---
ai_generation_date: '2026-07-07'
ai_model: gemini-3-pro-preview
audiodharma:
  talks:
  - date: '2022-01-10'
    mp3_url: https://audiodharma.us-east-1.linodeobjects.com/talks/14846/20220110-Diana_Clark-IMC-the_dharma_and_new_year_s_resolutions.mp3
    speakers:
    - speaker_name: Diana Clark
      speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/240
    talk_start_time_seconds: 0
    title: The Dharma and New Year's Resolutions
    url: https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/14846
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location_city: Redwood City, CA
video_unavailable: false
youtube:
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  imprecise_upload_date: '2022-05-04'
  title: The Dharma and New Year's Resolutions
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  uploader_str: Insight Meditation Center
  uploader_url: https://www.youtube.com/@InsightMeditationCenter
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvLqQNioU5g
---

# The Dharma and New Year's Resolutions - [Diana Clark](https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/240)

*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.*

## [The Dharma and New Year's Resolutions](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/14846)

Okay, so welcome. Welcome, everybody. A really warm welcome to this moment, whether you are here live or you're listening to this sometime in the future. Wherever you may be, whomever you may be, welcome.

So last week, it was January 3rd, and I spoke about New Year's resolutions. It seems like that's something that we can talk about around the beginning of the year, and today I'd like to continue that conversation. But you might be thinking, "But Diana, this is a Dharma center. I mean, New Year's resolutions, that's not very Dharmic."

And maybe I would just like to talk about this just for a moment here. Sometimes I like to talk, and many Dharma teachers do this, right, where we talk about a Dharma topic, unpack it, explore it, poke around in there a little bit, and then talk about how we might cultivate or develop or recognize, feel, or experience, and maybe with some application to our daily life. Maybe not, but sometimes there is this too. Maybe some way in which it might support our meditation practice or whatever it might be.

But today I'd like to do kind of the opposite. Last week I did as well a little bit of this: let's take our daily life, some of these mundane things—New Year's resolutions, whether or not we actually make them. This is something that, with this whole idea of a new, fresh start, whether it's at New Year's or some other time, is a common practice that people do, that our culture does, and I imagine that many other cultures do. And so can we take something that's—I'm using this word—mundane, ordinary, maybe not spiritual? Certainly in some ways people practice on New Year's Eve may not fall into the spiritual realm, but this activity of New Year's resolutions, of making them, can we take something as ordinary as that and bring it into our practice? Or bring our practice to that?

Or maybe a way to say it is: is there any way in which we're making this division, this artificial division between mundane, ordinary life and Dharma practice, our spiritual life, our inner life? For those of you who have been practicing a while, you know that that division doesn't really hold up so tightly. Some things that we experience, cultivate—I'll just use those words, experience and cultivate—whether it's in our spiritual life or whether it's in our daily life, affects the other, right? We're only one person. We're a single person, each of us, with one heart and mind and body.

So, if you're feeling this little protest—you might not be, but if you are feeling this protest, "New Year's resolutions and a Dharma talk?"—just an invitation to think about where we draw these distinctions and is it helpful? Is it helpful to draw these distinctions, and maybe we can bring the Dharma to all different aspects of our life, to all of that.

So maybe, more specifically, I was going to talk about if we want to start a new behavior, if we want to cultivate a particular quality, if we want to develop a new habit. We often use this word habit; sometimes habit refers to something that we do unknowingly, but I'm pointing to things that are intentional but we do to support our lives. So this new behavior. So one way to really support new behaviors, for example, a meditation practice, a regular meditation practice, maybe it's a loving-kindness practice, compassion practice, whatever it might be. In order to support it, it's really helpful: our environment. It can be a tremendous support or it can be something that we really struggle against.

