This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Relaxation and Discovery; Samadhi (1): Introduction. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
So I’m here at IRC, our Retreat Center in Santa Cruz, California. I’m here for a two-day program that I’m helping to teach with Andrea Fella and 15 people we’re training to be Insight teachers. We’re coming to the end of the four-year training, and it’s been quite special to be here, and special to be here with the volunteers and the residents. It’s a really special place to be. Some of you maybe have been here, some of you maybe will think of coming on retreat here.
So welcome and Happy New Year. Here at the beginning of the year, I’ll start an extended series on samadhi1. It’s provisionally called concentration practice, concentration states of concentration. I almost prefer not to use that word because the associations with it are very different than what is being cultivated when we cultivate samadhi. So, what we’ll do in the meditations and the 15-minute talks will very slowly build up the foundational elements for samadhi. Whether you get concentrated in the way that we call samadhi or not, I’m hoping that in the process of this, you’ll learn a lot about your capacity of attention and how to harness attention for yourself, rather than having it hijacked by all the different, growing forces in our society that are trying to keep your attention hostage, keep it busy, keep it activated. There’s a whole attention economy now that I never would have imagined could have existed.
For the meditation this morning, as a beginning for this whole adventure in samadhi meditation, a good way of beginning all meditation—and getting a foundation for meditation, mindfulness meditation, and concentration—is first to take a little bit of initiative for the state that you are in, not to just go along captivated by whatever state you’re in. One way to do that is to relax a bit, to begin a meditation with relaxation. It’s not just the value of relaxing, but it’s also the value of lovingly engaging or taking control or being responsible for how you are, rather than the forces of the world dictating, or the forces of an unsettled mind dictating how you’re going to be. So, to begin harnessing your capacity, your attention, by relaxing. That’s a standard way in which I teach meditation: to relax the body, the mind, the heart.
Then for the rest of the meditation, as a very important beginning for these weeks we’re going to be exploring samadhi, the focus today will be on discovery. After the initial relaxation, not being so focused on trying to do anything yet, but to really just spend the time discovering how you are—discovering the state and quality of the mind, the heart, the body—with a willingness to stay that simple. To only think, “Oh, it’s like this now. It’s like this now,” with no need to say, “Oh, it’s like this now, and I have to fix it. I have to stop it. I have to be different. This is not right.” Put all that aside for now. It’s a process of discovery. What you might discover is you have all those kinds of ideas: “It shouldn’t be this way. I have to make it different. I’m not doing it right.” But in the process of discovery, it’s like, “Oh.” And here again, you’re beginning to take a certain initiative or certain control or certain overview of yourself without getting caught in anything. Just to discover, “Oh, it’s like this now. It’s like this now. It’s like this now.”
What you discover about yourself then will be the foundation that you use for developing samadhi. Without that discovery, you won’t have the raw material that’s needed to gather together for these concentrated states.
To begin then, assume a meditation posture. Maybe there’s a way of having a somewhat alert posture that allows a deeper relaxation than if you start with a relaxed posture. If you have already put yourself into the most relaxed posture you can be, that might be nice sometimes, but for the purposes of samadhi and discovery, you want to have also some modicum of being alert. So adjust your body in some way, whether you’re sitting on a chair, the floor, or lying down, that there’s a kind of an intentional body to be here now.
Then gently closing your eyes, or if you want to keep them open, to gently lower your gaze. Then to take a few long and slow, gentle, deep breaths. Deeper breaths, expansion of the chest, maybe expansion of the belly, maybe a certain kind of lifting around your shoulders as you breathe in, allows for a longer exhale. And that longer exhale, to relax or soften in the body.
And then allowing your breathing to return to normal and to continue relaxing, continuing to take a certain degree of initiative or control even over your experience in this very simple way of continuing to relax, soften. The Buddha didn’t use the word “relax,” though he used the word “calm,” calming of the body. With the exhale, let there be a calming, a wave of calm through your body that might allow the shoulders to soften, relax, the belly to soften.
And perhaps there can be a calming of the face, a loosening, relaxing of the muscles of the face with every exhale.
Maybe a softening around the eyes. If the eyes feel engaged even with the eyes closed, letting the eyeballs rest in their sockets, maybe even by imagining that you’re looking backwards and down into your body.
And then your mind. You don’t have to go along with how the mind is completely. You can also begin softening, relaxing the mind, the thinking mind, the thinking muscle. Maybe with a loving, reassuring attention, maybe with the attitude, “It’s okay.” With the exhale, let the thinking mind settle, soften, relax. Almost as if as you exhale, you’re allowing the gentle pull of gravity to settle and quiet the thinking mind.
And for the final relaxation, if you notice that there’s somewhere in your body, mind, or heart that is activated by whatever emotional state you have, whatever mood you’re in, not necessarily to try to stop being the way you are, but also not to go 100% along with how you are, but to engage in a certain degree of sovereignty over how you feel by relaxing any way that you’re activated by how you feel. Any place where it’s energized or agitated, as you exhale, softening, relaxing a bit, without ambition to do it a lot, just a gentle softening, calming of how you are emotionally.
