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Practicing in the Natural World - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on August 05, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Practicing in the Natural World

Good morning. It is quite nice to be back here. For those of you who haven't been here much, I've been gone for the last maybe five weeks or something. I was away for the month of July. For better or for worse, I thought I would tell you what I did for my summer as a kind of background for this talk.

Maybe as a question for you to carry with you as you listen to the talk or after the talk is around the topic that in Buddhism, at least in our tradition, it's less interesting to ask the question of yourself "who am I?" than it is to ask the question "what is my nature?" What is natural for us here? When you ask the question "what is natural for you?" that can highlight the second question: "what is not natural?" This, of course, raises lots of interesting philosophical questions and protests very quickly. But what is it that belongs to the natural world, distinct from the social world we live in? The mental world where we construct, we fabricate, we make up all kinds of ideas in which we live, that we don't question. We take it as just "this is how things are." But to start questioning the distinction between what is natural and what is socially constructed is a powerful way to really begin going deep into this world of seeing ourselves, knowing ourselves, and finding a way to freedom.

The reason for that background for this talk is that for a good part of the month of July, most of July, I lived in the wilderness. I lived outdoors. For about 10 days I was backpacking, and for two weeks I was living in a 1300-acre nature preserve. All this was in the forested mountains and foothills of northern, central, and northeastern Oregon. I had never been there before; it's quite beautiful. For most of that time, for three weeks, I was part of the faculty teaching a program called Nature Dharma Teacher Training. We took a group of about 20 people who had already been trained to be Insight Meditation teachers and a group of about five people who had long histories of being guides and facilitators for bringing people into the natural world, into the wilderness and backpacking. We brought them together to train them in how to offer meditation retreats, day-longs, and teaching events that are embedded in the natural world. Some of them were offering backpacking retreats, some people are offering what's called stationary camping retreats where you go someplace and stay at some outdoor place and people are camping. All the meditation is done outdoors, sometimes the eating is done outdoors; the whole day is spent outdoors.

So that was the focus of those three weeks. It was a little bit of a practicum for them, taking them into the wilderness to practice there. A good part of it was actually meant to be a retreat for them, rather than the pedagogy of how to do this—giving them a deep experience for doing it, including three days in which they all did solos. Their solo practice in the natural world, by yourself, away from everyone, even away from themselves, just really alone, can be extremely powerful in all kinds of ways. In fact, it was quite something to hear them debrief afterwards at the end of this. At the end of it, I went backpacking with my wife up there around Mount Hood.

One of the reflections I had this month, living outdoors and hiking outdoors—and much of the time I slept under the stars, I didn't even use a tent—was coming across a very big Douglas fir, probably considered an old-growth Douglas fir. In much of these forests that we traveled in, there was very little old growth. There were beautiful forests, but many of them had been planted; many of them had just kind of sprouted up after things had been cut down. Maybe it had been enough decades since they were cut down that they had grown up quite a bit, but they weren't old growth. I remember coming across this big Douglas fir—huge, tall, wide, big—and it kind of took my breath away. I was in awe looking at this tree. I felt like I entered a whole different relationship to time because this tree must have been around for a long time—both the timeless now and that long span of history. I felt kind of humbled in the presence of it. I felt a little bit smaller than I usually am, and I had a very different feeling of my relationship to the cosmos, to the wider world, by being in relationship to this big tree that's been around a long time.

I've traveled in places in the world like in Japan where you come across periodically, also places where there's been lots of forestry. There are mountains in Japan that are filled, monocropped with beautiful cedar trees, but they're there because they've been cut and grown. It's a big part of the industry in Japan. But then you come across a cedar tree in Japan that is 800 years old. Wow. And it isn't just that you come across a tree; it's massive. A massive, massive trunk, gnarled and big. It's a power spot. This is special. The mind can go quiet, just like, "wow." In fact, in Japan, these trees have become worshiped. You see there's a little altar in the front of it. People put their coins there, put water there, a little bit of food there for the tree. The tree is not going to benefit from that, but they say it's the Kami¹. There's a wonderful term in Japan, Kami. Apparently, there's no consensus in Japan what a Kami is. Sometimes it's a kind of a god, a god in the natural world, the god of the tree. But maybe it's not; maybe it's just the natural force, the living force that's alive there. It doesn't really matter. People want to worship it. People stop and sit and are quiet and they bow to that.

