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Impermanence and the Familiar

What a delight to sit with other people. To feel the energy of the people in this room has been wonderful. Gil was unable to make it this morning, and that's kind of a lovely thing for me. As I said earlier, I haven't been here in a couple of years, and that's unusual. It's an unusual circumstance. Even driving here this morning, I thought how familiar it all was. How familiar, and how much it has been absent—the absence of what was once so familiar. I have an electric car and it saves addresses, and IMC is saved. Every time I get in the car it defaults to coming to IMC. And so for two years I've been putting up with what has become an irritation, and this morning it was true: whoa.

And sitting up here is familiar, although I haven't sat cross-legged since I fell the first of September, so I'm experiencing unusual hip movement. That's just how it is. We come into this day, and this is how it is. And that's what I'd like to talk with you about this morning. I want to talk about impermanence and the familiar, and how they intersect, and when they don't, and what this means for us in our practice.

While the teaching of the dharma has not changed over the last two years, the context for talking about the dharma has changed a great deal. I've noticed a lot of changes in my own personal practice. I do online practice discussion groups, which, if you've never tried, I really invite you to try; they're quite wonderful. And each time I meet with a group, it is a realization that these people are showing up in this moment, with these issues, with these conditions, and that each time is unique. Each breath is unique.

There is a patina of the familiar sitting in this hall. That's sort of the coating that goes over surfaces, the patina. This statue has a particular patina over the bronze that keeps it this color. And the familiar life that we live does the same thing. We don't often think about how the familiar becomes a condition for this moment. We talk about it in different ways. We cultivate skillful practices so that it becomes a habit for us, but it turns out that largely we humans have kind of a plan for how the day is going to go. I'm not talking about the agenda plan; I'm talking about what we expect to happen in the next moment, or the next hours, or the next days, or the next weeks. We expect things to be a certain way because we become accustomed to thinking about things that way. We become accustomed: this is how life works, and this is when it feels right.

Now sometimes that has to do with our ideals, how we'd like things to be, but it's the basic assumptions that we have about how things are—the assumptions we have about how things are without noticing how they are—that becomes the trap for us. We have a plan. I call it an experience bias. My experience leads me to believe; what I think about that experience leads me to believe. And so, of course, this is what it's like to sit in a hall.

Let me tell you how different this is. Never have I given a dharma talk in a mask. Not only do I hear my voice and feel my hands, now I'm feeling the breath inside this mask. It feels a little muffled, and my voice sounds a little muffled. Generally it's the same, but it is not the same. It is according to the conditions of this moment.

We have an idea about what should be happening, and then life happens. And we have strategies, right? So this morning, it's not as noticeable here, but where I live up by 280, it's extremely foggy, very dense fog. And there was a bicyclist that pulled in front of me. I was going up Sand Hill toward 280, and there's a place where the bicyclists have to cross the line of traffic going to San Francisco to get in the bike lane to continue out Sand Hill. And it was so thick, I just barely saw him, and I saw the fear in his eyes. I blinked my lights to let him know I had seen him as he was crossing that lane of traffic, but I imagined how frightening that could be. And how fortunate it was that I was actually looking for a bicyclist, because I'm familiar with the area and therefore I saw him. That moment of uncertainty, and my preparedness for a bicyclist, made it more likely I would see him. But it wasn't a given.

One of the things that's been on my mind particularly this morning was from the talk that Gil gave last week where he was talking about time. He made a statement that has really stuck with me. He said, "Hurrying is an attachment; going fast is not." We can behave in a certain way, but when we are attached to some outcome of behaving a certain way, that's when we create suffering. When we're attached to what is normal, that creates suffering. This, folks, where we are sitting now, wherever you are sitting, is normal. Everything else is a fantasy. It may not be what we want, what we hope for, what we dream about. My family right now is in London. To me that's terrifying. What are they doing going to London? They're all multiply vaccinated, and they haven't seen their in-laws, the other side of the family, for three years, and they're old and they want to see them. I get it. Normal for me is worrying about my family in the context of the pandemic. That is normal.