And then for the remainder of the meditation, have this period be a time of discovery. Put aside any ideas of what you’re supposed to experience as a meditator or make happen as a meditator. With every inhale, discover, recognize what’s happening for you, how you are in your mind, your body, your heart, whatever shows itself to you. And with every exhale, a very simple discovery that does not involve stories, explanations, reasons, and causes. Just a simple discovery, like you’re a naturalist of your own inner life, sitting quietly, noticing whatever way you are. A naturalist who watches the animals in the wild without disturbing them, allowing them to be as they are. To sit quietly, a naturalist of your own inner life, discovering, seeing, recognizing without any other idea of what meditation is.
One way to practice this discovery is simply to discover where your attention goes, almost as if you’re following attention. Now it goes to a sound, now to thinking, now to a feeling, now to a body sensation, back to thinking. Discover the pulls and pushes on attention and where it goes.
Can you discover the difference between discovering what’s happening and being lost in what’s happening?
And then as we come to the end of this sitting, I would like to mention that this process of discovery of Buddhist practice is to discover that we have a treasure within, invaluable goodness, possibilities for invaluable treasures of peace and happiness that can be found within. Not only in ourselves, but they can be found in others. Everyone contains a treasure of goodness, the spark of life on which it’s possible to settle, be at peace, free of unsettling.
As we end this sitting, may our process of discovery help us appreciate the treasure that’s found in everyone we meet. Everyone is precious, everyone is sacred, everyone has the capacity for an inner peace and freedom, happiness. And may we live in such a way that we shine a light on the goodness in everyone, even those for whom their public display is not that of goodness. Let us discover and see what’s good in everyone, so that is what grows in our world.
May we see everyone’s capacity to be happy, so everyone grows in happiness. May we see everyone’s ability to feel at ease, safe, so that they may feel at ease and safe. May we see everyone’s capacity for peace, so we can support the capacity for peace. And may we appreciate everyone’s ability to discover an inner freedom, and may we live in such a way to support the growth of that inner freedom. May all beings be happy.
Thank you.
Hello on this first Monday of 2020, and Happy New Year to all of you. Welcome to this new series that I’ll be doing on, titled Samadhi1. In the last few years, I’ve been doing long series, some of them 50-60 sessions long, on different basic meditation practices that Buddhism offers. I’ve done it on anapanasati2, mindfulness of breathing, the four foundations of mindfulness. And so this year, I’m going to do a whole series on basic instructions and practice of samadhi.
The word samadhi is generally translated into English as “concentration,” and it’s not uncommon for people to not be very satisfied calling it concentration because it limits it too much and narrows the scope of what samadhi is. Also, sometimes it suggests a kind of laser focus and an intensity that’s a little bit too intense to really stay focused and one-pointedly focused. Whereas samadhi is not a particular way of focusing the mind; it’s a whole state of being. It’s a whole qualitative state of being. Like if you felt deeply at peace, the peace wouldn’t be a particular activity of the mind; it would be something that would be integrated into your whole sense of being—your body, your heart, your mind. So in the same way, samadhi is something that’s integrated and complete and whole in all of who we are. It’s a state, and to call it a kind of a laser focus of the mind actually interferes with the relaxing and opening to this general, whole state.
So today is a little bit to make some introductory remarks about samadhi and this series we’re doing, and then we’ll just continue. One of the introductory remarks to say is that samadhi is a very important state for deepening Buddhist practice, and it’s very important for mindfulness practice. The depths of mindfulness practice, the full potential of it, actually requires a degree of samadhi. The way that I understand the teachings of the Buddha is that mindfulness practice and samadhi practice, Sati3 and Samadhi practice, are practiced and integrated together as being not really two distinct practices. They come along. Sometimes we might emphasize more the samadhi aspects of the mind, sometimes more the attentional aspects of the mind of mindfulness, but they’re both going together and they need each other, and they’re both accompanying each other.
Maybe not the best analogy, but it’s like the left and right foot when you’re walking. Sometimes you step with the left foot, sometimes with the right foot, and you need them both in order to walk. I’ve had an injury in my foot, and it was very hard to walk. I could bring the back leg, the injured leg, up to where my uninjured leg was, but the stepping forward always happened with the uninjured leg, and it was very awkward and slow to walk that way. But to walk in a fully integrated, easeful way was to be able to go back and forth between the two. So both are needed, both use the other, in samadhi and mindfulness. I don’t want to set up a sharp dichotomy or distinction between them, but for this series, it’s going to be focusing on the samadhi mostly, but a lot of mindfulness will be needed in order to engage in the samadhi activities that we’ll be exploring.
As we go through this, the plan is to do this very gradually, in very, very small steps. Some of you are already fairly familiar with meditation practice, with concentration practice, and I’m hoping that if that’s the case, the slow steps we make, putting down the real simple elements that add up to the whole, will be informative to some of you who maybe never really tracked so carefully what it took to enter into samadhi. You’ll understand much better the dynamics, the different elements and pieces that come into play. Some people have minds that can naturally drop into deep samadhi, and some people have minds that are more oriented towards mindfulness and never really kind of appreciate both of them. If it’s easy one or the other, you might not appreciate some of the different dynamics in the mind and the heart that come into play that maybe you take for granted.
