This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Kindness; To Transform the World (1 of 5) With Kindness. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: Kindness; Dharmette: To Transform the World (1 of 5) With Kindness - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 28, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Kindness

Hello everyone, and welcome to our 7:00 AM community in California. It is nice to be back with you after being gone for two weeks teaching two retreats back-to-back. I am a little rusty on all the buttons that have to be pushed.

Welcome everyone to our YouTube community. I'm delighted to be back sitting with all of you. It is certainly personal and heartwarming to come down to IMC¹ in the morning—getting ready at home, coming here, and sitting down in my meditation posture to be with you, to share the Dharma², and to participate with you in the Dharma.

One of the remarkable aspects of mindfulness awareness practice for me is the transition from awareness practices—mindfulness simply being mindfulness, simply awareness—to having a clear sense that mindfulness and love are just about synonymous. Maybe not exactly in all their dimensions; perhaps they can be teased apart. But in doing this practice, I came to a point where they arose together, almost as if they are the same. Almost as if they coexist, like right and left hands coming together to bow. Or maybe like petting a cat and feeling affection for the cat; the petting, the affection, the contact, the awareness of the cat, and the participation with the cat are the same.

To sit with love as a reference point is powerful. There are many flavors of Buddhist love, and the word can be very vague using it by itself. One of the flavors is friendliness—a basic goodwill, a basic attitude of meeting our experience and meeting others with friendship or goodwill. We can meet anyone at all with the basic love of stepping towards them with goodwill, with friendship, with a friendliness. It doesn't have to be that we like someone. It doesn't have to be that we agree with them. It doesn't have to be that we have what we normally would call love as a high bar. But we can have that joy, the miracle of opening our goodwill, opening our hearts, and opening our eyes to gaze upon others kindly.

Of course we would look upon others with kindness, because to not do that, we have discovered, is to diminish ourselves. To not do that means something closes, something tightens, something resists, something becomes limited in us. The Buddha emphasized that goodwill can have an unlimited quality. There is no limitation that we feel within ourselves; nothing closes, nothing resists, nothing shuts down. It is almost as if love and awareness arise together as a default because the alternative is not healthy.

Let's sit here to whatever degree you would like, whatever degree works for you, and to whatever degree you are inspired to meet yourself with goodwill. Meet your difficult emotions with goodwill. Meet your physical challenges with a level of goodwill that is good for your heart, and that is good for the world's heart.

Assume a meditation posture. Begin with a posture that is an expression of goodwill for yourself. The longer you meditate, the more you know how to enter into a posture of meditation that feels good, that feels right, that feels healthy and beneficial for you. If you haven't found that, just the wish to find it can be an expression of goodwill, without expectation of finding it right away.

With that goodwill, gently, softly, not doing too much, take some deeper breaths. Maybe breathe with appreciation for the oxygen you breathe in and the carbon dioxide that you breathe out. In breathing, you are being cared for. Even if breathing is difficult, it is an expression of your body caring for you.

Relax on the exhale. Relax the whole body. Settle into your meditation spot. Let your breathing return to normal.

In whatever way you are breathing, whatever the sensations of breathing you have, breathing has an influence on the body, the mind, and the heart. Breathing has an influence just beyond the edges of where we feel the breathing. Let that influence be like the softest, gentlest wind, or the most comfortable feeling of warmth that spreads kindness through your being. That spreads the warmth, tenderness, and softness of goodwill through your being.

Whatever your attention lands on, whatever present moment experience comes into mindfulness, let it be received with kindness, with goodwill. Let this soft wind, the soft warmth of friendliness, welcome whatever there might be.

At least for mindfulness, how you are aware is soft, warm, and kind—as if you're meeting a dear friend. Let your mindfulness meet whatever is happening for you, even what is difficult.

Is there some way to relax that allows you to be aware with a kindness, with a warmth, with a willingness to meet whatever there is with goodwill—even the absence of goodwill?

