--- ai_generation_date: '2026-09-16' ai_model: gemini-3-pro-preview audiodharma: talks: - date: '2020-09-24' mp3_url: https://audiodharma.us-east-1.linodeobjects.com/talks/12146/20200924-Gil_Fronsdal-IMC-guided_meditation_release.mp3 speakers: - speaker_name: Gil Fronsdal speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1 talk_start_time_seconds: 0 title: 'Guided Meditation: Release' url: https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/12146 video_unavailable: false location_city: Redwood City, CA video_unavailable: false youtube: id: _OYRZ_WF4BQ imprecise_upload_date: '2021-05-04' title: 'Guided Meditation: Release' upload_date: null uploader_str: Insight Meditation Center uploader_url: https://www.youtube.com/@InsightMeditationCenter youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OYRZ_WF4BQ --- # Guided Meditation: Release - [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: Release](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/12146) My warm and happy greetings to our meditation time together. I'd like to try to build on our meditation over this week—and maybe over these weeks for those of you who have been coming—to offer you something that is very useful in many circumstances, whether you're just beginning meditation or have been practicing for a long time. It is a practice that becomes increasingly important the deeper the practice goes, and that is to avoid being the agent of change, the agent of letting go, but rather to allow our whole system to release itself. What it means is that we bring a clear, mindful attention to whatever is happening, including how we cling, hold on, contract, and resist. But we don't actually relax it or release it, because sometimes the effort to do so is itself a kind of clinging—a kind of excessive holding on to some idea of ourselves as the agent, or even ourselves as the recipient of our experience. And so, as practice deepens, there tends to be less and less _doing_ of letting go, and more kind of allowing or receiving the releasing that the system wants to do when it wants to do it. Not to sit impatiently, expecting or wanting things to release, but to just be present. So it's a variation of the "letting be" practice we did on Monday. Just let it be, but let it be with clarity, so that what needs to happen can unfold on its own. It requires a lot of trust, but this is one of the options for how mindfulness unfolds. Even so, it's often good to begin with a little bit of letting go, a little bit of relaxing. Just so the coarse, outer surface tensions and holdings are settled a little bit, and so that we settle into a mindfulness and attention that's somewhat more stable and present. It's kind of like mindfulness has balance or has a foundation. In the ancient languages, it means it is _established_[^1], so that mindfulness is not easy to wander off. We can actually stay with something for a while, hold it for a while, so that the mindfulness, the awareness, allows, receives, or makes room for our system to release and let go of something. And we don't always know what that something is. It might be different than what we're thinking we should relax or let go. So, take a meditation posture, spending a little bit of time swaying back and forth, forward and back, to just settle in and find a nice center balance where your weight feels balanced through your body. Balanced on the sitting bones and the tailbone, if you're sitting in a chair or on a cushion on the floor. And maybe a little bit like curving or snaking the spine until you find a place where the spine is nicely aligned. So, in a sense, the vertebrae feel like they're stacked on top of each other and the weight travels through the spine. We're not leaning forward in front of the spine with the weight, but it travels through and is balanced on the spine. And it can be helpful to open up the space between the last vertebrae and the skull by lifting up the back of the head and tucking down the chin a little bit. And then taking a few long, deep breaths, with the idea that as you exhale, you're establishing yourself here in this place, at this time. Breathing in, and breathing out. And then letting your breathing return to normal, but still, on the exhale, continue to relax a bit in your body. Maybe relaxing the belly, and in doing so, settling in, becoming physically more established here, rooted in your lower waist, your hip bones, sitting bones. Relaxing and settling in. And so you take the time to have a definitive physical feeling that you are here, establishing yourself in this place. And then to relax, soften in the chest. Relax. Maybe softening in the shoulders, in the arms. And maybe each relaxation is also further grounding, establishing yourself here. And then relaxing the muscles of the face. And relaxing in the area of your brain. Even if you don't feel much there, but soften, relax, open. Maybe you can let go of the forces in the brain, the mind, that are scattered or directional—wanting and not wanting, chasing after