Guided Meditation: Inner Sacredness; Dharmette: Compassionate Action (1 of 5) For the Sake of Others

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Inner Sacredness; Compassionate Action (1 of 5) For the Sake of Others. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 31, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Inner Sacredness

Hello and warm greetings. I am happy to be back here at IMC at 7:00 a.m., sitting here with all of you.

For the last three weeks, I was at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center^[1], deep in the Los Padres National Forest in Monterey County. It's several mountain ridges over from the Big Sur Coast, deep in the mountains. You go up and over one of the mountains on a 14-mile dirt road, coming down a steep, narrow valley to a beautiful creek called Tassajara Creek. There has been a Zen monastery there for 55 years now. I trained there many years ago, and it was formative for me in many ways. It was very significant to go back there to actively support people who were practicing in that valley, in that monastery, and to be in conversations with them.

I am reminded over and over again, certainly by being there, of something which I feel is quite sacred. That is what we might call everyone's hearts: the depths of people's inner life, the inner capacity for feeling connected, belonging, and being alive in this world. That deep, inner, sacred dimension of our heart—which is perhaps in some ways the most personal, and at the same time the most impersonal or transpersonal—is sometimes buried. It is sometimes wounded in deep ways, hurt, and sometimes difficult to access. Sometimes people are afraid of it. But to come close to it, to support people, and to meet people in the depths of their inner life—the most valuable, most important parts of what their full life is about—is where we're not distracted or caught up in the things of the world or in our conceit. For me, that is a sacred dimension. To care for that sacred dimension, to meet it, and to be part of each other's inner life—perhaps you could use a different word than sacred, it's just the word I like.

I do feel that coming here—surprisingly, coming here at 7:00 a.m., alone in this room with a camera on the wall opposite me and two monitors in front of me, a laptop and a large screen so I can more easily see you all in the chats—is a vehicle, a means for feeling something that, again, I call sacred. It is very special, or profound. Maybe "profound" is another possible word instead of "sacred." Maybe "heartfelt," or something very core or essential. So it's very nice to be here. It's very nice to be able to share this part of myself, and hopefully touch this part of you.

Coming from Tassajara, I feel quite inspired by all of this. I offer this introduction because this week I'll continue this series I've been doing now for six or seven weeks related to compassion. The Pali and Sanskrit word for compassion is karuṇā^[2]. There is a kind of association in the word, and how it was used in ancient India, with the word karma^[3]. They both share the root "to make" or "to do." They also have a strong pre-Buddhist association to sacred action, especially with the idea of sacred rituals.

The Buddha took the ancient Brahmanical religious orientation and adopted some of the words they used, but moved them away from the idea of ritual to being something deeply personal. Here we have a word, karma, that has a variety of meanings but has associations with sacred ritual, and now karuṇā. There are some scholars who have said that karuṇā has this kind of meaning or association with a sacred ritual, a sacred activity, a sacred doing that comes out of us.

This relates to my association with the sacredness and the profound aspect of our human life. How do we care for each other? How do we meet that? How do we come from our own depth in order to support other people and their capacity for depth, profundity, fullness, or sacredness? Here we are: the enactment of something that touches the sacred with care, love, and compassion. What a wonderful thing. To feel like we're in the neighborhood of it, that it's being discussed and explored in a world where this stuff is not common enough to do, is a remarkable thing. I feel grateful to be here with you.

To begin this meditation, assume a meditation posture that's appropriate for you. This idea of an appropriate and wise posture for yourself can be seen as an act of compassion, inner care, or being attuned to something deep inside for what really feels like the most connecting, most enlivening, most personal way of meditating. Gently close your eyes.

One of the ancient Pali Buddhist words that I love is a word for assurance, to be confident or assured, and it comes from a root meaning "to breathe." To find a way to breathe easily, to be at ease in this world, and to have the breath be free and easy is a wonderful task, the task of a lifetime. It is not always easy, but it is good to know that that's the direction we're going. For many of us, breathing sits at the nexus, the meeting place of so much of our life that is closely related to this profundity of possibility within us.

Take a few long, slow, gentle breaths, a little bit deeper than usual so it feels good, it feels nice. Just to the extent to which it feels nice—maybe even delicious—breathe in deeply, and relax as you exhale.

Let your breathing return to normal, and again, on the exhale, relax the body. Do not think that relaxing is superficial or rudimentary. Relaxing is really a beginning to approach or settle into a profound connection to oneself.

Relax the face around the eyes as you exhale.

Soften the shoulders.

Relax in the area of your heart, the heart center. Maybe even loosen up in the diaphragm.

