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Guided Meditation: Trusting the Body; Dharmette: The End of Suffering (2 of 5) First Noble Truth - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 12, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Trusting the Body

Hello and welcome. Welcome to this next 30 minutes where we'll meditate together over this medium of electronics that connects us in a way that respects and acknowledges the vast web of humanity that we're part of. We have been interconnected for a long time. The seven layers of separation that used to connect us are now maybe much smaller. Thank you for being here.

Today we are going back to basics. Basics is not meant only for beginners. In some ways, the longer we've meditated, the more we appreciate the basics as being quite profound. Today I want to talk about mindfulness of the body.

The body and mind are not so distinct. It's hard to really tease them apart, especially in our experience of the body and our experience of the mind. If we step back and think about it, we might be able to come up with concepts and ideas that keep them distinct. But in our direct experience here and now, the body—the way we experience, sense, and feel it—is inseparable from the mind.

For one reason, we don't know exactly the beginning and end of the mind. Perhaps we could think of it as inclusive of all the neurological connections that exist throughout our body. It's only with the nerves all over our body that we can feel the body. Those nerves are part of the mind. How they fire and how they report to the rest of us contributes to our constructing the sense of our body.

The experience of the body is kind of like an antenna. It is an antenna that receives information from the world around us—invaluable information through the ears, the eyes, the nose, and the taste. It's also an antenna that transmits information to the world around us, and transmits information within us to ourselves, to the conscious mind where we register what's happening.

What the antenna picks up is amazingly complex and extensive. It picks up not just sensations on the skin, but deep in the body. Biochemical and physiological processes are picked up in the heart, the stomach, and all over. The more we can rest in the body, the more we can be aware of the body, and the more information we have. But more importantly, the more we are at home and at ease in the body, the more the body will support us to be at ease, to feel peace, and to feel safe.

Some of the challenges we have with the body are the ways that our conscious mind transmits information to all over the body that there's something to be afraid of—fear, anxiety, desires, and aversions.

Assume a meditation posture. Let the posture that you take for meditation be one that confidently shows your body and your mind that you are confident. Confident that for now, for these minutes in meditation, you're safe. If you have any anxieties and fears that are operating, chances are the object of it is not present here and now in your direct experience.

It can be very profound to let the body help you to feel at ease for these few minutes, to feel deeply safe here and now. If we relax the body—a confident, postured body—it's remarkable the support and the care it provides to the mind.

Gently closing the eyes, take a few moments to feel your body in whatever way you feel it. Scanning through the body. If you feel any anxiety in your body, trust it to your body. The body is quite a phenomenal antenna and processor for how we feel. Rather than churning on in the mind, feel the body from the inside out.

As you exhale, relax the body. Relaxing the muscles of the face. Softening in the shoulders. Softening in the belly. As you inhale, feel the expansion of the rib cage, the torso, and the belly. With the inhale and the expansion of your torso, feel your body become larger, fuller, having more room to feel what's here and to soften and relax as you exhale.

Perhaps relaxing the thinking mind with every exhale. Whatever restlessness or agitation there is in the control tower of the thinking mind, with every exhale, letting that agitation settle. Settle down into the body.

As you breathe, feel how the body experiences itself, centering attention in the body rather than having it centered in the control tower of thinking. Softening and calming in the body so the body begins to transmit feelings of being safe here and now. Feelings of being at ease and peace here and now.

As you inhale, spread your awareness through your body so that whatever challenges you have in your body are resting in a wider space of the body.

And as we come to the end of this sitting, gently, softly sense and feel your body. Maybe the body that is just beyond the edges of breathing. Whatever sensations associated with breathing, gently spread your attention beyond. Spread your attention into the parts of the body where there's a feeling of calm or ease.

To whatever degree, however minor, you have feelings of calm, ease, or feelings of being safe, let that register through your body. Let that register in your heart and in your mind.

Then consider how wonderful it would be if others could feel safe, could feel at peace and calm in their body, in their hearts, and their minds. That everyone who is anxious and afraid could be deeply reassured right down into their marrow, deep in their body.

May it be that how we live our day contributes to others feeling safe, others feeling that they can be at ease.

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

Thank you.

Dharmette: The End of Suffering (2 of 5) First Noble Truth

Hello and welcome to these teachings. This week the topic is the Four Noble Truths¹. After doing the introduction yesterday, I'll start today with the first: the First Noble Truth, which is the Noble Truth of suffering.

The guided meditation that I just did was on mindfulness of the body. The reason for that is that the approach to suffering, to really know it well, is not so much through the mind but rather through feeling it experientially here and now in the body. We need to know what's happening in the experienced life that we live—not in the imagined life, not in the projected life into the future, not in the remembered life, but here and now. The experienced life, the lived life of now.

For many of us, it's really through the body that we can feel the greatest sense of aliveness, the greater sense of being connected to life itself and to ourselves. This is the most useful way of being present for the First Noble Truth, which is suffering.

The First Noble Truth, as it has come down to us, is a very simple statement. It says: "There is the Noble Truth of suffering." That's it. So that requires a little bit of an unpacking.

First, the word "Noble." One translator translated it as the "ennobling truth of suffering." This implies that suffering by itself is not ennobling, or Noble, or special. What's ennobling is the possibility of meeting suffering honestly, seeing it clearly, and finding a path through it to the other side to bring suffering to an end. But to go through it is to really know it well, to really understand it well. Maybe we see whatever suffering we have as a messenger. What is the message? What is it that needs to be learned? What do we need to be present for here?

