This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Contentment; Attitudes (5 of 5) From Stress to Freedom. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Contentment; Dharmette: Attitudes (5 of 5) From Stress to Freedom - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 24, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Contentment

Well, good morning. At the moment, I feel a little reluctant to speak. I think sometimes sitting down in this meditation posture, I already start feeling settled. And also, seeing the chats and reflecting on this community on YouTube and our time together, I just feel happy and contented. And so, words don't seem so present. Sitting here this way, the highlight or the orientation that becomes clearer than when maybe I'm a little bit quicker to speak, or have something on my mind to speak, is that what's also close by is a feeling of freedom.

It's more like I'm aware of the pauses and silence in the music more than the notes being played, or aware of the space in a large room more than the people and things in the room. I'm more aware of a sense of freedom from pressure, tension, and clinging, than I am of the kind of things that I would be thinking about, speaking about, or what I'm doing in the moment.

So, to sit with an orientation to meditate, with an orientation of what's not here—the wonderful absence. Not because we're remembering what's not here, but because we feel the peace that's right here, the space that's right here. To see a door that's wide open and to freely walk through it is to appreciate the empty space of the doorway.

So, begin our meditation, assuming a meditation posture which is appropriate for you. And every time we go to meditate, what an appropriate posture is changes, even ever so slightly. The longer we meditate, the more we're attuned to the subtleties of the choices, the way of sitting, the adjustments to be made. The longer we're sitting, the more it's a homecoming to go into this posture. Gently closing your eyes.

Regardless of whether there's tension, pressure, or preoccupation, can you also find in your body, heart, or mind an appreciation? Allowing yourself to become quieter, stiller. The absence of busy activity, maybe an absence of a busy mind. The mind that begins to quiet and settle.

And then, in an easy way, in a way that feels just right for your breathing, take some deeper breaths. Deeper inhales, longer exhales. Just deep enough that you enjoy. And if you enjoy the deeper breathing, enter into that pleasure as you breathe. Stay close to it. As you exhale, see if you can find some pleasure, some enjoyment in relaxing the body.

Letting the breathing return to normal, is there any enjoyment or pleasure, however subtle, in simple, ordinary breathing? And then, as you breathe, as you exhale, go through different points of your body—face, shoulder, belly, elsewhere—and soften, relax your body. See if there can be some small pleasure in the relaxing. Even if otherwise you're challenged with some emotion or state there on the edges of how you are, feel the enjoyment of relaxing.

And then, centering yourself on the body's experience of breathing, and in the most immediate here and now, as if there's no future things to do or past to remember. Here and now, is there any feeling or sense of contentment? Appreciation of just this here? Any pleasure of just being present here? Enter into that enjoyment, however small it is, as a doorway to not prioritizing other things that you tend to be caught up in.

If meditation is a practice of contentment, a contentment that's found in the silence of the mind, like the silence between notes in music, or the spaciousness of a large open space where there's lots of breathing room just to be. A stillness of an early morning before there's any feeling of needing to do anything. A full contentment is a stillness of the body and mind in the here and now. In whatever way you can feel content with just this moment being alive, enter that contentment and breathe.

During meditation, there doesn't have to be a reason to be peaceful, to be content, to be happy. These states can be allowed to arise and be for no reason except that you're alive and breathing.

And then, as we come to the end of this meditation, to once again relax on the exhale. Relax the whole body, release, relax particular places in your body. Soften. Soften the thinking mind, releasing tension associated with thinking. Releasing any contraction around your emotions. And perhaps quietly sitting here for a minute or so, attuned to a freedom of heart, a freedom of mind that allows all things to be as they are just for now, in the context of freedom, contentment.

And then preparing yourself for the end of the meditation, turn the mind's eye outward to gaze upon the world that you'll return to from your meditation, in your home, or neighborhood, or places of work, your communities, and gaze upon it all kindly, wishing those people you'll encounter well. Wishing: may all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And thank you.

Dharmette: Attitudes (5 of 5) From Stress to Freedom

Warm greetings for the fifth and last talk of the series on attitudes. Today the topic is going from stress to freedom. I want to propose that stress might be seen as a kind of attitude, in that it can be pervasive and it can be chronic. We carry stress in our bodies, hearts, and minds. It's also kind of like a mood in that it has an influence on us. There's a cost to being stressed; it's not without an impact that it has on us.

One of the impacts that stress can have, especially ongoing stress, is that it self-reinforces. Ongoing stress is stressful, ongoing stress is uncomfortable, and then how we react to discomfort is sometimes with more stress. If we are afraid, that's stressful—to live with chronic anxiety. But the discomfort of that anxiety makes us want to somehow respond, react, or do something that reinforces it. If we feel stress around being anxious, or anxiety produces stress, that creates discomfort, and then we have more reason to be, or more fuel for being, anxious. Same thing with being angry and resentful or envious. Same thing with being full of craving and ambition. Same thing with being confused. There are many things which feel very uncomfortable, and in that discomfort, there's a birth of stress which makes us more uncomfortable, which gives birth to more stress.

