Guided Meditation: Equanimity – Things as They Are; Dharmette Impermanence (7): Creating Self

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Equanimity – Things as They Are; Dharmette Impermanence (7): Creating 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 21, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Equanimity – Things as They Are

Hello and welcome to IMC. Welcome to this moment, like all of the moments of your life, of our lives. It's a series of mind moments. We're choosing to come into this moment, but we've inherited something from our past. Whatever is from our past has set up this moment. This is the moment we are experiencing. And soon it will pass away. And whatever happens in this moment conditions the next moment. So this moment becomes the moment that we focus on.

Here we are with our intention this morning to enter into meditation. Be here for that. Be here for this moment. Allow yourself to set up the conditions, the immediate conditions.

Settle into this moment, into this body, settled into an alert posture—something that keeps you awake, but is truly relaxed. Because this moment, we want to just be in. We don't want to color it or change it. Let it be what it is. This moment, this body, just what it is as it is.

Notice your head, the scalp, the face, the cheeks, the nose, the mouth. Let them just be. Let them rest. Let all the tissues of your body just rest in this moment. It doesn't need to be anything else than it is: comfortable, uncomfortable, pleasant, unpleasant. Allow it to be just as it is.

Settle your shoulders. Let them come down. Let your torso just settle. Just this. Just for now. Your bottom, your knees, your feet. Be aware of them just as they are.

Take a deep breath and let it out. Be with the intention to allow the moment to be. Allow the breath to be what it is. Be aware of just how it is. Just this air entering the body. Receiving the air. The beginning. The end of the movement. The re-beginning of a movement. In, and then out. Just be here for this moment.

It doesn't have to be other than it is. It can't be. The breath as it is, the sound as it is. Ah, it's like this. In and out. Receive, follow, be aware. No need to change anything.

We may wish to be settled, focused on our object of meditation. May it be so. But if it is not, see it as it is: settled, unsettled. Thinking, back to the breath, aware of how it is just as it is. Ah, it's like this. Whatever I may wish, it is like this. Just in and out. Just as it is. Hearing, just here.

Sitting, just sit. Standing, just stand. Breathing, just allow the breath to breathe. The body is breathing. Air is moving. And we are here. We are here just as we are. Just this.

Even so, we don't abandon our intention to be here, to be aware. Let your awareness be soft, trusting, and alert. Neither favoring nor opposing things as they are. My intention is to be here. This is how here is now. On the breath, on the object. I am aware, just hearing, just this. The breath just as it is.

Mindfulness: being present for how it is. Present for the breath. How it is. Present for the sitting, the standing, the lying down. Aware of the feeling, the hearing, neither for nor against.

"All experience is preceded by mind, led by mind, made by mind. Speak or act with a corrupted mind and suffering follows like the wheels of a cart behind the hooves of the ox. All experience is preceded by mind, led by mind, made by mind. Speak or act with a peaceful mind and happiness follows like a never-departing shadow."^[1]

Suffering or not suffering depends on my own actions, intentions, and actions. Despite what I may wish, things are as they are. May I see things just as they are. May I meet the arising and passing away of all things with equanimity and balance.

Dharmette Impermanence (7): Creating Self

Welcome everyone. Welcome to IMC. Welcome to this moment. We've been talking about impermanence^[2] for a few days. Impermanence. All experience, all experience arises, is present, and passes away. Our lives consist of these things, all things arising and passing away.

Now, each person's experience is singular. Your experience, my experience, the wonderful recording people who are here experience—all experience is singular. It depends on what you have brought to this moment. What I've brought to this moment in terms of conditions, how I've conditioned my mind, how I've conditioned my intentions, and all of the other conditions over which I have no control, no input. Everything is changing all the time. And everything that happens is new. Patterns repeat. There may be patterns, but this accumulation of conditions for this moment is unique. It is the experience you are having. It is the experience I am having.

This experience is a series. All of our lives is a series of mind moments. Now this, now this, now this. And each of these has a content of how we relate to that experience, how the senses know it, whatever is happening—what we experience begins with that. What the body is sensing, what thoughts are arising.

Experience is not what we plan or what happens to us. Each moment is seen, felt, tasted, heard, smelled, thought arises out of this process. The Buddhists call this the aggregates^[3]. The aggregates that inform all experience. So there are five of them. And if I were to take... Oh, this is a good one. So there's form^[4]. Form is one of the aggregates. It's the material, the thing I can touch, taste, hear, feel. This is a thing. It's this thing. It's black. It's round. It's slightly pliable. It has form.

And then there is the second aggregate, feeling tone, vedanā^[5]: pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. This is not like or dislike. This is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. So this is, you know, it's kind of hard, not soft, not unpleasant, just a thing. It has ridges. It's called a "round tuit." That is the one. And it's called that.

The third aggregate: perception^[6]. I name it. It has meaning. It's a something. This is a... oh, see, I can't think of that word. It's a "round tuit." It's what you put something on to keep it from staining the surface. So there it is. I don't have a good name for it this morning because the word is not coming to me. But I have a meaning in my head of what it is.

