Undefended Dharma with Mary Stancavage · Mary Stancavage

It's Like This

April 6, 2026·27 min·2 clips

Mary describes waking up every morning for years thinking she'd rather kill herself than go to work — staying anyway because of fear about what would happen if she quit.

1. Undefended Dharma host Mary Stancavage teaches on the phrase 'right now it's like this' as a practice of equanimity rooted in the Thai forest tradition. 2. Mary is the teacher and sole speaker; the episode is a solo dharma talk recorded following a retreat she had been leading. 3. The episode's central question is: how do we stop clinging to what we want and resisting what we don't want, moment by moment, in ordinary life? 4. Mary opens with Gil Fronsdal's definition of nirvana: 'We neither cling to nor resist anything'—framing this as the ultimate destination that the phrase 'right now it's like this' is designed to approach. 5. The phrase 'right now it's like this' comes from Ajahn Sumedho, a monk in the Thai forest tradition and longtime student of Ajahn Chah who served as abbot of a monastery in England. 6. Mary distinguishes the phrase from the common instruction to 'let go,' explaining that telling someone to let go is unhelpful because clinging returns—whereas the phrase is a non-judgmental pause that interrupts reactivity. 7. She introduces three habitual patterns that prevent equanimity: demanding things be a certain way (craving), defending against things (aversion), and distracting oneself (delusion/ignorance). 8. As an illustration of craving, Mary describes waiting anxiously for her blood pressure reading at a doctor's appointment, tying her self-worth as a 'good patient' to whether the numbers are favorable. 9. She reflects on societal conditioning around grief, noting that most people in her chaplaincy training class reported learning nothing about how to process grief in their families of origin. 10. Mary shares that a close friend's wife entered hospice the previous day, and that the family—present and calm despite fear and sadness—exemplifies the kind of open awareness the teaching points toward. 11. She describes dukkha not only as major loss but as the suffering of mundane frustration: burned toast, a broken fingernail, a broken curtain rod, being late for an event—each a site of clinging and story-making. 12. Drawing on personal history about 30 years ago, Mary describes working a job that had been stripped down to only its worst elements after a reorganization, waking each morning thinking she'd rather kill herself than go to work while remaining out of fear. 13. She eventually left without a new position, was supported briefly by her husband, and ended up in work she hadn't known existed—using this as evidence that the feared catastrophe rarely matches the actual outcome. 14. The practice of 'right now it's like this' is described with an acronym-like structure: recognize, willingness to see, willingness to feel, patience, investigation (asking 'what is this?'), and the capacity to be present. 15. Mary addresses the concept of spiritual bypass—using spiritual principles like impermanence to skip over feeling, as when someone responds to loss with 'oh, well, impermanence' to avoid grief. 16. She clarifies that equanimity is not passivity or becoming a doormat: it includes accountability, wise speech, and the capacity to act skillfully when action is needed. 17. Mary reads a passage from The Book of Joy, a dialogue between the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, focusing on the theme that suffering strips away role and status, leaving only the human condition. 18. The seven factors of awakening—mindfulness, effort, investigation, steadiness, joy, tranquility, and equanimity—are cited as the natural sequence that unfolds when the practice is sustained. 19. The talk is a solo lecture format, meditative in pace, drawing on personal anecdotes, Buddhist canonical terms (dukkha, samadhi, sila), and direct teaching experience. 20. Best suited for practitioners with some background in mindfulness or Buddhist meditation; less suited for listeners seeking structured, evidence-based psychology or secular mindfulness instruction.

As heard by us

A plainspoken reminder that equanimity starts with meeting the moment instead of wrestling it.

Mary Stancavage takes a small phrase and makes it usable: right now, it's like this. She ties it to Ajahn Sumedho, folds in Gil Franzdahl's line about neither clinging to nor resisting anything, and keeps circling back to the ordinary pressure points that people actually live…

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Why you'd press play

You want a calmer way to meet the moment when your mind keeps objecting.

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