This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Insight using attitudes of mind and awareness with Maria Straatman. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Insight using attitudes of mind and awareness - Maria Straatmann

The following talk was given by Maria Straatmann at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on August 13, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Insight using attitudes of mind and awareness

So good evening, my name is Maria Straatmann. Hold on a second. What I would like to talk to you about tonight is the attitude of mind and awareness as tools of insight. It sounds very pedantic, doesn't it? But I really have as an intention to share with you a way of thinking about mindfulness that makes it touch how we are in life.

We all have things that happen that we're dissatisfied with. Think of it for a moment, of the many ways in which there are things that you wish were different. We lose someone or something, we lose our keys, we lose someone close to us. We stumble and fall on the path, the metaphorical path, or we trip over the sidewalk and we fall and we break something. We hurt someone, or someone or something disappoints us. The solace that we used to feel in meditation somehow has left us, and what's wrong with my meditation? Or our bodies age and betray us, and we wonder what happened to that juiciness and that resilience and that get-up-and-go. Somehow that movement is no longer reachable. Or maybe we're unable to forgive, or we feel unseen or dismissed or just plain passed over. Or we see or experience injustice.

These are common things that happen to us all the time. They're a normal part of life, and how we're able to meet them and interact with them determines whether we are miserable, unhappy, suffering, or whether we can encounter them with equanimity. We'd all like to have the secret for how to do that, right? I meet everything that I don't want to be true with total balance and equanimity, and I'm happy. How do I get there? So what I want to talk about is how do we get there.

Because suffering exists in the world, but we don't have to suffer. Pain exists in the world, unsatisfactoriness exists in the world. I don't know when you last lost your keys, but we had keys missing in our house this last week, and it was painful. Whose fault was it that the keys are missing? What are we going to do about the keys? We've torn the place apart. How important are the keys? And of course, in the overall scheme of these things, keys are not that important, but they can become a source of great irritation.

Of course, we have strategies for dealing with things that aren't the way we want them to be. We can ignore them, we can pass over them, we can substitute something else in place of worrying about those things. We can say, "Well, I'm going to take care of myself and I'm going to go off and distract myself." We can develop self-improvement plans. "Okay, I know how I'm going to deal with this. I'm going to take care of that bad habit I have," and we're going to fix this as if by fixing this particular case, everything's going to be better. Or we attach mindfulness to it, and we attach great intensity of intention, and "I'm going to be here with this. I'm going to measure it, I'm going to know everything about it. I'm going to analyze it, I'm going to understand what's wrong with it," and we just make it worse, and it becomes ever more a source of suffering and pain for us. Or we get down and we roll around in the papers on the floor and really, really get miserable. Or we become self-righteous. "This is not my fault," and we enter into the world of praise and blame. "It's not my fault, it's your fault. If you were better, if I were better." Self-criticism, judgment.

None of this is absolutely necessary. It's just the way the mind works. Suppose we see these sources of dissatisfaction as experiences that don't need to be fixed, changed, managed, massaged. Suppose we just see these as experiences that actually don't have anything to do with our self-worth, your self-worth, meaning in life, the end of life. They're just things that happen. Suppose it is actually possible to see things just come and go without attaching great meaning to everything that happens. Can we actually do that? How?

I want to call your attention to two aspects of how we experience the world, and those are the attitude of mind and our awareness. So by attitude of mind, what I'm referring to is the sort of context that we carry around with us that can be very short-term, or it can last days, months, weeks, years. It is sort of the container for how we experience the world. The interesting thing about it is it's usually what we ascribe to ourselves and say, "This is who I am." "Well, I tend to see the world with judgment. I'm a judger," or "I'm a fixer," or "I am really depressed, so I see things this way." And we decide that there is a way to look at the world, and that's how we look at the world, and that tends to color the experience. Now, it's a little bit different than mood. It's really just what we expect to see, and then we place our awareness in such a way that that's in fact what we see.

What I'd like to do is distinguish between what's actually happening and our attitude or our opinion about what's actually happening. So I want to give a few examples and see if we can look at what's the raw experience versus what is it that we describe and decide is the experience.

