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audiodharma:
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    - speaker_name: Gil Fronsdal
      speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1
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    title: 'Guided Meditation: Deeper than Personal'
    url: https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/17886
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  - date: '2023-03-10'
    mp3_url: https://audiodharma.us-east-1.linodeobjects.com/talks/17887/20230310-Gil_Fronsdal-IMC-dharmette_mindfulness_of_the_body_4_of_4_four_elements.mp3
    speakers:
    - speaker_name: Gil Fronsdal
      speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1
    talk_start_time_seconds: 1790
    title: 'Dharmette: Mindfulness of the Body (4 of 4) Four Elements'
    url: https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/17887
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location_city: Redwood City, CA
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  title: 'Guided Meditation: Deeper than Personal; Mindfulness of Body (4 of 4) Four
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  upload_date: '2023-03-10'
  uploader_str: Insight Meditation Center
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# Guided Meditation: Deeper than Personal; Dharmette: Mindfulness of the Body (4 of 4) Four Elements - [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: Deeper than Personal](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/17886)

Warm greetings from the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City. I'm very grateful for Matthew, who came and filled in for me yesterday. I was under the weather a little bit. I had a little fever on Wednesday evening and a little bit of an upset stomach. I woke up in the morning, and the fever was gone. Very quickly in the course of the morning, after sleeping 12 hours, I started feeling pretty good. So I think it's passed, and I'm happy to be here with you all.

When we're treated in an impersonal way, it can be kind of cold, and we can take it personally and feel like it's offensive—almost like somehow we've been ignored, overlooked, or not respected. Sometimes when things are personal, we get offended easily, and we're holding on to some idea or we're threatened easily. Sometimes when things are personal, it feels really cozy, comfortable, and safe.

And then there's a third step, for which there's no English word that I know of. Maybe we can make up a word, something like "under-personal," "pre-personal," or "post-personal." That's when things have become so personal, so centered, so connected here, that we stop thinking about ourselves. We stop assigning personalness to anything, and things can just be as they are in the coziness, the comfort, and the safety of the present moment.

In fact, to really be in this under-personal way, taking things personally—assigning personal value and determining what it means for "me, myself, and I"—can feel like using coarse sandpaper on very smooth wood. It feels like it's a little bit too much. What's nice is just to appreciate the comfort, the ease, and the subtleness of our experience without the overlay of whatever it means to assume or feel that it's personal. This extra evaluation is sometimes quite wonderful.

As meditation deepens, we start getting a feeling for how to meditate without taking it personally. It doesn't mean that it becomes impersonal in some cold kind of way; it means that we go deeper than what's personal—the under-personal. We can just be present in the simplicity of the moment, content.

If we're not content, then probably there's something that we're taking personally, something we're concerned with for "me, myself, and mine." It might be something that bothers us, something that we want, or something we don't want. In doing so, we're using the coarse sandpaper. But if we quiet down, let go of this content of all forms, and are just content to be here, there's this under-personal state where things just are. In meditation, this very simple way is very satisfying.

So, assuming a meditation posture, it's useful to take one that personally supports your meditation. Each person is going to have a different posture that's the right posture for them to meditate in. Sometimes the variations are very small.

Gently close your eyes. Feel at first how personal it is with the eyes closed. Feel yourself, feel the sensations of the body, and feel and recognize the thoughts you're having. Feel what's happening in your heart, the emotions that are present. Rather than judging them or reacting to them, feel how, with your eyes closed, how close they are to you. They are not someone else's sensations and feelings; they're yours. They're quite personal. Others might have similar feelings, but yours are your own.

Take a few long, slow, deep breaths. Breathe in and inhabit this personal experience of yourself here and now. Exhale and relax. Relax everything in your body. Exhale and release.

Breathe in and breathe out, letting your breathing return to normal. You might say that breathing is personal. You might say that it's something different than personal. It's shared by all mammals. All humans are doing the same movements. It's something universal to breathe in and breathe out.

As you're sitting here, become aware of the temperature of your body. Notice places where your body feels warm, places where it feels cool, and places in between. Feel the temperature of your body as something that's deeper than personal; it's nature. It's the natural movement of how the body works in the presence of certain conditions—the warmth, the coolness, the play of warmth and coolness in the body, and how breathing interacts with it.

Maybe in some more foundational way, below the temperature, there's the solidity of the body: the hardness, the firmness against your seat or the floor, the weight of your body. Out of that firmness and groundedness, there's also movement in the body, the movement associated with breathing—small little movements of the body.