For this reason, I think of stress as being like an attitude. We have an attitude of stress, almost as if we go into any situation at all, and the attitude is: "This is going to be a challenge for me, and this is going to be uncomfortable." And so I tense up, I contract, I feel internal pressure—pushing, leaning forward, holding back, making myself small, or making myself big in an assertive way to get what I think I need to do to protect myself or get what I think I need to have. All these things—this kind of forcefulness, stressfulness—become chronic and continually reinforce a discomfort which drives more of the same.

The alternative is to search for the freedom in any circumstance we're in. The freedom from stress, the freedom from reactivity, the freedom from pressure or tension, the freedom from straining. Or pulling back, or making ourselves small¹, or asserting ourselves. There's a freedom that comes from not asserting ourselves in some aggressive way, and not diminishing ourselves in any kind of way. A freedom of just being able to breathe, as if you have complete permission to be alive, to be present, to breathe, to be valuable and important. No one can take that away from you. No one can take away your basic capacity to find that middle way between assertion and collapse—pushing forward with pressure, and pulling back and giving up and having maybe apathy. Even apathy is also kind of stressful in its own way. But that middle way of just being like: "Here I am. Here I am, and I'm allowed to breathe. I'm allowed to have my eyes be relaxed and not straining or trying to figure something out. I'm allowed just to be relaxed and present in my body."

A milestone or turning point in the practice of Buddhism and meditation is to have a visceral feeling of freedom, of an absence of stress, of an absence of the mind straining, or pushing, or collapsing, or pulling back. A sense of ease and simplicity that is almost as if there's an absence of any demands on us—absence of any demands we put on ourselves. We can still take care of things, we can still do things and accomplish things, but we do it without stress. We do it without any sense of demand, a sense of "should," or a sense of duty that is burdensome to carry with us. We do it with freedom.

For some people, that idea of doing things with freedom means that we do it without expectations or measuring ourselves by the results. We do it because we do it completely, fully, freely, and we deal with the results when the results occur, whether they occur or not. It's in the doing in a free way that we find our joy or happiness.

At some point in meditation, there starts to be an inkling. It's kind of like just the beginning of light at dawn. As the dawn begins to show a little inkling, a little hint of what it's like to be free, what it's like to be unattached or non-straining, what it's like to be without stress. Maybe there's still stress in our system, but there's some place where some chronic stress is beginning to relax. "Ah, look at that. That's possible."

And as that sense of non-stress, non-strain, non-contraction, and non-pressure begins to get stronger, a point comes where this becomes compelling. This becomes a reference point for how we live our lives. This becomes a kind of an attitude of freedom, an attitude that is an orientation towards the freedom that's always here, always available here and now.

Most of us will have more freedom in the moment than we avail ourselves of, or more freedom that we're living in than we notice, because the mind has selective attention where it focuses on what it's afraid of, what it wants, what it doesn't like, and tends to be absorbed, spin out, and be caught up in its own little world. But at some point, there's an attitude that we live in, a mood that we live in, an orientation or a view of freedom, of an absence of strain.

There are many things that come with this sense of freedom. Today I'm thinking of contentment—just a contentment to be alive, just to be here, just to do what we're doing when we're doing it. Sometimes it comes along with a sense of love or care for the world around us. Not having stress does not mean we don't care. In fact, care that's done through stress is probably not done with love, but more maybe a sense of duty, or something else. But the love that comes out of freedom, that joy, the contentment...

So, to go from stress to freedom, do not just assume that the alternative to stress is being without stress, de-stressed. The alternative to stress is a certain kind of freedom that gives us lots of breathing room, a freedom that gives us a sense of fresh air for the heart or the mind. An openness, a brightness, a peacefulness—that's what's available when we figure out how to release our stress.

As we become more relaxed, as we're living less stressfully, look for the freedom. Let this freedom be recognized so that it starts becoming the attitude with which we live: an attitude of staying free, staying not caught up. In so doing, being wonderfully available to the world as an emissary of freedom, as a model of freedom. In a certain kind of way, giving the gift of freedom, because we're not imposing our stress on anyone else; we're doing the opposite. We're offering others space to be who they are.

So thank you, thank you for this week. I hope that those of you in the United States appreciate this holiday that we have of giving thanks. I offer my thanks to all of you, and the chance to be together this way, to meditate this way with you, and to be able to teach. I look forward to beginning again with a new series on Monday. Thank you.