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Coming Home to Ourselves - Diana Clark
The following talk was given by Diana Clark at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on August 27, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Coming Home to Ourselves
There's a number of different ways in which we can talk about this path of practice, this movement towards greater ease and freedom. There's a number of different ways in which we might like to characterize what it is we're doing here, like why we even have a meditation practice to begin with. And one way we could talk about it, not the only way, but one way, is this idea of coming home to ourselves. Coming home, the sense of, "Oh yeah, I'm at home."
Certainly, this idea that maybe there's some ease when we're at home. We're thinking about home not literally, but metaphorically. This idea of not only coming home but also implies that we're not elsewhere. I'll talk about in a little bit more what that means to be elsewhere, but instead, this sense of when I think about what it's like to be at home, I'm thinking about wearing comfy clothes and my bare feet, just wandering around. Maybe I'm looking for my glasses. I'm often taking my glasses off at home and I'm like, "Where are my glasses?" So you know, things aren't necessarily as in focus, and I don't know, there's a certain amount of ease there. What does that mean to come home to a place where there's a certain amount of ease and this sense of "nowhere else to go"? Like there's not this sense that we need to be anywhere else, that that's just where we are and we're happy to be there.
Maybe there's this other way that we can think about coming home is this idea of like we don't have to be anybody else. I know when I was working in Corporate America, I wore very—this was some years ago—but I wore very formal clothing, you know, just kind of buttoned up, definitely more than I am here now, often wearing suits or something like this. And I couldn't wait to get home, just take all that off, you know. For my first meditation retreat, which was a 10-day retreat, I had forgotten what it's like to spend 10 days just in sweats and t-shirts. It was just quite something, like, wow. So just this idea of coming home, the sense of ease, and not having to be anybody else. I was partly dressing that way at work because I wanted people—I thought they would respect me or I don't know exactly what ideas I had, but you know, they had to look the part or people see me in a particular way or something like that.
Maybe we would also say that coming home is that we can express ourselves in a way that feels whatever is the easiest for us. Maybe that includes dancing around, singing in the shower, dancing and singing, whatever we're doing. But just this way that we can express what we want. Maybe there's a way we speak differently at home than we do when we're with others or in our professional roles.
But maybe there's something that's really important about this idea of coming home, and that is this idea of safety, of feeling safe. And again, I want to talk about this metaphorically because I want to acknowledge and recognize that for some people, being literally at home isn't a safe place for them, either emotionally or physically. This is a terrible, awful thing that happens. But is there a way in which we can feel safe? That we can feel like we don't have to be guarded, that we don't have to be bracing ourselves?
Because there's something that definitely happens with a meditation practice. As the mind and the body start to settle with meditation, either during a particular sit or just as we do more and more meditation, we start to become more and more sensitive to the ways in which we are bracing ourselves or not quite at ease. This way in which we don't feel safe, we don't feel like we can be completely let go and feel content with what things are. And then what often happens is, in an effort to feel more safe, maybe we adopt communication styles or just our way of being in the world where we kind of keep people at a distance, thinking that's going to help us feel safe. And instead, that just contributes to a sense of isolation and loneliness and dissatisfaction with our lives.
So coming home to ourselves is a way of maybe recognizing the way that we are showing up in the world and saying, "Is there a way that I can meet myself as I am at this moment? Is there a way that I can meet whatever is arising?" And maybe not only just meet it, but can we meet it with a certain amount of open-heartedness? Can we meet it with a certain amount of ease? And this is where safety often lies. We tend to think that it's having to be tough or having to be separate from people in some way. But the truth is, of course, that human beings are vulnerable in so many different ways, emotionally and physically. But this idea of safety is more about, can we meet whatever is arising, instead of trying to get everything out there to be perfectly organized and non-threatening. There's this way in which we don't control our external environment nearly as much as we think we do.
So why is it that if we're not feeling at home, if we're not feeling connected, why is that? Why are we leaving home, so to speak, feeling disconnected? And part of it is just this idea that we have difficulties in life. Maybe we don't feel safe, maybe we have some fear, maybe we have some unfinished business of the heart, as Jack Kornfield's expression. We're having some emotional turmoil, some difficulties. Maybe there's some real legitimate difficulties happening in our life: a terrible diagnosis, maybe we lost a job that we really liked, or maybe there's some difficulties in our relationships. Whatever it might be, what often happens is we have this sense of, "Oh, I have to go figure this out." And often this "go figure this out" is a sense of going out there and getting something. This way in which we want to read all those books in the bookstore—remember bookstores? I still love bookstores—in that self-help section, or all those podcasts, or go talk to this person with that expertise or this coach or that mentor or something like this. Which is fantastic to do, right? We don't have to do everything alone.
