Dharmette: Blamelessness (3 of 5) Doubt and Confidence

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Dharmette: Blamelessness (3 of 5): Doubt and Confidence. 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 July 26, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Dharmette: Blamelessness (3 of 5) Doubt and Confidence

Hello everyone, welcome back. My name is Maria Straatmann. I'm sitting in for Gil Fronsdal this week. And just to note, early in this sit, I thought I heard what sounds like the beginning of a failing smoke alarm. You all know those intermittent, very loud noises. And so my hope is that it was a fluke, but if you hear something, don't panic. Otherwise, we'll just stay here anyway.

This week we have been talking about blamelessness. Blamelessness as the antidote to self-criticism, self-blame, and the piling on of things that we do to ourselves about how we are not succeeding. We're thinking of it as blamelessness because it has a little bit more positive vibe to it. It's how do we live in the absence of self-criticism? How do we establish the equanimity of blamelessness? This is here, this is not here.

We talked about the beginning of the Dhammapada^[1], and I want to just repeat that as we go into this next topic.

"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 the 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."

I repeat that because it's that final "happiness follows" part that I find encouraging. If I can find the peace in my heart, all is going to be well. There's an element of trust there.

But today we're going to talk about doubt. Doubt is perhaps one of the most insidious hindrances to practice and one of the things that most often leads to self-criticism. Doubt is the undermining. The word "doubt" comes from the Latin word dubitare, meaning "to hesitate." So we stumble in our practice, but also, as we hesitate, we give the chance for all kinds of other stories to come in and tell us how it's not going to work.

Unlike my usual habit, I'm going to begin with a poem. This is a Jane Hirshfield poem, and it's called "My Doubt":

I wake, doubt, beside you like a curtain half open.
I dress doubting, like a cup undecided if it's been dropped.
I eat doubting, work doubting, go out to a dubious cafe with skeptical friends.
I go to sleep doubting myself, as a herd of goats sleep in a suddenly gone-quiet truck.
I dream you doubt nightly, for what is the meaning of dreaming if not that all we are while inside it is intransient, amorphous, in question.
Left hand and right hand doubt, you are in me throwing a basketball, guiding my knife and my fork.
Left knee and right knee, we run for a bus for a meeting that surely will end before we arrive.
I would like to grow content, and you doubt, as a double-hung window settles obedient into its hidden pulleys and ropes, I doubt I can do so.
Your own counterweight governs my nights and my days, as the knob of hung lead holds steady the open mouth of a window.
You hold me, my kneeling before you resistant, stubborn, offering these furious praises.
I can't help but doubt you'll ever be able to hear me.

"I doubt everything. I doubt this, I doubt that, I doubt the other." I pull it into myself; it's my doubt. Everything about this poem epitomizes the nature of doubt and the truly undermining aspects of it. Once we begin doubting, we hold on to that doubt, and it becomes something that guides us. "Well, I can't believe... why can't I believe that? I can't believe that."

It often arises when our desired outcome is not realized. We have an idea, it's like we make a deal with the universe: "If I sit every day, then I'm going to have marvelous insights and I'm going to be a kind person." As if just because I want it to be this way, it should be this way. And if it's not this way, what actually happens is we suffer. We're very used to, as humans, trying to find out the cause of what is endangering us, what is threatening us, what makes me feel not safe. And then we have this myth that we should be able to fix that.

When we can't fix that, doubt arises. "Well, okay, it's my method." So we begin to doubt practice. We begin to doubt that I know how to do it. We begin to doubt the teachers. We begin to think, "Well, it must be the chair I'm sitting on, or the cushion I'm sitting on." We throw up reasons why we're not realizing the outcome we desire. And we're missing the fact that what we're suffering from is simply things not being the way we want them. We want things to be other than they are, which always gives rise to suffering. Not only do we want things to be other than they are, but we think we have responsibility for that. We think that it's our job to make sure that we're happy.

We're perhaps least happy when we don't know why something is true. We think we need to know why something is happening so we can fix it, so we can shape it, so we can control it. We can make it what we need it to be, what we want it to be. And if that doesn't happen, doubt creeps in. That little note that says, "Oh, if I were better, if this were different." But it's not happening. It's not happening, and so we come to a conclusion. The uncertainty is so uncomfortable for us, it must be that we're doing something wrong. It must be that this job is wrong. It must be that this person is wrong. Because I have to have something to blame. I have to blame something. I have to blame myself. If I can't find anything else to blame, I blame me.