If I treat it as an imposition, I'm denying this is how it is. This is how it is. Sometimes we embrace the unexpected, the "not according to plan." I would put lottery winnings in this category. How great, how lucky can you be? This is wonderful. Sometimes we marvel. I get to be a grandmother without ever having children of my own, because I married someone who had children. How great, how lucky for me. So I get the delight of that; I embrace that. The unexpected can have pleasant outcomes or unpleasant outcomes; they just are the things that happen in life. The experiences we have are just those experiences. And somehow we have this idea that we should be able to control the nature of those experiences, which is denying the fact that there are very few conditions conditioning this moment that we actually have any influence on, much less control over. Now, we can name things like the pandemic, or the weather, or taxes, but the very air we breathe, we don't have control over it. What we have some measure of influence on are the ways that we approach this moment, the attitude with which I meet this moment.

We tend to think of our experiences not in increments, but as a continuing stream. My life happened, these things happened, and they led to those things, and led to those things, and led to those things, and led to this moment. We have this idea that life is this stream, and we don't really think of it as packets of experience. And it's this continuing stream bias that we have that leads us to think that the familiar is what is right, that the familiar is somehow something we can navigate. But we're really creating the familiar in our minds. We're creating the familiar in our minds.

There are two things that I read a lot of besides dharma things, and those are neuroscience and the pandemic. As a former scientist, I spend a lot of time reading the scientific papers, and neuroscience is doing amazing things these days. Our assumptions about how the brain works, how the mind works, are mostly obsolete. I was reading a book by Lisa Feldman Barrett, and I just took this line out of it. It says, "Every thought, memory, emotion, or perception that you construct in your life includes something about the state of your body." Wow. The book is about how, in fact, we don't think about our emotions and react to our emotions, but that the thinking is just justifying the emotions that are already there. The emotions we actually construct by information from our bodies. Absorbing what that means lands us right in the middle of our Buddhist practice. It implores us to be aware of what's happening now, because that's what's creating, constructing our emotions. And that the habits of mind that we have are the ways in which we react to what's happening. But the brain is busy just gathering data, and sometimes makes decisions without the current data, if it's based on what's happened in the past. "These conditions are there and therefore this is what is required," but it doesn't know about these conditions. We can be aware of these conditions.

Resistance to what we think of as normal, resistance to now not being normal, resistance to normal are all still resistance. If I get in a slump because things just aren't as lively as they used to be, they aren't as... "Oh, I don't get to travel as much, I don't get to..." I walked in the hall, I saw friends I wanted to hug, I couldn't hug them. What's that about? Well, that's the condition of now. Why, in order to feel affection in my heart, do I need a more familiar way of engaging people? I can ignore the rising of affection in my heart and dampen it by what I am missing, or I can just feel the delight. And those choices have to do with how I relate to what is familiar.

I invite you to become well aware of what you constitute, how you influence and condition your life, your body, by what is familiar. Which is not to say that familiar is bad. It is a great joy to me that I can sit this way on this dais in meditation pose. I haven't tried it for a couple of months, and look at that: it's not only possible, it's very possible. Oh, I can be delighted at that, or I can think about all those missed opportunities which didn't exist, didn't exist.

When there are too many deviations from what we think is familiar, from what is familiar to us, we begin to build up a set of resistances, resentments. We feel a sense of betrayal. It's very common to hear someone say, "Well, you know, they promised us this would be over by now." Well, based on the information that was available then, that's what it looked like. Okay, that's not how it is. How do I meet that? I can have the thought of betrayal, of "not fair." Not fair. It just feels not fair. Oh, what's that about? I'm not feeling something... "Oh, I'm not getting what I expected." Fairness doesn't have anything to do with it, really. If I notice that thought, I don't banish the thought. I say, "Where do I feel that 'not fairness'? What's not fair?" And I feel the wanting, the leaning towards something else. I can feel that. Being mindful of this notion and saying, "What else is in this notion? What else is here?" allows me to keep from putting something in a box I label "familiar" and say, "Oh my God, I'm so depressed."

