This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Inspiration; Ten Reflections (1 of 10) Meaning. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Inspiration; Dharmette: Ten Reflections (1 of 10) Meaning - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on April 22, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Inspiration

Good morning, good day everyone. Welcome to this Monday. I am happy to be back after a two-week vacation. It is not often that I do something like that with my wife. We did a lot of hiking, and now I am happy to be here.

Many years ago, I met a monk in Thailand. I was staying at a monastery, and he was known for his great meditative accomplishments; he was a very deep practitioner. When I met him, there was something very special about looking into his eyes. I had never seen such depth and such peace in someone's eyes. I asked him what he had attained in his years of monastic practice. His answer surprised me, given the buildup that this was a person of great meditative accomplishments and attainments. He said he had attained non-contention.

This was said in translation, so I don't know exactly what the Thai word was, but the translator said "non-contention." That really made a big impression on me. It was one of the first times that I was being introduced to this Insight practice at that monastery.

This idea of non-contention has been very inspiring for me to practice mindfulness for all the different purposes that mindfulness can fulfill. One of them is this ability to sit with ourselves and not make anything worse—simply to sit with respect, a non-contention, and a feeling of the tremendous value of non-reactive attention. Something very profound begins happening when we can see clearly without being "for" or "against," without reacting or making it worse with our judgments. We are just seeing clearly the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Clear seeing is enough. But then we learn that clear seeing can lead to freedom—freedom from reactivity and freedom from our attachments. That clear seeing begins uprooting the many ways we are attached, clinging, holding on, afraid, and resentful. These slowly, or maybe sometimes quickly, begin to fade, and we find ourselves free of these afflictions that can follow us for a lifetime.

To see and know that this is the purpose of mindfulness, this is the possibility, and this is how mindfulness provides a tremendous sense of meaning. We can take it further and realize how this non-contentious attention—this freedom from affliction—allows us to enter into the world in a deep, friendly way. We don't lead with fear, aversion, or desires, wanting things from people. Instead, we lead with love, care, kindness, and respect.

I mention these because one way to sit in mindfulness is to really appreciate the value and importance of it—how meaningful and purposeful it is—to awaken our inspiration. That kind of faith energizes us: "Yes, I will do this. Yes, I want to be here." We have inspiration that this is important, so that the other things we are inspired to do with the mind—to worry, to be anxious, to review the past, to spin out in fantasy—don't get as much energy or fuel from us. The fuel and energy of our life is inspired to go into mindfulness.

Assume a meditation posture. Maybe do not close the eyes right away unless you already have, but rather lower your gaze and allow your eyes to be soft. Soft eyes that maybe gently float in the sockets, not fixating on anything, not stuck on anything. Soft eyes.

And now, perhaps gently close your eyes, letting the eyes be soft and gentle. Take a few gentle, deep breaths—just deep enough so it is not uncomfortable, so it is enjoyable for you to breathe in deeply.

Exhaling, relaxing. As you exhale, maybe in the way that you softened your eyes, soften your body. Maybe soften the edges of where you are tight, frozen, or stiff.

Let your breathing return to normal. On the exhale, soften in the face, around the eyes. On the exhale, find where there is softness in the face and let that spread. If there are places that are not soft, it's okay; let them be held in softness.

On the exhale, softening in the shoulders.

On the exhale, softening in the belly.

On the exhale, softening in the mind. As the mind softens, maybe there is more space to be inspired, more space for faith in being present here and now.

As you exhale, soften your heart so that more of your life energy—the energy of the heart—can be inspired to be attentive here and now.

Then, settle in to be here and now with your breathing. Have the breathing be at the center of all things. Even if other things require attention, breathe with those things. The massage of breath.

The word "inspiration" is related to the word "respiration." Stay close to your breathing so you can stay close to your inspiration for being present.

[Silence]

Remember to come back to the present, being reminded by what inspires you to be inspired to be here and now.

