistence like, “No, I gotta tweak this. I need to tinker with this in some kind of way.” So this is the discomfort that we add on top of reality, often without even realizing it. We are putting on top of reality this subtle way of saying, “Nope, it shouldn’t be that way.”
It’s kind of funny how we do this. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t do this, but we have an experience, for example, a pain in the foot, and there’s this way we kind of think that our getting angry about it or our being mad about it is somehow going to change this discomfort. It doesn’t change the discomfort in the foot. We could say it even promotes it or prolongs it. There’s this way in which we’re like, “Oh, it shouldn’t be this way. It should be different.” Our protest against what’s happening—”There’s a pain in the foot”—is what’s actually happening. And I’m talking about immediate experience. I am not talking about worldwide injustices and the terrible, awful things happening in the world. I don’t want to say that there aren’t. I’m pointing to the dukkha, the discomfort, the suffering that’s happening right now in one’s experience, not conceptual ideas, but right now in our experience.
Because this optional dukkha is something that we’re putting on top of reality without even realizing it. It’s the way in which we are plastering on our expectations or our pushing—”I don’t want this, get this away from me”—or this pulling—”I need to have more of this and please make this never leave.” These two different ways in which we are often interacting with our environment or our experiences is adding dukkha on top. Things will change. It will leave. Right? We know everything changes. And this wanting to push something away—it’s already here. And it’s already here due to causes and conditions. The causes and conditions will change. That’s guaranteed too. But there’s this way in which our pushing doesn’t allow it to stay.
So once we notice that our relationship to our experience is one of pushing or pulling, maybe the first act of wisdom is to just pause. Like, “Oh, this is dukkha.” Sometimes I even say this to my friends who are practitioners and know this type of language. We’ll say this to each other, “Oh yeah, dukkha.” And there’s something that, I don’t know, it kind of releases some of the pressure for things to be different than how they are. Instead, we’re just saying, “Oh yeah, okay. This is just part of the way the world is. This is the first noble truth.”
But this pausing interrupts the momentum of the craving for things to be different or this contraction of not wanting it to be this way. So pausing, maybe even just for a heartbeat, maybe just for a breath, is a way in which things can open up, in which things can relax. When I’m saying “things,” I’m pointing to how often it’s the mind in which you say, “Oh, no, no, no. This shouldn’t be this way. I want to make it different.” But is there a way in which we can just feel into the body? Maybe we can pause, take a breath, and rather than speeding through discomfort or distracting ourselves from the dukkha, can we pause, maybe just for one breath, gently, kindly, and simply notice what’s here? What’s happening?
And can we pause not as a tactic or a strategy, not in a way that has this hidden agenda of, “I’m pausing to get rid of this thing,” but can we pause just as an activity associated with care, with love? In the same way in which if you had a good friend or a family member that was suffering, you were to show up for them and just be there and hold the space for them and allow them to be seen and to hear what they have to say. Can we do that for ourselves? A real pause where we stop trying to make things different and instead we just feel. This is often exactly what we don’t want to do. And maybe that’s part of what makes it powerful is we’re disrupting some of the usual ways of being.
Sometimes this pause happens in formal meditation. Sometimes it happens over a cup of coffee. Sometimes it happens in a difficult conversation where you realize you need to say something that’s not easy to say, and you just pause and you feel into how you are as best you can. You feel into how the other person is and kind of align with what the experience is at that moment.
We could even pause in the middle of a sigh. In some ways, a sigh is a pause also. And I’d like to insert in here a little poem by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer2. This wonderful poet I appreciate so much. She has this poem called “Ode to the Sigh.”
Smallest of songs, you give voice to the breath, a wordless expression of sorrow or happiness. You seem to say, “Yes, that’s how it is,” a quiet doorway that leads to acceptance. You soften, you smooth, you signal a feeling that’s moving through. You change silence the way moonlight changes a room so slightly. And yet from the edge of perception, you say to me, “Sweetheart, pay attention.”
