This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Aware with Love; Love (7) Mindful with Deep Love. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: Aware with Love; Dharmette: Love (7) Mindful with Deep Love - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on January 13, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Aware with Love

Good morning and welcome to this meditation. I'd like to begin today with a quote from the Dhammapada¹, one of the more famous quotes in Buddhism—I hope it's one of the more famous ones:

"Hate is never overcome by hate. But love alone is hate overcome. This is the ancient truth."

This call to love in contrast to hate is one of the fundamentally important issues for humanity to address in our human nature, or our human natures. One of the capacities we have as humans is to hate, and another is to love. Often those two are set in opposition. But perhaps the deeper form of love doesn't oppose them but is able to hold them all in a wise way. That is the deepest love.

When we sit and practice mindfulness, there's an opportunity here to meet ourselves and the world—to be alive with a very different focus than what we're raised to do. Rather than changing what you see in the world, in mindfulness practice, we focus on how we see. Rather than focusing on what we know, it's how we know. Rather than focusing on what we feel or what our emotions are, it's how we feel our emotions—how we take in the world, how we know anything at all, the "how" we are.

Sometimes when people hate and love, it has a lot to do with the object, trying to justify why we should hate or love something. As important as that reflection can be at times, when we do mindfulness practice, we take a whole different approach. There's a paradigm shift. As we turn into how we are—how we're aware, how we know—we look not just at the love, but how we love; not just the hate, but how we hate. What is the "how" like? Then we get a whole other set of information about ourselves, which is a source of profound wisdom.

What we begin discovering is that there are layers to how we are. There are surface layers involving reactivity, and deeper layers involving the emerging, generative qualities of just being alive. The contrast between love and hate could also be said to be between ill will and goodwill. This idea of willing—the will to survive—is such a deep instinct in human beings, as is the will to care, to nurture, and to love in a deep way where the "how" we are is nurturing.

This deep regenerative place is deeper than survival. To survive, we engage the muscles, greed, and sometimes hatred. To nurture life, we involve something deeper—a movement of goodwill and good motivation. How we find that deeper place is in the "how." How we are mindful opens the door to discovering that depth within us.

So, please assume a meditation posture. Find a posture that is right for you, one that gives you a fuller, deeper contact with your full humanity. Sit with a degree of confidence and clarity, being here with all of who you are, so there's room for the deeper movements of nurturing and caring to be present.

Gently close your eyes. One reason we close our eyes in meditation is to shift our focus from what we see to how we are—how we see, how we know, and how we're engaged in life at this moment. Sense the physicality of that "how." Shift your attention from objects of sight to the emergent sensations of the body.

Gently take a few long, slow, deep breaths, relaxing on the exhale. Sometimes exhaling longer than you would normally allows for a further relaxing of the shoulders and the belly. Then, let your breathing return to normal.

As you inhale, sense different parts of your body so that on the exhale you can soften them. Relax the face. Soften the shoulders. Feel the chest, the area of the heart, and relax there. Finally, relax the belly.

Do the same for the thinking mind. As you inhale, sense your thinking mind, letting it be the way it is. As you exhale, relax and soften the thinking mind. Let all things be.

In the middle of it all, become aware of how sensations of breathing appear in your body—in your belly, chest, or nostrils. In the same way you might let the thinking mind be quiet to listen to the faint sound of a bird in the distance, let your inner life become quieter so there's more space in awareness to sense the body breathing. Ride the waves of breathing in and breathing out.

Stay connected to the experience of breathing, letting the body reveal those sensations. Become aware of how you're aware. Notice how you are with your breathing. Can you become aware calmly? A calm knowing: in-breath as in-breath, exhale as exhale. A calm sensing. As much as you're aware of breathing, also know how you're aware.

If the "how" you are aware has a source deep within you, might there be a tenderness, a gentleness, or a softness there? Might there be some warmth or love at the source of where mindfulness arises from? Not a love dependent on the breathing, but a warmth and nurturing that just is—perhaps without a reason.

With the coming and going of the inhale and exhale like waves, there are also the waves of gentle, sweet mindfulness—awareness that has within it some quality of love, care, or goodwill that's not dependent on where that goodwill is directed.

Without trying too much, might your awareness of whatever is going on be a warmhearted awareness? Might it contain love, care, and kindness that has nothing to do with having a reason or being in love with what you're focusing on? It's deeper. It doesn't need a reason.

A warmhearted awareness is satisfying in itself. It is meaningful to include all things within it, including the parts of ourselves that might be difficult. A warmheartedness that includes and holds our ill will and our fear.

As we come to the end of this sitting, allow whatever warmheartedness you have to be released out into the world. Imagine that your heart opens to spread its goodness. With your imagination, let your goodwill travel across the land, out beyond the spot where you're sitting, into neighborhoods and communities.

Gently greet all people with kindness, love, and care, letting them know they are seen, known, and appreciated, and that there's someone who cares. And that's you.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings live at peace. May all beings be free of suffering, oppression, war, and poverty.

And may each of us, in the way that's right for us—no matter how small—contribute to the happiness, safety, peace, and freedom of others.

May all beings be happy. Thank you.

