Guided Meditation: Being Grounded in Meditation

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Grounded in Meditation. 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 May 05, 2020. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Being Grounded in Meditation

Good morning, and good beginning of the week greetings to everyone everywhere that's participating this morning. Thank you for being here. As a little prelude to the meditation and to the teachings of today and this week, I want to offer an analogy. If you, for some reason, have to stand in a rowboat on choppy waters with waves, you want to find the center of gravity of the boat—the center of the boat where the weight is centered. You want to plant your feet firmly and strongly on the deck or on the bottom of the boat. The attention to the feet and to the legs is quite strong. You have to really pay attention carefully to feel the movements of the boat against your feet, and then adjust what muscles are operating and how you balance yourself. If you have this very strong, grounded foundation, then maybe you can do what you need to do standing in the boat.

The same thing applies in our lives as we enter into the tumultuous waters of life, of the world, and our experience. Part of what we're doing through mindfulness practice is learning how to stand or sit in a way that we're very well grounded. We're really rooted or well-positioned. That could be literally feeling our feet against the ground, our bottom against the chair or a cushion, and really feeling that groundedness and that weight. The more the turmoil is, the more being grounded, connected, and rooted physically makes it easier to find our way to stay balanced through it all. It's a beautiful thing, this steadiness: to hold yourself steady, physically grounded someplace in the body, and then just hold steady and be aware. Not fighting, pushing, needing to do a lot, or running away, but learning from that foundation how to keep the mindfulness clear and present for our experience. It's not so much that we have to fix, do, and accomplish; it's more just being present in a non-reactive way while we are well grounded here in the present moment.

So, if you could take a posture—whatever posture is the right posture for you—but one where you can feel the contact of your body against the surface that's supporting you so you don't fall through the earth from the pull of gravity. There's something that's holding you up. It could be your chair, your cushion, or the floor you're sitting on. Perhaps your knees are on the floor and your bottom is on your cushion. Perhaps your bottom is on a chair and the soles of your feet are on the floor. Whatever way that contact is made, take a few moments here to feel that contact, the physicality of it, and the way the weight of your body rests on those places.

Perhaps as you exhale, you can release yourself into that weight right at the spot where you contact what supports you, feeling the hardness and the softness that's there. Perhaps there's a sense of firmness that might feel supportive, giving you a sense of foundation or firmness as you're here. This physical foundation of what holds us, or the contact with what's under us, what supports us, speaks to the Dharma^[1]. The word Dharma in its etymological roots means that which supports, that which holds up. Then, from that grounded, rooted foundation, experience in whatever way—it may be very subtle—the vitality, whatever energy of aliveness means for you, flowing upward from there, especially if you're sitting upright. The flow lifts you upwards towards the skies. Perhaps very gently pull in your spine between your shoulder blades so that your chest comes out a little bit, and very gently lift and tilt the head forward a little bit so there's a little bit of space between the last vertebrae and the skull.

Part of the grounding that works for some people is the breathing. Take a few long, slow, deep breaths to feel the substance of your body as you breathe in deeply. If you take a deep breath in, you might be able to feel how things let go and relax a bit as you exhale—a physical relaxation, a physical easing on the exhale.

Let the breathing return to normal. Again, you might take a few moments to relax some of your body, with the idea that as you relax, you're settling into the physical body so that it becomes a foundation, a place of steadiness. Soften in your face, relax your shoulders, relax the belly, softening in the belly. Feel the substance of your body, the physicality of it, and perhaps relax the "thinking muscle." As you soften in the mind, relax into the physicality of your body. There is nothing much you need to think about while you meditate except about the meditation itself, but without judging it or analyzing it. If you have to think, softly, gently, quietly give yourself meditation instruction.

Within your body, as part of the body, rooted in your body, arising out of whatever centeredness you have in your body can be the experience of the body breathing. For the next minutes, perhaps you can trust being rooted and grounded in your body and trust the simple experience of breathing. Otherwise, you don't have to figure anything out or solve anything. You can let all things just flow by like a large, grounded, rooted boulder in a stream. The water just flows right by, and the boulder stays grounded and centered.

Dedication

As we come to the end of this sitting, once again take some moments to feel the foundation of your body against what supports your body's weight. Feel a groundedness or a firmness of your body against your chair, your seat, or the floor—wherever the weight of your body is supported from the pull of gravity. Feel that foundation, that rootedness. Connected to being rooted or grounded, it's from here that we can bring forth our aspiration, our wish, our dedication:

May all beings be happy.
May all beings be free of suffering.
May all beings be safe.
May all beings be at peace.

May it be that our rootedness, our groundedness in a peaceful way, this peaceful contact with the ground, be the conduit and the source of our care and love for the world. May all beings be happy.