Impermanence
Embrace change, says Diana Winston. Mindfulness can help you savor this fleeting moment.
She’s two, she’s five, she’s twelve, she’s almost seventeen. She’s a milk-drunk lump in my arms; she’s on her way to prom with her boyfriend.
What happened?
All parents have this experience. How can that sweet-smelling, preverbal mass of urges become the one taking the twenty-minute shower and complaining when the water runs out? How can she be nursing in my lap in one moment, and then I blink and she’s begging to use the car?
Anicca vata sankhara
“All conditioned things are impermanent.”Uppada vaya-dhammino
“Their nature is to arise and pass away.”Uppajjitva nirujjhanti
“Having arisen they come to an end.”
That’s from a chant recited in Buddhist countries to remind us of the reality of death. But we can also chant it to remind us of the truth of impermanence: Everything changes. Anything that is conditioned—made, formed, or dependent on anything else—will come to an end.
Each exquisite phase of childhood drums home to me the Buddhist teaching on anicca, which is translated as impermanence.
My daughter’s babyhood came to an end a really long time ago, and now it’s just a series of remembered scents and feelings. Her toddlerhood evaporated in a split second, and each year since—lived, arrived, gone. Today she is nearly seventeen, and if I blink, this will be gone soon too.
How can we live like this?
Anicca is one the core teachings of Buddhism: All things will pass because it is of the nature of things to arise and pass away. Could there be a more obvious insight? Of course things change. Duh.
Yet most of us steadfastly deny change. Or rebel against it, fight it, resist it. We take it personally when it happens unexpectedly and even when we know it is coming.
Change is taking place in front of our eyes every single second—whether it’s our bodies changing, cells turning over, job changes, kids growing up, changing thoughts, hairstyles, fashions, ideas, political ideologies, weather—and most of the time we don’t like it. Well, we do like change from something rotten to something good—we all cheered when middle school ended—but most of the time we cling tightly to things, hope they won’t change, and suffer when they do. Intellectually, we know everything changes, but despite what’s in front of our two eyes every millisecond, we live life as if it’s a personal affront when things change.
Insight meditation teaches us about impermanence but not in a cognitive way. Instead, it gives us a felt, embodied experience of change. We sit on a cushion or chair and simply pay attention to what’s happening in the body and mind, noticing whatever arises—a breath, a sensation, a thought—and we let it pass without trying to change it. We’re just experiencing the changing thoughts, sensations, emotions, sounds, breaths, no two alike. After a time, change becomes undeniable. We cannot help but see it, and in the long term it transforms something inside us. The part of us that wants to resist change begins to get it—Oh yeah, change happens—and that somehow softens the blow of living. It’s not just a cognitive knowing; it is a deep, felt sense of aha, this is the undeniable truth of things. Every single thing changes, is impermanent; there is nothing that lasts forever. This cannot not be true.
And as we cling less, we suffer less. We no longer live
in resistance to life but in harmony with the truth of things. The ground is shaky. We know it and align ourselves with this truth.
So, when the inevitable change happens, we don’t curse the universe for this shocking and unfair turn of events. Instead, we sigh and say, Oh yes, change. I know it. I can handle it.
When we understand impermanence at this bone-deep level, we let go and stop resisting life, and ease floods in. We still may be surprised. I’m still surprised each time I look in the mirror. I’m pleasantly surprised my daughter cooks dinner for me when it always used to be the other way around. I’m unhappily surprised she’d
rather hang with her boyfriend than me. Although I am still surprised by change, my deep-knowing body—my practice body—goes, ah yes, that’s right, isn’t it? She’s supposed to change. It’s a good thing. As they say, you spend the first years making sure they’re attached to you and the next twenty making sure they separate.
The beauty of mindfulness practice, in addition to teaching us about change, is that it also gives us the tools to work with the grief, shock, and overwhelm of change. We can use our mindfulness and kindness practices to hold ourselves with care while we’re experiencing challenging emotions. We can breathe through them and surrender to the present moment.
Insight meditation teaches us the deep letting go that is a prerequisite to freedom. When we find ourselves tightly holding on—to a person, a stage of life, an idea, an opinion, a desire, a grudge—if we can see the clinging fully and feel how sticky it’s become, then the mind just naturally drops it. We let go into freedom.
We start to take nothing for granted. Because we know how precious and fragile life is, we savor every second we possibly can. When we understand impermanence, we get that this is life. That the dinner table tonight where we are all teasing each other is life. That failing the driver’s test and then finally passing it is life. That dancing the dog on two legs around the house is life. This sweet, impermanent, delicious moment is the only moment that ever will be this way, so we should savor it because in a few moments it will be no more. It’s a huge ask to really live life. To love and show up for it all, the beautiful parts and the stinky parts. It’s truly a miracle.
