This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Relaxing; Introduction to Mindfulness (8 of 25) Relaxation as a Guide.. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Relaxing; Dharmette: Introduction to Mindfulness (8 of 25) Relaxation as a Guide. - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on January 17, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Relaxing

Welcome, everyone. It's probably fair to say, or certainly it supports deeper exploration of ourselves and meditation, to consider the idea from Zen Master Dogen¹, founder of the Soto Zen school². He said that mindfulness of the body is the body's mindfulness. What that does is it kind of switches around our idea of mindfulness, where there's a very strong emphasis on subject and object. There's somehow "you"—maybe in the head for some of you—who is doing the mindfulness, and that you're in charge of the mindfulness. And there's the body down there below; the body is an object of attention.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that separation, that distinction, but it can lend itself to a lot of challenges, and if we build on that, it leads to a lot of suffering. But to say it's the body's mindfulness is to put mindfulness in the body as intimately part of the body. Maybe if we, instead of translating sati³ as mindfulness, translate it as awareness, then mindfulness is the body's awareness. We're not aware of the body, but the body is aware of itself. Both can happen, so I don't want to rule out all the rich, wonderful ways in which awareness operates for us, but to appreciate in some deep way in which awareness is the body, arises from the body.

One way to understand this is that sensing and sensations are inseparable. Some people might say that sensing and sensations are non-dual⁴; there's no subject-object distinction between the two. They arise together. When there's a sensation, there's the sensing. When there's a sensing, the senses are stimulated, and there are sensations. Without a stimulus, it's almost as if the sensing doesn't exist. But as soon as there is a stimulus, the sensing comes alive and is now activated. And so, right there, there's this intimacy.

Our body is filled with organs of sensing, organs that can experience sensations. Right there, in the location of where the sensing occurs, there's the opportunity of relaxing the "being the doer"—being the one who's straining or trying a lot in meditation. Relaxing this separation of the subject being the doer: the one who has to perform, has to succeed, the one who's not succeeding, the one who's the victim of how difficult things are, the one who is succeeding and thinking, "Look how great I am."

There's an ability to relax deeply. It isn't like progress to deeper and deeper relaxation, but relaxation to the point where the alertness can feel that inseparability of awareness in the body. It isn't that we are the body, and it isn't that the body is us. We're not in the body, and the body is not in us. These things, the sensations, the experience, just is. There's a relaxation to it, and our job is to open, to allow, to rest in the body, to feel this. One of the ways the Buddha emphasized that supports this is to relax the body. So we'll begin with relaxing, and I'll do a guided scan of the body for relaxation.

One of the things to attend to as you relax is how relaxing the body either relaxes the mind or brightens the mind. It brings a gentle, soft kind of alertness to the mind, and then we can relax some more and feel the impact that has on the mind, or allow the impact on the mind to relax more.

Assuming a meditation posture, gently lower your gaze, close your eyes, and begin with some deeper breaths, maybe three-quarters full.

The intentionality of breathing in more deeply supports an intentionality to be here and now, connected to your body. Breathing in fully, and relaxing as the body as you exhale. Breathing in, stretching the torso, the shoulders, the back, the rib cage. And some of the relaxing just comes from feeling, as you exhale, almost like the desire of the body to soften, to release. Breathing in, breathing out, relaxing. And then letting your breathing return to normal.

As you inhale, feel your forehead and eyes. Feel whatever tension, or holding, or buzzing, or whatever is there. And as you exhale, for the next few breaths, relax around the eyes, the forehead, the temples. As you breathe in, feel the rest of your face: the jaws, cheeks, the mouth. And on the exhale, relax. Soften as if the muscles can fall away from the bone. Let go on the exhale. Ever so slightly, you might let your teeth fall away from each other, loosening any tightness around the lips. Maybe the lips fall apart ever so slightly.

On the inhale, feeling your shoulders, the movements of the shoulders, the tension of the shoulders. And on the exhale, with a great gentleness, let the shoulders soften and relax. Whenever you relax, feel your shoulders afterwards. Have the sensations of the shoulders changed at all? Continue with your shoulders, but take a moment to adjust your hands and arms so they are relaxed and are positioned to support the shoulders relaxing.

And then, on the inhale, feeling your heart center, your chest. On the exhale, let there be a softening in the chest. Releasing, releasing. There is a settling, or something in your chest settles backwards, like settling into a chair.

On the exhale, feeling the belly. Maybe as you exhale, to already relax, so as you inhale, the belly expands freely. And relaxing on the exhale, too, so there's something in the belly that settles.

