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Waking Up in the Now - Maria Straatmann

The following talk was given by Maria Straatmann at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 03, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Waking Up in the Now

Good evening. Hoping that my voice does the thing it's supposed to do, which is be mellifluous.

Today I received an email from someone, and she used a phrase that said, "It's a busy December, but let's see... not staying unfrazzled for the most part." You know, you got that double negative in there. I wasn't sure whether she was frazzled or unfrazzled.

There is this pressure around the holidays that has to do with how we're supposed to feel. We're supposed to feel goodwill, "Happy Holidays," and so on. There is the pressure of family or no family, gifting or not gifting, being short on time or short on cash, or worrying about whether I am going to get this done or not done. And of course, then there are all the usual things that happen: I'm working or not working, I have my social activities, my financial issues, my family issues—the stuff of life.

Sometimes we feel like we need an antidote to life. It’s just too much stuff, and we're carrying around all of this accumulation of things that we're keeping track of. It feels like a load that we're carrying around, and it's quite common to say, "I'm feeling frazzled." We have the list of things—the to-do list, or the rehashing of the conversation that we had today, or the email that we're writing about something that we're going to do, or the conversation I was going to have with my insurance company on why my auto rates went up 50% over last year. Apparently, that's happening everywhere in California.

Meditation can seem like a refuge, a respite. But what I'd like to do is give both my friend and you a gift: the gift of ease even in the midst of all the rest of that stuff, one that doesn't rely on you being in meditation to feel at ease. Now, if I had a wand, I would just do that, but I left my fairy godmother wings somewhere. I don't have them anymore.

So, here's a quote from Andrew Olendzki from his book Unlimiting Mind: The Radically Experimental Psychology of Buddhism. It's a relatively new book of his.

"Let go for the moment the impulse for sensory gratification. Hold off annoyance toward what you don't like. Settle down any restlessness in mind and body. Stir up energy when you feel sluggish, and postpone thinking over any doubts you may have. As you do this successfully for several moments in a row, you will find the mind gradually becoming more tranquil, more focused, more clear, and more powerful. The Buddha might have said, 'I know of no single thing more healthy than doing one thing at a time.'"

Now, of course, I love this quote, but it sounds like you've already acquired the ability to do all these things. I want to put an underline under the "one moment at a time" part. Because the truth is we only live in one moment at a time. It's only our tendency to drag our entire life story behind us that makes it seem otherwise.

Recently I went to a conversation at Stanford between some people in Humanities and a man named Alan Lightman. He's an author and a professor at MIT in both physics and humanities—a very unusual guy, a philosopher-physicist. He talked about an experience he had that he wrote about in a book called Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine. He also had a PBS series of a similar title.

In the experience, he described taking a boat off to the island at night. He suddenly stopped the boat, laid down on the deck, and looked up at the stars. As he lay there, he suddenly had the experience of just merging with the stars, and everything just became one. Everything was happening now. Just now. Everything.

You may have had a similar sort of transcendent experience yourself, where everything was included in just that moment. He doesn't try to explain that in physical terms, and neither do I. But what similar experiences have led me to conclude is that the Now is really important. The question is: how do I get into the now? When am I in the now, and when am I somewhere else?

In the last year, I have lost a number of people really dear to me, and so I have moments of grief that sort of overtake me unsuspectingly. One of those events happened on Saturday. I was just suddenly overwhelmed, and my husband took one look at me and said, "You look like you are really suffering."

I said, "Well, yeah, I am."

He said, "Do you want to go out to lunch? Do you want to go out to breakfast?" He wanted to fix it right away.

I said, "Well, let's go to that exhibit we've been wanting to go to."

So we went off to an exhibit at the Legion of Honor to see Mary Cassatt. The idea in my head was: grief is here, but so is the rest of my life. So is everything else. It isn't that I can ignore grief or make it go away or change it, but there is also this.

We jumped in the car and went off to the exhibit. While we were waiting for our timed tickets, we went into this room that had decorated porcelain—a fancy porcelain room of different kinds of dishes, some made like artichokes or with elaborate painting. They have a new piece in there that is made with Kintsugi art. Is anybody familiar with that?

Kintsugi¹ is a Japanese technique where they take broken pieces of porcelain and literally glue them together with resin that has powdered gold in it. So you have rivulets of gold streaming, holding the pieces together. The resultant pieces sometimes are more beautiful than the originals. I've recently seen this in a couple of different places, never having seen it before, and they're quite beautiful.