And maybe I'll introduce this idea by telling a little bit of a story that comes out of the suttas. I've told this story about the suttas; it's one of my favorites, so I tell it in a number of different contexts. But maybe I'll tell the story first and talk about it a little bit. So it's about this person named Meghiya, who is at this time the attendant to the Buddha. So this is before Ananda is the attendant to the Buddha. And Meghiya, he's with the Buddha but he wishes to go elsewhere and meditate. And he wants to go to this beautiful mango grove that he saw earlier; he thought it would be a good place to meditate. And the Buddha discourages him from going.

But Meghiya asks him three times, and we see this so common in the suttas that after a third time there's a shift. You have to say no, no, and third time, okay, yes. So maybe reluctantly the Buddha says, "Okay, Meghiya, you can go meditate." Because Meghiya was the Buddha's attendant, I'm assuming that the Buddha was expecting that Meghiya would do whatever the Buddha's attendant does, that he would stay and take care of that. But instead, Meghiya wanted to go meditate. So Meghiya goes off and meditates, and he has a difficult time. His meditation doesn't go well, and he even exclaims out loud, "It is amazing that I am ensnared by these three bad, unwholesome thoughts! That is, thoughts of sensual pleasure, thoughts of ill will, thoughts of harming."

So then his meditation doesn't go well and he goes back and tells the Buddha. And the Buddha responds by saying, "For those whose freedom of mind is not fully mature, there are five things that lead to maturity. What five? Here, Meghiya, a monk has good friends, good companions, good comrades. This is the first thing that leads to maturity." So when the freedom of mind, freedom of heart isn't there, there are these five things. The first one is good friends, good comrades, good companions, good associates. I appreciate that there's this number of synonyms here, and we can interpret that a number of different ways. One way I interpret it is not having this same level of intimacy. Like, we have people that maybe we just say, "Hi, how are you? Nice to see you," and maybe we don't talk with them a lot, but somehow just, there's familiarity. 

For example, come to a meditation center, maybe even on the chat box on YouTube just to say hello. There's something about just recognizing that other people are here, that other people are doing the same behavior, that we're supporting one another in this way. We shouldn't underestimate how powerful this is. The Buddha lists it as the first in this list of five things that when the heart and the mind don't have full maturity—we can interpret that as liberation—five things that support it. Number one: good friends, good spiritual companions, good associates. And we can interpret this word "good" that I'm saying as this translation of the word *kalyāṇa*[^1]. And we could also understand it as beautiful. So beautiful is often something that's uplifting.

So for me it's significant that this story from the suttas has Meghiya, who is the Buddha's attendant. Some might say the Buddha is the world's greatest meditation teacher. He's the Buddha's attendant, he has ordained, he has dedicated his life to practice. And he has ready access to this fabulous teacher, and he still has difficulties. And the Buddha says to him something that can be a support is good friends, good associates. It's a list of five; I'm not going to list the other four. My point here is the number one: it's about good friends.

So why is this? Do we think that the Buddha is pointing to—and I'm sure many of you know there's lots of different stories or teaching points that the Buddha has made about the importance of our associates and our friends. And I want to believe that the Buddha recognized something that all of us recognize too, but maybe we don't say it so explicitly: that we learn behaviors from others. We could even say—and it's true, right—our earliest behaviors, not so much that we learn them, but that we imitate them, right? It's part of natural human development that we imitate things. But even as adults, we pick up behaviors and ways of speaking from others, ways of dressing from others. Of course, this is how fashion works, right? Whether we intend to or not, clothing fashion changes. It's because people get influenced by one another. Whether they intend to or not, this is how dialects, regional ways of speaking get created, as we just slowly get influenced by each other, whether we intend to or not.

And to be sure, some of the power of social media for good, and maybe for ill—or I shouldn't say maybe, it's both good and ill, right—is this power of hitting a like button or this social... I forgot now what the word is, but this idea that, "Well, everybody else is doing it, so it must be okay." But we only know everybody else is doing it because we hear about it on all the social media platforms. So this tremendous power that, whether it's intentional or not, other people have around us.