As we come to the end of this sitting, open your awareness and your imagination to the wider world around you. Recall or think about the wider world of friends, family, neighbors, and strangers out across the world. Imagine what it would be like that whoever you meet, at least you meet them privately with a gaze of kindness, a gaze of wishing them well. Imagine them well. Wish them well in a healthy, good, psychological, and emotional way.

Imagine that they would turn around and be more friendly to the next person they meet. That they would be kinder, warmer. We offer our goodwill to the whole world so that others might be more disposed to also have goodwill—certainly not to meet people with some opposite of goodwill that would predispose them to do the same.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

And may the kind gaze we have upon others, the open heart we bring to others, spread a world of goodwill, even in the midst of all the ill will there exists in the world. May we spread the winds of kindness.

Thank you.

Dharmette: To Transform the World (1 of 5) With Kindness

Hello everyone, and welcome to this Monday morning sitting and Dharma talk. I've been away for a couple of weeks and am happy to be back for this week. I will be away again next week to teach a retreat at IRC³.

I realized after having scheduled next week's retreat that it is during the national election. We have given some thought to what it means to have this national election during a retreat. Probably many people on the retreat are anxious to know the results and will be trying to find out what they are. We are considering how to inform them and how to support them to process the election, no matter what direction it goes.

It might be important for many of you as well. I can imagine that there are many of you who are anxious and concerned about what is happening. No matter who wins or doesn't win, or what happens with the election, it could be distressing for someone, if not everyone. I might set up a YouTube or Zoom meeting for people during the retreat—finding a time where I can essentially leave the retreat to support those who need some support in this regard.

For this week that I am back, I thought it would be important to teach something that maybe would support you over these next weeks. It is not just the election which has people concerned; it is quite difficult for some people regarding what is happening in the world these days. I would like to support you and address some of these issues, but to do so in a particular way that probably will not satisfy some of you who are demanding action.

I want to offer you one way to transform the world. That is the title for this week's series: "To Transform the World." Specifically, to transform the world for the better.

One of the important questions for all of us to ask for ourselves and for each other is: How do we understand how change happens? Do we have a theory of change or an approach to how change happens to yourself as an individual, to a family, to a neighborhood, or to a friend circle? How does change happen in the wider world? How does it happen politically? How does it happen socially?

This question needs a profound consideration because I see a lot of people with very strong opinions about what should happen and what has to happen, but there is no reference point for how that change could happen—except that someone out there needs to do it.

I am not going to answer that question directly, but what I will say is that it happens in a hundred thousand different ways. It happens in seven or eight billion different ways. Different people have different opportunities to contribute to the change in our society. Some people do it dramatically, and some people do it in quiet ways that are not seen, recognized, or held up as exemplars. Some of the more exceptional ways that some people change the world are due to accidents of history—they were in the right place at the right time. Some of it has to do with where they are positioned, elected, and all kinds of things that affect them. Many people are not elected; many people are not positioned with the power and influence that a few individuals have.

How do individuals involve themselves with change for the better? When I look at my life with this question, I see I have been involved and interested in working for social and environmental change since I was 19 or so, when I went to college and began getting a better understanding of what was happening in the world. Now, more than 50 years since I was 19, I have the perspective of half a century of what follows that initial impetus to make the world a better place.

I would like to offer you how I see myself in those 50 years. Maybe it is a little hard to believe now that I have become what some people call a "senior Buddhist teacher," and it might seem like I have a lot of influence in certain places. But I feel that my contribution to change has been more of an earthworm or a fungus than a gorilla or an elephant that can charge around, do big things, and shake the world.

A fungus in the soil changes the soil. An earthworm in the soil changes the soil. It is underground; you don't see it so much, but it is essential. To have fungi is essential; to have earthworms is essential. It allows the soil to be healthy. When plants fall and die in the soil, they decay, but decay really is another word for composting. We need fungus to compost, digest, and transform the soil so that we can create a new world, so we can create new growth of seeds.

It might seem that the conditions of the world are so huge and monumental that it is not okay just to be a fungus—just to do the small changes, to work on the soil underground. It might seem like we are ignoring the rest of the world. "We have to do something! We have to stand up! We have to make our voice heard! We have to demand change!" But is demanding change how change happens? Is that the best way, or the only way for it to happen?