Soften the belly.

As you exhale, relax the thinking mind. A gentle and slow quieting of the thinking. Settling into a calming calmness in the mind.

Then, relax into the place within. Someplace within your body, within your heart, or maybe within your mind, where you feel most at home, most safe, or most comfortable. In that comfort, that safety, maybe there is profundity within.

Breathe. Breathe with it. Breathe through it. Let your breathing accompany that place, that sense, that intuition of what is most profound, most safe, or most at home within. Settle into it each time you exhale.

Let thoughts about other times and other places—distracting thoughts—float away and recede in the background as you settle in to what within feels most like home, most intimate, here and now.

Having sat these minutes together in silence and quiet, might there be some way that you can sense, feel, or intuit something that's below the usual discursive mind, the usual daily concerns and feelings? Can you drop into some dimension within that feels like the most intimate, most profound, most centered place within? A place which is both very personal and very non-personal, maybe transpersonal. So personal that it is no longer part of your ideas of who you are or fears of who you are, no longer part of how others see you and how you want to be seen. With every exhale, settle into this place within.

Then, as we come to the end of the sitting, consider how the depths of your being, the depths of your heart, and your capacity to feel and connect to others can at times be a source of care, compassion, and love, concerned with the welfare and happiness of others.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings everywhere be free.

Dharmette: Compassionate Action (1 of 5) For the Sake of Others

Hello on this Monday morning. I am happy to be here with you all. I am also quite happy to have had my wonderful colleagues teach while I was gone. It's a pretty wonderful thing for me to have such wonderful teachers as colleagues, companions, and Dharma friends. I feel like we're a team together now, teaching here at 7:00 a.m. on YouTube. It is wonderful to hear from some of you how much you appreciate the guest teachers who come when I'm gone. I thank them for being here when I was away.

As it turns out, I'll be here this week, and then I'll be gone again for two or three weeks. I'll be back for a couple of weeks, then gone for a few weeks, and then back a little bit. It will be a lot like this through the end of the year, and maybe next year I can settle down to be here more.

But I feel very fortunate to be here today with all of you, and to continue the series I've been doing for six or seven weeks now on compassion. We have been looking at different aspects and foundations of compassion. I am hoping to expand outwards for you the richness of what compassion is and all its dimensions, so that you can appreciate how to be compassionate in this world. How do we bring forth this beautiful quality we have in a way that is nourishing for you and nourishing for others?

The first person I heard really teach this was the Dalai Lama: if you want to be happy, be compassionate, care for others. This association of personal happiness and well-being with having compassion, care, and love for others is a really profound aspect. But I think it really helps to understand more deeply the different things that come together to support healthy forms of compassion.

It's too easy for compassion to feel like an obligation. It's too easy for compassion to be a reaction to our own distress and pain. Sometimes what looks like compassion is really us trying to help others not suffer because our motivation is mostly so we don't suffer. We are too uncomfortable, so we try to make ourselves more comfortable. Or it could come with an excessive feeling of responsibility, or trying to make it an exchange—wanting to be compassionate to others so that we can get something back from them, like their approval.

But clean compassion needs nothing in return. It does not come out of our distress, conceit, fears, or a sense of obligation. Rather, it comes out of some wellspring within that is sweet, satisfying, and has a rightness to it. Sometimes the suffering of the world that we contact is so great that you can't really feel like the compassion is sweet or has joy or happiness in it. But we still don't feel distressed or obligated. It doesn't trigger our conceits and self-concepts of who we are and who we're trying to prove to be. There's a feeling of rightness. Yes, this is painful, this is difficult, this is terrible, and I am here in a clear and clean way to do the best I can. That clarity, cleanness, and openness is what contributes in the long term. Stepping out of our own little inner dramas and into the wider world of caring and being open and available is one of the really fantastic things that a person can do. Hopefully, these talks have been supportive for this.

I am looking at compassion through five different aspects, or five different supports for compassion, spending a week on each of these: awareness, attunement, appreciation, aspiration, and this week it's action. Many people think of action almost first and foremost with compassion: we have to do something, we have to step up and save others or somehow take care of them. Certainly, sometimes what's needed must be done immediately. But to have cultivated and developed a capacity to show up, to be mindful, to be present in a full, embodied, and wise way supports the possibility that when immediate action is needed, it comes along almost as second nature. A capacity for wise awareness, wise attunement to the situation, a deep appreciation and respect for the people involved, and an appropriate aspiration for what we want to do—all of that supports the action.

Action is one of the central features of compassion. It isn't simply wanting people not to suffer, having empathy for them, and wishing that they don't suffer. That is significant, but there is one more step, and that is action: doing something.

