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Make it better - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on September 09, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Make it better

Good morning, everyone. Can you hear me all right out there? I want to start with an introductory story to this talk. It's a maybe a teeny story, maybe you'll think of it as insignificant, but it represents a really important turning point in my life.

At some point, I spent about three years doing Zen training at a Zen Monastery here in the United States. It was quite nice, but you're fully entered into that world. It's deep in the mountains; it's 14 miles on a very small, steep dirt road to go into the National Forest lands, in the middle of which is this little Monastery. I was completely involved in that world for three years.

Zen training is done with a lot of ritual, and there are a lot of ways in which you engage your body. For example, if you want to step into the meditation hall, you always have to step in with a particular foot first. You can't just step in with any foot and casually walk around. You have to have your hands in a particular way as you walk through the meditation hall. There's a particular way of walking; you can't just take the shortest route to your seat. You have to take a certain route around the place. When you get to your seat, you don't just plop yourself down and pick your nose a little bit and get ready. You bow to your seat, then you turn around and you bow away from your seat. Then there's a particular way in which you turn around and sit down on the seat.

Classically in Zen, there's a particular posture you sit in. Most classically, you sit in full Lotus, upright. Most people don't sit in full Lotus, but half Lotus or quarter Lotus or something. But it's very important that your back be straight. There are all these ways of being and being with other people. You walk through the Monastery and you see someone, you bow to them. Ideally, you would stop and just bow. I think I counted how many times I had to bow before 10:00 in the morning, and I think I got up to 54 bows, and that was not including all the people I had to stop to on the path to bow to. There were some people, including me occasionally, who would see someone coming down the path and we'd go the other route so we wouldn't have to bow.

The point being that a lot of the day was choreographed with these particular ritual forms you took, and they're quite powerful. To live in it requires a lot of mindfulness and a lot of presence. Some of these things you do with your body carry with them certain kinds of attitudes, certain kinds of feelings that affect you. For one, it's always done with intentionality and a certain kind of fullness; you're really there to do each thing. Your sense of participating with your life comes alive in that kind of world. You don't just sit back and think, "Well, I'll go to the zendo when I feel like it," and stumble in. You might have those thoughts, but your body has to really be there and participate.

Putting your hands together like this and all those bows we do—even if you don't want to bow, there's something about that movement that will probably affect a lot of people in different ways. For me, it developed a lot of gratitude, a sense of appreciation. Doing them every day, so many times through the day, for weeks and months on end, something begins to shift inside.

The same thing is happening for most of you in everyday life in all the little movements that you make in your body, in your voice. You're reinforcing something. So if you are going around kind of uninterested in life, and everything you do, you do it like, "Oh, I'll get to it," or "Oh, it's too hard," or "Who wants to do this? This is a drag," or "Why do we have to do this?" All those little voices might have some value to them, but the sum total of that kind of attitude dampens the energy. It drains a person. It doesn't bring a vitality and an engagement in life. It's more like pulling back.

There are a lot of attitudes that we express in all kinds of small ways, and some of those are not so great. I know some people who have an aversive nature, and there's something about saying little aversive statements, little resistance statements, that maybe one statement is okay, but to do them as many times as you bow in the monastery, they tend to create a habit, a momentum, a familiarity, a sense of "this is what I do." So it becomes almost second nature. You don't even think about it anymore.

We're all in a Zen Monastery; we just don't know it. In the sense that we're all doing something with our body, our voices, our eyes that are expressing something or living something or carrying attitudes and beliefs and a sense of relationships. All kinds of things are being carried with it all the time, but most of us don't see most of what we carry. We don't see the impact that has on us.

So when I left the monastery after three years, where so much of the life was choreographed and chosen for me—when to wake up, when to go to the meditation hall, when to do this and that, and how to do these things—I realized something. Even eating was choreographed. Most meals were carefully choreographed. You couldn't just pick up your spoon and start eating when you felt like it. You had to wait for a bell, and then you had to bow a certain way, you had to chant, you had to eat in a certain way. You had these very unusual eating utensils. The whole thing was choreographed.

