This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Sweetness; Samadhi (15) Feeling the Sweetness. 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 Friday meditation session. To say a few words preparing us for the meditation, the phrase for today is that samādhi1 is sweetness. Samādhi has a kind of sweet quality to it. In case the word sweetness doesn’t have such positive associations with you as it does for me, there are other words that speak to the goodness that comes with samādhi. There can be a feeling of beauty, and feelings of beauty that come with it.
More classically, people talk about there being joy, gladness, happiness, sometimes bliss. A more simple and maybe a little more humble way of saying the same thing is there can be pleasure. Samādhi involves pleasure; something starts becoming very pleasant as the state of samādhi begins to develop. At first, it might be something very specific, like a feeling of pleasure that seems to radiate or come with the experience of breathing. Sometimes the experience of breathing can feel like it’s just beautiful; there’s a beauty to it. It could be that there’s a tingling and warmth and joy, maybe kind of similar to what would happen if you had a half-smile and turned up the corners of your mouth. There might be a little bit of delight, that physical delight that appears maybe in the eyes or the cheeks or someplace.
I’m calling it sweetness today, and that sweetness can start to be pervasive. The sweetness becomes a feedback loop where we feel the sweetness of samādhi. Allowing yourself to feel that—we’re allowed to feel it. We’re allowed to feel the pleasure, the joy that comes with samādhi. And it becomes kind of a biofeedback that goes on where we feel it, and it’s there to help us to stay focused, keep doing what we’re doing so we can keep growing and developing.
The second thing to say before we start now: when Buddhism arrived in China and they had to translate Indic Buddhist texts into Chinese, the way that they translated samatha-vipassanā2—samādhi-vipassanā—is for concentration, they use the word “stop,” and for vipassanā, insight, they use the word “see.” So together, the practice of samatha-vipassanā is to stop and see. There’s something about samādhi that does involve a kind of a stopping, and a stopping which is a relief, a stopping which is pleasant. This feels good. Oh, I’m here. I don’t have to do anything anymore. I don’t have to keep accomplishing or proving myself. I don’t have to finish my to-do list. For these minutes of meditation, of samādhi, it’s a radically alternative way of being alive, fully alive here without needing to accomplish anything. Just to be here, let everything, all the accomplishing, doing, activities stop.
With that, assume a meditation posture that is, in a way, the beginning of stopping. A clear sense that now we’re not going to be doing the activities of daily life. It’s a time for a sacred pause, for something that’s more important and valuable. And maybe you can feel the relief of stopping, to just be in this posture.
For these minutes in meditation, the only person who is going to be talking is me. So for all of you, you can stop the ordinary activity of talking, and so something gets quiet. Maybe it feels like a relief, or maybe not.
There can be an appreciation for stopping the need to think about things and solve things, and to feel the relief that now nothing needs to be accomplished, including accomplishing meditation. To feel the relief, the goodness of just being alive as you are.
Is there somewhere inside some sweetness, some goodness, some maybe very subtle pleasure somewhere for just simply being alive and awake and present?
Gently breathing in in a deeper way to feel your body more fully, and as you exhale, to relax. Relaxing the body. And relaxing is more a stopping of something than a doing of something. It’s the stopping of being tense, of holding the muscles tight. As you relax the body, if there’s anything that approaches pleasure in that relaxing, in the midst of the relaxing, feel that pleasure or feel that goodness.
Letting your breathing return to normal. And as you breathe in, feel some place in your body that’s tight, where the muscles are tense, and gently on the exhale, soften, relax. If it doesn’t relax, soften around it, make space for it. And if there’s any subtle pleasure in that, or relief in that, just feel that.
If there is now any feeling of sweetness or goodness, relief or pleasure, just sitting here without needing to accomplish anything, just being here, allow your breathing to be in the middle of that sweetness. Breathing with it, through it.
In a way that you stay with a natural enough breathing, if there are any small, tiny ways you can adjust your breathing so that it’s more pleasant, so there’s more pleasure in any part of the breathing, or if there’s already some pleasure in breathing, feel it. Some people will feel a certain pleasure, goodness, or relief during the exhale. Some people in the inhale. Some people in the pause, if there is a pause at the end of the exhale.
