This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Wonderful Happiness

Good morning, good morning, hello everyone, or good afternoon depending where you're coming from, or even evening. Nice to be with you. I'm Francisco Morillo Gable, and I'm here in Berkeley, California. And I'm going to sit with you together here. So let's just jump in and get started and do our meditation.

Sometimes at the start of a meditation, it's a good idea to get aligned with a kind of a North Star, a north organizing star that's lighting us along the way, that's imbuing us with light. And for this meditation, let's make that North Star be something like unshakeable happiness or immaculate happiness. Why not? It's a good guiding light to point to—happiness and joy—for the reason that it allows us, helps us to see and move through this path together, move through the pieces and parts of our minds and hearts. And it provides a resting place for the mind that stabilizes the mind.

If we have just a light, general orientation toward some form of joy and happiness in this moment, sometimes if we sit with that, it helps us to find deeper levels of stillness and presence as we slowly, firmly, and assuredly move through, see through, and breathe through all the different phenomena that come and present themselves.

So to start this meditation, taking your meditation posture however it is most comfortable and conducive to being alert and a little bit diligent with a little zeal from joy. Maybe closing your eyes if that feels good to you, and going in. We're going to receive the touch of this body, just a general sensation of the body, noticing the breath, such as it is. And noticing where it might be more comfortable to rest your attention in the cycle of the breath as it arises, as it's present, as it ends. Breathing, allowing breathing to happen all on its own.

And almost as if you were being touched by a soft, delicate finger or a feather or something very comfortable and soothing, let's receive some touch sense from this body. Turning our attention to the crown, relaxing as if we're just being touched. The earlobes. The back of the neck, those occipital bones, just receiving whatever is there. The chin. The chest bone. Feeling the touch of both shoulders and those two bony things back there, the scapulas, feeling them as if they're like two floating clouds, just floating. The touch of floating clouds behind our back.

Continuing further down, feeling the belly button, maybe just a gentle soothing touch that eases. And the bony sit bones, how might they feel more relaxing? The top of the thighs and the back of the thighs, and the top of the knees and the bottom of the knees, both of them, like a gentle soothing feeling, receiving whatever's there. Or not. All along, we breathe, allow the breathing to just go in and out on its own gently.

Proceeding down to the shin bones, the bony front part, the calf muscles in the back of the shin bones. The top of the feet and the soles of the feet. Relaxing if it's possible, how it's possible, soothingly receiving any gentle waves of sensations. And if there are unpleasant sensations, noticing them, maybe saying without words, "Oh, it's okay, I care about you, it's okay. We're together here." And continuing with the rhythm of the breath in, out. Air moving in, air moving out. Air persisting while it's present, and then exhaling, ending.

Sometimes uncomfortable sensations just kind of evaporate away on their own. Sometimes they don't, and we just engage them with a caring, really soft awareness. Letting them, being here with all of this, all of these touches from the body all over.

And to return to our intention of joy and happiness in this moment, receiving the overall well-being of the body, breathing, sensing, feeling. Noticing there's a joy of just simply the body being. Nothing going on, no doing of any sort right now for just a little bit, just breathing and sensing these soft touches, all the touches. Allowing them to settle, calming as much as is possible, but receiving that calm. Maybe at the end of every exhale there's a little bit of calm to be noticed. At the beginning of an inhale that brings in wonderful air is a calming. This is joyful for the body to be seen, and it's mostly calmness. It's good to be touched by the body's sensations. And calming, relaxing, releasing, the mind can stabilize in this calm joy of the body in its wellness, its well-being.

And finally, to continue with the theme of joy and happiness, touching in on that happiness of the body and the mind calming and stabilizing together. Tuning in to that pleasant sensation of the mind stable, calm when it is, in the moments when it is. And with this same happiness of mind, resting on that along with the breath, the in and the out, joining the two together to notice. It's like our noticing is bolstered with this soothing happiness. In, out.

And we can observe the other things that keep arising from that point. From the whole space of the body and the mind, and joy, and calm, and stability, we can observe the many trains of different appearances of thinking. And from that vantage point you can let them just be there, maybe observing them gently, caringly, joyfully saying, "How interesting. Let them play along." Resting on a foundation of happiness, in joy, embodied. Continually being touched by that touch of the body in its many, many sensations of goodness. Let's practice this way for the time that it remains.

Being touched by the touch of the body's sensations. Being touched emotionally in the heart, that we're touched by so many sensations through the in and out of the breath. The body's natural joyfulness and all its wellness, full of well-being, are those touches of life moving through, coursing through. Knowing the pleasant feeling of a mind that's resting within this joyful stability of body. Let yourself be touched by that mind happiness. A pleasant feeling of mind.

