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Guided Meditation: Unconditional Acceptance; Dharmette: Quarrels (5 of 5) Unity not Divisiveness - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 03, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Unconditional Acceptance

So happy to be here. In preparing for the meditation today, I want to create an image for you. Imagine that you have two neighbors in the home you live in, one on each side. Two sets of neighbors, and they both have children about the same age. You've grown up with these children. You've known them since they were babies. You've been a babysitter for them, and you knew them when they were younger kids. Sometimes they came over to your house when the parents couldn't take care of them. The parents didn't take care of them very well; there was no love in the home, a lot of conflict, a lot of yelling, and maybe neglect of the children. But they would come over to your house and play and feel safe with you. It was the only place they really felt safe and comfortable, and the only place they had someone who believed in them, who showed them that they were lovable.

You loved having them come over. Because you were between their two homes, the kids felt like they were free to come over to you whenever they wanted to. You had invited them, and they'd often come and play and go there as a refuge.

But as they became teenagers, at some point there was a huge conflict between them. They both felt hurt and offended or violated by the other, and they were arguing and bordering on fighting. The tension and hostility between them was intense, partly because they were both responding to each other in the way that they had learned to be in conflict growing up in their homes. It was escalating, and it didn't seem like it was going to go anywhere good.

But coincidentally, because of their trust in you, they both came over to your home at the same time. You invited them in and sat down, and you could feel the tension, the hostility between them. They wouldn't look at each other. But you loved them both, you cared for them both, and certainly, you were not going to take sides in the dispute. You were going to help them settle their quarrel in some way or reconcile in such a way that if they had disagreements and had different points of view, they would settle down and see each other with the love and friendship that they had for so many years.

Sure enough, just because they were sitting with you and you were able to be calm and impartial—listening to both, accepting them both—they both calmed down. You saw as they calmed down, they relaxed, that they started looking at each other. You could feel that the old love they had between them was kind of there, but the tension was still somewhat there. But as that dissipated, you realized that now your involvement became even more important. Now, even sometimes they would talk about other things and get distracted from their conflict, and you felt that now it's even more important that you're present for them. That you're present and they can feel that you believe in them, you trust them. You have confidence in their ability to be honest, to talk honestly about what's going on, and to find a way.

In the same way, when we sit to meditate, we are the person in the home in between—in between all the different aspects of ourselves. We need to be impartial. We need to trust and have confidence in ourselves and our capacities that we can find a way. We need to have this kind of confidence and trust and love in ourselves, so something in ourselves can relax deeply.

As we get calmer in meditation, the mind might easily drift off into thoughts of all kinds, maybe no longer with any kind of sense of conflict with ourselves or challenges in the world. It turns out that this is an even more important time for us to stay present, a more important time to receive our breath, receive our body sensations, to just be with ourselves.

With that as an image for our meditation, let's begin. Assume a meditation posture. Be present with whatever posture you're doing. Have a presence that you would offer the neighboring teens, that they felt that you were there for them, that you were going to listen and hear and feel, and view them with kindness, care, and believing in them. So to sit here with that posture, maybe gently close your eyes, and prepare yourself to center yourself to be able to offer this caring presence.

Take a few long, slow, deep breaths, just big enough that it remains comfortable for you. Relax and settle on the exhale.

If it's easy enough, extend the exhale a bit so there's more time in which to release in the body, and settle in the body.

Let your breathing return to normal, but continue on the exhale to settle into being centered here in your body. Let there be stability—the kind of stability where you don't lean forward or pull back, stability that allows you to maintain an open, impartial presence, not taking sides in anything.

Relax the thinking mind. Or maybe as you exhale, allow the thinking mind to relax. Maybe it could relax because of the kind, generous, caring way in which you are present for your mind, for your thinking mind. That you believe in yourself, that you can in fact return to becoming whole. That you can in fact settle the mind to touch into some of the best qualities of yourself: peace and calm.

Settle into a way of being where you're not operating with a view that anything is wrong about yourself, or anything is wrong about your inner life. Maybe if there's tension, it's just something that can relax under the warmth of your caring attention.

Then, if it's comfortable for you, imagine that your breathing is at the center of all of who you are. If you can touch that center with care, acceptance, and impartiality—as if that center can do no wrong—you can just love and care and make room for and listen deeply to yourself through this essential feature of your life. That kind of nexus, meeting point of your life in your breathing.

[Silence for meditation]

If you find yourself somewhat calm and relaxed, but your mind is easily drifting off in thought, think of this time as a time that it's most important for your heart, for your breath, for your inner life to have you stay present. Impartially, kindly staying present because you believe in yourself. That yes, all things can be healed. All things of the heart can be healed. The path of deep peace and freedom can be your path. Stay present. Offer yourself the love, the care that you might want to offer to the neighboring kids.

