This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Freely Aware; Hindrances and Wholesomeness (3 of 5) Rigidity and Topor. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: Freely Aware; Dharmette: Hindrances and Wholesomeness (3 of 5) Rigidity and Torpor - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 02, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Freely Aware

Good morning and welcome. For this meditation, I'd like to offer a simile. Maybe some of you have had the occasion, perhaps when you were young, to learn to ride a bicycle. Sometimes people learn to ride a bicycle with training wheels. Imagine that you are accustoming yourself, getting used to riding a bicycle with big, solid training wheels—maybe four of them, two in the front and two in the back. You're really stable, and it's great to ride a bicycle; it feels wonderful. But then, you're afraid of taking the training wheels off because then gravity will have its chance on you. Gravity is dangerous, and how are you going to be able to manage on your own? The attachment to the security of the wheels is quite strong; you can't imagine anything else.

But then the training wheels go off, and it's hard to ride because the way that we participate with gravity is confused. We don't know how, and we're very strongly identified as someone who's under the sway of gravity. It's unimaginable how we can be free of gravity. Then, slowly, we get the hang of keeping the balance as we pedal the bike. At some point, you suddenly feel free. In a certain way, we're still under the influence of gravity, but we've learned how to manage, how to pedal, have the right speed, and how to stay balanced. It feels like now we're free. Bicycling can just be a free thing; it feels so delightful. Within time, you could even bike without holding the handlebar and be upright. It just feels so wonderful.

Now, in a certain way, we're no longer preoccupied by gravity. We don't identify ourselves as someone who is under the sway of gravity, or a victim of gravity, or someone who is incapable of responding to or dealing with gravity. The sense of self is so caught up in this idea of gravity that it's impossible to be free of it. But at some point, with the pedaling and the movement of the bike, we are now, in a certain way, free of gravity. We can go about on the bicycle without having any concern about it, no conscious involvement, and there's no identification with it. There's no being caught; gravity is no longer a sticky thing for us. We're unstuck from gravity.

The same thing applies to awareness, with mindfulness, with our capacity to know what's happening, to clearly recognize it. The capacity to sense what's happening without being entangled with what is known or entangled with what we sense. There's a freedom that can come when mindfulness and awareness are no longer caught in the gravity of stickiness, of attachments, of identification, of "me and mine," "I can and I can't." It's unimaginable to imagine a life that isn't using training wheels, a life where we're not stuck to and entangled with our emotions or our beliefs or our thoughts. But it is possible. It is possible to think, to have emotions—just like there's always gravity—and to have a feeling of non-stickiness, a feeling of, "Oh, this is freedom." I can go about now with these things, but I'm not pulled down, I'm not pulled into them, I'm not caught in them. They don't define me. There's a freedom of moving about.

This is the possibility with awareness: a clarity of seeing, a clarity of knowing. In the clear knowing of what's happening in the moment, in the intimate sensing without any identification, there we find our freedom. With this, it's not about putting on new training wheels; it's not about getting a bicycle with much thicker wheels or getting a tricycle. It's not about what bicycle you have, even, but rather it's learning to be free in riding it, learning how to balance. The freedom that comes with mindfulness is not about the experience we're having. It's not like having a special experience, but rather, no matter what's happening, we know how to ride the bike. We know how to be free. We know how to be present, see clearly, feel clearly, without being entangled with what is known, felt, or seen.

This becomes particularly useful and very important when we have challenges in meditation with our own mind, our own heart, our own body—that our mind, body, and heart are not behaving the way we want. We don't have to necessarily change what's happening, but we can find our freedom with it. We're not going to do away with gravity, but we are going to find our freedom with it. Some people are expecting and wanting meditation to be really pleasant and wonderful, deep calm and peace. Of course, that's important, that's a part of it, but that's not how freedom is found. Freedom is found no matter what the experience is, that it's known in this free way.

With that long introduction, we'll start.

Assume a meditation posture that, for you, regardless of your posture—standing, sitting, walking, or lying down—somehow represents a posture of being free, a posture of being somehow in a dignified way, independent, maybe even in a certain kind of mindful way, self-reliant. Adjusting your posture, maybe so the chest is a little bit more open, maybe sitting up a little straighter, or adjusting the body with pillows in such a way that the belly is relaxed and has a chance to relax.

Gently close your eyes.

Now, to just start directly, notice in your way, your experience, how you are. Not how you are in the abstract, but in detail, specifically. What are the direct experiences that are happening for you that make up how you are here and now? What are the sensations of the body, the mind, the heart that contribute to the more abstract way that we say how we are? How do you experience yourself now? Are you caught in that? Is that sticky for you? Are you pulled into it and reacting to it, or believing it, or prioritizing something, or pulling back, or judging?

Can you know what's happening for you right now and find a way to know, to recognize, that feels free of what is known?