So if we want to have a support for our meditation practice, for our spiritual practice, it can be a tremendous support to be with others who have similar practice, similar if not the same activities, behaviors, things that they do. For one, because we influence each other as I was just pointing out, but also, maybe to be a little bit more specific about it, is that if we see other people meditating... right? If you would have told me years ago that I would be on YouTube sitting still with my eyes closed, right... I certainly wouldn't think that I'd be doing this. But there's something about when we do see other people doing this, it normalizes this. And I have said, I'm sure as many of you have said in enough retreats or Dharma talks, that's what we did. We had a meditative posture and meditated together. So it normalizes this behavior. Maybe like, "Oh, it's actually not that weird." Maybe from the outside it seems weird, right? But there's a collection, there's a group of us, it doesn't seem weird at all. So just to have this behavior modeled by others, also maybe learning, seeing like, "Oh okay, they do it that way. Maybe that's helpful," or "They don't do it the way I'm doing it. I wonder why?" So not only does it normalize, but we can also learn from them, like, "Oh, that's how you do it."

And there's a little bit—I could use this word—peer pressure, that's whether it's explicit or not. I know certainly for me, when I was getting more and more active here at IMC and people were going off on retreat, and my first meditation retreat was not a pleasant experience, let's just say that. To be sure, it was immensely impactful and ultimately life-changing, but it was not a pleasant experience. It was so difficult. It was really difficult. Not everybody has that experience, to be sure, but for me it was hard. And part of it was just physically demanding, and then when you're in physical pain, we can collapse around that. But I was seeing people around IMC going off on retreat, and as I left that first retreat—that wasn't with IMC, it was in a different tradition—thinking like, "Oh my gosh, I don't know if I ever want to do that again." But there was a little bit of this being influenced by others. I felt like, "Okay, maybe I should do this." And boy am I glad I did. Boy am I glad I did! Not because it was a walk in the park, easy peasy, but it just really helped support my practice. So this idea that other people influence us, and we can use this as a way to be a support for our practice.

So many things are available on Zoom these days, it's astounding. To find a group that we resonate with that supports our practice, it can be a tremendous support, whether it's on Zoom, whether it's in person, if you are in a place, a location in which that's available. Maybe when IMC opens back up, to come back to IMC, IRC. We canceled a retreat because of Omicron, shifted some over to online, but we are really striving to try to keep as much as we can in person safely. So if that's in your realm of practice, to consider practicing in person with others too. So that's one thing about our environment that can be a support for our New Year's resolutions, really creating the conditions in which it makes it more likely that we would adopt a new behavior.

But I also want to point out another Dharma teaching that's related to this, and that is there's these Three Refuges, these Three Treasures: the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha[^2]. And I think the Buddha had some tremendous wisdom pointing to the Sangha as a refuge partly for just what I was pointing to: the support to have a community of people that are practicing together. But that's not the only reason, that's not the only benefit of the Sangha.

At the beginning of the Anapanasati Sutta[^3]—that is the sutta that gives the mindfulness of breathing instructions, and sometimes when we read suttas we might gloss over the part of it that's not about the actual instructions—but this is really a foundational text in this tradition, the mindfulness of breathing. And it begins by setting the scene with quite a few paragraphs talking about how there are these monastics all together, and there's the senior monastics teaching the junior monastics. And it's described in such a beautiful way. And the Buddha coming and seeing this, and I don't have the quote here, but it is being very pleased by how there's this helping of one another and people practicing together. So this idea of just the support, maybe indirectly by just showing up together, but maybe there's support for other people directly also by teaching one another, as that part of the Anapanasati Sutta shows.