thoughts. Relaxing the brain. And then to establish yourself on the simple experience of breathing, or a simplicity of awareness, with the simplest way of being with your breathing. Exploring for a few moments what it would be like to not interfere with your breathing. To just receive it or allow it to be as it is, without wanting it to be a certain way, needing to fix it or change it, without needing to relax any further. Just the experience of breathing is allowed to be as it is, and awareness kind of makes space for it, makes room for it to be as it is. The kind of mindfulness that can allow for release is a mindfulness that's very permissive in allowing everything to be just as it is, without being involved with it, without being caught up in it. Allowing everything to be just as it is, but knowing it intimately, knowing it allowingly, and knowing it leisurely. Just take your time to allow things to be known. No hurry. As if you have all the time in the world. And if something arises that is more compelling than the breathing, let that be the subject of your permissive, allowing awareness. Unhurried, knowing it. And if you can, to know it with a quiet mind, a silent mind, without a lot of thoughts or stories. Just to know. And even if this kind of awareness is what supports release, more profoundly it supports each thing to do what it needs to do, to unfold as it should. And if something releases in the process, appreciate that release. Sometimes what's released is not what's uncomfortable, but what's released is our non-acceptance of it, our resistance, our desires to change it. What gets released is how we relate to things, anything that gets in the way of relating to it with utmost simplicity, allowing each thing to be as it is. If you carefully notice that you're thinking, without any idea of letting go of it, just make room for it and see it, know it clearly. Almost as if you're stepping back and looking it in the eye. What happens to your thinking? Does it release itself? If you really want something as you're sitting here, or really don't want something, what happens if you turn your permissive attention to feel and sense, to know the wanting and not wanting? Not trying to fix it or change it in any way, but make room for it in a silent room of awareness, without being involved in it. Stepping back and looking at it directly: _There it is._ If there's any strain or tightness, pushing in the mind or in the body, let the permissive, allowing awareness just know that. Like you're sitting with a friend who's troubled. Just allow your friend to be as they are, but you accompany them. Make room for them to be as they are. Make room for your straining, your resisting, and see what happens. Or if there's a place inside that's the center from which doing arises—a place of congealing around self, on being the doer or the victim or the subject of it all—let the permissive, allowing awareness hold that without fixing or judging or changing it. Just allowing it to be there. Making calm, quiet room for it, and seeing what happens when you're aware of it without being involved with it. And if awareness itself, your mindfulness, has a place, a location where there's tension or pressure, a gathering together of a certain kind of intensity, hold your mindfulness with a wide-open space, lots of room. Where awareness that knows it is as wide as it needs to be to give lots of room, so that even awareness, any concentration of it or coagulation of it, is known as it is, with room to release. ## Reflections And then to come to the end of this sitting, to appreciate for a moment what it's like to be released from the grip of attachment, of grasping, of resisting, of being driven, compulsivity. What it's like to be free in the mind and the heart. To have it all release so the heart can sing, the heart is free from any limitations. And to whatever degree you can feel that or imagine that possibility, imagine that that's also possible for other people. Maybe everyone. And then the challenges that you might have with other people probably arise from ways in which their hearts are not free, but contracted, not open, and places they are not released. And may it be that as we sense and know the possibility of a free heart, a free mind, released, fully released, that we see that possibility in other people and we support it. We make room for it. We relate to them in ways that make that possible for them also to be released. We free them from our attachments, our demands, our expectations, and bias, to really free other people from us. So that their system might relax, open up, and their hearts have a chance to be free. May all beings be free. May all beings have hearts that sing or soar, that are at peace. May all beings be healthy and wise. May all beings be released. --- [^1]: **Established:** A reference to _satipaṭṭhāna_, a Pali term often translated as "the establishment of mindfulness" or "presence of mindfulness." It refers to the foundation of Buddhist meditation practice.