Like you would hear an innocuous sound in the distance, and it's so clear that you're not involved in the sound or judging it or reacting to it. It's just a sound that has nothing to do with you, and you're free of it, not caught by it. It's not sticky. Or you're seeing something in the environment that's neither appealing nor threatening, neither yours nor anybody else's. Maybe a cloud in the sky, an unthreatening cloud floating in the sky. And in the seeing of the cloud, you're free of the cloud. No stickiness.

So, to center yourself on your breathing, and see, feel, know the sensations of the body as you breathe. Is there, in fact, some stickiness for you in experiencing breathing? For you, in what way can you begin feeling freedom from the experience of breathing while attending to it?

Perhaps taking a little time to relax your body. Maybe every time you exhale. The tenser the body, the more likely we are to identify or be sticking to something.

Relaxing the mind, the thinking mind.

Softening in the heart center.

Gently, quietly, peacefully, like you're slowly pedaling a bicycle with freedom and ease, let each moment of knowing, recognition, being aware be a little push of the pedal that keeps you free from whatever is known. Know what's happening while moving on with awareness. Know while letting the river of experience flow through you. Knowing, mindfulness, not sticking to anything.

Perhaps you can feel a quality of calmness or stillness from these minutes of meditation, or a quietness relative to how meditation started for you. Or maybe with the exhale, you can relax into a calm or quiet or stillness.

And without making extra effort, can you notice some sense of knowing, being aware, that is not sticky, doesn't stick to what is known or what we're aware of? Awareness is free to move on, to allow things to change and move on, available for whatever is new. This river of time, letting everything flow.

May it be that our ability to be present with no entanglement, no for, no against, no stickiness, allows our care and love and respect for others to be present when we're with others. May whatever freedom we discover in knowing freely be like an open door through which our goodwill can flow. May this practice that we do support us to meet the world with goodwill, wishing others happiness, safety, peace, and freedom.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may our goodwill support that possibility.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Hindrances and Wholesomeness (3 of 5) Rigidity and Torpor

Hello and welcome to this third talk on the hindrances.¹ The hindrances are five kinds of strategies that our inner life has to respond to challenges in unhelpful ways. Maybe in some ways, life always has some challenges, and so how we respond to them is part of the nature of this practice of ours. I think it's important not to think of mindfulness practice as floating on a cloud of bliss and joy and just being peaceful and happy ever after. A more valuable way of understanding mindfulness practice is that we are actually learning how to be present in an effective and wholesome way with the challenges that life brings, that they always bring.

One of the ways to do that is to understand the unhelpful ways in which we respond to challenges, and the five hindrances are such things. Sometimes we respond with uncertainty and confusion, running around, not being able to make decisions. Sometimes we respond with agitation, restlessness, maybe with regrets and remorse about who we are, what's happening, how we're showing up, what happened in the past. Sometimes, which is the topic for today, we somehow freeze up, we shut down, we go to sleep in some way, so we're not having to deal with the challenges that come. Then for the next two days: next day is sometimes we respond with hostility, with aversion, ill will, with blame, with complaining, with hostility. And then finally on Friday, we respond with desires of different types—sensual desires, avaricious desires, desires of greed. We want something to fill us, to make us feel good, to get away from what's difficult and challenging, and we want to substitute it with something that gives us pleasure. This engagement with desire.

Some of these patterns can be pervasive in a person's life. Some people can recognize that one of these is their calling card, and this is where they keep falling back. So part of mindfulness practice is to become wise about recognizing these hindrances. A Vipassanā² student, an insight student, should really learn these well. Listen to Dharma talks, study them, think about them, read about them. I have a whole little book called Unhindered that has my essays about them, and it might give you a clearer sense of how they work for you to read something like my book.

For today, it's a topic that's usually called sloth and torpor. For many of us, the word sloth as a quality of lethargy is not really a word we use much in English, though most of us might know what it means. But when I studied the Pali for it—the ancient language—the dictionary says that it can mean rigidity. I think that works a little bit better because sloth and torpor are a little bit too closely connected, too similar. But to have something a little bit wider that talks through some very common human reactions—to somehow freeze, to shut down, to get rigid, to get so really tight and contracted in situations, maybe from fear—I think it expands the meaning of this third hindrance in a way I think is useful for many people.

This is where we feel overwhelmed or feel excessively challenged by what goes on in life. There's some mechanism of shutting down. It's not ordinary tiredness when they talk about torpor, but it's a kind of shutting down and giving up, where the system gets so tired, so dull. It's like mud in the mind, and it's hard to get through it. Things don't seem very clear, there's a vagueness, and there's not much energy to apply ourselves. There is a kind of giving up of our engagement with things that makes things dull and shut down.

Sometimes it can be quite intense if there's a lot of fear or a lot of anger, or the emotional response we have is just so strong that the other hindrances are really energized, that something shuts down again. We don't want to pay attention. There's a resistance, we're resisting what's happening. We're bored because we don't want to pay attention; we don't like what's happening, so there's a shutting down again. To pay attention to this movement of the drop of engagement, the drop of energy, the drop of clarity is an important part of this practice. Notice how that hinders us, how this gets in the way of clarity, gets in the way of understanding what is wholesome.

