A teacher sits in front of a small group and says, almost offhandedly, that she has been using a farm metaphor with a parent whose teenager won't cooperate. The metaphor is a water buffalo, a plow, and a field, and it comes from a Thai forest teacher who wanted ordinary people to see that awakening was not reserved for those who could leave home for a cave. In the 2026 InsightLA Meditation video "The Seven Factors of Awakening in Everyday Life," Trudy Goodman walks through that old agrarian image piece by piece, showing how the seven factors of awakening, the qualities traditionally listed as supports for insight, can be felt in a marriage, a traffic jam, or a stubborn habit. What follows is an attempt to hold that teaching on its own terms: what the metaphor says, why it works, and what it asks of someone who is simply trying to get through a Tuesday.
Goodman introduces Ajahn Buddhadasa as a Thai forest meditation teacher of the last century and an important influence on many insight meditation teachers. Her framing matters. She explains that the Theravāda insight tradition has often concentrated on removing hindrances, the things that get in the way of being present. The Buddha, she notes, mostly described awakening as an absence: the absence of the hindrances and the problems that churn through a life. Buddhadasa, by contrast, was trying to describe something you could move toward.
Goodman is candid about why his teaching landed for her. "His teaching always made me feel, oh, I can do this," she says at about 3:31 in the video. "I used to just think, well, those apply to other people. Those states and descriptions. No. They're about you and me." That is the hinge of the whole talk. The seven factors are not a list for accomplished monks. They are a set of capacities that a person working a field, or raising a child, or sitting in a parked car stuck in traffic, already has access to.
There is also a historical point she draws out. Goodman observes that Western psychology once focused heavily on psychopathology, the study of disorders and problems, before a movement emerged that emphasized gratitude and positive qualities. She suggests that same turn has been happening in meditation circles, toward loving-kindness, self-compassion, and joy. Her point is not that the world has become uniquely difficult. She says the opposite: "I think everybody thought so in their time, you know? That's kind of encouraging to remember."
Buddhadasa spoke to an agrarian society, so he used rice farming as his vocabulary. Goodman describes the old practice of plowing a paddy field with a water buffalo and notes that she is passing the image along because, as she puts it, "we're all plowing our own, you know, virtual metaphorical fields." The image does real work. A farmer cannot think about a field in the abstract. He has to read soil, weather, animal, and tool all at once.
The first instruction is simple and easy to skip past: be mindful of your buffalo. Mindfulness here is not a special mental state. It is knowing where the animal is, what it is doing, and what it needs. Goodman's translation for a modern listener is almost blunt. "You have to be mindful of your buffalo and you have to be mindful of the plow," she quotes. The rest of the metaphor grows out of that sentence.
"If the plow goes too deep, it gets stuck. If it's too shallow, it doesn't do any good."
— Trudy Goodman, paraphrasing Ajahn Buddhadasa's farming instruction, InsightLA Meditation video, 5:07
This is where the seven factors begin to feel practical. Goodman ties the depth of the plow to wise effort, the factor that asks how hard to push. Push too hard and the work jams. Push too lightly and nothing turns over. She then adds a second layer: the farmer has to know where to turn and how to signal the animal. "This is about communication and relationship," she says. She is quick to add that most of us are not literally living with buffalo, "but sometimes it might feel that way."
The parent she mentions in her opening is a good illustration. Goodman describes telling that parent that the teaching was useful, "not to compare your daughter to a water buffalo, but just listen." Wise effort, in that frame, is not forcing the relationship and not giving up on it. It is finding the depth where change can actually happen, and sometimes waiting for the right moment to say a thing at all. Goodman says it directly: "Sometimes it's not the right time to say certain things and we have to be a little patient and find the right time."
Goodman makes a claim that many meditators will recognize from experience. "We know that awareness is not enough," she says at about 6:19. She asks the room to think about one of their most stuck places. Did simply noticing it change anything? Sometimes, she says, but often not.
That is why the list includes investigation, which Goodman names through the Pali word vichaya. She glosses it as interest and inquiry in the practice. Her version of the farmer is "alert and checking things out": What happens if I do this? What happens if I go this way? What happens if I try this? The farmer is reading conditions, the quality of soil, the moisture in the ground, and he is learning as he goes. Goodman credits Sogyal Rinpoche for a similar phrase, "gathering data," and she sees it as the same skill: treating your own life as a field you are still learning how to read.
For a reader, the practical translation is a shift in posture. Instead of asking whether a pattern is good or bad, you ask what it is made of and what happens when conditions change. Goodman's examples keep returning to ordinary moments rather than dramatic breakthroughs, which is consistent with the talk's central claim that these factors are meant for daily use.
Effort is the next factor, and Goodman's treatment of it is lively. She reminds listeners that without energy you "might space out" and stop paying attention. Some buffaloes, she says, are naughty. "You may have noticed some of your own issues are quite naughty," she says at about 8:10, "and they don't just want to go away." Her humor softens the point but does not dilute it. Effort is not a grim push. It is a kind of steady, watchful engagement that keeps returning to the work.
She then reaches for a horse. "The minute you space out and aren't just not with it, they're going to find that patch of grass and just lean down and start eating," she says. Nobody needs a horse or a buffalo to tell them when attention has drifted, she adds, because most of us eventually realize it. Goodman's own example is a small car accident at a red light. "It was very gentle. It didn't hurt anything," she says, "but it was horrible because your whole nervous system gets so activated." Her lesson is practical: keep your foot on the brake when you are stopped, and notice the drift early, before it turns into a collision.
Goodman turns next to the factor that Buddhadasa, in her telling, described as a kind of satisfaction. Whatever you are doing, plowing a field, meditating, or washing dishes, it can feel either burdensome or pleasant. She quotes Wavy Gravy, who said, "If you don't have a sense of humor. It's not very funny," and then extends the logic to interest. "If you're not interested, what happens? It's boring. It's really boring," she says.
The implication is that appreciation is not decoration on top of practice. It is what keeps a person coming back. Goodman notes that when something is interesting, we pursue it, we want to meditate more, and we want to return. She uses the phrase "appreciation" for this quality and ties it to the tenderness she thinks the modern meditation world is rediscovering. A practice that feels only like obligation tends to be abandoned. A practice that produces some real pleasure, even ease, is more likely to last.
Near the end of the excerpt, Goodman addresses the structure of the teaching itself. Lists like the seven factors, she explains, were transmitted in an oral tradition, and they were built to be memorable and usable. "That's why the Buddha made those lists," she says at about 13:47. A list is a handle. It lets a person pick up a quality, check on it, and set it down again during an ordinary day.
That is the deepest argument in the talk. The seven factors are not presented as a checklist to complete. They are presented as a set of qualities that interact: mindfulness informs effort, investigation supports interest, appreciation sustains the whole process. Goodman frames the farmer and the buffalo as the same figure: the person doing the work is also the animal being worked with. She puts it plainly in the video: "In this case, we're the buffalo."
If the talk has a single instruction, it is to pick one everyday place where you feel stuck and treat it like a field. Notice the buffalo: what is actually happening in you or in the relationship. Check the depth of your effort: are you forcing or doing nothing? Investigate with curiosity rather than verdict, and let some appreciation in, even a little. Goodman's teaching is modest in its ambitions, and that is its strength. Awakening, as she presents it through Buddhadasa, is not a far-off state reserved for others. It is something you can practice while plowing your own ordinary ground.
To go deeper, watch the full video with a pen nearby, and try naming which of the seven factors you noticed most in your week. The teaching works best as a repeated practice, not a single lesson.