As you breathe, breathe with whatever pleasure, whatever sweetness there might be here. Maybe one that’s very closely related to doing almost nothing—the relief, the pleasure of just being. Just being with something so simple and fundamental as breathing.
For some people, the pleasure might come from the gentle rhythm of breathing in and breathing out, maybe like being comforted, gently rocking in a rocking chair.
Sometimes the sweetness related to breathing is just beyond the edges of the sensations of breathing. So in the body, maybe almost like radiating from breathing, the influence that breathing has in the areas close in around what is moving as you breathe. The area of space, spaciousness. Maybe the spaciousness that’s here has a kind of pleasure or relief, has space for joy.
If you need to let go of your thinking and relax your thinking mind, let go so that awareness drops into the sweetness in your body connected to the meditation. Relax the thinking mind to feel the pleasure of relaxing, letting the thinking mind be quiet so that you can better feel the sweetness of being present here and now, breathing one breath at a time.
If there’s anything that resembles sweetness, pleasure, contentment as you’re meditating, let that be an encouragement for the mind to be quieter and the body to be more open to the experience of breathing and the experience of sweetness, however subtle.
There’s an art to feeling the sweetness, the goodness that’s here, and within it, allowing whatever is not sweet, not pleasant, to float, to be there in the background. To not zero in or fixate on what is difficult, but allow it to float in a wider ocean of the sweetness of meditation that’s gently massaged by the breathing.
And then as we come to the end of the sitting, begin to feel whatever sweetness, goodness, calm, relief, pleasure, contentment, well-being, however small. To sense and feel into how it is right now for you in your body, your heart, your mind. Maybe having some sense that it can radiate out into the spaciousness, the space around you, even if it’s just an inch beyond your body. That somehow, imagine that your goodness, your sweetness is something that you can transmit to others. Not what you say, not what you do, but how you are. To share the sweet feelings you have, letting it radiate out into the world, and imagine that’s your gift today to the world.
Whatever goodness, whatever pleasure, well-being that comes from meditation, comes from being mindful and present, may that be a gift that somehow is transmitted, somehow radiated out into the world for the people that you’ll encounter. May it be that how you are today is for the welfare and happiness of others and for your own.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.
Thank you.
Welcome to this 15th talk on samādhi, this ongoing samādhi series. One of the things that this week perhaps you would have noticed is how seldom I use the word “concentration.” In the kind of phrase that I use for each day this week, the quality that’s being emphasized is not concentration. So, samādhi is simplicity, samādhi is subtleness, samādhi is steadiness, samādhi is spaciousness, and today, samādhi is sweet.
Maybe the closest thing to concentration in those five is steadiness. To be steady with your presence, be steady in your awareness, to be steady here with the practice. These five qualities don’t have to be separate; they can be part of the same state that we’re in. We can be sitting in a state of simplicity where meditation is not something complicated. It’s not an engineering feat; it’s not a complicated thing to do. It’s almost like an undoing, a not-doing more than it is a doing. It is a settling, a settling into something, and not a concentrating on something. It might be that the consequence of settling is that we settle so fully in a relaxed, full way that the world around the place we settle kind of falls away or recedes into the distance. It’s almost as if we’re concentrating on the subtle place, but rather than poking it from the control tower, it’s more like we’ve settled into it, like we would settle into a nice soft mattress. It just feels so good to settle into that, and we’re fully, completely here in that small little world where the body touches the comforter in the bed, and the rest of the world falls away. You could say we’re concentrated there, but to concentrate on that experience, for some people, immediately gets us tense, to strain, or gets us in the control tower. But to settle into it becomes something that becomes embodied, something that includes the whole body, the fullness of it.
This steadiness, holding steady, there’s something in us that I think loves being steady. It’s kind of like a commitment or a devotion or a simplicity of being just this. Because when we’re steady, something can relax into it, settle into it. I love to go hiking, and sometimes as we go hiking, it used to be this way when I used to run, if I just keep walking steadily, at some point, something settles in me. I arrive, and I’m just there in the walking, steady in the walking. But I have to walk steadily for the gathering of all the different parts of myself, where the distracted mind, concerns of the day fall away, and I’m just steady. It’s kind of like the steadiness allows something to gather around it.
