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Guided Meditation: Balance; Dharmette: Intro to Mindfulness Pt2 (12) Bundle of Feelings - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on March 19, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Balance

Good morning. Hello, everyone. Welcome.

For this morning's meditation, I would like to evoke an experience from some of your childhoods. If you have ever been on a seesaw as a child, standing in the middle on either side of the fulcrum, you try to find the balance so that both sides of the seesaw are parallel to the ground. Sometimes getting there takes some muscle to push one way or the other. But when you find the midpoint and you're able to stand there with the seesaw balanced, there's no longer a lot of effort needed. Maybe just a little bit of adjustment with your weight.

In meditation, we can find that balance point that stands between pleasure and pain, between what's comfortable and what is not comfortable. We are not leaning into the pain or pulling away from it; we are not leaning into the pleasure or leaning away from it. If you go towards the pleasure too much in meditation, the whole seesaw tips. If you attack the pain, the seesaw tips.

There is a place of standing in the middle—the balance point—where mindfulness has the greatest ability to become clear. It clears the fog, clears the air, and clears the heart and mind. You are completely connected to either side because that's where the balance point is. It is not avoiding anything, but it is also not picking it up, going towards it, or reacting to it. It is being balanced in the middle of it all and clearly seeing. For today, it is the midpoint between comfort and discomfort, pleasure and pain.

Assume a meditation posture and gently close your eyes. Feel the weight of your body against whatever is supporting it. Imagine that the support point is the midpoint of the seesaw. Adjust your weight or your posture a little bit so that you feel more balanced on those pressure points. As you exhale, settle into those pressure points of support gently, maybe lovingly. Take some slightly deeper breaths—just deep enough to feel a richer connection to yourself and your body. Relax the body as you exhale.

Let your breathing return to normal. Continue to relax on the exhale, but imagine you are relaxing equally and evenly on either side of your body. Relax the shoulders both together so there is a settling into the midpoint, the balance point between them.

Relax in the chest, equally on both rib cages throughout the diaphragm. Perhaps settle and relax into the midpoint of the chest balance point. On the exhale, soften the belly equally on both sides of the body. Relax the sides of the waist, relaxing into the midpoint.

If you are sitting on a cushion or a chair, there might be some sense of relaxing into the tailbone where the tailbone gets close to the chair or the cushion—the midpoint.

Then, feel your thinking mind on the inhale. Whatever you associate with the energy, tension, or pressure of thinking—whatever is physically activated around thinking—feel it on the inhale. On the exhale, relax the thinking mind. Relax evenly on both sides of the mind. Relax into a midpoint center where the mind itself feels balanced and at ease.

If the mind is resting in the easy chair of the brain, the mind can know and be aware without getting up from that chair to look at anything, get away from anything, or follow anything like thoughts. The thinking mind rests at the center, balanced at the center. It doesn't go out and doesn't go in, but stands spanning in and out so whatever comes to awareness is known without being for or against it.

With some sense of a body being balanced on the seesaw of life, the heart balancing and the mind balanced, we do not go towards or away. We do not try to fix or to hold on. There is pleasure and there is pain; there are things that feel pleasant and unpleasant. Stay in the balance point. Stay rooted in the middle where there is balance and a possibility of clarity of seeing.

Have you already left the balance point, tipping in the direction of thinking or reacting? Stay close to your body, your heart, and your mind so all three are lined up balanced on the seesaw of life.

When we are balanced on the playground seesaw, we have to have a certain continuous awareness of our balance. So when we are balanced on the seesaw of pleasure and pain, there needs to be a relaxed, continuous clarity of mind that knows how the system is tipping towards one or the other. In the knowing, staying balanced.

As we come to the end of this sitting, having found the midpoint—the balance point between comfort and discomfort, between wanting and not wanting—there is a significant way to hold yourself in respect. To respect yourself, your value, and your presence. It is also a very significant way from which to respect other people. To respect the dignity, the value, and the autonomy of others. We can care for them deeply and love them, but we are not tipping the seesaw, sliding towards them or away from them. We are not over-involved or under-involved, but involved with respect in that balance point.

