Relax and Receive; Views

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Relax and Receive; Views with Andrea Fella. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Andrea Fella at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on April 19, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Relax and Receive

Hi everyone. Just checking the volume. Is the volume okay? Can you hear? Okay.

My name is Andrea Fella and we'll begin with a guided meditation. Welcome to all of you, especially those of you who are new to IMC^[1]. Welcome. We'll start with a meditation of about 30 to 35 minutes, and I'll do a little bit of guided meditation at the beginning.

Finding a posture that feels comfortable and alert. And whatever form of meditation technique you use, relaxation is a helpful condition to support any form of meditation practice. So we'll start there.

Just allowing your body to relax, to settle around the skeleton, just the uprightness of your spine, allowing all the muscles to relax around that support. If we find a posture of balance, we don't actually need to work too hard to hold ourselves up. And so allowing a relaxation of body.

Perhaps the face, the head can soften and relax. Softening the muscles of the face is quite helpful because there's such a feedback loop between the expression on the face and the quality of the mind. And when we relax those muscles of the face, it can create a supportive condition for the mind to also be able to soften and relax.

So maybe around the eyes can soften. Maybe around the mouth, the jaw can soften. And we can continue scanning through the body. Just briefly kind of go through the body and explore relaxing the muscles of the body. Maybe the neck, the shoulders can relax and soften. Maybe the arms and hands can relax. Maybe the chest, the upper back, all those muscles around the rib cage. Maybe they can soften as I bring my attention to this area around the rib cage. And with the invitation of softening those muscles, I often find quite naturally a deeper breath arises. And if that happens, or even consciously taking a deeper breath at this point, it can allow those muscles to stretch and then release.

Allowing a softening across the stomach and abdomen, the middle and lower back, the hips. Maybe there can even be a softening inside the hip socket. Softening the legs, the feet.

And having explored relaxing the muscles of the body, it can also be interesting to explore how perhaps there can be a softening inside the body. This is more of an invitation than something to do, because often we don't really know how to relax inside the body. But just with the invitation as I name these next areas, just explore the possibility: maybe the inside of the throat can relax. Maybe the heart can relax. Maybe the stomach and the intestines can relax. All of those organs inside our body—there can be a kind of bracing in there. Allowing all of that bracing to soften, be supported by the body. We don't have to hold it all up. Hold it all in.

This exploration of relaxation has been using mindfulness as we've been connecting with the body, relaxing the body. And maybe too there can be a softening in the mind. Maybe actually this exploration of relaxing the body has created a little bit of letting go, or softening, or a releasing of tension in the mind. A letting go of worries or concerns about the past or the future. Maybe the mind can relax, or as Gil^[2] has suggested in the past as an analogy for relaxing the mind: as if the brain were a muscle. Maybe the brain can relax.

This exploration of relaxation of body and mind can create a very soft and receptive mindfulness. One that's just aware, receiving experience. Just what is obvious in this moment? Maybe your body sitting here, sensations of pressure or vibration, or maybe the breath.

What does it mean perhaps to receive the experience? If your familiar practice is one of orienting towards sensations of the breathing or the body rather than looking for that, can you settle back and receive whatever is obvious about the sensations? You don't have to look for anything in particular. Just be willing to notice what's already there. What's easy to notice?

At times the attention is drawn to various experiences. If you tend to gravitate towards an anchor for your attention like the breath or body, there will be times when the attention is drawn towards some other experience: a sound, a strong body sensation other than what you've been noticing. Can that be received?

Our primary interest is really cultivating mindfulness, and that can happen with any experience. And so if the attention is drawn to something, hearing is happening, or perhaps an emotion, and then perhaps that experience fades. It may arise quickly and fade quickly. The thing that has drawn the attention, and then what's left is a little bit of a feeling of reverberation. Maybe that can be known too. A sense of having been pulled away. What does that feel like?

Perhaps there can be an invitation to relax again if there's tension that has arisen. Relaxation supports receptivity of mindfulness. We can return to an anchor or a primary resting point for our attention. We don't need to be in a rush to do that. Can this relaxed receptive quality be primary, receiving whatever experience is here.

