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

Guided Meditation: Meditation as Peace; Dharmette: Gil's Story (5 of 5) Starting with Vipassana - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 01, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Meditation as Peace

Warm greetings from the meditation hall here at Insight Meditation Center. I'm delighted to be here, and I'm delighted to, in a certain virtual way, be with you all where you are. To feel the interconnected net of all of us spread around the world—I'd love to see a map with each of us, the place we're in, and then lines from each of us to everyone else sitting here, and how those would crisscross and what kind of net that would make. So thank you for being here this morning.

I was thinking about what used to be called, maybe still called, Russian dolls—these series of dolls of different sizes. If you pull the outer ones apart, the smaller ones are inside, and they get smaller and smaller until you get to the smallest one which is whole; you can't pull it apart.

Sometimes in Buddhist spirituality, people can have the sense that we're made up of all these parts, all these layers. Part of practice is to deconstruct them, to let them go, to quiet them down, to settle deeper and deeper in until we can get to some core: a core of peace, a core of freedom, some place of deep inner calm, or a deep inner sense of wholeness, honesty, integrity, or well-being. This doesn't dismiss, deny, or condemn all the other layers; it does create a different reference point for understanding them.

But as practice goes along, rather than the goal of practice being to tap into some deep inner place of peace, the peace, the freedom, the joy of practice becomes the outermost doll. And so everything is within that. The largest container, the largest sphere that holds all the different ways that we are, is joy, letting go, or peace—all those things are kind of synonymous.

It's kind of like we can be operating on these different layers at the same time. There might be a place within us that does feel very sad, hurt, angry, or challenged in some way, but there are these other places that could be at the foundation. We might feel at the very bottom of it all a place of peace. Or it might be that at some point, that peace at the bottom of deep letting go opens up and it becomes the largest of the dolls. It becomes the large sphere that holds it all, and it creates a very different context for being with the things that are challenging.

It's almost like the challenges are no longer challenges. They still may be painful, but they are not something that we're identifying with or caught in. Not being caught in it, we can hold it with greater compassion, hold it with greater care and love. And if we are identifying with anything, it's with that which is peaceful.

So, to assume a meditation posture, and to lower your gaze or close your eyes.

Feel yourself with the largest sphere that holds it all. Whatever way you are, not trying to look for peace or calm, just whatever way you are right now, allow yourself to be present for it. Be aware of it, appreciating that this is the present moment experience.

Even if you're thinking about the past and future, or how you're feeling relates to the past and future, for now, just appreciate that here and now, this is how you are.

Gently taking a few deeper, satisfying breaths. Just deep enough to some degree of satisfaction—very modest satisfaction. Exhaling a little bit more than usual, maybe giving you a better sense of completion in the exhale.

Letting your breathing return to normal. And for a few rounds of breathing, just surf on the breathing, or let the movements of breathing massage your body.

Whatever you're thinking about, can you lighten up, loosen up around it a bit by relaxing the thinking mind?

And then take a further step on the exhale to let go of what you're thinking about, maybe imagining it drifts away like a thought bubble.

Maybe letting go of your thoughts is also a letting go into whatever calm or subtleness there is in your body. Whatever is beginning to calm or become more settled—this settling process—let go into it.

If you're holding a stone tight in your fist, and if you let go of it, you'd probably drop the stone. If, instead of letting go of the stone, you let go of the gripping—and if you're holding the stone with your palm upward, the stone won't drop; it's just held lightly in the hand. As you let go of thoughts, do you let go of anything you can let go of? Don't let go of the thought itself; let go of the grip, the tension, the pressure.

Let go gently, steadily. Maybe with every exhale, let go. Let go of any holding, clinging, any way in which you hang on to thoughts, feelings, or ideas, any way that you're preoccupied by anything. Expectations, preferences—let go.

Relax, lighten up. And as you do so, let go into whatever calm or peace that might be here, however small it might be.

Tension, grasping, clinging, pressure are all things that make us smaller, limit the range of attention. To let go, to relax, let go into the wider space beyond the edges of what you're holding on to, beyond the edges of what you're thinking. As if you're stepping into a very big room after being in a very small one. With every exhale, let go. Relax into the widest sphere beyond the edges of whatever you're feeling and thinking, where there might be some modicum of peace and calm that holds it all.

