Guided Meditation: Intending Peace; Dharmette: Impermanence (9): Not Self

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Intending Peace; Impermanence (9): Not Self. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Maria Straatmann at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on April 23, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Intending Peace

Welcome everyone to IMC, to this moment. Thank you for sharing it with me. We are all arriving, and I would like to suggest that we do something this morning, which is to share our intention, and have that intention be the intention for peace. For peace, just in this setting. Just in this meditation.

Let's hold in mind the intention for peace. We don't have to do anything or make ourselves be anything. We're simply in the moment. We're simply here. Let's gather ourselves together and settle into this intention for peace.

Allow your body to settle. To just be here. Take a deep breath and let it out. Let go of all of the thinking about what was happening before or what intention might mean. None of this is needed. Just be here.

[Clears throat]

With the feeling in your heart, a leaning in your heart and an inclining in your heart to peace, peacefulness, just in these minutes. Loosen your body. Lower your shoulders. Settle your toes toward the floor^[1]. Notice your weight distributed to support you, and be at peace. Be at peace in this moment. Take another deep breath and let it out.

For just this moment, let all the worries and issues just breathe out with the breath. And for now, incline yourself toward peace. Put your awareness on your breath. Feel the air just moving in and out. Gently, in and out. Just this.

May I be peaceful and at ease. May all in the Sangha^[2] be peaceful momentarily. At rest with things just as they are. Lay down all the burdens of life, all of the distractions of life. Lean toward peace. Incline yourself toward just this. Movement of the air in and out the body. Breathing.

An intention toward peace does not mean that peace arises. It means it is the view through which I see what is arising. It sets a tone of gentleness for the air coming and going. Thoughts arise; they're not wrong, they're just thoughts. Hearing the drip of a drain spout^[3], the chirp of a bird... just hearing. And wishing all peace. Extending it out. Not expecting, just extending.

My intention is peaceful. I can return to that intention when it gets busy in my thoughts, in my hearing, in my body. My intention, my leaning, is to be just ease. Just breathe. Just here with what arises peacefully.

I check my attitude. I check my mindfulness. I return to the breath from wherever the mind has wandered. I return to my intention, wishing myself well. Noticing the breath. Noticing what has arisen. Keeping the inclination toward gentle peace in my heart, I return again to resting in the moment. The hearing, the sitting, the standing, the walking. It's just as it is. And I meet it with my intention for peace. Just this. Okay.

This is what's happening. Just this. No explanations. Just this is what's happening.

May whatever peace I have enjoyed during this time remain with me throughout the day. This inclination toward peacefulness, recalling this. May it condition all of my exchanges with others during the day. May they feel this leaning toward peacefulness. May it incline them toward the ease of just being at peace. May they go out into the world and infect others with this subconscious sharing of peacefulness. Calmness.

May the peace that we have enjoyed during this time infect outward into the world. May all beings be at peace. Just for a moment. Just for a breath. Peacefulness.

[Music]

Dharmette: Impermanence (9): Not Self

Hello. Welcome to IMC. Welcome to this day, another day where we talk about impermanence. Today, I have way too much to talk about, so we'll see how I can do with this. I entered the morning with humbleness.

I noticed yesterday a warbler flitting through the buckeye outside my window. It was going from place to place, hiding in the leaves, and I wanted to identify which warbler it was. There are many of them. I knew it was a warbler, but not what it was. And then it flew off before I could focus on it and know enough characteristics of what it is. The event was fleeting. I was pleased to see a warbler, and I didn't need to know what it was. Now, if I identified as a bird watcher—a serious bird watcher, a lister—I would need to know which warbler it was. But without the need to support that I'm a really good birder^[4], I could just enjoy that a warbler visited the tree outside my house. I didn't have to devote much mental energy to defending myself and why I couldn't identify it, or I could have been trapped by believing it was about me. It could have been my observation.

How do we practice with this idea of impermanence and not creating a self? Things happen all the time. Experience happens in a conditional soup. We don't control those conditions. It's not isolated only to the things that we're aware of. And one of the things we're often not aware of is how the view of who I am influences what I see. To call myself a bird watcher or a Buddhist sets up an expectation that I notice certain things or that I behave a certain way. It affects how I participate in the experience, in the mind moments of experience. It's particularly tied to intention as a condition.

If I look out with the eyes of wanting to be peaceful, for example, I notice things that are peaceful. I have a conditioning: I want to see this. My eyes are open to this. I'm prepared. If I enter a moment as a bird watcher, I'm looking for distinguishing characteristics on the bird. It affects my discernment. It affects what I see. It affects my openness to see what I'm not looking for. It affects my ability to be present for things just as they are. Whatever I identify with becomes a condition for the next mind moment, shutting down possibilities, producing reaction instead of a discerning response.

In the last two sessions we talked about experience and how experience is formed by the aggregates^[5]: the form (what the object that we're sensing is), the perception (how we name it, what it means), feeling tone (whether it's pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral), mental formations (what I think about it, the opinions, judgments), and awareness (what I'm conscious of). These all occur with experience. But it is the act of making it mine that sets up the wish for things to be other than they are. "I want more of this. I want less of this." It sets up desire and aversion. This insistence that this is mine and it needs to be my way. The disequilibrium between what is seen and how I wish it to be, or how I wish to be, leads to suffering. There's a psychological tendency to own experience as mine. This is what the mind does. But it limits what we recognize or directs us toward what we recognize. We also get in the habit of defending the thoughts that "I am this way." "Well, here are all the examples and this is how it always is." All of that is mental activity defending who I am, as opposed to saying who's showing up in this moment.