I love this. “From the edge of perception, you say to me, ‘Sweetheart, pay attention.’” So from this edge of perception, instead of being the most obvious thing—often we don’t even know that we’re sighing—but when we find we sigh, it can be like a little mindfulness bell. What’s going on? What’s happening? And just to notice.
There’s this way in which if we can move from this thinking mind that wants to fix and analyze and strategize to feeling. This movement from thinking to feeling, primarily feeling into the body, allows something different to happen. Because the thinking mind wants to strategize and explain, but this can actually just reinforce the dukkha. It’s a way of poking, like we’re pulling on things and tightening the tangle.
Instead, spending some time and really feeling into it, in this analogy of the tangle, is a way in which one of the ends becomes visible. “Oh, here’s an end, and I can see how it’s looped over that.” But feeling in the body is a little bit slower of an activity, and it sensitizes us to what’s actually happening in the moment.
So this pause, often accompanying it, is this movement from thinking and trying to fix and analyze and strategize and explain or blame or all these types of things we like to do, and instead allows this movement to, “Okay, can we feel?” And the feeling might be tightness in the chest, the shoulders up over the ears, this clenched jaw. This is letting us know, “Okay, there is dukkha here.” But it’s also a way in which we can unpack or become sensitive to what’s actually happening so that we can feel the dukkha without amplifying it, which we often end up doing with the words, with the thinking and trying to figure out how to get rid of it.
This mindfulness of the bodily experience also helps us to break the pattern of this self-preoccupied thinking. We’re seeing everything like how it affects us, with us at the center. And if we can feel into the body, it just turns into more of bodily experiences that has less of a self, less of a, “I don’t like this. I have to fix it.” Instead, it becomes more of like, “Oh wow, tightness in the jaw. The shoulders have a lot of tension,” which has less of a sense of an “I,” more of a sense of a body just having bodily experiences.
In contrast, this mind that’s trying to solve it—maybe it’s not so obviously trying to solve it. The mind sometimes is wanting to make stories. Some of the roots of dukkha is this story-making. Of course, humans do this. We’re trying to make sense of our experience. But there’s a way in which we are crafting a story. “Well, this happened and it means X,” and then we start having a relationship with X, whatever X might be. And then we are disconnected from what’s actually happening. Instead, we’re having a relationship and reacting to an idea that we had, and then the thoughts about this idea. Meanwhile, the actual experience is happening over here, but we’re disconnected from it.
And this turns out to be just a source of dukkha and more dukkha, because we have this inner commentator that seems to never take a vacation, that is always saying, “Well, why did I say that? Maybe I should say something else the next time I see that person. Maybe I’ll text them and say something like this.” Or we have the sense, “Well, what if this doesn’t work? I’m planning everything, but this might not work.” Or, “How can I maximize the efficiency of how I’m going to spend my time tomorrow? Okay, wait. If I have to stand in line too long there, then maybe I should go here and do that.” And there’s a way in which we start to think like being efficient is the absolute highest priority.
There’s nothing wrong with being efficient and using our time wisely, but there can be a way in which we’re just increasing our dukkha. I’m speaking from experience here. I used to have this crazy idea that I had to be perfectly efficient all the time. So, “Okay, so while I’m over there, I have to do this and that.” And oh my gosh, it was exhausting. And it just turned out to be so much easier and actually more efficient to do what was easiest to do next, and then what was easiest to do next. And maybe if you were to follow me around my living space or around the town, you might say, “Oh, it could have been a little bit more efficient there.” But there was an ease that I was moving with, and there was a more embodied way in which I was moving.
So, we’re making these stories, and we tell ourselves stories about what things mean and what they mean about us as individuals. And these stories about what’s wrong with us, what’s wrong with those people over there, what’s wrong with the world, how things should be. And we believe these stories not because they’re true, but because we thought them. And clearly, if we thought them, they must be true. We wouldn’t think anything that’s not true. At least that’s what we think.
