This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Contentment ; Ten Protectors (8 of 10) Contentment. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Contentment; Dharmette: Ten Protectors (8 of 10) Contentment - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 11, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Contentment

Hello and good morning for those of you living in places where it's dawn or morning, and good day for everyone else.

There is a dangerous teaching in Buddhism. It is so dangerous that I've been told that in one Buddhist country in South Asia, the government forbade Buddhist monks from teaching it. That is the danger I will be offering you today. I want to contextualize it a little bit, but first, I'll tell you what the danger is: practicing contentment.

The reason why governments, business corporations, and capitalism don't like it is that if people are too content, they won't consume more. If they are too content, they won't push themselves to work harder, build more, and make more money. In a certain way, many economies are based on discontent so they can keep going. Imagine the headlines: "The world became content and economies failed everywhere." So it's a dangerous teaching, and maybe is not always appropriate.

One of the ways of beginning a meditation practice is to settle down a little bit and then check in with oneself to discern how you are. Sometimes what's needed is just simple basic mindfulness. Sometimes what's needed is a little bit more focus on concentration to overcome a distracted mind. Sometimes what's needed is truth-telling, to really admit to oneself what's happening, and then we can settle. Sometimes what's needed is a lot of compassion, care, kindness, and forgiveness. Sometimes what's useful is gratitude, sometimes what's needed is patience, and sometimes what's helpful is contentment.

Primarily, when there is a lot of discontent, sometimes there can be a contentment that just comes along where we are not driven by desires or an aversion to how things are. We are just very content to sit and meditate, to have a certain contentment to meditate. It helps to distinguish between the actions we take in our life—some things need to change in life, and we are not supposed to simply be content with how things are and not change things—but when we are sitting to meditate, we don't have to act. Now we are trying to orient ourselves in a very different way.

If there are a lot of emotional difficulties or challenges that we have, then maybe contentment is not the right way of honoring and respecting that. Or, it might be the contentment to just be with it. To be content: "This is what's true now, and so I will be present. I will practice my mindfulness with this difficulty."

Check in at the beginning and decide what is appropriate. For today's meditation on contentment, if this is not appropriate for you, you are welcome to take what is useful or ignore what I say.

Assume a meditation posture. Lower the gaze, maybe with the eyes slightly open, which is a different way of connecting to oneself. Take some long, slow, deep breaths. Breathing in, breathing out, relaxing as we exhale. If, as you exhale, it feels good to close your eyes, feel the goodness of closing them.

Let your breathing return to normal. On the exhale, gently relax the face. On the inhale, feel any tension in the shoulders, and when you exhale, relax the shoulders. On the inhale, feel the belly. As you exhale, relax, soften. On the inhale, feel whatever emotions or state of heart you have. On the exhale, soften around it. On the inhale, feel the state of your thinking mind, and on the exhale, relax the thinking mind.

Is there any place in your body where you feel contentment, either now or at other times? When you feel content, where is it living in you? When you have had contentment in your life, feeling deeply content in the moment, what has it felt like in your body? What has it felt like in your heart and in your mind?

Here we are meditating, a remarkable event. For some of you, it's a daily event. It's still an amazing thing that we have the ability, time, and circumstances to be able to sit down to meditate. A time free of our responsibilities, tasks of life, busyness of life, maybe even free of some of the challenges of our mind. To sit quietly, to find some way to feel content. It's easy to be discontented, which is always kind of particular and overlooks the vast number of things right now that we can be content about.

When people practice mindfulness, there is a phenomenal opportunity to be content with being mindful. Content with the power of being aware without fixing, acting, or having it be different. Just aware, just mindful of whatever is happening. Content to breathe mindfully. Breathing surrounded by an attitude of contentment with this moment here.

If you are wondering or caught in thought, does that represent some discontentment? Can you find a contentment where you are not focusing on your thoughts? Contentment that comes from being present here to this moment, in this body, this breath.

What might contented breathing feel like? What might relax in the body?