As I have been this fungus, it started off very small. When I first wanted to offer Buddhist practice to respond to the suffering of the world, in retrospect, compared to what I am doing now, it was pretty modest. I just wanted to have a storefront meditation center. I was a Zen priest. I wanted to keep it clean, have the key that opened it, ring the bells when people came to meditate, and support people to have a place to meditate. I had some profound belief that was really valuable for people. It wasn't anything more than that I could imagine myself doing. I certainly didn't imagine myself being a teacher.

Then I engaged in practice, and at some point, I was invited to be in a teacher training. That seemed nice. Probably the highest ambition I had was just to be involved with a local sitting group and maybe support that group. I actually also wanted to just be connected to some of the Buddhist centers in the Bay Area that I had grown up in and be able to support those centers in some way, maybe with some teaching.

So, I was trained to be a teacher. I was involved in a sitting group nearby, and that sitting group grew. I just continued being the earthworm or the fungus, and things grew around me. As they grew, my influence grew. As they grew, other opportunities could develop and happen. When the opportunities came, we worked on things here at IMC, without making a big thing about it.

Now, over the years, we have done many things and had a huge influence in certain kinds of ways—not particularly in political ways, but we have done all kinds of things that have promoted the good in the world that we don't talk about or celebrate much. I've been to Sacramento to lobby the governor. I've trained people to work in prisons to offer restorative justice programs. I've trained people to do mindfulness in the schools. The very first national conference on mindfulness in schools was planned and organized here from IMC. We have created chaplaincy programs and sent people all over the world to develop and offer spiritual care in hospitals, prisons, and hospices.

Slowly things are growing. We have had kind of false starts. We tried to be engaged with "Engaged Buddhism," and there wasn't much traction for that. We created a Buddhist humanitarian organization that had a glorious couple of years of life, but then it faltered, and now it has been dormant for a long time. But as opportunities come, this earthworm and this fungus are working and doing things.

In the process of it, having Buddhist communities is now spreading across the country a little bit from IMC. That is spreading this practice of mindfulness, of goodwill, of care, training people in spiritual care skills, and training teachers to go out into the world. Maybe it is not enough. Maybe we should also have a training in political action. I would love to have a program in nonviolent civil disobedience that really expresses love and care. But has the time come for that? Do we have the conditions for us to do that? I don't know. But this earthworm is finding its way, seeing what happens. We have started so many things over the years. Now that I am 70, how much more can I start and do?

Behind all this—and now I will end—is that I believe it is essential not to sacrifice the goodwill in our own hearts. To not sacrifice a friendly attitude towards all things if there is going to be a change in the world that really matters. For this earthworm, the way earthworms can change the world—and earthworms and funguses in the end are probably more important than politicians—we have to do the simple, ordinary work of love, of kindness, of goodwill. Of showing up and being present for our neighbors and the people we encounter with an open heart.

That is no small task. But if we can't do it, are we expecting others to do it? If we meet the world with anger, if we meet it with a sense of horror, if we meet it with fear, if we meet it with despair—the unfortunate thing is that is what we spread out into the world.

This spiritual practice that we do in Buddhism is meant to support us to find a way to heal our despair, to heal our fear, to heal our anger. Because it harms ourselves to have those things. In a healthy way, we can be healed so that we can meet the world with kindness no matter what comes. That is a teaching of the Buddha: no matter what the challenge we meet, meet it with goodwill.

So, this week, "To Transform the World," I am going to talk about the five different flavors of love that we could have. Today it is goodwill.

Certainly, if some of you can be great, powerful, effective people for social change, certainly do it. Certainly go out and vote. Certainly go out and do what you can for our world. But let's also, in addition, be earthworms and funguses—composting the anger, composting the fear, composting that despair so that we can compost it into rich soil for the flowering of love into this world.

Let that be our theory of change: to love wherever we go.

Thank you, and I look forward to continuing.