Guided Meditation: Peaceful Awareness; Dharmette: Aspiration (5 of 5) Peaceful Aspiration

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Peaceful Awareness; Aspiration (5 of 5) Peaceful Aspiration. 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 07, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Peaceful Awareness

Hello everyone, and welcome to this last talk on the aspirations connected to compassion, or the meditation connected to it. More deeply than a love, appreciation, and devotion to the value of compassion, is a love, dedication, and devotion to something deeper that I like to believe is the source of compassion within us.

A simplistic way of saying it—because it can be so easily misunderstood or seen in a surface way—is that the source of genuine, healthy, and maybe even healing compassion is being ourselves fully and in some deep way. Another way of saying this, to appreciate the profundity of that statement, is that it is really letting go completely of our normal senses of self and letting something deeper within us move us. We let the Dharma^[1] work through us.

What is it that is so deep within us that we can trust and allow to unfold? In a less Dharmic way, life knows how to bring life forth. Life knows how to let the fullness of life flow forth in any kind of situation if we can let it flow in a healthy, harmonious way. Trust that there is some deep movement towards health for ourselves. Not always physical health, because we will all die at some point, but some deep heart health, deep spiritual health, and deep psychological health.

Something wants to be born. Something wants to be healed. Something wants to come to homeostasis. Something doesn't want to be stressed, in pain, or suffering. There is a movement to freedom from suffering, for sure. We can trust this deeper thing that doesn't require us even to generate compassion, or to live within a sense of obligation that we have to live a compassionate life. Rather, there is this deeper source that wants to live, and from that comes compassion in the situations where it's appropriate.

I offer that at the beginning of this meditation to show one of the values of lessening and quieting discursive thoughts. When we are attuned to ourselves in a deeper way than discursive thinking, there is something very significant in our heart-life that wants to come out in a full, harmonious, and balanced way. We might be far from that because of the challenges of our lives, the complexities of our psychology, and all kinds of things. But it is waiting for us. To drop below the discursive mind and begin attuning ourselves or sensing something deeper is one of the possibilities of meditation.

With that beginning, we will begin with meditation.

Assume a meditation posture where there is respect and care. It is a posture we take to allow ourselves to be better attuned, more aware, and create more space for something to really show itself from within. A posture that focuses too much on relaxation—where we give up a certain degree of vitality of sitting upright, or being clear, engaged, and intentful—might not allow the full unfolding and opening of this deeper dimension. We want the body to have some degree of alertness, so that the very places the body is alert and engaged become places where something can begin to flow, move, and develop.

Gently close your eyes and take a few long, slow, deep breaths. The fact that your body has been breathing for a lifetime now, mostly without your directing it to do so, means the breathing is connected to this deeper care and health of the movement of life within us.

Let your breathing return to normal. Attune yourself to the body breathing, relaxing into it. If the focus on breathing means you immediately get engaged, work at it, or get tense, imagine that you are stepping back away from your breathing. It is almost like you are observing the breathing in your back rib cage, or observing it from behind. This way, you are not interfering with the breathing, but discovering how breathing breathes itself.

Relax around the body breathing. Relax around your breathing in wider circles, so more and more of your body is softening and relaxing into the breath. Allow your thinking mind also to soften and relax in the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out.

See if you can switch your orientation away from being interested or involved in discursive thought. Shift towards an orientation of a quieter, deeper place within—a quieter attention and softer awareness of the breathing body and what's here.

There is a way of attention being soft, attentive, and present to our body and to the quieter places within. Make room for whatever is here. Make room for whatever wants to unfold, whatever wants to show itself, and whatever wants to be born.

Whatever is occurring is okay if the awareness is soft, broad, and wide enough to allow it to be there without picking it up, participating, or reacting to it. Allow it to be there without fighting it, holding on to it, or having expectations and wants. Just allow what's there to be itself on a path to, in a deep way, allowing you to be yourself. This is where our wholeness knows how to bring itself forth. Our role is the quiet, non-discursive awareness with which we know, make space, and feel a deeper attunement to the life flowing through us.

