This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Mindfulness with Care; Sources of Care-Giving (5 of 5) Care. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: Mindfulness with Care; Sources of Care-Giving (5 of 5) Care

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 03, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Mindfulness with Care (link)

Hello and welcome. This is the fifth meditation this week, generally oriented towards the source of caregiving within us. The meditations have been leading up to the talks that follow. Today, I would like to do a meditation that calls upon a little bit of imagination to support mindfulness, maybe mindfulness of breathing—a very basic meditation.

It's based on the idea that one of the real basic and ordinary forms of caregiving operates best when there are no attachments, no clinging, no anxiety, no fear, no greed, no hatred. That somehow the heart is at ease. It's open. It's clean. It's free of these kinds of obstacles that might be in there, disturbances. The ordinary capacity to care thrives or comes almost naturally when the heart is no longer disturbed.

So, can you imagine, maybe by remembering some particular special moment in your life, can you imagine that temporarily your heart's at peace? That your heart is whole, content, that your heart has no disturbances, nothing it's worried about, no attachments that are activated and present for you. What is it like to be in your body, be in your heart, be with yourself? Imagine what that's like. You might even imagine a location where such a thing has happened or can happen.

In this kind of scenario, is there some kind of inclination, maybe not intentional, but an inclination to care, to take time to value, see as important, help maintain, help benefit the immediacy of what's around you? Maybe the location itself, the physical material, the place, the beings in the area, and maybe with yourself.

One of the ways we care for ourselves, usually not at all intentional, is to breathe. The way that we breathe shifts and changes based on what we're doing, as the body tries to adjust to do the job that needs to be done to most support you in whatever you're doing. To see breathing as part of this caregiving field that we live in, that operates best when there are no attachments, no disturbances of the heart.

So, to assume a meditation posture and to gently close the eyes. In a very simple way, become attuned to your body breathing. Be attuned to this simple rhythm and speed of your breathing. Noticing what parts of your body are activated as you breathe, without any idea it should be any different. It's okay how you are. Just know it. Discover how it is now.

As you exhale, relaxing your body.

As you exhale, relaxing your thinking mind.

As you exhale, relaxing the area around your heart, softening the heart center.

And then imagine or visualize how it would be to be at ease, content, undisturbed, an untroubled heart without any attachment or compulsions, any conflicts in the heart. Imagine your heart at ease with itself, content.

And might there be, when the heart is at ease, untroubled, undisturbed, that there's a natural care, goodwill, kindness, compassion, gentleness with which the heart supports you, guides you to be with your breathing, the breathing body.

As you are aware of the breathing, the present moment, perhaps your awareness, your mindfulness can be informed and guided by a simple attitude of care. So partly why you want to stay in the present, not to get lost in thought, is because the care and kindness feels good. Maybe it feels better than the alternative.

What if mindfulness is a natural caregiving impulse? How would you be mindful if the natural caregiving impulse was included?

And as we come to the end of the sitting, if today or other times when you meditated you feel calmer and more settled at the end of a meditation, does that somehow influence your inclination to care—to care for yourself, your environment, care for others? In what way does caring for others, for ourselves, our life, become natural or easy when we're settled and calm?

And might it be useful to stay close through the day as a touchstone to your capacity for calm, settled attention? So that as you encounter people and beings around you, you discover your natural inclination to care, to be caring, to be benevolent, to be kind, kindhearted.

May it be that this meditation we do supports us to go through the world with a caring heart, wishing may all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may we give a lot of value, a lot of importance to our ability to stay close to a natural capacity for care. May we care for this world.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Sources of Care-Giving (5 of 5) Care (link)

Hello and welcome to this fifth and final talk on the sources for care and caregiving. Today the topic is anukampā¹, the ancient Buddhist word that is much more associated with the Buddha than the word karuṇā². Karuṇā is usually translated as compassion, and it's universally considered that Buddha was a deeply compassionate person and that he was motivated by it to teach. That could well be; it's a little bit of a semantic issue. But he's seldom associated with karuṇā in the way that we would expect if that's the central word for compassion. Rather, he's associated with anukampā (a-n-u-k-a-m-p-a).

The word is often translated into English as compassion, so therefore people associate the Buddha with compassion. But I would like to propose a different translation for anukampā that's based on the primary way in which it is described in these ancient teachings of the Buddha, and that is: it's a concern, a dedication maybe, to the welfare and happiness of others. Whereas compassion is usually considered concern about the suffering of others and wanting that suffering to come to an end.

They're a little different. They don't have to be that different from each other—compassion wanting to end suffering so people can be happy; wanting people to be happy by having them end their suffering. But I like to think of this instinct towards being concerned with the welfare and happiness of others as being a really broad category that encompasses caring for people who suffer, caring for people who are happy, caring for people who are neither happy nor suffering, and in all kinds of states. As such, it's a more fundamental, ordinary attitude of caregiving.

It's fairly natural for most people to spontaneously be caring for things that are not quite right. It could be for people who are a little bit in trouble, or it could be that it's someone who maybe has a little bit of trouble opening the door, so we open the door for them so they can come in. We care for them that way. Is that compassion? Is it kindness? What is it? Sometimes it's so ordinary to open the door, it's done almost without thought. There's not necessarily love or compassion as part of it; it's just a matter of fact. Of course, if someone needs help with the door, I'll offer it if I can.

If there's a piece of trash on the ground in a public place, some people will pick it up and put it in the trash can. Is there compassion there? Is there love there? Maybe not. But is there care? Yeah, we care about the environment. We care about what the environment is like for other people, and we would like to care for the sidewalk so it looks kind of clean. There's a natural kind of caring there, maybe even a kind of generosity involved in picking up the trash.