So when I was seeing this old-growth Douglas fir, I wondered what that area was like when it was full of old-growth trees. What was it like here in the peninsula when it was filled with massive oak trees? There are a few left here and there you can see. Some years ago, there was a massive oak tree on Middlefield, on the corner there, that the city felt was dangerous. It was so old they felt it was going to fall or break branches and fall on cars or something, near the school over there. The neighbors protested, the kids protested, and the kids made these little altars and put bracelets around the trunk of the big tree and made offerings and dolls and everything, trying to protect the tree. Finally, when they realized they couldn't, they did even more things to honor the tree. The kids had no idea about Kami, but this was special, their relationship to this tree.

But what if most of the trees here in the peninsula were still here? What if there were no homes, no fences? What if you could go from San Carlos all the way down to Mountain View and it's a vast plane of grasslands and these huge oak trees with no fence lines? What happens to your sight and how you see? What happens to your relationship to the land? What if there were very few people there? What if there were some grizzly bears?

In 1792, one of the first English people who came to California was George Vancouver, who was an explorer. Vancouver up in Canada is named after him. He visited the San Francisco Bay Area in November of that year. He was in San Francisco and he took a party of people on horseback and rode down the peninsula to San Jose. As he crossed the area that's the boundary between San Carlos and Redwood City, right here where we're sitting today, he described this whole area, about 20 miles going south, as like an English park with old English oak trees. I can imagine, being November, the grass was just getting green, and it must have been spectacular with these big trees and open plains and very few people. The Lamchin², the indigenous people of Redwood City, from Belmont down to I think maybe Atherton, people think there were only about 350 of them at the time when Vancouver came through. This is before the Spanish land grants happened a few years later.

What an amazing thing to imagine, this peninsula here, this vast plain with massive oak trees. What would it be like to be here and walk through that? What happens to your gaze, how you look across the land? What happens when you stand in front of these huge, ancient trees? Would it be a very different experience than when you walk down a city street in Redwood City and see all the fences, one after the other? You look in one direction and you can't see very far because there are fences. Maybe you see 30 feet, maybe 10 feet, maybe 5 feet. The houses are in the way. There are no grand vistas unless you stand in the middle of the street and you're lucky no one runs you over. You can see way down the asphalt, a mile or two perhaps. That's maybe nice. But maybe what you can do, if you're kind of tuned in, is look up into the sky. In the sky, you see a grand view. You see the clouds and the vastness of it, and that feels kind of special, relaxing, peaceful to see.

But walking through Redwood City, maybe it's peaceful right now. There are a lot of wonderful trees here, so it's kind of nice if you like trees. But what was it like for the Lamchin, the natives who used to live here? There's one family left of the Lamchin, one lineage. What was their relationship when the natural world was massive, was awesome, created such a peaceful view and place? When the trees and the sky and the mountains and the waters and the grizzly bears and everything were part of the territory and the land, does it change how people feel? Does it change people's relationship to the natural world? Does it change how people relate to themselves, how they understand themselves in that?

Some of us have gone into the natural world away from the social world, have gone camping, backpacking. Sometimes just going for a day hike in a park or nature preserve here on the peninsula will change and shift your relationship to yourself. It's so easy living in a social, urban life where all the ways in which life is organized are socially constructed: what we wear, where we go, how we work, the relationship between the different people that we encounter. All belong to a social world that's been constructed and invented. Fashions that we have, fashions of what kind of bodies are accepted and appreciated, trends in what kind of sexuality and genders are understood and appreciated, and how we relate to them. There are so many ways—race, ethnicity—that we have ideas and biases and preferences and bump up against things that are challenging. The dynamics between different genders, this very rich social world, is mostly a social construct, 90%, maybe 80% of it. If you just go to a different culture, you see that the relationship people have between genders is sometimes radically different than how it is here in California. How much of it is socially constructed, and how much of it do we think is natural?

