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Return to your center - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 25, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Return to your center

Hello everyone. Is it loud enough for you to hear? Yeah.

Sometimes the challenge of meditating before giving a talk is that there's nothing to talk about now. So I'm thinking of the solstice, which happened a few days ago, and that now, in a sense, we're turning towards the time of light. There's a saying that goes something like: "We are conceived in the dark and born out of the dark. We are born into the light and we grow in the light." With the seasons, we go into the darkness and that has its own value, and now we go out. For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, we're going out into the light.

When we meditate in our tradition, we tend to close our eyes. So it is a rhythm of going into the dark, and then we open our eyes and we're going back out into the light. What is it that's conceived when we close our eyes to meditate? What is it that is born out of meditation that is then born into the light of our social life, our work life, or lived life, and not only that, but grows in that light, in that life?

This rhythm of going into meditation and coming out is actually a very important one. We are a retreat tradition, so we put a lot of emphasis on going off on meditation retreats. There's a rhythm with those as well. For some people, it's a yearly rhythm. Maybe once a year they go on retreat, and it's an important part of the year to go in there and something shifts, something changes, something is touched into, something is born that is then brought back into the world and practiced in the world, or explored in the world, or applied into the world. Then, after a while, we go back into meditation.

That rhythm is something that goes back to the time of the Buddha, when monastics—who were the primary practitioners back then who did a lot of practice and went on retreats—had a lifestyle where three months of the year they would do what's called the Rains Retreat¹. They'd stay put in one place in order to practice a lot of meditation, hear teachings, and things like that. After the Rains Retreat, they would go out into the world and wander around Northern India. That tradition continued in a variety of Buddhist countries. I was told that in Korea, they have that pattern where monastics gather at a monastery for a three-month period of the rains, and at the end of those three months, all the monks scatter and then they come back the next time around.

That rhythm of coming and going... When I was at the Tassajara Zen Monastery here in California, down in the Los Padres National Forest, in the middle of it in the Santa Cruz Mountains—in the Big Sur Mountains—we had a similar rhythm. During the winter time, we would just be alone in this little valley in the middle of the wilderness with the river going through it, practicing with a small group of people with a lot of meditation and a lot of silence. Then, rather than scattering at the end of that period, during the summer from May to Labor Day in September, there would be what's called "guest season." Rather than going out into the world, the world would come in. It was partly a resort, and people would come to a monastery to resort.

As a practitioner there, I felt that rhythm was very important. By the end of the winter, there was something very important about meeting all these guests in the more complicated life of the guest season, with all the social interactions that happen there. Applying what I'd learned, having it tested by what I encountered as we went through this worldly life of all these activities, allowed something to grow and develop. Though by September, I was ready for the guests to go, and I was ready to drop into the silence again and return to some kind of deeper place of being. That was the place of genesis, the place of something being conceived. Something different has a chance to be born from that really settled place.

Our tradition is a retreat tradition, but regularly I've thought it's rather unfortunate that we call them "retreats." Yesterday I looked up the etymology and the history of this word "retreat." It comes from French and then from Latin. In French, it meant something like "to pull back, to step backwards," and it was originally used as a military term for the military to retreat when there was a need for that in battle. Then at some point, in the 1700s apparently, it became a religious term meaning religious people pulling back from something in order to be in seclusion to do their spiritual life. A few decades later, it became apparently for a while a term used for institutions to house the mentally ill—they get to go and "retreat."

But still, this pulling away... I think it's kind of unfortunate that we call it retreats: pulling back, pulling away like you're leaving something behind. If I could redo the English language, I would call our retreat centers "return centers." Not because you're returning damaged goods, but rather because it's a place to return to yourself. What I found through meditation practice—just sitting here now, partly why I wasn't quite ready to speak when we started—was there's a return to a place of inner psychological health. There's a return to a sense of harmony. If it goes well in meditation, it's a return, in a sense, to much closer to who I fully am than how I am if I'm out and about.

