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Getting Out of Our Own Way - Diana Clark

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

Getting Out of Our Own Way

Good evening. Maybe we'll start the recording... Oh, you did already. Nice to see you all.

Tonight, I'm going to continue this series of talks on how much effort we need to apply to our practice. How do we apply effort not only to our practice, but to everything that we're doing in our lives? How do we choose a direction and maintain sustained effort? There are many different elements there.

Two weeks ago, I talked about the five factors of endeavoring—these five factors that contribute to doing things, which the Buddha talked about. These five factors are confidence, vitality, integrity, energy, and wisdom. We can cultivate these and bring them to support us in whatever it is that we're wishing to do.

Last week, I told the story of Prince Bodhi¹, who was somebody who didn't want to make an effort in practice. He just wanted to have all the fruits of practice but didn't want to make any effort or apply himself, maybe partly because he thought it would be nothing but painful. I have to say, if I had that idea, I wouldn't want to do it either. But then the Buddha gave him some teachings that were about this idea of resolve; you have to have a certain amount of resolve, or adhiṭṭhāna². Then I unpacked that a little bit: what does that mean?

Today, I'd like to build on that, and it's perfectly fine if you weren't there for the earlier talks. What are some of the things that get in the way? We might hear these talks and think, "Okay, sounds great, but how do I do it? I can't quite get myself to do it." This might be another series, I'm not sure. We'll start with a little bit here and see how it goes.

There are so many things that get in the way. Why don't we accomplish the things that we want to accomplish? Why don't we achieve the things that we want to achieve? Why don't we get to where we want to go? There are a lot of factors there, and I'm just going to touch the surface. I'm not going to be able to answer everything, of course not, but I want to talk a little bit about something that the Buddha talked about as a support for this type of thing.

So, what are some of the reasons why? One is that it's hard. Trying to do something that's difficult, of course, by definition requires that we get out of our comfort zone. We do something where we stretch our sense of capacity, our sense of capabilities, and our sense of what we can do. To make a shift in this direction or to go further than we've gone before takes some effort, and it's not easy.

It is often a habit that when we encounter some difficulties, we turn towards distraction. We just go do something else that's not as difficult or not as demanding, or maybe we just try to comfort ourselves. If it feels uncomfortable to feel like, "Oh, this is hard," we might go eat some bonbons or Doritos, or whatever it might be. Or we might just watch another YouTube video, or turn on Netflix.

This distraction or comforting ourselves is something that, maybe even without really understanding why we're doing it, is so easy to slip right into. Our society really promotes this: "Here, you'll feel better, watch this, click here, buy that." It's all about this.

But there's this thing—maybe you've heard about it—the First Noble Truth in Buddhist teachings: there are difficulties. It's just the way the human experience is. It doesn't have to mean we're a bad person. It doesn't have to mean that we're terribly failing. It doesn't have to mean that we shouldn't do something. It doesn't have to mean anything when we encounter difficulties; it's just difficult. And this is the First Noble Truth, the truth of dukkha³.

As many of you know, dukkha has a wide range of translation, from just mildly irritating or a little bit annoying to just awful beyond belief. We might sometimes think, "Well, I shouldn't ever get sick. I shouldn't ever have injuries. I shouldn't ever feel disappointed. I shouldn't have obstacles to the things that I want. I shouldn't have to confront death, my own death or the deaths of the people that I love and care about." We can often slip into this thinking: "I wish there weren't any dukkha. I hope there won't be any dukkha." This is also part of the human experience.

We might even say it's biological; maybe evolution supported this idea that we're not always thinking about everything that's going to go wrong. Instead, we have a certain optimism that allows us to not always be focusing on that.

But when we often have this idea that we shouldn't have dukkha, that there shouldn't be dukkha at all, then we become disillusioned, or maybe just run out of steam. When what we're aspiring for, a direction we want to go, turns out to be tough—or maybe it's not even tough, maybe it's just uncomfortable—then our energy or our enthusiasm just kind of dissipates.

But I think all of us have this recognition, too, that if we're not facing or accepting in some way that there are difficulties, the difficulties just increase. They don't go away just because we're ignoring them or burying our heads in the sand. This dukkha increases unless we have a way to turn towards it and acknowledge, "Yes, this is hard. Yes, this is uncomfortable. Yes, this is dukkha. Yes, this is awful." It might be awful.

There is something that happens when we turn towards it. Not because it's exactly what we want—maybe it's exactly what we don't want—but it's a way to stop the denying, to stop turning away, and just turn towards it and say, "Yep, this sucks," because that's sometimes how it is.