Now the next aggregate is that of... so we have form, feeling tone, perception (the naming of it), and then it's what I think about it. Okay. So, it's kind of hard. It's not very soft. And I'm surprised it's on my desk. It's here by accident. I don't use it. You know, it doesn't have a use. The thoughts about whether it has a use, whether it has a value, that's all mental formations^[7]. That's the fourth one. Mental formations. That's part of this experience.

And the fifth is consciousness or awareness^[8]. Until I looked over and saw this, it literally didn't exist for me. It was not in my awareness. So the experience of this thing is tied up with these five things, and all of our experience does that. There is the feeling tone, there is the perception, there's the naming of it. Whether it's an emotion that arises or any kind of condition that arises, we have this process. And this process, this constellation of factors, is actually how we create our sense of self.

This thing is my thing. How I feel about it are my feelings. What I think about it are my thoughts. This notion of self, the "who am I" self. The process of constructing a self begins as just the input, the sense input. And then we have the response to it: pleasant, unpleasant, neutral. And then we name it.

Desire. Per Andrew Olendzki^[9]—he wrote a book called Unlimiting Mind: The Radically Experiential Psychology of Buddhism—he calls desire the state of disequilibrium between what is arising and what one wants to be arising. Desire can only manifest when a person who desires is created.

So I have another object on my desk. The texture I love, the color I love. It's pleasant to me. And the naming of this as a cup, because of what it has inside. It contains coffee. I can call that something. The experience of this cup, and then I have a response to it. I want it. I don't want it. I like it. I don't like it. I think about it: where did it come from? All of that is part of creating this experience. And it's my experience. The calling it of my experience.

The self as a noun is created as the subject of desire. This is selfing. This is selfing. My thoughts, my feelings, my meaning. This is how we create self. It's not the same thing as the person who is here who is experiencing. That exists. It's this projection of ownership on experience that we call selfing.

My consciousness, the raw experience, the feeling tone... these don't actually belong to anybody until I say they're mine. Experience occurs, but the person who owns it is an additional construction. The person who owns it is an additional construction to the raw experience of "this is what's happening."

Now, all week we've been talking about what arises with impermanence. The sense of inconstancy^[10], uncertainty, the fact of things arising, the beginnings, not knowing. These are all responses to the experience of impermanence. And whether they're my responses or not has to do with how I'm creating a self. So inconstancy, uncertainty has to do with my predictions. What I think is going to happen, what I think should happen. The confusion of unpredictability arising occurs whether we condition for it, how we condition for it.

Knowing this confusion doesn't have to mean I have to be confused by confusion. I can see confusion without becoming a confused person. It doesn't have to mean that I'm wrong or flawed or there's something that needs to be fixed. It's just confusion.

Not knowing is the attitude that gives us flexibility to respond rather than react. Developing the quality of not knowing helps us maintain a kind of equilibrium with what's happening and disperses that sense of disequilibrium that leads to "I want it to be different than it is." It helps us depersonalize the experience. You are having this experience, but it's not about you.

That seems counterintuitive, but it's very important. So I might say irritation has arisen. It is present. I call it irritation. I've given it meaning, the perception, and I'm aware of it. But what am I really aware of before I've named it? Energy is jagged. I can say energy is jagged. The experience is one of irregularity. I can register unpleasant awareness. I'm aware of unpleasant energy. I can be present for the unpleasant condition of irritability without becoming an irritated person.

I don't have to own that irritation and say, "Oh, I'm irritated." And then I have to defend with mental formations why I'm irritated, what I'm irritated about, who caused it, who's to blame for this. Judgments arise. We're in the world of story, built mental formations. It's also the way that we create the continuum that we call "my life."

This is happening all the time. "This always happens with me." But in fact, if I'm walking along and I trip, whose fault is that? I have to create a long story about the tripping when what really happened is the foot entangled with something and I fell forward. The walking didn't cause the falling. They were independent objects, independent moments. I was walking. I was not walking. The not walking did not cause the falling. It's not a continuum. It appears to be a continuum.

Or when I'm sitting and standing. I may be sitting, which is not standing, but the sitting doesn't cause the standing. When I am not sitting, I'm not necessarily standing. All of this is what we create by trying to make ourselves have a system to feel I know what's going on.

But seeing clearly frees us from having to have that system to explain everything, of having things to be a certain way. If we can just see, "Ah, this is what's happening." I have my intentions and I have choices I can make, but I don't have control over all the conditions of my life. My life. My life.

It seems quite simple and it can be, but it's difficult due to the habits of our minds. So seeing what the habits of our minds are is very important. Very important. Imagine a conversation in which someone says, "I don't need to hear this, I don't need to hear this." And the other person is saying, "But I need to say it." Now, let's take both of these people at their word. There's nothing that's wrong about either of them. They're just simply saying it. And yet, there's an apparent conflict. Can both things be true without either being judged?

There was a poem that was featured in The New York Times this week called "The More Loving One" by W.H. Auden^[11].

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That for all they care, I can go to hell. But on earth, indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we cannot return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am Of stars that did not give a damn, I cannot, now I see them, say I missed one terribly each day.

Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky And feel its total dark sublime, Though this might take me a little time.

Equanimity^[12] is not the same thing as indifference. When we create a self, we don't have to give up being. But we can give up the need to create a self.

The Buddha said, "This is not mine. I am not this. This is not myself." May we all know that this is not mine. I am not this. This is not myself. It's just this. Thank you.