As we end this sitting, from that place of balance, from a place of respect, care, and appreciation of others, we wish them well. Have our heart radiate with goodness, generosity, and respect.

May others be happy. May others be safe. May others be peaceful. May others be free.

And may the way in which I stay balanced, and each of us stays balanced, contribute to the welfare and happiness of all beings. May we support others to be balanced and strong in themselves. May all beings be happy.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Intro to Mindfulness Pt2 (12) Bundle of Feelings

Good morning, good day. Welcome to our second talk on mindfulness of grasping, of clinging.

Today there are many synonyms or many members of this family of attachment, and one of them is compulsion. To be acting on compulsion means that we are not quite in charge and we are not quite involved with the choices we make. In extreme forms, it can be called addiction. Some people have addictions with the words they speak or the things that they do; there is a compulsive quality to them. Some people lose themselves in the activity they do.

The Buddha was addressing this very directly. He wanted us to be mindful of the whole dynamics of how compulsion, grasping, and attachment arise in us. Clinging and grasping are not abstract ideas; they are physiological events that occur within us. We can feel them. Generally, when we tense up in our body, we are actually grasping to something. Maybe it feels necessary if we want to be safe in some situations, but chronic tension is not about immediate safety in the situation. Chronic tension has to do with grasping, clinging, or attachment—sticking to certain kinds of ideas, beliefs, attitudes, or feelings that we have. Sometimes the compulsion is so strong it can feel like we are stuck to something. We have the expression in English "to be stuck on" some topic, some idea, or some feeling. The attachment is strong.

It is a physiological event as well as a mental event and an emotional event. The ecology of grasping and compulsion is what we start becoming aware of as our mindfulness increases and develops. It is a natural thing. As mindfulness becomes more sensitive, we become sensitive to where the tensions are, where the contractions are, where the pushing is, and where the restlessness is. These are all symptoms of this compulsion.

One area of compulsion that is very common for many people—maybe everyone—is around what is pleasant and unpleasant, pleasure and pain, comfort and discomfort. This, for the Buddha, is the second of the five bundles of clinging that humans collect.

It is one thing to want something sweet to eat, and that is fine. But there is also a compulsion to have it where something takes over and we do not just have one; we have two, three, four of some sweets because something has taken over and we are on automatic pilot. Each act of compulsion is a new grasping onto something, clinging to it. We are gathering together these bundles.

Some people live with these bundles of clinging, of compulsion. It isn't just for something sweet, but it is also for certain kinds of pleasures, certain kinds of delights, or clinging to avoiding discomfort at all costs and going to great lengths to make ourselves comfortable in situations. Some people are more oriented to comfort and discomfort than others—maybe a sensuous kind of person, though perhaps I shouldn't say it that way. Everyone is oriented this way to some degree. There might be many things that we are gathering together into these bundles of attachments, bundles of compulsivity. It just takes the slightest little change in the circumstances we are in for the compulsion to act up.

Start becoming mindful of our relationship to the pleasant and the unpleasant, to comfort and discomfort. In many ways, that is very fundamental to the human mind: to somehow be reacting to pleasant and unpleasant. Wanting more pleasant, getting away from the unpleasant, attacking the unpleasant. Some people push away the pleasant; they have some association with the pleasant that is wrong in some way. Some religious teachings seem to get people thinking that they are not supposed to experience pleasure.

But in some ways, it is always operating. You sit down in a chair and it is a little uncomfortable, so you want to make yourself comfortable. You go into a room of people and look around to see where it is comfortable or uncomfortable to sit based on the people who are there. There might be a more complicated assessment going on, but for some people, it is just a simple sense of pleasure and pain that is operating.

It can drive a lot of behavior. Some people will spend days planning ahead to have a certain kind of pleasure or go to a great extent to avoid a certain kind of discomfort that they don't want to deal with. Sometimes it is more complicated, like with people who are conflict-avoidant. But some of it just might be avoiding discomfort—they just don't want to be uncomfortable.