We can turn towards these things with a certain amount of courage, thoughtfulness, awareness, and attention. The Buddha talked about this. The Pali word is khanti⁴. I'm going to translate it here as tolerance, this willingness to stand when there's discomfort, the ability to withstand discomfort and withstand dukkha.

Through the dukkha, the difficulty, and the uncomfortableness, it's not just trying to fix everything out there. We are always trying to fix everything out there, and it doesn't work so well. We can't just do this never-ending fixing, manufacturing, manipulating, creating, and trying to get everything just right. It doesn't work. Instead, the focus is on our relationship to the dukkha.

We can't make all dukkha go away. This is part of life, with no escaping it, but we can affect our relationship to it. I think this is a big part of what the Buddha is pointing to when he talks about this First Noble Truth: there is dukkha. Let's not pretend, let's not wish that it were different, and let's not blame ourselves for every single difficulty. I'm not saying that we don't have a role, but we often can slip into this inner critic that gets really loud whenever there are some difficulties, thinking, "I must be doing something wrong if I'm uncomfortable." Difficulties are just difficulties.

And so this khanti, this tolerance, is like adjusting our attitude towards suffering. It is a willingness to have some tolerance to be able to withstand when there's some difficulty. Because the alternatives when we have this dukkha is that we might respond with an expression like the gnashing of teeth, the wailing: "No, not me, I don't want it." That happens. But the trick here is maybe not to get stuck there, because then you're stuck.

Rather than this lamentation or wailing, or rather than getting caught—and maybe there's some terrible injustice there, and sometimes we can get stuck there with the dukkha. I'm not saying that there aren't injustices. I'm asking, can we not get stuck there? Can we say, "Yes, this is an injustice," and be able to step away and have a relationship with it, as opposed to just being completely subsumed by it? As opposed to feelings of dejection, gloom, misery, or some of these things that we humans like to do, collapsing into the difficulties.

So khanti, this tolerance of difficulty, is a way that we can cultivate and develop our capacity to be with difficulties, to be with hard stuff. It turns out we can train this up. We can do it intentionally, and sometimes it happens unintentionally just because lots of uncomfortable things come our way.

You might even say that meditation practice helps support being with dukkha, because meditation is not always perfect, fun, or blissful. There's a way in which we think, "Okay, I wish that timer would go off, I wish that bell would go off." Just to notice, "I don't want to be here. Oh yeah, this is uncomfortableness." Maybe feel into it: what does it feel like? It feels like there's energy in the legs, like I want to bolt, or maybe there's a lot of spinning in the mind, like, "Oh my gosh, this is never going to end."

But just to be able to notice, "Okay, this is uncomfortable, and I'm just going to sit here until the bell rings. I'm not going to sneak a look at my watch; I'm just going to sit until the bell rings." This is minor—hopefully, it's minor in the grand scheme of things—but don't underestimate how powerful it can be to just practice here: "Okay, this is uncomfortable. Can I just be here with the uncomfortableness without slipping into all the things that we can slip into?" It's quite something. It's something that we do; maybe that's not the greatest difficulty, but doing it again and again really can have a big impact.

I know I've told this story a number of times, but this was so clear for me before I started meditating. I was doing some yoga. I did all kinds of styles, but this one in particular was Yin Yoga, where you take a pose and you hold it for a long time. In the beginning, the pose is comfortable and you're like, "This is nice, yeah, great, look at me, I'm doing yoga." And then one minute, two minutes, five minutes, seven... and the body just does not like it.

The yoga teacher—I didn't know it at the time, but she was also a meditation teacher and in the Buddha Dharma as well—would give little mini Dharma talks while we were sitting there in agony. It was great. It just helped me so much to realize, "Okay, that was uncomfortable and I survived it, and I could stretch afterwards and shake it off, and it was okay." Just like after meditation, you can stand up and open your eyes, and it's okay.

Just that little bit of confidence helped, so that the next time I was having a difficult conversation with one of my coworkers, I recognized, "Oh yeah, this is uncomfortable, but I've done this before, I can do this again." In the same way with meditation practice, if we're sitting at home, we might have the habit of thinking, "Oh, I'm done, I want to be done, I'm just going to get up and do whatever I want to do." But just to stay, to recognize, "Yeah, this is uncomfortable," and stay anyways. Or just get to the cushion when maybe you don't even want to sit. Maybe it's the last thing you want to do, but saying, "Okay, this is difficult, not what I want to do, but I'm going to do it anyway." It's easy to be dismissive of these small, minor things: "Yeah, yeah, okay, we're supposed to meditate all the time." But this is exactly how we gain confidence and stretch our capacity with difficulties: by being with difficulties.

