This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Settling into the Body; Samadhi (9) Recognizing Self-Made Limitations. 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 and welcome to this series of guided meditations related to Samadhi1. One of the very important aspects of Samadhi meditation is that it’s deeply attuned, deeply connected to our subjective experience. The contrast to that is objectifying our experience or being with the objective experience. There’s wisdom to both sides, though not much wisdom to objectifying exactly. But often when we suffer around ourselves or even around others, there’s a strong tendency to be caught up in objectification, seeing the objects, objectifying ourselves, seeing ourselves as an object of our ideas, our projections, our fantasies, our thoughts about what the future will look like, thoughts about the past, and building up all kinds of stories about the past.
There’s a removal, a stepping away from the immediate subjective world. And not subjective in the sense of being subjective because of our opinions, our preferences, our likes and dislikes, but a much more deeply subjective experience of being in the experience of our body, the embodiment, to be sensing and feeling the quality of our immediate subjective experience.
One of the things to notice is whether in our subjective experience, we are in fact viewing it through some idea, some concept, some sense of self, of me, myself. Some idea of how I’m supposed to be, some idea of what has happened to me. Of course, things happen to us, but then we live in the idea of that. Some idea of what’s supposed to happen in the future, some idea of what meditation is supposed to be like, what we’re supposed to experience, what’s supposed to happen. And we’re seeing the world through the filter of these ideas.
The alternative here is to feel, to sense the immediacy of the quality of our subjective experience. Does it feel pleasant or unpleasant? Does it feel whole or partial? Are we focused on a very small piece of the whole? And can we open up to feel more of the whole experience that’s here and now? Oddly enough, one of the ways to focus in a very partial way is to identify ourselves with just a piece of the full human experience we have. To identify ourselves mostly through our body, or through our pleasure and pain, or through the stories of our life, or through the concepts and ideas that we have inherited or made up. Even to think “we are consciousness” limits the full subjective experience.
So, to sit with a quality of our inner life subjectively, so it’s not an object to fix, to manipulate, to judge, to comment about. It’s just something to feel and sense.
Assume a meditation posture and gently close your eyes.
Maybe tell yourself that all of who you think you are, all your past and your memories and your judgments, all the ways in which you see yourself through the conclusions your thinking makes—it’s okay to put that aside as you’re going to meditate. We are entering into a sacred world in Samadhi, the sacred world of our subjective experience here and now, in and of itself.
And now with your eyes closed, allow the present moment experience of body, mind, and heart to be as it is. Feel the quality of it. Does it feel good or not so good? Is it comforting or not comforting? Is it settled or unsettled? You’re allowed to be whatever way it is. It’s okay. Is the inner life peaceful or is it conflicted? And putting away the ideas of all that, just to feel what it’s like to be peaceful within, what it’s like to be conflicted within.
And then to help you enter more deeply into this temple of Samadhi, or at least into the entryway, gently, lightly, easily take some deeper breaths. As you feel your body more fully, as you inhale, imagine that you’re entering your body, and with a longer exhale, settling into your body.
With a deeper inhale, entering into your arms and hands, feeling them for what they are. And as you exhale, softening, relaxing the arms, hands, fingers.
As you breathe in easily, deeper, enter into your legs and feet to feel the sensations of life in your legs and feet. Feel it on the inhale, relax your legs and feet as you exhale.
Maybe still breathing a little deeper than usual, but easing up a bit so it’s more easeful. Enter into your whole torso as you breathe in and settle as you exhale.
And as you breathe in, enter into your neck and your head, feeling the sensations there. And as you exhale, soften in the neck, in the head.
And as you inhale, in some simplest way that’s easy for you, feel your whole body or open up in a way as if you’re going to feel the whole body. And as you exhale, to settle the whole body. Settling into the settling place, the grounding point, maybe at the end of the exhale, deep inside from where the inhale begins.
And perhaps as you breathe normally, you can feel the hum of the body, maybe a subtle sense of vibration or flow or tingling that’s broader, wider in your body than any single thing you can focus on. As you breathe in, breathe into that hum. As you exhale, release the body.
And as we continue now in the body, breathing with the body, body with the breathing, notice when you lose touch with the body, or with the whole body. Notice how your thinking, being pulled into thoughts, ideas, pulled into treating things as an object, separate you from something which feels more whole or holistic in the body. And then if you can, relax back into the body here and now, this subjective experience of your inner life known through your body.