Where we find ourselves is in a place where we're trying to find out: "Why am I thinking this? Why is this here?" And it digs at us, and it digs at us, and we begin to dig into it. "What is happening here? What is happening here? Everything seems to shift, and nothing I do seems to work out. I'm probably just going to be late anyway." If we could say, "Ah, I'm probably going to be late," and stop. Oh, late. You know, sometimes I find myself in my car and I'm late because I've tried to put one more thing in. I find myself gripping the steering wheel and leaning forward, and I remind myself I can't get there any faster than the car, and I sit back. This is how we deal with doubt. It's, "Ah, doubt, uh-huh." And we come to realize that doubt, like everything else, arises and passes away. It's just that in the midst of doubt, we doubt that we know that.

What we need to do is think about what are the thoughts we're investing in. What are we investing our energy in? So when doubt arises for me, I think, "Okay, I'm doubting. I'm doubting, yeah." Curiously, this morning when I was thinking about what was going to be the centerpiece of the talk this morning, I began to doubt that I'd be able to come up with anything that was going to be interesting or new to say about it. I felt that creeping sense of, "Oh no, oh no, oh no." And I said, "Oh yes, I'm quite familiar with this. It's just doubt." And unless I give doubt the reins, if I reify doubt, if I make it a thing... it's just doubt. It doesn't have to mean anything. It's just doubt.

Sometimes we forget that thoughts are empty. They're just thoughts. The ability to be in the presence of doubt is something that we cultivate, and we cultivate it by surviving it, for one thing. We say, "Oh well, yesterday I was so full of doubt. Today I'm not certain, but huh, it doesn't feel as strong as it did." Or in that last moment, I felt doubt, I thought, "Oh no, oh no, I don't know how to do this." The reason I began with the Dhammapada again is because I wanted to emphasize that it's really what's going on in the mind that is creating the condition that leads to doubt.

What are the thoughts that we're grabbing onto? Are we grabbing onto all the times when things didn't work? Are we willing to take a risk? It really comes down to a sense of safety. Can I feel safe even if I am full of doubt? Well, it's tricky. It's hard to hold those things together. We're not comfortable with the uncertainty of doubt, but we don't have to be comfortable. We don't even have to be doubt-free. We just have to come up with that little piece of faith that says, "I'll wait and see what happens."

"I'll wait and see what happens." It's like stepping out of the room when you're angry, or when you're confused, or when you find yourself out of touch. Just pause and say, "Doubt. Doubt." Learn what doubt feels like so that you can recognize and not be surprised by it when it shows up in your life. Try not to get so far into thinking about doubt that you're down in the pit before you say, "Oh, that feels like doubt." So then you watch doubt and you say, "Ah, doubt looks like this. It has this kind of shape. This is what it does with me."

The interesting thing that I have discovered is when I am most full of doubt, when I'm most uncertain, when I'm certain that the teacher is wrong, and the place is wrong, and I'm wrong... sometimes in the middle of a retreat, I'll discover I've forgotten how to meditate. I totally just can't meditate, I don't even remember what it means. I'm so lost, and I'm very happy in those moments, because what I realize is something's about to happen. My experience—not what I believe about it, my experience—is when I am most full of doubt, something is about to happen.

It's rather like—I think I told this story to you the other day, but I'm not certain—I was talking about fear and being on the side of the mountain and having to call it fear. Instead of trying to talk myself out of it, I said, "Fear. I'm afraid. What am I afraid of? I'm afraid of falling off the mountain." The only thing you can be sure of is you can't stay here. And realizing that you can't stay here frees you. It gets to the place where you can say, "Oh, I wonder what's going to happen." As soon as you open yourself up to the curiosity of "I wonder," you break the bonds of the doubt that says "I know I can't rely on it," and you have the beginning of confidence. Confidence, by the way, is one of the Five Faculties^[2] for a spiritual practice—the development of faith and confidence. It is the backside of doubt.

