This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Relaxing; Samadhi (8) Learning from Tension. 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.
Hello everyone, and welcome to our meditation. I want to begin in the usual way that I teach. Because it’s so usual, it can be seen as rudimentary, so basic, or for beginners, or simplistic, but it’s actually quite important and has a very profound possibility. And that is to relax. To be able to recognize the difference between when we are tense and when we are relaxed is invaluable for finding our own way with Dharma practice, all the way to liberation. Because what keeps us from being liberated will, in one way or another, be understood as involving tension, clinging, grasping, and contracting.
So, to begin recognizing the difference between tension and the release of tension penetrates deeply into our hearts, our minds, our body. Starting off with relaxing is very significant. One of the reasons why relaxing is so important is that tension pulls—it’s almost like it pulls something out of the whole. It’s like if there’s a lake, and it’s all one big, nice lake, but then a piece of it begins to freeze up. Now it’s frozen, rigid, and it’s kind of pulled itself out of the liquid state and might not even recognize or be so attuned to being with its partners, with the water.
So as we get tense, something about us—our attention, or focus, or preoccupation—tends to become smaller or narrower, and we’re coming away from the fluid state of being that we can be in when there’s no tension, no rigidity, no tightness, and no contraction. As we get ready to go deeper into samadhi1 over this next period of time, this is very important because samadhi is a unification of all of who we are, bringing all of us together to become like a fluid, clear lake of water. That’s the metaphor the Buddha gives. So, to relax and return and feel how relaxing begins to return us to something that’s more whole, it kind of opens us and fills us to more of what’s actually happening.
So, assume a meditation posture. Maybe thinking of your posture as the wide, soft basin of a lake, which holds all the changing, fluid, flowing water of our life. And to establish and ground oneself in that basin. So, feeling your posture, gently closing the eyes, and taking a few long, slow, deep breaths. Gentle breaths, not too big a breath that is tiring or challenging, just enough to be comforting and pleasant. A reminder of the wholeness, the fullness of who you are in your body. And as you exhale, longer than usual, let go, relax, soften the body.
Letting your breathing return to normal, and breathing in a normal way, scan through your body to see where there is tension, contraction, or tightness. See if you can be untroubled by that; it’s okay. As you breathe in, feel the tension, and as you exhale, invite the tension to relax. Welcome it to soften back into being part of the whole of the body, no longer frozen. Welcome it back into the lake of the body.
And as you relax, whenever you have the opportunity to relax, don’t let relaxing be a simple task to do. Relax, soften, release. Take your time to feel the goodness of relaxing, what flows, the pleasure of it. Feel how it might be, how it feels better to relax the muscles than it is to keep them tense.
Where the gentle rhythm of breathing in and breathing out is a gentle massage for the holdings in the body. It can be quite subtle, maybe in the fingers, the wrist, the elbows can be a little bit tight, held. The shoulders, the belly, the area around your diaphragm, the center of the chest.
And then up into the face. Sometimes the tension associated with thinking manifests in the area around the eyes, the forehead, sometimes the jaw, sometimes in the throat or the back of the neck. Sometimes thinking is a sense of pressure, a contraction deep in the head. Be untroubled by this. And also, as you exhale, relax. Maybe letting there be a calming in the body sensations connected to thinking.
And then centering yourself on the breathing. And even in the middle of breathing in the body, is there little room to relax and soften? Maybe at the end of the exhale, so the exhale extends a little bit. Maybe near the top of the inhale, relaxing that allows the body to receive the inhale.
From time to time, in a relaxed way, notice if there’s any tension in your body, mind, or heart. And if it’s easy enough, relax the tension. Don’t make it a big project. And if it’s difficult to relax the tension, then relax your attitude around it. Soften around it. And notice what is pleasant or good or wholesome in the relaxing, the softening.
As you’re sitting here meditating, where in the field of your attention do you feel an absence of tension, an absence of contraction, tightness? Maybe an absence of clinging? Breathe into that, breathe with it. Relax into where there is no clinging, there is no tension.