But there's also a mindset that can be about, "Okay, whatever issue or difficulty that I'm having, I have to go out there somewhere to figure it out." And the figuring it out means we're all in our head, thinking, thinking, thinking, trying to figure it out, trying to solve it, trying to understand it better. And there's this way that imbuing our thinking with this idea that it's going to solve everything kind of disconnects us from what we're actually experiencing. From the loneliness, for example, which can feel like this heaviness sometimes in the shoulders, like there's not sitting up straight so much, but it can feel like this weight on the shoulders or something.
Part of the reason why sometimes we don't feel safe is because we're feeling like we have to hide parts of ourselves, and we don't want other people to see certain things about ourselves. So there's a way in which we try not to let anybody see some of the ways in which we feel vulnerable. But if we can just be with our experience as best we can, whatever it is we're experiencing, then there's a way that it feels like this connection with ourselves, this connection to come home, so to speak. And then we don't feel so vulnerable. It might be uncomfortable feeling the loneliness, for example, the sadness, the anger, whatever it might be. It might be exactly what we don't want to feel. But there's this way in which it's a sense of arriving again, instead of just being in our thoughts.
Because being in our thoughts turns out to be a big source of our not feeling like we're at home, feeling disconnected from ourselves, feeling disconnected from others. This feeling of not being at home is so much about the thoughts that we have about how we should appear or what we should be doing, or, "Oh, the people down the street are probably doing that, so I have to do something to keep up with them," or whatever these stories that we have. And to be sure, these stories are subtle. It's not something that's obvious that we're saying to ourselves; there's just this way in which it's influencing the actions we do and the way that we are speaking to ourselves and the way that we're showing up in the world.
So not only might we feel like we have to figure things out, or maybe it's even the same but I'll use different words: we just want to avoid. We just simply want to feel comfortable, so we're going to avoid any of this discomfort. And we've created this society that has endless distractions, have you noticed? It's amazing if you think about media these days, like all the stuff that's available to just distract yourself endlessly if you want. It's so easy. Sometimes I find myself wanting to look up a particular YouTube video, a particular talk I want to listen to, and then before I know it, I'm going down, looking at all these little things. Time ticks on and then I'm like, "Oh yeah." So I've set a timer on my YouTube videos. My phone can do this; it'll interrupt me and say, "Are you sure you want to still be doing this?" This turned out to be very helpful, otherwise I'll watch kitten videos all day or something. Not that there's anything wrong with kitten videos, of course, I happen to be a fan of them, but it's not how I want to spend my life energy.
So there's this way in which we don't feel at home just because we want to avoid the uncomfortableness, or we have this sense that there's so many things on our to-do list. Like, "Oh, well I have to do this and take care of that and email this person and do that." There's this way it's so, you know, we can just be always busy, busy, busy, and our life just feels like one to-do list after another. Or maybe just one giant to-do list.
That's part of the reason why we might feel a little bit disconnected from ourselves. And maybe also related to this, I'm kind of giving a list so that maybe you can recognize what are some of the patterns for you, but maybe there's a way also in which we have this "The grass is always greener" idea. Like, oh, the next best thing is going to be out there. And so we find ourselves kind of ignoring or dismissing what's actually happening in our lives right now. Meanwhile, our lives are passing us by. We might be thinking, "Well, you know, I'll get connected to myself..." Maybe we have this sense that we need to attain something or acquire something. "As soon as I've paid off the house, got this promotion, my kids have left, or my grandkids are at a different place," or whatever it might be. Educational goals, career goals, these are great supportive things, but there's also a way in which we can use them as a justification for not really being connected to ourselves.
So then this whole idea of coming home to ourselves in some ways it doesn't even sound attractive because it feels like, "Oh, but then I have to forgo all these other things that are important to me: my goals, things with my relationships, my professional life, pursuing always feeling more and more comfortable or entertained." But there's a way in which we can feel connected no matter what we're doing. And a lot of that, if not most of it, is about being connected to the felt sense, the physical body. What does it feel like to be sitting in a chair right now? It doesn't take time just to let the mind incline that direction and like, "Oh yeah, I can feel the pressure of the chair, the cushion against the body." If you're using the backrest, just feeling the pressure against the back.
