Guided Meditation: Being the Guest House; Mindfulness of Mind (2 of 5) Simplicity of Recognition

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Being a Guest House; Mindfulness of Mind (2 of 5) Simplicity of Recognition. 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 November 09, 2021. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Being the Guest House

Hello everyone, welcome.

I read recently that the Buddha likened the Eightfold Path^[1] to a guest house. A guest house that all people were invited to come and rest in. But the nature of the guest house as the Eightfold Path is that somehow it brought out the best in people. It brought out the best in the person that was wholesome.

So here we sit, and when we meditate, we are a guest house where we invite everything. Not so much to invite everything, but we are a guest house that welcomes everything that comes. We don't go looking for things, but if it comes, we welcome it here. There's something about that welcome—that ability to be mindful in an open, generous way, without being for or against anything. Inviting all people, all states of mind, all experiences. That transforms us into the best of ourselves.

The beginning of that is this ability to receive equanimously and openly. A certain kind of impartiality for all our experience. This ability to know, to be aware, and to be receptive without being for or against, without judging, without closing the door, is transformative. It brings out the best in us eventually, not immediately.

So, taking a comfortable, alert posture. Lowering your gaze, relaxing your gaze. And if it's comfortable, gently closing your eyelids.

Then lower yourself into your body. Feel the three-dimensional body that you are. The fullness, the global body sitting here. Your legs, your torso, your arms, your head. Make room for it to relax, to settle in.

The more tension in the body, the less we are an open, welcoming guest house. The more we operate from our preferences, our fears, our desires, and our aversions. The more relaxed we are, the more we become a guest house for all things.

To help that process in a leisurely way, like you have all the time in the world, breathe as deeply as is comfortable for you. Breathe deep. Breathe in deeply. At the top of the in-breath, hold the breath for a moment—just long enough that you feel the gentle urge to exhale. And give in to that urge to exhale.

Breathe in deeply, exhale fully. At the end of the exhale, pause for a fraction of a moment until you feel the body's urge to inhale. And when you do, allow for that to happen.

Breathing in, breathing out. And as you exhale, relax the body more. Relaxation together with alertness, with clarity of attention, is profound.

Letting your breathing return to normal. On the exhale, relax the muscles of the face: the forehead, around the eyes, the temples, the nose and the cheeks, the jaws and the lips. As you exhale, relax the shoulders, the area around the shoulder blades. And also soften the belly.

Instead of inviting the breathing body to awareness, welcome it when it comes. When the inhale comes, have a simple welcoming awareness. A guest house that receives the experience. As if it comes in from the cold or from being away, welcome it into the guest house of awareness. Without any prejudice or judgments about what's there.

And the exhale, when it occurs, welcome it. Allow it to exhale. If anything takes you away from breathing, even if it's thinking, don't invite it, but when it occurs, have a welcoming attitude towards it. Not to indulge in it, but so it feels safe and there's space and awareness. Awareness is the guest house that receives everything equally, allowing each thing to be itself.

Perhaps you'll see, as you do that, it's a simple welcoming awareness that allows the best in you to begin to peek through. In the guest house, everything is welcomed and left alone to find its own way to where it can rest.

Near the end of the sitting, can you be the keeper of the guest house? Everything is welcomed. Not so that you engage in it or do anything with it, but so you don't judge it or need it to be different. Clearly recognize what's here in the guest house. Allow it to rest. A rest house for travelers. Welcome them and allow them to take their rest.

As we come to the end of the sitting, is there anything in the metaphor of the guest house? Being a guest house that is open to all things that come, welcoming, but also doesn't interfere with people's business, allows all beings to come and rest and be themselves without judgments, without wanting something from them.

Can you become a guest house for the people you encounter today? Or the experiences you have, or those you communicate with? They don't have to know that you're a guest house, but in your heart, you welcome them as they are so they can maybe have a little experience of being respected as they are, allowed to be as they are. They don't have to be worried about your judgments, your needs, your desires, your aversions. First and foremost, you're there to welcome them in the guest house of your presence, your awareness.