Every time you come out of a moment of doubt, in that moment rejoice and realize: "Ah, one more tick for confidence. One more tick for trust. One more tick for I'm safe just with me. I'm safe, it'll be okay." What will be okay is I'm still here. Not that it's going to be the outcome that I want, not that I'm going to come and give this talk and be amazingly brilliant, but that I will be here. The intention will be here. The thoughts will be here. The heart will be here. This is what I can rely on. In the midst of everything else, I am still here. No requirements for how I'm here, just here.

From this, blamelessness rises. Where I stop expecting something. I stop expecting something of myself and I'm simply here. Still here, despite everything, still here. We don't have to give up everything. We don't have to be brilliant. We don't have to be wise. We just have to realize the is-ness of just being here. I don't have to believe anything, I can just experience this. This is enough. This is enough for now. All the other expectations can come after that.

I read an article the other day by Dan Harris in the New York Times, and he is the guy that has the Ten Percent Happier podcast, which is Buddhist-related. He talked about visiting with the Dalai Lama recently, and his struggle with the word "selfish", that all practice seems somewhat selfish. And the Dalai Lama said, "You know, it's wise to practice wise selfishness." I thought about that and said, "You know, this is the point at which the doubt—am I doing this right? Am I doing it wrong?—is met with wise selfishness." Wise attention to just this. And then from here, I reconnect with my intention. From here, I take just the next step and see what happens. Just see what happens. Thank you.

So hopefully that is useful, and if you have any questions, I'd be happy to entertain them.

Q&A

Speaker 2: Thank you very much, Maria. That's a lot to chew on, and I'm sure if anyone has any questions, you can go ahead and in YouTube post them in chat, and we'll try and get to as many as we can. And in Zoom, if you want to post them in chat or raise your hand, you can do so as well. Okay, we've got Stuart right on the line. So Stuart, go ahead and unmute yourself.

Stuart: Hi. Thanks, that was very helpful, very encouraging talk. But while you were talking about doubt, I found myself substituting the word "worry" for that. I'm just wondering if what you're saying about doubt applies equally to worry?

Maria: They're very similar, aren't they? Now, worry is doubting the outcome that you desire. You can substitute the words one for the other. You can also look at it as there are lots of elements to worry, but it is the fear that what I wish to be true turns out not to be true. And in doubt, it is the fear that all of my best wishes don't come true, aren't realized. So doubt and worry are very, very similar. They both have the quality of wanting, wanting, wanting—leaning into something I want—and the fear that I can't have it. It comes down to the fear in the end for that form of doubt. So I would call worry a form of doubt. So yeah, I think it's very, very similar. And the antidote is also very similar: "Okay, right now, this is what's true. Right now, this."

Stuart: Thank you.

Speaker 2: Maria, we have a comment from YouTube. LG says, "One of my favorite things from AA—assuming that's Alcoholics Anonymous—is 'don't quit five minutes before the miracle.' It would give me space from doubt and an invitation for patience." And I don't know if anyone's familiar with the book The Dip, this kind of sounds something similar to that, you know, don't quit before the payoff comes.

Maria: When doubt is full-blown, I realize something is about to happen for me. So that is a wonderful quote, yeah: "Don't quit right before the payoff." I once experienced an entire month of aversion in a retreat. Because of that, I doubted everything. I doubted the teachers, I doubted the place—I was at Spirit Rock. I was never going to go back to Spirit Rock again, it was a terrible place, the teachers were all horrible. I was just in the pit, and I did that for the entire month. The only virtue of the whole thing was that I became very familiar with aversion and doubt. I know what they feel like and what the shape of them are, and that experience allows me to see it more easily when it arises. So you know, if all else fails, just see what you can learn from being there with that.

Speaker 2: So, next up is Patrick.

Patrick: Thank you. This is very timely for me, or maybe always is timely. I experience doubt constantly, all the time. I sense when I'm more curious that it has a lot to do with recognizing that I have no control, and recognizing that things are subject to change, unsatisfactoriness, and all these things, and that maybe there's some part of me that's fighting that reality or trying to protect me from it. Like, "Well, if I just really question everything I'm doing, maybe I'll come up with the solution, the thing that is not affected by change and things falling apart." I think as I get older, I've just seen cycles happen so many times. I've seen myself go like, "Yes, this is the thing, this is the way," and then it's blank, and then coming back around. Seeing these cycles, what I sense is that there's somewhere deeper to reach, or a sense of faith and groundedness, as we say about taking refuge. But I often find that hard because I feel it very much in my body. It's really a nervous system kind of fear. So I'm trying to get to the question in this—it's something about how to work with doubt in the body, and what is the anchor that helps just sort of let doubt be there, but draw from something deeper to find a deeper source of faith or confidence in just being a human and whatever might come from that.