The very last line of the death chant is Tesam vupasamo sukho: “The cessation of things brings bliss.” That’s because insight into anicca helps us love more. It helps us let go more. It helps us live fully. If through your mindfulness you can see impermanence, if you can see it in all its absolute brightness and unwavering, breathtaking truth, your mind can drop into liberation.
Inked on my husband’s forearm is “This tattoo shall pass.” Yup, even permanent ink. Let’s show up for the ride.
She’s waking me up with her hungry cries.
She’s running in a white dress with her stuffed bunny.
She’s playing the ghost in Macbeth.
Once she told me she hated old-fashioned music like Prince. Then she’s soloing a Cure song in choir.
Soon she’ll leave for college. I better buckle up.
Anicca vata sankhara. “All conditioned things are impermanent.”
Suffering
Holly Gayley on how dukkha drives the search for elsewhere—and how turning toward discomfort opens the path to meaningful action.
Octavia Butler was prescient. Decades ago, as one of the first Black, female science fiction writers, she imagined a dystopian America beginning in the mid-2020s when society would come undone due to income inequality and climate change. A time when exploratory missions to Mars promised improbable new horizons.
The search for elsewhere is an age-old feature of human suffering. It has informed migration patterns, chosen or forced, across the centuries and millennia. The quest for greener pastures and dreams of a better day have informed both freedom struggles and colonizing, extractive pursuits. This perpetual search is integral to samsara, the ongoing cycle of suffering fueled by persistent attempts to grapple with the precarious and ever-changing nature of conditioned existence. In fact, the English translation of the Tibetan term for sentient beings is “migrators.”
Today we have a new portal to elsewhere, the cell phone. As useful as it is, the cell phone stands at the ready whenever here is uncomfortable. Any time, we can escape into endless distractions and entertainment. Whether doomscrolling, channel surfing, or shopping, we easily get ensnared in the struggle to find fulfillment outside ourselves.
In Buddhism, this struggle and dissatisfaction is called dukkha, the second of the three marks of existence. Duhkha has been translated by a range of terms, including “suffering,” “unsatisfactory,” “unreliable,” and most recently, “stress.”
Suffering can take many shapes: physical pain, emotional turmoil, mental anguish, and so much more. Sadly, we may feel that we have to hide the painful challenges in our life, to deal with them privately, in order to return anew and composed to the social world. In a happy-face culture, there’s pressure to project an image of enjoyment and success in our conversations and on social media platforms. This can make it difficult to face pain when it arises, as it inevitably does.
In our current neoliberal system, it’s on the individual to carve out the best life possible. This leads to constant striving, but it’s never enough—there’s always the next thing to need or achieve. It’s as if we’re constantly trying to fill an empty hole inside ourselves. American cultural theorist Lauren Berlant calls this “cruel optimism.” It’s the promise of a good life that is perpetually out of reach, such that our desire for external markers of success actually impedes our flourishing.
According to Buddhism, how we react and respond to painful feelings determines the degree of suffering that ensues. In the Sallatha Sutta, the Buddha famously gives the analogy of the two arrows.
The first arrow is the raw experience of pain—the present-moment encounter. The second arrow is our reaction: the interpretations or emotional upheaval that follow a painful experience. When we ruminate after an encounter, that’s the second arrow. In overidentifying with or resisting our raw experience, the Buddha says, we make things worse. The very act of bracing ourselves against pain reinforces and perpetuates suffering.
The classic antidote to the suffering caused by the second arrow is to see the fleeting nature of feelings, which arise and pass away moment by moment. In this case, there is no second arrow. Even when emotional pain runs deep, it’s not forever and it’s not who we are. We have agency in how we respond to our present-moment experiences, whether painful, pleasurable, or neutral. Present-moment experience is vedana, the seventh link in the twelve nidanas or causal chain that perpetuates the cycle of samsara.
In the wheel of existence, vedana is depicted as an arrow in the eye. The arrow symbolizes the intensity of our experience in the present moment, which we generally try to manage by grasping or pushing it away. If we don’t grasp or resist experience but simply feel it with nonjudgmental awareness, as we do in meditation practice, then vedana can become the very site of liberation. This is where we can break free of the causal chain of samsara. Whenever we’re brave enough to stay with our feelings, we have the possibility to shift from a habitual reaction, or ego-defense mechanism, to a genuine response.
