This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Compassion; Core Teachings (4 of 5) Natural Care. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Compassion; Dharmette: Core Teachings (4 of 5) Natural Care - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on June 13, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Compassion

Welcome to this meditation. As an introduction, I'd like to mention that I have a particular, very special relationship, maybe even reverence, for places in the natural world that are untouched or off-bounds for human beings. There's a place near here on the San Francisco Peninsula that's a water district. They have a big reservoir for water for San Francisco and other cities, but some of the land around it, no one is supposed to walk on; it's off-limits. I'm sure that some people in the water district have occasion to go on it occasionally, but it's basically off-limits. It isn't like I feel like it's private property exactly, but I feel like it's protected from human encroachment. I'm so happy that there's a place in the natural world that is inaccessible to me. It's just there. It's a kind of sacred place, a special place where the natural world can just be itself, be its own thing. The animals there—the deer, the mountain lions—they can just be outside the influence or outside the desires and preferences of humans. I'm sure there are other ways of understanding this water district land, but there are these places in the world that are considered sacred that you don't visit; you stay away from.

In the same way, in ourselves, there are realms or aspects of our being, our inner world, which also belong to a kind of dimension of life which I feel shouldn't be part of our desires and preferences, what we construct, and even what we interpret and the meaning-making we add to it. It's there, and it's operating in its own way as a natural functioning, as a natural phenomenon that can operate with us, for us, maybe even guide us. But it's not something we can appropriate. It's not something that we can claim to be ours or that we can put outside the realm of appropriating as "mine" or "me," outside the realm of how I think about myself, all the ideas I have about myself, the conclusions, the judgments about my life. There's a whole other operation that's operating here.

It's found, or touched into, and can be known by a deep quiet, a stillness within. A quieting of the constructing mind, a quieting of the mind that's reacting and thinking and planning and judging and making meaning of things and predicting the future and hanging on to the past. That quieting of the mind that is concerned with me, myself, and mine—who I am, what my experiences are, what's happening to me. Certainly, those kinds of thinking have a place in life, I don't want to rule it out completely, but there's something beyond it, something deeper than that. When that gets quiet, there's a natural operation, and part of that belongs to the realm of love, of compassion, of some deep sense of tenderness or care. And maybe there are the human qualities of nurturing, like a parent, the nurturing that a parent might feel for a little baby. Maybe these are instinctual in us. They're deeper; they belong to the human species, they belong to maybe all mammals, that we have certain hormones and chemicals and orientations that bring forth a natural capacity to care, to love, that should not be appropriated, that should be left alone. It can operate in us, through us, with us, but it's not about us exactly. And it's not about how well we can do something. It's not about being successful or not, about failing. It's about becoming quiet enough or still enough to be able to listen on the other side of all our thoughts and thinkings and ruminations, to be able to feel below the level of our anxiety or disappointments or desires, aversions, resentments.

There is a place inside that I think is sacred, a place that I have a certain reverence for, that it's not exactly me. I can't appropriate it, but it's there and invaluable. And it's very deeply connected to the idea of care and compassion, love, kindness, an instinct towards nurturing. So maybe we can sit here with that as a reference point for today. To sit to meditate in a field with an intention, with an orientation towards being compassionate or loving or kind, nurturing for ourselves and whatever is here within us, whatever is challenging within us, whatever our thinking mind is churning up. The way the thinking mind is churning up and casting its difficulties through our muscles and our body and our emotions. It's difficult to be a human being. And deep within us, there is an instinct to care, to nourish, nurture, compassion, and love.

So to assume a meditation posture, perhaps viewing the posture as a form of love or care for ourselves. Gently closing the eyes, and this closing of the eyes to be done with care, with love, with a sense of purpose to nourish, to heal, to free this human being from suffering.

To become aware of the body breathing, not as an exercise in concentration or becoming present, but rather as an instinct to bring care, love, maybe a parental or grandparental love for what's at the core of yourself. Maybe the core from which breathing is intimately connected, where we sense that breathing itself arises from a deep source of keeping ourselves alive, of nourishing ourselves, providing us with the energy, the vitality that allows us to be here. So much of our inner systems—keeping us in homeostasis, keeping us in balance, keeping us alive—is for our own benefit. Allowing this deeper place of ourselves to care and benefit us, that's beyond our thinking mind, engineering mind, judging mind. To sit present for our natural capacity for love.

And as we come to the end of this sitting, might there be for you enough quiet or calm, or maybe inner sensitivity to your body and heart, that you could feel that operating system within that has to do with nurturing or caring, has gentle compassion or love? The kind of source of motivation and instinct that comes with caring for or holding a newborn baby, or holding someone's hand as they're dying peacefully. There are times in our life where we're touched deeply by our shared humanity, our connections to others, that bypasses our biases and our judgments and our histories and even our created identities and ideas of me, myself, and mine.

And as we sit here and bring this to a conclusion, can you be still and gaze upon the world kindly? Gaze upon the world with compassion and love, not wanting anything from anyone. Being able to gaze upon everyone with no fear, no aversion. Be still and gaze upon everyone kindly, and with that nurturing, caring instinct, to wish everyone well.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may all beings know that there is care and love and compassion in this world, and that it's directed to them as well.

Dharmette: Core Teachings (4 of 5) Natural Care

Hello everyone, and welcome to this fourth talk where I try to articulate the core teachings that underlie what motivates me to teach and what guides how I teach. It's hopefully a clear way of letting people know what I'm about. Because some of you have been listening to me for a long time, it feels like the responsible thing for me to be very direct about what I think are my core orientations as a teacher, my core perspectives.

