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Guided Meditation: Samadhi as Welcoming

Hello everyone, and welcome to Friday morning here in California. We come to the end of this five-part series on the Gladness Pentad^[1].

Take a moment to imagine a circumstance, maybe a time when things are going well for you, a time when you have no real concerns, and that you can settle into your meditation first with gladness. It's like just feeling glad, delighted, and appreciative of the chance to sit in a place where your senses are open and your body is present. Just being alive is enough. Being alive is to be present in your senses: with your eyes, your ears, your body, and with the mind here and now. Maybe it is not the highest quality, but it's just nice to be here, content, and kind of glad.

Then you remember that you're here to practice being attentive. Practice gently and lovingly quieting your mind, letting your mind quiet, because you can reassure your thinking mind that you don't have to do all this thinking. You don't have to fix anything or solve anything, and it's okay just to quiet down and let attention be available for the simplicity of being alive now with the breathing.

There's a joy in the simplicity of presence with the breathing. Even if the mind wanders off, there's a joy in recognizing that and beginning again with the breathing. The breathing is kind of the representation of being centered, at home here in this life, in this body, where just being alive is enough. Just breathing is enough.

Being present for the breathing, the joy of it is partly riding on the breath like a bird soaring on an updraft. Awareness rides up and down on the breathing, and on the updrafts and the waves.

In this joy of the practice of being present, the practice of keep showing up here feeling and sensing the body and the breathing, makes room for tension in the body to relax. There's a softening and relaxing in the body. Tensions of the face soften. Tensions of the belly soften. Make a small adjustment in the positions of your hands and arms to release any tension that's held there. Maybe there's even a little tension in the thighs that can be released.

Maybe there's some tension or pressure in the thinking mind, some agitation, and just being aware of it is enough. The joy of having an awareness practice that knows and sees without making anything a problem. And so the mind has a chance to relax also.

Just being alive is enough, sitting here breathing and attending to breathing. Another level of contentment or happiness, physical satisfaction maybe, comes from a place that's deeper than the places where the body aches or the heart hurts. The place inside that feels peaceful and quiet. There, there's a kind of well-being.

There, the breathing gently arises and passes, comes and goes, wave after wave, as the companion of an inner feeling of well-being, calm, and tranquility. There is an inner place of stillness and calm, maybe in the breathing, that is a center of gravity for all things. The weight from the body gathers around this place. The weight of awareness settles. The weight of your emotions, your moods, the atmospheres of your mind—a gentle pull of that center gathers everything together here and now.

Your whole being becomes centered on breathing, centered on the stillness or the peace which the breathing moves through and arises out of. Even the weight of thinking settles into the center, and the thinking quiets and settles.

Perhaps there is a sense that samadhi^[2] is an immersion in experience, an immersion into this practice. An immersion of all of you together, centered, centering, gathered here now, breathing. Surrendering to the pull of the gravity of the center of your being. Surrendering everything to that center so it all gathers together. It's all working together here and now.

At the center of your being, there's a loving sign that says welcome. Maybe it says all of you is welcomed here. Give yourself over to this welcome at the center of it all. Breathing in and out through that center of gravity for all things.

However far your thoughts take you away from yourself, away from your center, when you notice it, let it all return back to that center. In a sense, bring your thoughts with you so that they can relax and compost back at the center of all things.

And then taking a gentle breath deep into your being, maybe taking a long exhale and pausing at the end of the exhale in preparation for ending the sitting. Relaxing into your heart, and letting there be whatever kind of sense awareness gazing upon the world around you, remembering it, imagining it.

Imagining that your goodwill, your kindness, your heart's deepest welcoming of everyone, welcomes the world and you look upon it kindly. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

May the deepest way that you welcome yourself extend out to a welcome to all beings. Welcome, letting them come well into your goodwill.

Dharmette: The Gladness Pentad (5 of 5) The Natural Unfolding of Samadhi

So that was unplanned, the way that unfolded in terms of the meditation. I was just welcoming you all to the sitting and having some thoughts about how to begin, and I was going to be explaining it, and then somehow it transitioned into being a guided meditation. So hopefully some of you understood and weren't waiting the whole time. I think it came a little bit from my own being quiet and settled and sharing that from within with you.

We come to the last of the Gladness Pentad, and this is samadhi. Samadhi is a powerful word in India. To translate samadhi as concentration, we lose some of the richness and the breadth of it. Sometimes I have this idea that in its Indian context, samadhi has many meanings. Sometimes it refers to some of the deepest realizations a person can have.

Some people will understand it to be a deep absorption, an immersion in our experience. In the meditation, we immerse ourselves in it, but the quality of that immersion, that absorption, is kind of like entering into a sacred place—say, a sacred grove, a sacred spot in nature, a sacred temple. There's really a feeling about this: this is where church is. And for people that are theistic, which I'm not particularly, this is where the presence of God is. It's really quite something to be immersed in, all this goodness that samadhi is.

To translate it as concentration, many people take it to be a kind of laser-focused bearing down, a straining to look and be. But it's more like there's a warm, happy, loving welcome at the center of your being, and your system, your whole psychophysical being, feels that welcome and is happy to settle there. It settles around it, kind of like settling around the earth, or a group of people settling around a fire and being cozy and comfortable together.