I'm going to tell you why I think this is important first. On my mind lately has been a lot to do with grief. I've recently lost somebody very, very dear to me, and I have been contemplating a lot about the intimacy of that relationship and the loss of that relationship and what that means. So one morning, I was very conscious of thinking about, "Well, I'm going to think about all the wonderful times we had," and I set myself to thinking about memories of things that we had shared, looking for what it is that has led to this great intimacy. And what arose were times of great pain, things that we shared around events that were really quite painful. And the memory brought to me, what I was experiencing were pangs of, "Ow, oh, that hurts." And at the same time, I realized that those were moments when we were really, really close, that we were there for one another, that we were very present for one another, that we were vulnerable and present. And the intimacy that I recalled in those moments brought me delight.

So here I was in the present moment, recalling pangs of grief, feeling pangs of grief and the pleasure of the intimacy of just being there for one another. And the insight that I had was not that intimacy requires pain or pain gives rise to intimacy, but that intimacy has to do with vulnerability and trust. And I said, "Oh, that's really interesting." I came out of that few seconds of experience with a sense of ease and relief in my grief that didn't have anything to do with getting rid of grief or changing the nature of grief, but understanding that there was pain and joy in the present, even though this person is now gone. And I could focus on, I could put my awareness on worrying about, "Oh, those moments will never arise again," or I could just be here with this experience, this insight. This comes and this goes.

It's possible to get caught in the place of the story. I could have gotten into any one of those grief stories around the pain stories that we were talking about. I could have gotten worried about why can't I find any happy memories to feel very intimate about. I could have gone on to how I'm going to miss these in the future. I could have been lost in thinking about or having opinions about what the experience was. But the raw experience was just pain and joy following close on one another, and the insight that intimacy was because we really trusted one another and how wonderful that was, and how grateful I am in retrospect that we had that trust. Now, that was an experience that lasted less than a minute, less than a minute of my life, which has gone on for many decades, but it actually was a portion of my life that was very free and easy and flowing.

We very often get caught in the place of thinking that pain has to be fixed, that discomfort and dissatisfaction needs to be managed, fixed, tolerated. Somehow we have to do something about it. It can't just be there. Unsatisfactoriness just is not acceptable. But in fact, why not? It just is. It doesn't mean anything. It just is, like a thought coming and going.

In the last couple of weeks, I've spent a lot of time watching the Olympics. I sprang for the $13 a month to watch Peacock so I could really get into watching everything on the Olympics, and I watched a number of these super elite athletes do their thing. There are two events that I want to call your attention to because they illustrate basically the same thing. One was Steph Curry doing those final shots in the men's basketball, in the last few minutes of the gold medal game. There were ridiculous three-point shots, and somebody asked him afterward, "How did that feel? And were you thinking about the end?" And he said, "I was just looking at the rim. I was just looking at the rim." I didn't see those two much taller guys standing right in front of him blocking the shot that he threw over. You know, you can imagine the hands would be up like this in front of my face, and the ball went up over and a distance to the basket. He said, "I was just looking at the rim. I just saw the rim." And he's talked about this in other times where for him, he had done a lot of skill development, but also he was just in the moment. "I'm just doing this." He wasn't thinking about comparing it to something else. He wasn't trying to be better than, he wasn't worrying about what people were going to think about it. He wasn't thinking about, he had a goal which was to make those baskets and to win the gold medal, and he had a determination, but he wasn't pushing through something. He was just totally in the moment. "I was just looking at the rim."

The other one was Katie Ledecky, who got a gold medal for the 1500-meter swim. And she said that after a thousand meters, it just hurts. And she'd been practicing, practicing, practicing, practicing, and it was uniform. After a thousand meters, it just hurts. But she didn't think about the pain. She didn't try to push it away or tolerate it. Pain was there, and she just kept swimming because that's what she was doing. She was just swimming.

So in both cases, they were just doing what they had trained themselves to do, and they weren't focusing on those things that we tend to think you should think about, that you have to pay attention to, that you should really be mindful of. The pain was there, but it was, "Yeah, the pain's there," and she just swam. That's what she did.

