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Noble Dukkha And Well Being - Tanya Wiser

The following talk was given by Tanya Wiser at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on January 22, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Noble Dukkha And Well Being

Welcome. Is anybody here for their first time? Ah, nice, welcome. Insight Meditation Center welcomes everybody.

How many of you listened to Gil's talk last week? I have been enjoying this nice tradition he has of starting the year with the Four Noble Truths¹. I've been teaching on them, and other people have as well. I really liked what he offered, and I'm going to fold in some of what he shared into what I'm going to offer today. But I'm going to start by asking: who here doesn't know what the Four Noble Truths are?

Okay, great. I'll put a little context around it before I get started. The one thing I want to do is differentiate what I'll call for the moment "Noble Dukkha²" from "heedless Dukkha." I also want to talk about Dukkha and well-being, because they really come together, or at least they can.

The First Two Truths

The Four Noble Truths are said to be the first teaching of the Buddha. There is a sutta³ quote where Sāriputta⁴, one of the main students of the Buddha and a great teacher of the Dharma, compared the Four Noble Truths to an elephant's footprint. He says that just like any animal in the whole kingdom's footprint can fit inside of the elephant's footprint, so too can all of the teachings of the Buddha fit inside the Four Noble Truths. It's a very significant teaching.

Essentially, the way it's traditionally taught is: there is suffering (and I'll talk about how to interpret that), there's the cause of the suffering, there's the end of suffering, and then there's the way to end all suffering. I like to pair the first and second truth, and the third and fourth truths, so maybe we can call them two sets of noble truths.

The first two are really about the direction of unwholesomeness and not doing well. Dukkha, which Gil likes to translate as "pain," can be thought of as ranging from a super subtle disease, or irritation, to total distress. There is just this huge variation. Pain can be super mild—just this little rough patch on your skin that feels a little bit sensitive to the cold—all the way to your leg being broken, or worse.

The word in Pali for the cause of Dukkha is Taṇhā⁵, which is classically translated as craving. Today, what I want to talk about it as is resistance and compulsion. Resistance and compulsion cause pain. That's pretty relatable, right? Is that relatable for you to understand? When we resist things, even slightly—just think about that subtlest resistance of, "Oh, I don't want that"—there is the subtlest pain. And compulsion, when we feel compelled, there's a discomfort to that, all the way up to extreme discomfort. These two forces can move us, if we are heedless and unmindful, toward more and more difficulty.

The third and the fourth truths are about the end of suffering and what leads us to the end of suffering, and that is the Noble Eightfold Path. These are the teachings of the Buddha that guide us in how to engage with our life and our practice.

Two Kinds of Well-Being

So, we have Noble Dukkha, heedless (unheeded) Dukkha, and well-being. I'll take a minute to talk a little bit about two kinds of well-being.

There can be hedonic well-being. "Hedonic" is a term used to describe the treadmill of life where we're always trying to get, do, and feel better. It's sort of like me trying to get the microphone sound just right; there's this trying to adjust and always moving towards trying to get things perfect. We do things like go to the spa and do all this extra stuff to make ourselves feel good. It can be really helpful, actually, but when it's heedless, it just leads back to Dukkha.

Then there's eudaimonic⁶ well-being. Eudaimonic is a well-being that's the result of what the Buddha really talked about in terms of happiness. It's things like the bliss of blamelessness. It comes from showing up for others and ourselves in a way that we feel is blameless. It's not dropping our garbage on the ground, and instead putting it in a trash can, and being able to walk by other garbage and go, "Yes, I didn't do that." In a simple way, it's ethical action, wise action, and the result of those things.

I want to give you this idea because when I start to talk about Dukkha, if all you have in your mind is something that's very unpleasant and unhelpful—something you don't want—you might not hear my words the same way I'm hoping you will. There is Noble Dukkha that leads toward well-being.

Listening to Dukkha

Actually, I have learned to listen to Dukkha, and I have learned that I often feel very happy when I recognize Dukkha. When I see Dukkha, I know that there's an opportunity to suffer less.

When I don't listen to my Dukkha, when I'm not heeding it, it can become heedless Dukkha. That can be where we're trying to do things to make ourselves feel better, but we just keep making it worse and worse. We're ignoring the suffering and it just grows and grows because we're ignoring the problem. We're ignoring the pain, and the cause of the pain gets worse and worse because we're not listening.