What was marvelous about eating in the monastery was we would eat in our meditation posture. Just taking that posture that we've been meditating in is very different than sitting at the table looking at the news on your phone while you're shoveling food into your mouth, which probably none of you do. You have to be really there, and this is the activity of the moment. You don't bring your phone with you into the zendo. We didn't have phones then, but I'm sure that they're not allowed.

After three years of that, when I left and came back to San Francisco, I recognized something. This was the revelation: now it's up to me to decide how to do all these things. I had so much more choice than I ever imagined.

I went to talk to the Abbot one day in a formal discussion about practice, and I told him, "Wow, coming back to San Francisco, so many things are not choreographed anymore. I have a choice." When I'm standing, I have a choice in how I stand. When I sit in the chair—I never thought I had a choice before, I just sat the way I sat, I didn't think about it—but I have 100% choice about how I sit in that chair. Do I slump? I've sat in couches where my shoulders were in the crack, all the way down, just really chilled. Do I sit upright? Do I use the armrest? What do I do?

So I told him, "I have a choice in how I sit in the chair." And the abbot did something very unusual. He broke the rituals, broke the patterns of what you expect in a formal Zen setting. He's in robes, I'm in robes, we're sitting in meditation posture having a serious conversation, maybe at 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning. I told him this, and he lifted out his hand and shook my hand. It was like, "Congratulations, you understood something really important." I felt it was a real affirmation that I had a choice.

I had a lot of choices to make, and I have much more choices to make in my life than I'd realized before I started the monastery. We have choices actually every moment of our life. And if you don't see you have choices, you don't have choices. But if you see you have choices, does that mean now you have a burden? "Oh, more choices to make, it's exhausting." But we're making the choices anyway. We're making the choices subconsciously, and the choices we make make a difference.

So what Buddhist practice has a lot to do with is recognizing the places of choice and learning to make wise, beneficial choices. That involves something as small as how you sit in a chair, something as small as how you stand, how you look, how you think, what you're thinking about.

I was coming down here to talk about this, walking down here, and I was thinking about this. It occurred to me, "Well, Gil, you have a choice now how you think about this." As soon as I thought about that, I thought, "Okay, let me look and see how am I thinking about talking about the choices we have." And I realized I was probably a little bit contracted in the mind, a little bit tense, a little stressful because, after all, I'm talking in front of all these people. But I don't have to do that. I don't have to be worried about what I'm going to talk about. I want to talk about this thing because I think it's important and helpful. What if I just shift how I think and just think in an easy way, and think about it from how it's helpful for people? Let me think in a way that's helpful for me, that's beneficial for me. So I shifted how I was thinking, and it became really pleasant to think about giving the talk. I think I became a better person because of it. The difference was not that great, the shift was one degree or something, but right there, there was a choice in how I think about something.

One of the purposes of meditation in Buddhism is not just to make you calm, and that's it. Not to give you some wonderful experience, and that's it. Not to make you peaceful, and that's it. But rather, one of the important roles of meditation is to help you into a little or better state of mind, of heart, of being than you were before you meditated. I say this intentionally, "just a little," so you don't have a high bar. It means that if you're feeling kind of lousy that day and you just feel a little bit less lousy, you've made it a little bit better. So the bar is low. But you make yourself better than you would be if you didn't meditate.

That way of feeling better now becomes a reference point for you to understand what kind of choices you want to make, how you want to do what you want to do next. Because you can see, if I don't do anything, if I don't pay attention here, that's a choice. If I don't pay attention, I'll just go back into all the things I have to do. Pretty quickly, I know with all the demands and the difficulties I have, I'm going to feel lousy again, I'm going to feel really stressed out again. But I have a choice here. Do I just barrel ahead and forget about my meditation? Or do I use this feeling better as a reference point and see, can I stay close to this? Can I be careful not to abandon it? What do I choose to do next so I stay closer to that, I maintain it a little bit?