That's what we want our mindfulness to be like. We don't want it to be a task. We don't want it to be something that we have to always have an object for. We don't want to spend our time walking around saying, "Okay, now I'm going to be mindful of this." We have to develop the skill so that it's like a muscle memory. So what I'm encouraging you to do tonight is to become very aware of your attitude of mind. That's the thing that determines, that's the container for your experience. If you're walking around saying, "The world is really crummy," or you're an eternal optimist, a person totally focused on optimism and you can't see anything bad, you won't see anything bad. You also won't be very realistic, and things will happen to you. You'll lose your keys even if you're optimistic. You'll still trip over the crack in the sidewalk.

But if you come to really understand your attitude of mind, that attitude of mind that you have now, then it becomes a tool that you can use. You can check in with it and you can say, "Okay, this attitude is here today." You don't have to change the attitude, by the way. You don't have to make it different than it is. You just have to be aware of it so that you know how it is coloring your experience. So knowing that I'm carrying around a certain amount of grief right now, I'm aware of it. It's here, but it doesn't have to color everything. I can still notice other things. I can be aware of it and use my awareness elsewhere as well. It's like knowing it's raining and wishing it wasn't raining, but okay, it's raining, but you know, it's not the only thing happening. But it helps to be aware of it because things are still kind of damp. It's going to affect you. It doesn't have to surprise you.

That's one aspect of it. The other one is you can also cultivate an attitude of mind. So you can decide, for example, "I want to understand what it's like to have the attitude of mind of generosity. How do I cultivate that attitude of mind?" Well, when I notice that somebody said something hurtful, instead of deciding there's something wrong with that person, I can say, "I wonder what's bothering that person." I can be generous in how I think about or respond to people. I can deliberately give something to someone and say, "How does that feel?" Come to understand what it feels like to have an attitude of generosity. There's value in knowing how it feels. Or to develop an attitude of renunciation. What does that feel like? Not to learn how to deprive myself, but to know what it feels like to be able to let go of something. What does it feel like to let go of something?

This afternoon I read, I was trying to think of a poem that might illustrate the idea, so I read a "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman, and there he just talked about how wonderful it was just to touch people, just to feel that. Do you know how wonderful it feels just to touch people? It's kind of not PC to touch people these days, so you've got to be kind of careful about this, but you know, choose carefully.

The other night, we had an event here for volunteers to celebrate volunteers at IMC, and it was absolutely delightful. Just delightful. People that I hadn't seen since before the pandemic, I got to see, and I reveled in that delight. I carried that delight, I experienced that delight, and I was still aware of this grief hanging over here. And people say, "What's new with you?" and you think, "Well, I don't really want to dump on this story," but it really felt different. I could feel how lovely it was to see old friends that I hadn't seen and to experience that in your body and say, "Ah, yes." So that you recognize it, and you don't develop the attitude of mind that this is the only way to be, whatever that attitude of mind is. And you don't identify with that attitude of mind and say, "This is who I am." It's possible to be many kinds of people. You are many kinds of people.

And when you see that, you can use your awareness in any situation to say, "What's going on here? How can I see more clearly?" And in seeing more clearly, we become disentangled from all the ways that we decide, "This is the most important thing in the world, and I am really caught in this suffering." The way we become uncaught is by disentangling ourselves, by seeing clearly. This is what's operating. This is what... oh, this is what's happening. Just this. Not more, not what used to happen, not what's going to happen, not what's going to follow from this, but just this. Just the rim. Just the rim.

The closer we can get to just this feeling, just this moment, just this, the closer we can see, "Oh, this is what's happening." It doesn't say anything about who I am or who you are. It's just this happening. As we become disentangled, we become dispassionate. Everything falls away. We don't hold on to it. It's not like we have to let go of things or push things away. "Oh, this is what's happening." And the ease that we are looking for arises. Ah, and we see things coming and going and coming and going. Sometimes they're happy things, sometimes they're sad things, but they don't say anything about, "This is who I am." They're just things. It's just raining. It's just not raining. I notice I seem tense today. Tension, tension, tension. What's happening? Okay, it seems like this. Okay, could be. What else is happening?

