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Guided Meditation: Wholeness; Dharmette: Ten Reflections (10 of 10) Healing - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on May 03, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Wholeness

Good morning, or good day. Hello, welcome.

As we are coming to the end of this two-week series, for this meditation I'd like to introduce something which in my mind and my heart is a kind of gathering together of all that we've done these days.

Sometimes the word Dharma¹ is used to refer to something profound in our own nature—that we have the nature of being Dharma. We are vessels for the Dharma. There is a wonderful capacity, a wonderful processing that is within our psychophysical being which we can't exactly appropriate as being "mine." In a certain kind of way, it's a greater power within us that is not what we normally identify as "me" or the one who's going to do something.

We have agency, but one of the really powerful ways to use that agency in Dharma practice is to use it to create the conditions for our own inner Dharma nature to move through us. A lot of Dharma practice sooner or later is about getting out of the way—not interfering, not blocking, not messing with the natural Dharma movement within us.

Sometimes that movement is a movement towards healing. Our heart's nature is to heal if we allow it, if we create the conditions and the time and the radical non-interference. A radical way of not being a victim, not being a fixer, not being an avoider, not being a builder and maker of making things happen. The natural movement towards homeostasis, or towards health, or towards a certain kind of healing. Sometimes it's a process of maturation. Maybe we are healed in a conventional, psychological way, and something begins moving through us to mature us, so we grow and develop and blossom—come into fruition is the Buddhist language for it.

So to have a profound respect for our own capacity and everyone's capacity for this natural process of healing and maturation. Of moving into a kind of wholeness, or moving into a kind of healing, moving into a kind of maturity that is wholesome, that is in some ways ethical.

As we sit with this meditation, the task is to sit mindfully present for our experience, centered maybe in the breathing and being very simple, being here and now. But notice whatever takes you away. Notice whatever takes you away from this inner process that needs awareness to have space for it to allow it to come and grow.

Notice whatever ways you interfere with it, judge it, try to fix it, try to avoid it, react to it. To see if there can be a radical way of getting out of the way of your deeper nature, of your psychophysical system. Sometimes certain things will have to get more intense before they heal, before they resolve. But to have the profound trust in getting radically out of the way and staying present. I hope this makes sense.

So to assume a meditation posture. And one of the ways of understanding this meditation posture is that it's a posture that doesn't interfere with the full dynamic freedom of this inner process while we sit still. Not to hold ourselves still but to softly allow ourselves to be still. So there's a kind of soft space for each unique thing that's happening within us to appear, persist, and pass away.

Perhaps you gently close your eyes. And with the eyes closed, a kind of soft homecoming to the body. A soft willingness to turn the attention here in this body at this time.

And as you breathe in, to feel the body. Feel the tensions of the body without reactivity, without judgments. To feel on the inhale and relax on the exhale. And if relaxing is too active, allow for a release, allow for letting go in the body as you exhale.

Finding where in your body the experience of breathing has some sense of freedom. Where the inhale begins freely on its own—maybe in a different place where you might be controlling the breath. Where the exhale happens on its own.

And as you stay with your breathing in and breathe out, maybe you can have an appreciation that whatever little piece of breathing is a natural process that happens without your interfering and doing consciously and intentionally. And it could be as simple as the contact of your skin against your clothes, how it shifts as you breathe, or the expanding and contracting movements, however subtle, in your back rib cage.

And then noticing any way in which you interfere or avoid or judge or try to fix. Instead, leave things alone—radically alone. Maybe with the support of the way in which breathing happens naturally. Breathing is the centerpiece of a natural process that everything is part of if we can get out of the way while clearly aware of what is here.

Trusting the natural processes within us works best when we're radically thorough in non-interference. Non-interfering awareness. Really present here in a clear, living way. Not participating actively in anything, leaving all things alone. Each individual thing that arises within us, around us—let it be. Content to just be aware.

Whatever is happening, make room for it. Don't do anything about it, just know it in this simplest way. You can be aware, be mindful, know that it's happening. Like you would know clearly a cloud floating in the sky or water flowing down a river. Let it be. Let life flow here and now.

