Guided Meditation: Inner Care; Dharmette: Compassionate Action (2 of 5) For the sake of Oneself

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Inner Care; Compassionate Action (2 of 5) For the sake of Oneself.. 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 August 01, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Inner Care

Warm greetings from IMC in Redwood City. I am aware that some of you logging on to this YouTube stream through the calendar at IMC may have found that some of these links seem to not be working. So you are here, you found a way to do it, and we will try to repair some of these links that we have.

Classically, in a certain kind of representation of Buddhism, it is said that there are two wings to Buddhism: compassion^[1] and wisdom^[2]. Compassion is usually considered to be an attitude and motivation that we have in relationship to other people who are suffering. Wisdom has many meanings, but one of them is that we become wise about how to monitor ourselves: how to become free of our own greed, hate, and delusion; how to get free of our attachments that interfere with compassion and that interfere with our freedom. These two work together; they are said to be the two wings of a bird.

Meditation is very much done through this wisdom side. Part of wisdom is to practice with a focus on oneself so that one can have a healthy and beneficial focus on the world and on other people. It is not meant to be selfish or self-centered to have an inner focus on oneself; it is a means toward caring for others or caring for the world around us. One way that this works is that by this inner focus of meditation, we learn to find, recognize, and support some of the healthy, precious, or peaceful ways that are waiting for us inside. We learn to put to rest some of the forces of distraction, forces of preoccupation, forces of anxiety, aversion, greed, desires, and forces of attachment to self-concerns. Paradoxically, there is a kind of inner focus on oneself that is meant to free us from an unhealthy focus on ourselves, freeing us from the ways in which we create strong divisions between "me, myself, and mine" and the world around us and others as well.

I say this in preparation for this meditation: there is a very valuable way of taking the time to pause from all the usual activities of the mind that take us away from ourselves, that take us away from caring for ourselves in a deep way. To care compassionately for ourselves is to find the place where we can sit quietly with peace, with a sense of ease, with a sense of warmth, and maybe appreciation of ourselves—not in conflict with ourselves, but in a non-conflictive state, resting in our own hearts, resting in our own inner life, not spinning out. This is not necessarily easy, but it is a journey well worth taking.

It is important to know that this inner journey is part of the path. With time, on this inner journey to really rest in ourselves and be at ease with ourselves in a deep way, we find ourselves, in a certain way, turned inside out. We become ready to be present for the world, ready to be compassionate and caring for the world, ready for a kind of selfless service for the world that is healthy because the selflessness comes with a real establishment of a healthy inner life.

So, assume your meditation posture and gently close your eyes.

[Bell rings]

Just sit here quietly without doing anything else, and notice how you are right now. Have the idea that you are going to allow yourself to be as you are, being your own good friend who is there for you. Be there for yourself, to sit with you, to be present, to be a deep listener. Do not try to fix or give advice, but be a friend who sits with you, allows you to be yourself, and accompanies you as you are.

Now, in the midst of listening to yourself, being with yourself, from the navel^[3], from whatever depths within that you can, let a deeper inhale arise—comfortable, fuller, maybe a satisfying deep in-breath. And a relaxing exhale.

Breathing in and breathing out, relaxing. On the exhale, relaxing into yourself, deep inside. Then letting the breathing return to normal. Maybe for the next three or four exhales, continue to relax and settle into yourself.

Breathing in and breathing out. Then again, check in with yourself, maybe in the depths of your heart, the depths of your being, the depths of your breathing body. Offer a kind of compassionate care. Bring a compassionate, caring listening, feeling, and sensing to what is inside. Do this in such a way that whatever you find inside feels reassured. It feels like it matters, it feels recognized and known. Do it in such a way that it can ease up or relax, bringing space around how we are.

