This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Medt’n: Be Here; Dharmette: Buddhism Beyond the Lists (4/5): Coming to Our Senses. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Diana Clark at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Good morning, welcome, welcome. And of course, I have to say good afternoon, good evening. Hello to all those people who are not in the chat. And hello to the future, including it might even be some of us in the future who happen to for whatever reason listen to this again. Welcome. Welcome.
So, if you haven’t already, taking a meditation posture, maybe beginning with a few exaggerated exhales. The exhale can support a sense of letting go, a sense of allowing some ease to be experienced.
Feeling into the posture, what it’s like to be sitting, literally or figuratively, and to know that you’re sitting. What does it feel like? What is the experience, without words, of the body being in this particular configuration?
Doing a light body scan. Checking in with the face. Sometimes we hold tension around the eyes or the jaw. The shoulders, and maybe just a little bit more relaxed.
If you’re using a backrest, resting your back against the back of a chair, couch, whatever it might be, can you feel the pressure against the back? If you’re not using a backrest, can you feel into that sense of uprightness?
Leaning into the heart area, the chest area. Good morning, chest. Good morning, heart. Sometimes we’re a little bit disconnected. Softening the belly. Good morning belly. Hello.
Then feeling the pressure against our seat as we sit in the seat of the chair or on the cushion, whatever surface we’re sitting on. Feel the contact pressure. It includes the back of the legs. Noticing what the feet are touching. What is supporting the feet?
Without words, is there a way you can have a sense of what it feels like, the experience of very simply just being here now?
Being here now includes a soundscape. What are the sounds? Just experience hearing the sounds arising and passing.
Bringing a sense of aliveness or presence to the bodily experience in whatever way feels comfortable and supportive for you right now. Maybe that’s noticing how the body moves as it breathes. Maybe it’s feeling the contact points with the body and the sitting surface. Or if it’s more comfortable, just staying with sounds. For me, I’m hearing birds chirping outside. It’s making me feel happy.
When we’re meditating, we find ourselves lost in thoughts. For this morning, can you notice the different experience of being lost in thought versus actually inhabiting the bodily experience? You’re noticing you’re lost in thought and how that feels. That will have to be retrospective, just a memory. “Oh yeah, lost in thought felt different than it feels right now as I’m feeling the chest expand with the inhale.” You’re just noticing.
You might notice that in some kind of way the thought world has a flatness. The experience of the thought world, not the contents, the experience has a flatness compared to being present with the bodily experience that’s happening right now.
For today’s meditation, we’re emphasizing tuning into the experience of being here without words, just feeling into the experience. Whatever practice you’re doing, whether it’s mindfulness of breathing, sounds, or perhaps something else. What are the sensations, which are different than thoughts?
Okay. Thank you. Thank you. I’m not ringing a bell, just don’t have a good way to ring a bell that’s clear. Maybe bringing some movement back in the body after having sat still for a little bit there. Nice to see you all in the chat. It’s funny, it just makes me smile.
Okay. So this morning, or today I should say, I’m continuing on this theme of Buddhism beyond the lists. It’s so tempting when doing these 7 a.m.s, Monday through Friday, to find some list of five things and do one item of the list per day. That’s so straightforward: five hindrances, five faculties, and there’s a number of lists of five that we could come up with. I’ve even taught that way actually and have mapped out different ways of, “Okay, where’s a list that has five things?” And we’ll just unpack that list for a week.
But this week, I’ve decided to go the opposite direction, Buddhism beyond the list, and talk about things that are an important part of practice, an integral part of practice, I would say, but aren’t on any lists. And these are some of the things I wish I knew earlier in my meditation practice. Something that I wish that I understood and appreciated while I was diligently working with and memorizing all the lists. So don’t get me wrong, I love these lists and they’re so useful, but it’s a trap if we feel like practice is just all about this list and that list, representing very concrete, linear thinking in some kind of way.
So today I’m going to start us off with a poem, maybe not so differently than I did yesterday, to help introduce a topic. This poem is a powerful poem and there are so many things that we can talk about in this poem. I’ve read this poem in other dharma settings and I’m going to pull out one thread this morning, but you’ll hear it certainly is not the dominant thread. And maybe just allow this poem to touch you, if it does. It doesn’t have to, and maybe it doesn’t. But allow yourself to maybe feel the experience of hearing this poem. This morning I’m emphasizing experience.
This poem is called “Because” and it’s 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 so 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 rise 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.
I know this poem, right? It’s so rich. There is so much to say here. And I’m going to unpack maybe what isn’t the obvious thread. I feel like Rosemary Trommer in this poem is giving us a lot here. But one reason why I chose this poem is because it touches me. I feel in my heart and belly some way the heartbreak and the warmheartedness, the openheartedness.