Notice how thinking might take you out of the body, away, a pulling back from the deep subjective experience. And that relaxing the thinking mind allows you to settle in to the simplicity of the body here, breathing.
The mind can rest more deeply if it’s not thinking so much. And if the mind can rest, maybe you can settle and rest deep into your body, settling into the settling point.
And as we come to the end of this sitting, if you feel your way into the quality of your inner life, inner being, how is it now coming to the end of the sitting? And if you could relax into, settle into your body even more, what would you settle into? What would you enter in your body? What deeper subjective experience or fuller, wider subjective experience?
And if you have relaxed some of the objectifications, some of the preoccupations, some of the ways of being in the world when we’re filled with desire and aversion, doubt and fear, imagine that you’re able to be open and kind, open and friendly, open with goodwill for the people you encounter. And that staying deeply connected and in touch with yourself allows you to remain kind and friendly without being pulled into the world of objectification.
And may we aspire for being available to the world with kindness, with friendliness, with goodwill, either secretly—no one needs to know—or through the acts of our body, our speech. May the treasure we carry through the day be our goodwill for others. May we have well-wishing that all beings may be happy, may all beings be safe, may all beings be peaceful, may all beings be free. And may we stay close to these wishes. May we go through the day with a deep subjective capacity for a warmhearted goodwill.
Hello to this Thursday talk, the ninth talk in the Samadhi series. The last three talks kind of focused on the hindrances. One of the purposes of those talks was to help you see in yourself the ways in which you limit yourself through being caught in the hindrances. The hindrances involve some kind of thinking, some kind of projected concepts, ideas onto the world, onto others, onto ourselves, some kind of being caught in preoccupation. And in doing so, we in some degree lose touch with ourselves. Of course, people might not feel that or think that because they think they are their thinking, they are their aversion, they are their desire. And so there’s no problem. They’re really in touch with themselves. They know exactly what they want, they know exactly what they don’t want, they are their fear. And so, you know, that’s who I am.
But if we go deeper in, we can feel how these hindrances—being caught in the thoughts and the ideas of desire, aversion, fear, doubt, regrets—that all these are a kind of limited world. We narrow the focus to those preoccupations. And the important thing to understand as we go into Samadhi is that we become partial, we become fragmented, we become divided, we become a limited part of a whole of who we are. And Samadhi is a process of becoming whole. The classic language of that is unification, gathering together all the parts of ourselves so they can be working and connected in a harmonious way together.
So today and tomorrow, I want to talk a little bit about how the process of identification does the same thing. And classically, that’s the steps the Buddha takes to develop, to go into this deeper quality of being. He first talks about overcoming the hindrances. And when those have settled down enough, then the next stage is something even deeper that still involves some kind of concepts, ideas, projections, some kind of limiting ourselves. But now it’s deeper, and sometimes we don’t even see it as a kind of thinking or concept. And that is the ways in which we identify ourselves, who we are.
And there are different ways that we establish “this is who I am,” at least in the moment, that in doing so, we limit ourselves, we short-change ourselves, we’re not available to the whole and fullness of who we are. So, you know, this morning I brushed my teeth. And if I had thought, “Wow, Gil, you are like really skilled at brushing your teeth. You’re like a really good tooth-brusher. And maybe the world has never seen someone so good at brushing teeth. And I just really know how to zero in on the different teeth, get them really clean. Boy, am I a good…” And I’m, you know, this is so important that I’m going to have to come down to IMC this morning and really let all the people on YouTube know, like, this is really an essential element of who I am, a tooth-brusher, and how good I am at it. And you really need to see that and understand that so you appreciate who I am and to affirm and confirm my very being as a tooth-brusher.
Well, it’s ridiculous, and I apologize to talk in such a silly way, but it’s intentional. To be focused on this simple identity of being a tooth-brusher, I kind of lose touch with a lot of things. I lose touch with maybe all of you. I lose touch with a sense of the world and the wider sense of who I am. I lose touch with the fact that at this moment, I’m not brushing my teeth, and I have more important things to do at this moment to sit here with you and try to share the Dharma. And to share it in a way that I feel connected to myself, to my body, to the very sensibility inside, the quality of inner life that I’ve learned through Dharma practice.