If we're truly in touch with impermanence, with the arising and passing away of all things, we recognize that we have to disentangle from this idea that everything is this continuous stream with a well-known past and a projected future. Life appears to be a stream, just as we appear to be a continuous person, even though the cells of our body are sloughed off every couple of months; they're totally different. But you know, the overall pattern, the overall familiar part is, well, that hasn't changed, has it? It appears not to change because we have this continuing stream, this continuing stream of what we think experience is, and we link all our experiences together and we give them meaning.

What you notice when you contemplate this is it's all about how we think about experience, what we think about what's happening now. It's all of those thoughts rearranging the experience into a pattern. I'm taking all these clumps and I'm making it look like this, and it is the collage of my life. But if we can become disenchanted with our own story, we have the opportunity to just meet these experiences, these experiences of this moment, with fresh eyes. When we follow our breath, we're not thinking about how the breath was yesterday. We're really just following our breath. That practice of nowness, of suchness, is not just for breathing. It's about the experiences of our lives.

If we can disentangle ourselves from the story of our life, then it becomes possible to more closely see what is arising in this moment. What's arising in this moment, as distinct from our experiences of the familiar. This happens in unexpected ways, this attachment to the familiar. I've lived with my husband for over 30 years, maybe 35 years—I've stopped counting—and he has some habits that irritate me, as I do from his point of view. This is not a one-way street. But one of the things he does is he has a much higher tolerance for clutter than I do. That clutter pervades. He has his own office space, which I do not enter because I will immediately start picking things up, which of course he finds very irritating. But the shared spaces I bump into often. And while we have grown to accommodate each other over the years, I can see when the conditions are right, when I am maybe in a hurry, that his clutter—notice that's his clutter, clutter left by him, not picked up by me—becomes especially irritating. And I notice that irritation and that jitteriness. And then I remind myself that it isn't about him. It's not even about me. It's about attachment to an outcome that that clutter is getting in the way of. But because it has become so familiar, it becomes very easy to blame him for my attachment to some outcome. And sometimes I even notice that happening, right? I'll go, "Okay, this is not about him. Not about him. This is you wanting something." And that allows me to be consistent with one of my intentions in life, which is to be kind to my husband. And in the moment that I realize this is not about him, I become aware of that intention also, and my heart softens. That happens.

It isn't about me saying I'm not going to behave that way. It's about a series of realizations that happens in the now. Okay, irritability. Irritability, not him. I can feel irritability in my body. He's not in my body; this is in me, this irritation. Irritation, irritation. It's not that my knee hurts, it's irritation because I'm rushing, rushing. Oh, I have a plan, I have something I want to do. Realizing that in a moment, it isn't that I'm a bad person, it's that I see attachment to some outcome. And that pause, the pause created by that seeing, allows me to recall my intention of kindness, and the heart softens. I don't order my heart to soften; that would be a useless instruction. It happens in the course of seeing clearly.

This is the real value of mindfulness and the acceptance of impermanence, and not allowing the pattern to become the defining characteristic of now. I'm influenced by the pattern, I'm subject to the pattern. But if I see the pattern, other possibilities exist. I'm remembering a time when I told my mother-in-law, who is no longer with us, that my next house, our next house, was going to be more Zen-like. And she said, "And who will you be married to?" She then apologized for not bringing him up correctly. But this is all a sense of patterns and how we think things should be. How we think about our experience becomes a condition of the experience. So it becomes very important to notice how we're thinking about what's happening, to be aware of how the mind is imposing some thought pattern on the experience, and to get as closely as possible to the rawness of that experience. And not stop with the first word we come up with to say, "Oh, this is what this is." What is closest to us? Try to get as close in that mindfulness as possible. What else is here? What else is here?

