This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Seeing with Freedom; Don't Make it Worse (4 of 5) Sensing and Seeing. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Seeing With Freedom; Dharmette: Don't Make It Worse (4 of 5) Sensing and Seeing - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on September 05, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

So, hello, a warm hello from Redwood City. A warm hello from this, maybe in a certain kind of way, the center of this wonderful online community for this gathering for meditation and teaching. Thank you for being here.

Today I'd like to make a very important distinction for in mindfulness practice, and that is that there is an important distinction between what we see and how we see. To take it literally with seeing with our eyes, what we see could be any object at all: a mountain in the distance, a person, some delicious food that's in front of us that seems appetizing, whatever it might be—something unpleasant, something pleasant, something neutral. There's the object, and then there's a wide range of ways that we could see it, the what comes along with seeing.

There could be seeing that comes along with fear, and so the eyes are part of scanning for safety, scanning for where the danger is, and that's the orientation. There could be seeing that's oriented towards what we want, our desire, and looking for what's good and wonderful and what's in it for me. We can see through the lens of what we don't like, aversion, what we want to say no to, what we want to pull away from, what we want to resist. We can see through skepticism and cynicism. We can see through hatred. We can see through intense infatuation and craving. The way the eyes work varies, and what the eyes see, how the eyes see, varies. We could be staring at something intensely with anger, and people feel the heat of the daggers in our eyes. We can gaze at something lovingly and kindly, and people feel the warmth and the kindness. So there's all these different ways that we can see.

In mindfulness practice, we want to recognize how we're seeing and learn to see in a way that's free. Seeing that's free, seeing that's freeing, that liberates seeing from all this extra baggage that goes on. And so we can see clearly, directly, openly, where we free the seeing from entanglement with what's being seen.

That's kind of talking about it more literally, but there's also seeing with the mind's eye. There's knowing. All the same thing applies to how we know, how we're mindful. And as important as sensing is, really being embodied, feeling, sensing what's going on, there is also a distinction between what is being sensed and how we know it, how we see that. And so it's in the how that we find our freedom, not in the what. So whatever you know, whatever you see that can answer the question, "what is it?"—that's not where freedom is founded. It's not in a particular experience, a particular understanding, a particular something that we see, but rather it's how we see.

This means that if something is uncomfortable, difficult, if we're suffering, the art of where we find our freedom is not by getting rid of the suffering per se, but rather learning how to see it freely, see it so we're not for and against it, caught in it. And then we see better. As long as we're caught in something, we don't see it really as it is. If something is really wonderful and it brings us happiness, that's wonderful. But the art of mindfulness is to see it in a better way, a more satisfying way than seeing it with the happiness. It's seeing it with clarity and openness. There's a higher level of happiness that comes when the seeing is free. So if this makes sense to you, then maybe you can follow along in this guided meditation today.

Guided Meditation: Seeing With Freedom

Assume a meditation posture. And to kind of just maybe rock back and forth, sway the body a bit, in order to feel the moving body as an invitation to feel your body, to be in your body. And then gently to let your body become still, a soft stillness, not held or tight. Maybe do the same thing with the head, just let the head rotate around, move back and forth gently, not too much, but feeling a little bit of loosening in the neck.

And lowering your gaze, so that you may be feeling a little bit of softening and relaxing in the eyes. And softly closing the eyes.

And without doing anything else, softly let the body, let your body, feel the movements of breathing. How does your body experience breathing?

And then gently, not too much, just a little bit deeper breaths, so there can be a little bit more fuller sensing of your body on the in-breath, and a little bit more opportunity to relax the body on the exhale. Without ambition, content to do this in small little ways.

And then letting your breathing return to normal. And in the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out, kind of riding on in-breaths and out-breaths, movements of the body, feel the body and relax the body, softening the body.

And if there's any way that you can also soften the thinking mind, without a lot of ambition, small little micro-relaxations on the exhale. Relax the thinking mind, maybe imagining that the mind expands and spreads out horizontally like a lake that spreads wide and the waves quieting down.

And then to center yourself again on the breathing, the body's experience of breathing.

And then become aware, notice how you're mindful of breathing. Is there any strain in being mindful? Any attitude that comes with being mindful? Any belief that's coming along with being mindful of your breathing?