Part of what samadhi is, is a gathering together of all our faculties. The classic language is that of unification, that there's a unified field. Nothing is scattered, nothing is fragmented. We're not spinning out; there's not a centrifugal force outwards with the mind. If anything, there's a settling inward, or here. As that settling happens more and more, there are levels of it, and the experience of samadhi shifts and changes. Sometimes a sense of boundaries and barriers falls away. Even though I talked about this settling into the center, the idea that there's an edge to the space which you're centered on falls away. Sometimes samadhi just feels like we're immersed in a boundless space. It is kind of like if we swim underwater in a beautiful clear lake, and underneath, in that scuba space, it feels peaceful and quiet. We might look up at the surface a few feet above us and see that there's some agitation of the water up there, but here where we are, we're kind of immersed in this boundless water world.

So samadhi is not something to strain for. This is part of the lesson of this Gladness Pentad: that it's built on the previous four. You see in the teachings of the Buddha over and over again the different ways samadhi follows the four before it. It follows gladness, joy, tranquility of the body, and happiness, and then samadhi. It follows almost as a natural phenomenon.

What we're doing here is a very profound principle of the Buddha's, and that is that we're not causing meditation to happen. We're not causing samadhi or concentration to happen, but rather we're setting up the conditions that allow it to happen. The way that this Gladness Pentad is talked about is not something we do, but rather something we allow, something that naturally flows. When we have this Dharma^[3] gladness, from there arises joy, from there arises tranquility, from there happiness occurs, and from there samadhi, concentration, happens.

As we give ourselves to the practice, we have to practice. As I like to say sometimes, the practice doesn't work at all if you don't do it. There is a doing of it that has to happen, but what that doing is, is partly showing up, really showing up here so we can begin allowing here to unfold. And here unfolds without our reactivity, here unfolds without our straining and wanting, without our mind being scattered and distracted. When we start becoming undistracted and here enough, there begins to be an unfolding, a deepening, that is not necessarily our doing but what we allow for.

If we're always staying the agent, the one who does in practice, we can only take the practice so far. At some point, we have to start being the doer that does something, shows up, but at some point we also start allowing. More and more there's allowing of something to flow through us, something to unfold within us. It's not so mystical; it's very practical and simple that it comes when we allow ourselves to just be present and relax.

One of the remarkable things that's a little bit embarrassing, maybe for some of us, is all our grand conclusions about the world, about ourselves, and how terrible things are, how terrible we are, the challenges we have, or even how great things are. These happen from the thinking mind, the conceiving mind that's living in its thoughts, reactions, and ideas of things. When those ideas and thinking quiet down, we start living in a different world where the conclusions are very different. Even the idea that "this is boring"—boredom is a certain activity of the mind, actions of the mind constructing the evaluation that things are boring. But as the mind gets quieter, this centrifugal force away from the center, which is boredom, vanishes, and you see that it's not boring here at all. Unless we return to that evaluative, analytical mind, which is an activated mind, this quieting, settling, coming together, and immersing ourselves in our experience here begins to slowly occur on its own.

Sometimes, if you have a daily sitting practice, this process might be so slow you can't see it day by day. There's almost like a slow and steady movement that moves us through this Gladness Pentad so much so that we don't necessarily see it or recognize the stages. But then eventually it allows us to sit down to meditate and it's more like, "Here I am," and there's an entering into it or allowing into it that maybe is samadhi. Or it can be that sometimes in one meditation session you can almost feel the cascading movement like water down a hillside, going through these different steps.

It's relatively easy for me to talk about it; it's not so easy to have this happen. So it's very important not to be the kid in the back seat that's saying, "Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" wanting it and trying to make it happen. A hugely important part of this meditation practice is a certain kind of contentment to be practicing with whatever the circumstances are that you're practicing with.

There's a very profound principle that I like: the Dharma knows better than you what you should be experiencing. There are no mistakes. When you sit down to meditate, whatever you're given is what we learn to practice with, without trying to make it different, but rather to wake up with it, to be present with it in a very wise way. If anything, what we can do is we can learn to relax. Relax with it all, relax with the difficulty, relax around what's difficult, let the thinking mind relax. This relaxing, this tranquilizing, as we stay present and attentive, is really the ingredient for allowing the Gladness Pentad to move through us on its own.

As we do that, and we come to some modicum of being settled and present here so that we're not being scattered or pulled into the world of thinking and reactivity, and we're able to see and be present, then the Gladness Pentad opens up to being able to see how things are. Just to see deeply. And what we see deeply, one of those things, is the nature of suffering. We might begin the practice because we suffer and we want to find some relief, some freedom from that suffering. But we're not really ready to address it deeply until we've prepared the ground for it, until we've entered into the temple in a respectful and kind and appropriate way. When we enter into the temple of samadhi, then we have new eyes with which to see the suffering.

Yes, we're here to overcome suffering. Don't be so concerned with it at first; let it be the motivating factor and part of why you feel the gladness, knowing that you're on a path to the end of suffering. But don't try to fix it and navigate it as you begin your practice. Just develop the ability to be present, and then when the time is right, when the Dharma knows best for you, you will address the suffering in a deep way. Seeing things as they are is the nature of it.

I wasn't planning on this, but coincidentally, the topic for tomorrow's day-long is the Four Noble Truths^[4], the truth of suffering, so it is kind of a follow-up today. I don't know if there's still space in the day-long, but it's online. You find the registration on the Insight Retreat Center website where it talks about online day-longs. There's also a link to it in the IMC 'What's New'. If there is space and you can only come to part of the day, that's fine. It's best to come early I suppose, though the whole day is going to cover the Four Noble Truths. It's a little bit of a teaching day and practice day and meditation day.

So thank you very much for this, and I appreciate having this chance to teach and be with you and share this with you. I look forward also to coming back and beginning again on Monday. Thank you.