This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Spaciousness; Samadhi (14) Opening to Space. 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 start again, welcoming you all here and to say that the meditation journey is a lot easier if you understand it as a journey that’s leading to a profound capacity to be in the world in a new way. It’s a journey that takes us inward in a certain way, deep inward, almost like we could imagine to the source. And there, in a sense, we turn ourselves inside out, and then we can return to the world in a new way.
One way we return is as if the world begins with ourselves, begins in our hearts, begins deep inside. And how we are as we come out of our depths shapes the world—certainly the world that we see, but in a certain profound way, shapes the world around us. We want to have that shaping, that remaking of the world, come from a place of profound goodness, profound health, profound love or care—a care for everyone, no one left out of our hearts.
But to do this, we have to know that that’s the journey and then be able to put aside for the time being the preoccupations we have about the world, the future, the past, what’s happening now. Not to ignore it or abandon it, but to be able to come back in a better way. A willingness to suspend the usual preoccupation of the mind for a better cause, for a really good thing.
So, Monday I said samadhi1 is simplicity, and then samadhi is subtleness, then samadhi is steadiness. Today I’d like to contribute to this list that samadhi is spaciousness. We’re going inward, in a sense, and for those of you who are following along here, to use the breathing as the primary anchor or settling movement that settles us inside. To the settling place, as we do that, at the same time, we’re opening up to a spaciousness that’s the context, that’s the atmosphere that surrounds the experience of breathing.
This opening to a spaciousness, it’s almost like the peripheral awareness is aware of the space, and the primary focus is aware of this settled place within with the breathing. It is being involved in two things at once, but we do this often in our life. We go through a space that’s either crowded or a space that’s very open, and we’re primarily doing our task, walking perhaps, but we’re very aware that it’s crowded with people or very aware that there’s space to walk in. And either one affects us, and we might not be doing it so consciously, focusing on the people or the space, but it sets the mood, it sets a condition for how we’re going to follow our way.
So in meditation also, we can be attuned to the spaces around the breathing, and that contributes to a sense, eventually, that the mind doesn’t move. When we meditate, when there’s a lot of thinking going on and a lot of concerns and preoccupations, it’s very reasonable people say their mind moves. “My mind wandered away,” “it got distracted,” “it got caught up in something,” and then we bring it back.
But as the mind gets more and more settled, the idea of bringing the mind back, the idea that the mind goes anywhere, is just a metaphor. The mind never goes anywhere. And as we settle and feel the spaciousness, it gives us the kind of relief, “Oh, the mind doesn’t have to work so much.” The awareness seems to be arising out of the spaciousness, or in the spaciousness itself, having qualities of spaciousness: light, open, almost insubstantial.
So to assume a meditation practice and assume a meditation posture, gently close your eyes.
And to settle into here, you might begin by taking some long, slow, deep breaths, relaxing in the body as you exhale, relaxing in a settling way. So you’re settling your body.
Letting the breathing return to normal, and continue for a few breaths to feel your body on your inhale and relax the body on the exhale. Maybe relaxing different parts of the body in different breaths.
And similarly, as you exhale, to soften the thinking mind. If you can feel the sensations associated with the thinking mind—some pressure, tightness, weight, contraction, or some agitation, activation of some part of your head as you think—gently, softly soften the thinking mind. As if you are allowing the waves on a lake to settle and quiet down. Or if you drop a pebble into a lake, waves ripple out, but the further they go, the smaller they become until they disappear. Letting the mind, the waves of the mind, ripple out and quiet.
And then to settle in to your breathing. And if you have found a settling place deep in the experience of breathing, at the end of the exhale where the inhale begins, a place from which the in-breath arises and expands, and where the sensations of breathing end at the end of the exhale. And not searching for that or feeling for that from the control tower, but almost like having your mind deep in your torso, where awareness arises together with the inhale, together with the exhale.
Settling, and then having a steadiness through the inhale, a steady companionship for the whole length of the inhale, and a continuous attending to the exhale from the beginning to the end.
And here’s where you might steady your mind, steady your attention, so you can continuously follow one inhale, one exhale.
And as you follow the inhale, notice how it arises, it appears, it begins, grows, and comes to its end. And the exhale begins, continues, and comes to an end. And as the exhale comes to an end, allow your thinking to become quiet. And into whatever quiet there is, allow the inhale to arise.
A gentle steadiness with the breathing. Then become aware with your peripheral awareness of any sense of spaciousness, any sense of just beyond the edges of breathing. The edges of how you experience breathing is the beginning of a kind of space or openness, or maybe a kind of quiet or that kind of stillness. To whatever degree you can be aware of spaciousness, stillness, while you’re with your breathing. It’s almost as if the weather is spaciousness through which breathing travels.
And whatever feeling of spaciousness you have around the sensations of breathing will support you to not fixate on the breathing, but have a softness, an openness, that more like allows yourself to be aware, breathing in and breathing out.
