This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation with Gil Fronsdal (4 of 4). It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Wednesday Evening Introduction to Meditation - with Wisdom - Gil Fronsdal

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

Wednesday Evening Introduction to Meditation - with Wisdom

Q&A

Good evening everyone. Welcome. Maybe as we did last week, if you have any questions you want to ask, this might be a good time while people might still be coming in. We'll start officially in a little bit. Do you have any questions about what I taught last week or about your meditation? Up here on the stage, yeah. If you can use the mic, please.

Speaker 2: Can you hear me? One of the things that I don't seem to have the ability to do is to be able to observe my thoughts. I guess the thoughts or the emotions maybe are so strong that I just hop on that train and I don't realize it till I've kind of come off the train. I was wondering if you had suggestions.

Gil: Can you hold it closer because my hearing's not so good, so I really have to get the mic close.

Speaker 2: Yeah, so I'm not able to observe my thoughts. I guess maybe I'm just so attached to them and I was wondering if you had any suggestions.

Gil: Yeah, I don't know what to say. I wouldn't worry about it, but do you notice when you're lost in thought?

Speaker 2: I notice afterwards. After I've kind of got off the train I can say, "Okay."

Gil: How long do you spend on the train?

Speaker 2: It could be 30 seconds, it could be two minutes, could be five minutes.

Gil: So one way to deal with it is just be content with that. Slowly, what you're doing is trying to develop your mindfulness. So when you come to, after however long it is, just exercise the muscle of mindfulness and try to be present for a while to be with what's going on. Slowly over time, you'll settle, you relax, and your ability to be mindful gets stronger. At some point, it'll be time for you to see your thoughts as they occur, and you won't get pulled into them so quickly. That's one thing you could do. But is there any time during the day where you're self-reflective about the fact that you're thinking? Like, do you ever say, "I have to think about a shopping list now"?

Speaker 2: Yes, so I mean, there could be lesser things or it could be more serious stuff. You know, my mom died a few years ago, so a whole bunch of stuff was happening with the estates. But it could be as simple as, yeah, did I pay my water bill or something like that.

Gil: So find something which you can think about that you can watch also, that you can stay mindful as you're thinking and see what you can learn about yourself. Probably pick one that's weaker, so to speak. Maybe not in meditation, but as you go about your day and you have one of those weaker ones and you're aware that you're thinking, just start paying attention to some of the different characteristics of your thinking, like we did last week. Slowly you'll become more familiar, and maybe then you won't be pulled in so quickly.

The other thing about thinking is that the more easily we get caught in thought, the more likely there's tension somewhere in our system, in our body, in our mind. So when you finally catch yourself being lost in thought, one of the things to do at that point is check in: "Where am I tense?" Because people who notice they're thinking and they just come back to their breathing without doing anything else, the conditions for thinking are still there. So you have to relax. See if you can just take a deep breath and just relax and see what can be relaxed. That could be the body, it could be the thinking muscle itself, the kind of tension around in the mind where you're thinking. Because tension is kind of like a toothpaste tube. I don't know if any of you have had the experience that if you're squeezing a toothpaste tube, you could be wiping it off from the opening trying to get it away, and it'll keep coming out. You have to stop squeezing. So I'm not trying to be disrespectful of your thinking, but if there's a lot of tension in our system, it's kind of like the toothpaste tube is being squeezed. You have to stop squeezing. So don't just let go of your thoughts and come back; spend some time seeing where the tension is and see if you can soften a little bit. Don't be too ambitious about relaxing, but it is really helpful to relax.

Someone else?

Speaker 3: I found that the labeling technique that you mentioned—when my mind is racing, every so often it pops up and I say, "Okay, that is that," and then go again on the train. So that was helping to slowly kind of see.

Gil: Fantastic. The labeling, for some people, is extremely helpful, and that also might help you with your thinking. If you have a relaxed, ongoing rhythm of just labeling your experience—"in-breath, out-breath, sound, itch, in-breath, out-breath, belly tight, feeling tightness, breathing in, breathing out, thinking"—if you have that regular habit, you're using thinking to keep you present rather than using your thinking to take you away. An idle mind sometimes wants to do something, and so sometimes you want to give the thinking mind something to do, and the labeling gives it something to do. It's helping you out rather than taking you away. Some people complain about labeling because it just makes the mind more busy, they think. However, it's actually better than the alternative, which is getting lost in thought over and over again. Also, because if you have a regular, kind of gentle rhythm of noting, you're more likely to notice if you get lost in thought, because you stop labeling. So I'm glad you brought it up.

Speaker 4: Good evening. I remember the first class you mentioned that there was a reason for your ordering of the breath, body, emotion, thought. I was wondering if you could remind us what that is. And then I seem to recall there was something about it that was maybe culturally based, and I was wondering if you would have a different order if you were teaching the class in a different part of the world.

