This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Meditation as Love; Gil's Story (4 of 5) Becoming Compassioned. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Meditation as Love; Dharmette: Gil's Story (4 of 5) Becoming Compassioned - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 30, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Meditation as Love

Hello everyone, and welcome. As an introduction to this meditation, I would like to evoke the emotion, the attitude of love as a part of meditation—an integral part of it. I'll use a metaphor.

Now that it's getting cold, sometimes the windshield on my car is frosted over. There have been times when it was so frosted over it took some time to be able to clear the ice to drive away. There are different options of how to bring back the clarity in the windshield. One is to simply wait for the sun to come up, and the sun will slowly warm it up. Another way is to turn on the car and the defroster and let the coils that are in the windshield slowly warm up, or let the heater in the car slowly blow warm air on the glass. Then, with time, the glass will be warm enough that the ice melts.

The other option is to go out and get an ice scraper and scrape away the ice. Sometimes that's easy if it's just a little light frost, and sometimes it takes a lot of work to get a thick layer of crusty ice off the windshield. Especially when it's really cold, it kind of frosts up right away even as I scrape it away.

So when we sit to meditate, the liberation that we're looking for could be understood to be clarity—to be clear of the obstructions to our seeing, to be clear of the frost that covers our perception. That's our fears: all of them which agitate, all of them which obstruct in some way. We could try to let go, we can try to scrape it away, and if it's a light frost, maybe that works fine. Or we could let the warmth melt it all. That could be the inner warmth, the defroster in ourselves that we bring along, so that when we are mindful of our experience, we are mindful of it with some modicum of love, warmth, care, goodwill, appreciation, respect, valuing. That awareness is not neutral, but awareness is infused with love.

Or we can use the sun: something outside of ourselves that might also help warm up something which is frozen or caught or stuck inside of us, so it begins to thaw. It could be the love that we feel from other people, it could be a sense of universal love that just exists in the fabric of the universe, it could be being in nature and feeling somehow some warmth, some nurturing that comes from the natural world.

And so, to sit and meditate and to call upon our capacity for love—to do so, you are kind of speeding up a natural process. As we deepen our meditation and relax and open up, we will slowly defrost. We slowly develop the clarity that allows the heart's tenderness and care and warmth to flow from us. So whether we call upon that warmth to whatever degree we have, or we clear the window so the clarity is there to see and feel that warmth, it's all part of the meditative process.

So, to assume a meditation posture. And what posture would you take if it is a posture that expresses alertness, relaxation, and love, warmth? Some people are very fond of putting their hands on their hearts as a way of more directly feeling the warmth, the tenderness, the goodwill of a warm heart. And if you find no warmth inside of you that you can call upon to support this meditation, maybe you can call upon what's outside of you.

And for this meditation, I will spend my time actively having goodwill, mettā¹, for all of you—some 400 people here. All of you, I will just sit here and wish you well. So then, gently closing your eyes. And to whatever degree feels loving for you, let yourself take some deeper breaths, gently, lovingly, as if you're caring for your body and taking in the oxygen, and relaxing as you exhale, where relaxation also is an expression of self-care.

And letting your breathing return to normal. Gently feeling whatever tenderness or warmth there might be within. Maybe in the area of your heart, maybe somewhere else. Some people can feel something like that in their hands. For some people, it's in the face. For some, it might be in the belly.

And putting aside any expectations or ambitions or older ideas you have about what it means to be mindful, see if you can become aware of your breathing with an awareness, with an attention that is loving, carries with it warmth and tenderness, maybe a gentleness. For different people, different manifestations of love are most available: kindness, goodwill, compassion, deep appreciation, a deep sense of care, sympathy. Where every moment of knowing awareness touches with love, with warmth. No matter how difficult the experience is, touching it with a warm awareness, as if the warmth is going to melt it, not fix it.

There are parts of ourselves which benefit immensely from being seen. Seeing and love sometimes are synonymous. And there are parts of ourselves that really benefit from being heard. At times, being heard well is almost the same as love. To perceive, to be aware of yourself as you sit meditating, as an act of love, of care, of compassion with each breath.

And as we come to the end of this sitting, to imagine or let it be that your capacity to be aware comes along with a warmth, a tenderness, a love. And then, as you gaze upon the world around you, that that warmth and tenderness spreads through your body like a little radiator that fills a room with warmth, and that it spreads beyond your body out into the world.

With the imagination or the hope that your love, your warmth, care can radiate out across the globe. Beyond the building you're in, the county, province you're in, out across the lands. And imagining that there's a kind of a Midas touch, that whatever your awareness lands on touches it with love.

