This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Love; Ten Reflections (8 of 10) Kinship. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Dharmette: Ten Reflection (8 of 10) Kinship - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on May 01, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation

Hello and thank you for being part of this 7 a.m. practice session, participating with your interest in your practice. Everyone is appreciated as being part of this wonderful effort at exploring our life through the lens of mindfulness.

These Ten Reflections we're doing these two weeks, for me, are founded on or based on our capacity to be mindfully present here and now in our direct experience. In a sense, it's a follow-up for the long series on "Introduction to Mindfulness: Part Two" that we did this a.m. from the beginning of the year until just about April.

With a foundation of mindful attention, a foundation of awareness, there's a softening of our clinging, our resistance, our attachments, our fixations. There's a softening and lightening up. In the lightness of our presence and the softening of our presence, it's easier for the heart to respond. The heart registers and is responsive. Our emotional hearts are designed to be responsive and shift and change with the circumstances around us.

This morning there was an article about how anger prevents the dilation of the arteries and veins of the heart, and it's detrimental to the heart. In the same way, the softening, the relaxing of mindfulness probably helps with dilation, makes things easier. So this softening of the heart, this responsiveness of the heart, gives rise to a greater sense of care, or empathy, or a sense of being connected to ourselves in a heartfelt way and to others.

From this mindfulness practice, there can be born four different forms of love—maybe more than that—four different ways of caring. In the tradition, they're sometimes called the Divine Abodes¹. There's something quite phenomenally valuable about a human being, and so some English speakers like to call them "Divine"—it's a translation of the word Brahma.

These are:

1. Friendliness, kindness, good will.
2. Compassion, or a certain kind of empathic concern for the suffering of others.
3. Sympathetic joy, appreciative joy, a kind of sharing in the success and happiness of others.
4. Profound equanimity love. A love which is not easily rattled. A love which is not easily swinging to dismay, or anger, or hopelessness, or despair, or a kind of fear rush to action. It has a wisdom, the oversight, the overview of the situation to stay balanced and clear and loving, but not reactive.

So, bring your mindfulness to open to the softness or the lightness of being, and see if there can be one of these four that can flow through the mindfulness, with the mindfulness.

Assume a meditation posture. If you're familiar with meditation and have meditated for a while, then close your eyes and maybe feel the homecoming of the posture, the familiarity of the posture. Occasionally, maybe you feel the goodness of being in this meditation posture. Assuming the posture has associations, has its own dynamic that begins bringing us into contact with our body and ourselves.

If you haven't, gently close your eyes and take some gentle, deeper breaths. With the inhale being a reminder that you are here, this place, at this time. And the exhale a softening, relaxing into this here and now.

Then letting your breathing return to normal. On the exhale, relaxing the muscles of the face. And as you relax, notice on the inhale how it is to feel and sense those muscles of the face.

On the exhale, relaxing the shoulders, softening in the shoulders. And on the inhale, feeling the shoulders more fully.

On the exhale, softening the belly, releasing in your belly. And then on the inhale, feeling whatever impact relaxing the belly has, feeling it more fully, broadly.

And if it's available to you, on the exhale, relax the thinking mind. Soften the thinking mind, quiet it. And then on the inhale, let yourself feel and sense more fully the thinking mind as it relaxes, or as it doesn't.

And then on the exhale, relaxing around the heart, the heart center. Softening, opening. And then the inhale, feeling your heart.

As you sit here in your body, here and now with your experience, which of the Divine Abodes seems closest and most relevant for you with whatever is being carried with you in the present moment? Is it a basic kindness or good will? Friendliness? A compassion? Sympathetic joy? Equanimity love?

Which of those seems to arise in a kind of simple, ordinary way so that it can accompany your mindfulness? Kind mindfulness. Compassionate mindfulness. Joyful mindfulness. Equanimous mindfulness.

