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Poetry of Practice II (2 of 5) Guided Meditation; Poetry of Practice II (2 of 5) - Integrating - Diana Clark

The following talk was given by Diana Clark at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 17, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Poetry of Practice II (2 of 5) Guided Meditation

Welcome. Today I'm going to continue this exploration of poetry and practice, and this has been such a rich endeavor for me. Some of you know that I'm certainly not trained in the arts; I'm trained as a scientist. So I come to this appreciation of poetry late in life, and not as a scholar or anybody that's done any formal training or investigation. I just want to share this person's understanding and interpretation of them.

I like to use poems that have a lot of imagery because there's a way, at least for me, that this imagery touches us differently, touches me differently, than just words—than just something very specific and explicit. To be sure, I appreciate all these different ways in which we can communicate and share what's going on with us as individuals, or our ideas, opinions, and views. But poetry has this distillation, this pointing that I find really meaningful and impactful.

Today's poem has a real gritty quality to it. It's not all beautiful. I mean, I think the poem is beautiful, but the content... I chose this today partly because that's the truth of the human experience. Sometimes it feels gritty. Sometimes there are rough spots. Sometimes there are difficulties, like real difficulties. For me, I think part of the practice, the beauty of the practice, is to invite those parts of our experience in, not to just wash over them and pretend they don't exist.

Well, that is a short little introduction. Let's do a guided meditation. I'll do a little bit of guiding to get us settled, and then I'll drop in the poem. Just a reminder with this poem: you don't have to do anything with it. Just allow it to touch you. Maybe it touches you, and maybe it doesn't, and that's okay. However we receive these is perfectly fine.

Guided Meditation

Okay, so maybe taking a big exhale, as I find myself doing as I start to settle in. With this exhale, there can be a sense of letting go, a sense of settling in. Neuroscience tells us that these large exhales activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which is a way of relaxing and soothing. So perhaps what we've been doing naturally, the scientists are catching up and telling us it's good for us.

And then bring attention and awareness to the experience of this moment. The experience includes what formation this body is in, how we're situated in space. More specifically, the activity of sitting, literally or figuratively taking a meditation posture, a meditation stance. How does it feel at this moment to be in this configuration right now?

Some things that might be obvious are the pressure against the body where the body is in contact: the chair, the cushion, the ground, couch, bed, whatever it might be. Feeling the pressure on our feet as we're in contact with the earth or ground. Our legs if we're sitting; the buttocks; the back if you're leaning on a chair. Maybe there's a very slight pressure of the hands where they're resting, or if they're touching each other.

Doing a broad sweep of the body, noticing if there are obvious places of tension, tightness, contraction, and just resting the attention there. It might be that simply bringing attention to areas with tension allows the tension to dissipate, let go, soften. And maybe not; there are no guarantees. But can we invite into our experience whatever is happening in those areas of tension or tightness, without insisting that they be different, but creating the conditions in which something different might arise?

Bringing a quality of curiosity and care to the attention, and noticing that the body is breathing. Resting awareness on the sensations of the body moving while it breathes. Alternatively, some of you may be resting attention on the feeling of the cold and warm air going in and out of the nose.

Right now, there's nowhere else to be. There's nothing else to do. We are just here now with the experience of breathing. Can we bring a quality of care and warmth to our experience, as if this mattered, what we're doing? As if it were important—not in the sense that it has to be done, but in the sense that it's valuable. Inhabiting this experience, being embodied. Not thinking about it or looking at it, but experiencing the sensations of breathing.

It wouldn't be surprising if the mind wandered away. We don't have to make it a problem. We don't have to make a story about what that means. We just very simply, gently, begin again with the sensations of breathing.

What would it be like to give yourself over to being with the breath? Letting all other experiences be in the background, while in the foreground are the sensations of inhales and exhales.

Poem Reading: Bluebird

So I'm going to drop in a poem. There's nothing that you need to do with this poem. Just allow it to be received. You don't have to try to make sense of it, evaluate it, or analyze it. Just allowing it to land in your experience.