With each breath, offer a reassurance to your inner life that it is okay to settle, relax, and center yourself here and now within your body. Feel and sense your way to a place of well-being—even a modest sense of being at ease, being in harmony, being free from conflict. Just be here, present for yourself as you breathe in and breathe out. There is no need for the mind to wander off into the past, future, or other places. It is profound to be able to be present here for yourself, breathing.

Take the time to feel how you are deep inside. Go as deep as is easy to feel and know: how are you? Is there a way to recognize and know how you are so that your inside feels cared for? So that how you are feels like there is a friendly presence, a friendly attention, a loving attention? In this way, how you are is allowed to be, and so it relaxes, settles, and moves into a place of deeper at-homeness, here and now, as it is.

[Silence]

As we come to the end of this sitting, check in with yourself again. How are you on the inside? How would you characterize the quality of your inner life, your inner state^[4]? Is there a way of relating to your inner way of being with compassion and care, with friendliness? No matter how you are deep inside, feel as if you are there to support yourself, to aid whatever is there, to let something settle and relax deep inside.

As you feel a greater care, compassion, and well-being within, may that be a foundation for a dedication to support the well-being and happiness of others. May this practice that we do serve for the happiness of others. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be healthy, and may all beings everywhere be free.

[Bell rings]

Thank you.

Dharmette: Compassionate Action (2 of 5) For the sake of Oneself

Hello on this Tuesday, the second day of our series on compassionate action. Before I start, I want to mention that I also noticed that the link to this YouTube channel in some places on the IMC website is inaccurate. I will see what we can do to fix it today. However, if you go to the homepage for IMC's YouTube channel, there is a square there for what is being broadcast live, so that is one way to get to it. By tomorrow, hopefully, the links will be repaired.

Returning to the issue of compassionate action, yesterday's talk was focusing on compassionate action for the sake of others. That is commonly how compassion is understood: that we are caring for others. But equally important is that our compassion for others should also include care for ourselves. We should take action to help and support others for our own sake as well. As much as Buddhism might talk about not-self^[5] and not living from selfishness or self-centeredness, there is an emphasis on really being responsible, caring for, and carefully monitoring this inner life of our own. To care for that is also important. To have compassion for this inner life is important, to bring care and friendliness to it.

In terms of compassionate action in the world—having compassion for others and acting on that compassion—the focus might be on doing things for others, but as we do it, we should also do it for our own sake. That means two things.

First, it means: do not abandon yourself as you do it. Do not give yourself away. Do not easily sacrifice your own well-being and welfare for the sake of supporting and helping other people. It is not necessary. There are times when we become uncomfortable, and sometimes we do sacrifice our comfort level for the well-being of others, or we sacrifice certain things for others. But do not abandon yourself. Do not give up on staying connected to the practice for yourself. Continue monitoring yourself, knowing when you get attached, when you get stressed, when you get contracted, when you get afraid, or when you get overly anxious in what you are doing, overriding the compassion with despair, dismay, a sense of obligation, or a fear of consequences if you do not do the action.

The principle is to have compassionate action in the world in a way that is also for your own sake, so that you benefit from it. It becomes a way of caring for yourself simultaneously as it is caring for others. Caring for others and caring for oneself do not need to be two separate things. Many times the idea of compassion is considered to be almost synonymous with being altruistic, and that is often seen as synonymous with abandoning oneself. Sometimes Buddhist teachers will even say, as I said yesterday, that one of the purposes of being compassionate is for your own happiness and well-being, by giving up your selfishness or self-centeredness. However, that does not mean that you give up on yourself in some deeper way.

It means that you do not get attached to yourself. You do not cling to yourself. You do not try to lock on to some definition of who we are or who we aren't. Nor does it mean we do the compassionate action only for ourselves in order to make ourselves feel better while not really caring so much about other people. Rather, we care about others, and we try to act in ways that support them, but we do it in a way that is not compromising ourselves. We are not adding stress. We are not abandoning ourselves. We are not allowing ourselves to lose touch with our own inner well-being, our own inner beauty, our inner practice, or our place of peace and calm.

