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Guided Meditation: With a Metta Touch; Dharmette: Core Teachings Pt 2(4 of 5) Natural Love - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on June 20, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Hello everyone and welcome. One of the ways that practice and even Enlightenment is talked about in the ancient texts is through the language of touch. We touch Awakening with our body, and there's something that's very special about human touch. It can express many things, of course—hostility, a certain kind of way of touching others—but there's a way of touching that is friendly, reassuring. Gently touching someone on their shoulder to say, "I'm here with you." We might hold someone's hand. As I did when my mother was dying, I was holding her hand. A newborn, babies thrive with touch and are reassured.

The possibility of expressing friendliness, kindness, and love can be done through touch. I think of the Greek myth of King Midas. With the Midas Touch, everything he touched turned into gold. It's possible through this practice of ours to not hold ourselves removed from our experience, not to be up in the head, the control tower looking down and from a distance analyzing and thinking about our experience. It's possible to have awareness and attention touch everything. And as we touch everything, turn everything into Mettā¹, everything into love, everything into compassion, whatever the circumstances call for in the moment.

This idea of coming close to touch with kindness. Maybe the control tower is feeling sad, or angry, upset, afraid, or distracted. But when we approach something with attention—approach our breathing, approach the sensations of our body, approach how we feel emotionally through how they're experienced in the body—if we approach with mindfulness the process of thinking, not about the content of our thought, but the process, the activation, the energy, the agitation, the tension that's involved in thinking, the physicality of it. All these things we approach, we can touch in the body and touch with Mettā, touch with love. To have not the Midas touch turning things into gold, but the Mettā touch turning everything into our friend, our beloved, what we care for.

For this meditation today, maybe this idea that mindfulness is a form of touching the physicality of everything that we experience directly has some way in which it is occurring through the medium of our body. What is it in the body that, when we're mindful, we can touch to recognize it's there? To say, "I'm here, I'm here with you, here to support you, here to be your friend, your companion, to care."

Guided Meditation: With a Metta Touch

Assume an alert meditation posture, whatever posture that might be for you. Perhaps it's a posture of care, in being alert, having a certain kind of vitality in your posture. In that vitality, be a form of care. If you need to rest deeply, certainly take a posture of rest, but have within it, somewhere or other, some place in the body that is also alert. Adjusting the head, the back of the neck maybe straightens a little bit, between the shoulder blades the spine pulls in a little bit, so that the chest comes out just a little bit more open.

Lowering the gaze, gently closing the eyes.

The body's experience of breathing is a physical experience of movement, of pressure, release of pressure, expansion and contraction. As you feel the sensations of the body breathing, let each sensation that passes through be the meeting place of your touch and your body, the touch of awareness as a way of caring for yourself.

Gently, ever so tenderly, take some deeper breaths, fuller breaths, just so it's right for you, and a longer exhale. Caring for yourself as you release the air from your lungs, settling as you exhale.

Letting your breathing return to normal.

And feeling, if possible, is there some place within you where there's tenderness? The kind of tenderness or softness that's associated with a soft or tender love or compassion, care. A gentle place where a gentle open-heartedness is available.

And is it as if mindfulness, attention, is at home in this place of tenderness? As you're aware of breathing, body, emotions, thinking, sounds, whatever might be, feel the place of touch. Feel the place where the sense objects are sensed, where the sensing occurs of your body. This is a touch spot, the place to touch with attention, loving attention, kind attention. Attention that cares for each thing.

Noticing if thinking interferes with your capacity to gently touch your direct, embodied experience. And if so, let yourself again be in touch with your body, with your embodied experience. Each act of attention is a touch of reassurance, companionship, care, love.

And as we come to the end of this sitting, and still while you're in your meditative mode, maybe with your eyes closed, imagine that when you think of anyone, when you're aware of anyone in front of you, that your thinking and your awareness carries with it your kindness, your care, your good will. And for those who suffer, your attention carries with it compassion.

With your eyes closed, sitting in meditation, the complexities of the social relationships can be put aside for now. And for now, to gaze upon everyone kindly, as if you're touching them in friendship and reassurance, offering companionship to all fellow humans, sharing the planet with others, caring for others. A radiance, a 360-degree willingness in meditation to look upon this world with friendly eyes, with a friendly touch.

Wishing everyone well. May it be that from my heart to your heart, may everyone be happy. From my heart to your heart, may everyone be safe. From my heart to your heart, may everyone experience peace. And from my heart to your heart, may everyone be free of affliction, free of suffering, free of oppression, free of poverty. May all beings be happy, and may we contribute to that possibility.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Core Teachings Pt 2(4 of 5) Natural Love

So hello everyone, and welcome to this fourth talk on the five core principles or foundations for my teachings, the way I offer Buddhist teachings. Today, what I'd like to talk about is the social emotions of love, as an umbrella term for all of them, but certainly friendliness, kindness, goodwill, compassion, sympathy, empathy, appreciative joy, empathic joy, sharing joy in the joy of others, and a profound form of equanimity, of peace, of non-assertive, non-wavering love in the face of challenges. In the face of our inability to make a difference for people, we still have some kind of love that is unshakable, equanimous.

