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Working with Difficulties

Many of you have been practicing for quite some time; I can kind of tell right by how quiet the room was during the sit. That was very nice, thank you.

You might not remember, but at the beginning of our practice—and maybe this still arises—it sometimes feels like our difficulties are getting worse. We started this practice thinking it's going to make things better, and yet we start noticing all these troublesome experiences and things that aren't quite right. And so it seems like our suffering is actually increasing.

Part of us recognizes that this happens because, with practice, we are no longer hiding from the difficulties. We are no longer hiding from ourselves, no longer constantly distracting ourselves whenever something uncomfortable arises, trying to do whatever we can to not experience it.

Of course, a big part of mindfulness practice is also learning to become tuned in and maybe more sensitive to what it is that we're experiencing—all of our experiences, not just the pleasant ones.

For all of these reasons, sometimes in the beginning of practice, and maybe continuing with practice too, we start to feel like, "Wow, there's a lot of stuff here that doesn't feel so great."

I had a student say to me, "Ignorance was bliss, because I just didn't see some of this, maybe the deeper difficulties." And it's true, right? When we practice, we start to see things that we hadn't seen before.

Not only that—and this is true with any endeavor we want to do. If we want to learn to sew, and we get the fabric together in the sewing machine, we start to see, "Oh my goodness, it's so hard to get the lines to go straight and the tension right, let alone reading a pattern." We start to notice all the ways in which sewing is difficult.

So of course, in the way in which we practice, if we have this idea that we want to have more freedom and more ease, we just start to notice everything that isn't freedom. We start to notice everything that isn't ease.

This naturally happens whenever we're trying to learn something new, or we have an expectation, a goal, or a direction in which we're headed. Of course, we notice everything that seems to be going wrong that's preventing us from going in that direction or achieving that goal.

So we start to see some of our limitations. In meditation practice, maybe some of our fears start to come up, or some of these inner conflicts that we might have, or confusion, or sensitivities that we might have.

When these things arise, of course, we fall into some of the habits that humans have when they meet difficulties: blame. It's got to be somebody's fault.

Sometimes it's our own fault, and we have a whole story of why we are inadequate, or "If only we could do X, Y, and Z better," "If only we had A, B, C experiences." The list is endless.

We blame ourselves, or we blame others. The media is all about who we can blame. There's so much societal support and pressure to just blame somebody. That distracts us from the discomfort of seeing the frailties, fears, or sensitivities that we have.

Maybe we have a sense of frustration. I don't need to go into all these long lists; I think many of us are familiar with them without my having to list all of them.

Just this recognition that we might have some difficulties—maybe we have an idea of how we want our life to be, or who the person we think we want to be is, and then we see a gap between that and how our life is or how we are. That feels uncomfortable.

Maybe we blame somebody, and then we don't even notice that the blaming itself is uncomfortable. At first, maybe it feels good. We get to have this righteous indignation: "How dare they," and "I can't believe it," and "They should have done this." But then we're not noticing how our hearts and our minds are just getting smaller and constricted. There's no freedom there. You set up a "me versus you," "us versus them," and that's not where the freedom is.

So of course, when we discover that things are uncomfortable, man, it just starts all over again. We have this uncomfortable feeling, we have this reaction trying to push it away, get rid of it, or just go distract ourselves and have some other pleasant experience. [Laughter] So difficulties are part of the human experience, of course.

Maybe we can make a gross generalization and say that there are two types of difficulties. First, the recognition that every human life, without exception, has periods when there are a lot of difficulties. We all think and hope that our life won't be, but it's not the case. So there are two types of difficulties when we have these seasons of difficulties.

One type is difficulties that are clearly problems that need to be solved. There's something we can do, and we fix them. Maybe there are some situations that call for some compassionate action.

I had anemia for quite some time and I just didn't know it. It wasn't until a blood test—I don't remember exactly what the occasion was—and they said, "Oh Diana, you are anemic." "Oh, that explains a whole lot. Okay, I can take iron supplements." This is a problem, there's a solution, and this is what I do: I take iron supplements. So there are those kinds of problems that are straightforward, aren't too complicated, and there's some action that we can take.

But many of our problems aren't like that. Many of them are problems that we are unknowingly creating for ourselves. We don't mean to, of course not, but maybe there's this way in which we're insisting, struggling, or wrestling with life, and demanding that it be different than how it is. That's painful.

