This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Self-Importance and Self-Non-Importance; Ten Reflections (6 of 10) Dignity. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Self-Importance and Self-Non-importance; Dharmette:Ten Reflections (6 of 10) Dignity - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on April 29, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Self-Importance and Self-Non-importance

Warm greetings at the beginning of our week. I am happy to be here and to be able to share this wonderful practice that we have. It is a practice that has been one of the most constant sources of gratitude and appreciation for my adult life. The regularity of meditating for all these years is a through-line, a thread that runs through my life and forms it. It is a reference point for my lived life that has been invaluable, so thank you for this opportunity to be here with you all.

There is a famous line in a poem called Ash Wednesday¹ by T.S. Eliot² that goes something like, "Teach me to care and not to care." Oriented towards what we are doing today, we might say: "Teach me that I'm important and not important."

By "not important," I do not mean that we are unimportant. Rather, we often see ourselves as important in the wrong ways. We see ourselves as important enough to be attached to our ideas of who we are, clinging to ourselves, and clinging to life. Sometimes that attachment is negative, and we treat ourselves with less respect and care than we would our houseplants.

There are a lot of struggles that people have with their identity, criticizing themselves or feeling inadequate in some way. One of the symptoms of that is not seeing ourselves as important or valuable. On the other hand, people will have too much conceit and be too filled with their self-importance. It is the importance that we assign ourselves—negative importance or positive importance—that makes us feel important enough to judge and hold on to ideas.

By "teach us to be not important," I mean learning to be free of these attachments. To know we are "important" is to know that, independent of our attachments, we can see the world with kindness. We can have a heart that feels deeply and caringly for others and ourselves.

When we see ourselves as important enough that who we are, how we act, and how we live can bring into the world the absence of attachment, hate, and greed—that we can bring kindness and goodness—then we can also begin seeing that we are fundamentally important. Each individual is phenomenally important.

The Buddhist premise is that we are important enough that we can dedicate ourselves to a path of practice. It is invaluable to engage in a practice like this, to give one's lifetime to doing it, because we are important. We are important enough to learn to let go of what diminishes our humanity and our value.

Let us meditate as if—or because—we are as important as any other person. We are important enough for our own respect, important enough to meditate in a field of worthiness for this practice, and with confidence.

Classically, meditation is meant to be done in a posture of dignity. They say there are four dignified postures: lying down, sitting, standing, and walking. Whichever one of those four postures you think will work best for you for these next 25 minutes, please assume a dignified posture that you feel allows your innermost life to reveal itself to you in its dignity and worthiness. Sit as if your inner life is important.

Closing your eyes, gently and in a way that is right for you, take some longer, slower, deeper breaths. Relax on the exhale. Maybe on a deeper inhale, have it be a filling of yourself with a sense of presence, value, and certainty that here you are—an important person engaged in this practice.

Let your breathing return to normal and feel where in your body the inhale begins. Maybe there is a particular spot where the first little inkling of sensation appears for an instant and then expands and spreads as you breathe in.

Perhaps you can allow the place where the inhale begins to be a place that is free of any way in which you diminish yourself or your value. Instead, let it be the opposite: a location from which you can view yourself as at least as important as any other person on this planet. You yourself are a valuable person, a human being.

As you inhale, let that sense of dignity, value, and importance grow and spread throughout your body. As you exhale, let yourself relax into a sense of embodied value and respect, so that your thinking becomes quieter. Let any self-criticisms or self-doubts quiet on the exhale.

Inhaling and exhaling, be like a center for all things that occur to you—a central resting place. Be a place that reminds you of your own importance, important enough to let the thinking mind become quieter and stiller. Allow a relief from the fragmentation of discursive thought.

To be present here in this body with every breath, as if your lived experience right now is the place in which to experience your tremendous importance, your dignity, and your value.

