Guided Meditation: Embodiment; Four Principles for a Buddhist Life

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation:Embodiment:Four Principles For a Buddhist Life. 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 October 17, 2021. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Embodiment

Welcome, everyone. It is wonderful to have you here. Before we begin, I wanted to make a few announcements for both all of you here in person and for the people who are on YouTube.

It feels like the Sunday morning community has expanded dramatically because of the pandemic and YouTube. How to integrate these two formats is not so obvious to me. During the pandemic, it became clear that it would be useful to do a lot of guided meditations online to maintain connection and offer support. Before the pandemic, however, we used to come on Sunday mornings and simply sit in silence; there was no guided meditation. Now that people are coming back in person, what do we do? We still have this online community participating who may be expecting a guided meditation. I don't have a definitive answer, but it will be what it is as it unfolds.

We also still have a mask mandate here in San Mateo County when people gather. Even after the mandate is gone for a while, we may want to be careful. So, the people on YouTube will be seeing me with a mask on. To our surprise, I think the quality of the sound is okay going through the mask. We tested it last week, and the consensus of the few people here was that I actually sounded better! [Laughter] People online are also saying it sounds good, so maybe the mask will never go off.

To those of you here, thank you for coming. I don't know if it took a little bit of bravery to come, but it's wonderful to have you. With limited numbers returning, I see you all as representing the wider community. You may think you are just coming as yourself, but in my eyes, you represent a community that has actually grown. A large number of people have been watching online and are now part of our expanded community. I appreciate those of you who are online, and hopefully, the transition to doing this live is harmonious enough for you. Perhaps you'll consider that the twenty-five people here in the room are representing you as well—a reminder that there are embodied people out there in this world, after all.

Let's meditate.

If you would, give some love and care to your meditation posture. Loving care is not only about being comfortable; there is something about love or care where you want to sit in such a way that there's a potential for a greater aliveness—a greater attentiveness that is embodied.

For some people, that means sitting up a teeny bit straighter than you normally would so that the chest can be a little bit more open. If you take a few deep breaths, there's more room in the chest for the lungs to expand. Take a few long, slow, deep breaths, and as you exhale, settle in and relax.

Part of the function of attention to posture and deeper breathing is to connect to the embodied aspect of mindfulness. Sometimes I wish we had translated the word sati^[1] not as "mindfulness"—which prioritizes the mind—but as "body-fullness." To whatever degree that's available to you, spend a few moments here becoming embodied and connected to your physical form.

Gently let your breathing return to normal. On the exhales, continue this process of embodiment by relaxing into your body and letting your body relax into itself. You can soften and relax the face, the forehead, and the area around the eyes and jaw. Exhale and relax the shoulders, letting them settle back into the body rather than lifting them.

When you relax and soften your belly, you might feel the weight of your body settling into the pull of gravity. Feel your belly and body settling more deeply into the bottom of your torso.

One way people become disembodied is through excessive thinking. A lot of thinking often has an embodied quality to it; there can be physical tension, pressure, or agitation associated with those thoughts. It might manifest on the forehead, in the brain, in the jaws, the shoulders, or even as slight tension in the hands. If you're able to recognize the physical effect of thinking a lot, perhaps on your exhale, you can relax that tension and pressure, bringing yourself back into your body more fully.

Keep a tether of attention—a connection to the physicality of the body breathing. Maintain a gentle connection to how the body experiences the breath. As long as you can stay connected to the physicality of breathing and the movements of the breath, you don't have to worry so much about what thinking is occurring, especially if the thinking remains in the background and isn't interfering. If thinking does interfere, try relaxing the "thinking muscle."

[Silence for meditation]

As we come to the end of this sitting, I want to mention that I sometimes find meditation feels like being turned inside out. Sometimes this happens to a minor degree, and sometimes to a great degree. As we become more settled in our bodies and our experience—grounded in an inner stability or calm—there can arise a greater sensitivity. When we then turn our attention outwards towards the world, we perceive that world with that deeper sensitivity, and hopefully with a deeper stability and openness.

As we get turned inside out, let us apply our sensitivity, calm, and stability to bring to mind the people in our lives, in our neighborhoods, in our communities, and across the world. Without any obligation to be caring or compassionate, is there some kind of care or goodwill—however small—that flows naturally from that inner sensitivity when we perceive others from a place of calm?

If there is some goodwill and care that seems to flow from your embodiment or settledness, perhaps these following words can help you feel more connected to it:

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

May acting on this care for others contribute to your own freedom and happiness. May you care for the world and for others in a way that cultivates well-being, welfare, and freedom for yourself. May all of us contribute to each other's happiness and freedom.