And this space is where the Buddha maintains there is non-self. He never said there's no self. He said, this experience is not mine. I am not this. This is not myself. Irritation is here; I am not an irritated person. Anger is here; I am not anger. I am not an angry person. Just anger is here.

Part of the question around non-self has to do with how we experience impermanence. [Laughter] It's pretty easy to think of impermanence over long periods of time. Long periods of time can be five minutes, but we can see, you know, I'm aging over time. We can see the grass changes color. It's there, it's not there. These pieces of impermanence are easy to see. What is more subtle are the changes, the arising, being present, and passing away of things in this moment. That takes practice to see.

Impermanence can be seen in the very act of showing up. In calling oneself back to this moment, there is a shift. You can feel a physical shift of, "I'm here." Almost like an awakening. "I'm here." In that moment we are indeed awake. We don't have to wait to be a better person to be awake in this moment. But we have to stop identifying with the person who can't do that. We have to stop identifying with the person who is a particular way and show up as this person. That's how we see it. That's when we see impermanence, and thoughts arising and passing away.

It's much easier when we're on retreat, and we're meditating, and everything slows down, and there are not so many distractions. Then we can see an emotion changing from sadness to self-compassion, and lessening the need to be other. We can truly experience that feeling in the body. But we can do that outside of meditation also. It just is a matter of practicing so we recognize it. So, it's not imaginary. It's not just something I tell you is existing. My goal is to help you experience it for yourself, by yourself, in your own moments, so that you can feel the shift, one thing changing to another.

Self in Buddhism is not a noun. It's a process. And the problem when we talk about this [Clears throat] is a problem of language. How can we say it accurately? It is foreign to see self as an experience in flux. It's not what we normally do. But it is possible to be and see, "This moment is changing. And the person who's here for this is changing." Uncertainty becomes, "Ah, okay." And when it happens over and over again, this identifying with "I'm this way, I'm this way, I'm this way," we pretty soon seem to think that it's a continuum and we buy into the idea, "I am this way. I am an anxious person. I am an introvert. I don't do well in this situation." We extrapolate little moments of this and say, "Yep, that's it," and we build up a story about it.

Without judgments and mental formations and run-on perceptions about what things mean, we can see clearly, "This is what's happening." I'm standing, I'm typing, I'm sitting, I'm sweeping. Sometimes I'm a cleaner. Sometimes I'm a mess maker. Depending on how I feel about messes, I notice a reaction to mess. "It's disorderly." I can stop when I see that arising. I can just stop and see, "Oh, I'm reacting to mess." You only have one shot at this moment. Don't miss it. Whatever it is. Mess maker, reacting to mess—see that.

Before I begin something, I have a habit of cleaning up everything on my desk and putting it in order. Now, I do this because it helps me with distractions. Not having this lessens the distractions. But I could think of myself as a control freak, and I could become obsessed about mess. Now it becomes something entirely different. Now it's not just trying to minimize and condition against distractions. Now it becomes, "It needs to be this way, and I have to do this," and desire and aversion arise. What we need is to approach what is happening with balance, with equanimity. Practice with what's going on in the moment.

I was reading some things about Alan Watts the other day, and one of the things he said was hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present. Hurrying and delaying are ways of resisting the present. See this. "I'm rushing, I'm rushing." I'm not going to get there any faster than the car. "Ah, I can sit back. I don't have to lean over this steering wheel." Check your intention and mind state as you're going along. It isn't that everything's okay. It's the opposite of apathy. We don't sit back and say, "Everything is fine." We just say, "Oh, this is what's happening," so that we have the freedom to exercise our skillful intentions. So that we are free to advocate with fluid open hearts and not from a position of tension and needing it to be this way. I can see, "Ah, it's like this. This needs to change, but I don't need to be a certain way. I don't need to resist you to change this. I don't need to make you into the enemy to resist this. I can resist this with equanimity in my heart."

I hope this makes sense to you. It is meeting the moment without needing it to be otherwise. Meeting the moment without an opinion about it, neither being for or against what's happening right now, and my reaction to that, whatever that reaction may be. I don't have to own it as mine. I can say, "Ah, there's that reaction." [Laughter] And now this is true. To change the world, we only need to free ourselves. Free ourselves from the constant creations of self, so that we can see clearly, "This is what's happening," free of the biases of self, but always in the context of intentions. So that we pause in the middle. We stop in the middle. Even if the same conditions are there and they rise and we have adrenaline in the body, we say, "Ah, adrenaline in the body. I'm going to go wash my hands." [Laughter] Keep yourself free to discern what is happening. This is how freedom arises in this moment.

I'm going to read you a poem by Ada Limón called "The Conditional."

Say tomorrow doesn't come. Say the moon becomes an icy pit. Say the sweetgum tree^[6] is petrified. Say the sun's a foul black tire fire. Say the owl's eyes are pinpricks. Say the raccoon's a hot tar stain. Say the shirt's plastic ditch litter. Say the kitchen's a cow's corpse. Say we never get to see it: bright future^[7], stuck like a bum star, never coming close, never dazzling. Say we never meet her. Never him. Say we spend our last moments staring at each other, hands knotted together, clutching the dog, watching the sky burn. Say it doesn't matter. Say that would be enough. Say you'd still want this: us alive right here, feeling lucky.

The Conditional. Say tomorrow doesn't come. Say you never meet her, never him. Say we spend our last moments staring at each other, hands knotted together, clutching the dog, watching the sky burn. It doesn't matter. Say that would be enough. Say you'd still want this, us alive right here, feeling lucky.

May you have an intention toward peace that allows you to stay in the moment. May it sustain you to your freedom. Thank you.