You go into the natural world, away from most social things, and it's remarkable how much of this socially constructed spinning of the mind quiets down. The preoccupations, the concerns, the "he did, she did, they did" kind of things become quieter. Trying to live up to standards which belong to our society or family or the people we have around us quiets down. It's remarkable to be able to step away from the social world, the social constructs, and just be able to breathe easily and have the mind become quieter. A lot of this is what some of us experience in meditation. Meditation itself is a quieting of the socially constructed world because that's the quieting of the mind. The thinking mind is mostly what that is. Then we discover the natural world in ourselves. Just as it is awesome to encounter an 800-year-old cedar tree or to stand looking out at the majesty of Mount Hood, which I saw many times on the hiking trip, it's possible to sit quietly and view the majesty of the inner landscape, to feel the awe of being conscious and present and peaceful that can be inside. There's a natural world inside of us that's available as well.

The capacity to go into the natural world in order to have the social world calm down is extremely powerful. It allows us to begin questioning and becoming wise about the constructed world that the mind is usually living in. We can see more clearly what is necessary and what is not necessary. Whereas when we're always living in the social world, always navigating it, all of that seems natural, that seems obvious, that seems universal, that seems like there's nothing else. But to step away from it is powerful.

In Buddhism, there's been a very long tradition of meditation practitioners going into the natural world to practice. Sometimes they're called forest practitioners, sometimes they're called wilderness practitioners. There are different names that they use. In the many thousands of years of Buddhist history, 2,500 years, sometimes whole schools of Buddhism have been revived by the forest tradition, by the monks and the nuns who have gone into the forest to practice. Sometimes there's been a tension between the Buddhist teachers and practitioners who live in urban settings and urban monasteries and those who step away from that social world to practice deep, sometimes alone, deep in the forests, sometimes in little forest monasteries. Sometimes that tension has been a useful, creative tension. Sometimes it's been really essential because, as I said, sometimes Buddhism has been revived by it.

In our tradition, the Insight movement that we're part of here, we have clearly inherited some of the benefits that came from the forest practitioners in Thailand and in Burma in the late 1800s and early 1900s. To give you one dramatic reference point for this, in the 1800s in Thailand, the dominant Buddhism of the time did not believe it was possible for human beings to become enlightened anymore, to have some degree of realization. They weren't oriented around doing that. A lot of the emphasis was in study and preserving the teachings, but not doing deep practice. But there were a couple of people who decided, "Oh no, this is possible," and they went into the forest, away from the urban Buddhism of the time, and went deep in the forest and practiced for years and came back and said, "Yes, it's possible to have some degree of attainment, of realization, of freedom." The ecclesiastical authorities of the time in the early 1900s criticized them, saying "No, it's not possible. What you're doing is not possible." Right up until the 1950s they were being told they couldn't do this.

But there were two monks in particular who went and did this. One of them was a man named Ajahn Mun³, and his attainment, his realization, really made a big impact slowly. Among the people he had a big impact on was Ajahn Chah⁴, who went to study with him. Ajahn Chah was a teacher for Ajahn Sumedho, Ajahn Sucitto, for Jack Kornfield. This idea that it's possible to practice to the point of some kind of deep attainment came out of that, and then it became more popular. By the 1950s, there was a big shift in Thailand, and a little bit earlier in Burma. I don't know when exactly the shift was in Sri Lanka, but in all these places, it was the forest monastics who went and practiced away from all this that really showed what was possible.

