This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Wholeheartedness; Intro to Mindfulness Pt 2 (4) Restlessness and Remorse. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Wholeheartnesss; Dharmette: Intro to Mindfulness Pt 2 (4) Hindrance of Restlessness and Remorse - 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.

Guided Meditation: Wholeheartnesss

Hello and welcome. As an introduction to this meditation, I'm going to be addressing the issue of restlessness or agitation, as that's the fourth of the five hindrances¹. It's valuable to understand that the tradition says that unless you're fully enlightened, human beings will always carry with them a degree of agitation or restlessness. So if you should feel that way, it's just part of the human experience. Being human comes along with that. There can be varying degrees of it, of course, and sometimes it can take over, and sometimes it's subtle.

One of the triggers for this agitation—there are a number of triggers for this agitation that's so fundamental, but one of them has to do with the other hindrances, especially the first two: sensual desire and avariciousness, and ill will or aversion. These are also considered to be part and parcel of most human beings. We're kind of born with this tendency. So if we have any of the hindrances, there's no need to take them personally, like you're the only one who has it and therefore you're terrible. All human beings contend with them; they're part of being a human being. Learning to be wise about them is part of the task, and how to hold them without any further reactivity—to hold them without shooting second arrows².

The first two, desire and aversion, contribute to agitation. If you have too many desires and you're jumping around chasing them, that's an agitated state. If our desires are frustrated, or if somehow we have desires but we can't act on them—even healthy desires, appropriate desires—if we're held in check by society, family, work, or anything, the energy of the desire that we want to act on is held in check. Held in check, it vibrates. It's there with pressure that agitates.

Same thing with aversion. We can have a lot of things we're aversive to, and we're kind of jumping around and searching for it, and just everything is wrong. So aversion itself is agitating. But also frustrated aversion—aversion which doesn't seem to be able to do anything or accomplish anything, that's held in check or held back, or just unempowered. Not that we should empower our ill will, but still it's held in check, and so there's something agitating there, just vibrating with pressure.

Also, one of the basic needs of a human being, I think, is the need to have agency, to be engaged in something in a healthy way. We're not only supposed to be quiet and peaceful, sitting serenely doing nothing. That doesn't really work for the depth of our psychology and who we are. So when desires and aversions create agitation, when the frustration of them adds to frustration, what can really support us is to do something wholeheartedly that we value. Maybe something that we love, that we can really put ourselves into, so the whole psychophysical system can have the experience of, "Yes, we have some agency, we can do something here." We can settle some of this inherent agitation by doing one thing really well or thoroughly.

In terms of this meditation practice, that one thing is the meditation. It is, for example, to wholeheartedly immerse ourselves in the practice of present moment awareness. Increase the degree of motivation, increase the degree of commitment, increase the degree of wholeheartedness without strain. Do it without adding some kind of desire that will just make you more agitated, without aversion. There is a form of love, there is a form of faith or trust: "Yes, let's give ourselves just here to the breathing." It isn't that the breathing is the source of our life, but it's the engagement, the immersion with the breath, immersion with your present moment experience that gathers us together. Some people talk about how, as we do this wholeheartedly, it puts us in a flow state. But for the purpose of today, it begins to settle us. It begins to reassure some part of our deep mind that, "Oh, we have something valuable to do here, important to do, something trustworthy to do, and we can do it." Then some of the other causes of agitation can begin to settle down. So that's the premise for this meditation.

Assuming a meditation posture and closing your eyes. Feel yourself sitting here. Feel here. You get to experience a human being from the inside out. You get to do something that no one else can do: you get to really have a closeness to, and really sense and feel more than anyone else can, what it's like to be alive right now, breathing.

Any sensation that you experience, pleasant or unpleasant, any feeling that you have, is a symptom that you're experiencing life as it's being lived from the inside out. It's your task to care for this life. It's your task to participate in this life wholeheartedly. Begin by taking a few long, slow, deep breaths. Not too big, not too fast, not too slow, but in a full, engaged way, immersing yourself in the experience of breathing deeply.

Fully expanding the chest as you breathe in, lifting the shoulders. Maybe sometimes the front of the rib cage opens and expands, lifts. Sometimes the sides of the rib cage expand. Sometimes it's the movements of the belly, or all of the above. Relaxing as you exhale. Not relaxing mechanically, but relaxing with a care and kindness, a love, a gentle appreciation for you and this body. Letting your breathing return to normal.

For thousands of years, human beings have meditated by following their breathing, following the sensations in the body of breathing in and breathing out. People have entered the world of breathing wholeheartedly. They've trusted it. They found it to be a doorway to engaging with life in a full, immersive way with something very simple. Trusting breathing, trusting the process of opening and receiving, of intimacy.