But all of us have had thoughts about things and then later realized, “Oh no, that wasn’t true.” I’ve told this story a number of times, but it had such a big impact on me. This was years ago back when I was a research scientist. It’s part of the regular practice to get together with colleagues, maybe once a week, just to discuss some of the findings in the past week in the field. And there was this finding that got reported in the most prestigious journal, so it had been peer-reviewed by some of the most senior people in the field. It was this whole brand new idea, and I remember thinking, me and my colleagues, “I can’t believe that’s ridiculous. This can’t be right. No, what are they doing? They should have designed this experiment that way. They should have done this, blah, blah, blah.” I think it was like two years later, they won the Nobel Prize. It turned out to be this great, fantastic new discovery they had made. But because it was new for us, we were like, “No, this isn’t right,” and we were finding all the data to show, “Oh, they should have looked at things this way.” So that was such a big teaching for me, how all of us were convinced that we were right and couldn’t see that there was something a little bit different, something new. We just weren’t willing to see it. And luckily, other people were, and these people got the Nobel Prize.
So we can ask ourselves, as part of just noticing the story-making mind, “I’m right, you’re wrong.” This way in which we do this. If we find ourselves lost in this storytelling mind, we can maybe stop believing every thought, question some of the authority of some of these thoughts that are insisting that they in fact are true. And maybe we can ask ourselves, “Is this thought adding to the dukkha or making dukkha less? Does this story that I’m telling have kindness or freedom as part of it? Does it have peace as part of it? Can I let this thought float by like a cloud?” Just like, “Oh, okay, there’s a thought,” and not having to cling to it and not having to make it be about ourselves or anything like that. Just notice, “Okay, this is a thought that’s being had,” without having to hold on to it and make it mean something about us or about the world.
This pause helps us to see the way in which the mind is contributing to the dukkha, to the suffering, to the discomfort. It’s also a way in which if we are able to pause, even just a pause for a breath, it helps us to see those moments in which there is not dukkha. Those of you who are familiar with the four noble truths will know that the third noble truth is there’s the ending of dukkha. There’s the ending of suffering.
There’s this way in how these just pauses are where maybe this third noble truth becomes real, not as some theory but in direct experience, where we can just say, “Just this moment, this moment like this, it’s okay.” Just this moment, just sitting here, feeling the pressure against the body of the chair or the cushion. Hearing sounds. Nothing else to be doing right now. Just this moment. It’s so often when we’re lost in our thoughts is where all the dukkha arises.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t think. We need to think to solve problems, to help ourselves, help the world, help others. Absolutely. But can we notice how the thinking often is the source of the dukkha, the story-making? “I can’t believe they said that. It means they don’t respect me. Don’t they know that I’ve done x, y, and z, and what have they done?” And there are these ways in which we have different versions of these kinds of stories.
So this cessation of dukkha, this ending of dukkha, often doesn’t happen as a dramatic breakthrough. “Cessation of dukkha” sounds lofty. It sounds like some idealistic thing that will happen to other people at some other time. But this ending of dukkha can be tiny and immediate and happen to you right now.
It’s so easy to be dismissive of these small, simple moments when things are okay, and we want to go look and find the next moment. But the pausing allows us to even notice, “Oh yeah, things are okay.” Don’t underestimate how powerful this can be. Just to notice these small, tiny moments. It kind of signals to the mind and to the heart like, “Oh yeah, remember that peaceful moment that you had 15 minutes ago? It’s not all dukkha.” Because there’s this way in which we start to just feel like dukkha, dukkha, dukkha. We kind of get lost in it. And there’s this momentum of creating it and only seeing it in our perception and being dismissive in a way that we’re not even aware that we’re doing, in which we aren’t noticing these tiny, small moments.
