This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Emergence; Don't Make it Worse (5 of 5) Express. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Emergence; Dharmette: Don't Make it Worse (5 of 5) Express - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on September 06, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Hello and welcome to meditation at IMC. This is the Friday meditation, the last one of this particular series. The introductory words I want to make is to say that meditation is not for bystanders. It's not to be an observer from the distance, but it involves participation—participating in something profound. But the act of participation is kind of very unique or maybe different than how we normally would think, where maybe the participation, the idea of participation, is active, like it's a real doing. And it's also not passive, like a bystander just being done to. There's something in between those two, and this is where some of the profundity of living from mindfulness, living from the Dharma, begins to be possible.

The example I'd like to use is if you're cold and you go stand in the sun to get warm. So you have a role of going someplace where it's sunny and standing there in such a way that the sun's rays can land on you and warm you up. You probably face the sun or put your back to the sun so the greatest surface area is kind of facing the sun. But then, you don't do the receiving of the sunlight and the warmth. You don't send it through your body, but rather the body has these sense organs, has a capacity to absorb the heat, and you're allowing that to move through you to warm you up. In a sense, your role is to participate in the whole event that is not your doing, but you have to be present for it and allow this movement of the warmth, slowly thawing your body, warming it up maybe.

So the same way in meditation, there's maybe a sun, something equivalent to a sun warming us up from the inside. There's a light that's beginning to, like the sun arises, and you might be sitting there looking out in the early morning as it gets lighter and lighter and lighter, and you're participating in this movement of the earth lighting up, being illuminated, but you're not doing it. But you are participating, and it has an effect on you. So there's some illumination that can be born inside of us, or there can be love—not love that involves any desire. Desire and love are often confused, but there's a kind of a love, a warmth that's generated from the inside out that we place ourselves close to and allow for it, like we're standing in the sun, allowing something to appear.

And so it isn't so much that we are doing something, and it isn't so much that we are being done to, but rather we're placed in ourselves where the two come together, and something wants to be expressed, something wants to arise, something wants to appear that we participate in, that we enter into as we meditate.

So the initial kind of steps of meditation of relaxing and settling and kind of staying with the breath are the kind of the early preparation for participating in a deeper expression that's going to come—participating in the sun warming you up, and a kind of participation of being there for the sunlight as it becomes brighter in the morning. And so what is the equivalent for you? What wants to be expressed? What wants to bubble up and be born from the inside out? So not from a desire from the mind, not from ideas what should happen and shouldn't happen, or ideas of what will fulfill us or not fulfill us, but something that's deeper than desire, deeper even than "me, myself, and mine." Almost as if this is not personal, it's something deeper.

Guided Meditation: Emergence

So to assume a meditation posture. And I like to think sometimes the posture is a posture of certainly a kind of respect, maybe even a kind of reverence, where your posture is being adjusted in whatever way that works for you so that you're ready to receive, ready to host—be the host, the respectful, the caring host for something that's quite profound, for the Dharma, for your heart, for love, for freedom. And it's not a casual posture, but it's not a tense posture. It's a dignified posture, maybe the kind of dignified posture you would use if you literally were receiving the Dalai Lama in your house for tea, or you were creating a meditation room in your house to invite the Dalai Lama to come and meditate with you. So you're making a posture, and then to gently close your eyes. And this idea of gentling and being gentle at the beginning is to begin orienting yourself to be with something that is maybe not shy, but maybe something which easily gets eclipsed, easily gets overlooked; something which is quiet, unassertive, undemanding; something inside that's profound. And so to gentle ourselves as part of this preparation to receive, to be a host.

And then gently taking some deeper breaths, breathing in, expanding your body, your torso, your rib cage, your belly, and relaxing as you exhale.

Settling with a longer exhale. It's organizing your body, bringing it together, bringing everything together so it settles here, all of you coming together, rather than being absorbed in the thinking world. We're entering into the wholeness of our embodied being.

And letting the breathing return to normal. And as simply and ordinarily as you can, unambitious, let there be a gentling of your breathing. Maybe a gentle softening of the belly, the body as you exhale. And a gentling and softening of your thinking mind. If the thinking mind is filled with thoughts and ideas and mental energy, agitation, there's no room for the mind to be a good host, to have space for something different than just thinking, to have room to receive and feel and sense the sunlight, the warmth, something deeper that wants to emerge from deep within—maybe love, maybe peace or calm.