The poem goes like this:

There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I'm too tough for him. I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you. There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I pour whiskey on him and inhale cigarette smoke. And the whores¹ and the bartenders and the grocery clerks never know that he's in there. There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I'm too tough for him. I say, stay down, do you want to mess me up? You want to screw up the works? You want to blow my book sales in Europe? There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I'm too clever. I only let him out at night sometimes when everybody's asleep. I say, I know that you're there, so don't be sad. Then I put him back, but he's singing a little in there, I haven't quite let him die. And we sleep together like that with our secret pact, and it's nice enough to make a man weep, but I don't weep, do you?

I'll read this poem again.

There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I'm too tough for him. I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you. There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I pour whiskey on him and inhale cigarette smoke. And the whores and the bartenders and the grocery clerks never know that he's in there. There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I'm too tough for him. I say, stay down, do you want to mess me up? You want to screw up the works? You want to blow my book sales in Europe? There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I'm too clever. I only let him out at night sometimes when everybody's asleep. I say, I know that you're there, so don't be sad. Then I put him back, but he's singing a little in there, I haven't quite let him die. And we sleep together like that with our secret pact, and it's nice enough to make a man weep, but I don't weep, do you?

So this poem was called "Bluebird" by Charles Bukowski. Again, it's called "Bluebird" by Charles Bukowski.

Poetry of Practice II (2 of 5) - Integrating

Okay, so welcome. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening.

I'll start by reading this poem by Charles Bukowski, called "Bluebird." I admit that I didn't even know until last night that Charles Bukowski was actually a well-known poet. Poetry isn't something that I've studied; it's more something that touches me, and I save poems. I heard this poem just recently, somebody was reading it, and I felt really touched by it. It wasn't until last night that I discovered, "Oh, this Charles Bukowski person is actually a really well-known American poet."

So the poem goes like this. It's called "Bluebird" by Charles Bukowski.

There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I'm too tough for him. I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you. There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I pour whiskey on him and inhale cigarette smoke. And the whores and the bartenders and the grocery clerks never know that he's in there. There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I'm too tough for him. I say, stay down, do you want to mess me up? You want to screw up the works? You want to blow my book sales in Europe? There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I'm too clever. I only let him out at night sometimes when everybody's asleep. I say, I know that you're there, so don't be sad. Then I put him back, but he's singing a little in there, I haven't quite let him die. And we sleep together like that with our secret pact, and it's nice enough to make a man weep, but I don't weep, do you?

Wow. For me, this is dukkha². Dukkha on so many different levels, right? This conflict between the speaker in this poem—I don't know if it's autobiographical, I imagine it is—who has this tough exterior. He talks about how he's too tough and too clever. Yet, he also has this sensitive, tender, vulnerable, emotional core that he's struggling to protect. There's this real separation between what this individual is showing the world, being a tough guy, and what's being experienced inside: some vulnerability or happiness, right? Often we think about bluebirds as the bluebirds of happiness. So we might imagine that this person kind of earned his living as a poet as this gritty, misanthropic character, but really, maybe inside was something that didn't quite align with what was being presented to the exterior, and what was being presented as appropriate for his view of himself, his identity.

It's also a reminder for all of us that those individuals who seem to be tough on the outside, maybe even ourselves sometimes, have a gentler, tender side inside. At least, I want to believe this. I don't want to believe that people are just, through and through, of this roughness about them.

We might say that the Dharma is part of this path of uncovering these positive qualities inside of us. It is the path of uncovering these, in some ways, as we meet all the difficulties of our life—the difficulties that are in our minds, right? The ones that we make up, and everything that seems to obstruct or get in the way of aligning with, discovering, or finding our way with experiencing the beauty, the tenderness, the vulnerability, and the emotional aspects of a human experience.

So this poem has this refrain: "There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out." Sometimes we ourselves have refrains, things that we repeat to ourselves. Stories about ourselves, stories about what it means to be us. I'm using this word "stories" not to be pejorative or to say that they're not true, but to maybe highlight that there's a way in which they're fabricated. There's a way in which we are creating them based on experiences we've had, but they are created nevertheless. That is, they aren't expressing some inherent truth about ourselves.

