This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Meditation as Friendship; Gil's Story (1 of 5) First Interest in Buddhism. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.
Guided Meditation: Meditation as Friendship; Dharmette: Gil's Story (1 of 5) First Interest in Buddhism - Gil Fronsdal
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 27, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Introduction
Good morning. Before we officially start at 7:00 a.m., I want to just appreciate that all of you are here. I see the names and the locations: Abby from Denver, Zach in Portland, Marie in Massachusetts, Mikela in Santa Fe, and Mammoth Lakes. Kathy, a beautiful place to live in Mammoth. Cindy, hello from the Redwoods. Jamie, hi, nice to see your name and greetings. Here we go, and from Denmark, far away, Anja. Ana from Florida, Henry, hi in Boise. Rita, hi, Los Cabos, Mexico. Hi, Al, Alexa, and Kathy Mets from Berkeley. Hi, Parisa. It's a lot of names, and I'm sorry to skip over some, just kind of doing it for Monterey, Blue Dun, Dana, Santa Barbara, Charlesy. Hi, it's wonderful. So my friends, it's nice to see you all—or well, see your names and your greetings.
Guided Meditation: Meditation as Friendship
Good morning, good day, hello everyone. One of the radical acts in any human life, given the state of the world, is to be friends with everyone. Maybe it's a tall order, but to be friends with the people that we encounter. I like to believe that a lot of what Buddhist practice entails is—in spite of us being here on YouTube today—personal. It's person-to-person meetings. And in those meetings, may we be friends with people we encounter. We might not agree with them, but we can be friendly.
One of the people to be friendly with, and towards, is ourselves. Meditation can be understood as a deep practice of friendship towards yourself, a continual act of friendliness. If that's too high a bar, at least be safe for oneself—at least not be the opposite of a friend. What would it be to be a friend with all the complexity of who we are in our inner life, our life experiences, and our reactions to the world?
What is it to cast a wide gaze upon ourselves, such a wide gaze that we can take the whole in and view all of it in a friendly way? One of the purposes of this—among many purposes—is that the attitudes with which we move through the world affect our breathing. To breathe with ease, to breathe in a relaxed, gentle way, to breathe peacefully, is one of the great experiences of life. Our attitudes affect our breathing: anxiety affects it, anger affects it, desire affects it. But to meet ourselves with friendliness and safety creates a more relaxed breathing. The easeful breath, in turn, nourishes and nurtures us. It has a profound impact on ourselves, and perhaps then supports our ability to meet others in a friendly, kind way.
So, assuming a meditation posture and giving some care to adjust the torso so that there is some space in the chest and the rib cage around the diaphragm, for the breathing to be unencumbered. Sometimes sitting in such a way—or laying, if you're laying down—in such a way that the spine is a little bit more erect, especially the upper spine, so that the chest curves outward a little bit. Assuming a posture in such a way that the belly is not scrunched, the belly is not restricted by being curved over into it, but kind of an opening up in the area of the belly. A concave belly, so the belly hangs forward and has a chance to relax.
Maybe also it's possible to roll the shoulders back a little bit, and adjust the head and the neck so the back of the neck is maybe a little bit longer than usual. Lowering your gaze, maybe closing your eyes. With as much calm as you can find—a calm attitude, a calm approach—let your attention roam around your body, just taking it in as it is. Beginning to have this broad gaze, taking in all of who you are in this body with a calm attention, slowly moving around the body. Then taking a few long, slow, deep breaths. As you exhale, relax the body, letting the breathing return to normal.
Calmly and slowly move from the top of your body, down through the face, shoulders, belly, hands, legs. Calmly and slowly move through, relaxing each area as you exhale.
Then calmly and gently bring your attention to your back rib cage, and feel the movements there of breathing. The movements of the spine, the rib cage, the ribs—maybe a subtle lifting or expanding. Or if not there, maybe the lifting of the shoulders as you breathe. Maybe noticing if there's any movement in the collarbones as you breathe, and how that movement in the collarbones is different when you breathe in and when you breathe out.
What is the experience of breathing just on the front rib cage, high up, just below the collarbones? Maybe an area where there are no muscles that are doing the breathing; the high rib cage just gently moves with breathing in and breathing out. Some parts of the body just passively follow along with the breathing.