As we come to the end of this sitting, appreciate that contentment is one of the great states of being. It is a healthy state that represents an expression of a mind which is not discontented, not struggling, fighting, resisting, afraid, or caught in desires and conceits. Contentment allows this psychophysical system of ours to operate without agitation, without something activated. Contentment allows us to feel whole.

To whatever degree that we appreciate contentment as a valuable, healthy state, may we wish it for others. May our contentment be a nourishment for others. May our contentment help bring calm and peace. May our contentment help us to be more generous and loving for others. May our contentment protect us from being caught up in ourselves.

May the benefit of practicing meditation be for the benefit of all people everywhere. May all people be happy, contented. May all people everywhere be safe and protected. May all people everywhere be peaceful, able to rest at ease. May all people everywhere be free—free of oppression and violence, free of hostility and fear. And may these possibilities for others be something that our practice supports, implicitly, unintentionally, and intentionally. May we contribute to the welfare and happiness of this world. Thank you.

I'll be back in a moment.

Dharmette: Ten Protectors (8 of 10) Contentment

Hello everyone, and welcome to this series on the Ten Protectors¹. Today's protection has to do with contentment, and it's a particular form of contentment. Before I talk about the particularity of it, I'll say a few things, repeating myself from the guided meditation.

There are people who consider contentment to be a dangerous state because it undermines the motivation that people get from being discontented. If we are discontented with the state of affairs as they are, then we fight and work to change them. Certainly, there are things we should not be content with. But there are also things that maybe are not healthy to be discontented with. There are people who have plenty of money who are discontented with what they have and want to be richer. There are people who have plenty of pleasures but always want more. There are people who have plenty of stuff but always want more and better.

To be driven by discontent is what supports many economies in the world. There's a vested interest for many people to keep us discontented so we keep buying or working long hours to try to get ahead. Feeding or encouraging discontent is part of what advertisements do. In some ways, to be content is a radical act; it's a disrupting act.

From the Buddhist point of view, the benefit of contentment is that it is easier to focus on the practice, to focus on what's happening here and now. If the "there and then" is a two-dimensional reality, and if fantasy is a one-dimensional reality, then being really rooted and grounded here in ourselves is entering into a three-dimensional reality. It's richer, like going from black and white to multicolor. This three-dimensional reality of now does not mean that we don't think about the past and the future, or that we don't let the creative mind fantasize, but we do it rooted here. We don't lose touch with this place. Contentment is one of the great states that helps us to be rooted and able to stay here.

In the teachings on these Ten Protectors, the Buddha was giving instructions to monastics. For them, he said that they should be content with the basic necessities of life. What is not often recognized is that the monastic lifestyle designed by the Buddha might look like a deprived life from the point of view of how many people in the modern West live, but it was meant in ancient India to be the Middle Way². Just enough basic necessities are provided to live well, but not more than that. It was not understood to be a life of deprivation or an ascetic life. There were people who were more extreme in that direction, but for the Buddha, we were not supposed to harm ourselves. There were no ascetic flagellations going on. Rather, entering into this meditation was understood to be a pleasant abiding, an enjoyable place to be, provided that we had the basic necessities.

What monks and nuns are content with are the four basic necessities: the food that comes in their alms bowl, the clothes they have, the shelters that are given to them, and the basic medicine for their health. How many of us are maybe not so content with just having the basic necessities? We have more clothes than we need, and we are not buying clothes just for the sake of staying warm and protected from insects and dirt; we're getting clothes and paying a lot of money for other reasons. How many of us are not content with having a simple roof over our house, but want a bigger or nicer home? How many of us are not content with the basic necessity of food that we have, but are buying food that's expensive and that we don't really need, just because it's nice, pleasant, and enjoyable?

For a monastic, being content with the basic necessities makes it easier to live a radically simple lifestyle. It's a lifestyle that allows them to stay connected to the Dharma³ that they love. They like to engage in Dharma practice without having a lot of other things to take care of that can make it harder. In this love affair that monastics have with the Dharma, they want to stay close to their lover. It is so important to stay close, attend to it, and let that relationship grow, develop, and flower all moments of the day.

