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Guided Meditation: Simplicity of Being; Dharmette: Stories of Practice (4 of 5) Growing Appreciation - Gil Fronsdal
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 27, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Guided Meditation: Simplicity of Being
Hello. On this Thanksgiving morning in California.
One of the really wonderful qualities that gradually grew in me as I did my early years of practice—it grew unexpectedly, unknowingly. At first, it was just a slow, gradual awakening in me. What it was was a deep appreciation, a deep kind of gratitude for life, for meditation, for breathing, for awareness, for being present, and for the communities I sat with.
It was almost as if it was appreciation and gratitude for no reason, or for no subject. It was a state of gratitude, a state of appreciation that didn't need a reason. I can't explain to you exactly how that arose or how to have that, but it had a lot to do with becoming undistracted in a soft, open, careful way. It came from the opportunity to stay close to my direct experience. An opportunity to be here at home in the present moment without a lot of preoccupations, desires, aversions, or distractions—just here in a simple way.
Maybe the appreciation and gratitude came from the simplicity of being, the miracle of being just here and now.
So, to assume a meditation posture, a posture that for you is suitable to experience a simplicity of being. A posture for finding a deep contentment and comfort for just being alive at this moment in and of itself.
Of course, there are problems, issues, and things going on. But to settle through them, to not be caught in those concerns, to be able to let them be there on the side for now. To be able to settle in here to the simplest way of just being alive.
Find whatever posture is good for you, and gently close your eyes. Lower your attention like you would lower yourself into a comfortable bath. Lower your awareness into the bathtub of your body and feel your body from the inside out. As if the awareness is almost like the gentle water lapping up the sides of the bathtub, the lake, or the pool.
Feeling and sensing your body just as it is, just as it appears.
And then to take some fuller breaths as a way of touching your rib cage, your belly, your chest—touching your body more fully. Almost like the inhale touches all around the stretching and moving of the rib cage. Being touched by the movement of breathing.
And as you exhale, maybe a longer exhale than usual. Ride the exhale all the way to the end. Letting go as you take that ride, that slide, with breathing out.
Letting your breathing return to normal. And find in your body, in your torso, deep inside—is there a place of quiet appreciation? Quiet feelings of gratitude? Quiet feelings of maybe contentment or simplicity deep inside, deeper than any of your concerns or preoccupations right here?
And maybe as you breathe, have the breathing be influenced by gratitude. Have your breathing be breathing with appreciation. Breathing itself arises out of contentment here and now, in this simplicity of breathing.
[Silence]
As we come to the end of this sitting, is there some way that you could touch into the simplicity of being? Putting aside your thoughts and concerns, past and futures. Simply being here in the simplest possible way: breathing, feeling the body, allowing yourself to be as you are with a kind of gentle intimacy to your present moment experience.
And might there be some appreciation of that simplicity of being? Maybe a contentment that doesn't require a reason to be content. A simple appreciation that doesn't require something particular to be appreciating. Just appreciation, a gratitude that doesn't need something to be grateful for.
That gratitude for the simplicity of just being alive and breathing and sensing that is below any level of preoccupation or thinking. Free of any stories or evaluations.
And might that appreciation and gratitude have space within it for the people you'll encounter today? For the food that you'll eat? For whatever circumstances of life that support you and hold you?
May your simplicity of being allow the flow of simple gratitude, simple appreciation here and now. Just here. Just now.
May all beings be appreciated. May all beings be respected and cared for. May all beings receive thanks. May all beings be loved and respected. May all beings experience kindness and friendship.
And may our simplicity of being be the source from which our appreciation, thankfulness, care, and kindness flow. May we touch each other's hearts.
Thank you.
Dharmette: Stories of Practice (4 of 5) Growing Appreciation
So, hello. Good morning on this Thanksgiving Day in the United States.
It is kind of remarkable to have a whole day that is dedicated to thanksgiving—giving thanks. It has been one of the surprises for me in my years of Buddhist practice how much deep gratitude, how much deep appreciation this practice has evoked in me.
It is a surprise to me all the different ways that gratitude and appreciation arise. Sometimes it is for the people who have supported me, knowingly and unknowingly, or inspired me along the path of practice with their goodness. Sometimes it has been a deep appreciation for life itself—a gratitude to be part of the amazing life systems of this planet, for which I can feel tremendous gratitude.
I don't understand it fully. I don't try to understand it. Maybe there is a deeper way of living that is deeper than understanding. A deep, deep kind of simplicity of being that is free of the challenges and viewpoints that come from how we think. Certainly, I love thinking; thinking is my friend. I have a very friendly relationship to thinking. But it is also great to experience life free of thinking.
One of the things that I look back at in my practice is all the time that I sat in my early years in a Zen meditation hall. It is called the zendo1. In retrospect, they tended to be very simple, empty rooms. Sometimes they had altars and nice Buddhist statues, but they were relatively simple. Except for maybe flowers on the altar, there was no life there. There were no flowers or trees, and it tended not to have windows, so you couldn't really look at the natural world outside.