Can you find some corner, some place of awareness, attention, or mindfulness that's quiet? A place quiet of the discursive thinking mind. Peaceful, and not being for or against anything. Open and spacious. Make room for whatever is here, but don't get involved in it. Just know. Just be aware. Quiet, peaceful, and spacious. Is there some small corner of your life where you can sit, breathing and aware, in a way that makes room for and trusts life as it moves through us?

Perhaps, as we bring this meditation to a close, attune yourself to your capacity to be peaceful. It may be that peacefulness is found in the effort to be attuned—a peaceful attunement, a peaceful awareness.

Maybe attuning yourself to it is partly helped by the memory of how, at some point in the past, you've been peaceful. A deep state of calm, or a feeling of safety, ease, and peace. A time when self-concern, self-preoccupation, self-assertion, and self-doubt were absent. Can you attune yourself to that absence of stressful self-concern as we sit here? Can you attune to that quality of peacefulness?

Can you imagine or feel a capacity for care, love, and compassion that flows from that peace? It is not something we are choosing, generating, or doing, but something that is part of the flow of life that comes from being peaceful.

If you can imagine that, or remember a time when you were close to that, imagine that these following words are part of that flow. A deep attunement to peace and to being ourselves in some deep, peaceful way.

May the people that I see, know, and hear about—may they too be happy. May they too be peaceful. May they too be safe. May they too be free. May they too, being happy, safe, free, and peaceful, discover the gifts of really being themselves. May their hearts' movement—free of discursive thought, free of self-attachment, free of greed and hatred—have a chance to revitalize, enliven, heal, and give a profound meaning and belonging to their life. May all beings know that peace, where there is an absence of self-attachment.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Aspiration (5 of 5) Peaceful Aspiration

For this fifth and last talk on aspirations that are a support, aspect, or manifestation of compassion, I want to emphasize the possibility that aspiration can arise out of peacefulness. Peace is a wonderful reference point for the motivations connected to being compassionate.

There are not a few people who confuse compassion with distress. They confuse compassion with their own discomfort around being in the presence of suffering. They confuse the motivation to be compassionate, or to act compassionately, with the motivations that flow from that discomfort and distress. Some of that has a lot to do with our attachments to the self and all the kinds of attachments we might have. Even in some of the most important ways we can be compassionate and caring for others, we carry with us something that is not peaceful. We carry something stressful, where attachment, clinging, force, assertiveness, and tension are a part of it.

It is possible to have the aspiration, desire, and motivation to be compassionate arise in a peaceful, easy, and light way, where there is not a lot of self-attachment and self-concern entangled with it. It doesn't come from any sense of being distressed, challenged, or uncomfortable with being uncomfortable. Rather, it comes from our capacity to be attuned, open, appreciative, and aware in a broad, open way.

Those three—aware, attuned, and appreciative—are aspects of compassion that we've talked about already in this series. All of those lead to the possibility of a certain degree of peace, ease, and non-clinging. Having compassion arise out of non-clinging looks very different than what people conventionally think compassion is supposed to look like.

Sometimes people feel like if there is some injustice in the world, we are supposed to be angry and upset, and if we are not upset enough, we don't show that we care. But that upsetness and anger may very well be a symptom of something we are attached to, something we are clinging to, or some assertion of self that isn't really necessary. The alternative to being distressed and angry is not passivity or avoidance. Instead, it allows for a powerful motivation to arise within us to change the injustice and fight it, but it comes out of the inner world of non-clinging and peace.

The Dharma orientation around this is that we want to trust the Dharma within us. We want to trust those natural processes of healing, freedom, love, and compassion that can flow and move through us without clinging and self-assertion being part of it.