Four Principles for a Buddhist Life

Hello everyone, and welcome. This is the first hybrid dharma talk here at IMC. Thank you to the roughly twenty-five of you who are here today, and to the people online for being here. I appreciate it very much.

We still have a county mask mandate, and out of caution, I will be giving this talk with a mask on. I actually find it kind of cozy to meditate with the mask on; I keep my mouth slightly open, and the humidity feels somewhat comforting to me. Everyone has a unique response to this mask situation.

We are beginning to shift formats here, and hopefully, this shift will continue as we slowly open up more. We'll start offering some of the programs we had before alongside new ones. For those of you online, this means the format will shift a little bit. We'll see how much guided meditation I do moving forward. During the Zoom era, it felt too long to speak for the full Sunday morning duration, so I shortened the talks to a half hour. The old format usually ran until 10:45 AM. For those on YouTube, we will return to that 10:45 AM ending, varying between a longer talk or a shorter talk followed by a Q&A period depending on the situation.

The Teachings of the Buddhas

For today, I want to start by reciting a four-line verse that captures the Buddha's teachings in a nutshell. It sets the stage for our discussion today. The last line is significant because it states, "This is the teaching of the buddhas," reflecting the Buddhist cosmology that buddhas appear periodically down through the eons, all offering this same core instruction:

Don't do any harm. Do things which are wholesome. Purify the mind. This is the teaching of the buddhas.^[2]

You should memorize that: Don't do any harm. Do what's wholesome. Purify the mind. If you want, you can forget about memorizing the last line!

Reflecting on the Pandemic

I want to name this whole period from March of 2020 until now that we've been closed. We shouldn't underestimate how big of an impact this pandemic time has been and continues to be for all of us. Some of us have been in more fortunate circumstances during this time, and some have not. But even for those in fortunate circumstances, it has likely had a much larger impact on the psyche and the heart than most of us realize. If you have been impacted by it in various ways, you should probably assume the impact is larger than you currently recognize.

It is remarkable to me that in the United States alone, one in five hundred Americans has died from COVID. That is over 700,000 people. Worldwide, almost five million people have died. And that only accounts for the people who died; there is an immense ripple effect. If you didn't lose someone you loved and cared for, you probably know someone who did. It's not many steps away.

Then there are the other effects of the pandemic that have been difficult. I had family members in hospitals for non-COVID issues during this time, and it was incredibly hard because you couldn't visit them. There was fear around what it meant to be in a hospital before the vaccine came out. People put off medical care; I had to have a tooth extracted and it was hard to find someone to do it because everyone was catching up on delayed procedures.

Economically, this has been the biggest recession in the United States since the 1930s. People have lost their jobs, their homes, and their livelihoods. Compounded by all this tension are the social challenges of the last few years: the tremendous pain surrounding racism, the evident disparities in this country, and political tension that has risen dramatically. Regardless of where we sit on the political divide, we feel the strain of it. On top of that, we have faced devastating fires here in California, floods and hurricanes elsewhere, and supply chain disruptions causing anxiety over securing basic goods.

Medical Ethics

One of the places these challenges were felt most acutely was in the medical field. A year ago, there was a real emphasis on medical workers being superheroes, and they truly deserved that title for showing up to save lives before vaccines were available. Now, in some communities, they are dealing with hostility from people who don't believe in vaccinations or the medical establishment—people who feel excluded, criticized, or angry.

A friend of mine working at a local hospital told me they had to walk through protests just to go to work, facing hostility from people who hate them simply for trying to save lives. I've read that some medical workers take off their uniforms and badges when they go grocery shopping so they won't be targeted. That makes the job of offering medical care so much more difficult.

I sit on an ethics committee for a local hospital, and what inspires me deeply is how often medical professionals evoke medical ethics. They are committed to caring for anyone who comes through the emergency room doors, offering the best and most equal care they can. One person told me explicitly that even if a patient is a murderer, their job is to offer the best care possible. They do not turn anyone away. They treat everyone equally, vaccinated or unvaccinated. This commitment to be available and care for everyone equally in challenging circumstances is profoundly inspiring to me.

In the field of medical ethics, there are four core principles:

1. Autonomy: Every patient has the right to make their own decisions regarding their care (unless they lack the capacity to do so, such as in cases of severe dementia).
2. Beneficence: The dedication to do what is beneficial, supportive, and helpful for the patient.
3. Non-maleficence: Do no harm.
4. Justice: Ensuring fair and equal access to medicines and procedures for everyone, without distinction based on economic status, race, or any other factor.