If you sense space around the breathing, around you, if thoughts arise, don’t be troubled by them or involved in them. Let them drift away into the space, and you settled on breathing that’s in the middle of all things.
Perhaps rather than trying to be aware, you’re more like not trying and allowing. There’s an art to not trying that brings forth a deep awareness, spacious awareness, almost as if it’s always there waiting for you, and that breathing is at the center of it.
And then as we come to the end of this sitting, any idea of beginning and end exists in the midst of a wide field of spaciousness, openness, beyond the edges of the word. And beyond the edges of any word, any idea, in the space and the quiet between one sentence in the mind and the next, between one image and the next, there can be a silence, a stillness, a spaciousness that can exist together with the noise in the mind, the activities of the mind.
And perhaps to sense and feel the breathing room that spaciousness provides. Breathing room for all things can be left alone just to be. And as we end this sitting, perhaps we can do that for other people: give them space, give them breathing room so they can just be as they are, without our judgments and desires, wants, expectations. The gift of allowing people space to be themselves, maybe so they can see it more clearly, maybe so there can be a different way of responding.
May it be that this practice that we do helps us to contribute a respectful space, attention, awareness for all the people we see in our lives as spaciousness.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings be free.
And may our holding people in spaciousness support that possibility.
So hello and welcome to this next talk on samadhi. One of the things to appreciate is samadhi is not a practice per se; it’s a state. The practice as we do of steadying the mind, focusing the mind, being attentive to breathing, letting go of thoughts—there’s a lot of things we might be doing, but that’s not the samadhi, that’s the practice to enter into samadhi. And samadhi is a state; it’s actually a variety of different kinds of states of mind, of heart, of body, the wholeness that we can experience.
And then it’s important to appreciate that the practice, the instructions for meditation, can be state-specific. There’s a strong orientation for people to use as their reference point “me, myself, and I”: how I am now, how this is benefiting me, how it’s good for me, or if I like this or not, or if this works for me or not. And there’s a value in that to some degree, but we can get stuck in that kind of orientation as well. Meditation practice is meant to be something that helps kind of step out of that excessive self-orientation, self-referencing.
One way to do that is to appreciate that when we practice samadhi, practice meditation, we have to adjust our practice according to the states that we’re in. As we go through these teachings about samadhi, in a way, as we get further and further along, I’ll be talking about things that probably are not immediately relevant for many of you. And it’s appropriate for you, if you’re aware of yourself, to practice in an earlier phase of the instructions here. And often, the right place to be is as a beginner, or you have your own practice of how to get settled and get started in meditation. You’re welcome to go back and use that as well, because we’re often, it’s kind of like a pyramid as we practice, and we spend a lot of time creating the foundation. Even very experienced meditators start at the beginning, laying on the foundation, and then slowly over time the building of that pyramid maybe goes faster and faster, or quicker or something. But we don’t spend a lot of time in the higher states of samadhi. So just be aware that you have to adapt yourself to how I’m teaching here.
But also to participate with your imagination if it’s not directly what you’re experiencing. Maybe it’s evocative enough for you to imagine, in a sense, because what I’ll be offering is the landmarks that will become available as we keep practicing. And you might be able to better see the landmarks in the distance having receiving these teachings. You’re familiar with what’s coming, you’re ready to recognize what is useful to take in and where the path is, rather than just being in a big territory not knowing, not seeing the path, and just kind of wandering around. Even though it might be beautiful terrain, you’re still maybe wandering in circles.
So today, I was offering opening up to something I think very important for the deepening of samadhi or the expansion of samadhi, and that is spaciousness. And I’ll try to explain this a little bit better. We have an amazing capacity as human beings for spatial awareness. And I’m sure that there’s a range of how much that capacity exists in different people. To some degree, it’s a capacity that can be developed, and some people haven’t spent much time developing it. But it’s possible, for example, to close one’s eyes when we’re in a room and then with the imagination, imagine the size of the room, imagine the distance to the walls. Or if you’re sitting outdoors, you can close your eyes and imagine how expansive the outdoors is. If you’re sitting on top of a hill or a mountain and close your eyes, you can still remember something about how expansive the whole vista is in the mind.
So this idea of the mind has spatial awareness. We have a sense of what’s to the left, to the right, maybe even behind us a little bit. We can have a sense of distance between us and other people. Some of that is a deep functioning of the mind. If you’re going to toss a bean bag to a friend, some calculation goes on deep in the mind of how strongly to throw that bean bag, how high to throw it, how fast, the angle, the direction. All this is incorporating a sense of the space and distance and things that goes into our spatial awareness.