And there's a way in which if we can use some of these obvious indicators of the present moment, that can help disrupt some of the momentum away from the thinking mind. We can disrupt the momentum of the thinking mind by connecting into this bodily experience. This is where the home is, actually. We all know this. Our thoughts are so often in the past or in the future; that's not our home so much. The home is what's being experienced, and with this sense of ease and safety.
But I also want to acknowledge that this whole notion that I'm talking about, like coming home, can feel kind of like a letdown. It can feel disappointing. Like, really? Maybe we started meditating thinking that we're going to have these astral projections—I don't even know what those are—or we're going to have some wild experience or something like this. And maybe there's this way in which you kind of want to be dismissive of the ordinary experiences of being at home, literally or metaphorically. But the truth is, our life is filled with ordinary things. So why not be present for it? And we can find a certain delight in it.
Yesterday, I asked a friend to help me with changing the cabin filter in my car. Never having done this, it turned out to be so much fun. I was so excited, like, "Wow!" And partly why I was doing this is because I thought I had mice in my car. Turns out I did, and there was a little mouse nest there on this cabin filter. Come to find out, this is a common thing, and if you look on YouTube, there's all these people taking out their cabin filter just like I did. I don't know, it just turned out to be such a fun, delightful, simple little chore. But it's like, wow, look at this. Okay, I have to come up with some way I'm going to work with this here. But it was, you know, I got to connect with my friend, and he felt very happy to be able to help me. It was an easy thing for him. And so why not take delight in some of these simple things?
Part of the reason is because maybe we are afraid if we let down the bracing or let down the guard, that it'll be uncomfortable. It will be uncomfortable. There's no avoiding it. And the Buddha talked about this, right? He used this word Dukkha1; there is Dukkha1. Somehow when we hear this word, we think, "Yeah, that's talking about the big existential angst or really big things." But I like to think about it as there's just this discomfort. And I've discovered that I have so much more capacity than I thought I did to be with discomfort. And when I'm in the role of a retreat teacher and I'm meeting people who are on retreats and encouraging them to meet some of their difficulties, I see them, I watch them discover how they have so much more capacity to be with their difficulties, to be with their uncomfortableness, much more than they imagined or knew.
So there is this way in which we are often running away, but we don't really need to. There's this way in which we might think that all the answers and what we're looking for is somewhere out there. And I'm doing this gesture with my hand, "out there," and I'm saying this word "out there." But another way could just be we have this idea that it's all in here, it's all the mind that has this idea it's going to be out there. And that's really the experience of "out there." And you know, how many thoughts do we have a day? Countless. They're just thoughts. "It's going to be better out there." "If I worry enough, it's going to be better." "If I avoid this, it'll be better." Those are just thoughts.
But if we're actually home with this experience, it turns out that there's this richness and this depth. And not only that, there's a sense of being grounded and a sense of, "Okay, I can see a way forward from here." Whereas just thoughts lead to more thoughts, lead to more thoughts, and you can spend your whole life doing nothing but chasing thoughts. But there's a way in which when we're here, there can be a sense of, "Okay, I'm a little bit grounded. I can see how going this direction is not going to be so helpful, but going this other direction, I think is going to be more helpful." We have a sense of what's going to be more helpful.
And there's this way in which we can meet our experience with warmth and care. And often this warmth and care is coming from our embodied experience, not from thinking, thinking, thinking. Don't get me wrong, thinking is important. We need to do it. It helps solve so many problems. I'm a big fan of thinking. But if we have the notion that that's the only way to solve things, is we have to do non-stop thinking, then our life is filled with this notion that, "Okay, just in the next moment, I'll figure it out."
So the invitation is to come home to ourselves. This meditation practice is a support for this process. I would say it's a process; I know for me it certainly was a process of orienting towards ourselves, but not only that, to orient with some warmth and care and compassion. Can we meet our experience with an invitation, a sense of welcoming?
Sometimes I talk about this. We have our experience, we see something that's uncomfortable, not what we want. Can we do it in such a way that there's this gesture of opening up, like, "Come on in, you can join the party"—the party being whatever the experience is. Because what we start to notice with meditation practice is how much we are pushing away, pushing away, pushing away. "I don't want this, I don't want this, I want that other thing over there. I don't want all these things." And our life energy is often spent with this pushing away, saying no, saying no to things that are already there, being experienced. In some ways, that's like denying reality. To be clear, I'm not saying that we should say yes to everything. We do need to say no to some things. We need to have boundaries and to say no.