Marvelous Qualities

Host: Thank you so much for joining us this morning, Francisco, and being here with us, talking to us. I'd just like to introduce Francisco. Francisco is a student of Andrea Fella and Gil Fronsdal^[1], though he also studies and teaches early Buddhism with Bhikkhu Anālayo^[2]. Thanks to a devoted engagement with Dharma, Francisco made a remarkable recovery from an accident in 2003 that rendered him disabled. He has a special interest in teaching underserved groups and he is highly committed to bringing the Dharma to the greater Spanish-speaking world. Thank you very much for joining us today, Francisco. Appreciate it.

Francisco Morillo Gable: It's a delight to be here with you all. Thank you so much for having me. Welcome to the morning sit. It's a real pleasure for me to be able to share a little bit of these teachings together here. And I'd like to talk about joy and happiness—immaculate happiness, let's just put it all out there.

And to lead into this topic, I want to share a little story about the Buddha from the discourses. It's from this charming little discourse called Wonderful and Marvelous—yes, Wonderful and Marvelous. And so you gotta imagine the setting. The monks are all together in a big assembly hall, and they're sitting around chatting. They've had their alms meals, so they're satisfied, and they're sitting around trying to outdo each other on stories about the Buddha, to see who could come up with the greatest stories of the wonderful and marvelous qualities of the Buddha. And they go pretty far out there, each one trying to outdo each other with bigger and higher achievements about the Buddha.

And then the Buddha comes in and asks them, "What were you all talking about?" And then they recount all the wonderful, marvelous qualities, and some of these things are crazy interesting. It's how the Buddha was born—well, I'll read you a little bit of the tenor of it.

"I heard and learned this from the Blessed One's own lips: Mindful and fully aware, the Bodhisattva^[3] appeared in Tusita heaven^[4]." And then in Tusita heaven he does all kinds of things before he descends to his mother's womb and makes her totally pure and awake, was born walking and standing, and a great light and shining light appears in the heavens. And each one of these comments ends with, "And this too I remember as a wonderful and marvelous quality of the Blessed One."

So this goes on and on and on. And then the Buddha speaks. But before he speaks, look how over-the-top these things are: "I heard and learned from the Blessed One's own lips, when the Bodhisattva came forth from his mother's womb, then a great, immeasurable light surpassing the splendor of the gods appeared in the world with its gods, its Māras^[5], and its Brahmās^[6], in this generation with its recluses and brahmanas, with its princes and its people. And even in those abysmal world interspaces of vacancy, gloom, and utter darkness—are you there?—where the moon and the sun, mighty and powerful as they are, cannot make their light prevail. There too, a great, immeasurable light surpassing the splendor of the gods appeared." And then it ends, "This too I remember as a wonderful and marvelous quality of the Buddha."

And then the Buddha speaks. So this is all kind of like a setup for the Buddha to have his word. And then the Buddha says, "That being so, remember this as a wonderful and marvelous quality of the Blessed One here: For the Tathāgata^[7] himself, feelings are known as they are, as they are present, and as they disappear." And then he says the same thing about perceptions and thoughts.

So you might think, wow, what a comedown when all these wonderful qualities are mentioned, but this is the wonderful quality: knowing feelings. And the feelings that they're talking about, that he's referring to, are the feeling tones. It's not feelings as in emotional feelings; it's feeling tones. So he points to feeling tones above every other wonderful and marvelous quality of all possible. Because, and he points to this throughout many of the discourses, it's like he keeps pointing this arrow to feeling tones, feeling tones, feeling tones.

And feeling tones contain these different categories, but one of them is the unworldly feeling tones, those pleasant, unworldly feeling tones. And I'd like to point a little bit of attention to those today. Because, well, why not? It seems to me that we are just kind of very dutiful and diligent here in our practice, and sometimes don't really orient so much toward the joy and happiness of the practice, and rest in the joy and happiness of the practice, and have that maybe be the guiding light. Have that maybe be the starting point of everything that we do in this practice.

We're kind of riveted by so many facets of dukkha^[8], so many facets of the afflictions, the pains, the difficulties, the sufferings, the challenges, the confusions of thinking that embroil us. And we're kind of swimming in this environment that's telling us, "Well, maybe we need to do more. Maybe we need more security. There is more; it's not really just enough being here and breathing."