Beyond the edges of whatever is troubling you, or deep, deep down inside at the core of everything, might there be a calm or a peace, a place of non-identification, non-reactivity, that helps you to not identify with what troubles you? That helps you not identify with what is going well? That allows you to be at ease, untroubled by the layer inside which is troubled, without preferences for the layer inside which has preferences?

In reference to peace, calm, in reference to that which is beyond the edges of your thoughts, edges of your feelings, edges of your body, let it be the outermost sphere that allows and accepts all things peacefully.

And then, as we come to the end of the sitting, take a few moments to let go or to stop whatever you're doing that could be called meditation. Maybe still keep your eyes closed, but allow yourself just to be without anything more, without any intentional practice of attention or focus.

And if there's anything here that's enjoyable, pleasant, let yourself be nourished by that. And if anything is here that is unpleasant, difficult, let that be the prompt for compassion and love and care.

And then with your inner eye, turning your gaze outward into your world, the places you'll be today, people you'll encounter, people you might have communication with, people you're likely to read about in the news, or from whom you receive an email. And in that world, imagine that you are experiencing them all from that place of peace, calm, the wide sphere, or from the center of all things within. Gaze upon your world with goodwill.

As if everyone you encounter and think about is, in fact, your friend—even the difficult friends. And wish them all well. May all the people that I encounter today, may they be happy. May they be peaceful. May they be safe. May they be free.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Gil's Story (5 of 5) Starting with Vipassana

Hello, and we're here for the fifth talk about my story and encountering Buddhism. The plan is to take it up until I started teaching here at IMC, and then I'll make an announcement at the end of this talk about what the plan is for next week.

I was ordained in 1982 as a monk at the San Francisco Zen Center. I felt very comfortable and happy to be a monk. The monastic lifestyle worked really well for me, and I was happy in it. I appreciated the simplicity of that life, the dedication to practice, and the idea of being of service to this world. I really wanted to address the suffering of the world as deeply as I could.

It was a bit of a shock a few months later when the abbot gathered together all the people who had monk ordination at the San Francisco Zen Center and decided that he was going to change the name—we were no longer monks, but priests. I was stunned. I had no interest in being a priest; I thought I was going to be a monk. Over time, I've come to really appreciate this idea of being a priest because it much more clearly involves being in the world, serving people, and being involved in the lives of people. "Monk" isn't so obviously that. Now, as a Zen priest, I'm happy enough with it.

So, I was ordained in 1982. Oddly enough, within a year, by April or so, the abbot that ordained me had an ethical scandal. It was fairly serious, and it took some months for that to work itself out for the San Francisco Zen Center. Eventually, he resigned and left. When people got the news of his ethical breaches, many felt deeply betrayed and deeply hurt. It was very hard for the community. Maybe because I'd been at the Zen Center for five years and I hadn't invested as much as other people had, I didn't feel so hurt by it. In fact, I had the opposite experience. I'll tell you how that happened.

A little over a year after my ordination, around February or March of 1983, I was beginning to feel that the Zen Center was a little bit too ingrown for me, a little bit too self-focused or claustrophobic. I felt a need for fresh air. I felt happy about my ordination, my teacher, and most things, but I had this feeling that it was a little bit too insular, and it was healthy for me to step out of that bubble. But that was hard to do back then because it was a little bit cultic—there was a feeling like only at the Zen Center was the truth really there, and anybody who left was leaving that Buddhist truth. So it was a little bit hard to leave.

I was thinking about these things, and I was talking with a friend at the Zen Center. It was the first time I told someone this feeling that I had. As I was telling her, one of the senior priests from the Zen Center came over to me, tapped me on the shoulder, and said, "I'd like to talk to you. When you finish the conversation, you can come over to my apartment."

I finished my conversation with my friend and went over to talk to this priest. I thought maybe I'd gotten in trouble, because no one had ever asked to talk to me like that; it was a serious request. Instead, what happened was he told me about the ethical breach of the abbot. The news had not been told to everyone yet—only a small group of people knew. The decision was to go around and tell key people individually before letting the whole community know, and I was one of those people. As he told me, I felt delighted because now I was free to leave.

