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Guided Meditation: Being Embodied; Dharmette: Poetry of Practice III (2 of 5): Sometimes - Diana Clark

The following talk was given by Diana Clark at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on September 24, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Good morning, welcome. Welcome, greetings, good afternoon, good day, good evening. Hello, whether you are watching us live or in the future, welcome. It makes a difference to practice together. And whether you are here live and on the comments or not, welcome. Happy you're here.

Craig writes, "Love and peace from North Carolina." Love and peace. Nice. Love and peace from Northern California, maybe I'll say.

Welcome, Stephen, and Kathy, and John, Craig, Stuart, Mona, Sherry, Maggie, Rebecca. Good morning. There, Susan is in Redwood City. Hi Susan, I'm in Redwood City also. Hello Diane, and Julie, Leila, Jenny, and all of you that are sitting out there not on the comments or not posting anything in there, hello to you.

Wish everybody a good start of the day, if this is the start of your day, or if this is a break in the midst of your day, or the way that you're ending your day, welcome.

Maybe I'll wait just a little bit longer here before we kick off our time together this morning.

Everybody, good morning. It's nice to be with you all to practice together. I'm continuing the series on what I'm calling the "Poetry of Practice." This is the third week I've done this. I've done it two other times, and I think it was in 2023, so it's been a while since I've done "Poetry of Practice," just bringing poetry into our meditation practice.

I'd like to start this morning, I'm just going to read this quote from David Whyte, who's a well-known poet, before I guide us into some meditation. So David Whyte, he's writing on the poetic imagination, this expression he's using, this poetic imagination and writing poetry. And for me, it feels like, oh, he's pointing to a meditation practice. And David Whyte, he has said that he has a Zen practice. He doesn't necessarily identify as a Zen Buddhist, but that he has been practicing Zen for quite a few years, maybe even decades.

So this is a quote from David Whyte: "One of the great first steps in writing poetry is to stop the surface conversation you're having now, the peripheral conversation you're having, the conversation where you are in competition or you feel besieged, where you feel fragmented, and drop down into a central image or tonality in the body or in your understanding that can hold a whole constellation of individual qualities together, qualities that circulate around you at the edge of your ordinary everyday life. This is called the poetic imagination."

I love that he's talking about stopping the conversation that you're having. We could think about this as the chatter, the thinking, all this stuff that happens in the mind, conversations with ourselves, imaginary conversations with other people, but maybe just the way that the mind is speaking, quote unquote. So he's putting down, like to put down the story-making and this chatter and maybe the everyday way in which our mind likes to do things and instead to be embodied, to be present here.

Guided Meditation: Being Embodied

So I'll lead us in some guided meditation, and then I'm going to drop in a poem from David Whyte, and we'll unpack it and explore this poem a little bit after the guided meditation. So if you haven't already, take an upright posture, a posture that expresses your intention to meditate.

It'd be nice to have some exhales help the arriving process, help us to get collected around this bodily experience, this moment, so that we can inhabit this moment, inhabit our lives.

Feeling the pressure against the body, pressure from the sitting surface. Feeling connected, grounded. We're here, having this experience, ordinary everyday experience. And can that be okay? Can you be in a body that's just having an ordinary, mundane experience of being in a meditation posture?

A body scan, starting at the top. Feeling into any area that feels like it wants to be felt into, areas that have tightness or tension, often around the eyes or jaw. Shoulders, letting them be away from the ears. Maybe there's a way in which the shoulders move back just a tiny bit that allows the chest to open, allows the chest to be a little bit less shielded, guarded, more spacious. A very small movement.

Feeling the other side of the chest, the upper back. There be ease, softness there, and the lower back. Can we send some love and care to our lower back? As humans, we sometimes have issues there. The belly, allowing it to be soft. Let it be unguarded, relaxed, just for this meditation period.

And again, feeling the pressure of the sitting surface against the body, the buttock, back of the legs. Can we be embodied with an attitude of kindness and warmth, resisting any feeling of wanting to complain or fix the body? Can we inhabit our physical forms with appreciation?

As we inhabit the body, we notice the body breathes. Can we rest attention on the sensations of breathing, feeling whatever there is to be felt with inhales and exhales? What does an exhale feel? What's the experience of exhaling?

Resting, knowing that the body knows how to breathe. We don't have to do anything to breathe. We're just noticing the experience of breathing.

I'm going to drop in a poem. You don't need to do anything with this poem. You don't have to understand it. You don't have to figure it out. You don't have to remember it, and you certainly don't need to Google it. Just experience it.

This poem is called "Sometimes" by David Whyte.

"Sometimes" by David Whyte. It goes like this:

Sometimes, if you move carefully through the forest, breathing like the ones in the old stories who could cross a shimmering bed of leaves without a sound, you come to a place whose only task is to trouble you with tiny but frightening requests, conceived out of nowhere but in this place, beginning to lead everywhere.

Requests to stop what you are doing right now, and to stop what you are becoming while you do it, questions that can make or unmake a life, questions that have patiently waited for you, questions that have no right to go away.

I'll read this poem again. The poem is "Sometimes" by David Whyte.

Dharmette: Poetry of Practice III (2 of 5): Sometimes

Welcome, good morning, greetings, hello. Those of you who are joining at this time after the guided meditation, during the guided meditation I dropped in this poem called "Sometimes" by David Whyte. David Whyte has spoken about this poem in a number of different settings. Unlike some poets who never talk about their poems and they just kind of offer them out to the world and let the world interpret them however they'd like, David Whyte has spoken about this poem in some rather large forums, I would say, with Sam Harris on a podcast and with Oprah. So these are two big forums where he's discussed this.