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

And may we be the recipient of the kindness and goodwill of others. And if we don't feel it from others, then those people are definitely in need of warmth to melt the frost on their windshield. Let us melt each other's frost so we see each other with clarity, and in that clarity, we care for each other.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Gil's Story (4 of 5) Becoming Compassioned

Hello, and as I begin this fourth talk about my own story, my own life story with Buddhism, with Buddhist practice.

When I was about 24, I came to live first near the San Francisco Zen Center, and then after some months, I moved to the Green Gulch Farm² to live at the Zen Center. It might be interesting for some of you to hear my experience of the first seven-day silent retreat I signed up for. It was when I was still at the University of California, Davis, studying. Between my junior and senior year, I signed up for a seven-day sesshin³ at the Zen Center.

A week or two before the retreat was supposed to start, I called up the Zen Center and explained to them that something important had come up, and I wouldn't be able to attend the retreat. They said okay, and that was it. What I didn't tell them was that the important thing that had come up was fear. So I chickened out of going to my first silent retreat.

Some of you maybe have been nervous coming to your first retreat. Some of you haven't been on a retreat and feel nervous about doing it. If that's the case, you're in good company. Not only was I nervous going, I didn't go! But then I did sit in a seven-day retreat at Green Gulch in the spring of '89, and that's when I decided to go live at the Green Gulch Farm.

I was still thinking about going to graduate school, and in fact, I had been accepted to a soil science program at UC Berkeley. After studying agronomy, I was aware of the tremendous challenge of soil erosion around the world, and I wanted to be someone who addressed those issues. But then, as it was getting time to go to UC Berkeley in the fall of '89, somehow in the middle of August it dawned on me that school was starting in a couple of weeks, and I better figure out what to do, where to live, to make arrangements.

I went to the noon chanting⁴ of the Heart Sutra they do at Green Gulch. It was a noon that mostly people didn't go to, so I was just there with a few people, and it was optional. We were chanting this chant that I had chanted many times by then, and I wasn't particularly thinking about anything but the chant. Suddenly, there was this inner explosion inside, and I knew that instead of going to graduate school, I should go to Tassajara⁵, the Zen Center monastery. So I called up, or maybe I wrote a letter, to UC Berkeley and said something important has come up, and could I postpone my beginning of graduate school for one year.

So then, in January of 1990, in the middle of the winter, I went to this cold place in the Big Sur mountains called Tassajara. It's deep in the canyon, about 14 miles on a dirt road, deep in the national wilderness in a small private property—maybe it's 100 acres, 140 acres. And so I started my monastic life there.

I loved it for the most part, and I was really happy with that lifestyle. Sometimes I thought this was a perfect lifestyle; I just loved the whole thing about it, except for the times off. About every five days, we had a day off, and then I would often go hiking in the mountains there. That's when I started thinking about my life: "What do I want to do with my life? Should I go back to graduate school and address the soil erosion problems of this world?"

I wanted to be of help to the world, but I had a deep suspicion or mistrust of the desire to help. I kind of had the suspicion that it can be, more often than not, self-serving and selfish to do that. So I had this doubt about myself and what I should do. That made me kind of miserable during those days off, thinking about that there was no solution. Then the next day, I would get into the monastic routine, and that was great, meditating a lot. I continued like this for probably quite a while.

At some point, I was walking in the mountains and I said, "This is ridiculous. I'm living in a world of imagination—imaginary futures, imaginary things I could do, imaginary possibilities, things that I can't really imagine properly and know anything about. It's not really taking me anywhere. I feel stuck."

So I spontaneously made a decision to start my life over again and just take the next step. Whatever the next step was, I was going to build my life from there and start over in a certain kind of way. It might seem, even to me, that it was somewhat naive or maybe simplistic, but in fact, that was a decision I made. I feel now in retrospect, I'm so lucky that I decided to do that at a Buddhist monastery, because the "next step" meant they rang a bell, and it was time to go meditate. They rang a bell, it was time to go do the monastic work, and go to a Dharma talk. So I had all this wholesome kind of Dharma practice that was the next step.

It allowed me to just settle in. Then I decided not to go back to graduate school, but just stay there and keep practicing at the monastery. At some point, I began wondering again about what I should do with my life, or what's next. I wasn't thinking about it too much, but I started to recognize that I was starting to be changed by the years of doing Zen practice, and it was a very slow change.

One of the primary changes that happened was that I didn't get "enlightened," but I became compassion. I was sitting for those years with a lot of suffering, inner suffering of myself. But in Zen practice, I wasn't given any tools, any mindfulness practices to do with it. The only practice we had was to sit upright and accept the moment as it is, and it turned out that worked out really well for me.

