This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Happiness; Intro to Mindfulness Pt 2 (18) Happiness of Non-Clinging. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Happiness; Dharmette: Intro to Mindfulness Pt 2 (18) Happiness of Non-Clinging - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on March 27, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Happiness

Hello from Redwood City at the Insight Meditation Center. I'm particularly happy to be here today. This morning, as I turned my attention to the topic of today, I started to feel a kind of smile, delight, and joy—some happiness just from turning my mind in that direction. That's because the topic for today is happiness.

Happiness is a word that I see as an umbrella term for a whole family of states of well-being that we can experience, and it is an important reference point for Buddhist practice. On one hand, clearly, Buddhism is an honest meeting of our suffering¹—an honest assessment and consideration, turning our attention towards suffering to be very honest and truthful about its presence. But we do not do this so we can suffer more; we do it so we can somehow resolve, dissolve, or solve that suffering in some way so that the mind can open to happiness.

I like to think there is a natural capacity we have for happiness that is often obscured by our clinging and our holding. As we let go—as we let go of clinging and grasping—the mind's simple capacity to feel delight and joy becomes increasingly important.

Of course, it is difficult to sometimes be happy, and we have many challenges in our lives. I don't want to in any way diminish or belittle the difficulty we have with the challenges of our lives. At the same time, I don't want to limit our capacity to recognize well-being. These can coexist. Sometimes the problem with anything is that when we get fixated on it, we get attached to it, we make it the whole picture, and we identify with it—we become it. It's possible to be so identified, connected, and preoccupied with suffering that we don't see the bigger picture of what's happening for us, the bigger context.

In the wider context, it's possible to hold suffering with a sense of well-being, with a sense of confidence, goodness, generosity, and compassion. It's possible to hold the suffering even in a field or atmosphere of something that resembles well-being, joy, or happiness.

So, start becoming attuned. Start to recognize our capacity for joy or happiness in the letting go, in the relaxing, in the lightening up, and in the easing up with what's happening.

We will begin this meditation, and I'll put an emphasis on easing up, being easy, and putting yourself at ease. As you do so, see if you can find glimmers—maybe more—of something in the family of happiness, joy, delight, or well-being. Without getting fixated on anything, even if a glimmer of this well-being is there, let it be the support for you to continue with the practice of being here. Now, let it be a support for you to help you let go of anything that takes you away from the present moment or obscures it with suffering.

Assume a meditation posture and close your eyes. Gentle yourself into your body. Gently, almost as if with your awareness, enter into your body. Your sense of sensations, awareness, and aliveness is found within your body.

Even if you're feeling some distressing sensations or emotions, maybe there's a way to appreciate how even those sensations are a form of vitality, a form of being here, alive in the present moment. Tune into it as vitality or activation so we don't identify with the content, the story, the predictions, or the meaning that we attribute to our suffering.

Gently, from the inside out, take some long, slow, deep breaths. As you exhale, shed stories, ideas, and considerations of the past and the future. Shed the discursive mind that tells stories about how we are or what's happening. Take some gently deeper breaths and relax the body.

As you exhale, as you relax, maybe there can be a kind of letting go into the pull of gravity. Simultaneously, keep a kind of alertness in the body, in the posture.

Let your breathing return to normal, and with a normal breath, continue to relax, soften, and let go of the muscles in your body. As you do so, see if there's any feeling of ease or pleasure in the letting go, in the relaxing.

As you exhale, see if you can let yourself be at ease—at ease in your body. Being easy with what's happening in your body. Easing up, lightening up.

Gently set your heart at ease, or be easy with how things are in your heart. Ease up any tightening, grasping, or pressure associated with the heart.

As you exhale, maybe set your mind at ease. A temporary ease, just for now. You can pick up your challenges later. Or, if the mind is not at ease, ease up on the tension that's there. Be easy with it. Lightening up, softening the tension and the grasping.