In Buddhist meditation practice, being aware of these properties of temperature, solidity, and movement are three of the four properties to tune into that are pre-personal, under-personal. It's a way of having our experiences without the overlay of attributing a self or "me, myself" to it. It's so intimate, so cozy, and content to stay close to these basic properties, these sensations that are at play in the body sitting here: movement, temperature, softness, and hardness.

Solidity. The water element property is cohesion. Anything that feels like it's stretching or being held together is considered to be the property of stickiness or lubrication. Stay close to these fundamental sensations as a way of being under-personal, less personal than personal. Or, if you can't do that, have a heightened awareness of how you overlay the idea of the personal on top of your experience.

*(Silence for meditation)*

Gently take a deep breath or two. And on the exhale, settle in. Let go of the impersonal and the personal to just be here in the body, in the sensations of the body. Be so intimate with the body that there's no room for judgments or ideas or attributing them to anything. They're under-personal, just here, the natural self, the natural world, nature.

As we come to the end of this sitting, what if love, goodwill, is something deeper than personal? Something that resides within us in a natural way that we don't have to personally evaluate. It's not a personal reason to love, to be kind. It's just the nature of the heart, the nature of our inner tenderness. Kindness is deeper than personal, under-personal. Maybe this kind of kindness doesn't need a reason. Loving without a reason, loving without needing anything in return. Loving without fear, without resistance. The heart's goodwill.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful, and may all beings be free.

Thank you.

## [Dharmette: Mindfulness of the Body (4 of 4) Four Elements](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/17887)

Hello. In the Buddha's teachings on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness[^1], in the section on mindfulness of the body, he has an exercise on what's generally called the four elements. The four elements are usually called earth, water, fire, and air. One of the reasons for this exercise is to become aware of the sensations of our body in their elemental properties, their elemental manifestations.

One of the classic reasons for this meditation is to be able to experience our present moment experience without the filter of self-identification. Without all that comes along with taking it personally, making it "mine," or thinking "it's happening to me" or "this is my experience." The goal is to be able to experience it directly without any overlay of self. To do so impersonally, in a sense, but "impersonally" sounds cold. So I kind of made up the term "pre-personal" or "under-personal"—something that's so intimate, so close in, so settled and connected here, that we stay at the foundational level before the mind starts bringing in ideas of "me, myself, and mine."

This exercise on the four elements is meant to free us from self-concerns and preoccupations. Now, regarding the elements—earth, water, fire, and air—I don't know if it's appropriate to call them "elements." "Elements" kind of sounds like the elemental table; it implies solid building blocks, like atoms or molecules, fundamental things that exist. Probably the better translation of *dhātu*[^2], the Pali word, is "properties." There are many things that are *dhātus* which are clearly not elemental in terms of being fundamental things. They're processes, they're activities, they're things that are appearing and disappearing.

These have to do with our sensations. It's not our thoughts; it's not our feelings about them. Rather, it's the sensations that might be there providing information that helps us understand, "Oh, this is an emotion." It's the sensations that tell us the impact that thinking might have. We want to stay there in the realm of sensations.

The idea of the four properties—earth, water, fire, and air—is to give us a little bit of an orientation on how to stay close in to these different things. The earth element is solidity, hardness, softness, firmness, maybe tightness sometimes. Anything that feels solid or, conversely, soft—that range is considered the earth element. Granite rock is really hard; soft soil in the earth is quite soft when you put your hand in it.

The water element is one of the harder ones to experience. The way the tradition holds it is that it's fluidity, the kind of fluidity where the fluid kind of holds together. That's what fluid is. Water has a very little bit of force that keeps the molecules connected to each other. The spit in your mouth has more stickiness to itself. It's about things that hold things together, keeping things cohesive. It's a little bit hard to feel and experience, but maybe you get the idea.

Then there's fire, which is temperature—hot and cold.

Then there's the air element. The literal word in Pali is not "air"; we say "air," but it's "wind." Then it's easier to understand that the elemental level here has to do with movement. Any movement we have in the body—as we're sitting still, for example, and there's some kind of movement—that's the wind element moving through us.

It can be a delight to be able to put to rest our self-preoccupations, put to rest all these concerns about "me, myself, and mine," and become so deeply personal with our experience that the idea of personalness falls away. I tried "under-personal," "pre-personal." I see in the chat someone suggesting "sub-personal," maybe "underneath it all."