With meditation, we can tune in and allow ourselves not to fall into overwhelm. We can be with the experience and realize, "Oh, it's not what I chose, but it's okay. It's okay." Khanti, this idea of tolerance, is this tolerance of some difficulties.

I want to say something about what tolerance is not. We might think that it's a passive acquiescence, a kind of collapse, like, "Okay," instead of sitting up with it and being like, "This is difficult, and I'm going to be with it." So khanti is not this passive disconnection. It's not just acquiescing. Instead, it's saying, "No, this is difficult, and I'm going to be here as best I can." It's also not cowardice. It's not running away or pretending it's not there. Nor is it a type of denial that it's difficult; we're not trying to pretend that it's different. We're not saying, "Ah, it's not so bad." It's saying, "No, this actually is uncomfortable, and that's okay."

There's a poem that talks about this a little bit. I love this poem because it has a little bit of whimsy and a little bit of biochemistry in it. I love biochemistry, of course! And it also has truth in it. How can you go wrong with a title like this? "Self-Portrait as Root Vegetable." [Laughter] "Self-Portrait as Root Vegetable" by Rosemarry Wahtola Trommer⁵. She's a lovely poet; she's a practitioner, and a lot of her poems have to do with practice. It's a very short poem, and it goes like this:

It’s science, of course, how the sugars in beets will caramelize when heated, a process that includes conversion, condensation, dehydration, collisions, and the formation of thousands of volatile compounds, and though it’s not simple, and though this process of sweetening is not fully understood, sweetening happens every time. Is it wrong this gives me hope for other hard and bitter things? Just asking the question already I feel myself begin to soften.

You can see how she has this shift in her relationship to hard and bitter things. She's saying that when you cook beets, you apply some warmth to them, you give them some attention, and then they shift and change towards some sweetening. What happens if we apply some warmth and some attention to other things in our lives that are difficult? Maybe they're a little bit like beets. Maybe they'll sweeten. Maybe they won't be delicious, but they will shift.

Something else that I appreciate about this poem is that Rosemarry Wahtola Trommer, the poet—the protagonist in this poem—keeps in mind that things change. This is a key insight, that things change. There's this inconstancy; there's impermanence. She's saying, "Oh yeah, beets change. They used to be hard and bitter, and they become sweeter. Maybe other things can." This way of just asking the question is a way of no longer being lost in the difficulty of what's happening, but remembering, "Oh yeah, things change, and there can be a different relationship here. It can sweeten."

Tolerance, or khanti, is this recognition that there is suffering—the First Noble Truth. And of course, the Third Noble Truth is that there is the absence of suffering, and the Fourth Noble Truth is that there is a path leading to the cessation of suffering. Many of you will know that the first step in the Eightfold Path is Right View, and Right View includes the Four Noble Truths. The beginning of this path towards awakening includes Right View. We could say it's the beginning, or we could say that maybe Right View is the most important, which is why it's first: just to have this recognition that there are things that lead towards suffering, and there are things that don't lead towards suffering. This is a primary differentiation in our practice that we can work with.

So, why is it that sometimes it's hard to do things? Because it's hard. Difficulties are difficult. But there's another reason—well, there are lots of reasons, but one other thing I'd like to talk about relates to the same Pali word, khanti. If we have an aspiration and a direction in which we want to go, it takes time. These things take time. Of course, we want instant gratification. We want things to be the way that we want them to be as soon as they can be. And so this word, khanti, can also be translated as patience.

Impatience arises when, let's say, we're standing in a line, and imagination out of nothing creates a different scenario in which we're not standing in that line. It creates an idea—maybe we're sitting at a beach, maybe we're driving our car, maybe we're doing whatever—and superimposes it onto what's actually happening, and we get irritated. This is impatience: this sense that things have to be different, that they should be different. It's usually just based on something we imagined, which we compare to our actual experience, and we don't like the comparison. So we have this wish, or maybe even insistence, that it be different somehow.

I've noticed this myself. I was watching myself when I was impatient in a line not too long ago. Actually, the line wasn't so long; there was one person in front of me, and that person was spending a long time with the clerk. I was watching myself have a little bit of impatience, and I noticed a feeling of intolerance—the opposite of khanti—like, "This shouldn't be happening." A little bit of resentment slips in there too, a little bit of anger, a little bit of ill will: "Why are you making me wait? Don't you realize I have to do X, Y, and Z still?"