So these refrains, these things that we repeat to ourselves. This poet here is writing, "There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out." It's very powerful, this tenderness or things that we feel are inside of us, but somehow we don't know how to get in touch with, or express, or incorporate into a view of ourselves.

But something I want to highlight here is that the poet, or the speaker in this poem, is making a real distinction between himself—I'm assuming it's a masculine person—and what's inside. Like there's this bluebird inside, and then maybe there's this rough exterior outside. This is part of the dukkha of the human experience too: breaking up our experience into sub-parts that somehow are in conflict with one another. Like, "this part of me wants that," "this other part of me wants this other thing."

Part of Dharma practice is this integration. Integrating, and discovering this wholeness. Discovering that maybe there aren't these different aspects, these different parts to this entity, to this being. More so, there are just different experiences, without having to create identities and sub-identities. Without having to say, "You know, there's this bluebird character that's different than this other character."

Instead, we might say that, oh, there are moments of vulnerability, there are moments of tenderness, there are moments of sadness. There are moments of singing, this bluebird. There are also moments of being too clever, moments of being too tough. There are moments of hiding things from other people in our life, maybe even hiding them from ourselves.

One way that sub-characters get created often is as an inner critic of ourselves. That helps create this divide between these different aspects. In this poem, the speaker is saying to this bluebird, "You stay in there. I'm not going to let anybody see you. Stay down, do you want to mess me up? I know that you're there, so don't be sad." This is the way in which, sometimes, the inner critic speaks to ourselves with a sense of harshness, a sense of, "Somehow you're inadequate or inappropriate in some way." Ouch. Ouch. This is dukkha. This is really dukkha.

Sometimes our activities, the way that we show up in the world, are an expression of this. I'm using the word "inner critic," but there are so many different ways we might consider this. In this poem, the poet is saying he pours whiskey on him, and inhales cigarette smoke, and only lets him out sometimes: "but I haven't quite let him die."

So these activities that the speaker of this poem is using—pouring whiskey and cigarette smoke, and not quite letting him die—are ways of squashing down certain aspects of his experience, the tender, happy, vulnerable side. But there are also ways in which we can do things that aren't so obvious as drinking and smoking and other things that are unhealthy for us. There's a way that we can use spiritual practice itself as a way to avoid our inner life.

We use these spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep some of our unresolved emotional issues. For example, I love Jack Kornfield's³ expression, "the unfinished business of the heart," referring to some of these wounds that we have. There's a way in which we might use this practice—that's supposed to help us integrate and become whole with all of our experiences—as a way to avoid working with what's so difficult. There's a way in which we can disconnect from our feelings or not look at the big picture, to shield ourselves from the truth because we're just "being mindful of each moment" or reading the next Dharma book or something like this.

To be sure, there's nothing wrong with spiritual practice. In fact, I would support such a thing! But it's sometimes the way that we use it to not be in touch with the grittiness of our lives. I kind of chose this poem because the grittiness is so obvious; we don't have to work very hard to imagine it. And to be sure, working with spiritual practice is better than some other defense mechanisms, better than drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes. I don't know exactly when this poem was written, but I know the poet was born in 1920, so maybe the 1950s, '60s, or '70s, I'm not sure.

But I'd like to end with a challenge, a query: What if there actually is no bluebird and no tough exterior? What if we just put down, stop the reification of these entities, of these experiences, and it's just this experience, and then this experience, and then this experience? What if life is just a collection of experiences? Of course we want to make meaning out of our experiences, but is there a way that we are trapping the bluebird inside, having this rough exterior that can only be rough by creating these entities from what are, in fact, just experiences one after the other? Maybe creating personas or characters is extra, and is part of what is dukkha.

So the way to happiness is not to finally let the bluebird out, to finally let go of the toughness or the roughness. The way to happiness is to let the bluebird and the roughness integrate. Maybe the bluebird doesn't so much want to get out, doesn't want to escape this character. Instead, it just wants to integrate.

So I leave you with some of these thoughts, with this poem "Bluebird" by Charles Bukowski. Thank you, and I'm wishing you a wonderful day. Thank you.