Gil: Well, I think one of the cultural things that has developed in Buddhism in the United States is putting much more emphasis on emotions. A very famous Westerner who's a very senior monk in Thailand now—he's a monk, Ajahn Sumedho¹, and he's almost retired now—but he's fluent in Thai and also teaches a lot in English, and he says he teaches differently for the two communities. For the Thais, they don't have the same enculturation around Freud and Jung and Western psychology that is part and parcel of the common culture in the United States. It's so common here in the United States that people don't even know where it comes from; it's just part of life, it's just obvious, isn't it? But we use language, we use thoughts, we use orientations that are very much only 100 years old and have crept into our culture in the West. They don't have that in Thailand. So here, Ajahn Sumedho will talk about psychology, emotions, acceptance—all these things that have to do with psychology. He would never do that in Thailand. To Thais, that wouldn't compute; it wouldn't work.

So there are cultural differences that we take into account. In fact, it's hard to find in some Indian languages a nice, clean word for the English word "emotion." It's even more so in Pali², the ancient language. We've organized the human pie—we all have the same pie, we're all humans—but we cut the pie pieces in different sizes or different ways. We've made this cut in the pie and called it "emotions"; they cut it a little bit differently and called it something else. So those are kind of cultural differences.

The logic of what I did is that thinking is hard. For many people, it's one of the biggest obstacles to being present because we get pulled into thought. If you start with being mindful of thinking, it's going to be thinking about thinking. It's not really going to be mindfulness. It's a lot easier to be mindful of thinking if you have some mindfulness of your emotions, because a lot of thoughts, especially the ones that drive us or catch us, have an emotional base. The emotions are sometimes the factory; sometimes it's the other way around. But generically, it's easier. Then emotions are always present-moment phenomena. Thoughts could be about the past and the future, and we get pulled out of the present. So it's easier to be with thinking if we're connected to the emotions.

It's easier to be with emotions if you're connected to the body. The body creates a container, a context, a safety of grounding to be with emotions. That is hard to do for some people. Some emotions are just so difficult; if you just become aware of your emotions, some people have panic attacks or something. But if you have the body as a foundation, it's easier grounding. And it's easier to ground yourself in your body if you start with breathing. Breathing stabilizes; for some people, it gets you out of your head enough so it's easier to be with your body.

What I've seen in the recent generation of Vipassana³ teachers, like what I'm teaching here, is that we have much more diversity now among the teaching community. My generation were basically white, privileged people, and so they had a particular way in which they organized or had to deal with the world. With a newer generation of teachers who come from very diverse populations, some really disadvantaged populations in this culture where there's been a lot of trauma, they find that it's much better to start with the body than with breathing. In a sense, that's a cultural difference as well. For a certain population, I'm not as trauma-sensitive in my teachings as they are, and that's true. I have to navigate all these different issues. There are cultures within our culture, right? How do we manage with it all?

Speaker 5: Hi Gil. Like everyone else, I'm suffering through all these uncontrolled thoughts entering my mind when I'm meditating, and it comes and goes, etc. But I wanted to say that since the pandemic I've been attending the morning sessions pretty much every day that it's on. I'm finding over the past three years I feel more settled. I don't know how; my language has changed. I refrain from saying some of the things I used to say or the way I said them before. I'm not sure if it's wisdom or whatever, but I see it when I digress or move away from what I think I should be doing. I see it right away. Perhaps before I was oblivious to it. So it does work. I have no idea how, but it does work. Yes, and that's all I had to say.

Gil: Great, thank you. I love hearing that, that's a nice testimonial. It does work, and it's a slow process. Slowly we begin to be able to monitor, to see what's happening as it's happening, and we have more choice. We have a choice with the words we use and the activities we do because we see it coming, we see ourselves in the middle of it, and there's much more awareness. Also, the meditation provides a different reference point for what it means to be alive. You discover that you can be alive and feel at ease, you can be alive and feel comfortable in your skin. You can be alive and feel a kind of ethical sensitivity. That's one of the reasons it's so good to be connected to the body.

The body is kind of an ethical antenna. It picks up and understands when something is ethically off; it'll understand it in yourself. It's the tensions, the yuckiness, very subtle. But if you're lost in thought all the time, or filled with greed and hatred all the time, you don't have that subtle tuning in to the antenna that's here. If you slow down, quiet down, you heighten sensitivity, and one of the consequences of that is a heightened wanting to live an ethical life. It's quite inspiring to see it in people as they get into this practice. You kind of described that.

Speaker 5: I feel there's someone next to me watching everything I do. And it's myself. But in a way, you know, in private you may think or do something, but not in the presence of others.

