This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Freedom;Ten Reflections (3 of 10) Agency. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Freedom; Dharmette: Ten Reflections (3 of 10) Agency; Guided Meditation: Love - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on April 24, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Freedom

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Insight Meditation Center, virtually.

I would like to offer the theme for today's meditation to be something fundamental to Buddhism, and that is freedom or liberation. What we can learn about freedom in the mind or in the heart—maybe through meditation or Buddhist practice—has invaluable lessons to offer us for how to live in our regular life and the world with a degree of freedom and liberation as well.

But we learn it here; we learn it in our own minds. To have a mind which is not free is to have a mind which is caught in its preoccupations, a mind which is caught up in fantasy and lost in thought. We bring the mind back to the breath or to the moment, and then immediately the mind has a mind of its own and takes us away. We feel like we have no control, no role, no agency with our own mind.

There are two things that stand out to me when I think about freedom in the mind. One is certainly to have mastered a degree of agency with the mind where we can choose what we think about, where we can direct our attention, and the mind will stay there. We have the skills, the capacity, and the freedom to be able to direct the mind where we'd like it to be. In meditation, that is invaluable: to direct the mind to the present moment, to the breathing, to being focused here and now is profoundly¹ meaningful and valuable.

But the other understanding of freedom—because we can't always have that level of agency and freedom in the mind—is the freedom to be aware of what's happening in the mind. The freedom to know. It is like there is an independent observer or observation that goes on. Yes, what the mind thinks about, what it is involved in, maybe is not so much under our control. But we feel free because we can observe it; we can know it as it's happening. Because of that, we are not so caught in it. We are not so invested in it as we are when all our mental energy goes into it.

There is a really important part of ourselves which is not fueling the patterns of the mind, but rather is fueling our capacity to observe, to know, to see—to kind of stand independent of the mind's oddities.

These are two forms of freedom, and both of them can give us a sense of agency, a sense of not being lost, not being the victims of whatever the mind brings up to us. So, freedom. This will be the reference point for this meditation: two kinds of freedom. If you can do the first, great. If you can't, then the second is the place to discover freedom.

To assume a meditation posture and to give some care and time to establishing and adjusting the subtleties of the posture is an expression of freedom and agency. We are engaged in the process of finding a way to meditate with our posture that feels the best we have given the circumstances. Straightening, maybe, the spine; letting the chest be open; adjusting where the hands are so the elbows can be relaxed and at ease; adjusting where the weight falls on your sitting bones, maybe so the belly can relax.

Then, close your eyes. With a sense of freedom, choice, and agency, in your own way—in a gentle, supportive way—take a few long, slow, deep breaths. Let your choice, your engagement in those breaths, be something you appreciate you can do. Enjoyable, deep, and full, just to the point so it's enjoyable and relaxing on the exhale.

Letting the breathing return to normal, and maybe with the same appreciation of your choice to do this more than how well you can do it.

As you exhale, soften in your face, around the eyes.

As you exhale, soften in the shoulders.

As you exhale, soften the belly, breathing in a normal way.

On the inhale, feel whatever tension, contractions, or pressure there might be in the thinking mind. And as you exhale, soften the thinking mind. Be less concerned about doing it successfully than with the pleasure, delight, or appreciation of being able to direct your mind into this effort to soften.

And then on the inhale, feel what is happening in your heart. Allow it to be as it is. Just feel it, maybe appreciating the choice, the ability to feel, more than what you feel.

And then as you exhale, to soften in the heart. Again, less interested in being successful as appreciating the freedom to make the choice to attempt softening.

And then with whatever ability you have, even if it's for a moment, appreciate the freedom you have to now direct your attention to the body's experience of breathing. Feeling the inhale, the exhale, and feeling how they are different from each other.

Appreciating whatever freedom and ability you have to stay with your breathing, however long it might be, and appreciate that as it is.

And if you can't stay with the breathing, appreciate your ability to know and observe what it is that's happening. An observation that is not entangled or reactive. Or if it is, step back further and observe that. Find the freedom in observing what's happening rather than being entangled with what's happening.