One of the reasons not to lose touch with that—to stay connected and to do it for your own sake—is so that the compassionate actions we do in the world are not stressful for us. We do not want to succumb to compassion fatigue or overwhelm. We do not want to wound ourselves or hurt ourselves by giving ourselves over to others in a way where we are open and receptive to feel the suffering of the world, but we do not know how to experience that suffering in a way that cares for ourselves as well. The suffering of the world can be very difficult for a heart; it can break our hearts, shatter us, and wound us in certain ways. But if we know how to maintain a place of openness and non-clinging, a receptivity where things are received but they pass right through—where we do not hold on to anything or resist anything—then the compassionate care and contact with the suffering of others does not have to be challenging for us. In fact, then we can be compassionate for a long time because we do not get fatigued or overwhelmed by it.

More important than that, the quality of compassion, the quality of our relationship to other people, is much higher if people feel that we are at ease, peaceful, and comfortable in our own being. If we are uncomfortable, anxious, dismayed, angry, or upset in some way, and that is the filter through which compassionate action operates in the world, the people we are caring for will feel that. Maybe it is not exactly conscious on their part, but they can feel that something is off. It is kind of like osmosis, or how "the medium is the message." If compassion is offered in the medium of anxiety, if compassion is offered in the medium of upset, or if it is offered through the medium of a kind of selfish self-concern, then the medium in which it is done actually skews and shapes the kind of action we take and the impact that action has on others.

It is very different if people feel us care with spaciousness and with kindness that is open, without anxiety, upset, or dismay. They feel: "Now I am with a person who has the ability to be equanimous and present in a full way. I don't feel like I have to take care of them, or that I have to be fed by anxiety, upset, self-preoccupation, or whatever it might be." So the quality of the compassion, I think, is much more significant and more valuable when we act compassionately for our own sake as well. We have a sense that for our own sake, there is something really here to care for; there is something valuable here within ourselves—some valuable center, a valuable way of being, a valuable sense of inner beauty, inner peace, inner wisdom, or inner goodness.

How do we discover that? There are many ways, but one of the ways is to meditate and have this inner focus. We really start tracking, monitoring, working with, and discovering deeply what is inside. We settle the inner conflict, the inner resentments, hurts, and fears to really drop down and discover something marvelous within, so that from this wonderful place of ease and peace, we can come forward into the world. So meditation is one way. The other way is through compassionate action for the sake of others. If we do that in a healthy way, it reinforces this healthy side of ourselves; it mirrors it and helps us tap into it, if we are monitoring ourselves and know that we are coming from this place.

Ultimately, there is this wonderful cycle of mutuality: how in caring for others, we care for ourselves, and in caring for ourselves, we end up caring for others as well. Self and other, in this way, are not separate. It is not like it should be one or the other; they are mutually supportive. Eventually, it reaches a point where with compassionate care, we feel in this marvelous way that there is no difference between self and other for the purposes of our care. The barrier, the division that many people live in, begins to soften. This does not mean that we merge with other people, but that there is a vast sense of openness within which caring for others and caring for oneself has no difference. It is simply caring for whatever our perception or attention lands on.

So, caring for oneself, or compassionate action for one's own sake, is the next characteristic of compassionate action. Yesterday we covered compassionate action for the sake of others, which is always there for compassionate action. And now, including that as we care for others, we also want to care for ourselves. We do not abandon ourselves or give ourselves away. This ensures that there is more here in ourselves to be able to offer others. If we abandon ourselves, there is actually less that we can give.

Thank you. If you are interested in experimenting with this, you might look at situations where you are doing something nice for others and see how you can do it in a way that feels satisfying for yourself—a way that feels like it is a good thing to do and a good way to be in the world. Maybe you do that in small ways. Small ways might be the best place to experiment, and then you can learn from there and carry it through to more difficult places.

Thank you very much.