It can be never-ending, this trying to make things be different than how they are. In this way, we're kind of shoving things aside and insisting that things be different. Or maybe there's a way in which we get so caught up in our point of view and not seeing the bigger picture, or not seeing the harm that we're causing ourselves, let alone the harm we're causing others.

Okay, so I talked about some difficulties. Maybe it'd be helpful to talk about what we can do.

In the Buddhist Four Noble Truths, the first is that there is suffering. So sometimes it's just to recognize, "Okay, what are some of these difficulties that we are creating for ourselves, partly by insisting that things be different than how they are?"

One thing is, we can find freedom in the midst of the difficulties of our lives.

I know for a long time I had this idea: "Okay, my life is going to be better as soon as all these other things are taken care of," or "Okay, I'll be able to meditate properly as soon as I'm no longer restless, tired, filled with desire, filled with aversion, or don't have any confusion. As soon as this, as soon as that." And then, of course, those situations don't arise so often.

We try. We are trying to create all the conditions so that we finally can meditate or find freedom, but we don't have to wait.

In fact, it was such a radical turning point in my practice. Part of it was when I was helping Gil Fronsdal^[1]—probably all of you know who he is—create this book called Unhindered. It's about the hindrances, and I helped create that book and edit it. Essentially, the whole book is about how to be with difficulties.

If I can sum up this book, the answer was: just be mindful of them as best we can. Bring this openness and spaciousness so we can just bring awareness to our difficulties. I'm not saying this is easy, because I went through the beginning of this talk talking about how we're trying to push things away, and we don't want to see them, and we're trying to make them be different. But this mindfulness practice—kind of like bringing our attention back to our breath again and again and again—is exactly the practice that we need to help not turn away from difficulties, to help us be with them as best we can.

Often, we have this idea that there are only two ways to be with our problems: to suppress and deny them, trying to insist that they be different, or to yell and express all our difficulties, making sure that everybody knows how unfair it seems to us or how angry we are. But this practice is pointing to a third alternative for being with our difficulties.

There's this story that Jack Kornfield^[2] tells in one of his books that I really like. It's about a poison tree—a tree that has poison fruit. Jack tells this story—I don't know if he created this story or if he got it from somewhere else—that when some people first discover this tree, they see, "Oh my gosh, this is really dangerous. This poison is dangerous, so we'd better cut down this tree before anybody gets hurt." So they get out the chainsaws and cut it down. This often is our initial response to difficulties: we've got to get rid of it, and we're trying whatever way we can. The two approaches that I talked about just a moment earlier are either denying and repressing it, or letting everybody know about it. So often we are using one of these two approaches with this poison tree.

But there are some other people that have maybe journeyed a little bit further along this spiritual path. When they see this poison tree, they realize, "Oh, let's not cut it down. Let's take care of the tree, take care of ourselves, and take care of others. Let's put a fence around it and protect people. We'll allow this poison tree to be there, but we'll just protect ourselves." Maybe this is a compassionate way to be with the difficulties, or to be with the poison. In some ways, this is a profound shift in our practice. Instead of, "I've got to get rid of it," it shifts to, "No, no, it's okay. It can be there, and we'll just build a little fence around it."

But then there's a third type of person. Maybe they have gone even a little bit further on their spiritual path. They see this poison tree and they go, "Ah, fantastic! Here's a poison tree. Exactly what I needed. It's perfect, just what I was looking for." They take the fruit and they work with it. They take the poison, maybe extract it, add it to some other things, and they turn it into medicine—something that can be helpful for themselves and helpful for others.

As an aside, I'll say probably the reason why I like this story is that back when I was a biochemist, at one of the laboratories down the hall, they were working with cobra venom factor. They were taking cobra venom, extracting the active ingredient, and turning it into medicine that can help people. So this is sometimes what people do.

Is there a way in which, when we see poison fruit, we can pick the fruit—maybe not eat it, but investigate it? Look at it, look at its properties, treat it with respect and some understanding, and use this as a way to find more freedom for ourselves, and maybe we can help others too.

So what are some ways in which we can get a little bit more tangible or practical about how we can pick these "poison fruits" and help them be medicine and a support for our practice?

Some of you might know that here at IMC, Gil and Tania Weiser^[3] came up with this acronym: RAFT. A raft is something that can help us cross over some choppy waters, something that can help us get to the other side where freedom is.