For some people, it's only by doing something in the world, by acting, that we begin dissolving some of the crusts, some of the hardness. Sometimes it's our laziness, our indecisiveness, our hurt, our stubbornness, the way we're closed, the way we're afraid—all kinds of things where we get stuck and may be frozen in despair. But to step forward and act—there is something about the movement of activity that begins loosening us up, almost getting ourselves out of ourselves.

To do an action that's beneficial for someone else besides ourselves requires the focus of attention to be on the other person enough to loosen our self-preoccupation. Sometimes self-preoccupation for some of us is almost like an addiction. We're so self-centered and concerned, perhaps because our life has been very confusing, disorganized, disorienting, and painful. Of course, in those situations, it is almost necessary to have a lot of attention on oneself in order to find one's way, to survive, and to somehow continue. I don't want to belittle how some people really need, as an essential first step in their lives, to be focused on themselves. But it's easy to get stuck there. It's easy for that to be built up in such a way that there's a wall between self and other, a closedness, a collapsing inwards.

So how do we loosen that up? Action makes a big difference. To act for the sake of someone else to such a degree that there's some kind of self-forgetting, some dropping of self-concern, some dropping of conceit. I keep saying "some kind" because we don't want to lose ourselves in the compassionate action. We don't want to lose touch with what's happening inside ourselves. We want to be responsible, mindful, and monitor ourselves and what's happening.

That's why these concepts of developing awareness and attunement are such an important foundation for mindfulness. To really have a strong foundation in awareness practices means you're tracking and knowing what's happening within: when we stress, when we're getting caught up, getting afraid, or getting overly ambitious. We can track ourselves. But there is a way of tracking ourselves and being present that's not exactly focusing on ourselves; it's being present and aware of the whole environment, including the self.

It's kind of like if you turn on a small light in the middle of a dark room. The light radiates outwards. It first lights up the part of the room that's closest to the lamp, and then outward and outward until it gets to the walls of the room. To the human eye, it's instantaneous. The same thing happens with awareness: it spreads outwards from ourselves. First, it touches us and knows what's happening here, without being confused by self-preoccupation, defining ourselves by what's going on, or limiting ourselves by our identity of who we are in the moment. We aren't trying to prove ourselves, protect ourselves, or defend ourselves. We want to be aware of ourselves, but in that awareness, the "self" part begins to fall away. We're aware of the emotions, feelings, and sensations here, and we're very aware of the people we're helping. We're extending ourselves, opening ourselves, and letting the self almost disappear in the process. In this way, the action of compassion is focused on supporting and helping others.

But it is also supportive of ourselves. It supports our own inner freedom, allowing us to offer our compassion with a sense of freedom, without resistance, without attachments, and to find our own freedom. This is where compassion can be a source of joy, a source of sweetness, goodness, rightness, and a deeper connection to what I call the sacred aspect of life.

Ideally, by being deeply attuned and appreciative of other people and ourselves, we're not just putting Band-Aids on people's cuts. We are putting Band-Aids on people's cuts as a way of communicating a deep care for their hearts, for their inner life, and for their fullness as human beings. It's a way of offering our respect, our fuller love, our appreciation, delight, and joy in the other person as a human being in their humanity, no matter who they are. Yes, putting a Band-Aid on someone's cut is valuable, but in the deeper forms of compassion that bring joy, it's a vehicle for a deep connection to our own sacredness, the sacredness of others, and the meeting of those two in the act of compassion.

This week, the idea is to talk about action, the fifth of these parts of compassion. Over these next 24 hours until we meet again, you might study the ways in which you do nice things for other people. Whether you open a door, whether you let someone else have the short line in the supermarket and let them go first, whether it's smiling at a supermarket checkout clerk and being kind to them, helping someone with a little task they need, or offering to do a favor or an errand for someone else. There are so many different ways we might actually do something for other people—for strangers, for people we know well, for colleagues.

As you do these small or big things for others, monitor yourself. See what's happening here inside. In that doing for others, is there contraction? Is there fear? Is there self-preoccupation or conceit? Is there a desire to be seen in a good way? Or is there a way to drop all that and have the care be a beautiful act of generosity, a beautiful act of opening and appropriately letting go of self-concern, so that there's a feeling of freedom and openness in your care for others? Maybe there is also a sense that you are doing more than simply offering someone the shorter line in the supermarket or giving people the right of way on the freeway. There is some deeper sense of these other people in the depths of their humanity, and the care that we want to offer.

Thank you. I'll be here again tomorrow.