The way we would meditate would be sitting facing a wall that was sometimes only a foot or two from where my knees were. Sometimes further back, maybe a yard. And we would meditate with our eyes open. So there wasn't really anything interesting to look at. Sometimes the floor, sometimes the wall, but it wasn't anything in particular.
What became clear, what stood out in high relief in that little bit of sensory deprivation—they never talked about this, and I never felt like I was being deprived—was that from the hours of sitting there, the life that stood out, the life that was alive and living, was the life that was in me at that present moment.
At some point, rather than living in my thoughts, I began living in the lived life of the present. That was where the life was. That was where the wonder of the natural world was appearing and being. What really existed as a life in that moment was only what was happening as I breathed, as I sat in this body, as I thought, and as I had emotions.
These things began to appear in a kind of highlight where it became clear that I should care for it. It became clear that there were choices: using my thoughts in ways that diminished the quality of my life, or in thinking in ways that did not diminish it, that allowed it to be. It never occurred to me to try to improve the quality of my inner life. It just occurred to me not to harm it, not to diminish it, and to sit there with that simple dedication not making it worse.
I came to delight in the simplicity of being—just being here, being alive. So much started to disappear in my thinking: my judgments, my stories, and all these preoccupations that diminished and limited me.
The remarkable thing that happened was that there arose this wonderful sense of appreciation. We would always end our meditations with bowing. For me, it was a bow of appreciation. After a while, it was difficult not to do it. I felt something was really wrong if I didn't; I wanted to have some way to express that appreciation.
Living in monasteries, we had to bow to each other a lot as we passed each other in pathways. Even when I didn't want to do it, this wonderful bow changed something in my heart. It touched that place of appreciation. It touched that place of gratitude.
I once counted how many times I had to bow before 10:00 in the morning, just in the rituals we all did. I think I got up to 50 bows. But then, that was just the beginning of the day. There was something marvelous about just dipping my head slightly, coming forward, putting my hands together, and bowing. Something opened inside of my heart every time—little drops, little openings.
So much so that when I left after three years in the monastery and went to Berkeley, California, the next day I was walking down a street there called Ashby and College2. There were a lot of people passing by, strangers, and I just wanted to bow to them because that is what we did in the monastery. We passed each other, and we bowed. I couldn't do it because they probably would have thought I was weird. Then I saw someone I had met at the monastery across the street, down the block. I ran after her. Partly it was nice to say hello to her, but partly I ran after her because I just really wanted to bow to someone. It was just like I had to appreciate, or be grateful, or have this sentiment in my heart step forward.
This simplicity of being, of just being intimately connected to the living life here in this dark environment of the zendo, meant it was almost like I didn't have to meditate. Formal meditation techniques could almost be a distraction from just being in touch with the lived life as it was happening in the present moment and settling into it.
What that also did was begin to awaken a greater appreciation and gratitude for the other people in my life. When I saw people expressing compassion to others, to myself, or simply in how they lived their life, that simplicity of being just felt such gratitude and delight in them. It informed me. I saw people who lived with a simplicity of being—no complications, no big social games, no greed, hate, and delusion. It touched something really deep inside of me that I recognized and just loved and appreciated—a certain kind of purity.
I saw acts of generosity, and it would move me to know to a great degree how generous people were. Even in simple ways, like just being able to offer thanks.
I will give you one example, and then I have to stop. Once at the Zen Center, there was a gathering of the primary Zen masters in the United States. Back then there weren't that many; maybe seven or eight of them came. Most were Japanese, some American. They were having a meeting among themselves to take care of business and hang out. One evening they had a panel to answer questions from the Zen students.
They were sitting at this table, all in a row, answering questions. Some of the students came around to offer them some water or tea to drink. They would come and put a glass in front of them, coming gently and quietly from behind so as not to disturb them. I think most of the Zen masters were involved in the conversation and didn't really register what was being given to them.
But we came to the last one in the row. Someone came around and put the water in front of him. He stood out because the others hadn't done this: he turned around, bowed, and said "Thank you" to the person who had given him just the water, right then.
And I said, "Wow." Even that simplicity of someone doing such a simple thing, and taking the time to really thank them—that inspired me. That was a change moment for me to see that.
The point I am trying to convey is that as I was sitting and discovering the tremendous value of this simplicity of being, it made me more sensitive, more aware of the goodness around me. I was in an environment where there was a lot of goodness, not just in the Buddhist community, but I started seeing it in town and around people who were not Buddhists. I thought, "Wow, this is cool."
That has been one of the great delights of this Buddhist life: the delight of becoming increasingly sensitive, increasingly appreciative of how much goodness there is in this world. A world where it is very easy to be overwhelmed by how much is terrible. I would venture to guess that for every major thing that is terrible, there is much, much more goodness going on.
May we all contribute to that goodness. So, thank you.