I'm restless, I'm jittery. Well, jitteriness is here. If I don't identify with the jitteriness, with the restlessness, I have an opportunity to see what else is present. I don't have to jump in the vat of restlessness. I can see discomfort. Maybe I don't have to name discomfort, maybe I don't have to give it a familiar name. Maybe I can just say unpleasant. Now I could argue that the smell of a ripe brie cheese can be unpleasant, and it can also taste delicious. And any moment that we experience unpleasantness, we can look at the unpleasantness, and the very act of seeing, "Oh, this is unpleasant," allows us to slip back and settle into a place of seeing that is a moment of ease and equanimity. Maybe it's just the briefest of moments, but notice it. It is in the noticing, the awareness of what's happening, that we form memories and that we form other patterns. We give the brain other information that it adds to this store of information when it's making up its vision of what familiar is. And we can become familiar with the aha. In the same way, when we're meditating and we notice that the mind has gone off into a story, and we say, "Oh," that's the very moment when we are here. The very moment. And we can say, "Oh, I'm here." And this becomes a practice for any moment. Any moment when we are aware enough to say, "I am here," is a moment of being awake, a moment of just this experience. It's not that we arrive at this place by some magical absorption of qualities or some practice that makes us all of a sudden aware of every moment; it's just this moment. This moment is the only moment that we can actually be responsible for.

And I can allow myself to wander off into some place, or I can notice my hand drifting off into the air, and in the noticing there is a form of awareness here that is a registering. When we talk about mindfulness, we remember that there is the object, there is the knowing the object, and there is knowing we know. That last step, that awareness step, is crucial in coming close to what is happening in this moment. Now I can say I'm sitting here, but unless I'm actually feeling and noticing my bottom on this cushion, I'm not really aware of sitting. I know it, but I don't know that I know it. I don't know what's behind me.

Okay, that's not going to work for me. So Gil gave me some advice last night and he said you should have the YouTube running so you can keep track of the chat, you know, what people are saying. Which is good, but then I don't have a computer, I have an iPad, and it doesn't work the same way. [Laughter] I'm unsuccessful at doing that. So for anybody who has a chat item that they want me to notice, I'm just not up on it. So that's not going to happen. That's the moment. Okay, that's not going to happen. I can bemoan that or I can just say that's not going to happen. It's just this. It's just this.

Impermanence is the arising and passing away of all things. And when we think about impermanence, we mostly think about the passing away. We think about the loss, we think about what's missing, we think about the deterioration. You know, my hip is giving me trouble because frankly I'm old and I have arthritis and I fall and stuff happens. And as time goes on, I can become overly aware of aging, or I can just say, "Well, now those are things I do and those are things I don't do." Last night my husband and I went looking for something on a trail that he had lost. And it was going to be a long trip around to get to this place, and it was past dusk, so it was really kind of foolish for us to be looking anyway. But we were good. So there was a steep rise up to the path right where we were, so I scrambled up and then slid back down because I didn't have scrambling shoes on, and then I did it again and we made it. Not gracefully, not elegantly, but we made it. Okay, that's how that went. When I left the house I didn't plan to do any scrambling up the side of a steep path. Okay, we did not find what we looked for, but it felt pretty good just to do that. So if we're focused on the only successful outcome, we would have missed the full moon that we got to see on the path over the balance. And that's the thing about mindfulness. It doesn't have to be what you choose to be mindful of. The blessing of mindfulness is in the unexpected. It is in the arising part of arising and falling.

This is the primary thing that I have been exploring for myself over the last few months: that impermanence is not about loss and going away more than it is about what is arising. What is arising? If it doesn't arise, we don't lose it in the first place, it doesn't go away in the first place. This emphasis on what is arising brings me more closely into the moment, and more close and more intimate with what my experience really is. So I've adopted an emphasis on arising. What is arising? And I don't rush to name it. I notice something about it and say, "So what else?"

I got dressed this morning and I was trying to decide what to wear. I don't know what the note on the web says, something about it might be cold because of the high airflow, and there's these new airflow things. And my temperature management is not as good as it used to be, and how can I get warm? Anyway, I got dressed, and as I was sitting down to breakfast with my husband, I said, "You know, these clothes actually feel nice." I just got to realize this feels... the fabric feels nice. What a delight. Came out of nowhere. It isn't like we're constantly searching: "This, this, this, this, this, I'm going to be aware of everything in my life, I'm going to be awake about everything in my life." It's just being open to the possibility of discovery. Open to the possibility. Mindful of the suchness of the moment, reminding myself it's like this.