So sometimes we can close our eyes and have a sense of some kind of spaciousness around us. In very deep meditation, sometimes people have this sense of infinite space, that the space that they’re sitting in has no edges, has no limits, because edges are a concept the mind makes of this kind of thing of space. And so you can sit and be aware of, you know, with the eyes closed, imagining the room you’re in, and there’s a limit to that—the walls. But if you’re sitting on top of a mountain, the limit of it, maybe there is no limit going upwards out into space. And so that sense of limitlessness is sometimes breathtaking or inspiring, or it just kind of opens something up wide. If we’re in a claustrophobic space, it tends to support a kind of claustrophobic preoccupation with ourselves, our thoughts, our concerns.
So in sitting with meditation with the eyes closed, when we’re settled enough, when we’re still enough, when we’re steady enough, simple enough, there might be a time when we can start feeling the spaciousness in the mind, spaciousness in the body, a sense of kind of like there’s room for things. And because the mind is not filled with thinking—because thinking and desires and aversion, according to the Buddha, is what creates the limitations and the smallness of the mind—the mind becomes expansive. The mind of awareness, without those limitations of thoughts and concerns and preoccupations, desires, and aversions.
So as we get more settled, to begin to become aware of the spaciousness that’s here, so that we’re not riding the breath, like latching on or kind of zeroing in in a tight laser focus. But rather, the awareness itself starts becoming integrated or integral to that spaciousness. And the mind itself, the awareness itself, feels as part of the spaciousness almost. And so as the breathing comes and goes, sensations of breathing come and go, it feels like they’re coming and going within the atmosphere, the weather, the context of spaciousness.
One way of understanding this kind of spacious awareness is it’s not something you can fixate your mind on. If you look at the space in the room you’re in, if you’re in a room or outdoors, and try to really, you know, like stare down the space in the room, like really focus and really zero in at the heart of it, and you’re really going to let the space know that you see it—that kind of one-pointed focus that you would have maybe for someone you’re angry with and you’re just letting them know through your stare, it doesn’t work with the space around you. It’s almost like you’re better off not trying to look at the space as a point for the central focus of the eyes. You more like have to relax. Some people, when they’re looking at the space in any place at all, the natural tendency of the mind is that the eyes roam, and in the roaming, the gentle, soft moving, this is where we have some kind of inner sense with peripheral awareness maybe of the space in the room.
So rather than having a central focus, we have this peripheral focus of awareness. And like eyesight, there’s a kind of central focus and the peripheral awareness. And the peripheral awareness is always there, but it’s hard to focus on it in the way we can when we zero in on the central focus. So the same thing as we sit and meditate, the center of attention could be the breathing, but at the same time, we’re aware of this peripheral space around it. Both are going on at the same time. There’s two different, almost systems of awareness operating, and they both can be mutually supportive, operating at the same time. But in order to do this, the mind has to be quiet enough, still enough, settled enough. And that’s the work of developing the subtleness, and that allows the spaciousness to start to come.
The Buddha sometimes called this an expansive mind, mahā2, the expansive, because the mind itself feels like it’s starting to have lots of room. Rather than the mind caught and preoccupied by something, the mind that’s not caught opens up and relaxes and is expansive. And this spacious awareness, peripheral awareness, as we do subtle and steady on the breathing, makes possible the state of samadhi that is going to arise. And that will be the focus for tomorrow. I’ll talk a little bit about what begins to become possible with this settling and focus on breathing that becomes possible as we begin opening to the spaciousness.
In the meantime, until tomorrow, I’d encourage you to look for occasions where you can settle back to appreciate the spaciousness, the space, the wide space around you. Probably it works better outdoors, but you know, some places like here at IMC, there’s a really high ceiling, and so just looking up toward the space, your ceiling, that itself does something to the mind. See if you can appreciate, take time, have tea, look around, open to the spaciousness. If you’re lucky enough to live in a place where it’s wide open space of some, maybe a city park or a hilltop or something, spend the day specializing on becoming aware of open space all around you, so that that might help you to find that in meditation as well.
So thank you very much, and we’ll continue tomorrow. And tomorrow we’ll do the community meeting for our YouTube community on Zoom. And I’ll keep the YouTube channel open so those of you who don’t want to go on Zoom can attend that way. But for those of you who want to attend it on Zoom and ask questions and go into breakout groups to meet each other, that will be at 7:45. And the Zoom link is in the “What’s New” on IMC’s website. It’s also in the IMC calendar, and I’ll put it here in the chat tomorrow. And the password you’ll need is the Pali3 word for loving-kindness, which is metta4, M-E-T-T-A. So, thank you all very much, and look forward to tomorrow.
Samadhi: A Pali word for a state of meditative concentration or absorption, where the mind becomes still, unified, and focused. ↩
Mahā: A Pali word meaning “great” or “expansive.” ↩
Pali: The liturgical language of the Theravada Buddhist canon. ↩
Metta: A Pali word meaning loving-kindness, goodwill, or benevolence. It is one of the four “brahmaviharas” or sublime states of mind. ↩