And if there's resistance to what's here, that's another experience that is just happening and can be received. What does it mean to receive resistance? It's an experience that's arising. Perhaps a bracing or a holding in the body, a tension in the mind. These can be known. Sometimes recognizing "Oh, resistance is happening" begins to allow there to be a different relationship with it. And not buying into the beliefs around resistance, but just a recognition. "Oh, this is just something happening right now." Just something else that can be received.

We start noticing, as we receive experience, that everything changes. Things arise, they last for a while, and they pass away. Sound arises and passes away. Body sensations arise, maybe linger for a while, and pass away. Emotions, moods, thoughts arise and pass away. All of it is just our bodies and minds working. All of it can be received in awareness with mindfulness. Relax and receive whatever is happening.

If the attention gravitates to a familiar experience like the breath, that's what's happening. Receive that. And of course the mind will wander into thought, get lost, and equally of course at some point mindfulness returns. That moment when mindfulness returns, what's that like, receiving that experience? Mindfulness has arisen and it's knowing something in that moment. What is it connecting with? Maybe the thought, maybe an emotion, maybe a sound or a body sensation. What's there? And again, receiving. We don't have to be in a rush to return to a familiar experience like the breath. Just receiving and inclining again towards that relaxed receptivity. Receiving.

What is being received is your life in this moment. This is all there is. Can we be here for it? Be aware with it. Even thoughts, thoughts of the past. That's a phenomenon happening now, arising now. It can be known. Thinking now is all there is. What's this? Receiving this.

Announcements

Hello everybody. First of all, if you're in the outer hall, there are lots of chairs in the inner hall if you'd like to move in. And second, are there any announcements?

Good morning. We have mindful parents today here at IMC from 11:30 to 1:00, and all caregivers, parents, grandparents, any caregivers are welcome to join us. And that could be caregivers of kids of any age. So, thank you.

Hi, my name is Nancy. This Wednesday there is starting a short three-part series for intro to mindfulness with Lydia Ridgeway and Lauren.

Do you need the mic back? Okay.

Views

So, my name is Andrea Fella. I'm one of the co-guiding teachers here along with Gil at IMC, and welcome.

Today the topic I'd like to reflect on is views. It feels like a timely topic. Views shape how we engage with the world. Views shape our intentions, and then intentions shape our actions. And we're seeing this in our world. But we can also see this in our own lives, just small ways that a particular perspective we have—and this isn't, I mean views run the gamut from a small view about how I should wash my hair, to views about the political realities, the political situation, to views about the nature of reality.

And views then often are not seen as views. They're often taken to be what's true partly because we've lived with them for so long. They've been shaped. These views have been shaped by our culture, by our families, by our experience, by how we've lived. And often the shaping has happened without our knowing that shaping is happening, that conditioning. The word often used in Buddhist circles is that things are conditioned, shaped by other things. And our views are shaped by our experiences growing up, the culture that we grew up in, and how we were in relationship to all of that.

And also views get shaped because we're in a human body, and what happens as our particular sense apparatus meets the world. It's quite remarkable the range of the way views are shaped and how little we are aware that these views have been shaped, and that we're operating our perspectives—how we meet the world is being shaped from those views.

The Buddha understood this. This is why he started the Eightfold Path with right view. He said right view shapes right intention. And right view being, in the teachings of the Buddha, the perspective that supports our way of living that creates conditions for more happiness, more ease, more peace, not only for ourselves but in the world. It's a perspective of ethics, of non-harming, of kindness, of love, of compassion.

And one of the key ways it's framed is through the Four Noble Truths. And we are encouraged with the Four Noble Truths to understand suffering. And as we understand suffering, not only our own but the suffering in the world, we begin to see how our own minds are shaping that suffering. Views shape that suffering. And so we are encouraged to understand how suffering comes to be. And that exploration begins to shape different relationships with our world, different relationships with how we engage, how we act, and different relationships with how we meet our own experience.

So we begin to be curious about being aware, being mindful, being with our experience. This encouragement to understand suffering is not an abstract understanding or an intellectual understanding. It is an invitation to understand suffering directly when we are experiencing stress. What's happening? What's going on there? And one of the things I'd like to explore today is that a big part of what's going on there, kind of at the root of why we are suffering, are views, beliefs, ideas: "Things should be this way, things shouldn't be this way." And not seeing them as views, we take our perspective to be right. We then impose those views on other people. We impose them on ourselves.