When many people have challenges in their lives—all kinds of things they're grieving or distressed about, or stressed or afraid—one of the invaluable supports that can happen is to have a friend who will listen. To be accompanied by someone for a walk in the park, or sit and have tea together. The friend doesn't judge, doesn't try to fix, but really takes in and experiences compassionately, fully, in a friendly and caring way what you're experiencing. You can explain, you can say what's happening, and your friend just receives it. It's so good to be received, to be known, to be heard by someone who's calm and settled and available.

In the same way, this ennobling attitude of how to be with suffering is to be our own good friend. To really stop and be able to take time to really know what this suffering is. That has to be done with a lot of care and love and attention about how much we can tolerate, how much we can open up to at any given time.

This is the message of the Buddha: that the direct way to freedom, the direct way to peace, is not by avoiding suffering but learning how to stop to recognize it. I sometimes in a silly way say that the bumper sticker for Buddhists would say: "I stop for suffering." Not to suffer more, but to really be present for it and offer this ennobling attention to really know it and see it. As I talked about yesterday, the bumper sticker doesn't have any pronouns.

So we stop. If others are suffering, maybe we stop to be their friend, to accompany them for a while around what's going on and support them. If we're suffering, we stop and pay attention. There are many ways of stopping. Sometimes it's meditating, sometimes it's sitting having a cup of tea, sometimes it's going for a walk in a calm, relaxing place so we can really take time for it. This is opposed to just going headlong into our busyness, or sitting and just being lost—lost in the fretting, lost in the preoccupation, lost in the anxiety about what we're experiencing, our reactivity.

So nobility is not inherent in suffering, but it's what we bring and how we are with suffering.

Suffering itself—the word in Pali² is dukkha³. It's a difficult word for some English speakers, partly because the word "suffering" implies really big things, catastrophes. And partly because, in that we're coming to an end of suffering, it seems like there is some suffering we have that we don't want to end. It doesn't seem right to push it away or stop it. It seems like it's an inherent part of life. For example, a parent who loses a child would feel emotional pain—are we supposed to not have that?

The dukkha that we're talking about here is the emotional pain that arises from our reactivity. It is not from deep empathy, not from the deep sense of connectedness where there are no attachments, no fear, no hostility or conceit around it. It's possible to experience a certain kind of emotional pain in the world, to be heartbroken for example, and be at ease with it. Not only be at ease, but feel it as part of the fullness of a relaxed, free life to feel both the joys and sorrows of this world.

But the dukkha, the suffering of the First Noble Truth, is the suffering which doesn't have to be there. It's a subset of all the different ways that we can feel some emotional pain. It's the emotional pain that comes from clinging, from craving, from reactivity, hostility, from being caught in something, being contracted around something. It is where the desires are so strong that there's a compulsivity to the desires. Where there's compulsivity to the hostility we have. That there is something extra that's going on.

As we start being honest about our suffering, stopping and getting to know it, and we're experiencing it through the body, we start being able to tease apart that emotional pain which is fine to have in a certain way—it feels like this is part of a lived life—versus the kind of suffering which clearly comes from some kind of reactivity, some kind of attachment that we're really holding on to, that we don't have to hold on to, that we're better off without.

The importance of mindfulness of the body is that through it, we're learning a number of different things. We're learning to be present for our emotional discomfort in a relaxed way. Holding it in the body, letting the body process it, letting the body reveal to us what's there. That is more holistic than if we are only understanding our emotional discomfort from our thinking mind—only from thinking about it through the lens of our fear, hostility, or self-preoccupation.

We're kind of breaking the hegemony of the reactive, self-preoccupied, contracted thinking mind by dropping down into the body to feel our emotional discomfort and to learn how to be non-reactive to it. To learn how to be present for it in a very simple, open, caring way. To be present for it as if we're our own best friend, and learning to breathe with emotional discomfort.

This is a tall order. It's not easy to do this. But the rewards of doing it are phenomenal. The rewards of being able to have a non-reactive attention that doesn't add or subtract, doesn't push or pull, is not rejecting or accepting, but just there and feeling and being present. Then we can begin seeing more clearly.

At some point, we can see that kind of emotional discomfort or pain which is deeply part of something precious as a human being—maybe it's part of love and care. We see that it's okay to have in a certain way. It's not troubling; rather, it's actually in a certain kind of way enriching because it arises from deep in the heart, deep within us. We see that on one hand.

And on the other hand, we experience that "oh, this is extra." This has to do with my reactivity, my attachments. This has to do with my rejecting, or my wanting something so strongly that I'm filled with disappointment and anger that I can't have it. This has to do with my heartbreak that is not because of the discomfort of losing, but rather it's heartbreak because my whole sense of self was tied up in this thing, this person, this experience, and I was really attached to that.

So we start teasing apart that which comes with being a human being in a relaxed and meaningful way, and that suffering which is extra, that has to do with what we're contributing.

So the First Noble Truth, the Truth of Suffering: There is suffering in this world. There's no way that a human being is not going to have some kind of emotional pain going through this life. Can we clarify for ourselves what kind of emotional pain we're having so that it's not diminishing us, it's not draining us, it's not harming ourselves even by the reactivity by which we feel it?

The path to that is to get to know the suffering well. Stop for suffering, but learn how to do that. Learn how to be present through the body, to relax, to breathe with the emotional discomfort until there's a suppleness and openness where we can now begin receiving from the body almost the information that tells us whether this is healthy for us as part of a healthy life, or this is unhealthy to have this kind of "caught-up-ness" with what we're doing.

If we do that, then it's ennobling. We receive the deeper message: what needs to be healed, and then what needs to be allowed.

So, the First Noble Truth, the Noble Truth of Suffering. And then tomorrow comes the Second.

Thank you.