Especially this season. I went out on the roads a few days ago and, boy, it was crazy. The cars and the people and the lines and the stores. Actually, I enjoyed myself in the lines because I thought, "This is just as good a place to meditate as any. I'll just do standing meditation here. And if I can't do standing meditation here, then I probably can't do it anywhere. I should be able to do it here too." So I actually enjoyed it standing there, and I kind of looked forward to the next store with the next long line.

But anyway, in this frazzled kind of life that we can live, I sometimes feel disconnected to some degree from myself, which sometimes I only realize when I sit down to meditate. Then, by meditating, something begins softening and relaxing, and the fragmented quality of my life settles down, and the fragments come into harmony and get settled. The way that the mind gets more peaceful, it also harmonizes, it settles, it stabilizes. There's an idea of unification that's part of meditation practice, and this unification means everything comes together in a kind of unity. When everything is in unity, then no parts are working against each other.

Partly to make a point—you can disagree if you will, but religious people use hyperbole a lot, so I can get away with it sometimes in case you don't like what I'm about to say—whenever you're carrying around tension in your muscles, you're in conflict with something. It's an interesting idea. It might not be 100% true, but it's a very interesting idea that many times, I think, we're in conflict with something. If we're living with that tension chronically all day long, week after week, month after month, decade after decade, then we're living constantly in some kind of conflict. Something we don't want, something we're protecting ourselves from, something that we're trying to push away, some ambition we're trying to attain. That ends up as a kind of alienation from ourselves.

To sit down and meditate and let the tension dissolve and relax, then that sense of conflict disappears, and we're not in conflict with any part of ourselves. This wonderful possibility of breathing, being alive, settled here with no opposition to what's happening in this psycho-physical being is a remarkable experience. When I've touched into this in clear ways, to me it feels like, "This is health. This is what being healthy is like."

I have this issue—one of my little delusions that sometimes affects me is if I get sick, at some point I'm no longer really sick, I'm just a little bit sick. I'm getting better, but I'm still really tired or achy or something. My delusion is I don't want to believe I'm still sick. I'll have these thoughts: "Gil, you're probably fooling yourself. You're probably not really sick. Maybe you're lazy or something." Because I can't quite tell, I can't quite believe it. But then the next day, "Oh, now I'm healthy. This is what health is. Now I really know."

The same thing psychologically, spiritually: we can have a sense of, "Oh, now this is health." So when we go on these so-called retreats, that's the place where we return to who we are much more. We pull back from that, we withdraw from that, for whatever reason we retreat from that when we go back into the world all too easily. So there's a loss of ourselves.

From a meditator's point of view, meditation is not an altered state of mind; it's the normal state of mind, it's the healthy state of mind. The altered state of mind is how people are walking around in everyday life. That's pretty altered, full of greed and hate and fear and anxiety. That's what is defining² the mind.

So this return... You know, we could call these return centers. The Insight Return Center. And someone says, "You say you're going tomorrow to start a new return?" as opposed to a new retreat. It's a returning.

So this rhythm of this turn to something deep inside, to harmony, wholeness, and all that. The deeper possibilities of meditation that Buddhism offers arise out of this kind of return to a healthy way of being—being settled, whole, no longer living in conflict, no longer living with this tension that we can often carry in our daily life. That state is not the end state for Buddhist practice, but in that state of health, we can feel that there's a calling, there's an onward leading nature. There's a way in which the heart wants to continue with something profound.

And that profound thing that wants to be born is all kinds of things. "What is it that wants to be born?" is a wonderful question. How do we allow it to be born in us? That's one of the functions of meditation: to create the room in our hearts, in our minds, in our body to allow something to be born that wants to be born out of the darkness. When we go through serious psychological challenges, emotional challenges, really depressed, really feeling betrayed, feeling angry, really feeling like we've lost something profound, deep grief³ with anger, fear, whatever it is—all these difficulties that people struggle with—I think there can be less struggle around it all if we appreciate that in the right conditions, in the heart of them, something wants to be born. What is it that wants to be born?

Sometimes we're so reactive, so caught up, so judgmental, so disturbed by the emotions we have. Sometimes we even receive messages from our society: "You're not supposed to be this way." And that makes it harder as well. The meditation life is a time when we allow ourselves the possibility to feel the difficult emotions we have. The meditation life is a time when we give ourselves a possibility of experiencing the positive emotions that we are capable of having. For some people, those are hard to experience, both of them. In their heart, there's something in there that wants to be born. That's the nature of our inner life: there are seeds that want to be born.