Why is it the forest monastics could do this? I think partly it is the support that the natural world gives us in practicing. The natural world teaches us how to distinguish between the world of social constructs and the world that's free of it. The natural world also challenges us in ways that are invaluable for Buddhist practice. Going into the wilderness by yourself, even if it's just for one day, is frightening for some people. It's uncomfortable. There are times when it's championed as a place that's really peaceful and nice, and it's inspiring to go feel the peaceful settings of a natural setting sometimes. People can experience peace in a natural setting that's greater than any other time in their life. But it's also uncomfortable in the natural world. There are mosquitoes, Grizzlies. The weather is not cooperative. You go out and live in the natural world and it's not pastoral environments. There could be storms and lightning and thunder and fires, and here in California, Oregon, and Washington these days, smoke.

I was woken up at night by something chomping. It sounded like very hard chomping teeth right close to my head. What is that? And before I could turn to look, two cute little fawns dashed by me. One of the women who was part of the three-day solo was sitting, minding her own business meditating, and she heard this crashing sound behind her. She turned around to see a big bear running by. Another one chose a place to spend her three days. She was very careful and tried to be respectful of whatever was part of the natural world, and somehow she chose a spot that was the home of a herd of deer. They checked her out in the middle of the night. They were checking out what was going on, who this person was. And she wondered whether she should move.

So, the idea of not having the creature comforts, but to really practice with renunciation, letting go of comforts, letting go of it having to be just as we want it to be, our preferences and all this—this is part of the gift of being in the natural world. For these forest monastics who went into the forest back then, they had to let go of so much. They had to work with their fears, work with their desires, work with their preferences, and learn how to let go very, very deeply. Why is that useful? Because if you really want to drop the world of attachments, the world of all these social constructs that we live in and are caught in, it really helps to be able to learn to let go in a deep way, to really learn how to be at ease with discomfort, to work with our fear, go to the other side of the fear, be in fearful places but not run away.

I'll end this talk by saying that there's a beautiful discourse in the ancient teachings attributed to the Buddha where a man comes to the Buddha and says something like this: "I notice that you and your followers sometimes go and practice in the wilderness, in the forest. It's hard to practice in the forest; it's frightening to be there." And the Buddha says, "Oh yes, it's hard to practice in a forest. It's frightening to go in there. Before I was enlightened, I wanted to go into the forest to practice, and I considered, yes, it's difficult in the forest, it's frightening." But then he thought about himself and said, "Well, if you're not ethical, you don't live an ethical life, then it can be frightening to go in the forest. But I lived an ethical life, so I don't have that fear. If I have a lot of the hindrances⁵—a lot of desire for sensual pleasure, a lot of aversions, sloth and torpor, restlessness and doubt, and uncertainties, anxiety—it's hard to go in the forest and live there by yourself." And he said, "No, but I don't have the hindrances." So he listed all these things, he did this review. "So I'll go live, I'll go practice in the forest. And I'll work with my fear that comes up that's still left."

In fact, the Buddha, before he was enlightened, when he practiced in the forest, he was frightened. He got afraid. Isn't that a nice story? We hold up the Buddha as being perfect and he's never going to be afraid, but he was. And then it's cute how he talks about it. He says, "Yeah, sometimes there were these footsteps around me at night, and there were peacocks." He got frightened of the peacocks walking around. But he made a commitment that no matter what posture he was practicing in when he got afraid, he would stay in that posture until he saw through to the other side of the fear. So he had to deal with peacocks. In the biographies of these forest monastics in Thailand, some of them talked about sitting and having to confront tigers. You know, there were dangerous things. Tigers are roaring around in the middle of the night and they're sitting there, and they felt really afraid. And they said, "Okay, I'm going to sit here and work with this fear." And the ones who survived wrote biographies. [Laughter]

So the Buddha went off and dealt with his fear there. Then this particular discourse goes on and describes how he stayed in the forest and got very concentrated, and his concentration had insight and then he became liberated. But then at the end of the story, he's talking to this man and he says, "Well, some of you might think that I go into the forest to practice now that I'm fully awakened because I'm not really fully awakened." He said, "That's not the case. I go to practice in the forest for my own comfort and my own sense of ease and delight. And I do so out of compassion for future generations." The usual understanding of why he does it for future generations is he wants to be a model, an example of how to practice, to go into the wilderness to practice.

