Guided Meditation-"Not About Me"; Dharmette: Joy of Compassion (1 of 5) Joy From Awareness

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: "Not About Me." Joy of Compassion (1 of 5) Joy From Awareness. 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 August 21, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation-"Not About Me"

Okay, so I'm a bit rusty. I've been away quite a bit from here, and so all the buttons to push, and things to check, and the settings were not proper in the software part of this YouTube broadcast this morning. So, I wasn't able to get it up and running until just a few minutes before 7:00. Thank you for being here, I'm delighted to be with you.

The last two weeks I've been involved with teaching the Dharma^[1], teaching practice in outdoor settings. First, 24/7 in the Santa Cruz mountains, where I even slept outdoors under the stars and taught and practiced in a grove of trees in a wonderful meadow. And then this last week in Colorado, in the mountains outside of Boulder at 9,000 feet. Beautiful places to be practicing. And in Colorado, practicing together with moose who were in the area.

I think that mindfulness practice, the awareness practice we do, is very simple. But in being simple, it's both very radical and also maybe sometimes hard to appreciate the simplicity of it. The simplicity of it is that it's just to know very simply what's happening, to be aware of it. But the simplicity of it is to be aware of it without any reference to oneself. Meaning that it isn't the usual self—the usual me and my concerns, my orientation, my projections, my values, my fears, my judgments—that is doing the awareness.

There might be self-concerns, there might be concerns about others, but the radical nature of awareness is that we can know those, but we're not living in them. It's more like we're living in the awareness. We're living in the simplicity, where the awareness is kind of like looking into the sky at a bird going through the air. The space the bird flies through is not the bird, but it allows the bird to fly through space. It allows us to see the bird. Awareness can be almost like that. It's the awareness that can know if we're self-concerned, or measuring what's happening through the filter of ourselves—what I have to do, who I am, how good I am, how bad I am. But we don't believe in those, or we don't latch on to them, because the awareness is not appropriated as self. We're just aware, just like space.

The reason why this is so useful is that when meditation is about myself—meaning when meditation is about self-concerns, and measuring myself, and judging myself, or trying to accomplish something for myself—we're limiting our capacity for freedom and for joy. But if we can just step away and keep it so simple, just aware, then there's something joyful about that. There's something freeing about that. It's radically simple, but challengingly simple.

So what I'd like to offer is a little sentence you can tell yourself as we go through this meditation. It's not to deny anything about yourself; it's actually to be acutely aware of everything that goes on. But to have the sentence: It's not about me. The awareness is not about me. Just being aware, not about me right now. Just to be aware of what's here, and it's not about me.

Now, if that's troubling for you to say that, then don't do it. But if you can find freedom in that, if you can find even some joy in that, then maybe say this little sentence, "It's not about me," and then come back to your breathing, and be with your breathing. Use that sentence not as a mantra, but if your thoughts, if your concerns start going into something about me, myself, and mine, then say, "It's not about me right now." In these next 20 minutes that we have for this period, just for now, "me" can come back later. It's not about me. It's just to be aware. Just to be aware, not about me.

So, assume a meditation posture that's appropriate for you in one of the four dignified postures: sitting, lying down, standing, or walking. Adjust your eyes so that they are engaged—or not engaged—in a way that's relaxing for you. Most commonly, it is to close your eyes, or lower your gaze with half-open eyes.

Taking a few deep breaths, and relaxing on the exhale.

And then, to let yourself be as simple with your awareness, mindfulness, as you can. The simple knowing of breathing.

The simple knowing of sounds and what happens in your sense doors^[2].

The simple knowing of your emotions, or what goes on in your mind. As if there's no past and future. It's just the simplicity of this moment, the experience of this moment.

And if you find that your thoughts, or maybe your emotions, are somehow connected to identifying it as "me, myself, and mine"—self-concerned in any kind of way—tell yourself, "It's not about me." For these minutes meditating, it's not about me. It's about being aware, where the awareness is not about me, either.

Awareness is wider, more spacious than me, where the knowing has a quality of effortlessness.

Knowing is simple. Just knowing. Without laying on top of it feelings, senses, or ideas of "I'm the one who knows." It's not about me in being aware.

