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Living our Aspirations - Diana Clark

The following talk was given by Diana Clark at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on February 06, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Living our Aspirations

Welcome and good evening. I wanted to continue on a theme that I started last week. Last week, I introduced these five qualities of endeavoring, five qualities to bring together if you want to do something. It's something that the Buddha talked about as a support for anything we want to do. Of course, he's teaching about spiritual practice, but it's something that we could do for whatever. I already gave a whole talk on them, but I just want to add a little bit on this. So these five factors of endeavoring are: the first one is confidence, the second one is vitality, the third one is integrity, the fourth one is energy, and the fifth one is wisdom.

That's talking about how to gather up certain qualities so that we can do something, go in a particular direction, or accomplish something. But now I'd like to maybe add on to that and also introduce something else, and that is: where are we going? What are we doing? Which direction are we oriented towards?

When I talked about it last week, it was just whatever you want to do, and this is true; you can apply those five qualities to whatever you want to do. But maybe it's worthwhile considering what it is we want to do. What direction do we want our life to take? What direction do we want anything about us to take?

There's this way that it can be enormously helpful to just ask ourselves, because sometimes we don't ask ourselves, and it can be so powerful: what is our deepest aspiration? In my mind, an aspiration is a little bit different than a goal. A goal is maybe more immediate and tangible. You want to be able to lift a certain amount of pounds, walk a certain distance, knit a certain way, or something like this. Whereas an aspiration, in my mind at least, is a little bit grander, it's a little bit more heartfelt. What is our deepest aspiration?

Maybe as I'm talking now, you can just ask yourself: what are you most inspired by? What makes your heart sing? What is the place, this direction you'd like to go?

Because there's a way in which when we're aligning with an aspiration that we have, when we are being consistent with an aspiration that we have, there's a sense of openness or a sense of ease. Like, yeah, this may not be comfortable exactly at this moment, but I know that what I'm doing is going in the direction I want to go.

Recently, I sat a retreat. After the retreat, a number of us were talking, and I found myself saying there's something so powerful about being on retreat. Even if it's a horrible retreat, and you're in physical pain and emotional distress—and these things happen on retreat too, it's not all bliss and fun. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it isn't. But I said there's just something about being aligned with what's the most important to you that just feels good, even if the retreat is hard.

I hadn't really put that together in such a clear way, that there's something beautiful that happens just being on retreat. For me, one of my aspirations is to be cultivating my meditation practice. That doesn't mean that you all have to have the same aspiration either. But I'm just pointing to this sense of openness, or ease, or maybe even a little bit of relaxation when you have this sense of, "What I'm doing is aligned with my deepest values, what I really want from this life." With this alignment and this ease, there can be some power to that—power meaning a movement of force or something like this.

Many years ago, I had this quote in my kitchen next to where I would do the dishes, so that I would see it regularly. I put it there when I was in the midst of having to do something that was really hard, and I didn't want to do it. It was something that took me many months to do, and I just didn't want to do it. Here's a translation of the quote. I couldn't find the exact translation of the one that I had up there next to my kitchen—you would think I would have it memorized having seen it however many times. But it's by Goethe¹, he's a German poet and writer. In this quote, he says, "The moment one commits oneself, Providence moves too." I don't really know what Providence is, but just this idea that, "Okay, I'm going to go this direction. I'm going to do this." There's a way in which—not always, and it's not always obvious—but there's a way that things can help us along if it's really aligned with our deepest desires or aspirations. The quote continues, Goethe writes, "Whatever you dream you can do, begin it. This boldness has power, magic, and grace in it. Begin it now."

One way that I think about this idea that this Providence moves too is that sometimes we feel like, "Oh my gosh, I see all these things that have to happen in order to have what really is my aspiration, my goal, and I don't think I can do that." But here's what we're not considering: this beautiful thing called impermanence. The version of ourselves that's going to get to that step is going to be the one that just completed the step before, which is going to be the one that just completed the step before. So we are changing as we're moving along this path towards something we want to do.

Maybe when we're way back here, we're like, "Oh my gosh, I don't think I can do that." But when we're right here at the next thing, it's like, "Oh, okay, I can do that." We want to project the current version of ourselves into the future and say, "Well, for this current version it's going to be hard to do that." But the current version isn't going to be the one that's going to do it. It's going to be the one who finished, or completed, or found a way through other things. I remind myself of this whenever I have something big that I have to do. Like, "Okay, well, future Diana can take care of that. I'm just going to do this one little step here, the next thing that needs to be done."