Then calmly, slowly becoming aware of where the experience of breathing feels most comfortable to feel in the body. Maybe movement of the belly, maybe in the area around the diaphragm or solar plexus, the chest, the sensations of the air going in and out through the nostrils. Wherever it's most comfortable, maybe even easeful. Take in the comfort, take in the ease, even if it's quite modest. Let yourself feel whatever pleasure, however minor there might be, as you breathe in and breathe out.
Here, if there's any tension or pressure in the thinking mind, each time you exhale let that tension melt, soften, and settle ever so slightly with each exhale.
And then, as we come to the end of this sitting, see if you can have a bird's-eye view of yourself and gaze upon it all calmly, peacefully. Or perhaps a global feeling of the sensations of your body, feeling all of who you are. Maybe in the way that you would take in a stranger who seemed friendly and safe, and may be in need of hospitality. To be your own host, allowing yourself to be as you are in a friendly, hospitable way. Letting yourself be just who you are, as you are.
And now to expand your horizons to the people that you'll be encountering today, nearby, and maybe currently not so close by. Imagine yourself being a host for them, that your very presence is a presence of hospitality and friendliness. And as an expression of friendship, friendliness, wishing well, a generalized goodwill: May all people that you encounter today, that you think about today, may they be happy. May they be safe. May they be peaceful. May they breathe easily. May their minds and hearts be calm, safe, settled, contented. May they be free. And may our contact with them support this possibility. May we encounter all beings in a friendly way. Thank you.
Dharmette: Gil's Story (1 of 5) First Interest in Buddhism
So hello on this Monday. I'm sitting here in Redwood City at the Insight Meditation Center, and delighted to be in this kind of time together. Over the weekend, I thought about different themes to do for this week for this 7:00 a.m. YouTube stream. We've been doing this now for a long time—many years now, since the beginning of the pandemic. I've done many themes, and this weekend in thinking about what to do, I thought about different things, but none of them really had a spark for me. None of them really were something that I felt like I could come here and embody, or feel a deep heart connection to.
So I think what I'd like to do is to fall back on a certain default that might be interesting for you, since some of you have been listening to me here for a long time, and do something maybe uncharacteristic. That is to talk a little bit about myself. Maybe some of you would like to know more about me. Mostly here in the 7:00 a.m. sittings, I talk about the Dharma1. Occasionally I'll mention something autobiographical, but maybe some of you don't know much about me, and it might be interesting to hear a little bit. To make it interesting for me, I think I'll talk a little bit about the background of my life in a way that brought me to practice, and brought me here to IMC, and even here now teaching with all of you. So I hope that that's interesting enough to hear. I feel a little bit apologetic that it's not giving you some specific Dharma topic to chew on, but maybe that'll come out as I talk to you a little bit about my life.
I probably had my first contact with the Dharma when I was around eleven years old. My family—my mother, father, and myself—were traveling. My father was working in Italy at that time, and otherwise we had a home in Los Angeles. My father apparently had the summer free from work, so the decision was to return to Los Angeles, I think with a ticket that was paid for by his work, by traveling to the East. Along the way there, we stopped in India, and then Thailand.
While we were in India, my father was reading a book—I think it was called The Wonder That Was India2—and he commented to me that one of the characteristics of Indian religions was to be very inclusive. That somehow all the different forms of religion in India could be held together and seen as one big, harmonious religious family. I was really inspired by that. I grew up in a non-religious household. My parents were atheists, but they were disinterested atheists; it wasn't a big deal for them. I was originally born in Norway, and they have a pantheon of Nordic gods from a thousand years ago, like Thor and Odin. Those never came up in family discussions. I don't think my family believed in Thor or Odin, but it was never a topic of interest. It just didn't occur to them. In the same way, being an atheist was like that—it just didn't occur to talk about something like religion or gods. But hearing the statement about how ecumenical and inclusive things were in India, I was inspired by the harmony that seemed to imply.
Then we went to Thailand, and there I remember seeing a big statue of the reclining Buddha in Bangkok. It's gold; I don't know how long it is, but it's probably forty feet long at least. I remember seeing the Buddha—he's laying down. It doesn't just look like a sleeping Buddha, but it's a Buddha in the posture in which he died. He's laying down on his right side, and in the usual statues he has one hand underneath his cheek and he's kind of resting on it. I was inspired by that statue, but not religiously. I thought, "Oh, that's the ideal way of sleeping—sleeping on your right side." So for quite a bit, that's how I slept, inspired by what I saw in that statue.