Maybe I'll say this poem one more time, and then I want to share some things that David Whyte has shared about this poem. It's called "Sometimes" by David Whyte.

So David Whyte talks about this very last expression: "questions that have no right to go away." He expresses them saying that these are questions that have to do with the person we are about to become. He writes that they are conversations that will happen with or without our conscious participation, but they have something to do with how we might be more generous, more courageous, more present, more dedicated.

He's talking about these questions that maybe... and I like that he's using this word "conversations." There's this way in which we're often having conversations with ourselves, conversations with our environment, with our experiences, without maybe necessarily using that expression, "conversations." But there's a way in which the thinking mind is engaging with and interacting with itself, our experiences, and the environment out there. I kind of like this word "conversations" as a way to express that.

So he's talking about this potential, that these questions have to do with the person we are about to become. He's talking about being embodied and being present for our lives and being present for what's happening and taking note of maybe what we're about to become. In Buddhist language, we might say, what are we identified with? Or it could also be, can we be present for what's simply unfolding here? I'm opening my hands. We're identified often as grabbing onto something. What's unfolding? What's naturally happening?

In response to this expression, "questions that have no right to go away," David Whyte offers a number of questions specifically, and I'd like to offer just a tiny, tiny subset. I think he gave a list of 10. I think I'll do two this morning.

One question he offers is that we can have with ourselves, that might arise as a result of maybe being embodied—my interpretation of what he's pointing to in his poem. One question is: "What can I be wholehearted about?" What can I be wholehearted about? This expression "wholehearted," like bringing in the fragments, bringing in the different pieces, and instead, what is something that feels like all of myself can be present for, all of myself can be collected around, or something like this?

David Whyte writes, "What do I care most about in my location, in my family life, in my heart and mind?" He continues, "This is a conversation we all must have with ourselves at every stage of our lives, a conversation we so often don't want to have. 'We'll get to it,' we say, 'when the kids are grown, when there is enough money in the bank, when we are retired, perhaps when we are dead—it'll be easier then.' But we need to ask it now: What can I be wholehearted about now?"

I love this. So often we find ourselves spending our time, our energy, doing things that we think that we're supposed to be doing, showing up in a way that we think we're supposed to, but what is it that all aspects of ourselves can get collected behind? Instead of a way in which we are often pushing them to a side or ignoring them or thinking, "Okay, I'll get to that later. I'll be completely myself, be with all different aspects of myself sometime later." I appreciate that he's writing this is a conversation that we all must have with ourselves at every stage of our lives, a conversation that we so often don't want to have.

And I know that when I was a scientist, all those years training to be a scientist and then all those years actually being a scientist, in some ways, I now, retrospectively, I can look back and say there was this place which I love science—I still love science so much—and biochemistry. Some of you might know I'm a PhD biochemist. I love biochemistry, I still do, but there was a way in which I was also ignoring my inner life and ignoring, or trying to at least ignore, certain aspects of myself just as I was pursuing science, biochemistry. So is this a conversation that... What can I be wholehearted about?

Then another question that David Whyte offers. He writes, "Here's the question: Can I be the blessed saint that my future happiness will always remember?" Can I be the blessed saint that my future happiness will always remember? And then this is David Whyte writing, "Here's the explanation for what sounds like a strange question." And this is David Whyte: "I have a poem called 'Coleman's Bed' about a place in the west of Ireland where the Irish Saint Coleman lived. The last line of that poem calls on the reader to remember, 'the quiet, robust, and blessed saint that your future happiness will always remember.'"

I love that David Whyte is kind of tying together one poem with another poem. He's having conversations with himself, and the poems are having conversations with each other.

So David Whyte continues, "We go to places of pilgrimage where saints have lived, or even to Graceland, where Elvis lived"—I love him kind of throwing in Elvis there—"because these people have given to the rest of us music or good works that have carried on down the years, and that was a generous gift to the future. But that blessed saint could also be yourself. The person who in this moment makes a decision that can make a bold path into the years that come, and whom your future happiness would always remember. What could you do now for yourself or others that your future self would look back on and congratulate you for? Something that could be viewed with real thankfulness because the decision you made opened up the life for which it is now eternally grateful."

So David Whyte is pointing to what can we do now that helps create the conditions that there can be, in the unfolding of our life, more and more peace and happiness and greater ease. And I'll use this word: freedom. What can we do now that in the future we will think, "Oh yeah, that was helpful"? I'd like to offer, of course, that having a meditation practice is a part of that. Having a meditation practice in which we give ourselves the opportunity and the space to ask these questions and to become sensitive to our lives, to embody our lives, and to be able to feel into what is it that we can be wholehearted about? What is it that will help create the conditions so we can have a future that has great spaciousness and ease and peace and love and kindness, or whatever it is for you that's meaningful—wisdom, compassion, freedom. This is part of the beauty of this practice: we get to choose which words, we get to choose what's the most meaningful for us. But what can you get wholehearted around? What can you do today that supports a future that's filled with happiness?

We don't know what the future holds, of course not. But can we—this is what I'd like to offer—can we create the sensibility, the skills, so that whatever the future holds, we can hold it with love, kindness, compassion, wisdom, no matter what the future brings us?

So I'll end with saying one more time this poem, "Sometimes" by David Whyte.

Thank you. Thank you for your practice. It's lovely to practice together. And maybe join me in this exploration of the poetry of practice. Wishing you all a wonderful rest of your day or rest of your evening or whenever it is that you're listening to this. Thank you.