So that we don't get so attached to our first thought. We don't get lost in the story of the first word that we attach to what's going on. We don't decide meditation sucks because today I just can't seem to relax at all. We can actually allow things to be just as they are. And when we can allow things to be just as they are, we get over the suffering that arises out of wishing everything was different, wishing it was better, wishing we could be better. We just say, "Ah, that's the way it is right now." And then we look at our intention and we take the next step. And we don't allow the attitude of mind to determine what our life is. We use the attitude of mind to see things and to understand how it influences our experience, and we cultivate alternative attitudes of mind so that we can understand what it feels like and cultivate that. "Oh, huh, that's interesting." Developing a mind of curiosity. If you want to be free, cultivate freedom. Allow yourself to see things just as they are, without an opinion, without judgment. Just this.

I have no idea whether I said what was on my page, but those are my thoughts for this afternoon. So thank you. And may all of your attitudes be joyous ones. And when they are not, as they will not, may you see the world through clarity, because then you will be free. Thank you.

Q&A

So if you have any questions or observations or demands, I'd be happy to entertain them.

Audience Member: It's my first time here. We're talking about the feeling. That's something that I've been working on a lot, and it's about, for me, it's about just being able to feel it in every breath. To just have the excitement, the passion. It's all about feeling. The world reflects back to us what we feel, whether we know it or not. It's our subconscious. It's what we believe in our subconscious and what we feel. So it's a combination of both. So like you're saying, the thoughts that we're thinking during the day, we have to be conscious of the type of thoughts that we impress into our subconscious because then when we express it out, it comes out with those things attached to it. So we reflect it back to ourselves in our reality, but it's about detaching from those negative thoughts and just being at peace.

Maria Straatmann: So you've said a lot, and it's very, very complex. But basically, if I can reflect back what I've heard, we are impacted by our experience, and we reflect that back. And in reflecting back to others, it's changed somewhat by the attitudes and thoughts that we have, and that impacts others as well. And so there's a feedback mechanism between us and others. One of the criticisms of this practice is that a mindfulness practice can lead you to become self-focused. All I'm thinking about is what's going on with me. And it is one of the reasons for cultivating an attitude of generosity, that you begin to understand that you really are not paying attention if you don't notice what's going on for the other person out here as well and how that impacts you, because there is a lot of sense data that you're aware of that your mind maybe isn't processing.

Audience Member: And absolutely, obviously we have to be conscious of other people. I was just maybe saying, in the sense of even just experiences or things that come to pass, that we don't realize that we're that much in control of what's going on here. It's really all inside of us, and how we feel is what we're projecting. I mean, if you look at a mirror, you don't smile at it, you're not going to get one back.

Maria Straatmann: Okay, so I'm not quite sure I'm clear on what you're saying. So are you saying, I'm not sure how you use the word "control" there. You said something about it's... did you say we do control or we don't control?

Audience Member: I think we're in more control than we realize.

Maria Straatmann: We influence, but I don't think we're particularly in control.

Audience Member: Well, yeah, we influence. We influence our experience. For sure. But I think we influence it a lot more than we realize with our feelings and with our thoughts.

Maria Straatmann: Yeah. So what conditions our experience? The experience comes out of the conditions that are set. And so if I have ill will in my heart, then I'm going to generate a lot of ill will. If I have loving-kindness and peace in my heart, I'm going to generate quite the opposite. So I think that's the context in which you're speaking.

Audience Member: Thank you. So you talked about generosity, but I want to know how can we know how much generosity we need to have? Because I'm going through a hard time because I had, I think, too much generosity that it hurt me at the end because of caring too much about other people, of giving too much to other people.

Maria Straatmann: So I want to make a distinction between an attitude of generosity and a generous heart, a compassionate heart, and the act of generosity and the act of compassion, which is different than compassion. The reason I'm making this distinction is compassion is the movement of the heart, and generosity is an attitude of mind that is open and giving. The act of generosity is a step beyond that, and there's a different distinction to be made. An act of generosity that has to do with giving somebody something needs to take into account whether the generosity towards someone is ungenerous toward oneself. There needs to be a balance. A generous heart is also generous toward oneself. It is a kind of a spirit of loving-kindness that doesn't have anything to do with giving somebody something. That giving somebody something is like a measuring stick. "I'm going to measure my generosity by how much I give away, and if I give you everything, then you're going to love me." You know, there's a kind of transactional feeling to it, whereas a generous heart is just plain open and free-flowing. Okay?