Mindfulness is a way of making room for each thing that occurs within you as an expression of your value. It softens all the ways that we diminish or criticize ourselves. We are not opposed to those tendencies, but rather creating the conditions where they can relax—relax into our fundamental importance.

And then, as we come to the end of this sitting, consider how when we are present with others with a simple, unattached sense of personal dignity and value—where we don't diminish ourselves with shyness or feeling unworthy, and don't diminish ourselves by not wanting to be trouble for other people—we show up with a non-assertive clarity of attention.

When we engage with others in this way, we can meet them more fully. Our kindness can be transmitted more clearly. Our friendliness has more clarity, and our generosity has more impact than if we diminish ourselves with half-withdrawal.

Imagine yourself going into this world today, into your life, with a non-assertive uprightness and dignity. Part of your gift to the world is the full way in which you appear—non-assertively, but non-submissively. You appear with a kind of personal dignity, value, and importance through which you can convey the dignity and value of others.

The fullness of your presence for others is an indication that you value them as they are, without needing to exchange or get anything from them, or wanting them to be different. In our own dignity, our kindness can spread more widely and deeply into the world.

May our personal dignity be the source of wishing others well, promoting the welfare and happiness of others.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may our personal dignity show that that is possible.

Dharmette:Ten Reflections (6 of 10) Dignity

So today we are at the halfway point through the Ten Reflections that can be central to the offering of spiritual care. I like to think of it as spiritual care to oneself as much as it is to others. To wish ourselves well and to care for ourselves in a deep way allows us to care for others.

One of the phenomenally important roles of people who offer spiritual care to others—chaplains, clergy, monastics, and Buddhist teachers—is to convey to others their dignity, their value, and their importance. What a great role it is to be able to be a "dignifier" of other people. I think of that as being an affirmation of others, a deep appreciation of others, to recognize what is wonderful about them.

Not enough people have been seen in valuable ways or seen with respect and care. As we grow up, the mirroring of people who respect us and care for us is invaluable. Sometimes people love us—or they say they love us, they think they love us—but the love is so entangled with control, with wanting us to be a certain way, or with making us safe and protecting us, that there is no room for us to stand on our own two feet and be fully ourselves in a clear and full way. Excessive parenting sometimes gets in the way of having room for us to be recognized and seen as autonomous and having agency.

We can dignify others better if we have a sense of our own dignity. Dignity is the sixth of the Ten Reflections. Maybe you would prefer a different word than dignity; it could be self-worth, self-importance, or respect. I like the word respect a lot myself—that we have a deep respect for ourselves.

I say often that I like the word respect because in its Latin origins, respicere, it means "to see again."³ It means to have enough valuing of others and ourselves that we give a second look. We make space to really get to know somebody, ourselves, or the situation. We respect it, so let's get to know it more.

Respect is not the diminishing of ourselves. It is not submitting ourselves or lowering ourselves in order to hold someone else up. Respect is offering others respect with all our dignity, value, and importance intact. In a kind of American way, it is to see each other as equals, to meet as equals.

One of the profound ways in which I was trained in Zen⁴ practice is that the relationship between a teacher and a student was supposed to grow into a time when they met as "Buddha meeting Buddha."⁵ As the practice comes to fulfillment, the mutual respect, dignity, and value that was built into cultivating a Zen student-teacher relationship was very impactful for me. It is this idea that we meet with that kind of care, love, and respect, as if we were mutually Buddhas meeting each other.

In the reflection about respect, dignity, and self-importance, it might be useful to begin by really understanding all the ways in which we do the opposite. Notice all the ways in which we do not maintain our dignity, where we give it up. Notice all the ways we do not respect ourselves—where there is actually disrespect—and all the ways in which we feel unworthy.

Some of that is learned from the world around us. We internalize people's projections, opinions, and ideas that we are unimportant or that we have to be different. Sometimes growing into our dignity is like a snake shedding its skin; we have to shed all these inherited views and opinions that we received from family, our religions, and our society so that we can take a stand. We can take our seat in a full, clear, and dignified way.