The Tibetan tradition takes the classic teachings on vedana one step further by inviting the Buddhist practitioner to turn toward suffering. This approach comes out of the lojong, or “mind training” tradition brought to Tibet in the eleventh century by the great Indian master Atisha. One section of the lojong slogans is about “transforming adversity into the path of awakening.” The idea is that rather than trying to fix or get rid of discomfort, we can get curious and move toward what challenges us.
As Pema Chödrön says, “The only way out is through.” Bottling up intense emotions doesn’t make them go away. Somatically, we contract, and this creates a blockage in the body that we experience as tension or numbness. In the practice of mindfulness of body, we learn to attune to the felt sensations of the body, moment by moment. This allows us to breathe into the places where we hold tension. With breath comes awareness and the possibility of movement and release. The stuck places of contraction and blockage can begin to unwind.
This means being willing to feel our suffering, which trauma theorist Thomas Hübl calls the “disowned pain” that exists at individual, ancestral, and collective levels. When we withdraw from that pain, we become numb and absent. We prefer elsewhere to the here and now. We prefer distraction and entertainment to the unresolved pain that lives in us and in the social systems we inhabit.
When the capacity to attune to felt sensations in the body meets the empathetic presence of another person, the disowned pain can be felt and integrated. In trauma healing, this is called witnessing. Witnessing creates a space of attunement and deep listening in which to surface and tend to otherwise overwhelming emotions and disowned pain. The numbness, tension, or constriction—what Hübl describes as the “frozen” parts of ourselves—can melt and reintegrate. This restores our sense of wholeness and alignment.
In the end, suffering can be a powerful way to connect with others. It’s part of our common humanity. When we share our lived experience of suffering, and someone listens with empathy and presence, we’re no longer alone. It’s transformative.
When we affirm the here and now, rather than trying to escape to elsewhere or indulging in nostalgia for a bygone era, we can begin the work of healing and restoration on individual, ancestral, and collective levels. In order to heal, we need to relate to past and present social harms. Banning books and attempting to rewrite history will not make the problems in our society go away.
Turning toward suffering can be a catalyst for spiritual growth and the basis for engaging in social change. Eco-philosopher Joanna Macy emphasizes that “honoring our pain” in response to ecological devastation is a crucial step to mobilizing action in defense of life. In the nineteenth century, Tibetan luminaries like the Third Dodrupchen, Jigme Tenpai Nyima, advised, “Train gradually with minor discomforts, step by step, then eventually you’ll be able to handle the greater difficulties.”
These are teachings for our times. We’re in the midst of a polycrisis—the coalescence of multiple crises in the social, political, economic, and ecological spheres. This is the time to lean into discomfort and tackle issues head-on rather than avoid them until it’s too late.
There is no Planet B, as they say. Mars is not yet a viable option. Suzuki Roshi encourages us “to shine one corner of the world.” This is our corner, right where we are.
No-Self
Dawa Tarchin Phillips on how to see through the illusion of a solid, separate identity—and the deep compassion that arises when we do.
I struggled. I had questions—about life, meaning, identity. Who was I? Why was I here? What was the purpose? I didn’t feel anyone around me had the answers I was looking for. Maybe you have felt that way too.
One day on my way home from school—I must have been about six years old—a thought arose in my mind: What if I just sat down and looked at who I was?
Once I got to the bedroom that I shared with my brother, I crumpled my pillow into a seat and sat down on it. I closed my eyes. Then I started to look within. I tracked, observed, searched—following the simple question: Who am I really? What is my true character?
As I sat there, watching my mind, observing my inner experience, the obscurations covering my perception seemed to make way, layer by layer, like linen curtains in the summer wind. They pulled back one at a time, letting me glimpse something translucent, not yet clear, just behind. I kept going. And then, all at once, I broke through.
No one. There was no one. There was no self in the way I had assumed. I was shocked. The insight was an answer to my deeply held questions, and it also terrified me. If I was no one, how was I going to live my life? How was I going to care for myself and others? How was I going to become somebody? How was I going to fit in with the world as it presented itself?
When I checked the time, I saw that about two hours had passed since I’d sat down, yet the experience had felt timeless, as if I’d slipped into another dimension and reemerged undone. I was suddenly aware that I was now in on a secret that called all of human behavior into question—we are, in some sense, actors in an endless play of dress-up and charade, moving against a backdrop of calm, quiet, peaceful, yet unsettling disillusionment.