So, R stands for Recognize what's happening. This is a poison fruit. This is a difficulty. This is a difficult emotion. This is not what I wish were happening. But is there a way that we can bring mindfulness to the experience? "This is sadness, and it feels like this." "This is loneliness, and it feels like this." "This is anger, and it feels like this."

Sometimes just recognizing and even using a label is helpful, because then we're not tangled up with it as much. There's a way in which there's a little bit more distance between ourselves and the experience. There's also a way in which when we label it or give it a name, and just say, "Okay, this is... you know what, I don't even know what this is, but I feel out of sorts and it feels like this." There's a way in which there is an honoring and respecting of our experience, honoring and respecting ourselves. This is instead of being dismissive like we often are, or instead of blaming others or blaming ourselves, but just to recognize that this uncomfortable experience is here. And of course, this is the First Noble Truth: there is suffering.

The second letter, A, is for Allow. Is there a way that we can make space for what is already here? It's already here, we're already experiencing it. Is there a way that we can allow it to be here? To kind of soften the pushing away that we habitually do. This is what humans do, of course we do, we want to push away what's uncomfortable. But this kind of allowing, even the intention to allow, is a way that we can interrupt the momentum—this habitual momentum of pushing things away.

There's also a way in which mindfulness—just recognizing, being present for it, and allowing it as best we can—can have a restraining quality. Maybe restraining is too strong of a word, so I kind of want to point you towards it being like interrupting the momentum, stopping the flow of some emotional experiences, for example, like anger.

So, is there a way that rather than having this knee-jerk reaction of getting rid of it, maybe we could just ask ourselves, "Is this something that really needs to be dealt with right now? Is this something that needs a response right now?" We can allow it to be there, and by allowing it to be there, we can understand it better. If we want to work with something, if we wanted something to shift in our lives—some difficulty—it helps to understand it better.

There's a way that is also kind of respecting ourselves, respecting that this is what's happening. "I have the capacity to hold it in such a way that maybe I can understand it." We can have a little bit better understanding of what this experience is like, what the conditions are that help it arise, and what it feels like.

When we come into contact with and allow this experience, and maybe feel it, maybe some compassion arises. Compassion arises for ourselves—this warm-hearted feeling, this warm-hearted recognition of, "Yeah, this is suffering, this is difficult." That's coupled with this warm-hearted wish for it to be different. And this wish for it to be different is not the same as shoving it away; compassion is this more warm-hearted quality.

So allowing allows us to understand it, respecting ourselves, respecting our experience, and allowing some compassion to arise. Allowing increases our capacity to be with difficulties. This is definitely a skill that we have to train with. It's natural that we don't want to be with difficulties, so it's a skill that we can train.

We might ask, well, why would we want to train with something like that? It is guaranteed that in our lives there will be difficulties that do not end quickly, and maybe never end. People that we care about, people that we love, have illness or die. We have illness or die. We will die. We don't know when and we don't know how. Maybe there are world events that we have no control over that just really affect us.

So there will be large difficulties in our lives that we can't control. Just practicing with some of these simple ones, learning how to allow even the minor irritations that arise—when the person in front of you driving is going way too slow, when the line at the grocery store is going way too slow, when the person nearby is talking way too loud on their phone. These mild irritations are fantastic places to practice: "Okay, this is an irritation, and I'm going to just allow this irritation to be here as best I can."

F is for Feel in the body, tuning in to the somatic experience of this. Often, frustration, anger, sadness, loneliness—all these things—have a lot of stories associated with them. There's a lot of baggage associated with them. It's easy to kind of get lost in the conceptual worlds, or we generalize like, "This is terrible and it's always going to be terrible, and I'm always going to feel like this." The best way to interrupt that, to cut the stream or cut the cord—or stop the train on the tracks—is to feel it in the body. "There's frustration, and it feels like this: maybe my foot is tapping, or maybe my shoulders are going up towards my ears because I just want it to be different, dang it."

"There's sadness, and it feels like this: this real heaviness in the shoulders, maybe this knot in the stomach, or the lump in the throat." For all of us, it's different; we don't all have the same physical associations with these emotions. Sometimes we're not even aware of what the bodily experience is. Physiologists tell us that there are physical experiences that accompany emotions. So this is part of mindfulness practice: just tuning in and being able to experience them. It's a way to maybe stop the swirling that's associated with difficulties and to just feel them in the body.

