--- ai_generation_date: '2026-09-09' ai_model: gemini-3-pro-preview audiodharma: talks: - date: '2026-09-07' mp3_url: https://audiodharma.us-east-1.linodeobjects.com/talks/26238/20260907-maria_straatmann-imc-guided_meditation_opening_to_what_arises.mp3 speakers: - speaker_name: Maria Straatmann speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/142 talk_start_time_seconds: 0 title: 'Guided Meditation: Opening to What Arises' url: https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/26238 video_unavailable: false - date: '2026-09-07' mp3_url: https://audiodharma.us-east-1.linodeobjects.com/talks/26239/20260907-maria_straatmann-imc-dharmette_the_truth_of_suffering_1_the_truth_of_suffering.mp3 speakers: - speaker_name: Maria Straatmann speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/142 talk_start_time_seconds: 1816 title: 'Dharmette: The Truth of Suffering (1): The Truth of Suffering' url: https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/26239 video_unavailable: false location_city: Redwood City, CA video_unavailable: false youtube: id: 8_JLC7DcyYE imprecise_upload_date: null title: 'Guided Meditation: Opening to What Arises; The Truth of Suffering (1 of 5): The Truth of Suffering' upload_date: '2026-09-07' uploader_str: Insight Meditation Center uploader_url: https://www.youtube.com/@InsightMeditationCenter youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_JLC7DcyYE --- # Guided Meditation: Opening to What Arises; Dharmette: The Truth of Suffering (1): The Truth of Suffering - [Maria Straatmann](https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/142) _This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers._ ## [Guided Meditation: Opening to What Arises](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/26238) Good morning. Welcome everyone. My name is Maria Straatmann. I'll be here this week and today is a holiday in the US. It's Labor Day. I don't know how you feel about holidays. Somehow we have expectations about them. But the only expectation we need to deal with right now is that we're here and that we be here. So I invite you to join me in the next half hour of just being here. Let the holiday be the time we give over to just being here. So take a deep breath and let it out. Allow your body to settle in. Be in your body. This body right here in this room. Take another breath. And as you let go of the breath each moment, notice that you're just letting go into the moment. Just the breath. Just here we are. Become aware of this body. Allow it to settle in. Allow it to relax. Allow it to arrive. Totally arrive. The movement of the head, let it be soft on the neck supporting your head. Let the shoulders sink down. Let this feeling of sinking settle into your elbows, and your torso, and your bottom on the chair or on the cushion. The muscles of your thighs relax. There's nowhere to go. Down to your feet to the toes. Just here. Just breathing. As you settle in, notice your feeling tone. How are you feeling about this? Are you feeling a relaxed state, or a little edgy, or sleepy? How are you? Just note it. Neither good nor bad, just ah, that's what's happening. As you breathe in and out this air that is keeping this body alive and alert here, be aware of your intention. Be aware of, how am I coming into this time? Does the breath feel free? Am I breathing my breath or am I just allowing the breath to be here? However it is in this room, the air is moving in and out of my body. Breathing in, I notice thinking. Breathing out. Ah, so it is. Thoughts come and go. But I'm here, just breathing. Whatever arises, just let it be. Ah, this is here. A twitch. No right way, no wrong way, just this play. A sense of allowance. Whatever arises, arises, is here, and it's gone. No need to grab on. No struggle. The body breathes. Air comes in, air goes out. It doesn't need our help. We just watch. We feel the caress of the air as it passes in and out. We may feel at ease. We may feel irritable. We may feel safe. We may feel uncertain. They're just feelings. See them. Say hello. And let the breath move on. Just in and out. Each moment arises, is here, and is gone. With the coming and going of the breath and thoughts, check back in with your body. Is it still at rest? Are you still aware of it here? As it leaned forward, leaning into the thoughts or shrinking away, just notice. Maybe lift the corners of your mouth to see if your jaw is clenched or at ease. Just notice. Place your awareness back on your breath. Reminded that you are here. The body is here, feeling all the things you feel. And still the breath comes in and out, softly, gently. Breathing. In the stillness of this moment, if there is any stillness for you in this stillness, notice that it's easier to just allow things. There is less will and worry in stillness. There is less _must-move_ in stillness, less fixing in stillness. Just for these few more minutes, I can rest and just watch things come and go. I can just allow things to be true that are true. The breath is deep. The breath is shallow. It's long. It's short. It's tall. It just is. I can just let that be. In this stillness, I can allow whatever I feel to just be. I don't have to worry it. I don't have to explain it. It can just be pleasant, unpleasant, neutral, just is. _[Bell rings]_ ## [Dharmette: The Truth of Suffering (1): The Truth of Suffering](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/26239) So, welcome to yet another moment. The moment where I speak more, and hopefully it won't be consistent with my topic for today. So, what we're going to talk about this week is the truth of suffering. What is