Spaciousness is such an important quality for samādhi because to have a sense of being spacious, open, lots of openness, makes room for the sweetness that can arise in samādhi. Maybe some of you don’t care for the word “sweetness,” but in samādhi, there is a pleasure there. There is a sense of well-being. For me, one of the most wonderful words for the state of samādhi is “beauty.” There’s a feeling of a beautiful state that kind of radiates out, or the breathing has gotten quite beautiful and it kind of radiates a sense of beauty into the body. The most classic way of talking about it is there’s joy and happiness. Some people add the word “gladness,” so it’s kind of like each of those is a deeper and fuller experience that’s more and more satisfying. Some people use the word “satisfy,” and there’s a feeling of satisfaction at this. It’s really good here. And some people may like the word “goodness.” This feels good. Sometimes I’ve liked the word “health” because the settling into a good state of samādhi feels like an embodiment of health. Even at times when I’ve been sick, if I could settle into a samādhi state, it just feels like there’s this healing energy that courses through the body. It just feels so good, the healthiness, the health of it.
I’m not saying that this is easy, and I’m not saying that it should happen today or tomorrow, but this is one of the characteristics of samādhi. And so as we settle into the practice, it’s good to start becoming sensitive, aware when some of these good feelings begin to arise. These are good feelings which are symptoms of samādhi. One of the interesting things in the teachings of the Buddha is that he puts happiness as a precursor for samādhi. It’s a little bit odd to say that because many people are suffering a lot and they’re meditating in order to not suffer so much or to be free of their suffering, to work through it. And now to have samādhi, you have to be happy to begin with. But we always have the mindfulness practice to fall back to. For five years now on YouTube, the primary practice I’ve been teaching is mindfulness. So for those of you who have been following, the recourse is to go back to just being mindful of the experience until something settles and you feel like you’re able to be present with what’s happening in a simpler way. Then you can develop this quality of samādhi, this primary focus.
A lot of samādhi has to do with having a primary focus of attention, a primary place to settle, a primary place to be at home and to relax. The idea is moving into being absorbed in the experience. Maybe you could have as a reference point something you do in your life that you get absorbed enough into that you feel a kind of well-being in doing it. All the difficult thoughts and difficult feelings in life have fallen away as we do this simple thing that we get absorbed in doing. For some people, it’s reading a book. Some people, it’s doing a craft or playing an instrument. Some people, it feels really good just going into a shower; it lets everything else fall away, and it’s just nice to be in the shower. Some people start singing in the shower. It might be being with a friend that does that, or a walk in the park, or listening to music for some people can do it.
So there might be something that you already do that gives you a sense of what it’s like to have these qualities of this week: of simplicity, becoming simple just to listen to the music, just to do this one thing; where there’s a subtleness in it, where we’re not preoccupied and agitated by other things, just here with this; where there’s a steadiness and absorption like this here; and that there is a spaciousness around it because we’re not limiting ourselves in a tight way, but we’re relaxing into something. Something opens as we get absorbed. Sometimes with samādhi, things will get smaller and more narrow first before the spaciousness opens up, so don’t look for spaciousness too early, just when it starts becoming available.
Partly, I’m choosing the word “sweetness” because it has an ‘s’ in it, to be complete for the week. I think that if it wasn’t for wanting to stay with ‘s’s, I probably would have chosen “beauty” for myself.
So these are some of the characteristics of samādhi, and not necessarily easy to tap into or touch into, but they can be very subtle. If we already have a disposition in the mind to orient ourselves to what’s difficult, orient ourselves around our problems, orient ourselves around the pain we have, sometimes inadvertently, that’s actually where the samādhi is going. That’s where the concentration is going, to those things. And if we concentrate on things this way, where there’s a fear or aversion or something that is not so healthy, that focus on the problems actually can make the difficulty feel worse. Not to ignore it, but it’s possible to shift the primary focus to breathing, to the settling place, to keep settling, knowing that you’re not betraying the difficulties you have, but you’re placing them in a different context. It’s a really a delight to be able to sit in a state of goodness, a state of health, where the difficulties we have might be just like jellyfish floating in the vast ocean. They aren’t the ocean. They’re there and they’re recognized, but they’re being held by the goodness of samādhi.