There's this way that bringing them into the body interrupts the flow. By interrupting the flow—the train of thoughts or the swirling that might happen—there's a way in which we keep the experience in check, so it's not continuing to snowball into getting bigger and bigger.

Ajahn Geoff^[4] writes that getting to know the emotion, including the bodily experience, is like trying to know the currents of a river. Emotions do have this momentum. Even though the surface of this emotion may seem placid and calm, when we start to feel it in the body and interrupt the flow that happens in the mind, then we start to notice. With a river, we don't know how strong the bottom currents are until we try to dam it. When we bring awareness to the body and interrupt the flow of the emotion, then we really start to see, "Oh, there is a really strong momentum." And all of a sudden, all this rationalization might start to arise.

Bringing it into the body not only interrupts the flow, but it might also make it more clear what some of the underlying experiences are that are supporting this emotion, for example.

So RAFT: Recognize, Allow, Feel in the body. T is to Tease apart the experience we're having—the difficult experience—from the reaction to the difficult experience. We might be filled with anger, and then we don't want to think of ourselves as an angry person, so we have aversion to the anger. This aversion in some ways gets all tangled up with the anger, and it's kind of fueling the anger. This is so common.

It's so common. In my role as a retreat teacher, often when practitioners come in, they're sharing how things are going in their practice on retreats. They're seeing new things, they're understanding themselves better, their minds and their bodies are getting settled. But often they don't see—it's not so easy to see—the secondary reactions. "Okay, there's the aversion, we can see that." But often we don't see the second beat: the aversion to the aversion. Or the third beat: the aversion to the aversion to the aversion. So is there a way that we can tease this apart? Often, it's aversion to whatever we are feeling, and this aversion tangles up, fuels, and allows whatever difficult emotion we're experiencing to continue.

Often what we don't see, too, is the way that we might actually like the difficulty in some kind of way. That's certainly not clear to us at the beginning, but we might notice that there's something about feeling enraged, feeling angry, that makes us feel powerful. It makes us feel like we have a purpose, and this gives us license to say and do whatever we want because we're angry. We're not noticing how taxing this is and what a toll it takes, not only on us, but on the people around us.

So we're not noticing the aversion, and we're not noticing the way in which we might like it. Or there might be a way in which we're feeling really greedy: "Want more, I need more, I need more." But there might be a way in which we actually feel attracted not only to the object of whatever we're lusting after or wanting, but to the feeling of really wanting something because it distracts us from something else. Or again, it gives us a purpose or a direction: "I need this. Okay, I just have to get this." And we're not noticing how this constricts our lives. There isn't freedom there when we just feel compelled to go after something.

Or the same way with anxiety. Of course, nobody's going to say they want anxiety, but maybe there's a part of us that believes that, "Okay, if I just worry enough, I can make this problem go away." Maybe this is underneath; it's not clearly in our minds, but we might hesitate to get rid of this belief that worry is helpful, because we don't know what else is helpful. We don't want this uncomfortableness to be there.

So, to work with some of these difficulties: RAFT. Recognize, Allow, Feel in the body, and Tease apart the experience from our reaction to the experience. I'm offering these in this order because it makes a nice acronym. It doesn't mean we have to do this in this order. We start where we are. Maybe we've already recognized, and we're just allowing. Or maybe we're just feeling a lot of aversion, and we're teasing it apart like, "Oh yeah, this is aversion, and I have aversion to this aversion," or whatever it might be.

But there is a way in which we can take these poison fruit and turn them into medicine. I'm not saying this is easy. I'm not saying this is fast. I'm not saying this is a linear path—"Do step one, two, three, and you'll be finished." But I think you wouldn't trust these teachings if I were to say, "Oh, just do this and everything will be fine, easy peasy," right? I think we know this from life: to undo habits, to undo some lifelong beliefs, to undo what society pressures us to do is not easy and not fast.

But it's possible. And maybe it's not as difficult as you think. Maybe it just starts with a mindfulness practice, just being aware of what our experience is. It starts there, start where we are. It can start that simple. So I think I'll open it up to some questions or comments if anyone has something that they'd like to say.

Q&A

Questioner: Hi, Diana. I really appreciate you talking about the RAFT again. I've heard it several times, but every time I hear it, I have a different reaction. Today, it is so clear that everything makes sense. But before I get to the last one, I want to tease apart... A lot of the time, like you said, the aversion, the aversion to the aversion, the third aversion—it's a really fast slippery slope. It just happens all at once. So when I look at that, usually it looks so solid, it's just one thing. I don't know what the skill would be to tease it apart.