If your thoughts are about yourself, remind yourself that meditation is not about yourself. Not about thinking about yourself or being concerned about yourself. It's simply to be aware of what's here.

And if what's here is thoughts about self, to be aware of that simply. Almost like those thoughts are not really you, they're just thoughts.

The idea of "it's not about me" is to remember that awareness can be wider, broader, freer, when it's not pulled into or participating in our self-consciousness, our self-preoccupation, self-judgment.

We're always, in a way, larger or freer than any thought, idea, or contraction we have around ourselves.

And when self-preoccupation limits our capacity for joy, limits our capacity for love, and we see that, then the expression "it's not about me" can be an opening into this wider world of freedom, and joy, and love.

May it be that our practice is one that brings joy, compassion^[3], and love into this world as medicine for the problems and challenges this world faces, to support all beings on this planet.

May we help create a safer, caring, and freer world by learning how not to be excessively self-preoccupied, self-concerned. May all beings be happy. May all beings be free. May all beings be safe. May all beings live in peace.

Dharmette: Joy of Compassion (1 of 5) Joy From Awareness

Thank you all. I'll take this moment to mention that if you had trouble logging on today to this YouTube channel—which I did as well—it was because the settings for broadcasting onto YouTube were set wrong. They weren't set to public, so it was being recorded on YouTube but not publicly available. It took a while for me to discover that. I think it helped to understand the settings, partly because I've gotten rusty at doing this YouTube broadcasting. We needed to go public, I think, a couple of minutes before 7:00. So hopefully, just for those of you who tried before that, the problem was not with your links; the problem was that it hadn't been made public yet.

So I return here after being away for a couple of weeks with many momentous events happening in this country and around the world. The earthquakes, the fire in Maui, and just the tragedy of it; it keeps growing the more we learn about it. For anybody who lives in Hawaii and in Maui, I send my condolences and my love. And people who are maybe here in California dealing with the flooding in Southern California, they're in our hearts.

I hope that this practice that we do is really for the benefit of this world. In the way in which it benefits ourselves, it makes it possible for us to offer the right attention, support, love, compassion, and care for this world around us. Maybe it's just the very local world of a few people around us; maybe it's broader worlds. But this practice does orient us to live in a way that doesn't add to the harm of the world, but actually adds to ways in which we can benefit this world.

In the last few months when I've been teaching here, I've been teaching about compassion. I kind of wondered if I had been finished with this series, but in thinking about it these last couple of weeks, I wanted to do one more week—maybe a concluding week—on compassion. It felt important to actually spend a whole week on the joy of compassion, the happiness of compassion. Perhaps for those who have been listening to this series on compassion, as you start understanding the ecology of all the different pieces of compassion and how they come together, we can understand and appreciate that there is the potential for our compassionate relationship to the world to be one that brings joy and happiness. Or a sense of lightness, or a sense of sweetness, or something that feels quite right. There's a sense of rightness that lightens us perhaps, or makes the suffering of the world not so heavy and oppressive for us to live with.

This is one of the great aspects of compassion: when compassion is free of any kind of attachment, any kind of self-preoccupation, any kind of way in which we get caught in or identified with the suffering, or any way in which the suffering of the world somehow doesn't move through us in a free and light way. When it doesn't, the full potential of compassion—and how beautiful, profound, and important it is to have it—is limited.

So I want to talk about that this week: the joy of compassion. I'd like to do it by trying to evoke or point to the joy of the four different supports, or foundations, or elements that are there as part of compassion, if compassion is really going to fulfill its full potential. Many times when we have compassion, it can be genuine, but it hasn't really moved into its full potential, and maybe even feels overwhelming and difficult to have. There's compassion fatigue, for example, when these different elements haven't really come to fulfillment.

I've talked about how the four aspects that come together to really benefit compassion are awareness, attunement, appreciation, aspiration, and then action. Each of those is associated with a kind of joy, delight, and happiness. So for the first, a healthy compassion comes with a well-developed capacity for really being aware, and learning the art of being aware without identification, or being aware without adding into the awareness judgments and evaluations of "me, myself, and mine."