And then as we come to the end of this sitting, to imagine how it can be deeply respectful of others. To, from a place of our confidence, our safety, our self-respect, that we can just know others as they are. Take the time to listen to others, to see them, to hear and know them without our agendas, without our interference. Not giving in to others but not asserting ourselves on others. Not avoiding, but present.

Interested, knowing each person in their own right for who they are, not for what they are to us. Free of our fears, free of our desires. Just allow and know others. And maybe there too there's a natural process that unfolds. And one of those is our love, our good will, our sense of being in communion together.

May our good will spread out into the world. May it be a balm, may it be medicine for this suffering world. That we offer it our good will, our kindness, our friendship, compassion. Love that respects each thing in a profound way, free of our interference.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

Dharmette: Ten Reflections (10 of 10) Healing

So today I will reflect on that final and tenth of the Ten Reflections. In some ways, I very much think of it as following all the others; all the others are a foundation for this last one. I think of it as healing.

Yesterday was reconciliation, today is healing. And the difference between reconciliation and healing, in the way that I'm using it here, is reconciliation is the healing we do socially—the coming into wholeness, into communion, and coming together with kindness, with good will with others. Healing, I use here as how we reconcile ourselves with ourselves—how we come into communion, to wholeness with ourselves.

I like to believe it is not a coincidence, or that it's very significant, that the English words wholeness and healing and health all kind of come from the same Indo-European roots—through the Germanic and Scandinavian and Northern European languages. That there's something about healing and health which means to be whole, to be undamaged, to be uninjured, and to be complete in a certain kind of way.

And so to not be divided in ourselves. There are times when we are at war with ourselves. We have values we believe in, but we don't live that way. We have ways of being and thinking and feeling which somehow or other we think is not acceptable and we have to get rid of it, push it away. I've seen in some people quite an intense standoff, a kind of impassable checkmate around the war between different parts of themselves.

So to heal the divisions, we have to heal the ways in which we are critical of ourselves, angry at ourselves, hostile towards ourselves. Heal the ways in which we shut off from ourselves, divided in ourselves. And one way or the other most people are. To be attached is to be divided. To have hostility towards others is to be divided in oneself. To live caught in fear is a way of not being whole. And of course there's good reasons to be afraid and fears are a necessary, important part of life in certain kind of healthy ways, but there are ways in which people get stuck in ways that they're not full, not whole, not complete.

Of these Ten Reflections, I think of the last one as being the one that is closest to being religious. These Ten Reflections, as I've introduced them, come from the world of chaplaincy, where hospital and prison and hospice chaplains—especially in some parts of this country like California—are available to do interfaith spiritual care. Where they meet people of other religions in their own, and not to proselytize but rather to support them in their own way. And so the orientation has to be kind of more spiritual than religious. And it's so broad, these themes, that they also work for people who are non-religious or humanists or atheists. They're such fundamental human things.

But as we get to this sense of healing, the possibility of healing, the trusting of healing, of wholeness—that there's something here within us that is a kind of a greater power than what we have full agency over. That's different than what we have control over or can make happen or do. Something that we no longer need to resist and hold back from. Something quite significant that, in my language, is a greater power within us that is not appropriated to our identity, to that part of it that we create a self and build up a sense of self.

And it's not so strange what I'm saying. As is often pointed out, it's kind of like the natural great power of physical healing from a cut. We can cut ourselves, and it's physiologically a fairly complicated, multifaceted event for the body to heal itself. But if we can let it get out of the way of the healing, keep the wound clean, keep it from getting dirty, not pick the scab, the body has a way of healing up to a certain point.

I still have on the back of my hand the remnants, the leftover, of a cut that I think is fully healed as far as healing is concerned. But I still have the scar. I appreciate the scar that's left. It reminds me of my fragility, my mortality, by all kinds of things. That's part of the wholeness, to include the remnant of what's there. It's not necessarily that we have nothing left over psychologically, emotionally, physically from how we get healed. But there is this power within, this force, this ability, this capacity within that I can't say it's "mine" in the sense where I usually place where I identify "me" as the agent, me as the experiencer, me as the doer, me as something. And it's so lovely to relax and trust this deeper process.