Sometimes these principles conflict, and ethics committees have to navigate how to balance them, particularly regarding justice and limited resources—like setting up triage situations during COVID surges to ensure care was distributed as fairly as possible.

Autonomy and Awareness Set Free

These medical principles map interestingly onto the Buddhist verse I shared. "Do no harm" is non-maleficence. "Do what's wholesome" corresponds to beneficence. But the verse doesn't explicitly mention autonomy and justice.

One challenge around autonomy, especially outside a hospital setting, is that granting everyone complete autonomy can sometimes support a certain kind of selfishness—an attitude of "I want what I want." However, a healthy sense of autonomy is also very appropriate. How do we distinguish between the two?

I don't have a perfect abstract answer, but this is one of the advantages of embodied mindfulness. Through careful and settled attention, we can start feeling very precisely what is beneficial and what is harmful. We begin to sense what promotes stress and tension, and what undermines our well-being. It turns out that selfishness undermines our well-being. With greater mindfulness, we cultivate a better reference point for feeling the difference between these two modes of being.

Eventually, in meditation, the sense of autonomy becomes more and more interesting. It's not about becoming an autonomous person—building up an ego identity that says, "Look how independent I am!"—but rather, it is awareness that becomes autonomous. It is awareness set free.

In Buddhism, we talk about the mind being liberated through non-clinging. If we understand the "mind" in this context to be awareness, we are saying awareness is becoming autonomous from our own baggage, associations, and beliefs.

To give you an example from my own practice: At some point, I recognized that my mindfulness carried baggage. It was suffused with the attitude that, "Whatever is happening to me, it's the wrong thing," or "If I'm being aware, I'm not doing it the right way." It was a subtle policy my mind had constructed, and it kept my awareness a little tense and pulled back from my actual experience.

As I got quieter in meditation, I could see I was operating through this filter. I felt the contraction around it and was able to relax it. For a short time, I played around with assuming the exact opposite: "If it's happening to me, it's okay. If I am aware, I am doing it just right." That was useful to help me stay free. Eventually, the awareness became simpler, autonomous, and independent from those judgments. Experiencing awareness set free, without the baggage of a "self" doing the mindfulness, is a wonderful part of the liberation process in Buddhism.

Justice and Turning Inside Out

The fourth medical principle is justice and fairness. How does that play out in Buddhism? I think this is one of the principles our society has the greatest need for—ensuring fair access to opportunities that many times are only available to the fortunate. How does IMC offer itself fairly to the world?

As I mentioned during the meditation, if we turn ourselves inside out, as awareness sets the mind free, it also sets the heart free. We cultivate a deeper sensitivity. It doesn't make sense to meditate, become subtle and peaceful, and then leave meditation and immediately shut down—getting caught up in our desires and busyness, erecting a barrier against caring for the world.

Shutting down is actually a way of harming ourselves. We lose something vital when we get so preoccupied that we lose touch with the open-heartedness we discover in meditation. If mindfulness becomes second nature, you can feel that getting caught up in distractions is a kind of self-limiting harm.

The social world is complex and difficult, but part of the task of mindfulness practice is learning how to bring this presence and open-heartedness into the world with others. Think of walking around with a closed fist; the most sensitive part of your hand is protected, but you can't pet a cat, comfort a friend, or hold a child's hand. You want that sensitive part to be available. The same applies to the heart. If we keep it closed, we limit ourselves.

If we turn ourselves inside out, we learn how to be stable and not contract. We learn to recognize the subtle attitudes we bring with us that actually make us feel unsafe. While the world can certainly be unsafe, sometimes the greatest danger to our safety is ourselves. Discovering how to carry our safety with us, rather than insisting the world cater to our safety, is a powerful realization.

From that place, it is easier to be open-hearted and register the presence of other people with goodwill. Not out of obligation, but because goodwill arises as a natural expression of what is already there when the heart is set free. You can't experience radical liberation while remaining closed off and insensitive to the world. The art of Buddhist practice is learning to do both.

If we are sensitive and open-hearted, it is easier to want justice for each other—to want to be fair in how we use our resources and to live not just for ourselves, but for others. This is one of the central principles the Buddha taught. He defined a wise person as someone concerned with four things: the welfare of themselves, the welfare of others, the welfare of both self and others, and the welfare of the whole world.

It can seem like a heavy burden to carry all that, but it comes from that place of autonomy and freedom. It isn't a duty; it is a natural expression. When I am not self-preoccupied, there is more integrity in my psychophysical system. It is simply more available to respond to the world around me.