Yesterday, I talked about how there's a strong naturalistic orientation in how I teach and how I practice. There is a perspective that there is a natural functioning within us that benefits us, that we're tapping into and allowing to move through us and allowing to awaken in us. As we orient towards suffering and the end of suffering, as we free ourselves from fixed ideas and fixed views, it gives room for this natural functioning of ourselves to operate. Just like if you keep a cut clean, it allows a natural functioning of the body to heal the cut. Similarly, for some of the ways in which our hearts get broken, if we metaphorically keep the heart clean, we don't interfere with its own natural working. Give room for it, get room for the pain, and there is a natural kind of healing or movement towards health that the heart knows what to do better than our thinking mind, our engineering mind, our mind that's trying to figure things out or trying to understand.

So, to sit in meditation and get out of our own way, and not only do the practice but also be practiced by the practice, allow ourselves to be changed and moved by this deeper instinct, this deeper movement that happens within us. It's not our doing. We learn over time that a lot of the things that we do interfere with the movement towards freedom and liberation.

One of the core aspects of all this, this naturalistic orientation, is that there is within us a natural movement towards the whole category of love, the whole phenomena of love, the movements of the heart that we can have. One of the deepest ones is the instinct to nurture, the instinct to care for that which we value, that which we love, that which we are touched by or moved by. Sometimes that's done for who we feel closest to, sometimes it's for small babies. I think I mentioned recently that I knew a man who volunteered in the local hospital working with prematurely born babies who needed to be held and have physical contact in order to develop normally. That was his volunteer job, just to hold premature babies. And it changed him, softened him, opened him over the time that he did it. Some people have this relationship to animals, little puppies or kittens, or an injured bird that we gently take care of. And some of us have been at the bedside of people who are dying. When they're dying slowly and peacefully, there can be a deep tenderness, a deep feeling of love and care on that occasion.

As we settle in meditation, as we get quiet in meditation, there are these very human capacities we have that are operating, that are, I like to think of them as independent of our thinking mind, our constructive mind, our reactive mind, our imaginary mind—the mind that builds up stories and images of ourselves and lives in these kinds of cathedrals, lives in these cities of concepts that are culturally, familiarly, and personally created. We don't even realize how much we are conditioned by our culture, by our society, by our language, by our family. And we just think that our very idea of who we are as a self, and who we are in relationship to other people, and even how we orient towards others, are very deep, culturally conditioned phenomena, and we take it for granted. We think this is the way it is. So with that comes the idea that of course being angry or being aversive, of course setting up strong boundaries of "you and me," of course I have desires, of course I'm protecting myself—of course, all these things build up this very complicated world that's very fragile and easily disrupted, easily hurt.

But if in meditation we get quiet enough and peaceful enough, that constructing mind, the active mind that makes up stories and imagines and has beliefs... we get through layers and layers of them. It's phenomenal to realize how many layers of conditioning we have. And we come down to a place where some deeper operating system can function. One of those has to do with love and care and compassion. So that when in contact with suffering in the world, it's not despair that arises, it's not anguish, it's not a sense of hopelessness or a sense of overwhelm. We don't suffer more because we're in contact with suffering, but rather, it awakens the instinct for compassion, the instinct to care for what is suffering.

This happened to me when I was practicing in a Buddhist monastery, my first time. I was there for about three years, and that was amazingly significant for me. I felt that the experience of meditating was... I used to call it like you have these salt-like things, I believe, you put on meat to tenderize it, to soften it up. So maybe it's an unfortunate metaphor, but I felt like my heart was being tenderized, softened by the practice of meditation in the monastery. I was amazed that there were places of responding to the world that was not me responding. It's not the usual Gil, not how I knew myself. But it felt like an instinct, or it felt like a completely unintended awakening of compassion, of love, of wanting to respond to the suffering of the world.

This became so central to who I became, who I am, that it wasn't really me in the usual sense of the term, but it was more me than anything else could be me. But there was no "me" in it, kind of. And that's where I wanted to base my life from. Specifically, the only thing that made sense, the only response to the world that I had, became responding with compassion to the suffering of the world. That's when I decided to devote my life to Buddhism, to Buddhist practice. And because I was in a Zen Monastery, to become a Zen monk and a Zen priest, because that's the only way I knew to address human suffering at its deepest roots. Many other ways of addressing it are very important, but I felt like I needed to, because of the depth which I had discovered, respond from that deep place to the deep place in others and to bring suffering to an end.

And so that's when I decided to be ordained, and that ordination was very significant for me because it set my life in a certain kind of commitment, or a clear recognition that acknowledged or accepted the fact that this was what my life was about: to respond to suffering. And that set me on a course that certainly brings me here today. So for almost 50 years now, this has been my life, to dedicate myself to address, to meet, to care for the suffering of the world.

In the process of it, these many years of practice, my understanding of this deeper operating system that is love, that is compassion, that is care, began appreciating all the different aspects of it—not all, I don't know about all, but many different aspects, many different flavors in which it takes. In different circumstances, different flavors, different qualities of it get evoked, get awakened and operate for all of us.

So in terms of my core teachings, this naturalistic tendency has led me to this deep faith in, or trust in, or reverence for this place within that is way too limited if I call it mine, or if I say it's within me, or define myself by it. It's almost like I get out of the way for this to operate. So I have a kind of reverence for this, a kind of sense that this is really almost sacred because it's not about me. It's about nature, nature knowing nature, and nature relating to nature, nature caring for nature.

This is a core aspect behind my teachings, a core aspect of who I am. And I suspect that this is at the foundation of what motivates me for pretty much everything I do.

So thank you for my chance to share this. There will be one more talk on this topic of my core teachings tomorrow. Thank you.