Maria: If you were listening to yourself, you might come to the place where you'd say, "Oh, that must be so painful." And if you were listening to yourself, you would feel that piece of tenderness in yourself, that place that seems so raw. And you would recognize it, and you would say, "Oh, I'm sorry that you feel that." And you would be cognizant of the compassion that has generated in you.

Doubt is very far from that. One of the difficulties we have with doubt is that we try to work it out in our heads. We try to analyze it and shape it and find some reason, some other way of explaining, so that doubt is not so prevalent. But what doubt actually feels like in the body has to do with what the trigger is that is giving rise to doubt. What is the center fear? So it is, in fact, in going deeper and deeper and deeper into that place of rawness that we evoke something else from ourselves. We evoke the peaceful heart that doesn't support doubt. And we're able to say, "As painful and as tender as this spot is for me, I wish myself well here."

It's a form of giving in and not fighting the doubt. The struggle against doubt stimulates doubt. It stimulates the corrupted heart; it keeps it stirred up. "I'm fighting doubt, I'm fighting doubt, no, doubt is undermining me." If I can stop fighting and say, "What is it that's being hurt? What is it that's making me feel unsafe here?" and look there, then doubt doesn't have a home. Does it come down to a fear of existence? Does it come down to a fear of not being loved? Does it come down to a fear of space? What is that point of tenderness in my body? You can only find it in your body. In the head, you can do all the arguments; they're just arguments, and the strongest arguer wins today. But it doesn't change the heart, and the heart is where the doubt lies, not in the mind. The mind just explains it. So say, "What else is here?" until you get to the place that is raw. And then allow that to be true. Say, "I see you. I see that fundamental fear. I see that, and I would wish it was not here, but it is here, and I am still here. This person, right now, here."

Patrick: Okay. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2: We've got a question from YouTube. See if I can find it here. Someone is asking, "Can you please talk a bit about the connection between the sense of being safe and being present, and the courage to be vulnerable in presence?"

Maria: Okay, so that's similar to the discussion I just went through. But what I've discovered—so I'm only speaking from my experience—is that when I am doubtful, I remind myself that the doubt arises out of actually not knowing the outcome, and that it is uncertainty and ambiguity, and that means I don't know the outcome. It could be pleasant or unpleasant, could be good or bad, it could be successful or not successful. And in the end, it will be. And what am I afraid of?

It turns out for me that in order to realize my intentions in life, it has become extremely important to become familiar with allowing myself to be vulnerable. It doesn't mean I put myself in unsafe situations in the sense that they're life-threatening, but I show up in a space that says, "Here I am. I hope it's enough." And it is enough for me. What I've discovered is that the safest place for me is to be totally present. That's the safest, because I'm not trying to be something other than me, which is an extra layer of suffering, an extra layer of being. And so the essence of that statement "I am here" is: this person is here as I am today, with all of my strengths and failings and uncertainties in this moment, under these conditions. I'm just here, and open to whether you feel okay about that or you don't feel okay about that. I may alter what I say to you based on the feedback I get from you; it's not as if I'm isolated in that showing up at all. It just means that I am willing to be affected by what happens next. There's a willingness in that showing up. And it means that sometimes you get hurt, and sometimes you say, "Oh, that wasn't expected," and then you marvel at how that wasn't expected. But it involves staying at that place of the peaceful heart. Try to stay there. Try to have that. And when it feels tense, back away from that. Let that not occupy you. It's the best I can do with that one, I hope it helps.

Speaker 2: Great, thank you Maria. Susan Sanford, you can go ahead and unmute yourself.

Susan: Hi. Thank you so much for this week, it's wonderful. I'm noticing how my—I would call my superego or my critic—uses doubt like it's a hook to limit my practice. It'll say, "Well, you may as well not even go to that retreat, because you know you're not going to get any further anyway." And then that leads into sloth and laziness, like, "Well, I may as well not even practice. I may as well not even meditate because I'm not any good at it anyway." So there's this constant way that I use doubt. It's a reactive doubt, preemptive doubt. I'm going to save myself from being disappointed by just not going there.