So the Buddha pointed to wise view as a perspective that will support wise intention, an intention to act out of this perspective of kindness, of care. When we start to understand suffering, when we start to see what happens in experience—not just the ideas about suffering but the experience of what suffering actually is—we begin to want to engage in a way that does not add suffering into the world. We begin to want to engage ethically. We begin to want to engage with kindness, with compassion, with wisdom.

And so this shapes us. The Buddhist path, the Buddhist practice is a path of being shaped by wholesomeness. And we have to start with the perspective, kind of adopting the perspectives of wise view to be curious about understanding our suffering, to sit down and actually look at our experience. To be willing to look at our actions in the world and see are they motivated by greed, aversion, delusion, or motivated by kindness, compassion and wisdom, non-harming? So this perspective of wise view supports wise intention, supports wise action. But the foundation of this whole thing is to begin to be curious about understanding suffering.

And not only do views shape this wholesome movement, but the habitual ways that we have been shaped... much of it, not all of it by any means, some of how we've been shaped has been shaped by love and by compassion, by ethics, by care. There's also a lot of how we've been shaped that's been shaped by believing things should be a certain way, believing things shouldn't be another way. Shaped by greed, shaped by aversion and shaped by delusion.

You know, the perspective, the view that is embedded in greed, we could say there's many, I think, but one of the foundational views that's embedded in greed is: "If I get this thing, I will be happy." And the way our minds work with that belief is that it actually thinks that it's going to be happy forever when it gets that thing. Now we may consciously know that that's not true. But there's something in greed. When greed is functioning, when greed is working, that is what greed believes. This will make me happy forever. It's kind of amazing to see this view at work.

I was kind of shocked one day watching. So I just watch everything, just watch my mind what it's doing, and I was watching the movement towards getting some chocolate one day. I like chocolate. So I saw the movement, the greed towards that chocolate and I put the chocolate in my mouth, and you know chocolate's pretty good. [Laughter] And in that experience of having the chocolate there was this like "Yes! [Laughter] This is going to do it for me." [Laughter] And it's like really the mind believes that. I saw the mind believe that this piece of chocolate was going to make me happy.

Now it was good for like, actually it lasts pretty long. [Laughter] Maybe like a minute, you know, if you track the happiness of being satisfied by something, you can watch it kind of come and go. And I was kind of surprised how long it actually lasted. It was like a minute or something. And then it's like, oh, that fades. Okay, that satisfaction fades. And this is one of the things the Buddha encourages us to notice around this belief, this view: "Having what I want will make me happy." Notice how long the happiness lasts. That begins to undermine that view. It begins to point out it's not truth. It's not truth.

Then in aversion, the basic perspective of aversion is "getting rid of this thing will make me happy" or "figuring this thing out." Sometimes with aversion, aversion can have a lot of different flavors to it. I'm a connoisseur of aversion. And like one of the flavors of aversion for me was around self-hatred. So, it was aversion to myself. So, it wasn't like "oh, getting rid of that thing will make me happy." It's like I was the problem. There was the aversion to who I was, that kind of experience.

And so the basic idea of aversion is some kind of separation will make me happy. With self-hatred, that's a challenging prospect. And so it tends to be a loop. But what I found in the exploration of self-hatred—and this was a several year thing of exploring this. This was in the first two or three years of my practice. I actually didn't know self-hatred was part of my experience. I had a perspective of myself as being very competent, can do things. I had agency. I was good at things. I was always successful at things. Now, that by the way, those beliefs, they're a setup. And I saw that at some point, too.

But when I started doing meditation practice on my first three-month retreat, that was when I really started seeing the self-hatred. And it was a little bit of a shock to see that. But I was investigating, fortunately in some ways being on a three-month retreat, it's like this is all you get to do: see what arises. Oh boy, this is my retreat. And I even kind of call that retreat my self-hatred retreat because that was so much of the experience. But there was so much learned.