So relaxing the thinking mind, and then aligning yourself or attuning yourself to your breathing, to the body's experience of breathing. And with your breathing, as if your breathing is holding your hand or breathing is guiding, leading you, follow the exhale to whatever is for you the deepest, maybe most intimate place within, underneath all your thoughts and concerns and fears and desires, all the challenges and pains that you have. Is there any intuition of a depth within you? Even if you have to just imagine that rather than to feel it, allow yourself to breathe through and with and out of that depth within.

Shifting from the control tower in the head where we observe and comment and judge, and where we are the victim and the actor, shifting from that to deep inside. And like you would maybe stand in the sun to receive the sunlight, be present in your torso, be present deep within in your heart or deeper, to allow something deep to express itself, to emerge, to shine, to radiate. And here it's not so important what that is. It could be difficult, it could be nice. As it is, you're the host. That you're a profound way of sensing and feeling, of allowing this to meet you and you to meet it. And you don't need to know what's going to happen or why it's happening. Breathe with openness, breathe with acceptance, receptivity, allowing what's deep inside to have room to emerge.

Taking a few moments to feel what's happening for you, not to think about it, but to sense and feel the global body, as wide a sense of embodiment as you can, to sense and feel. And within that field of embodiment, the movement of breathing. And relaxing, softening, settling into a place of quiet within, maybe a still, quiet place deep within, below your beliefs, your thoughts, your reactions, your fears, your desires, below all those things which are kind of at the surface, deep down inside. And sensing, feeling the deeper quiet place within, if there is such that place, or imagining it there. And then feel and sense what wants to be expressed, what is emerging from there, what is radiating, shining, flowing, vibrating, tingling. And if this place within could speak, what word would it say?

And perhaps from some place deep and quiet within, you can have some sense or intuition, understanding, imagination that we have within us an alternative to suffering, an alternative to ill will and greed and fear. We have the possibility of well-being, being at peace and calm. And as we come to the end of this sitting, to wish this for others. To wish this for others not in the abstract so much as with a sense of respect, care, reverence for the depths, the inner depth that everyone has, even if it's covered over. May everyone in their depths, under the surface of all their funny ways of being...

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

Thank you. And to comment a little bit about this last meditation, it was meant to be a continuation of the meditations and the teachings for this week, and with the idea that building on that or being supported by all that... And you might not have been to the earlier teachings, you might not be in a place where what I talked was relevant for you or something you felt you could kind of understand or do. That's understandable, and it's easy to be that way. But maybe sometime in the future, you can re-listen to this and there'll be a time when you're ready for it. So thank you.

Dharmette: Don't Make it Worse (5 of 5) Express

So hello and welcome to this fifth and last talk that's based on the practice of not making it worse. That, maybe you don't know what else to do, you don't understand the situation, it seems impossible, it seems like it's not going well. There's always one thing you can do: you can at least not make it worse. You can restrain yourself from speaking if the speaking you think is going to make it worse. You can restrain yourself from the actions you're going to do if that's going to make it worse. There's a profound way that, or very important way that sometimes what's most important is doing nothing. And doing nothing not to celebrate doing nothing, not to kind of imply that that's the only thing we can ever do, but if we don't know what to do and all the things we can think we might do is going to make the situation worse, maybe restraint, maybe holding back is the wisest thing we can do.

And how to make that wiser, so that is not just only restraint and kind of gritting your teeth or something, is to have a practice you can do while you're doing nothing. And so that's what I've been offering this week, and around the acronym WORSE. So you can wait, and there's something very profound about waiting. You can get, pull yourself together, get organized, get oriented, kind of let all the different pieces of who you are—your body, your heart, your mind, your emotions—be gathered together, be recognized, and be here. You can relax, and maybe even more valuable than relaxing, you can rest. Relax and then rest in the place of relaxation, abide, allow yourself to be there in that place. Don't pick up right away with your thoughts and activities and doings. Don't relax and then jump up and act. Take in and be nourished by the gentler, softer, relaxed state. Rest in it for a while.

And that allows you to sense and to see. So after going through this process, sense more fully what the situation is, what's happening in you. And when all your senses are open to the situation, what do you pick up? What do you tune into that's different than if you're only tuning in through your belief systems, through your bias, through your preferences? What does your body feel as you kind of be there with the situation, feel about the situation, or feel about yourself? So sensing.

And then part of the sensing world is eyes, seeing, but seeing is more than just sight; it's studying, looking at, understanding the situation. Take a good look at what's happening here. And you might be in a better position to look and begin understanding after you've done the first steps in this process of not making it worse.