Maria: When I was a teenager, I decided that life was so horrible that I was not going to have any expectations, because then if I didn't have expectations, I couldn't be disappointed. This is very similar to that. I adopted it as, "Yeah, this is how I'm going to go through life. I'm not going to have any expectations." And then what I discovered is I also didn't have any dreams. There was nothing wonderful to anticipate either. It was really self-defeating. Which isn't, you know, I don't want to make light of it. I mean, I understand preemptive doubt, trust me. I go through this. I have an exercise class that's really beyond my capability, but I go, and I'm exhausted afterward, and sometimes I'm in great pain afterward, and I have so much resistance to going. But I know I'm stronger and I'm better for doing it. But it isn't until I actually get there and start working out that I feel like I should be there.

I overcome the doubt by saying, "Well, I really don't know," and I use the discipline of effort to get me over the hump. It is wise effort, part of the Eightfold Path^[3]. Effort has a place that says, "You know, you just have to not give up." Because if you give up, you can't do it. Doubt is the thing that says, "Oh, who says?" Like I said, I went on that month-long retreat and it was horrible, and who would want to do that again? And it was later in retrospect that I looked back on it and said, "Wow, I learned so much about that." At the time, I'm not even sure why I stayed the whole month. Subsequent retreats have been quite different. All retreats are different, and you know this also: every retreat is different. I always have anticipation before I go because I don't know what's going to show up, and that can be frightening. Not everything I discovered was wonderful.

Susan: Yeah, and they're always really difficult. They can be pretty much, so far, they always are. But then usually at the end, they're like, "Oh yeah," there's always amazing openness, always an opening.

Maria: Yeah. "I'm still here, damn it! I'm just going to do it." [Laughter] The inertia of doubt can be very strong. Just inertia. You don't have to follow it. You don't have to be there with it. You don't have to say, "This is mine."

Susan: Right. Oh, that's a dirty trick. Just yes, name it. Oh, thank you. Go to retreat.

Maria: Anything else? We're going pretty late. I hate to hold up all our teams. Are people generally okay here?

Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I'm fine. There's actually another question off of YouTube. A person asks, "Maria, is doubt to some degree another form of inquiry, or is it more of a negation or fear?"

Maria: So there is the doubt of inquiry, the one that says, "Do I see this clearly?" The inquiry has a different energy than the doubt that I've been describing, which is more of a hesitation than a stopping. So if I have a doubt that I understand something, well then it is wise for me to question, "What's that about? What's that about?" And there is a form of doubt that I can have—for example, in the example that we just explored with Susan when she said, "Well, you know, it's probably not going to have a good outcome anyway," then establishing "Well, I wonder what could happen?" is a form of inquiry. Questioning your own doubt is a form of inquiry. So they're not exactly the same.

Here's another example: when I read Buddhism for 25 years before I ever sat on a cushion, I loved the ethical path of Buddhism, but I was particularly stopped by the idea of non-self^[4], because I was pretty sure I had a self. It was a very strong personality, and it made no sense to me. And so I asked about it, and asked about it. It wasn't until I was actually sitting on the cushion that I came to understand the meaning of not-self, which was not to deny that there's a person here at all, but rather to deny that there's an unchanging person here, and that I know exactly what's going to happen. And so it was the inquiry that was inherent in actually sitting on the cushion and allowing curiosity for the answer. Not the form of inquiry that says, "I'm going to prove you wrong," but the form of inquiry that says, "I wonder what..."

Doubt is that "I'm going to prove you wrong" part. The spirit of inquiry is, "I'm going to see what's true." In all of Buddhism, you should not believe a word I say. You should accept it with a grain of belief that says, "Well, that sounds like it's working for her. Let me see if it works for me, if that has value for me." It's the belief that comes out of experience. Buddhism is totally reliant on that. I hope that answers that.

Speaker 2: Sounds like a healthy skepticism.

Maria: So it's not non-believing, it's an openness to what may be true that we strive for. Thank you all for the earnestness of your questions, of your showing up. Thank you for your practice; the world is a better place for that. We offer our practice for the benefit of all. See you tomorrow.