I would just sit there and have this accepting practice of my suffering. Slowly, slowly, that practice tenderized me; it softened me. I had a great need for compassion, and I started seeing and feeling compassion all around me. I was clearly projecting my need onto the world, but I think it was very effective to receive externally the kind of warmth, love, and compassion that my suffering needed so sorely.

Slowly, something began to soften and dissolve. As it did so, there awakened a sense of compassion, and that sense of compassion became very important for me. Simultaneous to that was also a softening of conceit, a softening of any kind of strong sense of a boundary between myself and others. I felt like, in a healthy way, that I was continuous with the people around me and the people of the world—that in some ways, their suffering was my suffering.

But as I continued this process, I was not oppressed by the suffering of others. I wasn't dismayed by it, but rather it was met with more and more of this kind of warmth, this compassion. I started to feel that, in some ways, as my strong sense of self dissolved more and more, there was something inside of me that was responding to the world that was not exactly the classic or conventional idea of "me, myself, and mine." There started to be a response, a compassionate response to the circumstances I was in. Living in that response just felt so right, so appropriate.

It wasn't like a sudden realization or understanding that this is what was happening; it was a slow process of something dissolving and warming up. Then one day, the abbot, who was seldom at the monastery—we seldom had a chance to meet with him—came for a few days, and I had a chance to have a one-on-one meeting with him. I went and sat by the creek that's there, the Tassajara Creek, overlooking the creek, reflecting on what I should talk to him about, and what I should do with my life.

I think I was doing it in a very relaxed way. Maybe there was a certain kind of creativity or receptivity or openness to this. A little bit like it had been in that chanting of the Heart Sutra at Green Gulch, suddenly something just shifted inside of me, and I knew exactly what I should do. There was no question about it: I should be ordained as a Zen monk.

Because I'm a rational person, I thought, "Well, I have to have a reason for that." So then I spent some time thinking, "Why do I want to do that?" In some sense, the reasons I came up with were honest enough, but they didn't really represent the fact that there kind of was no reason. It was just a knowing I had that this is what I should do.

But the reason I came up with was that I really wanted to respond to the suffering of the world, and I wanted to respond to it from the deepest place of freedom from suffering that I knew about. If I'd gone and done soil erosion work, it would have been very important work, but I would have always felt a little dissatisfied. Because it's one thing to help farmers and communities, but the depth of their suffering is still going to be there. It's very important to do soil work⁶, but I was always going to have that dissatisfaction that I wasn't really addressing suffering at its roots.

Being ordained as a Zen priest was how I was going to do that at the roots of it. I didn't think I would be effective, or I didn't have high ambition of what I could do. My image of myself as a Zen monk or priest was to have a storefront meditation center that was just a really open room in a small place in the city. I'd have the key, and I would keep the place clean. I would open and close it for people to come and meditate with me. We'd meditate together. I had no thought about being a teacher; I was just the caretaker of a place for people to come to meditate.

The route to becoming a Buddhist teacher back at the Zen Center in those days was a very slow route. Because there were so many other priests there at that time and the training was very slow, I kind of thought, "Well, I have to be here 25 years before I even begin entering into a teaching role." And I was fine with that. I wasn't thinking about becoming a teacher.

So I asked the abbot to be ordained, and he said yes. Within nine months I was ordained, and I was surprised how much that ordination ceremony changed me. I didn't have much feeling or appreciation for rituals, but there was something very deep that changed in me in different ways. But I'll say now to end, that I became a public figure. I had a shaved head, I had robes, and I stood out now.

Strangers would come and talk to me, whereas before, when I was more or less like a hippie, scrawny, and maybe dirty, people would more likely avoid me than approach me. So being a public figure this way, as a representative of the Dharma, my own foibles and shortcomings became much more obvious.

At the same time as my own shortcomings became more clear to me, it was more okay to have them, because now I'd become a "child of the Buddha." It's a kind of metaphor for what happened to me. This combination of being able to see my shortcomings better and feeling more okay about having them because I was somehow sitting in the lap of the Buddha—I thought it was a wonderful and significant combination. This is a wonderful balance.

So those years of Zen practice compassion-ed me, and brought a warmth, a tenderness, and a gentleness with which I would sit my Zen meditation, and which then motivated my life. That then set the course for the rest of my life: that somehow my dedication then was to alleviate, or help alleviate, the suffering of the world.

That was the response of this life. It wasn't even personal, but it became the center of the life that was coming out of this body. That's what it was going about, and that's what it's been ever since. I feel like that's the center. My practice is important, but the one expression of it is wanting to meet suffering and help bring about the end of suffering.

Then, at some point in the Zen practice, I encountered Vipassana⁷ insight meditation. Maybe to leave you with a cliffhanger, that'll be the story for tomorrow. Thank you.