We also have to understand the difference between dignity and conceit. We can have an over-importance for ourselves where we are asserting ourselves, thinking it has to be "my way," or that I have to be the one who has my fifteen minutes of fame. Somehow we are projecting ourselves to the world because we want to be seen, held up, and praised in a certain way. Both diminishing ourselves and overvaluing ourselves should be understood deeply and clearly.

That is part of the value of mindfulness practice. As we learn to stay in the present moment to see the operating systems that are running us, not only do we see them, but more importantly, we see the cost of them. We see how life gets drained from us when we diminish ourselves. We see how we fragment ourselves and stress ourselves through conceit or overdoing it for ourselves. We lose part of ourselves.

As we begin understanding the problems of the different forms of the absence of dignity, then we can begin understanding something about the "Middle Way"⁶ of dignity, respect, and value. This allows us to really inhabit ourselves, to really be here fully and clearly without anxiety, fear, or assertion, but also without diminishing ourselves or feeling unworthy. We can do it in a simple, very peaceful way.

No one has to be afraid of us. I have met people who conventionally seemed somewhat meek, quiet, and gentle. The last thing I would be concerned about is that they thought they were going to be overpowering for others. Yet, somehow they live concerned that they are going to do that very thing—be too strong or too much for people. I don't know what the psychological dynamics of that combination is.

Ideally, we want to have a society of strong people. Some of us could do well to develop a sense of strength, to grow up in a certain way, but not diminish ourselves for people who are gentle or even "meek." Instead, we should find a way to support them, to see them with dignity so they also can be strong.

If we feel for ourselves that we are somehow "too much" for people, maybe that is a time for a lot of attention and study into what is really going on there. Sometimes it is useful to recruit friends and family to get feedback: "How does this work for me? Am I too much?" Sometimes we are, and so maybe we have something to learn. Sometimes we are not, and we have something else to learn. We need to learn how we navigate in the world and the impact we have on other people, and to be mirrored by other people to understand who we are and how we operate. This helps us find that Middle Way of dignity, where we can stand upright and strong without assertion, without being overbearing, and without being under-bearing.

The idea of dignity in a sense grows out of the earlier Reflections. When we have a sense of meaning and purpose, when we have agency and we can act on it, when we have a sense of autonomy and a strong sense of identity—knowing who we are—all of these build on each other and support each other.

Our dignity arises out of knowing ourselves well. It arises out of knowing a purpose and a value in our life, knowing what is most important. From the Buddhist point of view, we develop our dignity not because we are "inherently human"—as if the inherent humanity of everyone is worthy of respect and reverence, which it might be, but that is not the Buddha's orientation. I think the Buddha's orientation is that our dignity is something that we live. It is how we live in the world, how we speak, how we act, and even how we think.

That is why the earlier Reflections are so important: to really have reflected on what is a meaningful way to live, what is a meaningful purpose to live, and what is our ability to act and to do rather than just sit back and rest in some kind of inherent goodness. What is the way of discovering a healthy autonomy that then allows us to grow into a kind of dignified sense of humanity? This dignity grows as we learn that who we are has a lot to do with how we act and how we live our life. So, we try to live our life with freedom, generosity, love, compassion, and care, and then start inhabiting a fuller place here on this planet.

I hope that these words make sense and are appropriate for you. If somehow it didn't quite work for you, I hope at least that these words and ideas about dignity and value are a catalyst for you to really reflect deeply for yourself. How does this work for you? How do you live with a healthy kind of self-importance, and how do you avoid unhealthy forms of self-importance? How can you tap into your healthy sense of self-respect in order to support the creation of a better world for all of us, starting with the people near us?

If I was off track, it is your task to do a course correction and find how it works most valuably for you. Hopefully, in that process of finding that for yourself, you have some wonderful conversations with friends and family around this topic of dignity, respect, and self-importance.

Thank you, and I look forward to continuing this series tomorrow.