One of the things that I won't take you through the whole journey, [Laughter] but at some point—and this may have been the second retreat, the second round of this, it all kind of blurs at this point. This was about 25 years ago at this point. And I'm here to tell you it is possible to be free of self-hatred. It is possible. This practice can do it.

So one of the key moments in this exploration was watching self-hatred arise. And at a certain point in the retreat, I could see the thought, the feeling that came with it, and it was just like this: "I'm a failure. I'm no good." That kind of flavor. It came with thoughts but it was a lot of feeling, just this sense of "this being is not right."

So I was watching this in one late-night sitting, watching it come and go. It appeared and it disappeared. This was something I had learned over the course of the retreat. I mean, at first it came and it stayed like, I would see it come and I would feel dread because it would be like, okay, in the next three days... But I would see it go at some point. In this particular sitting, I began to see it coming and going very rapidly. It's like it arose. It arose. It passed. It arose. So, I could see it arising. I could see it coming up. And in that seeing it coming up I began to understand something about what was happening. What was the self-hatred made of? How was it shaped? How did it arise? And what I discovered was that it was a thought. "You're no good." Something like that flavor of a thought. And then the thought was being believed, believed over and over and over again. It was being reinforced over and over and over again.

And when that was seen, it was kind of like, "That's what self-hatred is. It's just a thought being believed." Really, the power of seeing that made it fall apart in that moment. The next moment was being flooded with bliss and the idea arose: "Never again will I experience self-hatred." Then there was some wisdom that said that's probably just a belief. [Laughter] That's just a view. Let's just like, okay. And then the bliss just kind of became much more like equanimity.

So all of that happened in the space of a few moments. That seeing and the falling apart of it, the bliss and the kind of chilling out around the bliss. So the key there was really seeing how the view, that this was a thought being believed. It was a view. It was a belief. And that's all it was, was a view. So that's a flavor of looking at or being curious about exploring the aversion side.

The delusion, the delusion with views is that we don't see them as views. We take them to be true. Now views are useful. The Buddha started the path with wise view. But he also said views when clung to—and that's where the issue is, is the clinging. And often the clinging is happening below the surface. We don't even know we're clinging because we don't even know it's a view. We take it to be true. That's one of the fundamental ways that delusion works. That we don't see views as views.

And so an exploration when we are suffering, when suffering is happening, there is some kind of view at work. And it's often a simple—I mean there's a lot of maybe layers of views around politics and who should be doing what and all of that, there's kind of these layers of views—but often it comes back to some pretty simple views: "It should be this way. It shouldn't be this way."

And so when there's suffering, one of the things that can be really useful to explore, it's like you're noticing what's happening. So this is in the mindfulness practice. And if you have time in daily life you could, if there's a situation that happens in daily life where there's suffering, a kind of a situation that feels like "wow I'm not able to be mindful right in the midst of that situation." That's often what our daily lives are, that they're moving so fast that it's hard to kind of be curious about "well what's my view right now? I'm having an argument with my boss, can I sit down and what's my view?" That doesn't happen, right? We often are moving quite quickly.

Now it can get to the point where we can see what's happening in our experience with practice. And yet early on, it can be helpful to take some time at the end of a day. If you had a situation where something happened, sit down at the end of the day and let those thoughts come into your mind. Just let them come into your mind.

Actually, we could try this right now. Pick something not major, not too big, but something that maybe created an experience of stress or suffering. Let yourself right now just settle a little bit, and then allow that memory to come to mind, that thought of that situation. But don't think about that. Just let yourself create that scenario. Let yourself create that situation in your mind and then check in: what's happening here? What's the experience?

Now emotions will likely arise. Thoughts are powerful shapers of experience. So when we remember a charged scenario, it often shapes similar experience. So what's here? Feelings, thoughts. Just noticing what's here, allowing it, being with it, and maybe exploring that receptivity that I brought into the guided meditation. Just receiving what's here. You don't have to find anything in particular, but just like feeling the experience. Maybe there can be a sense of feeling the whole thing. We don't have to find all the little pieces of what's happening, but just what does the whole thing feel like?