It's said that this third hindrance, sloth and torpor or rigidity and torpor, is unhealthy, is a hindrance, is an unwholesome movement. It's possible to feel that. There's a dulling, there's a shutting down, there's an unwillingness, there's a not being engaged in understanding or reflecting or studying the situation, being curious and interested in it. It can feel very uncomfortable to be in our own skin when sloth and torpor is present, in a very different way than when you're simply tired or exhausted. As uncomfortable as it is to feel this, if there is this rigidity and torpor, the practice of mindfulness is to turn around and really see it. To become the expert on boredom, the expert on resistance, the expert on shutting down, the expert on how we avoid and deflect, how we get dull, and how we can change that.

I think the wisest way of doing that is to understand the unhealthy ways in which we're responding to what's happening around us, what's happening in our life. Some forms of depression are a kind of this hindrance. It's a kind of shutting down, a giving up, where the energy disappears and we don't feel any vitality and inspiration, and there can be a sinking into that. To be mindful of that can be very hard if we are identified with it, if we believe we define ourselves by it, if we are invested in the strategy of rigidity and torpor and we're so part of it that there's so much stickiness between us and it that it's unimaginable that we could be any different.

But in fact, we can. One of the things we can cultivate, and what we want to develop here, is not just mindfulness, not just being aware of what's happening, but one step further: we want to discover the way of being aware, the way of knowing where we are independent from what is known. We're able to see into the seeing, to understand how seeing can be free of what is seen. The solution, in a sense, the liberation we're looking for in Buddhism is not in what we see but how we see; not in what we know, but how we know. Of course, we have to know, but how we know, how we feel, how we hear. So if we have sloth and torpor, rigidity and this dullness, how we know it is important. We must learn how to awaken, how to rise up with a sharpness or a clarity of attention, to bring energy into the mindfulness, into the knowing, so we begin to be free of what is known.

The image is of a lotus that's growing in muddy water, but then when it's going to flower, the lotus flower comes out of the muddy water and is untouched by the mud. It's clear. So as we get out of the muddy water of sloth and torpor, the awareness becomes somehow this beautiful flower that's untouched. While we know we have sloth and torpor, it begins to decrease its influence on us.

The traditional discussion about letting go of sloth and torpor says it's possible sometimes to just let go of it. When we clearly know how to see it, we've learned to recognize its ins and outs and how it works, we see it as an activity of the mind. We're doing something, we're picking up the strategy, and so it's possible when we know it well enough to see that it's possible to put it down, to let it go. The Buddha said, "Having let go of rigidity and torpor, one dwells without rigidity and torpor, mindful with clear comprehension, and consciously seeing. Doing this, one cleanses the mind of rigidity and torpor."

So here, the emphasis to overcome this sloth and torpor, rigidity and dullness, boredom and shutting down, is to cultivate these attentional qualities of mindfulness, clear comprehension, clear recognition of what's happening, and conscious seeing. Not just seeing, but seeing with purpose or seeing with intention, or seeing with knowing that we're seeing. It's possible to see something and be so involved with it we don't really know that we're seeing because that's kind of taken for granted. We're so caught up in what we want or what we don't want that we don't notice that our eyes are popping out of their eye sockets. To see consciously means to be aware of the quality, the characteristics, the healthiness, the wholesomeness of how we see, or how we know, how we sense.

It's in the attentional faculties that we have that we bring attention. All the different faculties of attention we have—hearing, seeing, smelling, touching, tasting, all the sense doors in the body, and in the mind's eye where we know and see what's going on internally with us, with the mind—all these attentional faculties can be awakened, can be engaged without any stickiness, without any involvement with the challenges that we have.

That's my suggestion for you today. Certainly, become aware of how sloth and torpor, shutting down, rigidity, and dullness come into play for you at different points. It's fascinating to watch your mind, like at a meeting or something, when your mind starts to drift off, when your mind starts shutting down, when you get sleepy or dull, and when it picks up again. What is happening in the room, what's happening in the talking, what's happening in yourself? You can watch sometimes the cycles and rhythms of being clear and present and being dull and not really paying attention. But more importantly, see what you can learn about being present, being with attention, where whatever form of attention you're using, whatever mindfulness you have, is independent of what is known. That you find your freedom in it, like you find your freedom from gravity when you learn to be skilled at riding a bicycle.

Thank you very much. Tomorrow and Friday I'm traveling, so Kim Allen, one of the wonderful teachers here at IMC, will finish this series. She'll do ill will and sensual desire for the next two days, and I think it'll be wonderful. I think a wonderful kind of perspective that sure, Kim is a very thoughtful, well-practiced person, and I'd be very curious to know how she picks this up and offers her take on all this. So thank you, Kim, if you're listening. I'll be gone for a few weeks; I'm teaching a couple of retreats and look forward to being back near the end of October. Thank you very much.