How's this? Damned unpleasant. Well, oh, that's an attitude. Where's that coming from? Attitude, attitude, attitude, attitude. Breath. Oh, breath. It's still unpleasant, but I have already a fresher approach to it just by taking the breath. It is in the cultivating of the not-knowing, it is the cultivating of not relying on the familiar, not becoming attached to the familiar.

When we sit in meditation and we're following our breath, everybody has kind of a different strategy around following their breath and what feels familiar. And over the years that I've been practicing, my approach to following the breath periodically changes, because it begins to feel like it's a rhythm and it's too familiar, and I'm not actually in the moment because it's just so familiar. "Yeah, the breath, breath, breath, breath, breath, breath, breath, breath." And so I choose something about the breath that is current. One of my favorites is to notice the null spot between the in-breath and the out-breath. That null spot is not about the air at all. That null spot is when the muscles have changed the direction of the airflow. A breath is sort of a construct, it's a concept that we have around breath. What we're really following is the movement of air as a result of the body's muscles opening and closing orifices. The air that we breathe in is absorbed into the body, and some other air is what's expelled. And so this moment in between where nothing is happening is kind of an interesting place to be aware of. It's not a thing, it's just a marker, but it's a mental marker for me. And it is just a noticing of the stopping of the airflow. And of course the airflow is still happening, it's going into the blood, it's coming out of the blood. We don't control that; the body just does that automatically. And even if we don't have the feeling of a bolus of air moving one direction or another, there's still leaking, you know, air in, air out.

You notice this very specifically—excuse me, hold on a second. You notice this very explicitly if you've ever been with someone who's dying. We have this notion that somebody takes their last breath. Sometimes that last breath is an in-breath. It's a stopping that helps me to follow the breath. That allows me, when I'm sitting in meditation, to be aware of the nowness of the air moving. It's just air moving. And focusing on the movement of air is getting at that very thing that is happening now, is being intimate with my body, intimate with this moment. That's the intimacy that we want to cultivate with all of the experiences of our lives. That's what it means to be alive. It isn't about all of the constructs we have about how we would like to be, or what we'd like to leave behind, or what we think of our children, our lovers, or what we think about anything. It is noticing when I think about my lover that my heart lifts. It doesn't mean something different than that, so that my life becomes the home of being here.

One of the big intentions in my life has been to be openhearted. I spent a lot of time thinking about what that would look like, what would be necessary. How do I cultivate that? It begins with: be open. It isn't about what I become or how I get to some place. Be open. Whoa, that brings up all kinds of thinking about stuff. How open do I want to be with strangers? How open do I want to be with people in my immediate family? What does it mean? How do I experience "be open"? Not what does it mean, how do I experience being unguarded? What is arising in this moment? What is arising?

It doesn't have to be a world that is about how I need to be. It can be a world about: how am I in this moment? Not who do I wish I was, not how do I become a better person, but where am I at this moment of what is arising? And if it is unfamiliar, how do I relate to the fact that it's unfamiliar? Do I say, "Oh great, unfamiliar, I get so excited"? I notice excitement. In the noticing, we become less driven by the familiar, and more in the place of these conditions.

And if I put my attention, for example, right now on my hip, I can say, "Oh, you know, there's pain there, kind of hurts." And I can try to do something about the pain, I can go into the pain, I can think about the pain, I can manage the pain, or I can say, "Yes, the pain is here, and this is happening. There are all these people in this room with me. How amazing." I'm not throwing away the awareness of the pain, I'm just shifting my attention from the sharp edge around the corner, and I'm aware of "also this." Also this and this. It becomes a life of and, and not a life of either/or.

So I invite you to notice the influence of the familiar on what you think is right. To notice that if, for you, the familiar is boring and restricting and closing down, that you notice that and don't blame it on the familiar. Don't be led around by the familiar. Become intimate with your mindfulness. Notice the rawness of your experience. Try not to shield yourself by putting something in a box that misleads you. Allow yourself to notice this. Whether it's pleasant or unpleasant, it has the virtue of being closer to seeing clearly. And in seeing clearly, we do not choose to suffer.

