Meet Hardship With Clarity Instead Of Panic

This talk is a reflection on how we can train the mind to remain steady in the face of life’s constant change. Instead of reacting with fear or panic, we learn to meet our experience with clarity, calm, and presence. Rooted in Buddhist teachings on impermanence and emptiness, it gently guides us toward inner stillness — a refuge that isn’t about control over life, but about cultivating awareness within it.

A grounding practice in facing the world as it is, without being swept away.

Transcript

To live life awake is in part to see clearly that there is really nothing solid to hold on to in this life.

There is nothing reliable to rest on per se.

That's because the nature of everything is impermanence.

It's change,

Instability,

You can call it whatever.

In Buddhism,

The term used is emptiness.

Now this is not emptiness in the sense of nothingness,

No existence,

Or,

You know,

A void.

Like things not being real,

As if everything was a dream or a fabrication of the mind.

Just a fantasy.

It is emptiness in the sense of lacking substance.

The starting point in Buddhism is the understanding that everything exists only in relation to everything else.

So nothing really exists on its own as a fixed,

Independent identity without being the product of other causes and conditions.

So in other words,

Everything is empty of self-existence.

That's the thing that's lacking from the container.

This is what makes it empty.

And when I say container,

I mean really anything that has characteristics,

That's part of our reality.

Anything that we take as being real,

Regardless of what substance it is made of,

Whether it's physical or mental,

Internal or external,

Objects,

Things,

Places,

People,

Ideas,

Emotions,

Feelings or thoughts.

Living itself is a wonderful teacher of this lesson of impermanence,

Of change and instability.

But we're also extremely talented when it comes to ignoring,

Or not acknowledging,

This lesson.

We're pretty good at just turning our heads away from it and closing our ears off.

And that's really where the problems start for us.

Because impermanence is the nature of everything,

Like we said before.

So when life puts impermanence in front of us,

Which is continuously,

Constantly,

We find ourselves utterly unprepared for it.

We call it suffering.

We call it hardship.

We call it difficulty.

When we bump into this reality that nothing ever stays the same,

Everything is subject to change and eventually disappearance in one way or another,

We're faced with the reality of the fact that we really don't have any control over the causes and conditions outside of ourselves.

And the problem is that our tendency is to take these things outside of ourselves and turn them into solid things that we can rest on,

Or almost like a refuge in a way.

A refuge is a place that you go to and you know that it will always provide some sort of shelter or protection.

It is dependable,

It's reliable.

And that's exactly what we want to do with the things that we already know from our life experiences.

And the mind does this.

We live life and we experience good things,

Pleasant things.

And in that moment,

The mind creates this little category.

This is good.

This is nice.

This is pleasant.

This is wanted,

Desirable.

And then it attaches this sort of permanent label to that experience,

To that notion,

That thing,

And stores it,

Puts it away,

To say,

Okay,

From now on,

This is something that we want.

This is something that we'll always accept.

This is something that we can even chase.

We want it.

And then there's the bad parts of life.

There's the parts that we don't want,

That we don't enjoy,

That we find unpleasant and painful.

Those are immediately labeled too as undesirable.

Also stamped with this permanent kind of label of not wanted,

Enemy,

Foe.

And put on the side,

Stored.

So what happens?

What happens in time is that the mind creates this vault of classified,

Or rather misclassified in a way,

Experiences and ideas from which it then reshapes our reality as we experience life.

Things have a way of coming around,

And so we've bumped into something before.

It gave us pleasure.

It was nice.

It was enjoyable.

So we might look for it again,

And we might bump into it again.

And when we bump into it again,

The mind will say,

Oh,

I know this.

I've seen this before.

I've lived this before.

This is good.

The mind is not going to analyze whether that thing has remained the same or not.

Or at least it usually doesn't do that because we don't focus on it.

We just accept it.

We assume that that thing hasn't changed,

That it stayed exactly the same.

The same tends to happen with the undesirable things.

Probably even more so.

We immediately run away from certain things because we have classified them already as permanently unwanted,

Permanently harmful,

Permanently bad.

So we don't take into account this factor of impermanence and change.

We don't take the time to really see things with clarity.

So what happens is that when we bump into situations that challenge all of these preconceived notions that we have,

We find ourselves meeting difficulty,

Meeting hardship,

Meeting suffering with panic instead of clarity.

We find ourselves utterly unprepared.

I don't know what to do.

I'm not ready for this.

I wasn't expecting this.

This wasn't even in my plans.

Yesterday I was completely healthy.

Today I'm very sick.

Yesterday I had so much money.

Today I lost everything.

Yesterday I had this beautiful house that today is gone.

This person that I loved so much was with me yesterday and they're gone today.

Will I ever see them again?

I don't know.

These are all unpredictable life situations.

They're unavoidable because we don't have any control over what is happening outside of us in this world of causes and conditions that continuously flow into each other.

And so it's bad enough not to have control over the things on the outside,

But to also lack control over what's happening on the inside of us.

That's probably worse.

That's an ever bigger problem.