And then we come to the last today, and that is to express. The E is to express. And not making it worse is not supposed to be eternally passive or not doing anything. There is a time and a place to speak. And so learning how to speak wisely, how to express ourselves wisely, has many different dimensions, and it's a huge, fantastic learning. So for example, there's mindful speaking and learning how to stay mindful as we speak, being embodied as we speak. There's learning how to speak in ways that don't diminish other people or don't criticize them or don't judge them. So there's the practice of making "I" statements and making statements that are really expressing the truth of the moment for ourselves.

And in this regard, I'm a big fan of "mindfulness out loud." Mindfulness out loud means that mindfulness inside is just to name and see and understand directly what is here without any additions to it—judgments, reactivity, opinions for and against. Just, "Oh, this is how it is now," without blame, without shame. This is how it is now. So that same way can be expressed out loud. So rather than saying, "I'm angry with you," you can say, "You know, with how this conversation has gone, I'm feeling pretty agitated and pretty upset and somewhat angry." And that shift in conversation goes from, maybe, "I'm angry with you" (as if you're to blame) to not saying anything about the other person but taking time to speak about yourself. That can make much more room in the conversation for something deep to happen. Now you're expressing what's true for you.

And so what needs to be expressed? What needs to be said? What needs to be shared? What needs to come out? And then there's a deeper dimension of this: what wants to be expressed? Because if we can really find ourselves deeply connected to the wholeness of who we are or the deep quiet place within of who we are, we discover that there's layers and layers of things that want to show up and be here that are covered over or ignored or don't have a chance, that is more who we are, more essential, or more feels like the fullness of our freedom, fullness of our spirituality, of our love, than a lot of the kind of surface ideas of me, myself, and mine, and this is what's happening to me, and this is what I want, and this is why I'm hurt or something.

And so meditation is one of those ways we can drop down quiet to that place deep under the surface. And from there, what wants to be expressed there? What is the expression of that? And I find that meditation at some point shifts from when I first sit down, it's something I'm doing, to it shifts to I'm participating, I'm going along with, I'm riding along with something deep that wants to unfold and move within me. And sometimes it's just the breathing. The breathing wants to happen, and it's not me breathing, but breathing is breathing itself, and I'm there receiving that or participating in it or allowing it, resting in it. But deeper than the breath, there can be a deep sense of care, a deep sense of love, compassion, kindness, care, peace that is also very quiet. As in a sense, maybe it feels it has nothing to do with what you want and your sense of self and exchange with other people and what you're going to get back. It just kind of, maybe it is a form of love that has no object, not about loving something or being loved back. There is just something profound. Or maybe it's something difficult, maybe it's grief that's the deep thing. But there's something fantastically important about this reverence and care to open up to what's deep inside and make room for it and feel the rightness of allowing this depth to be expressed, to come out, to be expressed in our body, expressed in our heart, to be expressed kind of from the inside out.

And so not all expression is spoken, because sometimes the spoken expression maybe isn't as deep as we could go. But sometimes we do speak. And sometimes when a situation is very difficult, there becomes a time to speak, not just wait, not just organize and relax, but there definitely is a time when we have to speak up. But don't speak up automatically, reactively. Go through this process of wait, organize, rest, sense, and see, and then you'll be in a much better position to speak wisely, caringly. And hopefully in doing that, make the situation better. And that in the end is, you know, I think what the heart most wants. The heart most wants to not make it worse if that's the danger, but more than that, we want to make things better. We want to make this a better world. We want to make ourselves a better person. We want to support others to live a better life. And so may this process we've talked about this week be one that supports you in many different ways in your life. So thank you very much.

Announcements

So a couple of announcements. I'll be teaching a three-week retreat for the next three weeks at the Insight Retreat Center. And Matthew Brensilver will be here next week, and Diana Clark will be here I think the following two weeks. Both of these are wonderful teachers, and I'm very happy and glad that they're coming to teach and that you'll have a chance to kind of hear their teachings, and not just their teachings, but also their beingness. I love them both quite a bit, so I'm happy they're going to be here with you.

And then it might be worth saying that I teach every year a Buddhist chaplaincy program. It's in person here, we teach it here at IMC, it's through the Sati Center, and that will start up at the end of September. It's been a very significant training program for some people in offering spiritual care that is kind of moving into, for some people, it's a stepping stone to becoming a professional chaplain. And so it's a very rich world of stepping into care, and people who do it have to have a volunteer role to volunteer, maybe in a hospital as a volunteer chaplain, or in a prison or jail, or there are many places, hospice, anyway. So if some of you might be interested in it, it's a rich way of continuing with this practice that we do. And you'll find more information under Sati Center, Sati.org. There's both an online version and an in-person, and I'm involved with the in-person here at IMC, and the online has other wonderful teachers who are teaching it. So thank you, and I look forward to being back here in a few weeks.