On the inhale, feeling the legs, the thighs, and letting there be a way of softening through the legs.

And then, as you inhale, feeling any tightness or pressure in the thinking mind. Any physical sensations of being energized or agitated, or any of the sensations connected to thinking. And if you feel any physical sensations—often in the forehead, behind the forehead, or it could be in the neck and the shoulders, or it could be in the back of the skull—as you exhale, soften that tension, or tightness, or energy. And if it doesn't soften directly, soften around it. Relaxing the thinking mind. Calming the thinking mind. And see if you do so, if there's a brightening of awareness. Not the awareness that you do, but the awareness that is.

Maybe imagining the mind to be like a large ocean, and the softening, relaxing is a calming of the waves. So the surface of the mind spreads wide and far horizontally in all directions, becoming stiller and quieter.

And then, becoming aware of how your body feels now. Sensing the sensations of the body in a relaxed, open way, in whatever way they appear. Feeling the intimacy of sensing and sensations. The sensations that appear, maybe they're not constructed or made to happen. They occur through whatever causes and conditions of what it's like to be alive right now. Sensations are a proof of being alive. Let awareness rest in the locations where sensations occur, so the body feels itself, so that mindfulness is the body's awareness of itself.

And then, as we come to the end of this sitting, take a three-breath journey, relaxing more deeply, letting go with each exhale. And now, another three-breath journey. This time, emphasizing the inhale, as if the inhale welcomes and opens you to the wider world all around you.

And considering if there's any way, known or unknown, that this meditation session has benefited you. Are there ways that you can turn that benefit around so that it also benefits others? If you're calmer now, maybe your calmness can be calming for someone in distress that you meet today. If you're more patient, maybe you can be more patient with someone who's challenged today. If you feel more tender, more friendly, maybe when you meet people who are challenged today, you can hold them more kindly with goodwill.

May it be that the practice of meditation that we do serves for the welfare and happiness of all beings, yourself included. May we live for the welfare of everyone. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may we, in whatever way that's possible and easy for us, natural for us, contribute to that.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Introduction to Mindfulness (8 of 25) Relaxation as a Guide.

Hello and welcome to this third talk on mindfulness of the body. One of the important areas of mindfulness practice is relaxation, or calming. The language of the Buddha, maybe the word he uses is closer to our English word "calming," if we think of it as a physical calming.

Many people associate meditation with relaxation, with calming, a softening, a gentling of our body, and mind, and heart. A significant thing begins happening if we have any degree of relaxation or calmness that's more than how we live our life normally, and that is that the relaxation of the body becomes a reference point to understand ourselves better.

What I mean by this is that if we're more relaxed than we usually are, then we have a chance to notice when we return to how we usually are because we're tensing up, because we're becoming a little bit more agitated. To be able to have a physical reference point for this means we can see more closely; we're more able to notice when we're engaged in some activity, some way of being which is tensing. We can see what's going on better. For one thing, we just simply see we're becoming more tense. And then we can ask the question, "Do we want to go along with that, or do we want to come back to the place we just were?"

One definition of meditation that I've heard is: set yourself at ease and notice what takes away that ease. So let yourself be calm and notice what takes away that calm. Let your body be somewhat relaxed—it doesn't have to be dramatic, just a little bit more than you usually are—and then notice what takes you away from that.

If you do that, then you can ask the question, "Should I continue doing this? Is this necessary? Is there an alternative? What needs to be done or taken care of—can I do it without being so tense? What would that look like?" And so, this relaxing of the body becomes a reference point.

That reference point is particularly useful in meditation because, in meditation, there's nothing we have to do in the world. So regarding this idea of "Do I need to get tense right now?", I think it's easier in meditation to come to the conclusion, "No, I don't need to right now. Maybe when the meditation is over I need to, but now I don't."

And so there's a questioning and a doubting of the value of the ways that we tense up, which is also equivalent to the ways in which we get preoccupied or caught in our thoughts or our feelings. Then we can see more clearly what's going on. If we decide there's no need, we don't have to. And if we recognize that it's physical tension we have, then we might be able to soften that, relax it.

One of the great ways of relaxing that I've found for myself is sometimes it can be done directly, but sometimes it's just to feel the places of tension in my body and then breathe with it. Kind of like breathing through it, accompanying the experience with the physical rhythms of the body breathing. It's almost like an act of imagination, like I'm breathing in through that tension rather than through my nostrils, and breathing out through it. It's using your imagination a little bit.