it? Why is it here? What do we think about it? What do we feel about it? How does it affect us? And most importantly, how do we bring suffering to an end? You know, I have a dear friend who said he really can't deal with Buddhism. He likes some of the ideas, but this idea that everything is suffering, life is suffering, cannot deal with this. But you know, the Buddha never said life is suffering. He merely said that suffering happens. Suffering arises. Many of us come to practice because of suffering. Some pain we've experienced, some stress in our lives. Whether we're interested in simply being able to relax, take up meditation so I can be easy, or we really want to solve our problems, or we want relief from our problems. Some with emotional pain, some with psychological pain, some with physical pain. All of us know the presence of pain. But what is suffering? And what can we do about it, given that we're not all going to get what we want all the time? That's not what the Buddha meant. He said two important things about suffering. Suffering he listed as one of the Three Characteristics of Existence[^1]. The others being impermanence and a not stable, fixed self. The Pali[^2] word that is used is _dukkha_[^3], and most people translate it as suffering, but it's also translated as stress, or unsatisfactoriness. When we talk about suffering we're really talking about how we react to what is happening in our lives. Stress doesn't arise because my arm is being pulled. It's because I don't like my arm being pulled. I don't want my arm to be pulled. It feels unfair for my arm to be pulled. I didn't plan that. It is really important for us to notice when we notice something that's unsatisfactory, or painful, or hurtful, that it is that. And there's also the presence of what I think about it and who I want to blame. I want to blame you. I want to blame me. I want to blame the system, because I want to fix it. I want it to go away. I want suffering not to be here. And that very movement of wanting to push away, push away, push away creates more stress, more suffering. The Buddha said, "And what is the result of stress? There are some cases in which a person overcome with pain, his mind exhausted, grieves, mourns, laments, beats his breast, and becomes bewildered. Or one overcome with pain, his mind exhausted, comes to search outside: 'Who knows a way or two to stop this pain?' I tell you monks, that stress results either in bewilderment or in search." Either we are just confused and further distressed, or we search for: Where does this arise? How do I know this? What can I do about it? And the most important thing he said is: "Both formerly and now, it is only suffering I describe, and the cessation of suffering." This is what he taught. Suffering and the end of suffering. So what can we know about suffering? Whenever something arises that is painful or uncertain in our lives, the first thing that happens is we want to protect ourselves from it. We want to change it. We want to fix it. And in that fixing, we establish blame. It's your fault. It's my fault. Oh, if I weren't so... If I just said something different. Oh, if they would just say something different. A few weeks ago, I gave a talk on forgiveness and someone said, you know, it would be so easy to forgive this person if they would just apologize for this horrible thing that they did. And I acknowledged that yeah, it would be better, it would be easier for you if they apologized. But why is that a condition for you to stop suffering? The suffering of putting them out of your life, of not having them, of telling yourself over and over how injured you are. That suffering is all yours and has nothing to do with their apology. To see how we create our own suffering is not easy. It's not direct. But what's interesting... I also have this book because I like to balance things. It's called _Happiness_, written by Matthieu Ricard[^4] who is a very prominent lama, a friend of the Dalai Lama[^5]. And in his book on happiness, he says that they did lots of surveys of people of what makes you happy. And the most common thing that happened that was true to all cases of happiness was the momentary disappearance of inner conflicts. That the person feels in harmony with the world and with herself. Momentary disappearance of inner conflicts. If this is happiness, it seems that the dispersal of internal conflicts would be a worthy goal, a worthy intention. Unhappiness is altogether different, he says, being the way in which we experience our suffering. How we experience our suffering. You know, emotions come and go. Anger in itself is not bad, but the reaction... we think of anger as a reaction, but there's actually this response that comes up in the body. You can feel the adrenaline going in your body, and then what? It's what you do next. It's how you see it. It's how you react to it that determines whether that anger builds and the ill will along with it, or whether you see that and you say wow. A couple of days ago, maybe longer, I read something in the news—but it's easy, it could happen any day—and I was momentarily outraged by what I read. I could feel the anger coming up in my body and it was so strong over something that was kind of trivial. It wasn't like somebody had been killed. It was... yeah, details not important. The strength of that reaction was amazing to me. And I felt the adrenaline rising and I thought, my God, I don't want to feel this way. How useful is it for me to have this kind of response to what's happening? So, I am reminded of my own feelings about how I want things to be and how when they don't happen that way, I