It gives us room, when we are feeling full of ill will and discomfort, to notice a softening that's possible by a deep breath. Not as a prescription to fix ill will, but to say, "And this is here." And with my awareness on "this is also here," my mind-heart is less focused on the ill will, unhappy, unpleasant things of life, and I am also aware of the possibility for delight and ease and equanimity. And these are what I wish for you. May you know the joy of intimacy with the moment, of the arising part of impermanence, so that joy can be a part of your life in the most dire of circumstances. And you no longer rely on what you'd like to be true; you become disentangled from what you would like to be true, to be open to the possibilities of delight in this moment. Thank you very much.

Q&A

So, I am open to questions if you would like. If anyone here has questions... I'm not sure how our timing goes this morning. Martha, can you give me a hint here? Okay. Does anybody have something they'd like to say? I'm afraid I went on the whole period. Yes, we need a microphone. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Question: Yes, I often find myself to be afflicted, or a victim of misconception. When I look at something or I notice something, I seem to expect that something to be what my mind creates, and very often it's wrong. Can you explain that, perhaps?

Maria Straatmann: Okay, I apologize but things are a little muffled so I'm not sure I got it, but you're aware that the mind creates a description of what has happened and you want to know how that works...

Question: But I like to know how do I not be a victim of that misconception that I create in my mind about something that's out there, that perhaps is not even remotely similar to what I create, right?

Maria Straatmann: Right, right, right. So, how do we become aware of the possibility of delusion, or misconception, or getting trapped by whatever the mental process is? That happens. That's something that arises. And what I've found useful is to say, "Okay, I get it, and what else?" And the "what else is here?" question often allows me to see things a little more clearly in a way that doesn't condemn the previous conclusion, but allows me to see a kind of evolution of what the thinking is. Usually that works best by asking myself about that conclusion I've come to: "How do I feel that in my body? Where do I feel that?" And that very act of saying, "Where do I feel that?"—I'll notice my shoulders are up, or my jaw is clenched, or my belly is tight. Noticing something in my physical body reminds me that there are many things that have that effect of my belly clenching or my jaw clenching. When I notice the jaw clenching, it gives me the opportunity to recall—mindfulness (sati^[1]) also means recalling—to recall, "Oh, that's not the only thing that causes my jaw to clench." Focusing on the body gets us out of the head, which is busy constructing these scenarios and impressions, and moves me into a place of possibility. Because once you focus on the body, the body changes. As soon as you say, "Well, my shoulders are hunched," immediately they'll go down. It's an automatic response. The body wants to say, "Hold on," and that very act has shifted something. So it's a process that is not so much condemning the mind, but saying, "Yeah, that's true, maybe. And what else?" It's in that being open to "what else" that we become not so trapped by the decisions that the mind makes. Does that help? It's just a process of not condemning or criticizing, but "what else?" Thank you. Okay, anybody else? Back in the corner, if folks do need to leave.

Question: Thank you. How do we think about conditions that are true, that also involve loved ones who are suffering, or loved ones who are in trouble, and how that suffering or troubledness affects others in the family?

Maria Straatmann: There are no families that are free of that issue, including mine. And sometimes it becomes very difficult to not want to fix everything, because the heart is moved by pain—both of the person who is troubled, and the people that that person affects. My practice—I don't give it as a prescription, but my practice has been to realize an aspect of equanimity practice, which is: despite what I may wish for you, things are as they are. May I see things just as they are. May I meet the arising and passing of all things with equanimity and balance. And it reminds me that the most important thing is to not allow ill will to grow in my heart, because it is only when my heart-mind is peaceful that I am able to skillfully navigate that space. Being present for someone when I wholeheartedly disapprove of their behavior does not mean that I cannot be with them with an open heart. I wonder, what is the pain that they are experiencing that is driving this? Being aware of my own pain in watching it allows me to realize that this is coming not because the person is an evil person, but because the pain is very extreme in them. And it allows me to be beside them—not in them or supporting them, but to be beside them and look outward. That being present for them can have amazing results. Not trying to convince them or change their behavior, not condoning or welcoming the behavior, I don't accept the behavior on myself as a burden, but I feel it passing through. I'm sorry I can't do any better than that at the moment. Thank you all. May you all have a wonderful holiday season.