That was considered by the Buddha a very important way of practicing. Some of that might be because back 2,500 years ago, they were still living in the Bronze Age. There were no meditation centers, there was no retreat center he could sign up for. Maybe if the Buddha had lived today, he would have signed up for a retreat, he would have gone to IRC or something. But back then there were no such things. The place to really go to have the circumstance, the occasion, the ability to go and be in seclusion and practice meditation day after day in a way that really was not caught up and complicated by the social world, it took going off into the forest for a while. He did that, and then he came back, and he would go back and forth between these two worlds. That's been the rhythm for many Buddhist practitioners down through the centuries: the rhythm of spending time in the wilderness practicing and time being in urban settings and teaching and supporting people.

We don't have a very rich forest tradition yet in the United States. There are some wonderful forest monastics who are starting that and living that way. But the lay tradition of Insight teachers that we are... it's only about 20 years old that some teachers like Susie Harrington and Mark Coleman have been beginning to experiment with teaching wilderness retreats. So they wanted to pass this on to the next generation, so they created this teacher training program for people to do this. They invited me to come along. I'm not quite qualified for it; I've never taught things in the wilderness like they have, but they wanted me along anyway. I felt very privileged to be part of it. It's been a very important part of my practice, practicing in these wilderness settings. I spent three years in Los Padres National Forest at Tassajara⁶, that was all outdoors. And in the forest in Thailand, I was in little kutis⁷, little huts. In one way or the other, the natural world has been a big influence on my own practice and my own understanding of what freedom is, how freedom is possible, and what freedom is.

So that's what I did for my summer. Luckily, I don't have to write an essay on that.

Q&A

So we have a few minutes before the usual ending time if any of you would like to ask any questions or comments or anything about this or anything at all, you're welcome to.

Questioner 1: So I have a question about the logistics. Where do you go to the bathroom?

Gil Fronsdal: Oh. So one of the guides, there were five people who are really trained to take people and keep people safe in the natural world, teach them logistics and how to put tents up and everything. She did this beautiful, I don't know, it probably was like a 20-minute-long talk about pooping in the wilderness. And everyone was like, wow. They never had such a thorough, complete, you know, with all the details you can imagine. It was quite inspiring. But the idea when you go in the wilderness is that nowadays, especially in many places, you're supposed to leave no trace. So for pooping, you're supposed to dig a hole that's fairly deep, so people have trowels with them. And you're supposed to bring your toilet paper out of the wilderness with you. So you bring Ziploc bags and you take them with you because you're not supposed to leave anything there. There's a whole way of doing that, and where to dig your hole and how to make your hole in a way that doesn't cause problems for later. Thank you.

Questioner 2: I have this theory that one reason, or maybe for some people the main reason that being a forest monastic is helpful toward becoming enlightened or moving toward enlightenment, is that you just don't have so much stuff that you own that's precious to you and that you worry about losing. Your house, all the precious things in your house, your decades-long book writing projects, or whatever achievements you have to make sure you keep. But if you lose your trowel, you can probably borrow one from someone else. Anyway, not so much stuff to be attached to. What do you think?

Gil Fronsdal: I think it's an important reason. To simplify the life, a life of radical simplicity. And it's not just because of stuff, but it's also because of responsibilities and caring for the world and all kinds of things quiet down for a while. It becomes more and more simple. I think being able to live a radically simple life is... and it's sometimes easier to do it in the wilderness than elsewhere. But it also takes a lot of preparation. Like, what do you do for food? One of the people who was doing the program, who's a guide, has taken wilderness survival courses, like in the desert, and now teaches that. So she's really well trained. All she brings when she goes in—I think she wears some kind of clothes—but she goes in with a knife. Goes into the deserts or the mountains just with a knife. And from that, she has to figure out how to sleep and how to create conditions and find food and water and everything. She's skilled. She's done programs to learn this. So that's very simple, but it's also complicated. You're busy trying to figure out food.