When we are in this state of health, when we really learn to settle and not be in conflict with things, including not being in conflict with the difficult emotions, we create the space to allow something in the darkness to come forth. We don't know what is being conceived in the darkness. If we think we have to know everything, we're maybe shortchanging ourselves. Part of the subtleness of meditation is to allow ourselves not to know. To really feel ourselves deeply and not know, because you can't know what's happening in the darkness within.

Even if it's a Dark Night of the Soul kind of time, and things seem really challenging, something wants to be born. What is it that wants to be born? If you don't make space for that possibility, it might never be born. So to see meditation as a time to really trust being here present. There's a possibility of inner health that comes from just letting go and settling and getting focused, arriving and being here in the present moment in a full, intimate, committed way. It allows for whole other possibilities that cannot happen if we stay distracted.

So a little bit, you know, to challenge you: it's when you're distracted that you have withdrawn, that you've retreated, because you think you've lost the battle maybe. It's coming back and sitting here, returning here, that our life can come to a kind of fulfillment that can't come when we're distracted, caught up, and tense.

So we're at this junction of the year where it's become darker and darker until Thursday, when it was the darkest day of the year for the Northern Hemisphere. Who knows what that has been for you? Maybe it's like the rhythm of sleeping. Most people sleep at night and then they awake during the day. Who knows what was settling and quieting down, and who knows what was happening as the days got darker and darker for you? Maybe it was a very important time to slow down, an important time to do less, to be outdoors less and do fewer things.

Now we turn towards the light, and now is a time to be particularly receptive. What wants to be born out of that? With the solstice on Thursday, and in a week or so the new year, I'd like to propose that we have this wonderful liminal time to be careful with ourselves. During this period, because at New Year's there's a custom of making a resolution for the year, most people I think are not really making their resolutions very well. It's wishful thinking.

What I propose for you is that you use this next week to ask yourself: What is it that wants to be born in you? What is it that wants to sprout? What is it that wants to come out into life? If you sit quietly, if you go for walks quietly, if you avoid being too busy during this season and spend some time connected to yourself, feeling yourself, sensing—maybe meditate a little extra—and maybe in coming out of meditation you can ask your question: "What is it that wants to be born in me?" What is it that this time of the year, as daylight gets longer and longer and symbolizes this way in which something gets born into the light and grows in the light... what is it that wants to be born in you?

If you get no answer, it's fantastic that you spent time with that sensitivity to feel for it or sense it. So don't worry. Don't feel bad if you don't know what's going on, or you don't know what's gestating in there, so don't worry about that. But if you come with something that you feel, "Oh, that's what wants to be born," that's when you make the resolve for that. Resolve to feed that and let that grow and develop in you. Care for what wants to sprout.

Maybe it's something directly related to meditation, directly related to a life of mindfulness and compassion. Maybe it's something directly related to a life of service, caring for the people around you, because that's what wants to be born. Or maybe it's so many possibilities... maybe it's a life of honesty. Maybe it's a life that's not being driven by fear, or driven by desires, or anger or ill will⁴. Maybe it's a life that for the next ten or eleven months does the inner work that would prepare all of us for the [Laughter] elections. Don't let yourself be surprised. Prepare for the best that you have. The world, no matter what happens, needs the best we have to offer, always. Let that grow and develop in the light. So what is it that wants to be born?

Those are my thoughts. Now I welcome you if anyone has any comments or questions. Martha, in the back corner.

Q&A

Question: I just wanted to point out that the winter newsletter—there's a copy when you go out the door—has an excellent article by Kim Allen in fact on resolutions. Since it is the beginning of the year, you might find it interesting.

Gil Fronsdal: Nice, the newsletter has an article on making resolves.

Question: How do you think about setbacks in life? So often we visualize goals or we set resolutions, and maybe it's health-related and then you fall ill, or you want to run and then you get injured. How are you using your practice to respond to these moments?