Community

What does this mean for IMC as a community? We are a much larger community now than we were before the pandemic. What does it mean for us to care for this "we"—our connected community? How does our community turn itself inside out to extend sensitivity to the wider world?

How do these four principles—autonomy, non-harming, beneficence, and justice—serve as the foundation for our community? What does fairness look like for the wider societies we are a part of here in Redwood City, San Mateo County, and California? I don't have all the answers, but I believe asking these questions is a natural expression of the autonomy and open-heartedness discovered through practice.

Here we are in person, still living in pandemic times with masks on, but we have come together. For some of you, this is the most people you've been around in a year and a half. It is a big deal. We are marking this time of returning to community, both for those in the room and those online who are feeling that something embodied is growing again. How we navigate and care for this community is one of the most important questions of our time.

That is what I have to say. For our remaining time, I'd love to hear if any of you have reflections to share.

Reflections and Q&A

Bill: I want to say how helpful it is for me to be back here. This past year and a half, my discipline when it comes to meditating at home has cratered. My life is good, but my state of mind isn't as equanimous as it could have been. I seem to need this structured setting. The community makes a big difference, so it is lovely to be back here. Thank you.

Gil Fronsdal: Great. Great to see you and have you back.

Richard: My experience has actually been somewhat different. I had wandered away from the community because you had moved in one direction and I had moved away, and it's a little farther to get here. When I found out the daily sessions were online, I started my practice again, and it has helped me tremendously. I've really enjoyed being part of the larger sangha^[3]. Nonetheless, it is still wonderful to be back in person. I think I'm going to renew my intention to connect more often in person. But thank you very much for creating the larger sangha as well.

Gil Fronsdal: Thank you.

Participant 3: I just wanted to say, Gil, that this has been a pretty easy time for me. My wife and I live in a senior retirement community, and while we had isolation, we are now able to get together in the dining room. What I really noticed was how helpful my fifty years of meditation has been—and twenty-five with you in this community. It's made a very big difference and helped me to stay pretty equanimous. That being said, there are times when I've lost it from time to time... glancing at my wife for the YouTube! [Laughter] But I feel like this has been a learning and growing experience for me.

Gil Fronsdal: Thank you. I think we would expect fifty years of practice to help! Even two years would do it. I remember in my first five years thinking, "Wow, my life is falling into place." One of my early teachers said that mindfulness turns up the volume on your intuition, and I think that was true for me.

Participant 4: When you announced that you were opening the center for sessions we could sign up for, I felt extremely privileged. I know there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people on the internet who would give anything to be able to come here and experience this. When there were really difficult circumstances in my life before coming here, I felt like I was coming out of my skin; it was a terrible feeling. The message you gave today—that your insides are turned inside out, and you feel comfortable—is just a wonderful way to be in the world. I want to thank you for all of your support.

Gil Fronsdal: Fantastic. Thank you.

Participant 5: I also feel so lucky and privileged to be here. I really appreciate your asking the question you did at the end of the talk regarding how this community can turn inside out. We were at a memorial service yesterday at a very activist Christian church. The talk given was very moving, the kind that historically would have had me go right out onto the streets to march and protest. I had really mixed feelings because it's dicey stuff when you have that kind of great passion. It's harder from a Buddhist perspective to have equanimity and yet still act. So I really appreciate you ending with that very hard question.

Gil Fronsdal: Great, thank you.

Participant 6: I just want to say thank you to you and the bigger community, which helped me get through not just last year, but many years. Unfortunately, I lost my father earlier this year to COVID. Being on a different continent, I couldn't even go. I think what kept me going was your meditation and listening to the talks you had on grief. I want to say I am thankful. Even though it was remote, I never felt remote because I listened all the time. The daily meditation kept me going. Thank you so much.

Gil Fronsdal: I love hearing that. Thank you so much.

Participant 7: I also want to give voice to the people who, during this pandemic, have not had this kind of experience. It's only the privileged who can share this kind of sentiment. I remember an unforgettable interview with a gentleman from India during the pandemic. He was asked if he was worried about COVID, and he said, "Are you kidding me? I'm worried about my next meal." Only the privileged can share this sentiment, and we must consider how to hold that.

Gil Fronsdal: Yes. Thank you. That punctuates very nicely how we live in this world in community with each other. What does it mean to feel community with everyone, and how do we acknowledge the whole range of joys, gifts, challenges, and suffering that this wider community experiences? How do we connect to it, and how do we contribute to the welfare of everyone?

A wise person is concerned with the welfare of themselves, the welfare of others, the welfare of self and others, and the welfare of the whole world. May we all become wise.

Thank you very much.