With a rhythm of breathing keeping you here in the present, being mindful of your experience supported by one of the four Divine Abodes.

[Silence]

Where within do you find a lightness, a softness, a gentleness from which arises love of some form? Kindness, compassion, appreciation, equanimity for yourself, for others, for here and now? Maybe without even an object for the love. Love, just love.

[Silence]

And then, as we come to the end of this sitting, sometimes mindfulness leads us to a simplicity of being. A simple, almost contentment with just sitting and breathing. Not much else is needed. We're not being driven by the future, or the past, or responsibilities, or desires, aversions, regrets. We feel the value of a simple being here, alive, present.

That might not feel like anything dramatic. However, maybe it can be characterized—maybe in a matter of degrees—but it can be characterized by an absence of ill will. An absence of hostility. An absence of objectifying others as the object of our desires of some kind, expectations, demands, judgments. The absence of reactivity, tendency to judge or criticize.

The simplicity of being, of simple presence, can be characterized by something phenomenally important: the absence of these difficult states, harmful states of mind.

That maybe has something in common with our human, heartfelt capacity for love, for kindness, compassion, joy in others, and even-mindedness, an impartiality. May this simplicity of being, this freedom of mindfulness, may it be a channel for all our good will for others, our friendliness, our wishing everyone well. Because in wishing others well, we help our heart feel well.

So may it be the heart's wish that all beings be happy. All beings be safe. All beings be peaceful. All beings be free.

Dharmette: Ten Reflection (8 of 10) Kinship

So, hello and welcome to this eighth discussion of the Eighth Reflection. These are reflecting on things that are invaluable for the development and growth of our spiritual life—or if you prefer, rather than the word spiritual, maybe our heart life, the fullness of our hearts.

Today's topic is kinship, and it goes along with yesterday's topic of community. Community has a lot to do with the relationships we have with people: the feeling of belonging, connection, the feeling of friendliness with people. So it has a little bit more to do with dynamics and relationships. Kinship, as I understand it, involves something deeper than our relationships. It's a way in which our hearts seek others. It's the way in which we feel that we're family.

I was surprised when I was probably 18, when I went back to meet some of my aunts and uncles. I had grown up with them a little bit, but it was the first time I was close to being an adult. One of my aunts made it clear in some way or other that we were family, and that had deeper roots than whether we were friends or we liked each other. There was just a raw, basic acceptance of each other because we're a family. It may be a kinship, you know, a family-ship.

I was struck by that and reflected on that. That stayed with me in probably the first ten years of doing Buddhist practice, as it slowly grew: this sense that there could be this kinship, this family feeling for everyone. That we're all kin, we're all family.

Sometimes I delight in the thought that if we could trace our lineage, our ancestral lineage, backwards in time, we would all converge someplace. If nowhere else, maybe a million years ago in the plains of Africa. We all have common origins. We are all part of the same family.

We know that this human race of ours is phenomenally effective at creating division. Phenomenally effective at creating alienation and separation, and very strong boundaries between inside and outside, and those who belong and those who don't belong—those who are part of my family, my tribe, my village, my nation, whatever it might be. We make it so strongly that the "other" sometimes gets demonized, sometimes gets treated as less than human.

The cost of that is a kind of separation from ourselves, a kind of truncation, a limiting of ourselves. Because if we see others as "others," radical others as distinct from us, as separate from us, as belonging to some other category than us—whether it's other family, or tribe, or village, or nation, or ethnicity, or race, or whatever—that limits our capacity to be whole. It limits our capacity to let all our faculties be open and receptive and take in the humanity of others.

So these divisions we live in become divisions that we carry inside of ourselves. Part of the influence that mindfulness practice or meditation has is beginning to soften and then dissolve these divisions that we carry within inside ourselves. These divisions that come with ill will, hatred, judgment, bias, prejudice, selfishness—the kind of selfishness which is collective selfishness: for my family, selfish for my village, my people.