Gil Fronsdal: There are many ways, but one way is that the healing from these kinds of things works better if there's no tension. If there's profound rest, and not just the rest of getting enough sleep, but even deeper rest. So when I've been sick, I will rest really. I'll go to bed, and not just lay there. Sometimes I lay there with my eyes closed and kind of meditate and relax, and just try to get as deep a rest as I can and support that rest, because then things seem to heal better.

And then, to let go of the tensions of wanting it to be different, as there are often protests in the mind and anger at how we are. I know people who have had injuries that seemed like horrific injuries, really changed the rest of their life. They were, you know, maybe an invalid⁵ or something. I don't want to belittle the challenges of that and how difficult it is, but there are some people who, after many years, will say it was the best thing that happened to them. Because they had to really... the more they were challenged, the more they were upset, the more that they had to give up, when you're practicing, the more you realize that represents something very deep inside: deep attachment, deep holding on, deep expectations, a deep sense of identity that we have.

So this practice allows us to really go in there and question, "Where am I still holding on?" Why am I so disappointed or discouraged? Go in there and find what that is and let go of it. Then whatever the injury has been, which maybe was a permanent injury, is not seen as a problem, but more as an asset, because it gave a certain kind of inner freedom that wouldn't have happened otherwise. So that's some of the ways meditation can help. Was that satisfying enough? May I ask why you are asking?

Question: I ask because I think of setbacks, whether they're injuries or failures in your life, as moments that can shake your sense of self and stray you from your progress or your goals, or whatever things in life get you out of bed every day. I think in each religious practice it's important to identify how your faith structure helps you respond to those, whether it's familial death or something like that that just really is difficult.

Gil Fronsdal: Great, thank you. That's very nice. So maybe if we understand how we can use these things not as a setback, but to allow something beneficial to happen, then maybe it's a step forward.

Question: Hi Gil. I had a question. As you were asking, "What is waiting to be born?", meditation at least has helped me understand a bit more of my own suffering, but I feel it has also, particularly this time of the year, made me a little more attuned to the suffering of others in my family and other places. But there is sort of this mix of helplessness that you feel when people aren't quite being able to help themselves, but you also really only can go so far. How do you deal with that sense of wanting to be of service but not quite knowing exactly what may be able to help, particularly when these are situations of psychological and mental health?

Gil Fronsdal: The simple answer, that hopefully respects the complexity and the fullness of your life, is that there's probably more than just wanting to help them. The wanting has extra baggage. If you look at your desire to help someone, or support someone, or companion someone in their difficulties, what is that extra that you're bringing? If you ask that question and then really get quiet and really look and feel what are all the motivations that are behind you, and the needs and the desires... One of the ways to find answers to these questions that I think can be very helpful and practical is to literally, physically feel your way to where the tension and the stresses are around this issue.

That sometimes can reveal... once you find the stress levels, you can sometimes then start feeling the emotions behind it. You realize it's not just compassion, but there's also some kind of fear. Once you recognize the fear, then, "Oh, there's more here than just wanting to be compassionate."

Question: Hi Gil. The example you gave of when you were still sick but you thought that it would be time for you to be healed... does that happen because we're not in touch with ourselves, or is it because it doesn't match our goals anymore to be sick? And how can we see that more clearly?

Gil Fronsdal: I think it helps to look at the beliefs you have around it, and also a little bit, maybe it helps to understand your personality, your disposition towards things. A number of things affect me, so I don't know what goes for you. One is I really enjoy doing things. I'm a doer kind of person, so I enjoy it. I'm just ready to do something. "Okay, I'm ready!" "But you're sick." "No! Yes... no, it can't be true." So that's part of it.

Sometimes it has to do with a sense of responsibility. Responsibility is probably my Achilles heel. So, "I have to do something, I have to respond to that email." "No, you're sick." "No!" Something like that. What can help is seeing what the mind is doing in terms of its tricks, the beliefs, the attitudes, the fears. Otherwise, if you don't see what the mind is doing, then what we're trying to do is trying to override it, and that often creates even more tension.