I still have a role to support that, but it's a role mostly of non-interference. Don't interfere with the healing that goes on. And this is also true in the heart emotionally; it's true in the mind. We have a phenomenal system—our whole psychophysical system is kind of maybe built to move towards balance, to homeostasis, to wholeness. And we are a very sophisticated system within us that none of us can fully understand.

So at some point in Dharma practice, to move towards wholeness or to freedom or to peace or to not being divided requires a radical kind of non-interference. A radical trust and allowing for this natural maturity, the natural healing that our system is capable of. But if we're always riding close like a kid in the backseat saying "Are we there yet? Are we there yet?", we're always there kind of pushing and trying to make it happen or scratching the scab, this natural process cannot happen.

And so to come into some deeper trust that allows some deeper movements within us to begin unfolding and opening and coming into a kind of wholeness. And part of that process is healing, a personal healing, healing within ourselves. And of course the reconciliation with others is not going to be independent from our healing in ourselves in the way I'm using these words. They're not separate but there is a whole process of self-healing that goes on.

And for many people when they come to Dharma practice in the beginning, I think a lot of what's happening is healing. Or if you don't like the word healing or it's not quite right for what your process is, coming into a wholeness. And to some degree it's aided by a certain humility. Not the humility of belittling oneself or being submissive or anything, but the humility of not feeling that we know everything, we're in charge of everything, we can do everything ourselves and kind of just barrel ahead and make everything right. There is a humility that trusts and allows for that we don't know it all, we're not the one who's the doer and the maker of it all. We have to allow some other process to unfold, make room for it. And that allowing then just that itself heals some of the divisions that are formed by excessive self-assertion, self-deprecation. Humility is not self-criticism or diminishing yourself, it actually heals that as well. We come into a simplicity of being.

And from that simplicity of being, from that kind of simple maybe humble wholeness or healing, then when we can still be agents in our life, we can still do things, we can still live with dignity and value and purpose and meaning, but it comes from a very different place. It rises within us without stress, without strain, without creating further division either socially or personally.

So this personal healing—and I remember Stephen Levine², a wonderful teacher from many years ago, made the distinction for me, maybe other people have done it, between curing and healing. And he worked a lot with people who were dying and he was kind of the one of the pioneers of the hospice movement in working with death and dying. He aided and supported people in their last days of their life to be healed in a psychological, emotional, spiritual way that didn't cure them of their illness. So didn't bring them back into physical health but still helped them with profound movement towards healing. And it was one of the greatest things we can do for someone as they're dying or we can do for ourselves if we're dying is to come into that wholeness, that personal healing. It is possible. And it's not the same thing as having a cure.

So what is your experience of personal healing? Or if you prefer, coming into wholeness? Or if you prefer, rather than these positive formulations, becoming undivided? And how does that work for you and how do you move into it? And is there space in your life to trust it more, to allow for it more to happen? It takes time and we have to give ourselves time. I like to call it sacred time for this process to unfold within us.

So those are the Ten Reflections, and I'm delighted to have shared it with you.

And if you want more of this, then in the fall I'm going to do a program through the Sati Center³ that is kind of adapting some of the things that we do in the chaplaincy programs I teach. That presents it kind of to a lay audience or to people who are not being trained to be chaplains but some of the fundamentals of spiritual care. And one of the things we'll go through over the year is these ten themes we did this last two weeks. So that's on the Sati Center website if you're interested.

And then for the next three weeks I won't be here. And teaching a retreat for the next two weeks and going on a pilgrimage, Buddhist pilgrimage the following week. And so next week Shelly Graf will come, a wonderful teacher from Santa Barbara. And then May Elliot will come. And I don't think we have a teacher yet for the third week but you'll be in good hands.

So thank you very very very much and I appreciate very much that I had this opportunity to reflect on these themes with you.