[Silence for meditation]

As we come to the end of this sitting, turn your attention, your thoughts, your imagination to the people around you in your world. In your household, or in your neighborhood, your community, the wider provinces and counties, states, nations, the world. As if your accepting heart, your impartial heart, does not take sides with anything because you know that more valuable than taking sides is to be a refuge for all people, to be someone who's safe for all people. So that the deepest places of tension, holding attachment, and hurt for others can be in the presence of someone who supports its relaxation, who supports its release.

Not taking sides when we offer our care and love has a good chance of allowing something deeper than the conflict to heal, to relax. The Buddha said, "Make yourself safe for all beings."

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

Thank you.

Dharmette: Quarrels (5 of 5) Unity not Divisiveness

Hello and welcome to this fifth talk on the Buddha's teachings on quarrels. Today I am broadcasting this, giving this talk from Spirit Rock Meditation Center, together with Guanyin¹, the great embodiment of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, which seems appropriate for the topic we're talking about this week.

Once when I met Shinzen Young and was talking with him—he is one of the great elder Vipassana² teachers in the United States, a brilliant man and very creative as a Buddhist teacher—he once created a program to teach mindfulness to teenagers. I believe some of them were troubled teenagers. I was really struck by the principle by which he taught these teenagers mindfulness.

First, when they came to him for the training in mindfulness, he asked them to bring whatever was their favorite music. They would come with their favorite music and listen to it. A big part of the session with him was listening to that music. He would not teach them any mindfulness directly. What he would do is ask them questions about listening to their music and questions about the experience of being with their music—what their mind does when they're listening to music.

I don't know exactly what his questions were, but I can imagine that he might ask, for example, "When you most enjoyed your music, how did you feel? What was the quality of your attention when you were most enjoying your music? Were there times when you kind of lost track of your music, that you drifted off in thought? What was that like for you? What was the quality of your being at that point, being distracted from the music?"

As he asked those questions, it directed the teens' attention to ways to pay attention inside of themselves, which maybe had never occurred to them to pay attention to before. As they appreciated that, maybe he was teaching them to recognize the kind of attention they brought to all that.

The principle that I wanted to share with you is that as he taught teens this way and asked them these questions, he said the most fundamental principle that the facilitator had to operate with was that no matter what answer the teens provided for the questions, they were all accepted. No answer was questioned as not good enough or wrong. Every answer was right; every answer was held as if right. He was practicing a kind of unconditional acceptance of each teen and their own experience and how they reported on it.

Part of what they were learning in mindfulness was the example of Shinzen Young—or the people he trained to do this—and the kind of attention they brought. They created space and allowed each teen to be themselves. Perhaps for some of these teens, maybe the troubled ones, there had not been many adults in their life who just had that kind of unconditional acceptance or willingness just to receive them as if nothing is wrong. That's how they learned mindfulness.

This is also a principle for us, that we can practice this mindfulness this way for ourselves. In learning to do this for ourselves, we learn that we can do no wrong; it's just something else to bring a certain kind of attention to, and really see and make space for. I think Shinzen brought a sense of safety to the teens. The Buddha said, "Make yourself safe for all beings." Make yourself safe for yourself, so that in the field of your awareness, your attention, there's no criticism, no blame. In a certain way, you can do no wrong.

Conventionally, you might do something which is not healthy and helpful and wholesome. But there's something much more valuable than seeing it as wrong, and that is this caring attention that holds it, that allows something to settle, to resolve, to process itself, to let go. Because we believe—I believe in you, all of you—that you have the ability to heal, to settle, to drop into this deeper place of wholeness that is inhibited or blocked whenever we're involved in seeing ourselves as wrong.

Of course, we do things which are harmful. We do things which we regret. We do things that treat ourselves in ways that are not so healthy. This is part of the human life, that we do this. Not to accept it naively—please go ahead and address that—but there's a way of offering an attentive safety that allows something to relax. We have access to something deeper within us, deeper wellsprings of well-being and wholeness.

Applying this to quarrels and disputes: if we're engaged in quarrels and disputes, there is some deeper agenda or deeper possibility that we might want to offer. We learn through this Buddhist practice, as we learn to do this for ourselves, to enter into disagreements and conflicts with an approach where we're not looking to be right or to blame other people. We're not looking to condone what's happened, and we're not looking to allow whatever is harmful to continue. But we are bringing an attitude, a kind of attention, that makes ourselves safe for others, so that the people we are in conflict with do not feel our hostility. They do not feel that we have blamed them or boxed them into a certain perception of who they are, where they feel like they now have to verbally box it out with us to protect themselves.

Offering safety to others in that way does not mean we have to give in to them. To give ourselves safety actually means that we have the ability to hold our ground, to be centered on ourselves and be able to say, "No, I can't go along with that." But we can do that without hostility, without yelling, without arguments, and to feel the inner strength that no one's going to push us over. We're not going to agree to anything that we don't want to do. Other people might do things in the world that maybe we don't agree with, but we don't have to agree. We can stay as a person who is safe for all beings.