In many ways, some people get very identified with their physical appearance, and that becomes their way they limit themselves of who they are. And of course, if you ask them and say, “Are you your hair?” they’ll say, “No, of course not.” But functionally, people can be—that’s how they define themselves. Their sense of well-being and how they want to be seen by others can be through a physical appearance. Some people identify themselves very much by their comfort, how pleasant and unpleasant, how comfortable and uncomfortable things are. And it’s a crime against humanity to be uncomfortable, and we have to fix it because that’s who we are.
Some people very strongly identify with their values, their ideas, their concepts, their judgments that they have. And some people identify with their stories and their fantasies of the future, their stories of the past. And some people identify with this kind of quality of just “is-ness” or this quality of consciousness or cognition, the one who knows. And in the early Buddhist tradition, each of those ways of identifying yourself has the risk of sacrificing the whole. And it’s not necessary to be locked in and be defined only by this way and then live through that way.
I don’t want to convince you this way. The reason to talk about this is the degree to which you understand it. The idea is to learn to see and recognize in yourself how you’re living in a truncated way, how by being preoccupied or caught in some identity, you’ve now left out a lot of who you are. And that’s the discovery process that prepares us for Samadhi: to realize the limitations we put ourselves under. Because if we try to develop Samadhi while we’re in those limitations of the way of identifying ourselves in a certain way, we actually stand in the way of Samadhi. For example, if we identify ourselves as a poor meditator, that just—even if there might be some truth to that in some kind of way, it doesn’t matter. If we identify ourselves that way and stay living that identity, hold it on like a badge or hold it on like a coat, then we’re limiting ourselves from this moment, the fullness of now. We don’t need to live through the lens of being a bad meditator or a good meditator. We don’t need to live moment by moment all the time through the lens of being a victim or being someone who’s ill or someone who has certain challenges. We want to respect everything about ourselves, everything. So it’s not like pushing any of this away. But the gift of Samadhi is to learn that we don’t have to limit ourselves by any of this.
And so the task for today is not to break free of that, not to be different than who you are, but can you begin feeling your subjective experience in such a way that you can see that you’re living in a partial view, a partial view of your direct experience, a partial view of yourself in your direct experience? That you’re prioritizing certain things over other things, that you think some things are more important. And of course, in the moment, there are things that are more important than other things. And so to be fluid and move between that, of course, that’s the way to go. But to not carry something with us and keep ourselves limited and boxed in to one different mode.
The Buddha, if he had an orientation, it was to identify people by what they’re doing in the moment. And that’s enough. I’ll end with a short Zen story. There were two Buddhist practitioners who were talking about their respective meditation teachers. So the first one talks about all the miracles that their teacher could do. They could fly through the air, walk on water, see through walls, all kinds of things, disappear and reappear in different places, all kinds of amazing, supernatural things. And then the other one, who’s a Zen student (the first one was not a Zen student, some other form of Buddhism), the Zen student said, “Oh, well, my master, when she walks, she just walks. When she eats, she just eats. When she cleans, she just cleans.” And the first one said, “Oh, you have a great master,” and bowed down deeply.
This idea of just being what you’re doing and entering into that with your whole being, that is how you can identify yourself in the moment. And if you’re sweeping, you’re the sweeper. Be that fully with the wholeness of who you are, not to limit yourself by past, future, ideas. So that when I’m sitting here with you giving a Dharma talk, let me be here fully for this, unconcerned in this moment what a great tooth-brusher I am. That would limit it. That was not relevant in this moment.
So may you not limit yourself. And if you do, great. That’s what you want. That’s what you want to see happen. Because the task for the next 24 hours is to become an expert, really skilled, really attuned to noticing what it’s like to be limiting yourself to the objectification, to the partiality, to a particular preoccupation which doesn’t allow you to be fully here for what you’re doing. Learning that, don’t overlook that. Don’t feel like you have to be anywhere else. Don’t feel like you have to be whole. The task here is to understand how you limit yourself, how you limit yourself, maybe with identity. So thank you very much, and we’ll continue tomorrow.
Samadhi: A Pali word that refers to a state of meditative concentration or a collected, unified mind. It is a key component of the Buddhist path, leading to tranquility and insight. ↩