Gil: Very nice. "I feel there's somebody right next to me." Fantastic. This heightened ethical sensitivity is part of what happens through this practice, and you're not even asking for it. Some of you are going to run away now. [Laughter]

One of the more common ethical reports that people come to me about is from people who work in a business environment where people hang out at the coffee machine or at snack time talking about things. They say, "You know, the medium for talking at work is gossip, but I don't want to gossip anymore. It doesn't feel good. But now it's really hard to be social with people. I feel like I'm disconnected or I'm not part of the gang. It's kind of awkward because that's how people connect, but it just feels wrong to do it." And then there are people who find out that the work they do... I remember one person who said that the company he worked with got a commission to make parts for fighter jets, and he went to his boss and said, "You know, I can't do that. Can I be assigned to something else?" And so he was.

It wasn't that anybody taught them to be ethical; it's just this ethical intent develops inside. What I'd like to say is that that antenna is you already. It's not like anybody's imposing anything on you. That capacity to feel and sense in a deeper ethical way is ever-present in you, just mostly you're distracted from it, too busy to notice. For me, that's very inspiring. I don't know what some of you think about that. I never said this in an intro class, though I have said sometimes that we could just call this a five-week introduction to ethics, but then no one would come.

Guided Meditation

Okay, so let's get ethical. Let's meditate.

What I'll do is a guided mindfulness exercise. It is not exactly how you should meditate—you could if you want—but it's to give you a direct experience of a way that mindfulness can work. The way that we teach it here is, as I've said, the default is to cultivate mindfulness, stability, steadiness, and continuity of attention on the breathing. But if anything happens that is pulling on your attention... If it's just a sound in the room and it doesn't pull you away from the breathing, don't worry about it. But if a sound is strong enough that it starts pulling you away, then follow your attention. Follow where your awareness is drawn and be aware, note with mental labeling what that is that has your attention. Be mindful of that for a while, and then when that's no longer compelling, come back to your breathing. That could be the body, it could be emotions, it could be thinking, it could be sounds in the room. There are a lot of different things it could be, but we're always going back to the center.

In this exercise, we're going to alternate between being with the breathing and then going out to these three other areas that I've taught you about today, and then I'll add one more area to that. So that's what we'll be doing.

Assume a meditation posture. If it's the end of the day and you feel really tired, you might feel like relaxing back. I would suggest that for this time, you sit up straighter so there's a little bit more energy coming out of your body into your mind. If you're tense and agitated from a difficult day, then you might want to settle back and rest a little bit more in the backrest.

Gently closing your eyes, or if you keep them half open, having them pointed down towards the floor. To transition into the meditation, you could take a few long, slow, deep breaths. Deep enough, maybe three-quarters full, without strain, but full enough that you feel your insides, your rib cage expand, stretch, and then relax on the exhale. With a longer relaxation, a long exhale than usual, just to allow more settling in the shoulders, the arms, maybe the belly.

Then let your breathing return to normal. Continue for a few breaths to see if there are more places in your body that you can relax, soften. This relaxing of the body is also a way of becoming more sensitive to the body, attuned to your body.

You might also see if in the mind, the thinking mind, is there any tension, pressure, contraction associated with thinking? And if there is, as you exhale, soften the thinking mind as if it's a muscle. Relaxing the thinking muscle.

Then center yourself on your breathing. Your body, your torso has its own experience of breathing. Follow that experience as you breathe in and breathing out.

Now switch your attention from breathing to the most compelling sensation in your body. It doesn't have to be that strong, but whatever it might be. The body has its own experience of that place, of those sensations. Notice how the body is experiencing this bodily sensation. Letting your awareness be close in or letting your awareness rest in this place in your body while you feel it, receive the sensations. For a few moments, allow this bodily sensation to be there as if it has full permission. It's okay, and you accompany it. You're present with it.

Then return to the breathing. Maybe there's some way that you can center yourself on the breathing. The body breathing.

Then, in a relaxed way, notice the predominant emotion, mood, or mind state, inner state that you have. It doesn't have to be easily identified as an emotion, but some state that you have. Allow it to be there for these few moments of mindfulness as if it's never had a chance to be in the sun, the sun of awareness. Let it be there and just notice it, feel it. Feel how it is experienced in the body. See if you can experience your emotional state, mood, state of mind without any stories connected to it, without adding any meaning to it. Just let it be what it is.

Then return to your breathing. If it helps you, you might take a slightly stronger, fuller in-breath to reconnect.

Continuing now for a three-breath journey, just give yourself over to three breaths.

Now switch your attention to your thinking, whether it's strong or weak, whether it fades away if you notice it. Notice your thinking, and see if you can notice how you're thinking without thinking more. A very simple matter of fact. If there's an emotion connected to it, be aware of that. If there are body sensations connected to it, include awareness of that.

Then return to your breathing. Reestablishing yourself on the body breathing.

Then one more shift of attention. Now become more aware of how you're mindful. As you're aware of breathing or anything else, how would you characterize how you're aware? Is there any strain involved? Expectation? Is there any hesitation or reluctance? Or lack of commitment?

And then come back to your breathing. So we'll continue for just a few more minutes, maybe with the breathing at the center, but as you need to, become aware of whatever pulls your attention, and then return to the breathing.