What could be there? But a lot is there. Maybe we touched a little bit in our meditation that in breathing, and sensing, and noticing, and feeling, there's a joy that is found that is probably always available if your body is mostly healthy. Because this body is resting in this field of wellness and well-being. And we can tune into that, and we can be oriented by that by the practice, because that joy becomes a happiness—a happiness that allows us to see the mind, allows the mind to show itself. And that's what the feeling tones help us do. Feeling tones help us to see what's going on at the core. They're kind of a map to the core of our being by sensing and noticing.

Because we notice feeling tones in the body and the mind as unpleasant, pleasant, or neutral. And each one that we notice—and there are billions of them to notice in our experience—and as we notice more and more and more of them, we get to the roots of the things that lead to the most unhappiness. And that's why we're pointed to them. Each pleasant feeling that comes has a root of kind of wanting more, wanting more—that root of greed. These are latent roots in us. So there's the latent root of aversion, the not-wanting. And then there's the latent root of ignorance, of delusion.

And so each feeling that we sense into allows us to get to those roots, allows us to see them kind of evaporate again and again if we rest on them, like we maybe did in our meditation a little bit. And so that then we can come to that kind of emotional tone of insight. What does insight feel like when it's happening? We see more through seeing our feelings and seeing our feeling tones. Seeing what's going on in there—how involved I am with my desires, how involved I am with my little cravings.

Because feeling tones have this powerful link that helps us to see very far, far into ourselves. Each feeling tone is like a product; it comes with a whole product of our mind, of our intentions, our histories, our deepest roots of wanting, clinging, not-wanting, aversion. And just by noticing that, "Oh, that's unpleasant," we can stop that whole link that leads to the craving that then goes on and goes on.

So when we notice, we can really penetrate through, which is why we develop more vision, because we begin to see more how much we are embroiled and knotted up by the senses. And when we can come to the joy—enjoy the body without sensual desire—we get to know more what it's like to experience the pleasures of the mind, those pleasures of the mind, the happiness of the mind that is not tied to anything sensual. That's kind of the flavor of insight that we like to touch into.

And we could touch into it a lot more than we do, by orienting toward a simple happiness, simple joy of being present. Doing an argument and being more present than being in the argument, for example. Noticing a beautiful sunset and appreciating it more because it's beautiful, and because we can see it—we're seeing that we're seeing it. Because it's a changing phenomena, we see the changing aspect of it, and we appreciate it all the more because we're connected to an appreciating, seeing, and unknowing. So knowing is something that keeps increasing by knowing our feeling tones.

How do we feel? Feeling tones are not the same as feelings, obviously. Feeling tones are the tone of different contexts: the "ouch", the "ooh, I like that". There's a touch of sense: "Oh, I want more coffee." And then there's a, "Oh yeah, I want a second cup." That second mental little thing we add to everything that we push and pull or ignore—and we ignore a lot, a lot.

So the more that we notice and go with that through the flowing of the stream of the sensations involved in all of this, because this is all a living, flowing experience, we can sense that. That's why the body is so important to show us that there is a ton of touch going on. And there's a ton of touch that gets interpreted as pain, for example, and it is painful. And then we can get close and notice it, we receive it and notice it, and maybe with time notice more and more how it transforms. And in noticing that transformation, our vision increases because we're sensing the change. We can sense the change, and every little bit that we do just keeps adding up.

And it's just a glorious thing because it helps us to get out of some of the really bad things in life. Like major depression, for example, just comes to mind. I came into this practice with clinical major depression. I didn't even know what that was. I couldn't understand the category, the diagnosis, when it was placed before me. And it took a long time to really work that out.

I had a major depression for a very good reason: I had a big accident and became disabled overnight. I got a disease that made my spine the equivalent of a 95-year-old person's spine, and it was collapsing and producing a lot of pain. I became disabled and basically withdrew from almost all my life. So yeah, I was very depressed. And it was a long process of finding joy again.

I couldn't understand the word "joy" for a long time. It was the most complicating thing in the world when someone asked me, "How are you?" For years and years and years people asked me, "How are you?" and I never knew how to answer that because I always hurt physically and I was depressed. And it took a long time to understand being depressed. Depression is very tricky to see sometimes. And so finding the word "good"—"I'm good"—took some long, long years of care and treatment and meditation, attention to those deep inner recesses of affliction that were looking to be noticed and understood and reorganized, accepted and healed.

And by coming back into the body... this practice is a body-centered mindfulness. As you probably have heard many times, I hope, mindfulness is a body-centered activity. Half of the practices of mindfulness are about the body, and the other half are about the mind. And right in the middle is our feeling tones.

