--- ai_generation_date: '2026-10-19' ai_model: gemini-3.1-pro-preview ai_prompt_hash: 2d625dd6 audiodharma: talks: - date: '2020-06-26' is_meditation: true mp3_url: https://audiodharma.us-east-1.linodeobjects.com/talks/11598/20200626-Gil_Fronsdal-IMC-guided_meditation_healing_awareness.mp3 section_slug: guided-meditation-healing-awareness speakers: - speaker_name: Gil Fronsdal speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1 talk_start_time_seconds: 0 title: 'Guided Meditation: Healing Awareness' url: https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/11598 video_unavailable: false collapsed_sections: [] location_city: Redwood City, CA video_unavailable: false youtube: id: CchKTa2Hero imprecise_upload_date: '2021-05-04' title: 'Guided Meditation: Healing Awareness' upload_date: null uploader_str: Insight Meditation Center uploader_url: https://www.youtube.com/@InsightMeditationCenter youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CchKTa2Hero --- # Guided Meditation: Healing Awareness - [Gil Fronsdal](https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1) _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: Healing Awareness](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/11598) Greetings. Coming to the end of our week on the roots of the wholesome and unwholesome, I would like to introduce this meditation by saying a few words about some of the points made this week. Early in the week, we explored the idea that Vipassanā[^1] practice has more to do with _how_ we see than _what_ we see. Certainly, what we see is important, but to say it differently: the liberation or freedom we are looking for—which this practice is aimed at—has more to do with how we are aware than what we are aware of. How we are aware is a medium, a vehicle, or a bridge through which we relate to the world and ourselves. If we can care for that bridge and care for that medium, then the practice really begins to come alive and unfold in a very significant way. We also looked at the Pāli[^2] words _kusala_[^3] and _akusala_[^4], which usually have two ways of being translated into English: wholesome and unwholesome, or skillful and unskillful. I offered some other words instead of wholesome and unwholesome, such as healthy or unhealthy. For skillful and unskillful, I kind of like the idea of helpful and unhelpful. That is what we are looking for: What works? What should I do? How should I be? What is helpful and not helpful? What is a healthy and not healthy way of moving forward? To bring these concepts together for today's meditation, I would like to suggest the word _healing_. We can focus on what is healing or not healing, recognizing that the awareness, the seeing, and the mindfulness we bring to our experience has the capacity to be healing. In the suttas[^5], they often use the word "touch"—touching our experience, touching freedom. Awareness can offer that healing touch. How could you do this meditation so that the very way in which you are aware of the present moment, whatever comes up, is touched with a healing awareness? This healing knowing, a recognition of what is happening, is in itself healing. It is somehow settling. It cools the fever of agitation, whether it is the fever of greed, hatred, or fear. It acts like medicine that moves through our whole system, soothing us in some way. I am not saying this is easy to do, but this is the potential of mindfulness and awareness. We can learn to adjust it, find it, touch into it, or experience it in such a way that the awareness itself does not have any unwholesome roots associated with it. The awareness we use has no greed, no hatred, and no confusion. It is very, very simple: found in openness, willingness, kindness, love, gentleness, non-oppressiveness, and non-hesitation. It is just there. Imagine that your awareness is just there. Whatever comes up is being touched. One of the ideas in this practice is that it can be 360 degrees. This means no matter what comes up in any place—whether it is inside or outside, anywhere in the body, anywhere in the world of sounds, or any place in our own minds and hearts—we can touch whatever might arise with a healing awareness. It is possible—maybe not today, but as this practice deepens and deepens—to actually feel it as a healing balm, a healing force that moves through our body. It is quite remarkable to feel this goodness that can exist. But it begins with _how_ we see _what_ we see. Whatever might arise, how do we see it? ## Settling into the Meditation Take your meditation posture, and gently close your eyes. As you become aware of your body sitting here, what is the closest approximation you have of an awareness of your body that has a healing touch