Maybe I'll just say the obvious, that often because we're busy and we are surrounded by a society that likes to distract us from anything that's uncomfortable—we carry these gizmos in our pockets that are designed to distract us—just because of that, it's often that we don't touch into what is our aspiration. We're just busy taking care of the next thing, maybe the next thing that feels urgent and important, but really maybe isn't aligned with the deepest wish or desires that we have. So it's worthwhile to really spend some time and think about it. I'll talk about this a little bit more in a moment here.

We can feel like we get lost in this—I get lost in this too—just taking care of the to-do list, and it just feels like life is one big long to-do list. We don't want that kind of a life. We can have a bigger life, a better life, but it does require us to pay attention. Pay attention to what's going on inside of us and how we're spending our life energy.

Some aspirations might be something like a deep wish in our hearts for happiness, for well-being, and ease. Maybe that wish for happiness and well-being is not only for ourselves but for others. Maybe there's this real wish to be able to make the world, or our community, family members, or others that we're in contact with, to just have a little bit more ease, a little bit more happiness, a little bit more peace and well-being. Just imagine what the world would be like if everybody had just a little bit more peace, ease, and well-being. I know I feel inspired by this. So maybe that's one thing that inspires us.

Or maybe it's something more about service. There's such a beautiful thing to just be supporting others and to help them find what's important to them—or maybe they do know, and to help them reach it. To show up with compassion when people have difficulties, or to support others rather than having it be about, "Oh, it's all about me." Instead, to feel like, "Let me help out." There's a way in which helping and supporting others feeds us and nourishes us too. I had that experience when I was a chaplain up at San Francisco General. It was quite something to meet these patients—some of them really sick, some of them where being in the hospital was a step up in their living conditions. Just to be able to meet them where they were, it was a beautiful thing to be able to do.

But it's not so easy. You don't need me to tell you this. We have these aspirations, these things we want to do. But to consistently orient our life, our activities, the way we spend our resources and our energy towards our aspirations is not easy. If it were easy, you would already be doing it.

I appreciate very much that the Buddha talked some more about this idea of what some supports are for this, some ways to help us go towards our aspirations. He talked about this quality of steadfastness, or I might say persistence, or stick-to-itiveness, tenacity, determination, resolve, or resolution. This is a quality that's needed because it's not always easy. Of course, we like things to happen quickly. Things don't necessarily happen quickly. We like to take the path of least resistance, but maybe following our aspirations is not the path of least resistance. It doesn't mean that we're failing. Because it's hard doesn't mean that we're bad humans or we're failing or anything like that. It's hard because it's just the way that it is. We could philosophize about it, but you know, it's just not easy all the time. Sometimes it is. I talked about being aligned and the openness when you're aligned; sometimes it's beautiful, and sometimes it's difficult. That's how it is. You don't need me to tell you this either, everybody knows this. If anytime you've ever wanted to achieve anything or gain anything, there's been difficulties.

This word for persistence, perseverance, tenacity, or determination, the Pali word is adhiṭṭhāna². One person described it, and I kind of like this, as this gentle but persistent wind that's blowing at your back, just helping you go a particular direction. This idea of, "Okay, I'm going to go this direction."

For some people, this kind of persistence or perseverance is not a difficulty. For them, that's the way that they are. They have a goal, and they just have a certain doggedness and they make it happen. If you're one of those people, then maybe where the difficulty lies is different than for some other people. The stick-to-itiveness maybe isn't the difficulty, but rather not pushing this practice or pushing whatever it is you're doing into drudgery. You don't want your life to be filled with drudgery, just "I have to do this" and doing it. Or if you're one of those people where stick-to-itiveness is easy and that's the way you move through the world, maybe the edge for you is to be able to do that and not alienate others or dismiss others. There can be a way of being like, "Get out of my way, I have to do this. I don't care what you're doing right now, I have to do this."

So whether this idea of persistence, perseverance, or determination comes easily or not, there's a way in which we can practice with it so that it can help us with our aspirations. S.N. Goenka³, a teacher in the Insight tradition, says—and maybe you have all heard this before too, it's not unique to him—with spiritual practice or any other thing that you want to do, you can dig ten wells one foot deep, but you're not likely to find water. But maybe there's one well that's ten feet deep where you can find water. It's this recognition of staying there, staying there. It's this power of adhiṭṭhāna, it's like, "Okay, I'm just going to stay here and I've made this resolve. This is really what's important to me, and I'm going to hang in there, even though right now it's uncomfortable, even though right now I don't want to do it." To find a way to do it, but not a way where we're tied up into knots. Not a way in which we're beating ourselves up, like "You're going to be a bad person if you don't do it," or "You are a bad person because you don't want to do it." But instead, a peaceful perseverance. Like, "Okay, yes, this is what needs to be done, this is what I'm going to do." We kind of bow and say, "Yes, I recognize you don't want to do it. We're going to do it anyway."