But this coming home to ourselves, this orienting towards ourself with warmth and care, bringing some of the heart into it, softening the sense of "no." I was pointing to the bodily experience, you're feeling the pressure against the body, but there's a way we can also do this with any of the senses. Like what's being heard, just orienting towards that. What are the sounds? Or the visual field, just seeing without having to figure things out or make them different in any kind of way. Just a very relaxed seeing, without necessarily looking, but just seeing. Hearing without necessarily listening. This is a way to come home to ourselves. And then as soon as we do that, the mind and the heart have a place to rest and something different can unfold. Maybe some new ideas, maybe there's just a sense of catching one's breath, so to speak, a sense of more ease. And that is part of the coming home.
So this connecting with ourselves in this warmhearted way is not the same as judging ourselves and saying, "Okay, everything's good." It's about just being with what is, putting aside the whole judging. We're just putting aside that whole thing of good and bad. And instead, is there a way that we can meet our experience more with a sense of, "Yeah, I'm having difficulties right now. What can I do here? How can I respond to my difficulties with kindness? How can I respond to my difficulties with care?"
This way that we can come home to ourselves is in some ways the same as welcoming ourselves, all aspects of ourselves. Sometimes there are these aspects that we're secretly trying to disown, but can we welcome all aspects of ourselves? This meditation practice really supports this. We often have so much pressure to prove ourselves in some kind of way. Some people even feel like they have to prove they're even worthy to exist, to be here. We have to prove ourselves that we are not suffering, that we're capable, or we have to prove that, "I got it together. I'll get it done, whatever needs to be done," or something like that.
There's a way in which meditation practice, when we're just sitting, we don't have to prove anything to anybody. Just to sit simply with no one to impress, including ourselves. This meditation practice allows that kind of movement towards connecting to ourselves with this openhearted warmth and care, and to be open to whatever is arising.
So this idea of coming home to ourselves is a way of connecting with the senses, with the body, with hearing and seeing. Recognizing how so often we are lost in our thoughts, separated from our experience, and then just reorienting to the senses as a way to come home to ourselves. Maybe I'll stop there and open it up for some comments or questions.
Q&A
Questioner 1: I wonder, it seems like some people in the world, their outer circumstances are so harsh. How could they come home? I mean, I just read this story about a young girl in the Middle East. She was raped, and then the man married her so he didn't get charged with the crime, and she committed suicide. And it broke my heart. But I'm wondering, some of us were blessed with a middle-class life in the Bay Area, where some people, their outer life is so hard. How can they come home?
Diana Clark: The other day I listened to a podcast about a person who was sentenced for life, I don't know what crime he committed. And he told the story about how he had been a very violent person, and in prison, the first 20 years he was in prison, it was a very violent life. And then he was able to participate, I guess this is at Folsom Prison, in this thing called "circling," where people meet—in this case, men in prison—and they start talking about the truth of what's really happening with themselves. And he talked about it took a number of years, but it completely transformed his life, the way that he understood himself and all the abuse that he had had growing up is why he ended up having a life of crime. And he ended up being released from prison because they had noticed what a different person he had become.
So I don't know if everybody can do this. I want to think so. But he talked about how it was the courage to meet what was inside of him, and not only that, the courage to meet what is inside of others. I felt really touched by this idea. And so he talked about that if you were to look at him, he doesn't look like he comes from a middle class, he doesn't look like those of us in this room, I would say. And he said, "If you were to look at me, you wouldn't think that I'm necessarily the safest person. But," he said, "I am the safest person anybody will ever be with, because I have no fear to be vulnerable. I have no fear to be with other people's vulnerabilities and empathy and whatever they might have."
I don't know, I just feel really touched by this. So what you described is just awful, right? It's just sickening. But I think that we underestimate—I want to believe that we underestimate the power of the heart, the power of transformation that's available. I want to believe that. Thank you for asking though. I mean, these stories, they're really heartbreaking.
Questioner 2: I like that feeling of coming home.
Diana Clark: You like the feeling of coming home? Yeah, thank you.