I did not have words for that insight then. The tradition I would later be trained in does: no-self, the third of the three marks of existence. And the first thing to understand about no-self is that a six-year-old could discover it on a bedroom pillow because it is not a philosophy. It is a finding. The Buddha was not interested in giving people a philosophy to adopt. He knew no philosophy ever frees anyone fully from fear. His work was to help people wake up through inquiry, and he asked us to conduct the inquiry ourselves.
So, I invite you to conduct it. If the self exists, where is it? Look in the body: The body is elements—bones and flesh, fluids, breath, warmth. Where in any of that is a self? If the self were the body, wouldn’t it still be there in a corpse? The body is still there. But when you look at a corpse, you see clearly that whatever you mean by the person is no longer present. Look into the mind: Try to find the mind in a single instant of experience. If you can’t, don’t worry. No one has ever been able to establish it—no shape, no size, no location. Look in the naming label: “Me” is just a word, and a word can be pasted onto almost anything. In all the places we look, the self turns out to be an appearance, a designation, a perception rather than an independently existing reality.
People often see all of this and then quietly shift the belief in a self into subtler identities—the soul, the observer, the essence, the part of me that watches. But the same inquiry applies. Everyone has the experience of an observer; from that experience we assume there must be one. But who has seen it? What size is it? Where is it sitting? I am not asking in order to take something away from you. Investigate the observer and you will discover what it actually is, and that discovery will set you more free, not less.
In all of this it helps to be honest about the stakes and to meet them with some humor. Every time we hurt someone and justify it with “I was just looking out for number one,” we might at least pause to make sure there is a number one.
Why does this matter for daily life? Because the self we cannot find is costly. For unwanted and unpleasant experiences to become suffering—the whole machinery of grasping, resistance, reaction, resentment, and recurrence—there has to be some idea of self. Self is what holds the suffering together. You can watch it operate: A stranger looks at you too long and uninvited, the observer registers threat, and now the moment is ruined. Nothing happened other than a curious gaze. But the self felt threatened, and the self must be defended. This same defense, scaled up, can manifest as nations at war. And because we’re not actually separate, there is an irony in all of it: Whatever we do to what we think is “other,” we are always going to experience it ourselves. If we’re robbers, we are robbing our own house.
Two misunderstandings stand at the gate of the teaching of no-self.
The first is nihilism: If there is no self, does anything matter? The Third Karmapa, Rangjung Dorje, resolved this in his Aspiration Prayer of Mahamudra, describing the nature of mind: “It is not existent—even the Victorious Ones do not see it. It is not nonexistent—it is the basis of all samsara and nirvana. This is not a contradiction but the middle path of unity.” The essential point here is that no-self does not mean that nothing appears, nothing matters, or no one struggles. On the contrary, experience still arises—vividly, intimately, and continuously. Pain still hurts. Love still moves us. Actions have consequences. Compassion matters.
What is being questioned is not experience itself but the extra conclusion we add to it: the belief that what appears must be solid, separate, and self-existing. The insight does not ask us to deny appearances. It asks us to stop mistaking appearances for independently existing things. When grasping relaxes, experience does not disappear. It becomes more open, unhindered, and direct. We are no longer occupied with confirming “me” and “mine” inside every perception. When we let go of the imagined solidity of the object, mind can relate to itself more clearly and with less fear.
The second misunderstanding about no-self is that its realization leads to indifference, making you dull, detached, boring, and unmoved. But, in fact, the opposite is true. For indifference to operate, the reference point has to remain self—my comfort, my space, my peace. When that reference point is gone, what remains is not a void. Out of that openness, in the absence of confusion, something entirely different arises: connection and compassion as a natural response to the difficulties and suffering of all beings.
You do not need to create or manufacture this response. It arises by itself in the absence of preoccupation with the presumption of self in the same way warmth comes off a fire. Bodhisattvas are the least indifferent beings precisely because they have nothing left to defend.
The years that followed my childhood insight were marked by struggle, experimenting with my own identity and calling, and searching for more answers. I eventually found them as a Buddhist monk and lama in long meditation retreat, where, now equipped with clear pointing-out instructions to the nature of mind and two-thousand-year-old explanations, I was able to find deep peace in the truth of no-self and connect to the liberating quality of this ever-present characteristic of our basic nature. What had terrified a six-year-old on a pillow in my childhood bedroom became, with training, the ground of indestructible freedom. Investigation is the beginning of wisdom, not the end of the path; what the intellect discovers through analysis, meditation recognizes directly. This is why we sit—not to become someone better but to become familiar with what is actually here when the belief in a separate, permanent self is just observed, not asserted.
To the fragile ego, no-self is terrifying. To the earnestly seeking heart, nothing brings you closer to your true home.