If we're listening to Dukkha, it can inspire us to move toward hedonic pleasure. It can inspire us to move toward getting a piece of cake or shopping, using sense pleasures to try and make us feel better. That's not really the kind of well-being or the usefulness of Dukkha that would be considered Noble. Instead, there can be noticing Dukkha and turning inward instead of outward. Meeting that Dukkha with intimacy and curiosity, with this deep faith and understanding that it's there with a message. It's there inviting us to notice how we're engaging with our life in a way that's causing pain.

I think one of the things that is a little bit hard to think about when trying to differentiate these two kinds of well-being is that it's much easier for the mind to focus on something than nothing. If you look around this room right now, try to find empty space—a space that is not inhabited. I'm going to have you pause and try to keep your mind on that space for several seconds.

Just see what happens if you try and just look at emptiness, at nothingness. What happens in your mind? Did anyone notice that it's hard to keep your attention focused in that space? For me, I could feel a tug. I just want to look around, I want to find something more solid to look at. I think it is easier and more compelling for us to look for something to help us feel better than it is to practice letting go, renouncing, or turning inward.

Moral Injury and the Purpose of Pain

Physical pain is caused by some kind of injury. So maybe we think about resistance and compulsion as causing injury. As I was thinking about this, my mind went to the term "moral injury." It came up a lot in the pandemic because of doctors and healthcare professionals working in hospitals with people dying of COVID who were refusing vaccinations and denying that they had COVID.

It can happen in similar ways anywhere. Here's a definition: Moral injury is the damage done to one's conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one's own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct. This is actually, to me, a kind of definition of what the Buddha was teaching, and I connect this with Dukkha. We experience that kind of pain when there's damage done to our conscience, our awareness, our clarity, or our moral values.

Here's a thought question: What would happen if we didn't have Dukkha? What would life be like if Dukkha didn't exist?

When I was asking myself that question, it occurred to me that there are people who don't feel pain. There is a medical syndrome called congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP). I looked it up a little bit, and an article started by saying, "Pain is the body's way of telling us to be careful, but there are some who go their entire life without feeling it. Wow."

It goes on to say, "People with CIP would love to know what pain means and what it feels like to be in pain." It mentions that people assume feeling no pain is this incredible thing that almost makes you superhuman, but for people with CIP, it's the exact opposite. They would love to know what pain means and feels like. Without it, your life is full of challenges.

We often think that when we have Dukkha, that's the problem. But maybe it'd be a lot worse if we didn't have Dukkha. I feel pretty sure it would be. I really want to inspire you to have a different relationship with Dukkha. Can you come to appreciate Dukkha as a guide, as a messenger, as something Noble?

Dukkha as Rumble Strips

Think about Dukkha like a feedback mechanism. Some of you may have heard this example before, but it works really well for me. I think about Dukkha a little bit like rumble strips. You know what rumble strips are on the side of the highway? They're little divots in the cement, and if you drive on them, it gets really noisy and there's a lot of vibration.

When you hit those, what happens in your body? You tense up, you react. And then what might happen in your mind? Fear, anger, annoyance. We can drive on the rumble strips, we get startled, it can bring up fear, and then we can have a mental reaction. We might harp on ourselves for being so careless. We might be thinking to ourselves a little bit later that we should probably call Caltrans and report a complaint about these rumble strips because there could be a better way. Maybe it could be soft, jingly bells or something beautiful that helps us stay on the road instead of this terrible, awful feeling. So we can be planning what we're going to say, and crafting this letter, and contacting the governor, doing all this stuff.

Or, at some point, we can finally recognize that we hit the rumble strips because we were driving off the road. Because we weren't paying attention. Because we lost our mindfulness. And then we can go, "Oh, what would have happened if I had kept driving?" Then there might be this sense of relief and appreciation, and even gratitude for the rumble strips.

Maybe this is what happens with Dukkha. We react to the Dukkha, but we can help ourselves walk through this and come back to this place of being: "Oh my gosh, I'm so grateful. I'm so grateful that my finger hurt so I didn't keep cutting with a knife. I'm so grateful I'm listening to this Dukkha so I'm not continuing to cause harm to myself or others."

Working with Resistance and Compulsion

Gil has a quote I'll read: "In Buddhist shorthand, addictions, compulsions, obsessions, and attachments are referred to as clinging and craving (Taṇhā). When the contraction of clinging is pervasive, it leads to stress, which makes us vulnerable to such human instincts as fear, aggression, and greed. When these qualities are activated, it can be easy to behave in ways that further harm ourselves or others. Buddhism emphasizes that craving is a condition for further craving, and that intentions to harm tend to motivate more of the same."