On one hand, there can be a straining and a trying hard. And on another hand, there can be a complacency or boredom or indifference that's being added. Both are being added to the simplicity of being aware. There can be tension with being mindful. There can be a for and against the experience.

And if mindfulness is a kind of mental seeing, knowing of experience, can you experiment to see if the knowing, the seeing, is simple, clear, open? Just mindful, just aware of what is, of breathing, without a for and against, without an attitude.

Maybe you can have this simple, clear awareness in one part of the cycle of breathing, where you can see and recognize that there's no interference, nothing extra, just the experience. Maybe the transition from in- and out-breath, out- and in-breath. Maybe at the beginning of the in-breath, beginning of the out-breath. So the how you're aware is not adding anything more than just being aware. That in the how you're aware, there is some simple, maybe humble feeling of freedom. Freedom from what is being experienced. Awareness independent of the breathing, but that knows the breathing.

A knowing or a seeing which is radically simple, free of ideas of what it means to be seeing or be knowing. Just whatever way it simply occurs on its own if you're present.

If you allow breathing to be present in awareness, how simple can the knowing be? A knowing or seeing, a mindfulness, or a how we are is free, knowing freely. Freedom in the knowing itself.

And then as we come to the end of this sitting, can you imagine or visualize someone that you trust seeing you, looking at you, being with you without any projections, without any for and against, without any agendas or desires or aversions? But the person sees you as you are, and in being seen completely as you are, warts and all, you feel that the person accepts you as you are. But an acceptance which is not a thing to do. An acceptance is like how the wide-open sky accepts a bird flying through it.

And can you imagine yourself gazing upon someone else kindly, gently, friendly, with an awareness that otherwise is not for or against? An awareness that sees clearly and accepts the other with an acceptance which is not a thing to do, an active acceptance, but rather an acceptance like the vast sky accepting the bird that flies through it.

May it be that our ability to see and know others, where the how we know and how we see has an element of freedom. We know with freedom. Knowing is not burdened by beliefs and attitudes and judgments. To see clearly, freely. And out of that seeing, may there be born kindness, love, care.

So from the depths of our being, we wish: May others be happy. May others be safe. May others be peaceful. May others be free. And the how we know them, how we're with them, offers some of that. May all beings be happy.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Don't Make It Worse (4 of 5) Sensing and Seeing

Hello and welcome to this fourth talk that's focused on the, I believe, very significant practice of not making it worse. If that's all we do, we'd make a much better world.

We're talking about it by taking the word WORSE and turning it into an acronym. So if you want to practice not making it worse, then there are these five different ways or steps to how you can do that, besides just doing nothing. This way, not making it worse actually makes it better, actually enhances something and allows something more significant or profound a chance to arise and happen in the situation that couldn't happen if we just barrel ahead and do the thing that makes it worse—that expresses the anger, or acts on the greed, or acts on bias.

So first is to Wait. If you feel, "Okay, I'm about to make it worse. I'm going to create more division, separation, divisiveness. I'm going to give this person a piece of my mind so that they feel lousy and belittled," or, "I'm going to do something that I know in the past makes me feel lousy afterwards," and so I know this will make it worse. And yes, I know an alternative. I know something to do in this circumstance. I know the specialness, the wonderfulness of pausing and waiting. Wait. Just wait a little bit. A sacred wait, a momentary Sabbath, a generative waiting. Let's let the wait make room for something to happen here and be known.

Then, to Organize, to orient yourself, to bring yourself together, pull yourself together. Because generally, if we're going to make the situation worse, we're probably not all of us present. We're probably caught in some desire, some aversion, some fantasy, some thought construct. And so wait, so you can then feel and bring yourself together, open up to feel your body, and give time by feeling your body for different parts of your body to come together and contribute to the whole, to settle down.

And then, Rest, relax. Find a place of rest, find a place to relax, to pause in a deeper way where the body is at ease, so you're not struggling to hold back from blurting out the thing that will make it worse.

And then we come to the S. And the S has two things as well. First is to Sense. Take time. This is where you harvest the benefits from waiting, getting organized, and resting or relaxing. Now you're going to be, now you have greater capacity to tune into all the different ways in which your physical body can sense and feel what's happening. There's a tremendous amount of information in the body that reveals what we're feeling, what we understand, what's happening around us. The body helps us to understand our environment, helps us to understand the people we're with and what we're doing. The body sometimes will understand and feel the tension in the room, maybe sometimes faster than the thinking mind. So if we're caught up in our thoughts and ideas and what we want to say, we might not really sense and feel the tension in the room, or the suffering that someone has, or the nervousness that's there, or the joy that's there, or all kinds of things that we start becoming aware of.