And as we come to the end of this sitting, take a few moments to feel or sense, in whatever way and wherever you might be, calmer, less tense, more relaxed from having done this meditation. Sometimes the more calm or relaxed we become, the more it highlights where we are still tense. And if that’s the case, don’t be troubled by that. Appreciate how valuable it is to hold our life in our attention, in awareness. Maybe a calm awareness, a relaxed awareness. Sometimes when there’s both tension and relaxation at the same time in our body, it can be an inspiring contrast, inspiring what’s possible and inspiring what practice needs to still be done.
And may it be that our ability to stay relaxed with our tensions decreased, that it allows us to be more present for others in our life, people we know, people we don’t know. It gives us a chance to take our time, to see more deeply, listen more carefully.
And may it be that this practice that we do increases our capacity to be present for others with kindness and care, goodwill. May it be that even in a silent way that we’re with others, wishing them well, a well-wishing presence.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.
So hello and welcome to this Wednesday morning talk, the third talk of the week and the eighth talk of the series on samadhi, which will go on for some time. In laying down the foundations for samadhi, an effective samadhi, what needs to be in place first? I’m emphasizing how we divide ourselves, limit ourselves, and lose the sense of our wholeness, the fullness of all of our capacities.
Sometimes, if we really want something our eyes see, we might be focusing only on what we can see. If we want some particular object, we don’t see anything else; we just focus on that thing that we want. And so the full capacity of hearing and smelling and sensing and taking in the wider world is limited by the strength of desire. Now, of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. From time to time, it’s helpful and important to do that, to be focused. But we get stuck that way. And people get stuck for a lifetime sometimes—strong desires, strong aversion, strong fears, strong pulling that way, closing up, closing our hearts, avoiding what’s really difficult in us, difficult unresolved emotions, staying in our head and our thoughts, staying focused on others rather than ourselves, or staying so focused on ourselves that we’re not aware of others.
This kind of partial attention, selecting a piece of the whole to be caught in or to separate from, is what gets in the way of a healthy samadhi. And healthy samadhi is a state of being that’s going to open up to all of who we are. In a sense, samadhi is what knits it all together, heals it all, so it can all be together in some kind of wider whole of attention.
The Buddha uses a lot of metaphors for samadhi having to do with water—sometimes flowing water, sometimes very still water, sometimes a very clear pool of water, especially lakes and pools of water. Something about being in samadhi can feel like different forms of lakes: lakes with a nice current in them, lakes that are very still, lakes that are very clear. And what all these lakes have in common is there’s no mud, there’s no algae that covers them, there’s nothing frozen, there are no dams that are blocking anything. It’s just natural water in a natural basin, just being there.
It’s possible to go down to the lake and pull out a bucket of water and walk around and tell people, “This is the lake, this is my lake, I’m having the lake.” But the bucket of water is just a bucket of water, and now we’ve left the lake behind, taking a piece of the whole. This movement towards dividing ourselves up, being separated from the whole, often comes along with tension, some kind of clinging, some kind of tightening in our muscles, in our hearts, in our minds, some kind of closing down, some kind of contraction, constriction, some kind of craving.
This movement of tightening that goes on, one way or the other, is something that we want to become aware of, and aware of the unnecessary cost that comes with it. Now, temporary tightening, doing something that needs to be done, that has to be taken care of, of course, is fine. It’s when we get stuck in it that is the problem. So when we sit down to meditate, that’s the time where we try to set up situations where it’s safe enough, simple enough, and nothing needs to happen much, that it’s okay for the tensions and the tightening that have built up to relax and to soften, and to learn from that.
It’s profound to become aware of tensions because, one way or the other, all that keeps us from being fully liberated, fully awakened, is something which is being held tight, something which is contracted, something which is tense, and something which is closed or blocked off—again, in the body, in the heart, in the mind. And the progressive softening of that, relaxing of it—sometimes they use the word letting go, releasing, liberation. Liberation is a very glorified and powerful and impactful form of relaxing.
So to begin becoming wise about the distinction between relaxing on one hand and tightening on the other teaches us so much. And we can question: is it necessary to stay tight? Is this situation necessary? Is there another way of being?
I’ve been going through the five hindrances a little bit these first few days, and the fifth hindrance is doubt or uncertainty. We can have doubt about many different things. To think that this word for doubt here in the hindrance is for any kind of doubt we might have can actually limit us from the full potential of becoming free.