Impatience gets in the way of this sweetening relationship we could have with the difficulty that's happening. When there's impatience, there's contraction, and there isn't a sense of openness. We can't really be open to other ideas or views; we're just collapsed into this rigidness of intolerance. Within it is this little insinuation that somehow we're superior. This isn't the direction towards more freedom.

Instead, patience is this way to stick with things even when they take a long time to show results. I think patience is one of these unsung qualities for everything, especially in Buddhist practice. We don't talk about it so much; it's not in that many lists. It is a pāramī⁶, and as one of the pāramīs—we could translate the word pāramī as perfection—it means that it's connected with liberation and with compassion.

Patience is a way in which we are open to what's actually happening, having the willingness to do what needs to be done however long it takes. This is what leads to freedom—freedom from anything, really, freedom from whatever it is that we feel shackled by. It takes time. Everything takes time. Learning new things takes time. Doing things differently and changing our default thinking takes time.

When we have this sense of patience, we focus on what we're doing in this moment. We let the next moments take care of themselves, allowing this moment to be. We are present for what's happening right now. You can see how this is part of tolerance, too, the same word, khanti. We're just like, "Okay, this is the experience. I'm standing here thinking that this shouldn't take so long, but it seems like it's taking an awfully long time. I can have patience. I don't have to whip out my phone and entertain myself. I can just be here. It's okay. It's not my favorite thing, but it's not so bad." Have some of this tolerance of the present moment.

Otherwise, the mind thinks, "When is this going to end? If this weren't happening, then I could do this." We can get into a spinning of the mind. But just stand with our bodies and with our minds, simply to be there. There's also a way that patience has a focus on consistency: just showing up again. We didn't get the results we wanted, we're not finished yet, so we'll do it again. Whatever needs to be done, we'll just do it again and again.

But with the recognition that all these "agains" aren't exactly the same. Some parts of them may seem similar, but we all know that you probably take showers regularly, but not every single shower is exactly the same. Maybe the water temperature is different, or the duration is different. Something that we do over and over again is not always exactly the same. In the same way, having some consistency with our meditation practice, or whatever practice we're doing, is a way we can understand what it means to be patient.

Maybe something else I will say about patience is that patience and not being angry kind of go together. I like what the author Dale Wright⁷ writes: "Impatience and anger are not the same, but they live in the same neighborhood." Impatience and anger have a simmering quality to them. One way in which they are related is that they're not opposites, but when we're angry, we can't be patient, and when we're impatient, we can't be without anger. When there's impatience, we're creating the conditions for anger.

As a support for patience, we might notice our anger. Notice what gets us irritated, even if we're not completely angry. What gets under our skin? Is there a way that we can learn to tolerate things getting under our skin? It won't lead to anger if we practice khanti. It supports patience and perseverance, doing things again and again, which helps lead us towards our aspirations—whatever it is that we want to do with our lives, what's important for us, what's meaningful for us.

Of course, mindfulness is a support for this too: just being aware of what's happening in our experience.

What is it that gets in the way when we set out to do something, when we have a goal and a direction, but we don't do it? One of the reasons is maybe there's not quite enough khanti, tolerance, and patience. These are things that we often don't think about. We think, "Oh, I just have to be better organized," or there are all these obvious things we think we should do. But I think some of these qualities are really the unsung heroes of practice. The beautiful thing about them is that they can be increased. It's not like we arrive with factory settings that can't be changed. We can stretch our capacity.

So khanti, one of the pāramīs that the Buddha talked about, can help us with adhiṭṭhāna, with resolve. It can help us with this exertion or striving, working towards something that is important to us. With that, I'll open it up to see if there are some questions or comments.

Q&A

Questioner: Beautiful talk, very clear and helpful. One of my Achilles heels—I have more than one—is being impatient. I just wanted to share a comment or guidance that Gil⁸ gave me once. I talked to him and said, "I'm so impatient," and he said, "Be impatient with impatience." And it works! It works fantastically because as soon as I start on the cycle, it seems like somehow that energy of being impatient with it stops it. It's really interesting, so I thought I'd share that little nugget. Thank you.

Diana Clark: I love it. Thank you. "Being impatient with impatience." Thank you, Catherine. Does anybody else have a comment or question? Okay, well, I wish you all a good evening and safe travels home. Thank you.