Well, maybe I get up and I don't rush. Maybe I don't pick up the most difficult thing to do. Maybe I get up and don't immediately check for emails, because that just pulls me back into that world. Maybe there's something worthwhile to maintain in how I'm feeling right now. And if I maintain it, not only maintain it, let me not forget this state. Let me stay close to it. I'm feeling better, after all. Let's stay close to it.

Now, is that selfish? Is that indulgent? It can be. But as you do this practice, you get more and more sensitive. That's the other purpose of mindfulness practice: not only to give you a better reference point in which to understand your life but also to give you a much more acute sensitivity and attunement with yourself, that you see all the little choices you make. "Oh, I don't have to do that right now." "I'm kind of abandoning right now." "I'm giving myself over to boredom, giving myself over to discouragement, giving myself over to desire, giving myself over to anger." Is that what I want to do when I'm feeling kind of calm to begin with? Is there another way of going about this? Is there another way of sitting? Is there another way of standing? Whatever you're going to do, is there a way of doing it that makes things better, or at least keeps things as good as they've gotten?

This last week, my morning teaching's theme was "don't make it worse." One of the things I tried to emphasize is that this little slogan, "don't make it worse"—whatever you're going to do, just simply don't make it worse—is very powerful, and it encompasses the profundity of the Buddhist teaching if you really understand how far and deep this topic can go.

But the Buddha had more to say than "don't make it worse." He said, "make it better." This is a central principle in the Buddhist teachings for how we live our lives, how we engage in our lives. We base it on these two things: don't make it worse, make it better. He didn't use that language, that's colloquial English. His ancient way of talking about it, if I told you, would put you to sleep or worse. Sometimes he was so precise and careful in what he was saying that he had a lot of words to do it, and it starts feeling kind of too technical.

But I can give you a little bit better colloquial sense of what he said. He said, "If you're making it worse, stop. If you're not making it worse, protect yourself from making it worse in the future." That's a little bit more colloquial. Then he went on to say, "If you're not making it better, start doing it." If you are making it better—and I think he loved making things better because for the first three he said "stop," "protect yourself," and "start"—but for this fourth one, if you are making it better, he said, "stay close to it, maintain it, don't forget it, don't lose track of it, increase it." And a wonderful word in Pali¹, "make it abundant." Let what's better be abundant. A sense of abundance. That's not just being less grumpy, that's something else. And then "cultivate it and bring it to fulfillment, bring it to its fullness." He was most into that. If you could do the first three, that prepares the ground so you can really get involved in the last one. Isn't that good?

So Buddhism is not just about not suffering, it's about cultivating and developing and growing and staying close to something you've learned for yourself that's wonderful, something that's worth staying close to and developing. And that something is—and this is a very important part of this—that when he would have said "don't make it worse, make it better," absolutely it can apply to the world around you. But where we have the most choice, where we have the most opportunity to make a difference, is in ourselves. In the quality of our inner life, the quality of our heart, the quality of our mind, what's happening there, and how we're responding to the world and reacting to the world. That's where we have the most opportunity.

We can't control the weather so well, usually, but we can do the right thing; we can bring an umbrella, for example. You can't necessarily prevent certain illnesses that happen, but you have some choice about how you relate to being sick. You can't necessarily choose politics and what party is in office, but you can choose something about how you allow that to affect your inner life and what you give yourself over to or abandon yourself to, as if it has to be that way, or as if there's authority to these feelings and attitudes.

The place we can make the most difference, where we have the most choice, is in ourselves. I love how it plays out in life. Sometimes we have to make big choices in life, and it's hard sometimes to make those decisions. Sometimes there's no real way of knowing which is going to be the right decision, partly because we don't know what's coming. We don't know where that decision will take us, to a place in a time and situation where things that are out of our control will happen and affect what happens. So sometimes every decision is the right decision, or two different decisions can be equally good. Who knows what the right one is? How some decisions become right and wrong is not by the decision itself, but by how we live with the decision, the choices we make after we make that decision, how we live with the consequences of it. And that's where we make the best of it.