And then in that space, drop in the question: "What's being believed?" And how does it feel to notice that? You don't have to try to change the belief or stop believing the belief, but know if you've seen a belief, just know it's a belief. This is being believed right now. And it can also be useful to be kind of curious about how much it's being believed. Like, are you really on board with that one? "Yep. Yep. I believe that." Or is it? Sometimes it can be kind of surprising to see a belief that just like, wow, that belief doesn't even make any sense! But at some level, it's being believed. So this is just an investigation right now. Just a curiosity. What's here? What's being believed?

We can let that go for now. Some of you may have noticed a belief. Some of you may not. But this kind of question at times if there's a struggle or stress, if you're noticing in meditation a sense of stress or struggle, you could drop this question in. And it's not trying to figure out the answer. It's more an invitation to let something be revealed. Dropping that question in: "What's being believed around this stress or suffering?" And then how strongly is it being believed?

Now, as I said, you don't have to try to stop believing something. So, for instance, in the self-hatred example, to tell myself to stop believing that would be akin to repression of the feeling. And that's not what mindfulness, wisdom, receptivity are about. We're not trying to repress what's happening. We're trying to open to the experience of what's happening. This is the experience of what's happening in the moment. We could say that's the truth of experience.

Views are often like we are looking through a perspective of views believing them to be true. And you know, people might say "well what is truth?" I mean in this kind of exploration the truth has nothing to do with anything conceptual. It's not to do with any ideas or views or beliefs. The truth is the truth of the experience. When a belief is arising, the truth of that moment is there's an arising of belief. That's the truth of that. That's it. It's very simple. The truth of the moment is: this is the experience that's arising right now.

And then the perspective that the Buddha pointed to about wise view is to be curious: Is there suffering happening? What's motivating the experience? What's happening with this experience? Is it a skillful expression? Does it come with love, compassion, the movement towards ethics, or is it motivated by greed, aversion, delusion?

So one of the things around views is that the perspective around views isn't so much "is it right or wrong?" because all views are simply views. They're perspectives that are brought to experience. Even right view is a perspective that's brought to experience. But the question is: is this a view that is supportive to move the mind, to move experience, to move my actions in a direction of skillfulness, towards non-harming, towards kindness, towards wisdom? Or is it a view that's moving in the direction of suffering and stress?

The wonderful thing about mindfulness when it has this kind of curiosity, this receptivity and curiosity of "what's here? What is this human experience? What is the truth of this moment, this experience?" When that's the perspective of how we are observing experience, the heart, the mind naturally move towards more skillfulness, more wholesomeness. And that's because the experience of wholesomeness, the truth of the arising of love and wisdom and compassion and the movement towards non-harming... The feeling of that is expansive, is connected, is broad, is not suffering.

And when that mindfulness, that same capacity to meet experience in the present moment, feels the experience of greed or aversion, it feels contracted. It feels there's painfulness there. And quite naturally, it's like the way our human system works. It is one of the great things about our human system: not only that we have the capacity to be mindful, but that our human system wants to move in the direction of not suffering, of ease, of feeling less contracted, more open. And so when we experience the actual experience in the moment, quite naturally, mindfulness begins to let go of those things that move us towards suffering and to encourage, to shape those things that lead us away from suffering.

Well, this is the natural kind of way that the practice works, through arriving with the truth of experience. What's here? What's here? Sometimes people ask, if that's the natural movement of the mind to move towards ease, peace, freedom, connectedness, caring, why on earth does the mind do these other things? Why is it caught by greed, aversion, and delusion? And that's because it's not seeing views as views. It's taking that perspective of the view of greed, the view of aversion to be the truth.

So this is an invitation for us. Just begin to be curious about what views are shaping experience. Those simple questions, you know, "what is being believed?" I find that question in practice to be most useful when I'm pretty connected with my experience. It's not something to sit down and start with "Okay, what's being believed?" because often that will be filtered through the beliefs and views that are operating in that moment. And so, as there's a space of really landing with your experience and mindfulness, that's a useful time to begin to drop in that question.

And it's kind of like a pond. Dropping that kind of question in is like if there's a smooth pond and you drop a pebble in, there'll be some ripples. So that question, you don't have to go searching for the answer, just dropping that question into the mind that's relatively still can allow something to bubble up so we can see the ripples. We can see sometimes, and not always. And so if you don't see anything then just continue, just carry on with your practice, continue with being with your experience, receiving.