And then to end this sitting, you can take some long, slow, deep breaths, feeling the contact of your body against whatever surface you're connected to. And when you're ready, you can open your eyes.

Reflections

This is a particular way of doing mindfulness meditation. There are many different ways it's taught. I just want to say that for some people what works best is to just stay with what I taught the first evening: mindfulness of breathing, and don't make it any more complicated than that. If all you did was every time you wandered off, you came back to your breathing, stayed with it, and developed stability in your breathing, it can be phenomenal. The Buddhist teacher that I spent time with in Japan said that everything you need to know about Buddhism will be discovered through your breathing. Breathing is considered really great, so if you want to keep it really simple, that's one opportunity for you.

One of the reasons why we expand it outwards to include the body, emotions, and thinking, and then other things as we go along, is that then more of our life comes under the purview of our attention and awareness. The more we can hold everything in awareness, it tends to move our whole life towards health. It tends to move to freedom, to healing, to all kinds of good things. We learn how to be present in life for our emotions, for our thinking, for different parts of our life, and there will be a time when it's really useful to have that skill.

When I was a Zen student, I was pretty good at the breath meditation thing, but I had no idea how to be mindful of my anger. In fact, I didn't even know I was angry. People would tell me, "Gil, you're so angry," and I said, "Really?" There was no teaching about how to notice your emotions and be mindful of them, and so they were just there operating in the background, kind of subconsciously, and having their effect and influence on me. Same thing with thinking.

To be able to have a practice that encompasses everything—Buddhism doesn't say this explicitly—your awareness becomes sacred. It's so special to have an awareness where nothing is left out. Nothing is outside of it, nothing is not acceptable for awareness to hold. You enter into almost like a different universe if everything can be held in awareness. So we're learning how to do that in this practice. How everything has a place in awareness. How everything we can include and be present for.

The big "aha" moment for me when I was practicing in Asia was when I was learning how to be mindful, learning just the simple act of mindfulness, there was a kind of freedom that could be found there. Freedom from entanglement, freedom from being for and against, a variety of kinds of freedom. I had this moment where I was literally stopped in my tracks, and I realized that if I can be mindful of anything that's an experience—anything that is a direct experience I'm having in the moment—in theory, I could be free in relationship to everything. I got so happy that that kind of freedom is possible in this world, and it comes from being mindful, being present for experience.

We're trying to teach you here at IMC a way of bringing in or encompassing your whole life in the scope of mindfulness, of awareness. One of the things that includes, then, is not just meditation, but bringing the practice into daily life. One of the great rewards I get from teaching this is when people come, meditating for a little while, and they say, "This is fine and good, this meditation, but how do I bring this into my life? How do I bring more mindfulness into my daily life, my activities, or what I do?"

The line between you in meditation and you outside of meditation is an arbitrary line. This deeper ethical sensitivity, deeper sense of peace or calm, deeper intimacy with yourself, deeper sense of not being caught, seeing more choice in what you're doing—when you meditate, all these good things happen in mindfulness. Why should you only do it while you're meditating? Why not the rest of your life? That was my big question that brought me to live at a Buddhist monastery. I wasn't so much interested exactly in the monastery; I was interested in how to expand what was happening in meditation into talking with people, working, doing the different things that I do.

A very important part of this practice, or potential in this practice, is to start bringing mindfulness into daily life activities rather than being distracted. We live in a distracting culture. People who get paid a lot of money to keep you distracted or to grab your attention and keep it going to get more clicks on your device. People's minds are jumping around here and there, and in doing that, they're not being mindful. They're not centered and settled on their experience here and now.

To bring this mindfulness into daily life is helped a lot by finding things you can do where you just do that one thing. Don't multitask. If you're at home and cooking, just cook. Don't have the radio on, or podcasts. Don't have music. Don't be on the phone. Don't read the news on your tablet. Just be cooking. As you're chopping a carrot, just be there like you would be just with your breathing in meditation. Just be with the carrot and chopping the carrot. Put your attention in your hands, have your eyes looking at what you're doing, and watch your mind. If your mind wanders off thinking about something else, or complaining, "This is boring," come back. "No, there's more, I have a lot to do, I have to multitask otherwise I can't do all these things." Come back. It's just you and the carrot.

Slowly you'll learn something about getting concentrated. You'll reclaim your mind that you've lost to distractions, and you'll feel how delicious it is to be present for an activity. Washing your dishes, just do the dishes with both hands. You don't have to do this, of course, but if you want to start learning how to bring mindfulness into your daily life, you have to train, you have to practice it and develop that capacity.

