This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Accompanying; Intro to Mindfulness Pt 2 (8) Faculty of Mindfulness. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.
Guided Meditation: Accompyanying; Intro to Mindifulness Pt 2(8) Faculty of Mindfulness - Gil Fronsdal
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on March 06, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Guided Meditation: Accompyanying
Hello from the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, and welcome to this guided meditation. We're in the middle of a five-part series on the faculties of faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom. These are supports that we have within us, waiting for us to use, to engage, and to support us to be present and overcome the way the mind obscures the present moment with its distractions and preoccupations.
Today, it's mindfulness. Mindfulness is such a fantastic potential capacity we have, and it's such a rich aspect of our capacity for attention. We have many capacities, many sense doors for attention. We can pay attention with our tongue as we taste, our nose as we smell, our ears as we listen, our eyes as we see, and the body as we have tactile contact with objects in the world. Then there are other forms of perception that we have. There are mental forms of attention that we have. We can observe things quietly from the mind's eye. We can know cognitively what's happening as it's happening, and all of these together contribute to what can be called mindfulness.
Because it's a multifaceted domain of attention, over time, I delight in having different words to translate the word sati1, or different ways of understanding mindfulness. Today, I would like to use the word "accompaniment." As we practice mindfulness, we're accompanying our experience—standing close to it, standing near, being near, remaining close.
In the ancient world, the expression for the practice of mindfulness is Satipatthana2. Sati is mindfulness, and patthana can mean standing by, standing near, being, approaching to be close to. So today, I'd like to suggest that we practice accompaniment, to accompany ourselves. Exactly what that means varies depending on situations. Just like if you're going to accompany a friend who is grieving or is disturbed or troubled by something, depending on the friend, depending on circumstances, it varies how close we accompany them. As you know, we hold them by the arm, we give them a hug, we sit a little bit further away, we give them space. Different situations require different approaches, but we're always there, accompanying. Intentional standing by, being a companion, being there with our experience.
Just this idea of accompaniment requires some kind of attention and requires something from within us—some kind of presence activated to be present. Maybe we're to accompany ourselves calmly, as you would a friend. Maybe accompany yourself kindly. Accompany yourself as if you're listening deeply: "What is this here?" without asserting your opinions, your conclusions, your preferences in the situation. As if each thing that's happening to you, each thing that comes into awareness, the respectful thing to do is to accompany it as it is. Listening, sensing deeply without interpretation. Let each thing, in a sense, speak for itself, and you accompany it without judgment.
So assuming a meditation posture. A posture of care, of respect for what you're going to accompany. That you're going to show up and be present. Sometimes when you're with a friend, you want to be with them so that they see that you're attentive. You're present, you're interested, you're listening, you're there with them. And sometimes that's done with a posture. And here, we're doing this for ourselves. Being our own friend. Dare I say, our own best friend.
So then gently taking a few long, slow, deep breaths. And as you exhale, relax and settle in to be here for these minutes, meditating. Just here.
Letting your breathing return to normal and continuing as you exhale, relaxing your body so that there's a softer, more receptive way of accompanying life as it happens to you. Here.
And then settling into your breathing and having the practice, the orientation, to accompany your body breathing. Breathing has accompanied you for your lifetime, and now you're accompanying breathing, returning the favor. Letting go of distractions, preoccupations, so you can listen or sense more deeply the experience of the body breathing.
Any other way that pulls you away from breathing, don't be troubled by that. It's the call of something that needs to be accompanied. Stand close to it for a while, even if it's just your thinking mind. But don't listen to the words. Listen to what fuels your thinking. Listen to what's deeper than words and images. Accompany your experience as it unfolds in the present moment.
Whatever is happening for you, to accompany it with all of yourself that you have to offer. Maybe even by breathing with the experience. So you're accompanying, you're not participating. You're accompanying, not resisting. Accompanying, not being pushed around by it.
And then, as we come to the end of this sitting, again spend some moments actively accompanying yourself from the inside out. An accompaniment that is energized by confidence and faith in the value of being present. An accompaniment that's wholehearted, with a kind of courageous effort. "Yes, this is phenomenally important, to be present here." And then a kind of certain inner activation that activates accompanying our experience, being there with it.