Perhaps you can find some degree of freedom or peace in the simplest ability to observe what's happening or to know—be aware of—what's happening. Even if the ability to do so is ever so short, appreciate the ability to do so, so you're not so caught up in what you're aware of.

And then as we come to the end of this sitting, is there any way that you can appreciate your own inner capacity for freedom? Freedom from mental afflictions by being calm and peaceful. A freedom to be able to direct the mind—and the mind is directable—direct the mind back to the present moment, and the mind goes along, however brief. Or the freedom to simply observe, know, be aware of what's happening, and to sense that awareness, that knowing, is not entangled, not caught in "for" or "against."

However the mind senses the mind's freedom, appreciate it. Be nourished by it. Imagine how that freedom can have a beneficial role for when you interact with other people—conversations, seeing them, thinking about them. Perhaps your own mental freedom can create the space in the mind and the heart for good will² to arise. Basic good will towards others, because the absence of good will is a kind of closing down, a kind of losing of the freedom.

And with whatever good will that you have—kindness, friendliness—to wish others well. Perhaps you can choose particular people that you know, or more generally for groups of people, or all people. As I say these words:

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

And may we, with our freedom and choice, contribute to this possibility, however small our contribution is.

May all beings be happy.

Dharmette: Ten Reflections (3 of 10) Agency

Welcome to this third talk on "Ten Reflections for a Dharma Life," or to live in the Dharma³. In fact, these ten reflections can be called reflections for living a spiritual life because they are orientations for understanding people that are used by people who offer spiritual counseling or chaplaincy to others. I find them very useful because they are really basic to our humanity. They don't fall out of a purview of just Buddhism, but in this context of teaching here, I offer them a little bit in the Buddhist context.

For today and tomorrow, the topic is agency and autonomy. What I associate that with—the positive corollary—is a sense of freedom.

When we are free to have agency, to engage, to act, and to do, and when we have a sense of autonomy in that activity, those actions come with a sense of freedom and capacity. If that is curtailed, people suffer a lot. People are frustrated; they feel oppressed; they feel held in check; they feel boxed in. They feel a sense of hopelessness and even helplessness. But to allow people to discover a sense of agency—that they can do, they can make a difference, they can act, and they're not held in check—this relates to the spiritual needs or human needs people have that we talked about Monday and Tuesday: meaning and purpose.

Once you have the real sense of what's important for you—the most important values, most important intentions, and important purpose, what you want to do, how you want to live your life—then to have the ability to actually live that way. To not be held in check by inner forces in ourselves—by our own fears, our resistance, our hesitations, our procrastination—and not being held in check by the world around us. By the oppression that some people live in: the oppression of war, the oppression of racism⁴, of poverty, lack of educational opportunities, lack of work opportunities. There are all kinds of ways in which people feel like they can't engage.

So to discover a sense of agency, to be empowered to act. In some schools of Buddhism, they actually do empowerment ceremonies for people. We don't do that in our tradition particularly, but maybe sometimes we should, because people don't sometimes feel like they have the ability, the permission, the capacity to engage in certain kinds of practices or certain ways of living their life from certain values. On their own, they can't do it. But if you're given permission, if someone believes in you, if someone champions you and supports you—has your back as you do it—some people then feel, "Oh, now I can do it. I can step into what's challenging and frightening for me." So to empower people, to affirm people, to encourage people is, for some people, phenomenally useful and important.

So for you, as you consider your own agency, is that something that you feel like you are an agent of your own destiny? That you have some choice and ability to act in ways that are important for you, that are invaluable for you? That you feel like it really would be an expression of being free to live the deepest values that you have, the deepest possibilities you have?

Understand where do we have agency and where we don't. Where is realistic agency, healthy agency, and where are unhealthy ideas of agency? Ideas of agency that are caught up in greed and hatred, and wanting to act from these very negative, unwholesome impulses. To feel like, "I want to be free just to be angry, I want to be free just to get whatever it is that I want." That is a certain kind of freedom, but at the cost of hurting other people. That is a certain kind of freedom, but it's only an external freedom. It's not an internal freedom.