This new artwork is a large sculpture, and there must be maybe 20 different plates that have been mended using this Kintsugi technique. In the center was an assembled porcelain piece of Kuan Yin², the female representation of the Buddha of Compassion.

I'm looking at this piece and thinking, "Okay, here are the broken pieces." The broken pieces of my life, the broken pieces of your life. They're put together and held together by this shining gold. I wouldn't be experiencing grief if love wasn't there to begin with. They travel together. They're not separate from one another.

This is true of all the things in our life; pleasant and unpleasant travel together. They're not independent of one another. We tend to get stuck in "I like what's pleasant" and "I don't like what's unpleasant and I need to fix it." Human beings tend to want to fix everything. We want to manage it, control it, make it the way we want it.

But equanimity is the space between wanting and not wanting, liking and not liking. Equanimity is not having a preference. It doesn't mean that pleasant and unpleasant don't exist. It doesn't take the texture out of life. It doesn't mean that sadness and gladness are not both present. It means that we ride the place of not grasping at one or the other—not saying "I must have that" or "I can't be happy." It is allowing both to be present in one's life.

It's Kintsugi. It's being present with all of what occurs in life and saying, "Ah, life. This is what's happening. It's like this today. This is here."

Where we get into trouble is we say, "Oh, it's been this way," and we start justifying why we're angry or upset or happy. "I want more of this" or "I want less of that." We project it into the future: "It's going to be like this forever," or "The way that I protect my future is if I make more of this."

The trick to being at ease in life is to give up all hope of a better past, or that we can control the future. Neither is possible. What we do have some influence on is how we meet the present. How am I now? Right now, what am I seeing?

Here I am. I'm tired. I'm sore. I'm upset. I'm happy. And what else is happening? What else is here?

It's really an opening up and not abiding only by the story that we came into the moment with. It's seeing that experience is an accumulation of moments, and it's only our wanting to carry along my story—the story of my life—that gets us in a rut, that makes us want to justify what's going on now or explain it to ourselves.

When I was upset on Saturday, I knew the proximal cause of why I was upset. I was thinking about a particular person. I was upset thinking, "I can't do this, I can't talk to this person again." It was very sad for me. But it wasn't the only thing that was true. It was just one thing that was true.

We're told that we have to let go of toxic feelings like anger or displeasure or ill will. Well, what if you can't let go of ill will? What if you wake up and you're just cranky and you don't know what to do about it? Or you're sad? Okay, I don't want to be sad—well, at least be the person who doesn't want to be sad. Give yourself some credit. But it is not the only thing that's true about you, and it's only true in this moment. It doesn't have to be true in the next moment.

So, what do we do about it? How do we meet that? How do we find ourselves in a moment without becoming overwhelmed by whatever emotional overwhelm is there?

Strong feelings occur—frustration, being flustered. How do I become peaceful in the midst of that?

The first thing is: Don't make it yours.

It's not my frustration, my anger, my sadness. It's just sadness. It's just anger. I don't mean to diminish it or dismiss it, but it's not yours. It's just here. This is amazing practice to realize it's not yours and it's not you. It's just here. It's happening in this moment. It's a condition like any other condition.

It's only when we try to explain it to ourselves that it gets prolonged. Emotions actually have a very short lifetime neurologically, but if we keep telling ourselves the story or explaining it to ourselves, we keep restarting the clock. We keep re-initiating the stimulus. So it isn't a matter of ignoring it or pushing it away or saying it's not here.

If you have a billboard of information, you stick it on there. It's there, maybe right out in front, right in the middle. But there's a lot more space on the board. It's not everything. And it isn't mine. It's just a prominent notice. It's just there.

I had foot surgery earlier this summer, and it is frustratingly persistent that I have pain in my foot—not where I expected to have it, but in my big toe. Just will not go away. It doesn't hurt now; it only hurts when I walk. No problem—only when I walk. So I walk and I go, "There's that toe again." It's not debilitating, it just hurts. It's not even my toe that hurts; it's just pain. It's just a signal, like a loud noise. It's not mine. It's just a signal. And I have to decide how much attention to pay to that signal. That's all.

What else am I aware of? There are all kinds of conditions that come to this moment—conditions determined by who else is in the room, whether I'm hearing something interesting, whether I'm bored out of my mind, whether I'm at peace for other reasons. That influences how much attention something gets. If I can look at it and see it as just that, it has less impact on the stories that I tell myself.