We really can't afford to not control the mind,

The intention of the mind,

And what's happening when we're making decisions based on what it is that we experience or what we think we're experiencing.

See,

The mind in a way is sort of like a huge town hall meeting.

There's all of these voices yelling,

Shouting things at each other,

Throwing ideas out there.

Some voices are loud,

Some voices are soft.

Some are talking a lot,

Some are not saying that much.

Some are saying things that are relevant and some are saying things that are completely off topic.

But from a certain distance,

It's sort of this cacophony of sound that really makes no sense to us.

So having control,

Just a little bit of control over what's happening on the inside,

Is almost like being able to pick the relevant voices out of that town hall meeting and put some order,

Almost like a moderator,

And to say who gets to be actually heard and who doesn't get to be heard.

This is a quality that's very important for us to develop for ourselves.

Let's call it alertness,

Being alert.

Technically,

It would mean to watch what we're doing on the inside,

To keep an eye on the mind,

To keep watching it.

As we're processing situations that we're dealing with,

As we're bumping into things and the mind starts to judge and evaluate what is happening,

We should have this quality of alertness,

To be awake within that decision-making process and not let it be automatic.

And not to know who's in charge of actually making the decision,

What part of the mind takes control when that decision process is happening.

Because the mind continuously churns stuff out.

That's also out of our control.

We can't even decide what our next thought is going to be.

We can't know what our next thought is going to be.

You can't plan that.

The most we can do is just sit here and wait for the next thought to be produced by the mind and then figure out what that thought is and what we're going to do with it.

Whether we're going to chase it or not,

Run with it or not,

Use it or not,

Whether it's useful or not,

Whether it's meaningful or not.

Alertness helps us keep an eye on that and to realize when a relevant voice arises from this cacophony of sound that's the town hall meeting in our brain,

In our mind.

And then there's another quality that's very important,

Which is mindfulness.

We're not talking about mindfulness from a New Age kind of perspective.

There's so many definitions of mindfulness out there,

But in our discussion,

We're talking about mindfulness from a strictly Buddhist perspective.

Mindfulness is the ability to pay attention to one particular thing for a while.

So in the context of our discussion,

It's the ability to focus the mind on one of these things that's being produced at the moment,

One of these voices,

Right?

And so in meditation,

Which is something we should practice in order to develop these qualities,

Because it's one of the best tools that we have for this process,

But in meditation,

We can anchor the mind to something like the breath,

For example.

And as we spend time,

We use mindfulness to pay attention to this one particular thing,

The breath,

As it travels through the body,

As it produces change in the body,

As it itself changes with the body.

We're able to sort of create this stillness within this chaotic storm that the mind is continuously in.

I mentioned before that there's nothing solid in this life,

In this world,

Nothing external that can be used for us to rest on.

So using mindfulness and alertness to pay attention to the mind,

To what's happening on the inside,

To this process,

Is almost like creating a resting place,

A place from which we can try to get some control over what's happening,

Rather than allowing the mind to run in all these different directions.

We try to be in charge and to put some order,

And in order to do that,

We need to create this space of stillness.

Of course,

This doesn't mean that we're going to quiet the mind.

The mind,

Like I said before,

Continuously churns out things.

We can't quiet the mind.

But we can create this stillness of the body,

From which we can observe.

We can observe the chaos,

And within that chaos,

Realize that there is an underlying stillness that's accessible.

So when we're in charge of what's happening in this town hall meeting that's in our mind,

We realize that we need to make sure that we put the right qualities in charge of the decision-making process,

Because our mind has these qualities.

Some of them are good,

Some of them are bad.

With a little bit of attention and observation,

It's quite easy to start noticing what the good and the bad qualities of our minds are.

We've all caught ourselves running with thoughts of jealousy,

Anger,

Hatred,

Envy.

We've moved towards directions that we saw were unskillful.

We made really bad decisions based on following patterns of thought that we were already noticing were not beneficial.

And then we've also been able to see ourselves,

Probably many,

Many times,

Making the right decision.

The mind was probably pulling us in one direction,

But we were able to rely upon our good qualities.

Qualities like kindness,

Compassion,

Patience,

Endurance.

We were able to rely on these qualities to make good,

Beneficial,

Skillful decisions.

And so when we're talking about meeting hardship,

And meeting difficulties,

And meeting impermanence,

All of these challenges,

Tremendous challenges,

We want to meet them led by the good qualities of our mind.

So our goal is to put these good qualities in charge of the decision-making process.

When we do that,

We're able to maybe create a place where we are a little bit more at ease,

Rather than reacting impulsively when a challenge appears in front of us and catches us off guard.

Because we spend time contemplating the actions of the mind,

Because we spend time contemplating the impermanence of everything,

Because we spend time training ourselves not to be caught up in the storm of never-ending thoughts and inner voices,

We just might be able to become at ease within all of this,

And to create this resting place that's almost a refuge from which we can actually respond skillfully to the hardships in our lives.

So in that way,

We don't panic when things happen to us,

But we're able to react with clarity and with wisdom.