Then start expanding where you do it. What I learned from Zen—a little trick from Zen—was every time I walk through a door frame, you're walking into a new place. Pay attention. Be mindful of the place you're walking into. It has been a fantastic thing to do. I'm certainly capable of doing very important things, like thinking about how I'm going to teach mindfulness to you, and I just walk from one room in my house to another, caught up in that. But that's not a good life either. It's good to be present for the life you're living. It might seem boring, it might seem you're not getting a lot of excitement in your life, but it's like a transition time, like withdrawing from caffeine to switch over to being present, until being present is delicious. It's deeply satisfying. You feel a sense of integrity or wholeness or completeness or contentment with whatever you're doing because you're present for it in a good way.

When you do that, that becomes a vantage point for wisdom. One of the qualities that mindfulness is leading to is wisdom, to understand better what we do in our lives. Once you have some subtleness, some stability, some continuity of mindfulness, that becomes a highlight when you start losing it. An analogy that's given is that if you have a napkin or a towel that's really dirty, full of stains, you and no one else might notice one more stain. But if you clean it and bleach it, and there are no stains, then you notice the dirt spot that comes, and then you clean it or do something. It turns out the same thing is true with our mind. If our mind is fragmented, busy, running around doing too many things, distracted by distractions, then you don't see what you're doing. One more mean word—you don't even know you've been mean to someone because you're mean all the time. But when you settle down and become calm, you see the meanness coming. "Oh look, there it is. Oh wow, that's a big deal. I didn't know I did it so much." We start seeing how this works.

I want to do a demonstration of what you might see about how your mind works when you are settled enough and mindful enough to see. I hope that this is an analogy you apply to yourself in some way. It's a kind of show-and-tell.

Here we have a flower. There's a famous story in Zen that once upon a time the Buddha had an assembly of people listening to him, ready for him to give a Dharma talk, a sermon, and he didn't say anything. But he lifted up a single flower like this. Most people were perplexed, but one of his disciples smiled, and he knew that that disciple understood it. We're supposed to figure out what the meaning of the story is, but this idea of holding up a flower... Many people think a flower is beautiful. A flower is a flower, and with one flower like this, we have what in Buddhism is called the "suchness" of the flower. The flower is just being the flower. It doesn't even use the word "flower" to describe itself. It just is. The "isness" of the flower. It's content being itself, happy.

But now look what happens. Now I'm holding up two flowers, and now we can say something about the first flower we couldn't say before. We can say that this flower in my left hand is the big flower, and this is the small flower. Big, small. Okay, that's pretty straightforward. This is the big one, right? I'm going to do a sleight of hand, and you're going to see how the magic works, and some of the magic is your mind. This was the big flower, right? It's kind of wilted, but now this is the big flower, and the big flower has become the smaller flower. You see that? Small flower, big flower. Wait a minute, big flower, small flower, what is it? It's a flower. The isness of the flower.

But the human mind can compare, and some things only exist in the comparison. Big and small only exist in the mind that compares. It's not inherent in the flower. A lot of human suffering comes from comparisons one way or the other. We compare ourselves to others, to ourselves in the past or in the future, ideals, and all kinds of things. As we get quieter and mindfulness gets stronger, we start seeing the mind doing this. We see the birth of a comparison. And because we see it in mindfulness, we have a choice. "Do we believe it? Is this a useful comparison?" If I want to ask someone to go get the big flower, then that's useful. "Go get the ugly flower, or get the beautiful flower for me." "Bring me the beautiful person... no, no, bring me the ugly person." I mean, isn't that painful that we live in a world like that? So we do a lot of comparisons.

I did a lot of it when I was younger. My self-worth was tied to all kinds of things about my body. I grew up in the hippie times, so I used to sit in school pulling my hair to make it grow faster, because that's what it took. I was in junior high school when they started bleaching blue jeans, and some people would actually put them on the road for cars to drive over. Brand new, right? Or put them through the washing machine 10 or 12 times to really make them look old, and they would tear them. This kind of happened over the course of a summer when I was away in Europe, and I came back and my hair was shorter, my blue jeans were new, and this was a disaster. I was no longer acceptable. Whereas when I lived in Italy for that summer, I had longer hair than any of the Italian boys, so I was cool. All I had to do is fly over the Atlantic and come back to the United States and I was no longer cool, right? Big flower, small flower. Cool boy, not cool boy. It's ridiculous when you describe it that way, but we do this kind of thing all day long.

Part of the wisdom of this practice is having the foundation, the subtleness, the clarity that we can see this operating. We can see it in ourselves, we can see it in other people. It's tragic what happens in our society around these kinds of things. To see it in ourselves and see it clearly enough that we don't buy into it. We see it for what it is before we get hooked, before it drives us, evokes emotions and tensions. This is an example of the wisdom that can arise from the practice because we see what goes on in the mind.

Mindfulness of thinking is not just an abstract thing; it has tremendous consequence and application as we go about our life. Slowly cultivate the greater and greater capacity for mindfulness. In terms of bringing it into daily life, it's invaluable to meditate every day, or six days a week. The trick about that is to sit as long as your life allows you to sit every day. If you say, "I'm going to sit for 45 minutes," but your life doesn't allow for that, then you get discouraged and you give it up. If you can only do 10 minutes, do 10 minutes. If you can't do it anyway, find out what's going on. Find out what emotions, what beliefs, what feelings, what restlessness, what anxiety is operating that you can't take 10 minutes to meditate. You'll learn a lot about yourself that you won't learn if you just give in to all those things.