And then, as you sit here, is there any sense of well-being? Maybe it's a global feeling that has a slight glow, buzz, or warmth. Or maybe there's a slight sense of pleasure somewhere—in the face, around the lips, in the chest, in the hands.

Maybe it's a contentment in the mind for the opportunity to sit in meditation, putting aside our responsibilities and busyness, content with the simplicity of just being here, breathing.

With whatever sense of ease, well-being, or happiness that you experience, see if that can be the atmosphere within which you are aware of your breathing and your present moment experience.

[Silence]

As you are sitting here, are you to some degree a bit more settled, calm, and at ease than you were when you first sat down to meditate? Is there some pervasive, but maybe very subtle, pleasure in your body, your heart, or your mind in being calmer, more settled, and more at ease?

Breathing, being here. In wherever you feel somewhat relaxed or at ease in yourself, is there a pleasure, a contentment, or some form of well-being that maybe has no reason except the satisfaction of being connected and alive with these settled, calm feelings?

Giving room, breathing room, to any feelings of contentment, pleasure, and well-being. As you breathe, breathe with it, breathe through it. Making room in your body, making room in your heart, making room in your mind for well-being, for happiness.

And then, imagine, think about, or visualize: what would it be like if you went through your whole day rooted in some feeling of well-being that's present right now? You don't give it up for anything. So whoever you encounter, whatever you're doing, happens together with a sense of well-being. There's nothing you do that sacrifices it. What would that be like for you?

Perhaps one of the consequences could be to feel some modicum of well-being or happiness in yourself and to wish that for others—to wish that for the people you encounter. To not be a force of agitation, desires, or agendas that make it harder for other people to settle into their own well-being.

May our connection to well-being lead us to wish this for others as well.

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

Thank you.

Dharmette: Intro to Mindfulness Pt 2 (18) Happiness of Non-Clinging

Hello and welcome to this third talk on the signs or symptoms of non-clinging.

As a review, this follows up last week where the focus was on mindfulness of the bundles of clinging², the source of a lot of suffering. As we untie the bundles, as we dissolve the glue that holds together the infrastructure of attachment, clinging, and grasping that we have—the continuity of resistance, pulling away, and closing down, and all the different variations of what Buddhism might call attachment or clinging—that release, that non-clinging, has symptoms. It leads to senses of well-being.

We start discovering that our clinging, our grasping, our resistance, and our closing down interfere with or cover over our capacity to be happy—our capacity to feel contentment and ease. Even when there are times of great challenge, it's possible to stay connected to some special kind of feeling that being present, being here, feels good. It feels right. Being connected to reality has a goodness to it, a rightness to it, that might not be literally considered happiness, but maybe we can call it a Dharmic³ happiness or a symptom of well-being.

So, one way or the other, one of the symptoms of letting go is in the family of happiness: happiness, joy, ease, lightening up.

I've learned through too many painful experiences that if I let go, and the consequence of letting go is that I feel neutral, then I haven't really let go. Because I've been doing this Buddhist practice so long, letting go can sometimes be relatively easy for me. I've let go of situations that were challenging—maybe I was angry or upset somehow—and I let go and thought I had let go. But I ended up feeling neutral, like, "Okay, I'm back to normal or something." Inevitably, I hadn't really let go. Whatever I was holding on to and clinging to would come back and bite me—would reappear at some point.

What I learned was that if I'm going to let go, or if letting go happens, for it to be full and healthy there has to be some feeling of goodness in it, some lightening up, some feeling of joyful energy or happy energy.

I want to be careful with the words I choose because sometimes we let go in very challenging situations and we can't obviously say in conventional ways that we are "happy" as a result of that. But there is something that feels right—a goodness to it, a lightening up, an easing up, a sense of richer vitality. Or maybe not contentment with what's happening, but a contentment of now being more fully present here for it.

So, one of the symptoms of release, letting go, non-attachment, and non-clinging is a range of emotional states that are in the happiness family.