But somehow, pairing up the places of tension with the breathing, the breathing itself—the rhythm of breathing—can be relaxing. Being with the breath that way is a way of feeling and being with something like a massage, without being caught in the reactivities of the mind around being tense, or the reactivity that's causing the tension. So it's shifting our locus⁵ of attention that way.

The more we can see in our tension—rather than feeling that tension is an unfortunate thing—it's actually a door to deeper understanding of what's happening with us. So tension is not necessarily something we want to be in a hurry to relax. That's one way to tense up even more, is to feel like, "Oh, this is wrong, I need to be relaxed." But rather, to be very easy with it.

Certainly, it's good to relax if it's easy to do it. But also, being present for physical tension begins learning how to be comfortable with discomfort. Learning just to be equanimous, calm about being tense, or about being agitated, is a powerful tool, a powerful foundation for deepening this practice.

Just like in the very beginning of this intro to meditation course, I talked about how distractions don't need to be treated as the enemy or problem for meditation. Seeing we're distracted and being mindful of it, that's mindfulness; then mindfulness has succeeded.

The same thing is true of the tensions and the agitations that are in our system, in our body. We open to those too in mindfulness, without the idea that it needs to be different or should be different. And if we have that need, or have that "should-ing" going on, that's one of the things that gets highlighted through this reference point of focusing on tension and relaxation. If you're very sensitive, you can see how the "should-ing," the needing, the wanting is itself a form of tension—maybe more a tension of the thinking mind, perhaps, or something.

And so, with this fascinating reference point, so much gets revealed. Many of the ways in which the mind is operating in ways that are not supportive of us, not wholesome for us—many of the ways in which we take the wrong turn in the way we live our life—gets manifested as tension in the body. And so there's this ability to relax the body, and then feel that as a reference point to understand ourselves better.

If you have a deep experience of relaxation sometimes, and it registers as a memory, that can also support you sometime when you find yourself really tense. You can say, "Wow, that's really different than this reference point I have of what's possible. Should I just continue doing what I'm doing now, or should I excuse myself from the situation?" Maybe ask if you can go to the bathroom. Most people won't question why you're going to the bathroom.

But what you're doing is going there to breathe and relax. There is this wonderful meditation throne that you can sit on for a while—maybe with the lid down—just sit on it and meditate. Close your eyes⁶. Maybe do three-breath journeys. It doesn't have to be long, but it helps to realize how tense we are, realize how caught up we are, and question whether we need to continue that. And then find simple ways: "Okay, let's do a three-breath journey, let's relax."

This frees up attention. This frees up mindfulness, the sensing of the body. A relaxed body is a field of sensing sensations. Maybe not distinct always, maybe a sense of vibration or warmth or tingling.

The more tense the body is, we might have some acute sensations around the tension. But when there's a lot of tightness, tense muscles, there's often a tendency for those muscles to go numb. With too much tension, we lose a connection to ourselves. Relaxation is rediscovering that connection, opening up to it again.

So the theme of today is this mindfulness of the body, and the value of relaxation. Relaxation can be overdone; it shouldn't be a forever project where you just relax, relax, relax. It becomes a kind of... but it is a very important part of this terrain of mindfulness. It's a self-correcting one, because if you pay attention to even the subtlest tensions, then you'll discover when relaxing is no longer needed or no longer useful, or that the focus and the way we're trying to relax has tension embedded in it. It's a self-correcting way in which mindfulness and tension help us for the mindfulness to be easeful, at ease.

I love this instruction that I shared: set yourself at ease and notice what takes you away from it. So I would encourage you today to continue with mindfulness of the body being a theme. Make tension, holding, contraction, and relaxation—use a physical sense of unease and a sense of ease—to guide you, and to inform you, and to help you feel a deeper connection to what's going on.

Don't be in a hurry to relax. Sometimes what's really good, even in meditation and elsewhere, is not to relax at the first opportunity you have. If there's some tension that could relax, take a few breaths to feel it better. There's something about feeling tension more fully that can allow the relaxation to be deeper. Feeling something more fully, and then letting go, can let the letting go be fuller as well.

So take time during the day, and for those of you who have enjoyed the practice of setting a timer, you might set a timer so that periodically and regularly, without forgetting about it, you get a little reminder to check in. What's the tension? What's the relaxation? What do you learn? What's available with tension and relaxation as a reference point for your life?

Thank you very much, and I look forward to tomorrow.