Sitting every day for 10 minutes, what might happen to you is that you might find that 10 minutes after a while feels too short. You might start seeing that it makes a difference in your daily life. You might find that you're kinder, more relaxed, more paced in what you do. Some people actually say that they meditate regularly and they don't really see the effect, and then they stop. "Oh boy, that was a hard day. I got so much more agitated, so much more anxious, so much more speeded up."

If you every day for a short period of time start bringing mindfulness into daily life... I don't know how it is so much nowadays, but there was a time where I could feel that if my telephone rang, there was some inner drive that it was essential to answer the phone as quickly as possible. No one ever told me that, but I felt like it was urgent. I learned you don't have to do that. Most people don't hang up after two rings. I found that I used that as a mindfulness bell. I would just check in with myself, breathe, relax, and maybe the fourth or the fifth ring—not so long—but just that little bit of time to be connected with myself, change my posture, relax. I was in so much better shape to answer the phone. I had much better conversations because I took that time.

There are a lot of these things you can do through the day. The more you do it, the wiser you'll become, meaning the more clarity you'll have. You'll see more clearly what you're actually doing. You'll see the effect that desires and ill will have, and you'll say, "Wait a minute, this doesn't make any sense." I knew someone here at IMC who had resentment for an ex-partner for, I think, seven years. Then one day she was being mindful about her experience of resentment and she said, "Wait a minute, I'm harming myself more than him." And then she gave up her resentment.

Here's another teaching story that comes from Buddhism. It has to do with how you trap monkeys in India. You take a coconut and you cut a slit in it and carve out a little bit the inside, and you put some candy inside, because apparently monkeys like sweets. The cut is a slot, so in order for the monkey to get its hand into the slot, it has to have its hand flat, and it can get in. But in order to grab the candy, it makes a little bit of a fist, and once it's a fist, it can't get it out of that slot. But it's so greedy, it's not going to let go, and so the hunter just comes and picks it up, because the coconut is attached with a rope to a tree so it can't go anywhere. The monkey was so consumed by its greed it doesn't see the dangerous position it was putting itself in.

If the monkey had been mindful, he would have felt the problems of having this fist that can't get out, and then he would let go and pull his hand out. We can feel that for ourselves. We can feel the effect of greed, how it makes us impatient, how it leads to anger, how it leads to compulsive activity that ends up harming us. We can then ask, "Where's the grasping? Where are we fisted up? Where are we caught?" Because we know how to bring mindfulness to our experience, we can feel it. The fist in our body. We can feel where the tension is in our body. We might feel the emotions. The desire, the greed that we might have for something might have deep roots inside. It might be we feel really insecure and afraid and we think, "If I can have that, then I'll be safe." It's fascinating to understand those deeper roots and bring mindfulness to that. You start noticing the beliefs around what you're trying to grasp. "If I have this, people will love me. If I could have this, then I'll be a success and I'll have high status. If I can have this, then I'll have the pleasure that will make everything right."

To live a life where you see all these things so you can be wiser. To live a life where you see them and you know from your direct experience something better. You know it's better not to grasp, it's better not to be caught in those comparisons, it's better to be settled. There's a feeling of wholeness, feeling of contentment, feeling of peace, feeling of well-being that we can carry with us. It's better than a lot of other things. We do have a healthy comparison. There's a place for comparisons. "Oh, look at that, if I spend my day pursuing everything that I want—more, more, more—that doesn't feel as good as a day where I live contented and peaceful and at home here. Settled. The end of the day, I fall asleep. In the greedy way, I'm still spinning."

Many years ago, when I was in my early 20s, I loved bookstores, and there were lots of them. I did a lot of reading. But after a while, I realized when I went to bookstores, I always was really exhausted and tired when I left. "Why am I so tired?" And then I realized at some point what it was. I had almost no money, so I couldn't buy any of the books that I saw, but I wanted a lot of the books. "I want that one, I want that one, I want that one." I was just consumed by greed, wanting, wanting, wanting. To spend an hour in a bookstore only wanting is exhausting, and that's what tired me out. When I realized that, I still went into bookstores, but then I just chilled. I just roamed around, approached the bookstore in a very different way so I wouldn't get exhausted.

This is another example of wisdom operating, understanding the consequences, understanding what's better for us and what's worse for us, and having a clearer reference point. For some people, it's unimaginable the degree of peace and happiness we're capable of experiencing. The feeling of feeling fulfilled, feeling happy with ourselves for no reason at all, just because we're alive in this beautiful way. Our desires don't have to be fulfilled for us to be settled and happy. You can just sit and meditate and feel a greater degree of peace than maybe you feel any other time.