[Silence]

Coming to the end of this sitting, consider the ways you understand the value of mindfulness and the value of your practice of mindfulness in the way that you relate to other people. How does mindfulness support you in being present with kindness, respect, care, love, honesty, generosity, wisdom, and equanimity?¹

So many things can come from the practice of mindfulness. What is it that comes from it for you? What might come from it for you today as you go about your life with other people—with strangers, with people you know?

How are you inspired to bring mindfulness into your social life today?

May it be that you are able to do this. May it be that your practice of mindfulness this morning—that our collective practice together as a community—combines to bring a tremendous amount of good into this world. Tremendous kindness, respect, care, love, and honesty.

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

May it be that our practice supports us to contribute to this possibility. Thank you all very much.

Dharmette: Ten Reflections (1 of 10) Meaning

Hello everyone, and welcome. Excuse me, I seem to have a little hoarseness this morning, possibly from traveling yesterday and possibly from allergies the last week or so. It seems like something that usually goes away after a while in the morning.

This morning being Monday, I would like to start a new series of teachings, and I will do that for the next two weeks. It is a ten-part series on ten areas of reflection for a Dharma² life. Each of these days, I will be giving one of those ten. I am hoping that the words I say will inspire you to think and reflect on these concepts. I will be offering my own ideas about these concepts as I go along, but I don't want to offer them as being the definitive presentation of what these things can be. Rather, I want to bring up some things that you then will reflect on for yourself and come up with ideas for how it works for you.

These ten reflections are being adapted from my studies of chaplaincy—spiritual care that is done in the world of hospitals, prisons, and all kinds of other places where chaplains work. Chaplains have a particular orientation. Especially since they are interfaith chaplains, they are not looking for particular religious ideas, but they are looking for spiritual qualities or characteristics that are central to people's lives that they want to address. Often, chaplains are meeting people at times of crisis—personal, family, and social crisis. In times of crisis, something is often broken or really challenged for people in their spiritual life and in their personal life.

These chaplains can have these ten different areas that they are paying attention to, to see: Where is something broken? Where does something need to be healed, worked on, understood, or reflected on in a deeper way? I find it very useful to take these ten qualities from chaplaincy and address them to a Dharma life. I will try to do that for these two weeks. As I said, I hope you will reflect on them and make them your own to see how it works for you.

These ten are really five areas, and each area has two qualities or characteristics. I will briefly list the ten today, and then I will go through each one.

When divided into five categories, they have to do with:

1. Meaning
2. Agency
3. Identity
4. Community
5. Healing

I have associated these five with five positive emotional states that manifest when these areas are healed, resolved, or developed well. Maybe you will think about the correlations and come up with different ones for yourself.

• Meaning corresponds with Inspiration.
• Agency corresponds to Freedom.
• Identity corresponds to Confidence.
• Community corresponds to Love.
• Healing corresponds to Wholeness.

Each of these five is then divided into two.

• To the world of Meaning, we add the idea of Purpose.
• To the world of Agency, we add the idea of Autonomy.
• To the world of Identity, we add the concept of Dignity (value, worth).
• To Community, we add the idea of Kinship.
• To Healing, we add the idea of Reconciliation.

It begins with Meaning. In my personal history with Buddhism—especially starting off in Zen Buddhism—I would say that I had a challenging or difficult relationship to the idea of meaning. I probably thought that it was overlaying some concept on top of our direct experience, and I was more interested in just showing up and being present for things as they are, not adding things on top.

Nowadays, I think that is still true—that it is valuable to show up for things as they are. But part of "things as they are" is meaning. Meaning isn't an overlay; meaning is its own thing. Meaning has to do with value—what we see as most valuable. It has to do with the values we live by and organize our life by, and the orientations that we organize ourselves for, deciding how we communicate with other people and how we relate to ourselves. All this fits under the category of meaning: What do we find is the meaning of our life? Where do we find meaning for what we do? Why do we do what we do?

In my Zen years, I avoided the word "meaning" and instead used the word "intention." I think that the words "meaning" and "intention" don't have to be so separate. Where we have meaning, we find intention; where we have intention, there is something that has meaning or importance for us.