So to go through this very slowly, for those of you who are new to all this, the slow, steady pace of little drops of pieces of instructions at a time maybe will allow you to follow and go along. At some point as we do this, you might not follow the instructions, but maybe then you use your imagination to get a sense, a feel for what I’m talking about, so that you have a general sense of what’s going on, and at some point in the future, this will become relevant for you.
The word samadhi literally, the etymology of it in Sanskrit and Pali, means more a collecting, a gathering together, a settling together. There are words that are variations of samadhi that specifically mean collecting, sometimes collecting firewood to make a fire. Sometimes these related words, just grammatical variations, can also mean to settle, to steady. So there’s a settling, a steadiness of the mind, a gathering of the mind. The idea of gathering is probably one of the most important aspects of samadhi. It’s not an exclusion so much as it is an inclusion. There’s a feeling that all of who we are is now included, but not in a way that’s fragmented, not in a way that’s going off in different directions, but rather it’s gathering together to work together and be coordinated, doing the same thing for the same purpose, the same intention. Everything is here and present.
But it’s a huge process to settle in, to steady in, to gather in everything. Part of the reason it’s a big project is that it goes so much against the grain of how minds often work. Even in the time of the Buddha, it was hard for people to develop samadhi because their minds, he used the word “monkey mind,” the mind was constantly… The idea of a monkey mind is that it’s like a monkey that’s swinging from the trees; as soon as it grabs one branch, it’s already reaching for the next branch. So the mind, as soon as it’s one place, it’s reaching for the next place.
Even in the time of the Buddha that was true, and I imagine it’s even more true now in the last 20 years with the advent of these smartphones and screens that we’re on, tablets and so on, that have in some ways unsettled the mind, that have activated the mind so it’s always searching, always surfing the web, the next thing, the next thing. Many people have pointed out that the modern mind has lost its capacity, its span of attention. The attention span has decreased, you get bored more, there’s more of an impulse like, “What’s next? What else is there?” rather than settling on one thing and just doing that one thing. It’s like, “What’s next, next, next?”
And now there’s been all kinds of studies and research done on the economics of attention, the attention economy. There are people who are paid a lot of money to plan and organize and create content that will get you to click, get you to look, get you to move on, to keep your attention, to have you return to look again, “What’s happening? What’s happening?” I’ve noticed in myself, and I’m sure some of you as well have this issue, that there’s an idle moment and you grab for the phone to see if there’s an email, is there news or something. Constantly being stimulated by what’s on a screen. The idea of sitting and doing nothing and being quiet, which I think human beings had a much greater capacity to do outside of these modern technological worlds that many of us live in, is becoming an unavailable state.
So samadhi is a return to a deep, natural state of wholeness, of subtleness, of an open attention which is not being driven by a thirst for more, a thirst for content, a thirst for experiences, a thirst for a serotonin rush or dopamine rush or something that you get, get, get, discover, discover, discover, want, want, want. I like to think of it as a process of being turned inside out. It’s a challenge to turn the stream, the flow of the mind from wanting and attention going and moving and being outwardly directed or directed towards fantasy and thoughts and anxieties, to turn it around and inside out, almost to settle deeply into ourselves and to discover that we get turned inside out.
There’s a whole new way to live in the world, a way where the mind’s anxiety, the mind’s reactivity, the mind’s overactivity is completely settled and quiet, and the source of our life arises from some deeper place of peace and well-being and wholeness within. The mind is now a vehicle of support, a channel for this deep, settled peace and happiness that we’re capable of, rather than the mind being what drives us. So maybe the analogy could be, rather than having what’s on our smartphone screen be where we live, we actually live settled in a very deep, steadied way in our inner life, in our hearts and our bellies and our mind here. And that’s what drives, that’s where the engine, that’s where the source of vitality comes from. That’s where we find our peace and well-being.
To make the transition from a scattered, activated, agitated, fragmented mind to a mind that’s steadied, stable, gathered, and whole can be a slow process and sometimes a very challenging process, but it’s a really worthwhile process. And so we’ll go through this and maybe you’ll discover something more about what I like to call the natural state, a healthy state that many of us have lost track with, that is invaluable for living a wise life. So this will be the focus: samadhi, the gathering together, the healing of the fragmented self into the whole self for the purpose of a deep peace.
So thank you, and tomorrow I’ll be back at IMC, and I’m happy to be with you on this beginning of the year.
Samadhi: A Pali word that is often translated as “concentration,” but more accurately refers to a state of collected, unified, and settled mind. It is a state of deep meditative absorption and tranquility. ↩ ↩2
Anapanasati: A fundamental form of Buddhist meditation that involves mindfulness of breathing. “Ānāpāna” refers to inhalation and exhalation, and “sati” means mindfulness. ↩
Sati: The Pali word for “mindfulness.” It refers to the faculty of remembering to pay attention to the present moment, without judgment. It is the first of the Seven Factors of Enlightenment. ↩