And as we feel tensions in our body, to soften and relax around them so the accompaniment becomes more sensitive, more receptive.
And then to turn your attention outwards to the world around you. People close to you, further away in your neighborhood, in town. People you'll encounter today, known and unknown. And then imagine, as we bring this to a close, that you're there to stand with whoever you meet, to accompany them. Standing with, in the English meaning of supporting someone. Or maybe supporting that which is deepest and most valuable in each person. We're there to accompany, to listen, to be present for. Where we have confidence in our capacity to accompany. That confidence makes room for kindness and friendliness. Wholehearted accompaniment, of course, comes with goodwill. Anything else is a limitation in our presence.
And wishing well for everyone you'll encounter today. Imagining them with happy faces that are smiling. Imagining them safe, content, and happy. And may it be so. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings everywhere be free. Thank you.
Intro to Mindifulness Pt 2(8) Faculty of Mindfulness
Hello and welcome to this third talk on the five faculties. Sometimes they're called the five controlling faculties. The word "control," of course, is complicated, but in the good senses of the term, it means that we have some choice and capacity to engage in this practice. That we're not living a life that's at the whims of fate and whims. That we have some ability to change the direction of our life, and change the direction of our mind and what's happening for us.
And so one of those is to activate, choose to activate, have the capacity to activate our awareness in a useful way. Awareness or attention is present for human beings all their waking hours, maybe even when we're sleeping in certain ways. And if we don't choicefully engage in activating that capacity, using that capacity, then our capacity for attention is used by things which are deeper subconscious within us. They're hijacked, in a sense.
If we are not taking control, taking ownership, or engaging with our attention, our attention might be swept away into our greed or hostility, and marshaled, recruited for supporting those things, or for fear. We get hijacked into the fear. Attention is kind of food, in a sense, food for these things. So the more attention is hijacked by fear, anger, ill will, greed, envy, and doubts, the more it thrives, the more those things get stronger, which is to our detriment. So we need to have some choice, some agency to engage in mindfulness, so it's not being taken over by other things.
And so this engagement, this activation of mindfulness, is in the family of things that I've been calling action. The Dharma3 is a lot about the actions we engage in, and mindfulness is one more thing that we practice. It's an activity that we engage in, an action of sorts.
The first faculty, confidence, is a confidence that there are things we can do that are beneficial to practice. A core thing in Dharma practice is confidence in the activity of mindfulness. And then there's heroic engagement with that confidence. I think of it more as a quality of the heart. Heroic effort, courage, is much more the activation of the embodiment of who we are, to show up in a full way. And then mindfulness is more of the mind, but we're activating something from the mind so we have a higher capacity for attentiveness to the present moment.
I'll give an example. If a friend of yours is quite distressed and you're walking in the park, and you're much more interested in talking about the movie you watched last night. You were fascinated by it and had insights about it, but your friend is really distressed. Actually, as you talk about the movie, you kind of notice that they're getting quieter, their posture is sinking, and they look even more distressed, on the edge of tears. At some point, it occurs to you, "Wait a minute, I don't think that talking about this movie is what's called for here right now. My friend is distressed."
So then you might decide, "Let me be present with my friend. Let me turn my attention to my friend and really accompany them or be with them, check out what's going on here." There's a choice to activate a certain kind of attentiveness that wasn't present when you were just carried away by your fascination with the movie. Something is being activated out of choice: "Let's listen to the friend, let's accompany my friend in a deep way."
One of the good ways to accompany people or listen is to pay attention to how we listen. You might notice that you now have tension in your body because maybe you feel like you've blown it and your friend is going to be angry with you for talking about a movie. So you take responsibility for how you are so you can accompany the person well. Maybe you're able to relax and settle and put aside your self-concern in that way, so that you can just be really there for your friend. As you're there more and more, it just seems easy to be there. It feels like now you're attuned to the person, and you're not interested in anything else. You don't have to work to be present for your friend, and you don't have to track yourself so carefully because you keep being distracted. You're just there in a nice, easy way. You see that your friend responds accordingly, and their mood lifts a little bit. They seem to appreciate the attention. It seems like you're starting to come a little bit more in harmony. So it all starts by activating a kind of attention.