But if we're not oriented towards that, if we ignore it, if we somehow think we're not supposed to be happy—that somehow happiness and joy are not "serious" enough for someone who is a serious practitioner who is just going to go directly to the truth, emptiness, and non-self—as if somehow in the seriousness and directness of it there's no room for joy and happiness, we're doing ourselves a great disservice.

Certainly, it can be easy to overemphasize joy and happiness. It's possible to be attached to it, to cling to it. It's possible to expect it and try to hold on to it in ways which interfere with the deeper possibility of well-being that practice can bring. But don't deny yourself that. Don't get in the way of it.

What I think is unfortunate is how many of us are so busy with what we think is important—basically sometimes with our attachments, our clinging, our sense of responsibility, our sense of obligation, or the sense of fear that drives us to "do something here"—that we don't avail ourselves of the well-being that's here.

This well-being doesn't require some great wonderful thing happening in the world. It doesn't require getting something, having some relationship with some person, or having praise or success or many of the conventional worldly things. There's a well-being that we can have that's independent of worldly conditions.

It can be very simple. It can seem unimportant. It can seem like, "Why should we focus on it when it doesn't relate to my sense of self, my agency, who I am, what I need to have, and what I need to do?" Deeper than that, or fuller than that, is a sense of just simple, ordinary well-being. A simple joy. The joy of simplicity. The joy of just being alive. A simple sense of contentment, ease, or satisfaction in simple things.

Looking at the sky when it's blue. Appreciating the sun and the clarity of the air. Appreciating the temperature or the freshness of the morning; the first morning breath outside can feel so nice. There are all these simple pleasures in life that help us realize there's more available here that I'm overlooking by the rush, by accomplishment, by getting things done, and by doing the "responsible" thing. Certainly, don't give up some of your responsibilities, but there's more well-being in this life than most people avail themselves of, and that most people feel like they have permission to stop for and enjoy—to make room for.

The proposal is that if you can start appreciating the joy and happiness that are available here, you also might begin appreciating the sense of well-being that comes from non-clinging, non-rushing, non-attachment, non-hostility, and non-greed. That is an invaluable well-being to be attuned to because that gives us a healthy alternative to hostility, to the satisfaction of a "good" anger, or the satisfaction of being involved in a strong desire that seems promising.

We are shifting the orientation to get our satisfaction from non-greed, non-hatred, and non-fear, and to be reconditioned by that—to be shifted, changed, and transformed by that well-being. So, begin appreciating the happiness of non-clinging so that we can be nourished by it. We can be reconditioned by it.

Some of us have been so powerfully conditioned, so powerfully shaped by the chronic fear we live in, the chronic ambition or desires, this chronic conceit we live in, the chronic hostility or aversion we live in. Some people have been so shaped by it they don't even know they have it. It's a powerful conditioning to live with those. In Dharma practice, we're looking to change that conditioning—to decondition the unwholesome⁴ forces within us and to bring forth a conditioning that is wholesome, nourishing, and supportive of all that's good within us. Supportive of that which leads to greater and greater happiness and well-being.

It is possible to be happy, and this Dharma practice that we do here is a path to happiness. A step in that direction is to begin availing yourself of the well-being, the contentment, and the joy that might be here for you already if you give yourself the time to realize it, to make space for it, to allow for it.

So that would be the challenge I offer you for today: spend a good part of today recognizing—realistically, not superficially, not as a holding on or kind of "color coding" your life—is there a sense of well-being, joy, happiness, contentment, or satisfaction that you can have just with the simplicity of being? Just being here as your life is right now. Granted that you might have challenges, but even with those, are there sources of joy and happiness that are simple, clear, and right here that you can nourish yourself with? Recondition yourself.

The happiness of non-clinging.

Thank you. This is also part of mindfulness practice. Remember that for some of you, this is the introduction to mindfulness we're still doing. So in this big package of things we include as part of mindfulness, part of it is the well-being that arises as well.

Thank you.