For example—this is probably not a good example—but one thing I'm struggling with is that after the retreat, I realized my life had so much "leakage of time." Suddenly the time is gone because of doing things mindlessly. Then I thought, well, there's a fine line. Do I treat my life as a project of improvement, or do I really have a purpose? I want to dedicate most of the time, as much as I can, to something I think is directed towards my life. There's a fine line there. So to tease it apart... again, I don't know how to tease that apart.

Diana: So you don't know how to tease it apart. There's a fine line between realizing you're leaking time and the idea of it being a self-improvement project, right? It wasn't quite clear to me what the other part was.

Questioner: The other part is that whenever I have an ideal situation, like on a retreat, my life is so clear. I know what I want to do, I know what I shouldn't do in my daily life, and what I don't want to waste time on. I see that when I come back home, I fall back into those habits. Then I don't want to reprimand myself too harshly because I still have to live.

Diana: I see. So while on retreat, you have some clarity, inspiration, and motivation, and then when you come back and you've been off a retreat for a while, you wonder, "What happened? How can I keep this clarity?" This is a great question.

You were talking about teasing apart the leakage of time and your wish to be using your time as a support for practice.

I would say that anytime we're trying to tease things apart, if it feels like, "Oh wait, this is too complicated, I can't figure this out, I don't understand," then we could just say, "Oh, frustration, it feels like this." Instead of having to tease it apart, we could just recognize and allow frustration, or recognize and allow disappointment, or confusion, or something like this. And then there you are, right in the practice again.

And of course, life outside of a retreat isn't the same as on retreat, even though we want to have some of the same benefits.

Questioner: So helpful, yeah. Thank you.

Questioner: I just wanted to share a joke. I'm used to RAIN^[5] for dealing with the Five Hindrances^[6]. I thought, is it RAFT or is it RAIN? And then I thought maybe it could just be RAFTING! R-A-F-T-I-N-G.

Diana: Nice! We just need to come up with a G. What would be G?

Questioner: Recognize, Allow, Feel, Tease apart, Investigate, Nurture, and Give resting.

Diana: I love it! Thank you very much. Eight letters, eight factors for working with hindrances. Nice, thank you.

Questioner: Hi, thank you for the talk. I like the idea of RAFT. In cultivating my own mindfulness practice, I do a lot of inner exploration and things related to RAFT, which is helpful. I also recognize the therapeutic value of venting at times, or sharing. I kind of heard elements of that in the type of people who tell everyone about the poison tree. Like, maybe I'm not going to turn it into medicine, but I'm going to tell everybody about it to keep them safe.

Recently, I've had a hard time and I've felt this desire to not quite shout my problems from a rooftop, but sort of share, put them outward, and not explore inward as much on my own. But I also know that there's a healthy balance. Sangha^[7] is important, and support. So, any words or ideas on balancing this inward and outward dynamic?

Diana: Here are some ideas. I appreciate that you said Sangha is important. Sometimes we connect with our shared vulnerabilities. If we say, "Here is some difficulty that I have," it allows us to connect with others and allows for some intimacy. So yes, there is some release, and even just being recognized by others can be really supportive.

But I think the Buddhist teachings point to the recognition that we have habits of mind, and if we feed those habits of mind, they're always going to stay. So there's value in interrupting them as we can. The Buddhist teachings would be the opposite of some therapeutic modalities that suggest going into a room and hitting pillows. The Buddhist perspective would say you're actually just increasing the amount of rage, or whatever is happening. That's not connecting with another person; that's just venting. So they would make a distinction there. Is this helpful?

Questioner: Yeah, so when you say habit of mind... some people may have this habit of mind of this desire to share their problems? Is that what I understood?

Diana: No, I was thinking about a habit of mind of being angry. If we're always expressing the anger, then we're just fueling the habit to be angry. It just gets easier and easier to be angry if we're always expressing it. But sharing it with somebody else or connecting with somebody else about it is different. You're talking about the anger; you're not being angry towards somebody.

Questioner: Right, yeah. Thank you.

Diana: Okay, so we're at the top of the hour. Thank you for your kind attention and for your practice. If you'd like to speak or come up to me, you're welcome to do that. Otherwise, I wish you all a wonderful evening. Thank you.