In a categorical way, I call this peace. Trust peace and use it as a reference point to understand the motivations we have to be compassionate. Are our actions of compassion coming from a peaceful, subtle place? Are they coming from a place of calm or quiet, below the level of discursive thinking where we spin stories, fears, fantasies, projections, and memories? That swirling mind drives an attached attitude that supports fear, anger, and distress. But if we can listen to that place below discursive thought—the place that is more peaceful than most reactive thinking—we have access to something quite different.

Life knows what to bring forth. Life knows the movement towards homeostasis, harmony, and peace for everyone concerned. It is not passivity; it's very important to understand this. It makes room for a deeper motivation that can sometimes lead to tremendous courage. It may not look like courage because it is not forceful, but it can give birth to a lifetime of dedication to living for the benefit of the world and finding ways to alleviate more suffering. If we can do it from this place of peace, it is sustainable.

If not, it gives birth to what in modern times is called compassion fatigue or compassion overwhelm. It is unfortunate these two are connected. It happens when our so-called compassionate actions in the world come along with the complications of attachments, clinging, self-assertion, self-definition, and self-victimization. When we act and don't know how to come from this peaceful place, we are much more vulnerable to being impacted in negative ways and becoming exhausted.

Use peace as a reference point as we are mindful of our aspirations. With all the different aspects of aspiration that make it richer, it is wonderful to ask: Is this aspiration peaceful? Is it free of clinging? One of the reasons these are important questions is that one of the directions we need to orient our compassion towards is, in fact, ourselves.

Many of us will be attached and clinging. Many of us will have inner challenges, fatigue, and distress. It is not a crime to be this way. It is very important not to add layers of criticism or shame on top of that. This peaceful place of awareness can act as a reference point to show us, "Oh, I'm not peaceful." Then, compassion can be directed here, to myself, to what is happening within me.

Can I hold this with a kind of peaceful presence that a friend might offer you, sitting on a bench in a park, just being present and listening to you talk about your difficulties? It is so meaningful when someone is just there in a non-reactive, attentive, and peaceful way—not asserting themselves, not fixing you, not treating you as someone they need to help, but treating you with respect and serving you with their presence and attentive care. We need to be able to do that for oneself in a deep way.

Of the different aspects of aspiration I've talked about, this last one is perhaps the most difficult. This is what comes with deep spiritual growth in the Dharma. We become more and more attuned to the possibility of peace, calm, and ease. It can't always be that way fully, but it becomes a reference point for seeing more clearly what is here. That peace and peaceful way of being aware can be seen to be a 360-degree awareness that includes ourselves and the whole world.

For aspiration to be that way is why I feel this deep intentionality, this deep motivation to live for the welfare and happiness of the world, is one of the most beautiful things we can have. Even if it is partial, even if it is halting, just having this capacity and living from it is a beautiful thing.

Announcements

We are going through these different aspects of compassion. The five we have covered so far are awareness, attunement, appreciation, and aspiration. The next time I'm here at this YouTube teaching, I will do five days on action, the fifth part of compassion, which is very important as well. When action arises after these other four have been included and considered, the action becomes much more valuable for everyone concerned, including oneself.

I won't be here again for three weeks. I am going down to Tassajara^[2], the Zen monastery in the mountains south of here, in order to teach a three-week retreat. It will be a Zen-Vipassana^[3] hybrid of sorts with my friend, Zen teacher Paul Heller.

I'll be back teaching up here at the Insight Meditation Center (IMC) on Saturday, July 29th. I am also teaching an online day-long retreat titled "Freedom and Mindfulness of Emotions" through the Insight Retreat Center (IRC). I'll try to put the notice of it on the IMC's website under "Reflections from Gil." Some of you might want to come to that online retreat; I think it is from 9:00 AM to 4:30 PM California time.

We have some wonderful teachers coming in the next couple of weeks. Right now, we don't have a teacher for the third week we are away, but we are still looking for someone. Hopefully, that is easy enough and we don't have to be creative with what we do that third week.

Thank you. I am certainly appreciating this chance to explore compassion this way with all of you these weeks that I am here, and I look forward to continuing when I come back on either the last day of July or the first day of August. Thank you very much.