I had been invited by my father, who was going to work in Japan for a year, to come to Japan. I had told him, "No, I don't want to come to Japan because I have to practice at the Zen Center." So I called him up and said, "Now I'm ready to go."

I was free to go to Japan. I went there to study Zen and be in the monasteries. I was there for a while, and there are a lot of stories to tell about Japan. Eventually, I needed to get a new visa to stay in Japan. I had a tourist visa originally and was going to spend some months living at a Zen training monastery. I went to Thailand, as it was the easiest and cheapest way to get a new visa for Japan. I went to Bangkok, applied for a visa, and had to wait for it to be approved.

I decided to go to a little meditation monastery outside of Bangkok, for which I had the address. I went there and said, "I'm going to stay here until the visa comes, and I'm going to ask the abbot to teach me whatever meditation he has and just do what he says."

It turned out to be a Vipassana¹ center. I knew almost nothing about Vipassana. It turned out that the way they practiced was to practice all day, and then once a day I would go see the abbot. I was given a little hut at the edge of the monastery on top of the swamps—a little hut on stilts. I practiced for ten weeks without getting the visa. Finally, I decided, "Well, I'll just go back to Japan anyway with a tourist visa."

But those ten weeks were a ten-week intensive retreat. In my Zen practice, the longest I had done was seven days, and to do it for ten weeks really made a difference for me. One of the differences was I got much more concentrated than I ever had in Zen, in a different kind of way. In that concentration, I touched something very seemingly deep inside—a little kernel of something that seemed like the truest place. It became essential for me to touch that place again. It wasn't logical or rational; it was just this deep feeling, a deep urge or necessity that I felt.

I did go back to Japan and finished up the year living in a Zen monastery. Then I came back to California. I had no money, so I worked for about four months. I was given free room and board at the San Francisco Zen Center so I could save up money. All the money I earned from working went to savings. After those four months, I had about $2,000, and then I bought a ticket to go back to Asia.

This time, I planned to go to Burma because I'd learned the Vipassana practice I had been given in Thailand, and the headquarters for that—the source of it—was a particular monastery in Yangon², Myanmar. I tried to go there, but I didn't realize that Burma was closed when I applied for a visa. So I was waiting for a visa, and nothing happened.

The teacher in Burma, U Pandita³, was going to practice in Nepal. I went and practiced with him for a month in Nepal, which was very fortuitous. People like Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, John Travis, and others came to practice with him as well. That's where I got to meet these wonderful teachers as friends practicing together.

After that, I practiced in Thailand, doing month-long retreats there waiting for the visa. I finally reapplied, and eight months after I first applied, I finally got a visa to Burma. I think Burma finally opened again, but only wide enough to allow people to have tourist visas for one week, or meditation visas for three months. I don't know how many countries have meditation visas!

So I went, and I entered into the life of intensive retreats in Burma. I meditated for eight months all day long. The longest I'd done before that was those ten weeks in Thailand, and now I did this for eight months. That was one of the highest points in my life. It was both difficult and something I deeply loved. It was challenging, yet I experienced a tremendous amount of joy. I would say it was transformative; it shaped me in a way that continues to this day.

I thought I'd finish this series today up until the time when I was going to start teaching here at IMC, but we're running out of time. So let me leave you there. This is a new phase—coming to Vipassana practice, diving into it in a deep way, which eventually brought me to teaching at IMC.

What we'll do for next week is continue this story. When I finally reach the point of beginning to teach at IMC, I thought I would continue for however many days that takes to share a little bit of the history of IMC. This is important because I don't want to convey just the bland history of IMC, but rather the values that were infused into this community and are here for this place, expressed through its history. In a sense, it continues my story, because my dedication for the last 33 years has been to IMC.

Coincidentally, since we are at the end of the year, I've written the end-of-the-year letter for IMC. This year, I wrote it a little differently than in other years. Usually, the end-of-the-year letter just talks a little bit about IMC, and it still does that, but I wanted the letter to have a Dharma purpose as well—something memorable, Dharma-wise. If you'd like to read IMC's end-of-the-year letter and maybe help care for IMC in the way these letters usually suggest, you'll find it on the "What's New" section of IMC's homepage. In the bottom right-hand corner, there's a little box that says "What's New." If you go there, you'll see the end-of-the-year letter from Gil.

Thank you very much, and I look forward to continuing this on Monday.