So to sense, and we sense what's happening with ourselves more deeply. There's a depth of attitudes, of response, of emotionality, of layers and layers of how we're responding and reacting based on our history and our experience and our deeper beliefs. And so a lot of that information starts becoming more available if we take the time to sense and feel. And the more we practice embodied mindfulness, slowly, slowly, sometimes over years, the deeper the sensitivity is in the body to sense and feel so much of what is carried in the body. If we think the body is senseless, it's senseless, it has no sense to be in the body, then it's true, then we're not there to pick up the sensations. But the body does have sense, both in the sense that it has sensations and we can sense things, but it has sense in terms of it has meaning, it has purpose, it has information, it has all kinds of things that are there that we can discover. So take time to sense what's happening here, feel your way into it.

You can overdo this sensing and only be in your body, and that also can be limiting to the whole. And that's why the other S for this acronym is to See, and see with the mind's eye. And this is a little bit more active than just sensing, perhaps. There's an intentionality to, "Let me look here, let me look more closely what's happening here." Now that I've paused and gotten more present and have sensed and relaxed, let me look at the situation. Let me take a new look, a fresh look at the situation that I'm in. Take a look at myself. Maybe I need to really pause for a moment and step aside and understand myself more deeply. What do I see? What's going on here? What can be named? Seeing clearly is closely connected to being able to name something. Sensing can happen without the words or the naming or cognitive understanding, but the seeing, at least in mindfulness practice, is closely aligned with a kind of cognitive clarity about what is happening. It doesn't have to be words, it could be a kind of wordless knowing cognition, but there is a kind of clarity.

So we start looking and seeing what's happening here. And that could be the situation around us. We choose to, "Okay, let me look at this. These people are talking very loudly, and now that I've kind of settled down and am not yelling at them or not overwhelmed by it all, now I'm in a position. What's happening here?" And we're looking and we're seeing what's going on.

What's coming to mind repeatedly as I say this is the example of one of my sons. When he went to kindergarten, a lot of the kids in the kindergarten already knew each other, but he didn't know anyone. And as far as we know, how he responded to being in kindergarten for the first, I think, a couple of weeks or three weeks—we don't think he was afraid or nervous or challenged to be there—but he did something very unusual. He got one of the teeny little kids' chairs that they had there, and he put it right in the middle where all the action was in the classroom. And he just sat there for, you know, two, three weeks, just watching all the kids, watching what was going on. And then eventually he got off the chair and then he started participating and engaging. But he just first wanted to take a good look, what's happening here, and understand it, I guess, and understand the people and who they were. So, to see, to really take a deep look and see what's happening here.

And then that gives the opportunity, especially if you're a mindfulness practitioner, to see how we see. To be aware of how we're tuning into the situation. Are we tense? Are we reactive? Do we have attitudes? Do we have biases? Do we have preferences? Do we have agendas? What do we bring with us? And in what way does that prevent clear seeing of ourselves and clear seeing of others?

So, wait, get yourself organized, relax, rest in the situation so that now you can take a good look at what's going on. Sense and see the situation. And what do you discover? What becomes richer and fuller? What are you missing? What becomes more dynamic or more connected and better understood by taking time to sense and see rather than making a situation worse?

And one of the things that you might see is that the people you're with, the situation you're in, even yourself, you'll see that there's layers of beauty, layers of value, layers of things that you can respect, layers of suffering that need to be addressed, need to be seen. We start seeing life in a deeper, fuller, more valuable way when we're not riding on the tip of, "let's make it worse, let's make it worse, let's attack, let's complain, let's criticize, let's be cynical, let's be skeptical." Just let's pause.

So for today, if you're at all interested and you like the idea of an assignment, the assignment is to, in the situations where it's appropriate, take more time than you normally would to sense the situation, sense yourself, sense what information is coming in in all the different ways that the body can be tuned in, that the heart can be tuned in. And then practice seeing. Ask yourself, even with a question, "What's happening here? Let me take a deeper look. Let me look again," and then see what you learn.

Thank you very much. And I hope all of us as a collective, in not making it worse for others this week, is making this world a better place.