It is understanding how the mind works. Seeing how the mind is working in the moment influences how much influence that emotion has on us. Seeing it. Just seeing it. That's all. It's not control, it's just seeing it.

The second thing is to not have an opinion about it.

By that, I mean not having a preference for it or against it. Now, I can certainly say I prefer that my toe doesn't hurt. But then, in a moment as I'm walking along, I have to be able to say, "Okay, I prefer walking to worrying about whether my toe is going to hurt." I don't prefer not walking. So the pain is unimportant until it becomes important.

The preference has to do with grasping on one side or the other. It's whether I hold on to it. It's the preference that is the problem; that's where the suffering comes. "It has to be this way." But when we are just in the moment, in this room, in this moment, it's what's true in this moment—not what I'm afraid is going to happen in the next moment. Does that make sense? It's awareness without wanting. This is the goal: awareness without wanting. I'm aware of it, but I'm not wanting it to be other than it is. It's the leaning one way or the other, leaning toward or pushing away.

So one thing to ask yourself in any moment is: Where am I now?

This may seem like an odd question to ask yourself, but it's an important question. Am I here in the room with what's happening, or am I in another place? Is the mind here with me, or am I thinking about—let's take the question of grief—am I thinking about this person located in that other place, or am I in this room? Am I thinking about something that happened before, or am I in this room? Am I here in this body? Even though I may be crying in this body, my mind may be somewhere else. "Oh, that's interesting, I'm not actually here."

Where am I? Or am I worried about what's going to happen tomorrow? "Oh, tomorrow I'm going to feel really bad because this is going to happen."

How to get into the now is to say: Where am I? Where's my mind? Where's my body? Am I in my body or am I in the concept of my mind?

It's sort of like when you're following your breath, and you're actually thinking about something else, and you say, "Whoops. Nope. Yep, I'm back on the breath in your body." Where am I? It opens up a sense of curiosity and of opportunity. It gets you out of the conceptual world where you think you know what you're doing and you think you know where you are.

When you find yourself thinking about your condition: Where am I really? Am I here or not here?

You want to be in the place of not knowing. Awareness is asking the question: What is to be known here? Not coming into the moment knowing already. Give up knowing it. Awareness is asking, "What is to be known here?"

The second question is: Who am I in the room with?

Am I in the room with somebody who's not here? Am I in the room with you and I'm aware of you, or I'm not aware of you because I'm in my head and I'm somewhere else? Or I'm thinking about what I'm going to say to you, so I'm not aware of you. Or I'm not aware of myself; I'm not even aware that I'm standing in the room. Who am I in the room with?

When my husband said to me, "You look like you're really suffering," that gave me the opportunity to say, "Here I am visibly suffering, and there's someone in the room with me. What's he experiencing?" Which got me solidly in the room and out of my head. It's not trivial.

And the last thing is: What is my intention in this moment?

To know your intention, you have to know the attitude of your mind. It's a quick survey. Am I sad? Am I anxious? Am I angry? Am I happy? Am I light? Am I agitated? Am I irritable? What is the attitude right here? It's not the mood so much as the condition. Am I just frazzled? The word you choose is not so important as being aware of the condition of your mind.

That information tells you, "I need to be vigilant about what I'm doing," or "I'm peaceful." Because then you can check in with: What is my intention for now?

What comes to mind for me very often is: I wish to be kind.

In the moment when I'm stopping to say "What is my intention?", there's a chance for that to arise. I wish to be kind. And when I know who is in the room, who I am with, and I wish to be kind, then I have an opportunity in that moment to be really here and create the conditions in my mind for the next moment that's likely to be much more light than whatever the moment was that brought me here.

I'm going to tell you a really quick story. When I was in one of these agitated minds, I was determined to take some packages to UPS. I had a half an hour, and I live a mile from UPS, and I thought, "No problem, I could do this." I was very irritable. I drive over to UPS, get my packages, go in. There's nobody waiting except the UPS person is in the middle of doing a notary job. If you've ever watched somebody do a notary job, it could be fifteen pages or one. I'm thinking, "Oh no, I don't have much time." I can feel the irritability coming up.

I tell myself, "You have plenty of time. Just be at ease. No problem here."

She said, "I'll be with you shortly."