Sometimes I find when I drop a question like that in and I don't see anything, sometimes the answer to that question doesn't come with words like we may be expecting a response with words, with language. "This is the belief" like it's going to point itself out to us in a billboard or something. But more often I see that when I drop that kind of a question into my meditation, over the next couple of minutes there's a little bit of a shift of perspective that begins to reveal. It may be a shift that has let go of a perspective that it's like, "Oh, I see. I was looking at it that way." And so, just see what happens as you explore this kind of a question.

I could probably keep going, but I will stop and see if there's any questions. And I think the mic's over in that direction somewhere.

Q&A

Questioner: Hey, good morning. Thank you so much. That was very thought-provoking. Is it ever possible that sometimes the pursuit is the same but the underlying view is different? Like for instance, here where we are there's a lot of focus on performance, whether that be in your work and academics and sports and arts or whatever you're pursuing in the home with your family, and there is so much drive towards that. Sometimes it might be coming from, say, self-loathing or self-hatred where, "hey, you're not enough so you have to perform better, do more, be more." But sometimes there might be a fine line between that or perhaps like self-respect where the view is different, where you believe that you want to do more, be more because you want to help other people, or you believe that you are capable of doing so, thus you pursue more. Does that resonate with our discussion today?

Andrea: Absolutely. The actions that happen, the outcome can have very different underlying motivations and those underlying motivations may have different views. So, yes, the same action might be motivated by different views, and the same action also can be motivated by mixed views.

I said earlier that I had this view of myself as being very competent, and I could do things and accomplish things. I was unaware that mixed with that was this perspective of "I'm a failure, I better prove myself." So, to begin to see that, that's really what this is pointing back to: not just assume what our perspective is, but to be curious about what's the motivation.

And what I found in that particular situation, it was interesting actually. That belief that I was competent, could do what I needed to do—I said it was a setup. And what I saw was that when I was experiencing that, there was a sense of empowerment. There was a feeling of "I'm capable. I'm strong." And there was also the belief there that that was what it was supposed to be like. And what I began to see was like that sense of "I'm capable, I'm competent" was based on the belief that I should always be able to control the outcome. That was a kind of an underlying belief there. And when I couldn't control the outcome, that's when I landed in the failure side.

And so I began to actually see... it was interesting because I was exploring the self-hatred side a lot. And initially, I thought that that sense of feeling competence, that that's what would be left when the self-hatred fell away, that I would always feel that way. But actually, what I discovered is that I really needed to look at that side too—that sense of "I'm good at this"—because that was the setup and the view that I should be able to control everything. I should always have a good outcome. It's not possible. It's not possible.

And so I began to see those two sides of it and they pretty much both fall away, you know, and then what's left is just this being acting in ways... I mean, it's not that action stops, but it begins to be motivated by more wholesomeness, by the wish to support other beings, and not with a particular outcome in mind but just to take action—the most skillful action that I can take—and keep going.

So yeah, I mean it's very useful to look at, with whatever action we're taking, what's the motivation behind it? What's the perspective? And there's going to be views there and they're probably going to be mixed motivations. So, not to feel like either side has to go, but more as I was describing, that curiosity. But what is that sense of "okay, I want to take care of myself, take care of my family"? Even that can have compassion and kindness and that can also have a sense of "got to be a certain way." So curiosity about all of it.

Not to take any of our perspectives for granted because they run deep. They run very deep. Not just those perspectives that have been brought into our lives through our cultures and our families and how we've engaged in the world. But also just because we're human, you know, we have these human delusions that we tend to think that things are permanent, that they're reliable, that there's a self^[3]. And those are pretty human and those views tend to underlie all of this stress and suffering that we experience.

So just keep being curious. And we don't have to make anything be wrong or bad. When we're looking at it with mindfulness, everything is a doorway to freedom. Everything, even self-hatred. I'm here to tell you, even self-hatred is a doorway to freedom.

Questioner: Thank you.

Andrea: So, thank you everybody. It's time to stop. I'm happy to hang out for a few minutes and check in if you have questions or other comments.