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Guided Meditation: The Source of Thinking; Dharmette: Stories of Practice (1 of 5) No Distractions - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 24, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: The Source of Thinking

Hello, with lots of warm greetings. I am delighted to be here, having just returned from teaching a retreat at our center in Santa Cruz. I very much appreciate the chance to be in this meditation hall, to be sitting in this posture, to be with you all, and to share the Dharma and this practice. Thank you.

One of the characteristics of human beings, if I can be so bold as to say something grand like this, is that we are often involved with thinking. That involvement is sometimes a preoccupation. Sometimes it involves being lost in thought. Sometimes it involves being addicted to or preoccupied with thinking.

It is possible to do mindfulness of thinking. That is a very significant way of practicing mindfulness. But there is another thing we can do. Rather than focusing on what we are thinking about—rather than being preoccupied by the subjects, no matter how important the people or concerns are—there is another option. I like to describe this as going to the source of thinking. Go find where it begins, where it arises, where it comes from deep inside of us. Go to the source.

To whatever degree thinking is valuable, the source is valuable. To whatever degree thinking is problematic, going to the source is medicine; it is a corrective. Different people find different places they identify as a source within. I would like to suggest for now that the source is not in the head. It is below the neck, somewhere in the torso. Some people might identify it with the heart area, but there is a long tradition in Buddhism to see the source as being even lower than the heart—in the belly.

In the general wide area of the belly, below the diaphragm and above the pelvic floor, there is a place that can be a stable base. It can provide a strong foundation for everything in us that is above it: the physical body, our emotional body, and even the thinking mind. It can all rest and grow out of the source deep in this belly area.

It might not seem like much of a source for thinking. It might almost seem like a betrayal of thoughts. Something as basic as the sensations in your belly area might seem disconnected from what is most important to you. But have this belly area be soft and relaxed. There is so much that goes on there: so much intelligence, so much source of emotions, and so much source of empathy. Allow the lived life to flow out of the stability in your lower torso.

Gently closing your eyes, enter into the sensations of your body. Let your attention settle into the area of your belly and your lower torso. If you are sitting upright, go all the way down to the sitting bones—to the contact with your cushion, your chair, your bed, or the floor. Feel whatever degree of stability is there. Maybe there is firm support created in the meeting of your body weight and the surface that holds you from the pull of gravity. Feel the place where your weight rests.

Sitting and feeling that support, relax your belly. Soften. If you are able, have a posture that doesn't constrict your belly, but lets it be more open. Let the belly expand and relax. Feel the weight of your upper torso giving substance and support to your lower torso, your belly area, the sides of your waist, and your lower back.

Feel the expansion of the lower belly as you breathe in. The exhale is directed by the diaphragm; that is where the work is. Allow the lower torso and the belly to gently, relaxedly follow and move in the wake of the diaphragm. The lower belly just follows along. Feel the stability, and maybe a degree of steadiness in your lower torso. Maybe there is a degree of softness and relaxation in addition to any tension that is held there.

As you exhale, soften the thinking mind as if the thinking mind can drop down and rest in the torso. It has a support. It has a soft cushion or bed it can rest in, where the soft support of the belly is the source of thinking.

When we are deep in the belly, we can feel what is there before we have a thought: the silent softness, tenderness, stability, and steadiness deep in the torso. Accompany the sensations of breathing not with your thinking mind, not from your head, but from your belly. Use the ability of the body to sense sensations. Stay there as if the sensations deep in the torso are the source of thinking.

As we come to the end of the sitting, feel whatever stability there is in your lower torso and sitting bones. Feel the stability, steadiness, and maybe the stillness that is deep in your torso. Feel that it is a source of empathy and care. It is a source for love that is deeper than the heart—quieter, broader, and more open than the heart can ever be.

From this deep source within, feel connected to the whole world. Feel part of this whole world. Be this whole world. From this deep source—deeper than ideas of self, deeper than your roles, deeper than all your past and all your possible futures—feel the source which is always ready to see the world in a new way. It experiences the world with new sensitivity, with an intimacy and orientation to care for the whole world.

Wishing everyone well as we wish ourselves well. As we wish the whole world well, the deep source within is not interested in the news. It is not interested in what could be or could have been. It is there just to care. Just right now. Simply holy.

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

And may we live from the deep place within, with care and respect for everyone we encounter.

May all beings be happy.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Stories of Practice (1 of 5) No Distractions

Hello and welcome to this Monday, the beginning of a new series. For this week, I don't really have a particular theme that I want to follow. Given how much I have taught this year about the first jhāna¹, samādhi², and insight, and building on those deeper teachings, I want to shift gears. Coming out of the retreat this last week and being here for this Thanksgiving week, I don't want to focus on a teaching but rather talk a little bit more personally. I want to share some stories of my experience of practicing over the years.

This was inspired by having breakfast with the resident volunteers at the retreat center. I was at the retreat last week, and there are residents who live there and care for the place. The custom is to have breakfast with them on some mornings. We chat and talk about all kinds of things, but it is not unusual to have discussions about practice and practice stories.