So disrupting this momentum. When there’s this pause, often there’s this softening, this moment when the discursive, story-making mind quiets, and then maybe there’s just quiet that remains. Maybe while I’m doing the dishes, it’s just soap, water, dishes, sound, hands, and presence. And it’s that simple. And it’s not dukkha. It’s just hands, soap, water, sounds.
It’s a trap if we think that this end of dukkha or lessening of dukkha will happen in the future, and we often are thinking it will happen to somebody else. It happens here, now, for us. And I know that the mind is protesting probably in every one of you, “Yeah, but Diana, that’s such a small little moment. Who cares about that?” Why not? Why not allow yourself to just experience these small moments of ease and not demand that they be different, not denigrate them or dismiss them? Why not?
Because when the mind grows quiet, what remains is peace, kindness, love—these things that we’re looking for. All of us are looking for this, thinking that it’s going to be sometime in the future, when in fact it can be found right here, right now. And this peace, this kindness, this love is not something that’s getting manufactured. It’s not something we’re creating. It’s something that’s there already, and we’re just not noticing. We’re not helping to create the conditions in which it can blossom, in which it can bloom. Maybe there’s a way in which clinging and contraction and wanting things to be different is a way that drowns out the sound of kindness, care, love, peace.
To return to this metaphor of this tangled ball of thread, each time we pause and maybe notice dukkha—notice the suffering, dissatisfaction, stress, terribleness—and each time we feel rather than think, feel in the body the bodily experience instead of trying to figure it all out and strategize and fix it in any way that we can; each time we notice a moment of peace, the ending of dukkha, there’s a way we might say that we’re untangling the tangle just a little bit more.
And so the roots of suffering, the roots of dukkha, they may be deep, but the path of release, the path of disentangling is real and is available now in these small ways which we so often want to dismiss. And the dismissing is dukkha itself too.
So maybe in closing, I’ll say that there is suffering, there is dukkha. It’s part of the human experience. Unavoidable. As much as we want to avoid it, as much as I want to avoid it, as much as I want all of you to never have dukkha, it’s not possible until we all become completely awakened. So there is dukkha and there is peace. There’s the ending of dukkha. And the movement from one to the other is possible, from dukkha to peace and from peace to dukkha. And the four noble truths, we could say, is part of one way we might understand that.
But we can learn to pause for dukkha, suffering, experiencing, feeling it in the body and letting the mind’s momentum soften and let go. And in those pauses, something begins to open. Maybe something wise and something that’s already free and gets to be known and experienced as freedom.
So I’ll read this poem again. “Ode to a Sigh.” Maybe a pause is just a sigh. When you hear yourself sighing—often we don’t intend to sigh, right? It’s just a response.
Ode to the Sigh by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer
Smallest of songs, you give voice to the breath, a wordless expression of sorrow or happiness. You seem to say, “Yes, that’s how it is,” a quiet doorway that leads to acceptance. You soften, you smooth, you signal a feeling that’s moving through. You change silence the way moonlight changes a room so slightly. And yet from the edge of perception, you say to me, “Sweetheart, pay attention.”
I love this last part. “From the edge of perception, you say to me, ‘Sweetheart, pay attention.’” In some ways, we could say that’s all of dharma practice right there.
So, I’ll end with that and open it up to see if there are some questions or comments. Thank you.
Questioner 1: It’s interesting that both you and another teacher pointed out that in the sea of Dukkha we live in, there are always these little islands of contentment. The reason I’m really taken by this is because yes, of course, there are these little islands of contentment. They usually just go over my head. I’m not aware of them. But ever since I heard this phenomenon named, I started to pay attention to these. And these are little 10-second, 30-second little islands, you know, driving on the highway and suddenly the traffic is moving smoothly and everything’s fine. For the moment, I’m fine. I’m content. And then Dukkha comes back. The reason I find this important and the reason I’m thinking about this is because that’s an easy thing to do. That’s a very easy practice and it’s, for me at least, it’s very worthwhile. There are all kinds of other things I could do which are difficult and I don’t do them, but this is easy. So thank you for highlighting that it’s an easy practice to just notice, “Oh yeah, here’s a moment of contentment.” It doesn’t take anything extra out of the day. It doesn’t require anything much except just noticing. Yeah, thank you very much for highlighting that.