We start taking responsibility for the choices we make. The one that the Buddha focused on the most for practitioners was how these decisions affect our inner life. That's why meditation can be so helpful, because we're learning about the ins and outs of our inner life. We're learning about the operating principles of how we get caught, how we get reactive, the choices we make, the values we live by, the priorities we make, the biases we have. If you start being carefully mindful, and you have a vantage point of calm, a reference point of some degree of peace or well-being, and you pay careful attention to what takes you away from that, boy, you'll learn a lot about yourself.

One of the practices I recommend is, when you finish meditating, appreciate whatever way you're a little better. And then try not to rush into your life right away. Pay attention and notice when you start losing that, when you're not feeling quite as calm or quite as settled, or you're starting to rush and you're not paying such careful attention anymore. When you find yourself losing that, this is probably the most important moment in the wake of meditation: the moments you're losing what you had that felt good for you.

At that moment, stop. Maybe sit down, close your eyes, just pause and take a good look. What just happened? What was I believing? What were my attitudes? What were the desires? What happened that I got caught? So now I'm rushing. What happened? I was fine, I felt confident, and now I feel discouraged. I was feeling peaceful, and now I'm agitated. I was feeling happy, and now I'm sad, depressed, despairing. What happened there in that interface? It might happen so quickly that you might not see it the first day or the second day. But at some point, you'll say, "Oh, look at that. I felt that life was going to leave me behind, and I can't be left behind. All my friends will leave me behind if I don't answer all those emails. People will be angry with me." And there's, "Oh, that's what triggers me. That's what gets me caught. I have this belief, this little voice inside." Do I have to believe it? Is it true? Is there another thing that can be done? Is it worth the sacrifice? Is it worth giving up feeling better for feeling worse?

Just that question—is it better to give up feeling better for feeling worse?—is a powerful question to ask yourself. And if the lawyers of the mind come and explain to you all the reasons why you have to be worse, you have to put up with it, you better question that. You better get a new lawyer and bring it to court and really have a discussion.

What we learn over time, I hope, is that we learn to cultivate a healthy inner life and learn how to stay close to that and value it and see how many benefits come from it. We learn to recognize when the inner life feels healthy and when it doesn't.

So then the Buddha, when he had this teaching about "stop making it worse, prevent making it worse, initiate making it better, and then keep making it better," what he actually said was not "worse" and "better." He used a word in the ancient language that can usually translate into English in two different ways. One is skillful. Skillful also can mean ethical. Is it avoiding causing harm? Is it doing the opposite of causing harm, bringing benefit? So, is it skillful? But it's also translated into English as wholesome. Is it wholesome or unwholesome? And that really takes you into yourself. Does it feel like a right, wholesome, healthy, beneficial, skillful, ethical thing to do?

We have an inner reference point, an inner sensitivity to feel when something feeds us and nourishes us and makes us feel better and makes us feel freer and more alive in a good way. And we have a capacity to feel when it does the opposite, when it makes us feel unwholesome. It de-nourishes me, it undermines me, it drains me, it makes me smaller or contracted or tighter or makes me feel stressed.

We don't always know how to make the world around us better. We don't always know when we're making it worse, maybe unconsciously or by accident, unintentionally. But we can track it for ourselves. And it's invaluable to do that, and to start doing that in a way that it slowly becomes second nature.

This is what's happened to me over these years of practice. So much of this is just second nature. It's like riding a bicycle. Your whole body and mind makes a lot of teeny decisions on the whole bike ride: leaning this way, that way, going faster, slower, shifting the weight of your body, where to look. It's second nature to do it after a while. When you first start, it's stressful, but after a while, it's actually relaxing to be that fully engaged and participate in your life with something you have mastery over. It's possible to develop mastery over all these decisions you make throughout the day: how you stand, how you sit, how you look at somebody, how you're with someone.