The beautiful thing that happens with this practice is that your inner sense of well-being inside becomes less and less dependent on what's happening in the world. You're no longer a victim where your well-being is influenced by whoever comes along and praises you or blames you⁴. Then you're kind of at their whim. But if you carry your own confidence and well-being and happiness that doesn't depend on what people think about you, then you're not so caught in that world. Let them think what they do. That's not dependent on having the latest and greatest device that's out there. That happiness only lasts for an hour after you get the device. But the happiness of this inner connection that we can get with ourselves, that can last for a long time.

Q&A (Continued)

Now it's your turn. Do you have any questions now about any of this and what I said today and what's happened here, or about these weeks we've been together?

Speaker 6: This is maybe kind of a trivial thing, but I think of some of the practice from kind of a scientific or curious point of view. Like with distractions, when you were talking about doing one thing at a time, I have habits of multitasking, and so I will just lately I've been trying the habit of just eating and not reading. I can talk, but I just eat, and seeing what that's like. So I guess this is more of a comment than a question, that I'm just approaching some parts of the practice from that sort of practical "let's just try it, see what happens" point of view.

Gil: I love it. That's the spirit of this practice. That's how we become our own teacher in this practice: by trial and error, experimenting, trying things out, seeing what we learn. That's definitely the way to go, and that's even true in meditation. There's a little bit of trying things out, like today, "I'm just going to stay more with my breath, what's that like?" And then noticing how hard it is, like when I start, I'm like, "Oh, the newspaper's over there, I could read." No, don't read. Exactly. So I find that very gratifying for me to know that you're approaching it that way with experimentation and learning. That's the way to become wise. Thank you.

Speaker 7: It's more of a comment, just appreciating something that you were just talking about. I found the idea really interesting of trying to understand why we want the things we want. Because you know, I'm aware that there's this kind of constant engine of desire. I don't think I'm alone, and we live in a very materialistic society. So I think the next step after recognizing that you have non-stop desires is actually looking underneath and asking yourself what the root of it is. For some reason that never occurred to me before, but I really like the idea a lot.

Gil: That's fantastic. There are a number of ways to get to the roots under the surface to see what's going on. I mean, a person could go for a walk and think about it, reflect on it and analyze in a more intellectual way. People go to therapy for that kind of purpose and find out the historical roots of these things. In the mindfulness practice, it's one approach out of many approaches, and I'm not saying this is the best approach or the right approach, but to give you the full power in a possible way that mindfulness works: we're not thinking our way, we're not analyzing, we're actually being very simple.

We would bring careful attention to the experience of desire. Get to know how it feels in the body, how it feels emotionally, what's happening in the thinking mind, what's happening even in the breathing. You start seeing what's going on. Then at some point, things begin kind of clearing up or breaking open a little bit, and then what gets revealed, not through analysis, not by figuring anything out... "Oh, underneath that desire there's anxiety, or anxiety is the root of it." It could be something else.

The point being, we're not trying to go below the surface in this practice. We're trying to be with what's obvious in such a way that whatever needs to be revealed will show itself to us. We don't have an agenda in the moment. In the bigger picture we do have the agenda that "Yeah, I really want to get to the root of this, and Gil says all I have to do is just stay really present and then it'll come. Okay, so I'm going to be present without an agenda." Just be present for the obvious. The hallmark of this kind of mindfulness is just to be present for what's obvious, and then what's obvious unfolds and changes as you stay and be present. Over time, you get through the layers and the depth.

Speaker 8: I've been practicing with trying to stay present with really strong, unpleasant, difficult emotions when they arise, and sometimes it's really tricky to do. Especially like with anger, there's a heat to it and it's tough to stay with it. I appreciated some things that you said in the last number of sessions that have been helpful for this, things like... I love the analogy of not looking a cat right in the eyes, just kind of coming up alongside it and waiting for it or something like that. I just wanted to take the opportunity to ask if you have any other suggestions or guidance for how to be able to stay present with really big emotions or tough emotions.

Gil: There's a lot to be said, but like with this really strong anger, a nice thing to do is not meditate with it, but maybe go for a long walk and give freedom to the anger, give freedom to your thinking, but be present. There's something about walking, the rhythm of walking, for me at least, that keeps me from getting stuck in my thoughts, stuck in whatever is happening. I'm paying attention, but I'm also giving it freedom. I'm not trying to stop it, I'm just letting it run. It's easier to be present for it that way sometimes than it is sitting still. The walking helps. That might be a good way to practice mindfulness while walking; bit by bit you start breaking it open.

The other thing to do is sometimes with strong emotions like anger, again, sometimes it's helpful to just let the thinking run. Don't try to stop the thinking, because maybe that's even needed, who knows. With anger, some powerful process is going on, we don't even know what's going on. In this practice we want to be respectful of all emotions, even anger. But what I found really helpful is to keep what I call "composting it in the body." Every time I notice that I'm thinking about my angry thoughts, feeling angry, I have enough wherewithal to be present. I feel the anger, how it's being expressed in the body, how it feels in the body. For me, that's called composting it in the body, and I keep referring it back to the body.