Questioner 2: Is what you speak of kind of in a sense of like surrendering, would you say?
Diana Clark: Yeah. But surrendering… I would use the word more “allowing.”
Questioner 2: Allowing. Okay. Thank you.
Diana Clark: Sometimes surrendering feels like, you know, we’re in the middle of a war and we’re going to become prisoners of war if we surrender or something like that. So I like allowing.
Questioner 3: Not sure if this is a silly question, but your thoughts about why it is that the more intense the dukkha, often the more intense the resistance to pay attention to the dukkha or the desire to avoid?
Diana Clark: Do you have a sense of why that might be?
Questioner 3: I guess my sense is that when you turn towards it and pause to attend to it, there is a way in which there is some intensification of the experience, at least at first.
Diana Clark: Yeah, I would say that fear has a role in there. So like maybe we might have an uncomfortable experience, whatever it is, and then we have fear of this experience. So now we have two uncomfortable experiences. And then we don’t like fear, so we have aversion to the fear. So now we have three uncomfortable things happening. And then when we notice that we’re having aversion, we don’t want to have aversion. We heard this talk that we should pause and notice. So then we have aversion to the aversion to the fear to the discomfort. And so this is what the mind does. It just gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
Questioner 4: I’ve had the experience of the end of Dukkha or just feeling like, “Oh my god, I’m in a slice of heaven,” and then immediately you’re like, “Oh, I wish someone else was here to experience this with me,” or “Oh, I wish I could have this longer.” Or, you know, I’m hugging on my cat and we’re falling asleep together and I’m like, “Oh god, what am I going to do when he’s not here anymore?” I wonder, is it just again pausing if you notice you’re doing that, to kind of pause and try to re-feel into the experience you’re having?
Diana Clark: Yeah. And I would say, can you just acknowledge the poignancy, the tenderness? Like, “Oh, I’m going to be so sad when my cat dies because cats have shorter lifespans than humans.” And just maybe to feel the beauty of, “This is what it means to love. This is what it means to care.” And just recognize, “I still love my cat even though they may die.” There’s something about kind of honoring and respecting our experience instead of chastising ourselves for wanting to have more. Of course we want to have more. And then just maybe tune into, “Oh yeah, this is a little bit of dukkha here in this beautiful experience.” I can see where there’s this little bit of dukkha too. And there can be both. There can be this little bit of dukkha, and we can just orient towards whatever is pleasant and satisfying without denying or pretending that the dukkha doesn’t exist—this wanting to have more or not wanting it to end. Can we just honor and respect that? And this activity of honoring and respecting the dukkha turns out to be a pleasant experience, to honor and respect what’s actually happening. So it allows the uncomfortableness of the dukkha to be there, but it also allows the beautifulness to be there.
Questioner 5: I was just thinking about when I was afraid recently, and I was quite aware of being afraid and okay with being afraid. And I was afraid for a while, and it didn’t make it any more peaceful or easier. It felt like it just kind of stayed the same way, uncomfortable. And I guess I had hoped that by accepting the fact that I was afraid and it might impede my ability to do what I was doing, that it would somehow ease it, and it didn’t.
Diana Clark: Yeah, this is the tricky thing. That little, “I was hoping that if I were to do this, then it would go away.” So that’s that little bit of an agenda we have, which is something that we only learn through experience, this subtle way in which, “Well, I’m doing this in order to make it go away. I’m trying to accept it so that it’ll go away,” which is not accepting it, of course.
Diana Clark: Okay. So thank you. Thank you all for your kind attention and I wish you a wonderful rest of the evening and safe travels home. Thank you.