Another example would be, say that you are really impatient, but you decide to go out for fresh air. But you're super impatient, restlessly impatient. So you find yourself speeding around the neighborhood and almost bumping into all the people on the sidewalk and the kids on the tricycles, because you hardly notice anything. After a while, you start noticing, "Wow, something's not quite right here." You notice how impatient you are and how fast you're walking.
And so you decide to activate your capacity to slow down. You activate the capacity not to give in to expressing the impatience in how you walk, tripping over the kids and their tricycles. You slow down to pay more attention. You slow down to be with yourself more. And then you've learned about mindfulness. You learned it's useful to pay attention to your body. You find out there's a lot of body tension with the impatience, so you relax your shoulders, you relax your eyes, your belly softens.
You're choosing, you're activating the capacity to relax as you walk more. And slowing down, you find that it's useful for you to kind of rest in your body and just be carried by the body, to accompany your body. You find that kind of settles something. Now you're not so much racing off into your thoughts, and in fact, now it's easier to pay attention. At some point, attention seems more receptive than something you're activating. "Oh, this is good. Receptive presence." And so you decide in a certain kind of way to be engaged in the choice to be more receptive, receptive to the experience.
Each step along the way, there's something we're activating, we're engaging, but it's an activation which is not leading to more restlessness or busyness or agitation. It's actually an activation that allows something to settle and be quieter and more receptive. The core thing here for mindfulness is the activation of our capacity for attention, present-moment attention. Exactly what that is, is less important than the activation of present-moment attention that almost feels like we're activating a capacity to accompany our experience here and now.
I love the expression "accompaniment" for mindfulness because that allows whatever attentional faculty we have that's useful to be activated. Yesterday, I went walking on the beach, and I felt this is really great, to feel the wind. I have a long history with the wind. Part of the reason I was at the beach was to remember things in the past, to honor someone who had passed away. I activated a capacity to feel the wind for all the times I'd been with this person when it was windy at the ocean. So I was activating a capacity to feel and be present through my skin and in the cold as it went through my clothes, and it was really a delight. This capacity to activate the sense door that's needed for any particular time is key.
But the word "activation," for people who do mindfulness, might seem like we're just getting busy. But when we activate a wholeheartedness, all the ways we're scattered, all the ways we're fragmented and being pulled away from ourselves, those can settle. There's something deeply healing even about activating a full, wholehearted attentiveness, accompanying our experience, being really here in our experience. That allows us to become whole. And as we do that, to be honest about what's going on. To be carried away from that into distractions—that's where things get off a little bit. That's where there's a tension or an alienation or it doesn't quite feel good. But to enter into this world here fully, in an activated way, allows for some deep relaxation. Maybe not initially—in the beginning, maybe we have to work at it, and then eventually it becomes easier.
I'll end with another metaphor for cultivating or developing mindfulness. I've read that there are stationary bicycles you can pedal that create electricity. Imagine you have such a thing, and it requires batteries to have lights in your house, but the battery is dead. So you get on the bicycle and you're charging it, you're pedaling around, and very slowly the battery has enough charge that it can turn on the lights in the house. But there's not any stored electricity in the battery, so you have to keep pedaling and pedaling until there's enough stored energy in the battery. Then you can start to stop pedaling and the lights can continue. Then you can just relax and enjoy seeing things that were in the dark before.
It's the same way with mindfulness. We're engaging in it, activating it in a certain way, charging the inner battery. At some point, when the battery is full enough, then we don't have to work so much at being aware. The light has been turned on. And mindfulness is when the light has been turned on. The practice of mindfulness sometimes is getting the charge going, but then once the charge is there, when we're in the groove of being present, then the light is turned on, and it's wonderful to be activated. Then we use that light to shine on different parts of our life as we accompany it.
So you might, for this day, those of you doing your mindfulness practice through the day, consider if it's interesting to understand it as accompaniment. If you accompany yourself, accompany others, accompany your experience of life in the present moment as it's unfolding, mindfulness will come along. You cannot help but be attentive when you're accompanying. So see how that goes for this practice of the mindfulness faculty. Thank you.