I said, "No problem."

Ten minutes later, now I'm getting itchy. I'm thinking, "No problem. I know it's just irritability is here. No problem." Some other UPS guy comes in and he's walking really slowly, and I'm noticing the mind going, "Why is he walking so slowly?" Now, Maria, he doesn't know you're irritable. This is not his problem either.

Eventually, the woman finishes what she does, rushes over. It takes her all of a minute to take care of my packages. I leave and I go out. I'm still hurrying, right, because I got to get home for this Zoom call. There's somebody standing very close to my car, and I'm thinking, "You know, if I just get in my car I'm going to scare her."

So I just said, "You know, I don't want to startle you, but I'm about to move that car."

She looked at me and she goes, "Oh!"

I thought, "Wow, that was cool." Just the act of constantly reminding myself to be kind allowed me to be kind. And the irritability left. It wasn't like I set out to do something kind; it was like the moment arose because I kept setting it up in my mind that I intended to be kind. It's not like I was determined to be kind. It's more like: what you hold in your mind-heart is what you create in the next moment.

That's why it's so important to be in the now and not to hold on to whatever that attitude of mind is. Whatever it is, just be in the now. Kintsugi with whatever it is, with no opinion.

I'm going to close with a poem from Joseph Goldstein's book. This is called "A January Morning."

Unrelenting Gray bears down,
subduing Morning Light.
It might be enough to dampen our Spirits,
except—
except for that secret Stillness within.
Not wanting,
not planning,
not intending.
Moments of Silence,
forgetting for some time who we think we are.

What I wish for you is moments of stillness when you forget who you think you are. Thank you.

Q&A

Question: When you were referencing grief... and bringing yourself back to the present moment, where you're at, who you're with. But I guess I just wonder about... sometimes maybe you want to think about the person that's passed, or that it's comforting in a way to think of them or maybe you talk to them because that brings you comfort. It's kind of a continuing bond type of thing, even if they're not here in the room necessarily.

Maria: There are different conditions. What I was describing before was a condition where I was really suffering. In that moment, to conjure up moments of our conversations probably would have only increased the suffering. "Oh, this won't happen again, this won't happen again."

In other moments, under other conditions, I might want to say, "Oh, we had some great times," and recall that. Now what's going on in the moment in my heart is feelings of love and peace. There's a very different feeling. The comforting feeling is different than the suffering of loss, the suffering of wishing they were here. Wishing things were different is not the same as recalling a memory that reinforces why the love is here now.

I'll give you a different example that's a little closer to what you were really asking about. My brother passed away suddenly this summer, and I was very close to him. What I remember, even in moments of great grief, was one particular conversation we had when I visited him in prison. He was confessing to me things about his life. I was holding his hand. It was as if he was saying, "What if I told you this, would you still love me then?"

What I remember is: it didn't matter what he told me. I still loved him. And how powerful that was for both of us—that it was independent of what he did, that love. That's what I remembered even in the moments of deepest grief: how strong the connection to him was. So that's a case where both things were there, and it was comforting to me at the same time as it was intensely painful that he was gone. Both things were true at the same time.

It also is a lesson for me that one has to be present for oneself regardless of what one has done. To be present for oneself. And that question of "Who's in the room?" has to do with being able to trust oneself to be present for one's own strong emotions. When you ask yourself, "Who's in the room? Am I actually in the room?", it is a matter of: Do I trust myself to be here with this strong emotion?

It's only by showing up that you can answer the question for yourself. Can I be present for this emotion, this person? Not the person I was then—this person. Can I be present for it? Because in this moment, you're a different person than you were then.

There's an alternative poem to the one I read you, also from J's book. This is called "Ode to Non-being," and it opens with a quote from Zhuangzi³: "If now on top of this non-being is, who can comprehend it?"

Non-being
that is what Matrix Keeps Us wandering
in the Dreamscape of the Mind.
What if the Matrix is beingness itself?
Castles of sand at Water's Edge
where aging children play,
and Shiva laughs as breaking waves
turn castles into caves.
In zero, all the numbers of the world are freed.
Who will Brave this Embrace of peace,
that mysterious absence,
terrifying at first,
and then release.

This refers to the willingness to enter every moment of now without knowing who you are—without knowing in advance who you are.

Just in case you want to take that step toward non-being, there is peace and release in not being so sure you are who you think you are.

Please have a wonderful holiday season. Good night.