And that’s what I want to point to, is how poetry—and Rosemary Trommer here is using words to include concepts, a lot of concepts—but she’s inviting us to feel into our experience, to love anyway as if it mattered. She writes, “So I can’t save the world.” This idea of saving the world, right? These are concepts, these are ideas. To save the world is a beautiful thing, but what does it mean? These are just concepts. So she writes, “So I can’t save the world. So I practice opening my heart right here in this room.” She takes it away from the concepts and brings it down into our experience, what’s happening right here in this room.
And we could say all of meditation practice, and maybe even in some ways Buddhist practice, is about this exact same movement of going from concepts to experience, and even learning the difference between concepts and experiences. Lord knows I have spent so much of my life lost in concepts, hyper-educated, just looking at understanding and thinking and figuring out and all this kind of stuff, only to discover that actually life is happening here, not in the concepts and ideas.
Because there’s this way that all the ideas that we have so much end up being about what should be and what shouldn’t be, and who we are and who we aren’t, and those people over there and how they should be different than how they are, or how I should be different than how I am. And wow, is there a lot of suffering tied up in that.
This way that we take thoughts—all these are just thoughts, these concepts, thoughts, beliefs, opinions, views. I’m just putting them into one giant bucket. They’re things that are not actually happening here. They’re just mental events in the mind. The events are happening now, but the content of the mental events are not here. So, just noticing that these are thoughts.
And what are thoughts? They’re insubstantial, ephemeral. How many quadrillion bazillion thoughts have you already had, maybe even this morning? And there is such a difference between hearing the voice—there is an experience of hearing voices—feeling the pressure against the body from the chair or cushion or whatever the sitting surface might be. Or maybe there’s an emotion that’s being experienced at this moment in the heart center.
So in some way, Rosemary Trommer’s poem, the arc of the poem is really pointing to: can we just be here and feel? And she’s using the language of heart to help us with this idea of feel. But there’s this way that thoughts, they are so helpful and we need them. And they’re an important part of a rich life. But thought is different than sensory experience.
Thoughts tend to abstract, solidify, divide what is actually just a seamless, ever-changing, flowing experience. Thoughts are chopping it up into little bits and creating something that gets made up in the mind and lays it on top of experience. And these thoughts are often having expectations. “Oh, experience should be some way.” And then we’re realizing the disconnect between the expectations and the experience. There’s always a disconnect. And this leads to some suffering, a lot of suffering very often.
So a big part of Buddhist practice, of meditation practice, is for us to become sensitive to, to notice that maybe all moments have different aspects. One aspect is the concept, the label, the name, the mental label that gets applied to it, and that’s different than the felt experience.
For example, when we do mindfulness, sometimes we say “mindfulness of breathing.” “Breathing,” we could say, is a label in contrast to feeling the chest expand as air enters and the release of that stretch when air leaves. So there’s the experience of stretching versus the concept of breathing.
There’s this way that often, without realizing it, we move through life with this whole bag of projections, notions, beliefs about ourselves, about life, about others, about spiritual life, about what it means to meditate, what should happen because we meditate. And wow, is there a lot of suffering tied up with that.
So mindfulness helps us to begin to pay attention to the actual experiences of our life as opposed to the ideas about our life. And instead of being consumed by thoughts, just this movement of immersing ourselves into seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, feeling helps us reconnect with the aliveness of this moment.
And this shifting of our attention from the abstract realm of thought towards the direct experience, we can access this more profound and fulfilling way of being where there’s less clinging because the thoughts aren’t being laid on top saying it should be different. We’re able to say, “Oh, it’s like this right now. Maybe uncomfortable. Maybe it’s not what we want, but it’s our life.”
Because thoughts so often are associated with suffering. And I’m not going to say that there isn’t suffering with uncomfortable bodily experiences, because there is. But that’s different than this incessant way in which we’re always thinking, “No, not good enough, not enough. I want this other thing. I don’t want this.”
So today, can you be sensitive to and orient towards the actual felt experience? And notice how the thoughts are often, very often saying, “Nope, this experience isn’t quite right.” This is called dukkha1. This is called dukkha. And we can turn away from dukkha by just sensing into this moment. Coming home to our senses, coming to our senses, we could say.
So I’ll stop there and wishing you a wonderful rest of the day today.
And then maybe even sheepishly this morning, I’ll just say that… first of all, I just kind of want to honor how much I just love practicing with you guys. Beautiful.
And then sheepishly, I’ll say that I just did a soft launch of a very modest website just a few hours ago. It’s dianaclarkdharma.org. I don’t know, I just thought maybe you guys would want to be the first to know this. It’s just a soft launch. Don’t have expectations very high here. It’s just something very modest. I need to start somewhere and I’ve been procrastinating on this for years. So, I just wanted to share it with you guys. It’ll grow. It’ll have hopefully all kinds of good wonderful things in there. But just wanted to express my appreciation for practicing with you guys and I’ll see you tomorrow. Thank you.
The URL for the website is dianaclarkdharma.org.
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It refers to the fundamental unsatisfactoriness and pain of mundane life. ↩