This pairs this idea of injury and harm with how, when we don't listen to the Dukkha, those other energies grow.

Coming back to my own experience, I like these words "resistance" and "compulsion." I feel like they're relatable. I often feel my mind gets kind of lost when I hear the words clinging or craving, so I like this, and I encourage you to find your own liking words—whatever works for you that helps you feel that direct connection.

If I recognize resistance, I can ask: "What don't I want? What do I think should be different than the way it is?" Then I can get in there and figure out what it is I'm clinging to, which is often an idea, a belief, or a wish. And with compulsion, there is this feeling of "I want, I want, I want," or a push and pull at the same time. It can be quite tantalizing because there's this sense that if I just get myself what I'm wanting, it'll go away, I'll feel better.

This is where we get into the hedonic well-being that I mentioned earlier. "Oh, if I just go get this, if I just give myself that, I'll be relieved." But generally, we're being bamboozled, because it doesn't last very long. How often do you reach for something because it just sounds good, and then you find yourself reaching again and again and again for the same thing? Just another hunger and another hunger and another hunger.

[Applause]

Just to say a couple of words about working with this resistance or compulsion. I got a lovely email from Sayadaw U Tejaniya⁷ this morning. He has a short, daily mindfulness email that goes out, and it was the perfect little quote for today. He says, "If desire or aversion are overwhelming, awareness needs to be built up first before tackling them directly. In this case, it is better to use a neutral object to build continuity of awareness for as long as it takes."

He might mean breath, or walking, or knitting. It could be something that we're paying attention to and feeling as we do it, and we do it for as long as we need to build up our capacity to be present and stay aware. He said, "We don't have to deal with anything in the mind until awareness and wisdom are ready." It's nice to keep it simple, and to take care of ourselves, to get the quality of the mind in a place so that we can relate to the Dukkha as Noble Dukkha, and not be heedless with it.

As we start to relate to the Dukkha as noble, we will grow trust, faith, and confidence. We will start to feel that joy and well-being that comes up when we recognize the presence of the pain of Dukkha. As we do that, something inside of me grows wiser. I can feel it shifting and growing, and it's almost like something inside starts to have more trust. Trust even in me—whatever "me" is. Then there's more relaxing, more ease, more earned confidence.

There's a poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer⁸ on dealing with what she calls "the longing." That compulsion and resistance—how do we deal with this? How do we let it be? She says:

Let longing be longing.
Though it rises in me with incessant hunger,
though it clutches for my heart with outstretched hands,
pins me with pleading eyes,
let longing be longing.
Never has it worked to pretend I don't hear it,
as it shouts and demands,
or charms me with its silken promises.
In a vision I said no to the longing,
and the longing only grew.
But when I said, yes, longing, I see you...

She says some other sweet words, but essentially, the longing just becomes longing, and I am a woman who sometimes longs for what she cannot have.

This is all about getting into that right relationship with Dukkha so that it can be noble for us.

Becoming Noble Dukkha Trackers

The Noble Eightfold Path is a path, right? And Dukkha lets us know when we're on that path, like the rumble strips let us know when we're going off the road. Here's another quote from Gil:

"The ancient Buddhist metaphor of a path draws on the idea of a cleared passageway that allows one to move through an otherwise impassable forest. Just as a person brings their entire body along when walking on a forest path, a spiritual practitioner enters the Buddhist path by engaging all aspects of who they are. Yet while this physical path exists whether we walk on it or not, in the story, the Buddhist path exists only in our engagement with it."

So Dukkha only becomes noble when we engage with it. The path only becomes available to us when we engage with it. He says, "We create the path with the activities of our minds, hearts, and bodies."

There's this really great book I read several times this last year. It's called The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life by Boyd Varty⁹. He grew up in South Africa, and his family ended up creating a reserve. They take people on tours to track animals, but they don't kill the animals. It's a long story, but essentially he talks about becoming a tracker. I have this idea of becoming Noble Dukkha trackers. One of the lines that he says that I really like is: "I don't know where I'm going, but I definitely know how to get there." I love that.

Last week, Gil gave a talk on the Four Noble Truths on the three levels of mind, heart, and belly. I like to call listening to the full range of Dukkha a tracking exercise. We have to start by becoming aware of when Dukkha is present, right? And it requires us wanting to recognize Dukkha, wanting to track it, wanting to learn about it.