Questioner 3: Yeah, thanks for the talk tonight. I appreciated it, and especially the idea of coming home. It's really just a comment. I think what I'm taking away from it and what I want to do going forward is catch myself whenever there's the senses. I find myself doing this; there's also thoughts associated with them. It's very hard to just sit there, you know, feel things or hear things and not have thoughts. And so what I want to do, and I don't know if this makes sense, but try and just not have the thoughts while the senses are happening.
Diana Clark: You know, I would look at it a little bit differently. This idea of not wanting to have thoughts, that's a really high bar. Instead, why don't we just let them be in the background, thoughts doing what thoughts do, and just be more tuned into, sensitive to experiencing the senses, and let the thoughts just do what they're going to do. Because they have a lot of momentum behind them, and we have a lifetime of fueling them and thinking this is the way forward. So instead, just to pay attention to the visual field or hearing, and there's a way in which the thoughts, they start to just lose some of their authority. They'll just naturally start to lose some of the momentum if we just aren't highlighting them or giving them as much attention. Because if we're trying to get them to go away, there's this way of like, "Oh, go away thoughts, I want them to go away," and then we're all tangled up in the thoughts. And then we're thinking that we're thinking, "I wanted to get rid of thoughts," and then that's a thought again, and then that gets complicated. So I just offer this.
Questioner 4: This idea of meeting ourselves with friendliness when difficult things come up. And I think of that, but I'm so reactive, and it's going around and around, "Okay, what does this mean to be friendly?" And yeah, so I don't know if you could say anything about that. You know, I try to think how I would meet a friend, and it's just like, "Oh," but it lasts a while. So it's tricky for me.
Diana Clark: The reactivity lasts a while? I see. So I would say actually being with the body, like feeling your feet on the ground, is a great way to kind of disrupt the momentum. But what will happen, it'll be like: thoughts, feet, thoughts, feet, thoughts, feet, feet, feet, thoughts, feet, feet, feet. So it's not like something that is going to go, but it can really disrupt the momentum of them if you can remember.
Questioner 4: A lot of times there's someone in front of me that I need to...
Diana Clark: I would say that's even more so the reason to be tuned into one's feet. To like, I'm saying feet, but like feeling your feet on the ground so that you're grounded. Because often what happens is when we get triggered, then we're thinking about other things or, "What am I going to say?" or "I hope they think this about me or don't think that about me," and "The last time I spoke with this person..." And we're not really meeting them in a way that they feel like they're being felt. Or actually, maybe I should ask you, is it uncomfortable for you because this is somebody who is saying harsh things to you, or is it just...
Questioner 4: Yes, or perhaps they've stopped but I'm still in a position where some sort of response is required. Or I guess I could run away, walk away, I don't know.
Diana Clark: You could say, "I'm not quite sure what to do with that." I appreciate the honesty, right? Because that's the truth. And then there's a way of, okay, you're coming home to yourself. That's the truth of the moment: "I'm not sure what to do with that."
Questioner 4: Or, "Wow, that was a lot." That's a good way to put it. Yeah, because sometimes I'm not even sure if it's harsh, it might be like a trigger for me.
Diana Clark: Yeah, or you could say, "Wow, I'm feeling a little unsettled now. I'm feeling triggered." Just a simple sentence like this, you know, the honesty of the moment.
Questioner 4: That's a great one. Yeah, thank you.
Diana Clark: You're welcome, Peggy.
Questioner 5: Just real quick, coming back to the home. I guess in my case, having a toddler and parenting and the whole jumping up, every day is different, discovery. But then we had this pause. My wife and I decided the kid's going to be with the grandparents and we're going to have three days where it'll be just the two of us. And all these thoughts are going in our heads for a couple weeks, like, "Oh, we'll go out for a date," or "We'll go to a movie," or "We'll do all these other things." And yet, when it came to the time, it was to be home, to make some tea, to be in the space, to think about very little things or just the things that grounded us. And the few simple things that we might take care of that gave us, that might have negative energy we wanted to take care of, or some positive energy things. And I don't want to go into the specifics of that, but we sort of naturally came to that place because all the busyness, all the thoughts, all those things, we know will come again. They will be there. And there will be all those surprises and all the joy and discovery and the suffering. They will still be there. But we recognized that that was the place to be and that seeking for everywhere else wasn't there for us.
Diana Clark: Yes, I've had a similar experience, not with a toddler, but this idea of like, you know what, it just feels good just to sit here and read this or something. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Okay, so it's 8:30. So thank you for your attention and I wish you a wonderful rest of the evening. Thank you.