In fact, if we're caught up in greed and hatred, something inside⁵ of us has been frozen. Something inside of us has stopped, is covered over. We have lost the deepest kind of agency from the deepest place of well-being, the deepest places in our hearts and minds.

To discover that—like through meditation—to discover a place of deep, abiding value, a deep, abiding sense of reflection and intimacy and peace and wisdom and creativity that just feels so good to have. And then feel like that can flow out of us into what we do. That we don't have inhibitions for what is healthy within us to come forth. We don't have inhibitions to speak what feels true—speak the truth if necessary—but to do so without being caught in fear or caught in hatred or in greed. To do it from a deep sense of inner freedom.

So agency in Buddhism has a lot to do with the inner freedom that we can have even when the world around us oppresses us—which is unfortunate and terrible and something that we should work to overcome. We can't always do it completely. But even in the midst of life's challenges and the limitations it puts on us because of illness and sickness and loss and all kinds of things, it is still possible to find agency with ourselves. How to find our own freedom, our own relationship with our experience. Our own freedom from the ways in which we dampen ourselves down or limit ourselves or close up or get contracted—which we do when we're operating from greed, hatred, and excessive anxiety.

To discover these deeper wellsprings within and feel the freedom for those to flow out of us in spite of the external limitations that somehow we have to live in. Maybe we have no choice sometimes to live certain ways.

I don't know if this is an appropriate example of this, but certainly, I became a parent a little bit late in life. I was surprised that after living for years in monasteries where there were a lot of limitations, that parenting with young children was phenomenally limiting—on sleep and self-care and all kinds of things, just taking care of the babies and all this. I mean, it was a limitation I had to live with. I had to take care of these children at the expense of being free to do all kinds of other things I was used to doing in my life.

But even there, this was invaluable for me to grapple with, because there I could work through these layers inside to find that deeper place of freedom where agency had returned. Agency to be free in the midst of limitations. Agency to engage choicefully and wisely with life as it's given to me, as opposed to how I wanted it to be and to be different.

So to really look deeply into this question of, maybe in the wake of reflecting on meaning and purpose, what is your sense of agency? Do you feel like you have agency in your life? Where do you feel like you don't have it? Where are you held in check and where are you limited? Where can you find an empowerment, maybe a self-empowerment, so you're not held in check, you're not held in resistance, you're not held in procrastinations? That you can step forward and set something free.

But not something free that is crazy, that's going to harm other people or even harm yourself. Because we do have oddities in our minds and hearts about our desires and our wishes and our fantasies and delusions about what goes on. What is it that's reliable? What's the reliable source of agency within that allows us to feel free, creative, intelligent, wise? One of the characteristics of that is it has a profound sense of peace as part of it, and a profound sense of good will and respect that comes from this deep wellspring where the spiritual freedom lives within us.

So, agency. If you're inclined at all, that's the theme for reflection for these next 24 hours⁶. How does that work for you? Is there another word that you would rather use than agency that maybe speaks to what I'm talking about today better? Maybe simply the phrase "freedom to act," "freedom to live from our deepest values." But maybe you have a different phrase that is useful for you to reflect on this.

Where do you not have a sense of agency? Where do you feel in check? Where would it be useful for you to discover greater freedom and agency, to be empowered, to be self-empowered, or to have someone who believes in you reflect back to you: "Yes, you can do this. It's okay."

So, agency. Thank you. Tomorrow I'll talk about autonomy, which also then raises this interesting question: Doesn't some of these teachings of meaning, purpose, and agency rub a little bit wrong against the Buddhist teachings of not-self⁷? The idea of autonomy—isn't that a little bit opposed to those teachings? I would like to say not, but that we will save for tomorrow⁸.

Thank you very much, and may you have a day of discovering greater freedom for how you can live your life.