From the book, I'm going to read you some excerpts. This first excerpt, for me, is about the level of Dukkha on the mind level that Gil was talking about. He says: "Tracking is very much like learning a foreign language. Single tracks are words. You might see a few as you walk the trail, and they create a jerky first phrase. If you stop speaking and don't practice, the learning recedes. While the more you do it, the more natural and fluid it becomes."

For me, in the beginning when we're trying to track Dukkha, it's a little awkward. It's not a language we're used to speaking. Our mind is going to shift around between seeing Dukkha as a friend and sometimes as a foe. But the more you do it, the more natural and fluid it becomes.

He goes on to say: "One afternoon, the short phrases became flowing sentences. I was out alone, as Alex, one of my mates, had some other work to do back at the camp. I came across the tracks of a large rhino bull that had wallowed in a water hole, his body caked with a thick black mud. The track away from the water hole was fairly easy to follow because, as the rhino walked through the thick bush, a slick of mud had scraped off on the trees and bushes. His body was dripping with it. A Hansel and Gretel trail that I could easily follow from bush to mudded bush."

So often with Dukkha, when we first connect with it, it's pretty easy to see. Over time, maybe it gets more subtle, and that's when we start to move to the level of the heart.

He says: "After a few miles of tracking, I knew the mud on his body had begun to dry, and the dripping trail became more and more faint. And then there was no more mud. My eyes seamlessly shifted from the mud to the three-toed clover tracks he had left. And suddenly, the iterations of the track that my brain had stored as search images began to pop. I saw the track with ease. I noticed compressions, scuff marks, smooth bark where his three-ton body had brushed against a tree. I saw the grass laid flat in the imprint of a side toe, the half moon of a front toe. I was moving on his track fast and fluent. The easy trail had helped me to get out of my own head so I could relax into myself."

Moving into a more relaxed relationship with Dukkha, our heart can start to resonate with what's going on. We don't feel contracted and pulled back. We develop trust and faith that the Dukkha is noble. If we relate to it in the right way, our heart starts to trust.

And then we move into level three, the level of the belly. He describes it: "It was easy and natural. I had the feeling that I had gained entry into an entirely new dimension. I could anticipate the subtle shifts of this path, picking up the faintest of tracks like they were elaborate signs. In the same way that after months of being an outsider on a French exchange, the language comes and you suddenly belong to France, to the place, to the culture, to the people. Suddenly, I was part of the story of the bush."

It is possible that engaging with the Four Noble Truths can lead you into a whole new dimension, a whole new way of being in this world. You become the Eightfold Path. In the words of the Buddha, you become free.

I feel moved by my own reflections on freedom. I can just feel it in my body. I'm at the belly level in the moment.

Allowing Life

I think I'll just try and summarize and end with a poem, and emphasize that really what I'm talking about is our relationship to and with our experience. We can have a noble relationship with life and our experience, or we can have an ignoble relationship with our life and experience.

I find a huge part of creating a noble relationship with my life and experience has to do with recognizing what I can and cannot control. So much of having a noble relationship with life means to allow life, to allow what's happening to happen, and to see it and show up for it in a non-reactive way, but with responsibility.

This is a hard thing. In AA they have the Serenity Prayer. It goes like this: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

There's a version of this that I like very much, which is useful when one wants to have compassion for others, which is: "God, grant me the ability to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know it's me." [Laughter]

Yeah, so this is a noble relationship to life, and it requires allowing. Allowing life, allowing others. I hope you know it's not that we're passively allowing, right? It's not that we're not engaging. Mindfulness is necessary. We need to be in wise, noble relationship to what's happening, but to do that we have to first acknowledge and allow what's really going on. Not to be in conflict, because then we're resisting it or we're compulsively moving to try and change it.

Here is a poem by Danna Faulds¹⁰. It's called Allow:

There is no controlling life.
Try corralling a lightning bolt,
containing a tornado.
Dam a stream and it will create a new channel.
Resist, and the tide will sweep you off your feet.
Allow, and grace will carry you to higher ground.
The only safety lies in letting it all in –
the wild and the weak, fear, fantasies, failures and success.
When loss rips off the doors of the heart,
or sadness veils your vision with despair,
practice becomes simply bearing the truth.
Practice becomes simply bearing the truth.
And the choice to let go of your known way of being,
the whole world is revealed to your new eyes.

There's a lot more I could say, but I think that's a good place to end. Thank you. And if anybody has questions because I left you confused or disheartened, please come and talk to me afterwards. Thank you. May we all become Noble Dukkha trackers.