For example, if I need gasoline for my car and I see that up ahead on opposite sides of the street are two gas stations that I’ve been to before, but I’m uncertain which one to go to. Wow, look, they have both the same gas price today. But one of them has clean bathrooms, but the other one has good coffee. But one of them keeps their machine and their nozzles really clean, so I feel comfortable grabbing it with my hand, but the other one has it kind of dirty. But the clean one, I have to make a little bit of a dangerous U-turn to go to, and the other one I can just pull into quite easily. But there’s a lot of people and a little line of cars in the one that’s easy to get to, but the other one is a little bit dangerous to go to. So what do I do? And so I’m kind of stuck. And so I just stand in the intersection. The light turns green, it turns red, green again. I’m just sitting there in my car, kind of, what do I do? I’m uncertain. I have doubts. I’m filled with doubts.
That’s not that kind of doubt we’re talking about in the Dharma. In the same situation, there’s no doubt about where to bring my attention. The attention should go into how I’ve now gotten tense, how I’ve gotten contracted and frozen in some kind of way. And that is where things are unwholesome. That’s where life is becoming deadening. And to soften that, relax. Maybe it’s not so important. Maybe the decision of where to go for gasoline… maybe what I should do, if I’m relaxed and open and don’t allow myself to tense up around this, maybe I see when the light turns green that I go, and if I need to kind of wonder what to do, let me just pull over in a parking spot. And I have better things to do, after all. I had a nice meditation this morning, and I’m still feeling the resonance of that in my body, and now I’m getting tense around this gas station question. I’m better off coming back into the calm of my meditation. Let me go to the park over there. I have a lot of time today. Let me just sit there for five minutes. Let me sit and just forget about the whole dilemma of gas stations. Let me kind of… I’m better off staying close to my relaxed state. I have no doubt, I have no uncertainty that this more relaxed, open, available state is a healthier place to be. I still don’t know which gas station to go to, but now at least it doesn’t matter that much anymore, because what matters is that I’ve returned to some kind of healthy way of being.
So when we’re talking about the hindrance of doubt, it’s not necessarily that we can have thoughts about a lot of different things, but we have no doubt that it’s useful to stay relaxed, not get frozen and caught. What we want to do as we prepare to go into samadhi, we want to get ready by becoming connoisseurs, experts on recognizing all the ways in which we unnecessarily get tense, unnecessarily tighten, and how we can do one of two things: either relax the tension in the body, heart, and mind, or if we can’t easily relax it, open up around it, soften around it, recognize it’s happening, where the recognition is very different than being swept into the tension and the concerns and the preoccupation.
This beginning to kind of open up and relax and soften around tension, and learning to see that distinction between all the variety of tension—which is every part of the kind of suffering we’re trying to overcome in Buddhism; suffering always has some kind of tension in it, some kind of stress in it—we want to really be able to see that and do that. And as we begin seeing it, we’ll slowly begin to learn how to open up more widely. And maybe not so wide before we start doing the samadhi part of this course, but then we’re prepared to receive the opening, to allow the opening into the whole lake of our being that samadhi is. We’re not blocking it. We understand the dynamics, we understand how we’re holding ourselves back, and we can maybe then allow it to soften and open up.
So for the next 24 hours, the next week, the next month, the next lifetime, make it the best study you can of your own experience of tension and relaxation. Make it a real study. You can journal about it, you can go for walks with friends and talk about the experience and what you’re learning. Really kind of try to sensitize yourself so that this is something you’re really focusing on. And as I said yesterday, you might want to put a timer on some kind of clock, maybe at some kind of reasonable interval, every 30 minutes maybe or something—it could be sooner, it could be longer—where an alarm goes off to remind you to check in: where am I tense? What tension am I holding here? So that you really keep it on the forefront as an exercise for the next while. It’ll be invaluable when we eventually get to samadhi.
So thank you very, very much. And as usual, I’m very much looking forward to continuing in the morning, tomorrow morning.
Samadhi: A Pali word for a state of meditative concentration or collectedness. It is a state of deep, unified, and tranquil awareness, often described as a key component of the Buddhist path to awakening. ↩