Every time I do that, I'm disengaging a little bit with the story, but I'm not trying to stop the story. I find that if I do that over and over again, something very different begins to happen. But I have to be very careful not to want a quick fix. I just be patient and say, "Okay, just feel it in the body. Feel it in the body." If there's grief, it can be very much the same way. Grief is more commonly recognized that the heart knows how to grieve if we get out of the way, if we allow it. The art of allowing it is to allow it without sinking into it, without participating in it, but radical allowance to grieve. You're allowed to cry all you want in this meditation as long as you sit reasonably straight. But as soon as you go, "Oh, poor me," then you're participating, and the inner processing that the heart knows how to do gets interrupted. I've known people who sat like this, from a distance they look like they're deep in meditation, not moving, and their cheeks are streaming with tears. That's fine.

Speaker 9: Just an experience I had last week that this is making me think of. So I came in here and was feeling some anger about something else, and so I was like, "Okay, you know, I'm here, let me try and be present with this." And something switched, and it was grief actually. And so I was like, "Okay, let me try and be with the grief," and when I was with the grief and not in the story about the grief, it was like it got silent actually, and it wasn't grief, it was something else, I don't know.

Gil: Fantastic. You're describing very well what can happen here. Because you weren't in the story, the story sometimes feeds the problem. The story is participating in it and feeding it, but if we can not be involved in the story, all kinds of other things have a chance to happen. That was beautiful. From my point of view, it's an example of the potential here.

Speaker 10: I just wanted to say thank you, and you spoke on Sunday about community. I'm very new to this, so I really appreciate the opportunity to meet some people that are also on the path. I think we're all kind of on our own separate paths towards self-improvement or discovery, and I just want to say thank you for this community.

Gil: Thank you very much. That's another thing in terms of learning to bring this practice more into your life and spread it out: it's actually helpful from time to time to go meditate with other people. So we're here, you're welcome to come here, or there might be other groups you can go to. There's something about the osmosis of being around other people who are doing this kind of practice. Something we learn from other people. We're mirrored by other people very differently in this kind of environment than we are in a hectic work environment. We model things for each other; we model how we behave when we're connected to ourselves in a deeper way that sometimes is hard to see in other places in this world. We can be inspired.

I know that some teenagers and kids will think that their parents are really strange because they meditate—like, weird. But then they come to a children's program here and they find out other parents meditate, and suddenly their parents are not so weird actually, now they're kind of cool. So as adults, it can be helpful also to know that you're around people who have similar values. As I said, there's this ethics antenna that we tune into in this practice, so there tends to be a higher ethical norm in this kind of environment. When you're not gossiping, you come here and you don't feel strange. It's reassuring that people understand you.

Sometimes people find it a lot easier to meditate when they're meditating in a group. Some people find it harder. For the people who it's easier, this is available. Come here whenever we have a session. We have all kinds of programs, and a lot of these programs are ways of building a practice or expanding it and developing it further and further. We have a whole series of progressive programs that you could be busy here for years, progressively developing and maturing this practice more and more. So that's another way of continuing: just hang out in a place like IMC.

Well, maybe we should end. We have five minutes. I want to thank you. I appreciate this chance; I think I said the first day, I love teaching the intro class. I find it lots of fun and interesting, and I'm always seeing what's new going to come out of my mouth. Am I going to learn something today? So this is wonderful for me to be part of this too. Thank you.

I used to teach these three times a year. I'll probably try to do it again in the fall, maybe in August. There's some talk about some other people here teaching an intro class. Tom's going to come and teach one maybe on some afternoon, like a Tuesday afternoon, maybe in the next couple of months. It'll be in the newsletter hopefully and it'll be on the calendar. Diana Clark has also been talking about wanting to do one. She's one of our teachers here, so she might incorporate it into her Monday series. She teaches every Monday. We're going to slowly start doing more here.

Some people come back repeatedly to the intro class. At first I was worried that, you know, am I not teaching well enough? But I think it's all good.

I'll end with this piece of wisdom. I don't know if I said it here. I say things in all kinds of settings. In meditation, there's only two types of people: there's beginners and experienced beginners. You can decide what you are, but either way, we're all beginners. Isn't that nice? I think that's great. So you don't have to compare yourself to the experienced ones. "They're advanced meditators." There's no advanced meditators; they're just experienced beginners.

So, well, thank you for being part of this very much. If you come back to IMC, I look forward to seeing you. May this mindfulness practice support you in your life. Thank you.

Oh, and Tom is available, Nancy is available—there's two Nancys—if you want to check in now if you have any questions for them. I'm here for a bit, so you're welcome to talk to me too. Thank you.