This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Mind, Body and Heart | Gil Fronsdal. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Mind, Body and Heart - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 14, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Mind, Body and Heart

Good morning everyone. It is sometimes not very motivating to speak after meditating, but I am sitting in this speaking spot, so here we are.

I have been practicing with two major areas of mindfulness: the cognitive or mind-based part, and the feeling or sense-based part—the body. Different people will specialize in one of these two areas. Some can do both, but it's important to have a sense of each so they can be partners in this endeavor of waking up and being present.

The simple representation of the cognitive side of mindfulness is what is called mental noting or recognizing—seeing and knowing clearly what is happening. Sometimes you might have the experience of someone else doing that cognitive work for you. You might be preoccupied with something, and a friend who is concerned with your well-being might say something simple like, "You seem tense," or "You seem preoccupied." They recognized what was going on and named it for you. You realize, "Oh, okay. Yeah, it's true. I guess I am." Only then do you stop and take that into account.

So there is this part of knowing clearly, and that can be very powerful. The deeper the practice goes, the more valuable the knowing becomes. Of course, some people are caught up in their cognitive mind, trapped in their thoughts, spinning around. Even in the time of the Buddha, he used the dramatic metaphor of being swept away by the floods.

In the modern world, we use the metaphor of "thought trains." You are going along, the guard comes down, you wait for the train to go by, and at some point, you realize, "Wait a minute, I'm on the train. How did I get here?" It can be months or years before we get off some of these trains. The Buddha talked about floods coming through—we are flooded by these thoughts, and they can overwhelm and drown us.

I see it happen to me when I spend too much time on a screen. Doing research or reading the news is very cognitive for me. The part of the mind that is searching, wanting, and jumping to the next thing ("click, click, click") is not settled. I can feel it affect my brain. I start feeling like my mind is locked in a box, swirling around, and I am disconnected from the rest of my being.

We can be caught in the world of thoughts, fantasy, projections into the future, or worlds of the past. Those all belong to the cognitive side of this practice. It can be very powerful to use our cognition to free us from cognition—to see, "Oh, look at that. I'm caught in past thinking or problem-solving mode." To really know it can help free us a little bit from it. We step out of it and know that this is what is happening.

The other side is the part where we feel or sense. The technical word in Buddhism is "to experience," which is an embodied experience. We feel through our body. I love the idea that we should have translated the word sati¹ as "bodyfulness" rather than mindfulness because the reference point of the body is a powerful foundation for doing any form of mindfulness practice, including the cognitive part.

Sensations are where we feel emotions. Sometimes emotions are the train we get on; they are the floods we get caught up in. Emotions can come with a compulsion or power that influences us without us knowing. It is like the mood music in movies; we aren't quite listening to the music, but our body is, and we wonder why we are getting so afraid.

We have lots of people in this world now who are providing the equivalent of mood music to try to get our emotions involved. Anyone who uses anger or fear as a medium—giving you enough anger to have someone to blame, or spinning stories of how terrible things will be—is creating mood music to evoke deep feelings. We don't recognize how these emotional states become the lens through which we see the world and interpret what is going on.

It is possible to get trapped in emotions that are self-perpetuating. But it is also possible to have the sensing and experiencing be freeing. To drop down and rest in the embodied experience, making room to feel what we are feeling, can help us separate ourselves from it enough that we aren't feeding it. We aren't picking the wound. We are letting it heal, open, or reveal itself. We can see it for what it is without being pushed around by it.

Ideally, in mindfulness, we are learning how to do both. We learn the power of seeing clearly and how that can be calming and clarifying. We learn the power of feeling what is going on and how that can be healing. By going back and forth, we can see how these two parts influence each other.

The cognitive part can make fantastically brilliant stories that frighten you. I have seen that in myself. I am sitting, minding my own business, being quiet, and my mind starts making a fantasy—maybe a fantasy of being in a car crash. My stomach gets tight, and I get tense. It is just a fantasy, but my body takes it up. My body doesn't always know the difference between my fantasy and what is real. If my body has a response where I get tense and frightened, that is a recipe for having more thoughts about what is frightening in this world. It isn't just car crashes; there are also shopping cart accidents in Safeway. [Laughter]. My mind is a little strange. I realized long ago my mind is strange, and probably some of you realized that about me too. [Laughter].

Rumination is a leading cause of depression and anxiety because of the way these things circle and feed each other. But they also work together to save us, to liberate us. The more we can feel in a relaxed, open way, the more it quiets the thinking mind. Feeling the rhythm and sensations of breathing is calming and settling.

If I am thinking thoughts about car crashes, my breathing changes—it speeds up and gets shallow. But if I free my breathing, the relationship with the mind goes in the reverse direction. Now the breathing helps the mind calm down. Rather than having fear affect the mind to think more fearful thoughts, we discover where the fear is housed in the body. "Oh, it's in the belly." We go down there and feel what is going on in a careful and caring way. Assuming control of your mind just enough to meet your fear calmly changes the whole dynamic. You are bringing a different influence on the ecosystem: calm attention.

This brings us to a third thing. There is the cognitive part, the sensory part, and the third thing is creating space. It doesn't cost anything, but you couldn't buy it, so it probably has no value—why bother? But the third thing is creating "breathing room" for the fear, or for the cognitive mind that is flooded with thoughts.

Just like in this room, there is a high ceiling. If you relax back and take in the space above, you probably shift how you feel being here. The same thing happens within us. If there is a sense of space for your thoughts, a sense that there is something beyond the edges of your thoughts, that creates freedom. Have you ever explored what is beyond the edge of an emotion? Or do you have emotions that fill the universe? Even the question lets us give space for it to be there.