The body is this field that registers what's going on in the mind, and it's this mutual registration that we begin to understand and know more by touching in, allowing to be touched, letting ourselves gently understand the touch of the body, the registering of thinking in the body, how it shows up, and sensing it. Sensing it and getting to know emotions—gosh, getting to know emotions, that took some work for me, being able to understand... not ignore. Emotions are interesting; they're on this range. Like, for example, anger. Either we really know anger, we're really full of anger, or we can't feel it at all. And there's this range of emotions, and teasing out emotions through the help of the practice.

Because each tone is full of a tone that's creating eventually overall moods. Our moods are big complex cognitive processes that we can start teasing away a lot with understanding the tones—the tones of what we think is unpleasant and pleasant. And it sure helps a lot to be rooted in a joy. And we can often find the joy in the body, or the mind if the body is not available—understanding the pleasantness of the present beingness, so to speak. Just being here for a moment, just being with this, and just really being with this without thinking about it, to appreciate it a lot more because I can just be with it. To be with this nectarine that I'm having for breakfast without thinking about anything, to just kind of be with that. That's the unworldly pleasure. To know that we are experiencing, to be able to see that we're experiencing. And that seeing evolves through a mind that's stable, a mind that's stable that finds a stability in happiness and joy.

It's this kind of fountain of giving the stability that's provided by tuning toward happiness, which we kind of don't do so much, not as much as we could. And we are swimming in a place that mostly is giving us the signal to not be here in full body, to do more. "You gotta do more, you gotta do more in order to be relaxed. You gotta do more in order to be liberated. We've got to work hard at meditation so we can have this concentration that's going to solve all my problems," or the worldly things of security and worries that we can provide for ourselves.

And that's what I've learned in this practice the most: how much I'm the custodian of this world of mind that I'm in, and that I build it and I create it by simply noticing, sensing, and feeling, and being. Maybe that's just being, being that way. Being without doing. Just noticing, learning to notice what I'm noticing, sensing, understanding the sensing through and through, and being emotional, understanding where we are.

It's very helpful to understand where I am in my emotional state about being right now, to be able to understand it first of all so that it can flow along, instead of blindly constantly possessing the whole mood of my mind. The mind that we liberate is this vast thing that has this wonderful knowing capacity of emotion, and it's much more. But we have to work through emotions. It's good to be intelligent of what leads to my emotional state, what do I add? And again it can come down to the feeling tones. What have been the driving set of feeling tones that have been driving me this morning? How conducive are they to happiness, to the happiness of insight, the happiness of being in the present, being in the practice, being in the presence of just the wisdom of how things are flowing through? Coming back to flowing through, flowing through.

Last week, the week before last, I was getting a test—one of those... I have to check my body, I have all kinds of physical spinal things that need continuous checking—and they were checking the visual field. It's this big machine, it's just really cool, it's like a big eye. And you look into this machine at these little dots. And then there are four little dots that you look at to move between the one dot and then the four dots. And then they give you this little clicker like a little video game, and you're supposed to click on this every time you see these other little dots all over the place. They're checking to see the periphery of the field. And so it's like this cool game. But what I noticed was that they kept saying, "Keep looking right at the dot and notice the field all around, and just click when you see the field."

And I thought it was so interesting, because we talk about knowledge and vision, we talk about vision. We develop this vision of seeing, but the vision of insight is not at all like this vision of my eyes. It's somewhat like it, but it doesn't have a specific location. Body sensations are all over the place. And then the mind sensations, once the mind is liberated, the mind knows endless space, this endless benevolence. Where's that? It's not in this little field of vision. It's this embodied mindful experience that comes from understanding and familiarizing ourselves with the endless flows of the energies of the body, changing and contracting and always linked up to a feeling tone. And each time we disengage a feeling tone, we release the flow and are more aware, and more aware of more body, for example, more aware of more mind when the mind is stabilized.

And the pleasant feeling, the pleasant feeling of knowing the changing sensations is a very helpful guide. They call it immaculate happiness. To have this understanding of the emotion of insight. So I hope that maybe you might tune in a little bit to the joy that is present, the wholesome joy that is present around within here and there in little bits. Every little bit counts. Because it's around a lot more if we have a living, breathing body, and we're not doing, and we're not thinking, and we're not wanting and not wanting, and we're simply just noticing, sensing, and feeling. There is a surgence of joy from well-being that's available, and a happiness of mind, happiness with a very pleasant feeling. And it's a wholesome pleasant feeling, the pleasant feeling that is not attached to the doing and the clinging and wanting more and the not wanting. That joy that's attached to insight, to watching the flow, being with the flow of the sensations of pleasant and unpleasant of the mind and the body.