So we'll continue in silence. With breathing, or any other way you practice mindfulness, let it be an act of devotion, or trust, or love, or wholeheartedness, to give yourself to the meditation without strain. By giving yourself wholeheartedly to this more than anything else—more than your thoughts, other wishes—you're providing food, nourishment, and satisfaction for a very deep need. The need for being fully engaged, the need to feel your agency.

Whenever your mind wanders off in thought, be gentle about that. Take your time with that, to recognize and know it, where the recognition is part of this wholehearted "Here I am, this is what's happening." Just staying present. Knowing is invaluable. Knowing this life as it unfolds.

Here you might consider that staying mindful is, for these minutes, the most valuable thing you can do. More than anything else, just be here, present for your experience.

And then to come to the end of this sitting. Gently relax. Let go of your effort to practice. Allow yourself just to be here and now in a simple way. Allow yourself to be as you are, with compassion and care. Maybe with a profound respect for this life, how difficult it is and how good it is. To acknowledge oneself, one's circumstances, and to just be still and quiet for a little bit in the middle of it all. Out of the stillness, or out of the sweetness, or out of the care and compassion, turn your attention outward now to the people in your life. The people here and participating in this meditation today, people in the wider world around you. Reflect and think and feel goodwill to them all, wishing them well.

May you all be happy. May you all be safe. May you all be peaceful. May you all be free. May you all find your way with all the challenges and joys of this life. And may we all support each other in this life that we share.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Intro to Mindfulness Pt 2 (4) Hindrance of Restlessness and Remorse

Hello on this Thursday, the fourth day on the topic of the hindrances. The hindrances are considered to be some of the primary obstacles to mindfulness and to concentration, to really being present here in some way. At the same time, they're almost universal in human experience. It's often emphasized that there is no need to take them personally, like they are personal failings. They're just part and parcel of what we're born with or come into our life with. Rather than taking them as enemies or as personal faults, we take them as subjects for mindfulness, for practice, for contemplation. We even hold a certain degree of respect that these are part of the human condition. Part of respecting ourselves is to respect their presence and then learn how to overcome the hindering quality.

There can be desire that is a hindrance, and the same desire can be there and not be a hindrance. Same thing with aversion, and sloth and torpor, all of them. The difference is that when they're a hindrance, we're involved with them in some way. We've succumbed to them, we've given ourselves over to them, we have somehow become them. The task of mindfulness is to step away enough so we're not involved with them. We're not caught in their grip, we're not gripping onto them, so they can be there but they're not interfering.

It's not all or nothing for these qualities. Except in their hindering qualities, we can either have them as a hindrance, or we can see them well enough and clearly enough that they no longer are a hindrance; they're just phenomena, one more thing that we're aware of. In that way, we're beginning to take refuge or put our faith, our life energy, into the process of being mindful. Learning how to be present and aware, clearly recognizing what's happening without identifying with it, without reacting to it, without being bothered by it, and learning how to be free from it.

Today the topic is restlessness and regret, or agitation and remorse. These are agitated energies, agitated ways in which the heart and mind can be, and that can be quite strong. We can feel like we want to bolt; we feel like we can't sit still. I've sat in meditation with so much restlessness that, because I had such strong faith in the mindfulness, I made the restlessness the object of my meditation, and it was so much fun. What I did was I felt the restless energy in my body as a ping-pong ball that was just bouncing off the sides of the wall of my body, just boom, boom, boom, boom. It was so much fun to just be with it and feel it.

Rather than identify with it, rather than being bothered by it or reacting to it—even having aversion to something like restlessness is being caught in its grip, it's being involved. The idea is to just see it and be with it, feeling it physically. However, it's also helpful to understand some of the dynamics that evoke it.

First, this idea of the universal quality of the hindrances. The Buddha said that only someone who is fully enlightened, at the final and fourth stage of awakening, no longer has restlessness or agitation. So even if you're partially enlightened, you can expect that the mind will have some restlessness. Part of the reason for this is that any kind of attachment we have—for example, attachment to desire or attachment to ill will and aversion—means that if that attachment is frustrated, if we can't act on it in a sane or ethical way, then something inside of us is held in check.

Even when there's no attachment involved necessarily, or if there's healthy desire and healthy aversion, social or world conditions may mean that we're not allowed to speak up. We can't speak up, we can't do what we want to do. So that healthy desire and aversion is bottled up, is held in check. When that happens, you can either go to sleep, shut down, and get dull, or the opposite strategy is to get all worked up and agitated. You feel this sometimes in an extreme way, like the water is boiling inside.