To be content with the basic necessities is the core thing here. For those of us living a lay life, it might be a little bit different. What do we consider basic necessities? The ancient Buddha didn't consider emotional or interpersonal needs as much as maybe is needed for people in modern cultures. We have a richer domain of basic necessities that we have to take care of, but still, can we find how much we need so we can be content?

What is the nature of our discontentment? If you feel discontented, what is that? What is driving the discontent? Is there some feeling of lack? Is there some feeling of insecurity? Is there a strong sense of desire? What is that feeling of "not enough" like? What's really happening here? Is there another way to address not having enough, other than thinking something has to happen, I have to do something, I have to be busy? Can we really settle something here—relax the belly, relax the shoulders, relax the mind and the heart—to really sit down and learn how to be content, even if that contentment is just for the period of the meditation practice?

There are things we should be discontented about. There is healthy contentment and healthy discontent, and there is unhealthy contentment and unhealthy discontent. To be discontented with our suffering or to be discontented with the suffering of the world is not necessarily a bad thing; that can be motivating, for sure, and we should act on that. One of the ways to act on that is to really sit and meditate and settle our discontent, so that we don't add suffering on top of suffering. We can be contented enough to sit and be present for what's happening within us, and find the way through our suffering from the inside out, rather than trying to change the world around us so we don't suffer.

If we need to change the world around us because it is suffering, we must distinguish acting in the world from the activity of meditating. Meditating is not the time to act. This is a time for some other process to deepen and unfold, and to learn how to be content with the moment we're meditating so that we're not still spinning and driven by the desires to change the world, get what we want, or avoid what we don't want. To be content with our lives, at least for the period of meditation. My necessities are taken care of: I have enough food for now, I've had enough shelter, I have enough clothing, and I have enough medicine for now, at least for this moment. To feel that contentment for these minutes is special.

It is unusual for human beings to have the time, the ability, the wherewithal, the understanding, and the dedication to sit down and meditate. Meditation is a phenomenally useful and important act. It is a phenomenal gift to the world that inner transformation can happen through meditation. We don't continue life with business as usual—with greed, hate, and delusion—but we settle all that is unresolved and unsettled in us. In that settled state, some of the most beautiful qualities of our being can come forth, represented by things like generosity, love, and wisdom.

Then, coming out of meditation, we have a better way of knowing how to act. If we are discontented with the state of affairs, we know how to act and what to do. If we are discontented with all the dirty dishes in our kitchen, then we go and wash the dishes in a meditative, contemplative, respectful, present-moment-engaged way that feels like we're bringing meditation with us into our life, and it's an enjoyable thing. We're not rushing off and multitasking.

If what we feel is the suffering of the world elsewhere—whether it's anywhere right now, Israel has huge suffering, the whole nation is traumatized or in deep pain; Ukraine, deep pain—if this really troubles us, when we come out of meditation and we're discontented with those states, then maybe we have the generosity or the wherewithal to do something about them. Even the smallest little act: making a donation to charities, or to someone who's helping the sick and the wounded. Meditation is not how to be calm and uninterested in the world; it is to be deeply contented with ourselves and with the moment in a certain way, so that what motivates us to act in the world and to change the world comes from a place of tremendous well-being. It comes from a place of generosity and the wellsprings within of our goodness, not from the agitation of our fear, distress, and anger. This is the possibility that contentment can bring.

I would encourage you today to explore this: your contentment and your discontentment. As you go through the day, maybe once an hour, check in with yourself. Would you characterize how you are as more on the discontented side of the spectrum, or more on the contented side? If you are discontented, what is happening? What is that about? Can you settle it? Can you be present for it? Can you investigate it? If you are more on the contented side of the spectrum, feel that, enjoy that, take that in, be nourished by it. If it's just a little bit on that spectrum, by recognizing the small amount of contentment you have, is there some appropriate way to settle into it more fully so it becomes a resource that supports and guides your day?

Thank you very much. We have two more of these Ten Protectors. Thank you.