Generally, for example, when people did the solo trip, three days in the wilderness, it was pretty simple, but there were other people who had prepared food for them. So they packed up prepared food that can last for three days and had that with them so they didn't have to cook really. Actually, they weren't allowed to bring anything to cook with because of the fire danger. So that made it a lot easier. Monastics often have to live close enough to a village where they can go and do alms and receive the food for the day because Buddhist monastics can't keep food overnight, so every day they have to get new food to eat. Generally, the forest monastic life is supported. So then that allows this different kind of simplicity, but we have to appreciate that it is supported. There's a wide network that supports and allows this to happen. Some of the people in the training program are IMC teachers, and so I see that in the future we'll probably be offering more—we've already offered some—but we'll offer more of these nature retreats and maybe even solo retreat opportunities in nature. My goal is to at some point be able to offer a month-long retreat in the natural world where people can do solos and be well supported by teachers, but it takes a lot of background support and upfront support to make that possible. So it's not as simple as just getting rid of all your stuff and going in the forest. Yeah, it's not just that simple. So living a life of simplicity, to organize that can be complicated. So I don't want to just glorify simplicity without appreciating that we have this wider world to take care of too. It's very well understood in Buddhism that the forest monastics have to stay in relationship to society because their food, their clothes, their well-being, their medicine, they depend on it. So I think it's important not to create this hard divide between the natural world and the urban world, but to see them in relationship to each other in a healthy way. Thank you.

Questioner 3: So I'm a backpacker also, and I have always felt and experienced that the process of getting ready for a backpack is as important as the backpacking itself. Because you really do have this... you have a backpack and a limited amount of things. So what do you take? In that process of deciding the values of what is more important and what do you leave behind is a really... I don't rush through it. It's a process. It's really, just taking time with that really brings insight and a new way of looking at your possessions when you take time to figure out what to take and what not to leave behind.

Gil Fronsdal: Fantastic. I love that point. It's very important. As a little bit of an example of this, I did go backpacking with my wife at the end for four days. But she was just warming up because when we finished after four days, we were going to end up on the Columbia River. We were hiking in Oregon towards the Columbia River. And then the next day she was going to walk the Pacific Crest Trail from the Columbia River, from the Oregon border, to Canada. So she's a thru-hiker. So she showed up, I picked her up at the airport in Portland, and we stopped at an industrial parking lot somewhere. "Gil, show me what you have in your backpack, what you're taking with you backpacking with me." And so everything goes out. "Not this, not this, you don't need this, you don't need this." I thought I did a really good job keeping it really simple, but if you're a thru-hiker, the idea is to go super light. So I was glad she went through it because it lightened it up even more. But then there were the things I didn't let go of. And then, why am I carrying this? For example, I brought a Kindle with me because I thought, you know, we're sitting around, it would be nice to read a little bit or something. She didn't force me to get rid of the Kindle, she might not have seen it. But I didn't look at the Kindle at all. It's like, why am I carrying it? Kindle's heavy. So it's not only what you didn't bring, but it's also contending with what you do bring.

Yes, another interesting thing was that with my wife, somehow in this thing in the parking lot, moving my things, "you don't take this, that," I use a contact lens for my right eye, and so I had more contact lenses than I needed. So in that process of separating that out, I didn't bring any contact lenses with me. And I didn't know that until we started the trail. So that was interesting, to be able to spend the four days with a certain degree of blurry vision as well. And that was just part of the learning, part of the contending with difficulties and what's going on. I kind of appreciated that challenge. It was kind of nice to be free of that.

So I hope that was nice to hear. I'm inspired by this idea of having a lineage or having a part of our Insight Meditation world have this richer connection to the natural world. And we'll be doing that, I hope, over this next few years because, as some of you know, we're developing a relationship with Hidden Villa, which is a nature preserve in Los Altos Hills. They would like us to come there and practice there and teach there. And that gives us lots of opportunities to do practicing in the natural world and nature without having to give up our Kindle or such things, because we can go there for the day or for retreats or something. So, thank you.