to it? A caring touch. Maybe the awareness is like soft cotton gauze used to clean a dirty wound—very gently, very soft. Not forceful, but not hesitant, either. What is it within you, as you sit here, that might benefit from a healing gaze? Something that is seen and touched with awareness, with something that approximates or that you imagine is a healing touch? What is it in your body that would benefit from that kind of gentleness or kindness, maybe even generosity? Perhaps that healing touch can be felt or used to experience your face, so that the muscles of the face can be released—released of all the doing and effort they hold. Healing awareness can go to your shoulders. I associate a healing awareness with an awareness that makes room and space. Then, move to whatever lives in your chest. Touching what is there, perhaps so that it can relax. It can thaw open. Move down into your belly, allowing the belly to be touched so it can feel safe and relaxed. Softening the belly. Then, gently, softly, and calmly apply the medicine of awareness to the body breathing. No matter how it is for you to breathe—whether it is comfortable or uncomfortable, whether you feel like you are controlling it or not—it is all okay. In the 360-degree practice, it is all okay. The _what_ is okay. Experiment, even to the point of imagining a bit that your awareness has a healing touch as it connects with your body breathing. Whatever gets your mind's attention as you are sitting here, whatever comes into awareness unconditionally—anything at all. Any distraction, any feelings, any sensations. When you are aware of it, see if there can be a healing awareness of it. Bring a healing touch that doesn't make anything a problem. It is just something that we touch, that we are aware of, with the medicine of mindfulness. Allow the medicine to do its work. There is nothing for us to do but to touch all things with our healing touch. The healing medicine of awareness works a little better if the thinking mind is quiet or quieter. One of the advantages of using "seeing" as a metaphor for mindfulness is that we don't see with words or an inner voice. It is just the seeing, the eyes themselves. In a certain way, they are quiet of thoughts. There might still be thinking, but the awareness that touches all things can itself be a quiet, caring, and kind awareness. For awareness to have a healing touch, it is less about what we do and more about what we allow. We allow the awareness to touch experience. This is an awareness that has no greed, hatred, or delusion[^6] in it. It has no pressure or forcefulness, no hesitation or holding back. Allow the awareness to touch and be touched. ## Concluding Reflections As we come to the end of this sitting, know that when we are preoccupied with self, with desires and aversions, or with our confusions, the healing power and medicine of awareness is not available. We hold back the self-healing powers of our own inner life. We also hold back the healing medicine that we have for the world. How we see the world is part of the medicine that we can offer. Anything that prevents us from offering our healing awareness is not worth it. I don't think anything brings us any greater benefit than seeing the world with a healing awareness. _How_ we see the world becomes the channel through which we can do the greatest good. If the _how_ is peaceful, generous, loving, and caring—if the _how_ is free of greed, hatred, and delusion—then we have a clear channel through which our care for the world can flow. May our wishes for the happiness and welfare of all beings have a clean channel from us out into the world. May our wish for oppression to end, and for freedom from greed, hate, and delusion for both those who are oppressed and those who are oppressing—may our wish that they be free of their greed, hate, and delusion flow from us in a clean channel. May that wonderful channel, that bridge, that medium of awareness, be healing for the world. May how we live this day provide medicine for this world. --- [^1]: **Vipassanā:** A Pali word commonly translated as "insight" or "clear-seeing," referring to the Buddhist practice of mindfulness meditation. [^2]: **Pāli:** The liturgical language of early Buddhism and the language of the Theravada Buddhist canon. [^3]: **Kusala:** A Pali term meaning wholesome, skillful, or karmically fruitful. [^4]: **Akusala:** A Pali term meaning unwholesome, unskillful, or karmically harmful. [^5]: **Suttas:** The Buddhist discourses or teachings attributed to the Buddha or his closest disciples. [^6]: **Greed, Hatred, and Delusion:** In Buddhism, these are known as the "Three Poisons" or the three unwholesome roots (_akusala-mūla_) that cause suffering.