Dharmette: Love (7) Mindful with Deep Love

Welcome to this series of talks on Buddhist ideas of love as I've come to understand them. Love is one of the central aspects of Buddhist practice. Sometimes it's expressed through the idea of mettā², or loving-kindness and goodwill. Sometimes it's expressed through the idea of compassion. And sometimes it's expressed as a basic nurturing care that is perhaps simpler and deeper than both loving-kindness and compassion.

One way or the other, love is at the center of it all. Exploring it and discovering it means not assuming we know everything about love, but engaging in an ever-growing discovery of what it is. For me, it has been one of the great joys of these decades of practice to keep discovering new ways this operates and new capacities for love and care.

As I mentioned in the meditation, there's a famous verse in the Dhammapada that says: "Hate is never overcome by hate; by love alone is hate overcome. This is the ancient truth."

We know all too much and all too painfully how much hate there is in this world. We see it in this country and elsewhere—so much violence and deep disrespect. It's very easy to "hate hate" and meet it with more hate. But what is it like to overcome hate by love? Can we be motivated to discover what that ancient teaching really means?

We see so many cycles of hate that go on and on. Can there be cycles of love? Part of the reason I highlight this is that we don't want to simply condemn hate or hate the hate itself. To really transform it, we have to discover something about love and how to hold all of it with love. My assumption is that this is actually a much harder thing to do than meeting hate with hate. It requires much more from the person—more self-standing, more attention, more discipline, and more strength to do this in an effective and intelligent way.

One part of that is to understand ill will itself. A wonderful aspect of mindfulness is that we want to be present for things. Even if we can't "love" our hate, we can step towards it, feel it, and know it. We can have a non-reactive relationship to it—not to give into it, but to respect that even ill will represents something very deep and important in a human being.

To condemn it might actually create the conditions that perpetuate it. When we live with ill will, we're living in a very limited way, on the surface of our psychophysical being. Condemnation does the same thing; it limits us. There's an art to becoming present and attentive to ill will or hatred—not to give into it, but to sense the fullness of our humanity.

I understand hatred and ill will to be, in part, a survival mechanism. When we live for the purpose of survival, we live in our muscles and on the surface of experience, ready to react, fight, or run away. Sometimes hate manages to get rid of what is hated, but the cost is huge.

If we open to the fullness of ourselves and settle, it's no longer just about short-term survival. Our fear gets quiet and soft; our ill will relaxes. We begin knowing from a different place—an inner depth. This depth is also a source of survival, but it's survival in the long term.

Consider how we create healthy children: we love them. If you yell at and hit a newborn baby because it's crying, you create conditions for a distorted upbringing, violence, and fear. But if that baby is held with care, warmth, and appreciation despite the crying, it creates a very different future. This question of hate and love has everything to do with what future we want to create. Long-term survival works best if we don't create enemies and if we meet the world from a place of nourishment and nurturing. This might be less about the muscles and more about the heart or something deeper in the nervous system.

One way of finding this is to make a radical paradigm shift. We often focus on the objects of attention—what we see, know, or think about. In mindfulness, we take a backward step. We stop identifying solely with what we see or feel and become interested in how we know, how we see, and how we feel.

When we do that, we learn so much. We see how limiting it is to view the world through hatred, aversion, greed, or fear. We see the cost—the tension and stress—and how much of our full humanity is left out. Asking "how are we" in a deep way is a large part of what mindfulness is about. To repeat myself: don't be so concerned with what you're experiencing, but how you're experiencing it.

It's possible to know and feel calmly and non-reactively. It's possible for the "how" of our thinking to come from a place of love and care. This is a mature development of the kind of care we would give a newborn baby, a wounded animal, a friend in distress, or even something beautiful we want to keep clean and polished. This deep kind of loving comes from an inner warmth, clarity, and strength. It is a love, a freedom, and a generosity that doesn't need a reason. It's just the nature of the good heart to love, to be generous, and to be respectful.

In a sense, we do these things for ourselves because we've discovered that not living this way is a way of harming ourselves. Why would you make things worse for yourself by hating? The only way I can convey that to you is if you really do this practice of mindfulness—to see for yourself the effect of how you live and the attitudes you live by. You'll learn what limits you and holds you in check, and you'll learn about the depth of beauty and love you can offer the world.

This love radiates independent of whether anyone deserves it or needs it. It's our nature—this deep nurturing nature we see in new parents or in someone caring gently for an aging relative. We can live our whole lives this way; it doesn't have to be reserved for birth and death.

Hate is not overcome by hate. By love alone is it overcome. This is the ancient teaching.

Thank you.

Just a reminder: this evening at 6:00 PM, I'm having a public conversation with Mohsen Madani³. He is a wonderful proponent of what I'm teaching today. He is a Buddhist practitioner who teaches about coming from love rather than fear. His message has placed him in the public eye—he was one of the Palestinian students at Columbia University who was arrested and detained. He is a bright proponent of building bridges of care between communities that are normally challenged by each other. You can learn more and register for the Zoom link at the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies website, sati.org⁴.

May your day be bracketed by conversations on love and everything in between. Thank you.