There are beliefs that people have around comfort and discomfort or pleasure and pain. Some people feel like they are a failure or they have done something wrong if they are experiencing unpleasantness in their life, and they have to fix that at all costs to prove that they are a worthy person, a successful person, or having a good life. Other people's sense of self gets validated when there is a lot of pleasure or a lot of joy. It kind of masks, maybe, some deeper anxiety that they carry. They like who they are when there is a lot of pleasure, but when there is no pleasure, then they are left with something deeper about themselves that they are not comfortable with.

Now, some people identify very strongly with discomfort. Some people actually look for discomfort, look for pain, want to have it. In a certain kind of odd way, because it is so familiar—maybe they have grown up in a way where that is always their companion—on the surface they don't want to have it there, but they don't know who they are without it. That is how they have navigated the world, how they have set up even their social relationships, around their pain or the difficulty they have.

People get attached to these things. We are grasping onto lots of them over and over again, and we live carrying these bundles of attachments. The Buddha taught the khandhas¹, often called Aggregates. It is central to insight practice to start becoming mindful of how things are pleasant and unpleasant so that we can see whether or not we are reacting to them.

There is a lot of human reactivity and motivation built on the very simple idea that something is pleasant or unpleasant. I kind of suspect that some political philosophies had their start when someone thought something out in this world was unpleasant for them, and so they wanted to build a whole philosophy to get that to go away so that they could be more comfortable. Occasionally it is that basic to some of the more complicated, sophisticated things people are doing. I have known people who have done great pieces of science, and they said that basically they are pursuing pleasure. They find a tremendous pleasure and delight in their work—pleasure of the mind—and that is what keeps them going.

That doesn't mean there is attachment. Pleasure is a beautiful, wonderful part of life. When it is there without attachment and without causing any harm to anyone, there is no reason not to allow ourselves to feel the full extent of the pleasure. That comes into play in meditation; with a deeper, more concentrated meditation, there is a lot of pleasure that happens. The idea is to experience it without any "for" or "against," without any attachment. Not to make another bundle of grasping around meditative pleasure as we would many other things.

Sit quietly in meditation, being mindful of what is settling, what is relaxing, into what is here. With time we start seeing and feeling how we are reacting, how we are clinging, how we are for or against things. We see how we are leaning this way and that way, how we lose our balance point—that quiet, still point in the middle where a certain thing comes alive.

If we are balanced on the playground seesaw and the seesaw is parallel to the ground, there has to be a continuous wakefulness to staying there present. Most people who might be sleepy, their sleepiness probably goes away if they manage to find that balance point on the playground seesaw. There is something about waking up to that balance point inside of us that can see and know clearly what is happening. We can feel the difference between leaning forward and leaning back—literally leaning back when we cringe or pull back, or leaning forward when we feel happy. There is nothing wrong with that; it is instinctual sometimes. But it is the early warning sign that now there is a possibility that compulsion is happening, grasping is happening, that we are getting stuck on something.

See mindfulness as being in that balance point between pleasure and pain, between the pleasant and the unpleasant, between comfort and discomfort. It is a fantastic thing for the wakefulness, the clarity of mind, to be strong enough that we are not caught in the orbit of anything. It is almost as if we can see clearly what is happening, where the clarity is not caught in what is happening. Some people call it observing; there is an observing mind that has a balance and clarity. We can find ourselves in the seesaw of life, balanced and wise because of that.

I hope that these talks this week will give you some inspiration to respectfully, kindly, and curiously look at how you grasp, how you cling, how you are attached. How you lean one direction or another, how you lean "for" and "against" things. And now for today, just a very simple thing: pleasure and pain, comfort and discomfort. How do you react to that? How do you live with that? Is there in fact some compulsion that you have around this?

You might think ahead through the day and consider: where during the day are you most likely to be caught up in the issues of the pleasant and unpleasant? Prepare yourself as you go into that situation to remain mindful and try to understand it better.

Thank you.