This is where it's so personal that the idea of the personal falls away. It's kind of like the experience of being in your home or in your bedroom. No one's around, maybe you're in your pajamas, and you're cozy with a cup of tea. There's no self-concern about "me, myself, and mine," and you aren't thinking about yourself. You're just cozy and settled. There's no other person to bounce off of, to compare ourselves to, or to be in interaction with. You feel like it's just okay to be yourself.

In meditation, it can be this way. It is so okay to be ourselves that this is maybe the one place where we can drop the social world. We can drop the responsibilities we have temporarily, so that we can get underneath to a deeper level of well-being, safety, and comfort, where we can just be absorbed in the simplicity of the moment, in the sensations of the experience. There's no agenda. We're not trying—we're doing it for a purpose, not trying to get concentrated or something, but just kind of floating in the sensations. As they come and go, we're kind of diving into them, sinking into them.

To have a fairly good experience of this becomes a wonderful personal experience of an alternative to all the "me, myself, and mine"-ing that we go through the day with. It can be exhausting how much our self-concern is part and parcel of so many things we're doing all day long: our preferences, what we're trying to avoid, what we want, what we don't want, how we feel about things, our opinions. How we are in relationship to other people—many people can get exhausted from all the ways in which we're navigating ourselves in relationship to other people.

Challenges that we have in our lives tend to evoke a strong sense of self, because the challenge often has some personal quality. "I have to figure it out," "it's happening to me," or "I'm responsible, I have to figure something out." This emphasis on ourselves as the agent, or as the victim, elicits more self. Some of that's okay, but it's really nice to know an alternative. It's really nice to know that there's another way where we don't take things personally, but it doesn't feel cold. We are just present for things without measuring them against our idea of self, or measuring them against "me, myself, and mine" and what it means for me.

To do this four element meditation, to drop down into the sensation that is deeper than personal, gives us a feeling for going about the challenges of our life without taking them so personally. Maybe they involve something that has to be done, but then we do it without the weight of "why me?" or "I shouldn't have to do it" or "this is too difficult for me." There's a simpler way of engaging where "me, myself, and mine" doesn't interfere. It might be there in the background guiding a little bit, but it doesn't interfere.

Some people find the four element meditation very meaningful. In fact, for the insight meditation practice that I learned in Asia, the heart of it was the four element meditation. The heart of it was to really drop down into the sensations of the experience—not the thoughts of the experience, the stories about the experience, or how we take the experience personally. But actually dropping down and really staying intimately present for the sensations.

This gets really helpful. For example, within an emotion, what are the sensations of the emotion? To course and travel and feel the sensations of the emotion. What are the sensations connected to thinking? What are the sensations involved in the activity and movement that we're doing? To spend some quality time in this sub-personal realm of just the sensations is quite freeing. The freedom from self that it provides then becomes a reference point to much better understand how much extra self we bring along as we go about our life, including with our challenges.

So, if you feel inclined, see if you could find a way to settle in in some nice way at home or somewhere, for a few minutes here and there. See if you can be so at ease that you stop taking anything personally. It's just nature operating through you. It's just nature operating in this body that's here. In not taking it personally, not being aloof or cold, but rather diving into the sensations. Diving into the basic fundamental building blocks of sensations from which we build our interpretation of life. See if that teaches you something about a less self-concerned way of being in the world.

It's invaluable to do when we have challenges, because the challenges that get mixed up with self-preoccupation become much more difficult. But the less self there is, the less agitation of self, the easier it is to take care of challenges in a responsible way.

Thank you.

## Announcements

So, at the end of the week, this Sunday at IMC, we're going to have a community meeting. I think it's the first in-person community meeting since the pandemic. I know many of you are far away, but some of you are close by. We're having it at about 11:00 AM, which is after the usual Sunday morning program. There's no need to register to come to the community meeting; you can just come to it. You do need to register to come to the Dharma talk.

We'll talk about IMC, we'll talk about the pandemic, we'll talk about our COVID protocol and maybe changing it. We'll talk a little bit about the vision of IMC and how we're going to go forward from here, and hear from you a little bit about what you think, your ideas for IMC, and how we'd go on from here.

Then, in about a month, we'll do a similar kind of community meeting for the online community, and we'll do it on Zoom. There will be more information about that later, sometime in mid-April.

So thank you, and I look forward to being here with you on Monday.

---

[^1]: **Four Foundations of Mindfulness:** (Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta) A core teaching in Buddhism outlining four domains of mindfulness practice: body, feelings, mind, and mind objects (or principles).
[^2]: **Dhātu:** A Pali term often translated as "element," "property," or "fundamental constituent." In this context, it refers to the primary physical properties of experience.