I'm saying this for myself too, because sometimes I find myself putting things off that I have to do. Recently I had to do something that was rather uncomfortable, and it's so silly, but it turned out it worked: I just said out loud, "Okay, I can do hard things and I'm going to do this." There was just this little tiny pep talk. It wasn't a way like, "Diana, you're going to be such a loser if you don't do it." That doesn't work, I've tried that. Instead it was, "Okay, I can do hard things. I'm going to do this." And it was hard, and I did it.

It's a way in which we can stop always insisting that we're comfortable all the time. I like to be comfortable, I think all of us do, but society really promotes comfort to the exclusion of everything else. Like never feeling uncomfortable. It's okay to feel discomfort. It's just discomfort. It doesn't mean anything about the way the universe is made, whether it's a just world or not. It doesn't mean anything about whether we're good people or not. It's just discomfort. It arises, it passes away. I wish for all of you that it doesn't stay around for a long time, but we don't get to control those things.

If we apply this perseverance or persistence, this adhiṭṭhāna, it adds this richness to our life, this level of fulfillment or satisfaction. Like, "Yeah, I really tried. Maybe I didn't get what I wanted, maybe I did, but I really did try." Often we hold back and don't even try because of the fear of not achieving or attaining. The fear prevents us from even starting. But if we're able to begin again and again and again, it brings a certain satisfaction to your life. When I had to do that difficult thing and I did it, there was a little bit of uplift, like, "Oh, look at that, I did it. I really didn't want to, I wasn't quite sure that I could, but I did it."

We need to fill our lives with these types of things. There's so much stuff that drains our energy, and this gives us a little bit of confidence, a little boost to do something difficult. It doesn't have to be wildly difficult. It can be just sending that email that you've been putting off to a coworker, or whatever it might be.

So how would we make a resolution? How would we set a resolve? One way to think about it for yourself is to ask, "What is something that I can practice adhiṭṭhāna with, this determination, this resolve, persistence?" Ask yourself what qualities you would advise a friend who is very similar to you to develop or cultivate or pay attention to, somebody that you loved and cared for. It's really helpful to think about things that way, it's a little bit more accessible. Otherwise, the inner critic is pretty sneaky, and it'll get right in there: "Well, you know you should do X, Y, Z, A, B, C." Instead, just think, "Okay, if I had a good friend who was like this, what might be something that this friend could work on?" Ask it that way. Maybe it's not something that comes immediately to mind, but maybe it's something that gets dropped in during a meditation or when there's some openness or ease.

When you feel like you have an aspiration you want to orient towards, and you know the quality you want to cultivate to support that aspiration, fill in the words. Be specific. Maybe the aspiration is, "I want to have more spaciousness in my life." And the quality to cultivate is taking care of clutter. Just like, "Okay, I'm going to organize my physical space. I'm going to start there." Or, "I'm going to practice saying no, because maybe my life is filled up with things because I can't say no to other people." Or, "I'm just going to spend more time taking walks in nature instead of doom scrolling. I'm going to go outside." Whatever it might be.

After you have these ideas, sit with it a little bit and see how it feels. Is there a little bit of delay, like "Oh, yeah..." Or is it like, "Yeah, okay, I guess I should do this, I really don't want to." There should be a sense of excitement or recognition that this would be a great thing for your life. The challenge feels challenging, but not too much, not like you can't do it. Feel into it and choose something that feels achievable, and yet you'll have to stretch yourself a little bit. Not completely be a different person, just stretch yourself a little bit.

There's a way in which we can even say things out loud. Maybe sit for a little bit and say, "I resolve to take care of clutter." I'm going to say this because I am planning to clean my desk tomorrow, as it is a mess! "I resolve to take care of clutter in my house, and may it be so." You can do a bow, or a saying, or ring a bell, or light a candle to distinguish it from just one more thought. Or you can say it to somebody else. Sometimes you can be accountability partners. I do this with a friend; we send photos to each other to make sure we get outside every day into nature. It's quite fantastic. You get these little pictures: "Oh okay, she's outside, look, I should go outside, it's so nice."

