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Guided Meditation: Rapport with Oneself; Dharmette: Love (18) With Rapport - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on February 04, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Hello and warm greetings from Insight Meditation Center here in California, in Redwood City. Continuing with the overall theme of love, and now this week, the elements of love. Today's topic is rapport.

Generally, rapport is understood as being the relationship resonance we have with other people. But in order to be able to have that with others, we need, in a sense, to have that with ourselves. Mindfulness is a way of developing a deep inner rapport. I love this way of talking about it because rapport implies a kind of willingness to listen, a willingness to feel and sense and be present. A willingness to suspend self-preoccupation or selfish desires that interfere with being able to be in harmony or in resonance with someone else to really know them well or feel them well, to have empathy for them in a deep way.

To be able to do that for oneself connects us to the very parts, the very sensibilities we need in order to be able to do that with other people. The more we can feel like we have a deep rapport, the easier it is to develop a healthy rapport with others, to be sensitive and empathic to who they are, the fullness of who they are.

So, to think of mindfulness as rapport, developing a present-moment attunement to oneself. Not a present-moment judging, not a present-moment reacting, not a present-moment probing and digging and fixing, but rather, and maybe also not a present-moment attempt to make oneself calm and stress-free, but rather to do that indirectly by offering a kind of higher quality listening, attending, attunement to ourselves to really kind of accompany ourselves as we are and see what happens. As we do that, to have this idea that you're not in charge, but you do have a very important role. Just like you're not in charge of a friend in distress, but you have a very important role of accompanying them, being with them, attuning to them.

So, in that way, we sit and meditate.

Guided Meditation: Rapport with Oneself

So, assume a meditation posture as you would with a friend if you were going to really attend to them in their challenging times, in their distress. Maybe you would adjust your posture. You would sit closer. You would clearly show that you're interested, that you're present. So, we do that with our meditation posture. Whatever way that your posture is, see it as a way to be available, to know, to listen, to discover what is here.

And then to take some long, slow, deep breaths.

To practice mindfulness is to be available for everything; whatever happens is part of the practice that we practice with. If you're ready, close your eyes.

Listen, feel, accompany how you feel right now. What has shifted? What has changed? How you are, and whatever way you are. See if you can become attuned or receptive, like a good friend who feels and senses what's going on within. Your mood, your state of mind, your state of body, the energetics.

Then to notice how your breathing is. Does your breathing somehow express or manifest how you are? The way you're breathing, the sensations of breathing. Is there any emotion or mood somehow conveyed with how you're breathing?

And with breathing as a reference point for how you are, both being aware of how you are, but not getting pulled into your thoughts and stories and ideas. With your whole body, see if you can have a deep rapport with yourself, a deep attunement to how you are. As if you're accompanying yourself carefully, kindly, lovingly, accepting yourself as you are.

But with every in-breath and out-breath, staying receptive, staying free of thinking the best you can, or letting thoughts recede to the background. With every breath accompanying yourself, a companion to yourself, building a rapport.

Letting go of your thoughts. Letting go so that you can better sense, know, feel in some way about how you are. And not fixing it or judging it, but accompanying, attuning, having a friendly rapport. A caring rapport that allows yourself just to be just as you are, but with empathy for it, with care. Every breath carrying accompaniment.

And then as we come to the end of the sitting, to take another look at how you are, how you feel. Your state of mind, state of heart, to settle down. And to consider how you are now, how it might allow you to attend to others, to be aware of others, to build a rapport with others, to have empathy for others. To what degree are you really open and receptive? Are you quiet and pulled back? You're allowed to be how you are. But given how you are, turn your attention out into the world and with whatever way that you can be present for this world of suffering and joy. This world of where people harm each other and help each other. And in your own way, as you are, offer your care through these words.

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

And may we have a deep human connection to all beings and their welfare, and to in some way, in our own way, contribute to the welfare and happiness of everyone.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Love (18) With Rapport

So hello everyone. Welcome to this third and middle talk on the five elements of love that are some of the building blocks to better love, the practice of the Brahmaviharas¹ that we have in Buddhism. After yesterday's topic of respect, today it's rapport.

Rapport is not just about us, not just about the other person, but it has to do with the interaction between the two people. As is somewhat common, there's the expression that there's you, there's me, and there's we. There's the us. There's the mutuality, what gets formed, the combination of you and me when they come together. So, being attuned, being aware of the rapport, the relationship that's between. Sometimes there's very little rapport, sometime there's a lot of rapport. But to have love, there needs to be something in that field that is not just about me loving someone, but for there to be something more genuine. It's almost like there has to be some attunement, some empathy, some sense of being accompanying or being in a kind of mutual relationship between other and self.

Certainly, it's possible to have a lot of love that's just kind of boundless, even without any object at all. And that's a beautiful spiritual thing, love without an object that's boundless. But in many ways, what we call love and what we do when we do the Brahmaviharas through Mettā², it really helps for that love to involve these mature qualities of resonance, of rapport.