So I hope that maybe we can tune to that as well as our other diligent practice parts, and take advantage of this living life. That's the living life. And it's going to end, and then there will be no more of that. So we can enjoy that now. And there's a lot to be enjoyed here and now of this life with a capital L.

And on that note, I'd like to just dedicate some good feelings of this moment to a teacher of mine who died very recently in the past few weeks, Dr. Bingkun Hu^[9]. He was a Qigong master who was the trainer of many, many teachers around the world. And I was very blessed to live close to him here in Berkeley. He was my teacher for a long time and really helped me to get back on my feet literally, because I didn't walk for three and a half years. So I want to send him the good vibes of merits and with a lot of gratitude. Because in this tradition here, we're doing this for ourselves and for others, always already at every moment. It's an internal and an external practice. So the more feeling good that we do, the more we extend that to others, the more feeling of the wholesome joy, the more room we create for others to just be how they are.

So may you be very, very joyful. May you be very, very happy this week. And may our practice nourish others that we touch. May everyone be peaceful, may everyone be joyful, and may everyone be at ease. Thank you for your attention, and you have a great week.

Q&A

Host: Thank you very much Francisco. We've got some questions. I'll take one or two questions like Gil does and then we'll wrap it up. So feel free to post any questions you have in chat on YouTube... So Shauna has a question: "How did you kind of move through your depression that you were going through?" I think just specifically for me, it'd be interesting to see, was it just like an epiphany all of a sudden, or were there setbacks as you tried to stay the course through coming back out of it?

Francisco Morillo Gable: Wow, that sounds like you know about depression. But a lot of people know about depression. And depression is very difficult to know because sometimes it's difficult to see it. Mine was very clear. And so it was a very long process of persisting and enduring and persisting. And I have to say that it was very supportive to have love in my life that helped me to endure and persist. Without it, I would not have been able to continue.

It was such a bad situation for me because of my body, because I lost work, and because of the pain that did not improve at all for years and years and years. Despite all the pain medication in the world, it just seemed like I was just losing more and more capacity and going downhill entirely and in pain. I sat my family around and we talked about ending my life because it just wasn't worth living. So I had suicidal ideation for many, many years. So it was pretty complicated.

And just like all our knots, we begin to just tease them out, you know, we try to tease out one thread at a time. We just tease them out, and persistence and endurance is so, so key to keep unthreading and finding the trust that each thread builds the foundation of stability. And slowly I learned to find stability mostly through my mind and my body. And when that stability started to build, it really started to heal things fast.

I think the body and the mind, for me, was about coming back to the body because the accident had taken me so far out. But the body is this tremendous repository of life and being and nourishment that holds us together, that provides a big, big space, field for the worst of the mind terrors. So I learned a lot from each layer of knot and going back into its deep old roots, and finding bigger knots there that needed to be unknotted and understanding how they came to be, and incorporating them into the present moment, giving them room.

That's where the body really helped me, to give them room to be all here together and learning to just sense and feel, and noticing, noticing again and again to just come back to these simple things of this practice. So this practice is huge. There are so many supports. I was supported by tons of things of this practice. You know, we have these big fat books and they're full of these beautiful, helpful guiding points for going on and thriving. Because we do become liberated in this life. We do have this extraordinary mind that is a mind-heart that is vaster than anything we can suppose. And it's really a wonder of life.

Host: Yeah. Cindy also had a question. Maybe this will be the last one. So what led you to the Dharma? Was it a person or a reading?

Francisco Morillo Gable: It was a person. It was a yoga teacher who taught me back care yoga and showed me how being quiet and how nourishing being quiet was. And then I just went to MBSR^[10] (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction), because that's where they put the people who are really sick and you can't do anything more with them. I was not walking and stuff, so I ended up there and had my first day of silence in an MBSR. And after that I was hooked forever onto this practice and just started looking into it and getting very, very engaged, much to my poor good fortune.

Host: Wait, when you say to be quiet, what can you kind of elaborate on that concept?

Francisco Morillo Gable: Well, silence, like that moment of silence, taking a breath. We take a breath and we're just silent doing one breath. And we take two breaths and we're silent for two breaths. And we take three, and on and on. Each one that we are intentionally just with the sensation itself is a moment of silence. Just being with it as it is, before the train, the deluge of thinking presents itself as what it is. But there's something else. Just that.

Host: Thank you so much. Have a great week.