This goes along with the Buddha's teachings. One of the core ethical teachings comes from a set of precepts called the Ten Skillful Actions³. These are more important than the Five Precepts⁴, because the Ten Skillful Actions—the first four of which are the same—are the very actions that people who are on the path of practice could use as a reference point for how to live their lives. The Five Precepts are just basic precepts for living a good life. For practitioners, we want to up the standard, we want to be more careful, and these Ten Skillful Actions provide that. One of them is that we are to abandon malicious speech, hostile speech.

I want to read to you the full explanation of how to practice with abandoning malicious speech:

"One abstains from malicious speech. One does not repeat elsewhere what one has heard here in order to divide those people from these. Nor does one repeat to these people what was heard elsewhere in order to divide these people from those. Thus, one is one who reunites those who are divided, a promoter of friendships. He who enjoys concord, rejoices in concord, delights in concord, is a speaker of words that promote concord."

There is a very important distinction between speaking words that divide people and words that promote concord. Even if the person that you're talking about is not present, if you speak in a malicious, gossipy way about someone, about how they made a mistake and how terrible they are, you are now promoting a division between the person you're talking about and the person that you're talking to. That spreads.

Perhaps you need to talk about some of the difficulties and behaviors of others which are harmful or challenging, and you have to figure out a solution for it. The idea is to do so in a way that doesn't create divisions. It might be with the attitude, "I'm really troubled by what this person is doing. I think it needs to stop. I can't go along with it, but I have to figure out a way to talk to this person or find a way to deal with this that doesn't perpetuate the hostility, doesn't accentuate the divide. If anything, can I address this issue in a way that shows my care or shows an attempt to try to be friends again?"

So this is a fundamental teaching the Buddha has for people who are on the path of liberation. To divide, to be hostile, to be malicious goes in the opposite direction for people who are wanting to go on the path to freedom, to compassion, to care. Avoiding malicious talk, talk that divides, and speaking in friendly ways or ways that unite people doesn't mean that we're avoiding difficult conversations.

There is another quote from the Buddha regarding the monastic community. This is a community where everyone has agreed to come together and live together by certain agreements that they're accountable for. It's in that context that he provides this guideline. Sometimes monastics have to reprove each other. Sometimes they have to talk to each other and say, "You know, what you did wasn't right, or that's not how it should be, or you did something that was harmful here." Monastics have hundreds of rules that they have to live by, and they're accountable to them. Some are quite serious. There is a set of five that if they break these rules, they are automatically no longer a monastic and can never be a monastic again—like if they kill someone.

Here is what the Buddha said about how a monastic reproves another:

"By speaking at the right time, speaking what is factual, speaking with gentleness, speaking about what is connected to liberation, and speaking with goodwill."

This is a high standard: speaking with friendliness, with goodwill. If you don't have goodwill, don't reprove anyone. Don't confront someone about what they've been doing if you can't have goodwill for them. Don't do it at the wrong time when they're not ready, when it's not going to have any benefit. Be careful to speak what is factual. Don't interpret. Don't lead with your feelings and your attitudes as if that's the truth. Speak with gentleness.

And I love this: speak about what is connected to liberation. Speak in a way that's connected to your own liberation, not in the opposite way. Speak in a way that supports the liberation of others. The first step to that is to help people feel safe with you. Even if they're attacking you, hopefully just verbally, there's something very powerful about being a safe person for them.

We will be in quarrels and disputes, conflicts, and disagreements in this world of ours. There is another way than violence. There is another way than hostility and divisiveness.

I'll end with an organization that I mentioned in my Sunday talk this week about the different groups that are offering a nonviolent approach, trying to unite people, not divide people, in the conflict in the Middle East. There is an organization called The Parents Circle - Families Forum⁵. There are about 700 members, and these are people in Israel and Palestine whose children have been killed in the violence over the years and decades. They come together because of their shared grief, their shared pain of having lost their sometimes very young children. One person I read about, a Palestinian child, was standing in front of a school and was shot by Israeli bullets. I don't know the context of it, but still, it was the killing of a child and very difficult. But these parents come together and become friends with each other across the Israeli-Palestinian divide to find another way, to find a way of peace. They believe that there is no solution in violence; it just perpetuates the cycles.

Let's not perpetuate the cycles of any kind of violence, including those that come out of ordinary disputes and quarrels. Let's find a way to bring safety, peace, and nonviolence so that the best in each person's heart can grow. Can we have confidence that at the base of everyone's heart there is a potential for wholeness, for love, for nonviolence, for care, that can heal this world?

Thank you for this week. Thank you for allowing me to talk about these topics over the last two weeks that have been so important for me. I'll be teaching retreats for the next two weeks. [Kota Conin?] will come here next week to speak with you, and Diana Clark will be back the following week. In three weeks, I'll be back, which I always look forward to coming and sitting and speaking with you. Thank you so much for the opportunity.