We can rest in that space or identify with that space more than we define ourselves by our feelings or thoughts. Not because that is who you truly are, but that is who you can be. It loosens the grip. It is the mind that is claustrophobic, caught in so many distractions that we don't even know we are distracted. But if we step back and make room, we aren't continually feeding the floods of thought.

When we are settled and grounded, having space for ourselves, it is not reactivity that leads the show. It is something deeply generative—a diffusion of warmth, goodness, and wholesomeness.

In the iconography of Indian religions and Buddhism, this is represented by the great god Brahma, who has four faces. You will see statues where he has a face in the front, on the sides, and in the back. These four faces represent Kindness (Metta²), Compassion (Karuna³), Appreciative Joy (Mudita⁴), and Equanimity (Upekkha⁵). I like to think of them as the four forms of love.

The source of love within us doesn't lend itself to reactivity. It doesn't arise when we are caught in tight, reactive emotions. It happens when we make space for it all. When we relax and make room for the wider functioning of our psychophysical being, there is room for these quiet, social emotions. I call them quiet or shy because they are easily overridden.

In that space, there is room for friendliness. There is room for deep care for the challenges people are in. There is opportunity for deep resonance with the joy and success of others. And in that deep resonance, there is a way of really loving people and caring about them without getting contracted or drowning in the suffering of the world. That is Equanimity. It is an unfortunate word in English because very few people associate equanimity with love. So, it is almost like we should say "Equanimous Love" for this fourth face of Brahma.

Maybe these are the four faces of your heart—the four antennas of your heart. If you are quiet enough, spacious enough, and centered enough, maybe your heart can work really well, and you will be ready to meet people as they actually are. Some you meet with kindness; some with compassion; some with tremendous joy; and some with this quiet, calm way of caring and loving where you can't really help them, but you can still love them and be present for them.

Q&A

Question: When the emotion is fear, it is fairly easy for me to identify it in my body. What if the emotion is desire or clinging? Do you have any tips for how to peel that one apart other than trying to trigger myself to get back into the moment?

Gil: If desire is problematic—very strong, compulsive desires—one option is to "co-meditate." Do two things: primarily, feel the physicality of that compulsion. Make room for it, feel it, sense it, and recognize the desire without giving in to it. Then see what happens. Something might relax. Desires perpetuate because we remain involved in them, but if you step back and feel it, maybe you aren't renewing it.

The more compulsive it is, the more you might want to check if there is some other emotion coming with it. Some desires are propelled by fear, loneliness, or our discomfort with being uncomfortable. To stop and breathe with it is quite good.

The other tip is to put yourself in a safe situation where you aren't going to give in. I have been told of people struggling with alcohol who are given instructions to find a comfortable chair, like a recliner, and be committed 200% not to leave the chair no matter how strong the screaming desire is. They describe it like a wave getting bigger and bigger, then it crests and breaks, and they find themselves on the back of the wave, and things are calm.

Question: Yesterday I was struggling with helplessness and despair regarding the shooting in the engineering building at Brown University. I have two grandchildren of college age, and the notion of them being at risk was something I couldn't deal with very well. The fear and despair just took over my body. I was wondering if you have any comment about how to deal with something like this.

Gil: I think there are two very important ways to address this. First is what your need is in the moment when it first happens. Maybe you need to find a friend and go for a walk. Maybe you need to call your relatives and find out if they are okay. There might be an immediate need to stabilize and get grounded so you don't keep spinning out. For some people, meditation accomplishes that.

The second is to take this seriously at some point later. The strength by which you reacted to this probably has to do with other things in your life besides the event itself. Other conditions set you up for this to go deeper. For example, maybe someone was in college 40 years ago and there was a shooting then, and the fear elicited back then never got resolved. Or there is a general feeling of helplessness in a person's life, so when something terrible happens, it re-evokes that helplessness. Once you feel stabilized and cared for, you might feel there is something deeper that warrants meeting and practicing with.

Comment: One thing you said today really struck me: "Meet your fear calmly." I think that's so important. I've been really stressed lately. When you said that, I realized there is a big difference between the things I need to do and the "Oh my god, oh my god" that I am adding on top of it. If I can just focus on the things that need to be done, I'm really good at doing things. I can give away the "Oh my god."

Gil: That was really well said. As we mature in the practice, there is less and less extra added. Life without extras.

Question (Online): Cindy is asking how we can make room for grief when it is physically and mentally taking over, especially this time of the year. They mentioned they are feeling the loss of their son right now.

Gil: Grief warrants our mindfulness. It warrants giving room and time for our grief, partly so we can allow our heart to do its natural work. The heart knows how to grieve, believe it or not, even though it can feel so painful. We learn mindfulness well enough to be present for these difficult emotions without adding all the extras—the fear, the judgments, the shame, the resistance. We relax so we can let the emotions be there in what I call their natural simplicity.

Sometimes we are supported by a good friend or a grief counselor—someone who isn't afraid of grief and isn't going to try to fix you. Sometimes there is a time and place for grief; it is wise to know when you need to be distracted for responsibilities, but you make high-quality time for it later.

I feel that grief is sacred. I say that to people so they can hear a different message than what society often tells us—that you are supposed to be "over it." Grief is a very important part of being human. Rituals can be helpful. On retreats, I sometimes give people a little stone and say, "Let this be your grief. Carry it around for a while." When they are ready, they might bury it and entrust it to the earth.

So, here we are with the four faces of love. When I sat down with all of you this morning, it was the face of joy and delight that we are here, and the face of friendliness—Metta.