May it be on this day that your ability to hold all beings in your heart—with your heart as a guest house—supports others to feel happier. You support others to feel safe, you support others to be peaceful, and you support others to be free.

May we contribute to the happiness, safety, peace, and freedom of all beings everywhere. May all beings be happy, safe, peaceful, and free.

[Music]

Mindfulness of Mind (2 of 5) Simplicity of Recognition

We continue today in the talks about mindfulness of mind, which could also be called mindfulness of attitude. Or in its purity, the mindfulness of recognition. And that's the theme for this Tuesday: recognition.

Recognition is a powerful factor if it can be simple. If we can simplify our recognition of all the baggage, all the associations that come along with it.

For example, maybe look around wherever you are sitting. Can you find something to look at where you can recognize what it is, but that it's very neutral? It doesn't evoke any ideas of for or against. I want that, I don't want that. It's just there in a very, very simple way.

My eyes now are landing on the far wall; there's an electrical cord to a clock. I see the electrical cord, and it's just there. I don't have any reactivity to it, or preference around it, or for or against it. It's just there.

Then, if I turn my eyes up now and look at something that I find that I like, there's a Buddha statue near the electrical wire. And now I find that there's a kind of liking, wondering, and engagement with it. That's not just recognizing it. Now there's appreciating, remembering its history, where it came from, who gave it to us—all kinds of things.

Then I look down, and there's some tape on the floor here at IMC^[2], and I have a little bit of an issue about the tape on the floor because it's a long piece of tape to mark a spot, but it's crooked. It wasn't laid down straight. So I thought, "Oh, should I change it? Can I use the same tape? Do I have to throw it away?" Suddenly my involvement is much more complicated.

Then I look at the electrical wire again, and it's just very simple. Just a wire.

If you could look around in your space, you could see the different ways that you can recognize something there. How simple can it be just recognizing it? And how much is coming with preferences, coming with judgments, coming with for and against, coming with commentary?

In meditation and at other times, the movement is towards becoming cleaner and cleaner, simpler and simpler with recognition. So that we can see things as they are, not as we want them, or not through the lens of what we don't want. There is definitely a time and a place for preferences, for desires, for things we don't want. This is not doing away with that forever. But there's also a time and place to learn the art of a very simple recognition.

It is so simple that this recognition is not distracted by our desires, our thoughts, and our commentary. We recognize it so simply, just there. There's an in-breath. It's just an in-breath.

It's so simple that the in-breath isn't tied to or connected to notions of time. Ideas like, "If I need to get concentrated, I need to stay here so that in the future I can be present for the next exhale," or, "I lost my attention to the breath a moment ago, a few breaths ago; I can't have that happen again, I have to be able to stay with the breath." All those ideas are complicating the simple act of recognition. For this moment, I'm able to recognize this inhale as if there's no before and no after. It's that simple.

If your mind wanders off in between, and at some point you come back to the next inhale, the past is gone. Just this inhale. Just that recognition.

At some point, as the simplicity of recognition is there—just this breath, this step, this chewing my food, this sitting in a chair, this walking down a hallway in the simplest possible way—what we recognize is recognition itself.

We recognize that recognition. As we're recognizing, we see that recognition is simple. We see that recognition is free of associations, commentary, preferences, and desires.

And then, wow! There's this thing called recognition. There's this experience, this movement of recognition, of knowing, of being aware. It becomes its own kind of object of awareness, and it starts being kind of special. There is this clarity, there's this openness.

It's almost like awareness now becomes a guest house that all travelers are welcome to come into. The guest house keeper is very gracious and allows everything to have its room so it can rest. It can be left alone, it can be accepted as it is. Nothing's needed, no judgments, nothing.