One of the topics people like to talk about—which is fun but also very instructive—is the challenges of practice. We talk about how the location, the place, or the circumstances for practicing meditation might not seem ideal. The ideal is often thought to be silence—a place undisturbed by anything, quiet and peaceful.

However, when I was introduced to insight meditation in Thailand, that was not the message I received. I didn't get the message that we were supposed to separate ourselves from the world and be in pristinely perfect, silent, still environments to meditate. We were supposed to learn to meditate and be mindful in the midst of whatever life brings us. It wasn't that we were supposed to go find noisy street corners to meditate on, but we were supposed to practice with whatever circumstances there were. Nothing was considered a distraction. It was just one more thing to be mindful of.

One of the first surprises I had regarding this was the very first time I went to Thailand and was introduced to insight meditation. During that time, I was taken by a Western monk to the large headquarters of the biggest sect of Thai Buddhism, the Mahanikai³. They have a big campus in the middle of Bangkok next to the river, which has a huge apartment-style dormitory where many monks live on many floors.

We went there to visit a monk who was up on the fifth floor. We came in from the street through the front door into this very big lobby. The lobby had a tremendous amount of people coming and going. I remember there were stairs—almost like curving spiral stairs—going up floor after floor. There was a very large desk to the side, where a monk sat as a receptionist. There were wired telephones on the desk, lots of people calling, the phone ringing, and him talking. There was a lot of yelling and people coming and going in that lobby. It was a very busy place, right in Bangkok.

On the far end of the lobby, as far from the front door as you could be, under those steps going up, there were about a dozen lay people meditating on retreat. They were just sitting completely still and quiet in this very public place because there was no meditation hall for lay people. I don't know quite the reason why they were sitting there, but they were sitting completely still, seemingly undisturbed by all the commotion. They were practicing mindfulness and insight.

I was so inspired by that. I had come from doing years of monastic life deep in the wilderness and mountains, where things were pristine, beautiful, and inspiring. But to see that we could practice insight right there in this busyness—that was very inspiring and instructive for me.

When I was in Burma practicing a long retreat—the longest retreat I ever sat was eight months in Burma—I was mostly alone in my room or doing walking meditation in the hallway. It was one of the happiest times of my life to be able to devote myself so fully to the practice. But it was in the middle of Yangon (Rangoon). It was a very big monastery, almost like a community college campus. The facilities I was staying in were close to the edge of the monastery, so the town around it was very prominent.

A number of places, including some of the local Buddhist temples, had loudspeakers. Back then, they were raspy, poor-quality loudspeakers. Music came crackling through, and most of the time it was Burmese pop music being played over and over again. Madonna's song "Like a Virgin" was played repeatedly—luckily they were singing it in Burmese.

Here I was at one of the most famous insight meditation monasteries in the world, the origin of the kind of insight meditation that many of us practice and teach here in the West. It was a place where sometimes thousands of people were meditating. And there was this constant glaring of these poor-quality loudspeakers.

For one week, there was a Buddhist festival. For 24 hours a day for seven days, Buddhist monks were chanting the Abhidhamma⁴—the Buddhist texts on psychology, which are very dry. The chanting in Pali was very monotone and droning on and on, day and night. Even there, that was understood to be just one more thing to practice with.

To inspire us with this idea, the abbot, Sayadaw U Pandita⁵, told the story of a turning point for him when he started doing insight practice. He had been a monk since he was a teenager, had gone through all the monastic study, and was very learned. But then he was ready to start practicing meditation as an adult.

Sayadaw U Pandita looked like he should have been a general in the army. He was strong, determined, and stern, with very strong motivation and fire in his personality. He was going to practice in a very determined way. He had a roommate, and his roommate always went to bed early. In that tradition, you were supposed to only sleep four hours a night, but his roommate didn't do that; he slept much more. But the worst of it was that his roommate snored.

The teacher said he was indignant and angry with his roommate. He was very dismissive of him: "He is this lazy guy who is sleeping all the time, and now he's snoring and disturbing my meditation." But at some point, he stopped his complaining and took the snores of his roommate as the subject of his mindfulness meditation. He just became really mindful of it. His resentment, his anger, his self-righteousness—all those faded away as he just got absorbed in the sound, listening. That was a turning point in which he started to understand what mindfulness was. He saw the simplicity of it, and how something he thought was a horrible distraction ruining his meditation could actually become the source of really maturing in understanding insight practice.

These are all stories meant to convey that there are no distractions when we do insight meditation. There are just more things to be aware of, more things to be mindful of, more things to absorb and learn how to be with—with simplicity, equanimity, non-resistance, and openness. "This too is included." There is no such thing as a distraction—except maybe the house burning down or something serious like that. In ordinary situations, the idea is to always fold everything into the practice.

These were important lessons I got from this practice. I will tell more simple stories like this for this week.

Thank you very much.