Those begin to dissolve. And if they don't dissolve, there's maybe subconsciously (or not quite recognized) a lot of pain. There's unresolved work. Sometimes this can be very dramatic. Sometimes it involves a deep alienation from all people. Some people carry around with them a perpetual anger, hostility, even resentment towards all people. Anybody they encounter, or huge categories of people. Sometimes it's towards certain genders, sexual orientations, ethnicities, races—all kinds of ways in which it's carried within us.

It can really break people. It can really be a lifetime of being kind of a broken heart or being alienated from oneself even. And so as we do mindfulness practice, we start feeling the impact, the cost, the hurt of living in a divided world, living in divisiveness.

I've known people who have done this practice and at some point, after many years, were able to put down their resentment towards certain individuals. After many years, they saw through the inherited bias, prejudice, racism that they'd grown up with. I've known people who have changed dramatically from how they grew up because they saw through how painful that was for themselves to carry this divisiveness.

So to heal this—and part of that movement of healing this—is to discover what I call our universal kinship with everyone. I like the idea that we're discovering we're all family. Even people that we've never met before, in some way we can meet them as if we're family.

It had a huge impact for me many years ago, the first time I met this Buddhist monk named Yanda². He's dead now, but he was a Burmese monk who first came to live in the Bay Area, in San Francisco, to teach this basic mindfulness practice that I learned in Burma. Before I went to Burma, I'd heard about him. I called him up on the phone and asked him if I could come see him and just kind of prepare to go to Burma. He said, "Yes, please come."

I went to his house, which was also his temple then. What blew me away, what was a little bit life-changing for me—I never met this person, but when he opened the door, I had the very distinct feeling that his friendliness, his warmth, his receptivity to me was as if he was meeting a long-lost friend. He was just so delighted and receptive. To have this feeling of someone I didn't know treating me with such a kinship, such a warmth, opened a whole world of possibility for me. Not so much that I could be the same way—which it did—but more importantly, that it was possible to drop the divisiveness, the separation, the "us versus them."

For me, it had a lot to do with fear. Fear of others, fear of opening up. That it was possible not to live that way. And so as I continued with my mindfulness practice, the mindfulness practice kind of folded in this possibility that, yes, this fear that I carried for others—fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of all kinds of things—didn't have to be there. The sense of separation from others and treating others with a certain kind of separation, or just difference, and keeping my distance, didn't have to be there.

Something began softening and opening in me. Over time, the sense of kinship grew and grew and grew for me. I would say that that is a very important guiding principle for me, or feeling for me: the sense of kinship with people. I like to feel it. I delight going to the supermarket to see if there's an opportunity with a checkout clerk to just have a little bit more human contact. To look at them, look them in their eye, to ask how they're doing, or have some simple conversation where feeling some contact that's deeper than just a casual hello. Often for me, that happens in—not that I'm staring at people—but some kind of recognition that happens when the eyes meet. That sometimes happens to me when I see certain mammals in the eye. Something profound happens to me in the feeling of kinship.

So what is your sense of kinship? What is your sense of non-kinship? Do you have a sense of kinship that's bounded by a certain community, that only for them do you have that? And if that's the case, what gets in the way of having that sense of kinship be wider than the community for whom it's easy for you? Do you understand what are the dynamics in you that create division? Social divisions between you and the people who are not in that circle of kinship?

And what is it for you to have some sense of universal kinship? Allowing that there are distinctions between how we love and care for and are friendly with people who are in different circles of community for us in our lives—there are differences. But what about a universal kinship where we love, we care for, we respect, we value all people as kin? In such a way that we do not create, live by the artificial barriers that we contribute to keep people out of our hearts, away from our hearts.

I hope you appreciate that this might point to how kinship might be a universal human need and characteristic. How does it work for you? That's the reflection for these next 24 hours. Maybe you can see that there's a connection between your sense of kinship and your capacity to love.

So thank you very much.