I found in my studies, and for myself regarding my intentionality, that there were layers and layers of intentions. I might have a surface intention, but I wouldn't stop there and say "that's the intention." I would keep looking: What is underneath that? What fuels that? What is it that is most important here? What is the most fundamental intention—the intention prior to all the others?

What do we hold most important in our life? What is most meaningful for us?

• Is it family? For some people, that is most important.
• Is it a sense of contribution—contributing to society?
• Is it personal fulfillment?
• Is it having fun and adventure?
• Is it understanding, truth, discovering, and learning?

I don't want to make a hierarchy of one of these being more important than the other, but I want to give you a sense of possibilities. Different people, for whatever reason—their personality, the way they were born, the way they were raised by their culture—will have different things that they hold as being important and meaningful. Meaningful enough that they want to live by it. It guides them in how they want to live their life, what is important to do, and what they like to do.

When there is no sense of meaning—when something is meaningless—people get depressed. People feel a sense of hopelessness and feel lost. Some people have done things which seemed meaningful in a certain phase of their life, but as they got older, those things didn't hold any meaning anymore. Certain work or pursuits that we kept doing beyond the time that they had any value for us can lead to a sense of vacuity, emptiness, or lack of energy or inspiration.

When there is no inspiration, is it because something about what is meaningful for us has been challenged? Perhaps what is meaningful to us can't be fulfilled, we can't act on it, or what we have been acting on is no longer meaningful. We might feel deeply betrayed and discouraged. Maybe we devoted ourselves to something we thought was really meaningful, and then we found out the people involved weren't living up to what we thought, or the whole thing was a facade or didn't seem to be what it promised to be on the surface. We become discouraged; what was meaningful is no longer meaningful, and the sense of how we organized and oriented our life is no longer being supported. Then we have to look around and see: What can I rely on as being meaningful?

There is a tremendous amount of human suffering around the topic of meaning, and there can be a tremendous sense of inspiration and joy in finding meaning and having meaning.

There are people who go through tremendous crisis in life who, when they have a meaning that they find in the middle of it, can go through it with confidence and success. Viktor Frankl wrote the famous book Man's Search for Meaning³, inspired by his experience in the Nazi concentration camps. He observed that for the prisoners, having some meaning about their life was enough to keep them alive or keep them going. The ones who had no meaning, whose meaning was destroyed or lost, were the ones who were most likely to die in those circumstances. I probably didn't say it just right, but the point is that meaning is what can really animate a life and help us through tremendous challenges. In difficulties that otherwise would be discouraging, we can stay inspired if we find meaning: "What is the meaning in it?"

In Buddhism, there is tremendous meaning in practicing mindfulness, finding a path, and knowing there is a path. There is tremendous meaning in not succumbing to hatred, greed, and fear—not being overwhelmed by these forces. Just knowing we are on a path to become free of those is so meaningful. We don't have to be free of them yet, but knowing we have a path that leads to freedom from being oppressed by ourselves—so that we don't add our own contribution to suffering to the difficulties of life—can be tremendously inspiring. It can help people go through tremendous difficulties. We will see later, as we talk about autonomy and agency, how important this is as well.

So for today, it is meaning. I would like to propose that human beings have a tremendous need for meaning and meaningfulness. Even people who don't recognize that in themselves, with a deeper reflection, would probably see that there is something around which they organize themselves that has to do with meaning.

What is your meaning? Where do you find meaning? What are the layers of meaning that you have? Layers of importance of what you really want to organize yourself around—the values, the sense of purpose, how to be in the world, and why to be in the world.

That is my proposal for those of you who would like to reflect on this and think about it for the next 24 hours. You might want to write about it a little bit if you are a person who likes to do that. Something different happens when you write about these kinds of profound things and then go back and read them; that allows us to reflect even further and deeper. Or, have conversations with friends around this topic of meaning.

We will continue tomorrow. Thank you very much.