I talked earlier in the week that one of the foundations that I really appreciate for Buddhism is the idea of not having any fixed views, not having any ultimate philosophy or that "this is what's ultimate," but rather not experiencing the world through the filter of our philosophies, our worldviews, our cultural views, our philosophical and religious views. But actually shedding those, as if they're a filter through which we experience the world. The reason why I feel so confident in that is for what I talked about yesterday: the naturalistic orientation to this practice that we do. We have profound, wonderful, deep capacities that are often overlooked, submerged in the hustle and bustle of life, the challenges of life, the sufferings, the pains, the betrayals. We have the busyness of trying to survive. But if we can somehow put all those down, and put down our views, our opinions, our stories that we are living in all the time, then it allows something deep, this naturalistic movement that is buried deep inside of us—I don't know if buried is the right word—but functions best when we're relaxed, when we're at ease, when we do feel safe. Then we're more likely to welcome the stranger as they come by, an ancient tradition of welcoming the stranger, not shunning them or being afraid of them. It doesn't necessarily mean that we welcome them into our home if that's not appropriate, but maybe we give them support and maybe show them the way to where they're going. But this idea of welcoming the stranger, welcoming the friend, welcoming those we know, welcoming everyone into our tenderness, our love, our capacity for friendliness.

When we're caught in views, caught in opinions, caught in stories, including stories and views about who I am and who I have to be and what identity I have to defend that I've created, sometimes that interferes with our capacity to feel and sense and respond from some deep place inside. Someplace that's resilient, someplace that is clear enough to not be caught in even insults, even criticism. We don't lose touch with this resilient place that is not actually troubled by the challenges in our life. It's free of needing to be caught and influenced, and it doesn't react to things.

This fantastic capacity we have for love, for care, for kindness. The way that I came across this in this practice, discovering the tremendous wonderfulness of compassion, the wonderfulness of Mettā, of kindness and friendliness, the wonderfulness of a very simple care and benevolence that we can carry with us, is not because I was told I should or I felt like I should, that I should engineer it, that I should pump it up and really try, as a duty, to be friendly and kind. Rather, it was a byproduct of doing the meditation practice. I did first Zen practice, then mindfulness practice, and something settled, something relaxed, something showed up, something became alive from deep inside. In that living sense of depth within, the crust around my heart softened and fell away. That's the way it felt when I was doing Zen practice: all this crustiness, all this defensiveness, all this hardness around my heart softened and chipped away and fell away until the heart was soft enough and tender enough that I could feel the suffering of the world around me without fear, without reaction, without a burden, without being oppressed by it or dismayed by it.

There was this beautiful feeling of compassion. I think healthy compassion, no matter how uncomfortable it is to feel the suffering of the world, healthy compassion has a beauty to it. It's hard to imagine for some people that compassion can be beautiful when there's so much ugliness in the suffering of the world, but it is possible, and it arises from this depth. It's not something that has to be done.

With the mindfulness practice, I discovered the same thing with friendliness, with kindness, with Mettā. As things cleared away, as I felt quite settled and at ease and happy just to be alive, then there was this welling up of this natural capacity for friendliness, for love, for kindness that I wouldn't characterize as beautiful the way I did for compassion, but it was sweet, it was joyful. If it was an adjective, I would call it smilingly or smiling.

Then as my practice deepened, it wasn't so much compassion that was the forefront or love that was the forefront, but there was a greater and greater freedom from any kind of attachment. And that kind of not covering over, not interfering with life through the attachments, the bondage, the clinging that I had, the cravings that I'd had before, I was surprised by a very tender, a very satisfying form of care. A care that was peaceful, a care that was not reactive, wouldn't succumb to distress or to anger or to hostility or to fear. Very simple and ordinary care, appreciation, valuing of things.

These things for me arose from something deep inside that was being freed when there was no overlay, nothing to interfere. It's kind of like a flower which, when the conditions are right, blossoms. And so when the conditions are right, this capacity for our social emotions can blossom not because it's a "should," but because it's the natural tendency when the conditions are right. Buddhist practice, and I'm sure other spiritual practices as well, are what helps us get out of our own way, get out of the way for something profound within that we can trust, that is not even personal. So it's not directly tied to all the ways we think about me, myself, and mine, which are primarily more views.

To feel the freedom and the joy and the delight in the freedom of a tender heart, of a loving heart, a caring heart—this is the byproduct or the consequence of a path of freedom. For me, this is foundational to myself as a human being. First it was compassion, then it was augmented by Mettā and friendliness, it was augmented by this sense of care and karuṇā². I feel like this is in some ways one of the primary organizing principles that motivates my life. Certainly the end of suffering, caring for suffering, but that caring for suffering now comes out of this same place of care, of compassion, this tender heart. This seems like it's the most important thing in life for me: caring in all directions, compassion in all directions, love in all directions. And to the best of my ability, I have organized or guided my life around this, with the motivation that comes from compassion and love.

So as a teacher, in offering these teachings, this is what drives it, what animates it, this is what gives it life. Thank you very much, and I look forward to the fifth talk tomorrow in this series.