So how do we do this adhiṭṭhāna? How do we have this persistence and determination? Well, one is, when your resolve slips—and it will guaranteed, if it didn't, then you chose something a little bit too easy maybe—when the resolve slips, just reflect on how that felt. Not beating yourself up, not analyzing it, just feeling the disappointment. For me, disappointment feels like this little tightness in the gut and the shoulders collapsing down. Allow yourself to feel that collapse, if indeed it is a collapse, and the body and the mind don't like that collapse. There will be a realization: "Oh yeah, going this direction leads to this uncomfortable feeling of collapse. Going this other direction gives me some confidence, even though it's a little bit uncomfortable and not what I want to do." Just recognize it in both the body and the mind. It can be really helpful to bring the body into it, your physical posture or the internal contraction that happens.

And then maybe there's something obvious about why it was hard at that time to follow your resolve. Like, "Yeah, okay, I made the resolve to not eat as much sugar. Maybe I shouldn't have bought all those cookies. Okay, don't buy cookies anymore." Or maybe there's something that's not obvious. Just without a lot of analysis—because often the inner critic gets disguised as analysis: "Well, you did this wrong, you did that wrong, you did this wrong"—that is not where we're going. It's just, "Okay, what can happen next? How did I get here, and what's next? Is there a way that I can just begin again?" That's all that's needed, just begin again in whatever simple way. I think it's James Clear who wrote this book Atomic Habits, and he says, just do something that you can do in two minutes. Okay, that's worthwhile. This is how you begin again: just do something for two minutes. We can all do that.

But we can also get in trouble with resolves. We can slip into something that is not helpful, like beating ourselves up when we have difficulties. Let's not make this something else that we're going to beat ourselves up with. I'm going to tell you right now, there's going to be difficulties, and it doesn't mean anything about you as a person. It doesn't mean you can't do it. It's just the way things are. It's not a personal failing, it's just the way things are.

If we have this resolve, we can also get really fixed views. "This is good, and anything else that deters me from it is bad." We can develop this dogmatism or fundamentalism or fixed view: "I don't care about anything else. You guys are inferior because you don't have the same idea that I have." It's a terrible way to move through the world. Sometimes we feel like in order to support this determination and resolve, we have to bear down and strain and strive. I'm even making a fist when I'm saying this because it kind of feels like that. But then this clenched fist shows up in our minds too, kind of being closed. "No, only this. Don't tell me about other ideas, that's silly." There can be a certain harshness, and that could be a downside of this resolve.

Or there can be a stubbornness, immovability, or obstinacy that bleeds out into other things too. Trying to control everything because we're trying to control this one thing. And it turns out we can't really control nearly what we think we can. The desire to control bleeds into trying to control other people. Once I had a friend who was trying to lose weight, and this friend discovered that they were feeding the cats less and less. Well, we all should be losing weight, right? But the cats didn't need to lose any weight at all! This way we try to control can bleed out into other things.

The Buddha gave some ways to work with this, to prevent having a resolve slip into some contraction, tightness, stubbornness, or obstinacy. He offered four supports to support adhiṭṭhāna, resolve, determination, persistence. This is Buddhism, so we have all these lists! I love these lists, but I know not everybody loves them, and that's perfectly fine.

These four supports for adhiṭṭhāna are:

1. Wisdom: Wisdom about how to stretch your capabilities in a way that honors who you are as a person and honors your life experience. Not something too big, and not something too small. It also takes wisdom to not beat yourself up, to not allow the inner critic to get in there. To say, "Oh, I see you inner critic. Okay, you can be there. I'm going to do this and I'm going to take care of myself, but I'm just going to let you be on the side." We respect the inner critic as a habit that likes to come along, but we don't need to give it authority. We don't have to believe it. We can just say, "Okay, I see you Mildred, come along." Giving it a name adds a little levity to it. That's wisdom.

2. Truth: This is the second support for adhiṭṭhāna. There are a number of different ways we can interpret this, but one way is just being true to your resolve, staying with it.

3. Relinquishment: We're going to have to let go of some things, guaranteed. We're going to have to let go of some views, activities, habits, or patterns. We have to have the willingness to let go of what needs to be let go of. There's a quote in the Dhammapada⁴: "If you see a greater happiness that comes by forsaking a lesser happiness, be willing to forsake the lesser happiness for the greater happiness." Thanissaro Bhikkhu⁵ says it's like "exchanging candy for gold." This candy is sweet, but gold is more valuable and can help us in ways that make a difference, unlike candy. So the third quality that helps us with setting a resolve is relinquishment. Often the things that pull us off the path are things that look good and promise quick gratification. But if those worked, you wouldn't be making a resolve for something different. You're going to have to let go of some of these things.