If we go into a temple building where you take off your shoes and the shoes are just a little bit in a mess, you might make a little clearing or put them a little bit in order so that the older person who comes, who has trouble putting on and off their shoes, can have an easier time than having to deal with all the scattered shoes around. It's a way of caring for someone.

I love the word "care" because in my mind, it's a very ordinary word, and we use it for so many different things. It's a fascinating exercise to just pay attention through the day to how often the word care is used, whether it's elder care, child care, intensive care units, or spiritual care (which is sometimes what chaplaincy departments in hospitals are called). There's car care, pet care—there are all kinds of ways in which we take care of things. We want to maintain things; we care for things.

One of the reasons I like the word care is it also means—in English it has a number of meanings—but it could also mean that we value something. We think it's important. To say, "I care for the environment," or "I care for people who live in my community," doesn't necessarily mean we're actively going to care for them, but that we're concerned about their welfare, that we value them. And then you could also say, "I care for the environment because I help clean the trash from the local creeks, and that's my contribution."

This ordinary idea of care, I think, is for many people a natural instinct in certain circumstances. Some of the circumstances have to do with how we feel internally. If we're stressed, the opportunity for natural care to operate is less. If we're in a hurry, we don't stop to care for people or offer the simplest forms of care, even opening a door for someone. If we're scared, if we're preoccupied, if we're conflicted within our own hearts. As we settle more and relax more and live a life that's a little bit calmer and more at ease, then we find ourselves more naturally wanting to care. It doesn't require great compassion, great love. We can care for things that we don't feel friendly towards. The bar is really low for ordinary, easygoing care.

However, the fact that it's ordinary doesn't mean that it's inconsequential. It might be the most important. It might be, in some ways, the source of compassion, the source of generosity, the source of all the other caregiving instincts. And because it has a lot to do with our internal state of mind and heart, the emphasis in Buddhism is that care, anukampā, is associated with two things. It's associated with non-clinging, with non-attachment. The greater the attachments are, the less there is care. So especially if we have some kind of hostile attachment against somebody, we have very little inclination to care for them.

So it's associated with non-clinging. As people mature in this practice and find themselves clinging less and less, the instinct to care in all its manifestations—including compassion and loving-kindness and goodwill and friendliness—comes more to the surface, and it becomes more natural to operate from those.

The second thing that anukampā is associated with in the sutta teachings of the Buddha is having respect for others. We care for what we respect. So as we begin clearing our eyes and having less bias, seeing people less through the lens of our attachments, our angers, our hatreds, our fears, our greeds and desires, then that gives an opportunity to see people for who they are, to allow them to be themselves in a certain way, and to respect them—respect their humanity, respect their ability to choose. The underlying assumption, before there's other evidence, is that whoever we meet is someone we care for, meaning someone we value and treat as being worthy, someone that we respect. And we respect everyone, all across the board, breaking down the barriers in our society of how disrespect is used to divide people and separate people and subjugate people even sometimes. So this profound form of respect.

Non-clinging and respect are the primary grounds out of which a simple, ordinary care can exist. The other thing associated with all these caregiving instincts, but I associate it most with care, is that it feels really good for us to have these instincts, this attitude, arise and course through us. The reason why I like care so much is because it's the simplest. It keeps a simplicity of being and ease of being as we care. It might not have some of the stronger positive feelings that might be associated with compassion or goodwill or loving-kindness, but it has something that feels more primary, more intimate with ourselves, because of its simplicity and its peace.

So, anukampā. This week I did five caregiving attitudes, sources for caregiving. It's nice to have a sense that there's a wide range of different attitudes that can motivate us to care for the world. At different times, different ones come into play the most. It's not all just one way. In different phases of a person's life, different ones of these might be more important, more what's operating and coursing through us. But all five are part of the palette with which we paint our care, our concerns for the world. They can be quite powerful, and I would like to believe that they can become more powerful, more effective than the motivations that come from anger and hostility. To produce profound change in our society that can be long-lasting, these five caregiving instincts can guide the way in a powerful, effective, and active way.

I hope that this has been interesting for you to hear about these five sources. Partly I did it because this fall, and just in the last few weeks, the different chaplaincy training programs I'm involved in have started, and so this caregiving is high on my mind.

In terms of caring for the world, I want to mention that the Sati Center for Buddhist studies that I'm involved in is going to have a very significant conversation a week from tomorrow. I'll be hosting a conversation between two Buddhist teachers and peace activists who live in Israel. One is a Jewish Israeli and the other is a Palestinian. They're longtime friends, and each of them teaches Buddhism for their own communities, in a sense. The Palestinian woman has a sangha of Palestinian mindfulness practitioners she supports, and the Israeli has a group of Israelis, maybe mixed a little bit Israeli-Palestinian. They've been involved with peace activities in Israel between Palestinians and Israelis for a long time. Both of them are contending and trying to manage with the issues of what's happening in Gaza.

They're going to have a conversation that I will mediate a little bit, but mostly they're going to talk about how this is for them personally, and how they're supporting their communities at this difficult time. I think they have a much more nuanced view of this than taking one side or the other, right and wrong. So I think it's an important conversation. I look forward to hearing what they have to say.

You can find out information for it on the Sati Center website, sati.org. The information is right there on the homepage, so it should be easy, and you need to register for it. I think it's at 9:00 AM next Saturday.

Someone asked for their names. The Palestinian woman is Muna Shaheen, and the Israeli Dharma teacher is Stephen Fulder, who's written a few books, one of them having to do with his peace activism work. So please come.

Thank you all very much, and I look forward to coming back here on Monday.