But there's another part of the Sangha and another part of this practice. I've been talking about how we're influenced by our environment, and of course we're influenced by those that are in powerful positions. Either directly or indirectly, often you find people imitate those who are in power. The Sangha... when I'm using the word power, I'm thinking about their power of dedicating their life to what's important to them. And there's this practice of recollecting the Sangha. And the Buddha describes it this way: "The Sangha of the Blessed One's disciples who have practiced well, who have practiced straightforwardly, who have practiced methodically, who have practiced masterfully." So he's describing the Sangha as these disciples, these followers who have practiced straightforwardly, methodically, masterfully. So he's referring to those that have some meditative attainment, who have tasted freedom.

And so bringing to mind like, "Yes, other people have been on this path before, and they have done this practice, and they have found some freedom." Maybe we know people who we find inspiring. Often we know that it didn't just happen overnight, but it's through the results of some practice. But this is more specifically in the suttas; there is this idea that recollecting the Sangha, being inspired by other people who have dedicated their life, who have found their way to this practice, that it brings some gladness to the heart, some uplift. The Pali word is *pāmojja*[^4], maybe some delight.

And then last week I talked about the gladness pentad. So this recollection of the Sangha, not only can we be influenced by those who have gone before us and who have really dedicated their life, but this activity of recollecting them can also bring some joy, some gladness, some uplift. I find myself smiling when I think about how many women, how many men have, through the ages since the time of the Buddha, dedicated their life, and how many have found freedom. And how many people have found freedom as lay people as well, right? So it doesn't have to be entirely dedicating their life, but it brings a certain gladness.

And then this gladness pentad: gladness that leads to joy, which leads to tranquility, which leads to happiness, which leads to concentration or collectedness, we might say. And this flowing from one to the other of this gladness pentad is another way in which it can be a support for new behaviors. This gladness, joy, tranquility, happiness, concentration... or maybe concentration I could say collectedness, is a way also in which we can remain focused on what we're doing here, what our priorities are, what's important to us.

So, an environment that's supportive for having new behaviors, new activities, new things we want to do. Being inspired by others that have done this. Being inspired in such a way that it touches us. Having some appreciation for people who have found a way. People who teach others to, for themselves, to find a way. Certainly, I have gratitude and appreciation for my teachers. And then allow this gladness itself to be a support for practice, and not only for practice, maybe, but for this... allow it to have this joy, tranquility, and happiness that leads to some collectedness, and the collectedness can be a support also.

So in this way we can think about New Year's resolutions like, "Oh, I'm, you know, there's countless ones that we can do," right? But is there a way in which we can actually think, "Oh, there's a Dharma way in which we can use this as a support for our New Year's resolutions"? I've been pointing to support for developing a meditation practice, but many of the things that I've been talking about here can be applied to other new habits or behaviors we'd like to do.

And in this way, bringing the Dharma to New Year's resolutions is that way also we might meld or knit together any divisions we might have between, "Okay, this is ordinary, mundane stuff, and this is Dharma stuff." But is there really any need to make a difference? Maybe there's no difference. Maybe that's what we discover with our practice, that there isn't a time when the Dharma is on or off, switch it on or off, but allowing it to blossom and permeate and flow in all areas of our life.

And if we find that it's stuck and not able to permeate certain areas, we could have some curiosity about that. What areas are we thinking that we are excluding? What do we think needs to be separate from our Dharma practice and all the things that we're learning and practicing and cultivating?

So the Dharma comes to New Year's resolutions. Wishing you a beautiful 2023. Thank you.

---

[^1]: **Kalyāṇa:** A Pali word meaning beautiful, good, auspicious, or noble. Often used in the context of *kalyāṇa-mittatā* (noble friendship).
[^2]: **Sangha:** The Buddhist community; in this context, it often refers to the community of ordained monks and nuns, as well as the community of practitioners more broadly.
[^3]: **Anapanasati Sutta:** A primary discourse by the Buddha that details the practice of mindfulness of breathing (*anapanasati*).
[^4]: **Pāmojja:** A Pali word translated as gladness, delight, or joy, which serves as the foundation for deeper states of concentration in Buddhist practice.