Question: Hi. Thank you for your talk. So I have a deep health condition or challenge, and then I have my meditation, and in my mind, they've actually never met. It's like it never occurred to me at all how my meditation practice could address or help it. So which begs the question then, is there a particular way that when I meditate, do I think of it as addressing the health challenge, or do I just kind of keep going? Is there some specific thing that I do to make them meet?

Gil Fronsdal: This is a great question, Beverly. We appreciate it a lot. I don't feel like I know you well enough to answer you specifically, so if this misses you, don't take it too personally. You have to distinguish between two challenges. There's the health challenge, which is the literal things you have to actually do: do the research, talk to the doctors, do the physical exercises, whatever it might be. But in the Dharma⁶, those wouldn't be called challenges, those are just things to do.

In the Dharma, we call challenges the psychological challenges around them: the frustration, the anger, the impatience. So how to bring mindfulness to that is to recognize what those psychological challenges are. Maybe write them down. Just really make a list of all that, get a sense of the ecology of the psychological things going on when you call it a challenge—the anger, the frustration, the impatience, the hopelessness. Just make the list, and then choose one and spend some time looking at the ecology of that particular challenge. What are the beliefs? What are the emotions? What are the body sensations, body stresses, and tensions that come along? What are the mind states? What are the stories?

Begin unraveling all the pieces of that ecological system around that one thing, like impatience. And then the more you can unravel and see the different pieces of the ecosystem, it might be easier for you to then sit in the middle of it and breathe. And this is where the meditation comes into play. In meditation, stop thinking about all this—that's what you do at other times. In meditation, now you can better identify it and sit in the middle of the complex and just breathe with it and see what happens. Does that make some sense?

Question: Yes, thank you.

Question: Hello. Hi Gil. I have a question about... sometimes I need to do something, like at work. I must do something, but I'm not sure what is the right thing to do. And by the right thing to do is usually... in the moral sense of the word. What is the moral thing to do at work?

Gil Fronsdal: Oh, this is a good... I love it when people have this question. I don't love the challenge of knowing how to answer the question! So, one of the things is, if we can return to some deep sense of feeling connected deeply to ourselves and feeling in harmony with ourselves so that we're not operating on fear or anger or confusion or delusions or a lot of spinning stories. If we get below the story level, then in a moral sense, we can be more in touch with the deep ethical sensibility that we're capable of. And then it might be easier to understand what to do. It may be easier to understand what you have to do even though it's not popular, or understand what you have to do even though it might mean losing your job or giving up your job.

But if we are too anxious about this, and even if we know that this is a moral issue, but we're so anxious about trying to figure it out, we're spinning around in the mind, we might not be in the best state of mind to really address it. So one of the things our practice can do is to have this return to some deeper sensibility of who we are. That's one.

The other thing is that this practice of mindfulness has a lot to do with understanding what our relationship is to any challenge we have. There might be fear in relationship to it, or desire in relationship to it, or a lot of selfing⁷ in relationship to it ("What do people think of me?", for example). To clarify how we're relating to the challenge might simplify our ability to understand what the real issues are that have to be solved. That's something else.

Another thing that practice can do is that mindfulness of speaking and mindfulness of listening can, if we practice it, help us slowly learn how to have honest communication. To figure out how to speak honestly without challenging other people, but letting other people know that you're challenged. "You know, I have this ethical issue around this, and can we talk about it? I feel like I'm left alone to make this ethical decision, but it's going to affect the company we're in. Is there some place I can go where we can brainstorm or go back and forth and find out, so I can get some clarity around this?" I don't know if where you work there's any possibility of that, or if there's a colleague you can go for a lunch walk with during a lunch break and have this kind of conversation. Using the practice in conversation so that we can have clear, more honest conversations about the very thing. I like to believe that honesty is mindfulness out loud, so that we're learning how to not just keep it to ourselves but learning to process it in relationship to other people as well. Those are some ideas.

So, the last one was next to you. Oh, it was the same, that was okay? Great.

Okay, so maybe given this very special time of the year, turning into the light, and we're all kind of doing that together here in person, if you would like to turn to a few people next to you and say hello, and see what they want to do with this growing light as we get born into it⁸, and introduce yourself. But look around so that you say hello to at least two other people so no one's left alone.