This is where the knowing, the awareness, the recognition, the mindfulness can operate with a certain kind of effortlessness. Because to apply effort to being aware is all too easy. The idea of "I'm the one who's applying effort," and because of that, all these associated ideas of who I am, and why I'm doing this, and judgments about my capacity, and all kinds of things come along. Independent of that, many people go around with a lot of self-concern. Everything is measured by what this says about me, or how this is for me, or how this is against me, or how I'm a victim of this, or how I'm a consumer of it and I just want to have more. Some of this, of course, is not wrong, but when it limits us, when it actually contributes to further suffering and more attachments, and limits our capacity to serve the world in a freer way, then there is another way.

The other way is to learn how there's a certain kind of way to be mindful that has a quality of effortlessness. A certain quality of just awareness that is just there, that just arises. And to enter into, or return to, a clear sense of attention to the present moment that has no self-efforting, making oneself do something, but rather it's an allowing. It's an opening. It's a relaxing into the awareness, into the knowing.

This is where knowing or awareness can start providing feelings of joy or happiness that are lightening up. Because so much of the self-concern and self-preoccupation that we live our lives with dampens down the joy, dampens down the freedom that we have; it limits it quite a bit.

Another idea of joy that people have, and the pursuit of happiness, is the pursuit of a happiness where we build up the sense of self. Where the self gets praised, or the self gets aggrandized, or the self proves itself as being somehow wonderful in the eyes of others or something. And some of the unhappiness that people have is also connected to the sense of self—that failure, and not being good enough, and feeling that somehow we're wrong.

The radicalness of this awareness practice is how it points to the possibility of being alive, of being aware and present, outside of the limitations of these judgments and evaluations of ourselves that we live with.

So the simplicity of awareness, maybe even the effortless quality of it, is a way in which it's not really the self doing it. Maybe there is a kind of activity of being aware, but there's not a sense that "I'm the one who's doing it" or "it's about me." The freedom from self-preoccupation, the freedom from this constantly being concerned with ourselves, is why some Buddhist teachers will say that if you want to be happy, have compassion for others, live for others.

It's not exactly because of living for others that the joy comes, but sometimes the reason they say this is because the joy comes from not having the tight, contracted, agitated, painful ways in which we live when we're self-concerned. So we're kind of loosening up that, and stepping out of it, and forgetting it. This is the self-forgetting that compassionate service can provide, and is maybe why some people do it.

But if you only do compassionate work in the world to forget the self, but haven't really addressed it, it's almost like it can be a distraction from the self. There certainly can be a lightening and easing up that happens when we kind of forget about ourselves, or we are distracted from it all. But healthy awareness practice learns how to honestly be present here for ourselves, for all the different ways in which this mind works, and even the self-preoccupation, self-concern, and evaluations we make.

To see it, to know it, to be aware of it without identifying with it. Without adding on top of it more attachment, more self on top of it. It's almost as if we're beginning to hold who we are, how our mind works, and the identifications we have, with a lot of expansive space. We identify a little bit more with the largeness of space than we do with the smallness of self-identity.

And so, to cultivate and develop awareness practice, and have that awareness be ready to encounter the suffering of the world—this kind of free awareness, light awareness, open awareness, spacious awareness, non-self-concerned, non-self-referenced awareness, where we know ourselves well and we start knowing the world around us, others—then compassion has a chance to be present and to share the joy of freedom. The joy of awareness which is free, just the joy of being aware.

And the final joy of awareness, of mindfulness practice, that I want to emphasize is the joy of having an awareness practice. The joy of faith, the joy of the appreciation of knowing we have a practice that can meet our own suffering, and meet our own "selfing," our own self-challenges that we live with.

Aren't we lucky to have a practice that helps us to work with it, to work through it, to find a way with it, to find freedom with it? It's not always easy; it takes time. But there's a joy in knowing that you have a practice that brings so much good to oneself and to others.

So the joy of awareness, as we get a sense of that possibility, the sweetness of awareness that we can find, then we're in a better place and ready to experience the joy of compassion. So we'll continue on this theme, and I'm happy to be sharing it with you. Thank you.