With regret, this is when we've done something that we have remorse about. I like the word remorse because maybe regret can be healthy, but remorse, in its Latin roots, means we're chewing something over, a morsel, we're re-morsing it. We're chewing and chewing and chewing the same thing. Usually, remorse is problematic when we're just reviewing and reviewing and beating ourselves up and being critical, not knowing what to do, feeling we should do something about it. There again, there's an agitated energy that we get caught in the grip of.

It's a time when our action, doing something, is frustrated and held in check. It doesn't mean that we necessarily should be acting on the desires or acting on the aversions, but maybe we should think about, "Yes, there is action needed here. And what is that action?" With regret, sometimes what's needed is an apology. Sometimes what's needed is to make amends, to go talk to someone. Something in the world needs to be done. It's not enough just to sit and try to be mindful and let go and find our peace by ourselves. That actually does a kind of harm to ourselves, to not take care of what really needs to be taken care of in this world.

I've known friends of mine who were sitting on retreat, and one friend in India had an issue that came up. He went to his teacher and his teacher said, "Go home to America and address this issue, and then come back." So my friend did, because some things need to be addressed; otherwise, the agitation and restlessness will stay.

Sometimes what's needed is that our human psyche needs to know that we can take a certain degree of—I was going to say control, and in Vipassana³ circles that's kind of a taboo topic to be controlling or try to control your experience, so maybe I should try to avoid it. But our system needs to know that we will act, we will do something. We're not just going to sit there passively and let things just occur and happen. When it's the hindrances, like desires which are just fantasies or unhealthy, or aversions which have more to do with attachments or hatred, we don't want to act on those. But our heart, our mind needs to know that we can act, we're not holding ourselves in check.

Engaging in the process of mindfulness—being mindful of avariciousness, greed, or aversion—and having faith and confidence, this is the practice. This is a valuable thing to do. There's no doubt that the better action is to be mindful of these than for them to still boil over. The better action is to be clearly present for them rather than giving into them. Something in our system appreciates that we're engaged and how to engage, so that the engagement of mindfulness is not itself agitating. The engagement itself is settling; it makes us more peaceful.

The reference point I want to make is an athlete, someone who goes running as a sport. It takes a lot of physical energy to do a long run, but some people get into a flow state. They get absorbed in it, and everything comes into harmony, gets unified, and they get a real sense of flow and quiet. Maybe even something in the mind gets really still, and they're really present. There's a way of expending energy that is completely harmonious and promotes calm and peace. If meditation is only about trying to find peace, trying to relax and settle and not do and not do, we might actually be doing a disservice to that part of our inner life that needs to feel like we can do something, we can act, we can move forward, and we're not always held in check.

Then there's a combination of these. Something like anger sometimes needs to be given its freedom, but not freedom for us to act on it. If it doesn't give its freedom to be in process, then again there's agitation. The marvel about meditation, and some other situations in life, is that it's safe to let the anger flow through us, but we know how to do it without participating in it, without getting involved in it or reactive to it. Sitting in meditation, learning how to have a good intentional posture where we're not going to collapse into something or get involved in it, and then staying mindful the best we can. Giving freedom to these movements, even of desire sometimes, so we can see it clearly, so we can make space for it, so that something can begin to shift in the freedom of letting it flow. We don't want to feed it, but we don't want to repress it, and that also begins overcoming the restlessness of things being held in check.

I think what I'm saying today is not necessarily easy to understand and practice, because the lesson that sometimes we have to act, engage, can lend itself to somehow being more agitated and more tense. But I'm trying to point to another possibility. One way to understand it is that one of the most valuable actions that we can give ourselves to—and it is an activity, an action—is the action of being aware. The action of being mindful. Being mindful in a way that's relaxed, at ease, unbothered by what we know. We're fully immersing ourselves in this mindfulness practice, immersing ourselves in being really here, but in such a way that there's no tension in the knowing. In the end, we discover that we can know while being free of what is being known. That knowing becomes really nurturing, nourishing for that part of our heart or inner life that needs to know that we're here and engaged in doing something very important.

As meditation goes deeper and deeper, the act of simple, clear knowing, lucid knowing, is more and more valuable, more and more sweet, more and more clarifying. It just feels like a flow state almost, almost like one of the best things to put our life energy into, and it's so satisfying and gratifying. Yes, there's purpose here, there's value here, there's meaning here, there's agency here, there is faith here.

So when you find yourself in the grip of the fourth hindrance, agitation and remorse, maybe it's a sign that there's a really deep need for action. Some kind of desire to act that's frustrated, that's causing the agitation, something needs to be done there to meet it. That's in the realm of activity—not giving into it and doing what it wants, but some other activity that's healthy and important. Exactly what that activity is, I can't tell you, but at least the practice of mindfulness, the meditation on it, is one of the most meaningful things we can do. If we can really immerse ourselves with faith and wholeheartedness, it does something really good for our heart.

So may it bring you peace. Thank you.