I learned at some point in that Zen practice that how I was with people was not present, attentive, available, receptive. I was turning away, feeling embarrassed, feeling shy, feeling afraid, feeling like I didn't know what I was supposed to do and I had to be really small. There were all these ways in which I was present for other people that I didn't know. But the Zen training, partly because in Zen you're sitting every day for many hours in an upright, open-chested, firm meditation posture, after a while with that reference point, I could see when I collapsed. I could see when I turned my body away. I could see all these little cues that represented not a good way to be with other people. And I learned, what if I'm just there, relaxed, full, open? It's really nice.

I saw someone this last weekend who was facilitating a very difficult conversation with a group of people, and she had those qualities. It was remarkable. Every difficult thing that was thrown at her, she was just there, and "thank you," and just like, "okay." She didn't cringe, she didn't pull down, she didn't get defensive, she didn't try to apologize in some kind of inappropriate way. She was just, "Oh, okay. Well, now we'll take this into account." And it felt so friendly and so caring. This is someone who had practiced for years and had that ability, and it felt to me like it was second nature.

So in summary, there's something really powerful, very profound in the simple statement, "make it better," and to use that as a guideline as you go through your life. If that's too much for you, if that's too saccharine and too idealistic and you feel like you don't deserve it, well then the next best thing is "don't make it worse." At least don't make it worse.

But you can make it better. And one of the purposes of meditation is to give you the information, to give you a reference point for "better" so you know how to do this in your daily life. You have a guide, you have a support, you have a reference point for it. Don't look for grand spirituality. Don't look for the big bang experiences of enlightenment. Don't look for great states of peace. Build towards that one little drop at a time, one little moment at a time, in these little details of how you live your life: how you stand, how you sit, how you walk, how you speak, how you listen, how you engage with your computer, with your device. So many people lose themselves in those, and you've probably seen a lot of people out in the world completely lost and absorbed in a way that doesn't seem good. Of course, you don't do that. [Laughter]

Right? Pay attention. Pay attention to how you make things worse. At least try to stop that. Try to make it better. And you don't just do it for yourself; you do it for the world. Because the more that you learn to do this for yourself, the more you're available to the world in a good way. When you cultivate and develop the wholesome in yourself, that wholesome spills out as wholesome interactions, wholesome ways of being in the world with other people. If we do what's unwholesome for us, what de-nourishes us, it's hard to then come back to the world in ways that benefit the world as well.

So with all this, I hope now you appreciate this little slogan, "make it better," and you see the value of that.

Reflections and Conversation

It's well before the usual official ending time. We have tea today, so I think it would be nice if those of you who would be happy enough to do this would introduce yourself to a couple of people next to you. Maybe have a little conversation about whether any of this talk had any meaning for you, if there was any reference point in your life for how this could be useful.

And you might consider, as you have that conversation, that very principle. It's very easy for some of us, including myself, to respond to things with, "That's not going to work," or "That's not right." And it's true if you believe that. But there might be one circumstance in your life where what I talked about today will be beneficial for you. If you only look at how that doesn't work, that "I don't believe in what he had to say," well, that's okay. I don't want to take that away from you. But if there was even one circumstance, once in your hundred years of your life, that this teaching is useful, then you'll benefit from this teaching.

So maybe you can try to benefit from the conversation by talking about how it might be useful for you. But you don't have to, if you don't want to. Anyway, it's mostly just to say hello. It's nice for people who are new to be met with someone and welcomed and included here. And that way, maybe you want to stay for the tea and continue your conversations. We'll have about five minutes just to chat and talk. Look around so that no one's left sitting alone; just look around and invite them into your group or whatever. And then they'll ring a bell at some point, so we have an official ending, and then we can go have tea together. Thank you.