4. Peace: Doing this resolve with as much peace as you can. In a way that we're not getting all worked up with the difficulties. We're not creating stories that it means we're bad people or inadequate in some way, or that we can't do it. Can we do it with peace? "Yeah, it's hard, but I can do hard things. And maybe I can't do that big hard thing, maybe I can do this little hard thing. Find something I can do that takes two minutes." But to do it with some peace, with as much ease and openness as you can find, so that we don't slip into the downsides of stubbornness or obstinacy.

So this is the idea of making an aspiration—what is really meaningful for us—and then setting a resolve or determination. What is a quality we can develop or cultivate to support our life going towards this aspiration? And then using the four qualities the Buddha talked about to help this resolve: wisdom, truth, relinquishment, and peace.

I'll end there, and then I'll open it up for some questions. Thank you.

Q&A and Reflections

Participant (Jim): Thank you Diana. Last week I attended a one-hour seminar on decluttering.

Diana: Oh, fantastic.

Participant (Jim): And it was for all of NASA, there were over 400 people on this. Decluttering was quite timely for many people, it's a thing. They actually had six categories of why you hang on to things. I won't go through all six, but...

Diana: Yeah, you don't want to sit up here and just give a whole other talk!

Participant (Jim): I mean, it was a one hour talk that I listened to, but the ones that stuck in my mind were: Number one was things that had no home, had no place to go. Some things were just junk, you know, just needed to be thrown out. Some things that you had overbought, like you'd gone to Costco and bought five pounds of nutmeg.

Diana: Five pounds of nutmeg... a lot of nutmeg! [Laughter]

Participant (Jim): One of them was sentimental attachment. I don't remember the other two, but that sort of helped me at least think about, "Okay, rather than just beating myself up like get rid of this, look at what is the attachment here." Clinging is something that we talk about, but this was a way you could sort of look at what might be behind not wanting to let go.

Diana: And maybe, if I may, we could even go further to say let's go ahead and put them in piles: this thing doesn't have a home, this thing has sentimental value, this thing is a to-do list, or this thing needs to be recycled.

Participant (Jim): Yeah, shuffle the clutter. And one of the other categories was the "someday I'll" project. Like, "Someday I'll get around to that." We all have those too.

Diana: Yeah, "just in case." Thank you, Jim. Anybody else have a comment or a question?

Participant (Nicole): Hi. As I was listening to you, I was thinking: what is it that stops us from doing what we want to do? It's very clear in our mind that we want this, this is my dream, small dream or big dream. I have a feeling that there is some training in the background, some memories in the subconscious that say, "Why would you do that?" or "You can't do that."

I was going through this for a while and then I started meditation. Actually, for me, decluttering my mind is more important than getting rid of stuff. I noticed that I have to focus on my conscious mind. I have to be aware of what's going on right in front of my brain. I have to train this, because it comes from all my background experiences, and then I focus on my awareness.

Diana: Yeah.

Participant (Nicole): During meditation... I've been practicing for a while. In the beginning it didn't happen. For two years I didn't even know what meditation was, and I sat with no result. But I knew something finally was going to happen. For me, meditation is helping me be aware of what it is that I want, and why I am not doing it. Some clarity comes in the meditation.

Diana: Yeah, this recognition of what's preventing you, what's in the way.

Participant (Nicole): I'm getting to know myself more than before. I'm very real when I sit and get rid of all the clutter. As I sit, my train of thought is getting slower and slower, and then I get to the point that it's kind of empty, and I feel like my creation comes from there. This has been a really great experience for me, I just wanted to share that with you. And you added some more knowledge that I can bring to my awareness when I meditate. It's just being aware. I like to be conscious of what's going on in my mind. We can't just let it go. My mind is my baby to take care of, I'm not going to let everything come in there like before.

Diana: Yeah, it can make a big difference if we can know what's happening in our minds, but we don't always do. We can't necessarily wait until we have perfect clarity. But thank you for bringing up "what is getting in the way." That makes me think that maybe next week I'll talk about what some of these things are that get in the way of doing the thing that's important to us. Would you be surprised if I said the Buddha has a list?

[Laughter]

Of course! But thank you. And what is your name?

Participant (Nicole): Nicole.

Diana: Nicole. Thank you, Nicole. Thank you all, and I wish you safe travels home and all the best. Thank you.