So when we're in a position of saying... you could say the same thing about generosity and vulnerability. So if I say that I value vulnerability in an open heart to the extent that I make myself unsafe, that's unskillful and unwise. To give to the point where I am harming myself is unskillful and unwise. How to determine where that is is a matter of balance that one has to determine for oneself. I don't know if that's helpful, but I want you to think in terms of a generous heart is not measured. It's open. It has nothing to do with the act of generosity, although acts of generosity help open the heart. Thank you.

There's a stage where people can become... we've heard of codependency, where someone supports somebody's bad habits. "I'm going to support you forever because I really believe in you," and then they're really causing harm in the end. That's not being generous. It feels like generosity but is not. So oftentimes it's possible to masquerade an intention, and so then one has to step back and say, "What is my intention? Is my intention to be loved? Is my intention to give love? Is my intention to be seen? Is my intention to encourage?" And to look very closely at what the intention is as a way of measuring that balance, to help to find that balance.

Audience Member: Thanks for the talk. Got a lot out of it. Can you maybe share a bit about this concept of attitudes of mind? You shared examples like generosity, I think freedom. Just curious if there's like a guiding principle or how do I expand my vocabulary of the attitudes of mind that we want to have?

Maria Straatmann: Well, see, that's the thing. I don't want to put a good and bad label on any attitude of mind. Now, if you talk to my husband... well, actually, he probably, I don't know if he knows this, but the very things he likes about me are the very things that, in extremis, he doesn't like about me, right? And we could say that about anything. A knife in the hands of a surgeon is a tool for good. A knife in the hands of a robber is probably not so good. So any attitude of mind exists. It doesn't necessarily have to be considered bad.

Let's take an attitude that is... let's take the attitude of revenge. "Revenge is on my mind." Okay, this is an ill will, right? So I would say that this is an unskillful attitude of mind because revenge is likely to generate more suffering, and therefore I suspect it's not going to provide anything useful. If I can look, if I notice an attitude of revenge, I can say, "What else is here besides revenge?" And it can be a way of saying, "Is revenge the right word? Am I just hurt? Do I really want to hurt the other person, or do I really want something else? What is it that I really want?" Because sometimes... one of my favorite teachings from Gil was he said, "If you can't get rid of ill will, at least be the kind of person who wants to get rid of ill will," because it softens and opens the heart, right?

A characteristic that is negative... greed, hatred, and delusion are the things that we want to get rid of in life because they do give rise to suffering. So an attitude of mind that supports greed, hatred, and delusion, you really want to let go of that. You want to see as clearly as possible so that you can let go of that attitude of mind because it's going to give rise to suffering.

I don't do it anymore, but I used to have engraved on my iPad the opening lines to the Dhammapada¹: "All experience is preceded by mind, led by mind, made by mind. Speak or act with a corrupted mind, and suffering follows like the wheels of the cart behind the hooves of the ox. All experience is preceded by mind, led by mind, made by mind. Speak or act with a peaceful mind, and happiness follows like a never-departing shadow." I routinely repeat those words to myself to remind myself to check what's in my heart. And if it is tight and twisted and full of ill will, I say, "I don't like that feeling. I don't want that feeling. Can I let go of that feeling?" It has nothing to do with whatever is happening, but only what I carry in my heart, because that's what conditions the next moment. That's the power of the attitude of mind.

So revenge would be one I'd say I'd try to lose, but I would use it to try to figure out what else is there. What else is happening? Is there some way that I can change that "revenge" word to what I really want? Which is for the world to be better. So I'll give you an example of how that might work. Somebody presses you on the freeway, cuts you off, and you think, "I wish there was a cop here," right? And instead, you say, "Wait a minute. That's not what I want. The truth is, it scared me. May nobody be hurt." Now I've moved from revenge pretty quickly. The thought arose, but I don't have to hold on to the thought. I can let go of the thought. But seeing that thought gives rise to another thought. "What else is here?" "Well, it scared me." That was the whole thing. It scared me. That's why the thought arose. But I don't have to identify with the thought and own the thought and hold the thought and justify it. I can let go of it, and then there's room for something else to arise, which is the habit cultivated by, "I want to keep a peaceful heart." That's why we cultivate skillful attitudes of mind, so that we can just look at the rim and keep swimming, because we've cultivated the muscle memory to do that.

Any last thoughts?

I wish you all joy. Thank you.