This idea of recognizing recognition—being aware of awareness, knowing that we're knowing—can seem like a hard thing to do, challenging, and even nonsensical to some people. But one of the ways we come to that is that we begin recognizing as a guest house keeper. We start recognizing that we are seldom simply aware.

There are all kinds of things we bring along with the recognition. We recognize something, and we recognize that we don't like it, or we do like it. We want it to be a little bit different. "It should be sitting over there, not there. Can I have that?"

We go into a room of people, and we start recognizing what's there. But it's not just simple recognition. It's: "Who is nice to sit next to?", "Who should I not sit right next to?", "Is it safe here?", "Where are the good snacks? That's what I want." There are all these preferences and agendas going on. Our awareness, our recognition, is being used by our agenda. It's being driven by it.

Of course, it is normal and healthy to do that in many circumstances. It has to be that way. But in meditation practice and mindfulness, one of the potentials it has is to start recognizing how we complicate or use awareness in the service of our agendas and our preferences.

Sometimes we make wise choices about what we pay attention to, like paying attention to the road when we're driving. But sometimes our attention is hijacked by things that, if you thought about it, you would say, "I don't want to focus on that again."

I've had the same complaint about my neighbor down the street probably a thousand times. I feel lousy after I have it. It doesn't feel good to have it, and it kind of hijacks my attention. Whenever I drive down the street and see that neighbor or see that house, I get contracted in my attention. I feel my awareness looking, and I pull away from the house. There are all kinds of ways we see awareness being used, hijacked, and influenced.

When we do that in mindfulness meditation—sitting in meditation—welcome it all. Don't add judgment on top of judgments. There's an art to welcoming it, allowing it to be there, which is paradoxically a movement towards simplicity of recognition. When we're not for or against things, then it can just be itself, and there's room for us to recognize it as it actually is.

As I've said, a very special time comes when we start recognizing recognition itself, in and of itself. We see that recognition is this jewel, this amazing capacity.

This ability to recognize, or to be aware, or to know—depending on how that attentional faculty is showing itself at any given time—can become its own strong presence. It feels like its own territory. It feels like a guest house. It feels like it has room for things, and it's okay for things to arise.

If the idea of welcoming is too much, just allow them to be there. Why do this? It might seem like then you're just victims of circumstances, things just come and happen. We do this because when we can keep our attention very simple—just recognizing the thing that's happening, including recognizing how we complicate recognition with desires and aversions—we continue doing the simple recognition. By being the guest house, allowing it to be there, the best in us begins to come forth.

That which needs to rest has a chance to relax. It's not being fed, it's not being egged on or encouraged. And as the simplicity of recognition happens, it's almost like there's space for us to hear ourselves.

There's space to know ourselves in a deeper way. There's space to start recognizing that there is goodness here, there is wholesomeness here. There begin to be cracks in our hearts, so that we can see where there's kindness, love, care, generosity, and goodness that resides.

The simplicity of recognition, the simplicity of awareness, is a key to recognizing our own inner beauty. Because we just welcome all the inner ugliness: "It's okay, come. I'm a guest house for all of you." In the guest house, in the space it makes, in the allowing, there is this welcome, this generosity, this goodness that allows something to settle and relax.

I suspect you'll be surprised by how much goodness exists within you through this simple act of recognition.

All along in mindfulness practice, we're practicing recognition of the breath, of the body, of emotions, and of thoughts. Everything I've been teaching before still applies. But as we continue this practice, at some point, it's appropriate to start recognizing recognition itself. Recognizing that the way we are aware of the breath, body, emotions, and thoughts is not neutral. There's an agenda. There are complications we bring to it.

So this turning around and being mindful of the mind—mindfulness of awareness, of attitude—begins to free awareness from all this extra baggage, all this extra stuff that we add to it. And goodness has a chance to grow.

Thank you. May you practice being a guest house for all things that come along this day. Remind yourself to look for appropriate places to try being receptive and welcoming, instead of falling into the usual habits of mind of how to be with things.

Thank you very much.