tense up and I wonder why it's happening and what's wrong with those people and what's wrong with me. So yesterday morning, for some reason that I could not explain to myself, I was in a terrible mood. Just so irritable, and so cranky, and so short, and just not allowing the time to move. I was so tensed up around the moment. And my husband and I were getting ready to go out for brunch and it didn't matter what he did. It was wrong. It was just wrong. And I thought, "No, he's not wrong. You're wrong." And knowing that, seeing that, I couldn't fix it in myself. [Laughter] All I could do was see it and remind myself, say nothing. [Laughter] Just move on. Keep moving. Watch this mood. But don't think about it. Don't dwell on it. Don't massage it. Figure it out. This just puts energy into it. Just be aware that there is this black thing in your attitude. Just dark, dark. And say dark, and laugh at it. I don't feel like laughing. Right. [Laughter] Okay. And you know, it passed. And it probably took, I don't know, maybe 10 minutes after I really became aware of it before it lessened its energy. That's a long time to keep track of, what am I doing? How am I treating this? How am I reacting? But constantly watching, how am I reacting? Because that's where the suffering is. How am I reacting? Am I blaming myself? "You should have gotten more sleep. You should have prepared before." I could go on. Those thoughts came, but they didn't stick. They just came and passed. If we're in this practice to end suffering, we have to know when suffering arises. And I don't mean, you know, there's this instruction that is often given in Buddhism when you stay with your pain, stay with your sorrow, stay with whatever it is, just be with it. But what's not really explained is what that means is watch what is going on with you in response to it. It does not mean get in and roll around on the floor in it. It doesn't mean, oh, I'm sad, so I'm going to really examine sadness. What it means is, if I see sadness, how do I feel? How do I know I'm sad? Where do I find it in my body? What's happening that I'm calling sadness? Looking very closely at what that is. So that we can see the cause of the suffering not as whatever the initial experience was, but what comes right after it. We have to know how to let go of the burning stick. Let go of that flash of outrage, that flash of righteousness. To relinquish what is causing suffering, we first have to see it. We have to see it. And in seeing that, what happens is we see the suffering in others as well. The thing that really kept me from saying something in the midst of my dark mood was understanding that almost anything I would say to my husband would only hurt him, because it wasn't coming from a place of love and compassion, which is what I needed to feel first for myself. Until I could feel that, I couldn't risk the relationship with someone else. In that moment I had to really see, ah, I am the one suffering, and all I can do is just say hi. Hi. What we have to do is bring ourselves to the place of mindfulness. Notice, be present for the sensations, the feelings, the thoughts, the ideas. Be present for what's happening. Notice your reactions. And know that you know. It's not enough to say, "Oh, I'm cranky today." Know that you know that. Feel it in your bones. Then the practice is to watch them pass, because they will. All those feelings, the resistance to the pain in my knee, know that it will not be permanent. One way or the other, it's going to change. Feel the peacefulness in that moment of knowing. Just a tiny bit. And then you go back to the feeling. And then you say, constantly disentangling yourself. I'm going to close with a poem by Jane Hirshfield[^6] called _Two Kerosene Lanterns_. The cat walks the narrow shelf beneath the window where many delicate things are arranged. Polished ammonites, a dried starfish, three turtle netsuke[^7], a few curls of birch bark, two long unused kerosene lanterns. As if on their own, two hands fly up to cover the person's face, to cover the eyes already closed. The crash, as it must, arrives. The hands lower slowly. The cat sits on the floor in the room's middle, calmly licking one paw. The law of cats is simple. One arrangement becomes another. People are strange. Let me repeat that. The cat walks the narrow shelf beneath the window where many delicate things are arranged. As if on their own... two long unused kerosene lanterns. As if on their own, two hands fly up to cover the person's face, to cover the eyes already closed. The crash, as it must, arrives. The cat sits on the floor in the room's middle, calmly licking one paw. The law of cats is simple. One arrangement becomes another. People are strange. Only we insist that we control everything. May you know suffering and let it go. Thank you. I'll see you tomorrow. --- [^1]: **Three Characteristics of Existence:** In Buddhism, these are impermanence (_anicca_), suffering or unsatisfactoriness (_dukkha_), and non-self (_anatta_). [^2]: **Pali:** The language used to preserve the Buddhist canon of the Theravada tradition. [^3]: **Dukkha:** A Pali word often translated as "suffering," "stress," or "unsatisfactoriness." [^4]: **Matthieu Ricard:** A French writer, translator, and Buddhist monk who resides at Shechen Tennyi Dargyeling Monastery in Nepal. [^5]: **Dalai Lama:** The highest spiritual leader of Tibet. [^6]: **Jane Hirshfield:** An American poet, essayist, and translator known for her Zen Buddhist-influenced poetry. [^7]: **Netsuke:** Miniature sculptures that were invented in 17th-century Japan to serve a practical function on traditional garments.