One way that I teach, and especially when I teach people chaplaincy where there's very deep rapport and connection in the field of spiritual care, is I encourage people to have 50% of their attention with others and 50% of their attention towards oneself. If all the attention is on the other, then we don't understand what's happening with ourselves, and some of our more subconscious or unknown reactions, beliefs, opinions, or bias, we don't really track it, and they can kind of come into the picture unknowingly if we think we're supposed to be fully present for someone else. If we stay instead mostly preoccupied with ourselves, fully present for ourselves, we don't pick up the cues, we don't hear well, we don't really understand what's behind the words that people say because we're not attuned to them. There's not a sense of resonance or rapport. So the "we" is not understood.

But if we take 50% in each place approximately, then we track ourselves. We know what we're thinking and what we're feeling and how we're reacting and the body sensations that are going on. And we're with someone else and we're tracking them. We're listening deeply and sensing them deeply. And then we have all the information we need to be in harmony, to be accompanying, to know the big picture of what's happening and create a healthy relationship. If it's all one-sided, others or oneself, it's hard to have a healthy relationship.

This is one of the values of meditation: to really get to know oneself. And how do we know ourselves well? The same way that we would listen to a friend when we're just there to accompany them, to attend to them, to listen, to be a good listener to them. We're not trying to change them or fix them, but we are trying to support them to know themselves better. And so the same thing with ourselves: to be our own best friend. And in that, trust that something will shift and change in a healthy direction if we simply are really attentive, accompanying ourselves without being reactive and judging, but without going along with some of the unwholesome things that we might be doing.

This ability to have a resonance or rapport or attunement to oneself then also translates to ways to have an attunement or a resonance or a rapport with someone else. One thing is that we are grounded in ourselves well enough to track in all our senses what's happening with someone else. Listening is not just through the ears. We listen or we sense through our whole body when we're really present for someone else. And the other is, if we can attune ourselves to ourselves, we can then do it to someone else. We're ready now to not have it be about just me, but to really know the other person, to sense and be present. And then there might be between the two empathy, there might be understanding. There might be a rapport. There might be a sense of that we're attuned to something deeper within us, deeper in the other person. It's not just a surface presentation that we are delighting in, respecting, appreciating in a deep way. We're appreciating something about their inner life, their personality, their character, their goodness, their way of being in the world. And so we feel a rapport or resonance or mutuality or delight in something deep, fuller about who they are.

So that rapport—the delight, the joy, the appreciation—means that there's something that gets formed between the two people. Not necessarily that the other person shares it, but from our point of view of loving someone, we feel that something there is kind of a spark. Something there is warm. Something there is a delightful kind of resonance that touches us in a deep way. Something about the other person that we tune into. We're touched and something wonderful kind of evolves as a resonance or an attunement or what I call a warmhearted rapport between self and others.

So it's a little bit amorphous, this world of rapport, because it has a little bit to do with the interactions that happen, the way that the subtle communication, subtle sensing and feeling go on together and what kind of happens between the two. One of the great skills in life is to not just be mindful of self, not just be mindful of other, but be mindful of the rapport, the relationship, the way of relating. And there's no right or wrong way necessarily to relate to people. To say it differently, there's not a fixed way that's the right way to be with others. The appropriate way to be with others has to do with the way that both people come together, the dynamics between them, and what gets formed in that relationship.

So when our love is with someone we know well, that rapport is deep and mutually created perhaps. When we love someone who doesn't even know us, or we can have love for the whole world or for others more abstractly, that rapport, that resonance, has a lot to do with what we bring to it. But remember, it's not just about us. There is something between us and the abstract "others" that we're opening ourselves to. We're resonating with. It's not just about us. It's not just about what we transmit outwards. To really love, we're here to let there be the possibility of a resonance. There's a possibility for a rapport and there's an openness to something unknown, something that we can't control, something that can form in that "we." And even if it's the abstract whole world, that sense that we're in rapport with it, in attunement with it, is a protection against our love being only self-centered or only about ourselves and what we can offer. It's also about being ready to listen deeply, being ready to be in relationship, be ready to be changed and affected in return. That it's a two-way street, that we're ready to love and to receive what comes back and be changed by it, to be attuned to it, to somehow understand the relationship between us.

So, rapport. When I've heard people talk about rapport, often a term that is closely connected to it is empathy. But perhaps the way that I've included that here arouses a curiosity in you to see what you think rapport is and how you understand rapport in relationship to how you love. Or if you prefer the word attunement, or the "we," the attunement to the relationship that's formed between self and others and how that shifts and changes from person to person. And what's it like to include the rapport, the dynamic between people as part of what we attune to when we love?

So, as I've been saying, you might want to consider this topic of rapport. Maybe talk to friends and strangers about it and see what they've learned and how it's understood. And maybe you'll discover something new and interesting. I'm not offering my words on this topic as the definitive idea of rapport, but I'm hoping that it gives you some ideas of how to explore this important topic in the ways that you can be in relationship to others, the ways you might love.

So, thank you very much. And I hope that you have some occasions for nice, satisfying rapports today.