When I was fourteen, my mother bought a copy for herself of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. I read it, and was inspired by what I felt was the simplicity, the peace, and the non-contentiousness of the life that the Buddha was represented to live in that novel.
These things didn't make a big impression on me right away, but then I think the next big impression was when I was eighteen. I was traveling around Europe by myself—except for people I would travel with for a few days—and I came to this great cathedral monastery called Mont-Saint-Michel. It's on the coast of Normandy or Brittany, and architecturally it looks a little bit like a Disneyland castle that's rising up from this hilltop on this little island, with spires reaching up into the sky.
I went through it on a tour that they gave. I spent the night there on the little island at a Pax Christi hostel that had an ancient feeling. It wasn't exactly like a cave, but it was a little stone building with a wood table and wood chairs. We were served bread in the morning like we were at the Last Supper or something, and there was a priest there who was very friendly and talked to us. It just felt like I had stepped into something timeless, almost like I was in the monastery already.
The next morning, I took the tour of the monastery. The monastery had been built around a very simple, one-room stone cottage or stone chapel at the very top of the hill, and slowly over the centuries it was added to. As they took us through that original chapel, as soon as we stepped into its cool, quiet, peaceful space, something in my body shifted. Everything got really peaceful and quiet. I had never experienced this deep peace and quiet. Even though the tour kept going, I tried to linger as long as I could in that chapel to feel that experience. That made a huge impression on me.
I don't remember if it was exactly that time when I was a teenager, but maybe it was after that that I spent time wondering if I could join a Catholic monastery and become a monk. Even though I was an atheist, there was something about the atmosphere of that life—getting up early and walking around the peaceful architecture that represented that experience. It was like the experience I had in the chapel. I wanted to have my life devoted not to God, not to religion, but to that experience of peace, that deep sense of calm that I felt. It felt so healthy, so holistic. I couldn't imagine anything better than this.
But I didn't do that. I went to college, and I went to college during the Vietnam War. I was draftable. During that time in the dorms the first year, there were intense debates about war and the Vietnam War. I was always the extreme pacifist in the discussions. I don't know where my pacifism came from, but it was really clear that I would not fight; that was impossible for me. Originally, I couldn't give a good philosophical, political, or religious reason for why I would not pick up a gun. It was just impossible for me by disposition to do something like that.
But then I defended my pacifist stance with my friends, and I found myself disturbed by what I discovered about myself. I had this strong position that involved, if necessary, participating in civil disobedience, passive disobedience, standing up and protesting to interfere with the harm being caused in society and the world. But what I discovered was that I was afraid to die. I thought that if I took my beliefs seriously, I had to have the same courage as a military soldier who goes into battle. I had to be able to put myself in harm's way in order to be involved in protesting or working for nonviolent change.
I was afraid to die, and the dissonance between my beliefs and what I was capable of really disturbed me a lot. That became where I started to search for some approach, some way of living, something that would help me deal with this fear of death so I could live with my ideals. And that was when I first thought that Buddhism might have an answer.
At the same time, I was going to college at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which is right on the coast. You can see from the coastline of the university out to the oil platforms. Just before I got there, there was a massive oil spill on the Santa Barbara beach, so that was very current. I got interested in Environmental Studies, and I actually became an Environmental Studies major for a while. First, I was going to study the science of it all, but I felt science wasn't going to solve these problems; it's a political issue. So I started studying political science. That was interesting, but I thought politics wasn't going to be enough to change this either. In the language of 1973 or so, what needed to happen was a "change of consciousness."
That's where I started looking: Where, what orientation, what teachings, what way of life can really help us change our consciousness so that we can have the change that would really help this world of ours? So then I started looking around, and the things that spoke to me the most were Daoism and Buddhism. They seemed to speak to a radically different way of living in harmony with the world, rather than a disharmony that over-consumes, destroys, and abuses the world in order to support our lifestyles.
And so that was my beginning. Looking for a solution to the fear of death, and looking for a solution to social and global ecological issues, I began orienting towards Buddhism and Eastern religion. Then I dropped out of college, and I'll pick up that story tomorrow. Hopefully this is interesting for you, and if it is, I'm very happy to continue telling it. Thank you.