Finally, I’d like to say that for next week, I won’t be here. I think Liz Powell will come, a wonderful teacher who lives in Colorado now, and I’m delighted that she’s going to be here with you all. In the meantime, at the beginning of the week, I encourage you to count your breathing because that can support the steadiness, and it can support all these qualities, provided you find a really nice way for the mind to do the counting: gentle, soft, beautiful, settled, spacious. See if you can find a way to count. There are different ways of counting as I described, but if you find yourself being able to settle into the counting, you might see if counting from 1 to 10 and then starting over again begins to support this settling in, the steadiness that really brings you to getting absorbed in this experience of breathing, of samādhi. I’ll be back the following week, and I look forward to this quite a bit to continue this.
Now, those of you who would like, we’re going to have a Zoom meeting for our community. I’ll put a Zoom link into the chat. If someone could go and get the Zoom link from the calendar and put it in the chat, I would appreciate it a lot. It’ll take me a minute or two to be able to make it to the Zoom room myself. You need a password to get into it, and the password is “metta,” M-E-T-T-A, the Pāli word for loving-kindness.3 I’ll be there shortly.
(Community discussion begins)
Gil: So, I think what we’ll do today is I’ll take some questions, hear from some of you, and we’ll do a breakout group. At some point before we do the breakout group, I have some announcements to make. Then we’ll do the breakout group and maybe have time for more questions. The function of the breakout groups is just a chance, maybe somewhat random, but the chance for some of you to meet each other and have some personal conversations. Some of you have been chatting daily on YouTube, and it’s been lovely to see the warmth and the friendship and the care that goes into some of those chats as you communicate with each other. So, happy to have you all here. Is there anyone who’d like to ask a question or make a comment? Ideally, they’d be somewhat brief so we can have a chance for more people to speak.
Catherine: I live in the middle of the woods, so this is a very special community for me to feel connected. I will try to keep it brief. When I first got back into meditating about a year and a half ago, I often felt more relaxed and calm by the end, which was a lovely feeling. Now I notice that a lot of the time, first of all, it’s much harder for me to settle, but also by the end of it, I often find that I’m experiencing more of the hindrance of restlessness and worry rather than less. It sort of amps up over the session, and I feel like there must be something that I’m doing to sort of engage it during the sit, but I haven’t been able to figure out what. So I was wondering if you had any thoughts or any suggestions.
Gil: Thank you, Catherine. The general way that I view these things is that many people when they start meditating, there’s often beginner’s luck. There’s a kind of excitement, there’s more focus because it’s new and exciting. The other thing that can happen is that we’re practicing well enough that we’re dropping into a deeper level of the mind in our psychology, and now it’s time that something has to be addressed. The analogy I use is if you move into a house where the people who lived there before you never cleaned for decades. The first thing you do is you manage to clean the entry hallway. You get it really clean, it’s nice, it’s easy to walk through, and you say, “Oh, this is good.” And then you open the door to the living room and, oh my, this is terrible. But actually, you’re making progress. You’ve taken care of one thing, now you have to take care of the next room. Many of us have a number of rooms that have been unattended and a little bit messy that as we settle, we’re coming to next. So that maybe makes it a little bit easier to have a more positive view of the challenge you have. Sooner or later, everyone who meditates will be up against some challenge where they think they’re going backwards. I like to think we never go backwards.
The question is, how do you address this? One way is to not be so concerned about the issue you had, but rather, what is your relationship to the issue? That might be the key thing to focus on. There are all kinds of secondary arrows we add to it that are more important to look at than the actual issue itself. If the second arrow stops, then it might be fine to sit there with the challenge, not so troubled by it, and then maybe you can see it more clearly. The other thing is you call it a hindrance, and we have these five hindrances. So you might want to go through carefully the five hindrances and see which one of them seems to be operating. The first thing that occurred to me as you described it, there might be some degree of doubt playing itself out. Doubt is one of the hindrances.
Feather: It’s so wonderful to see all these faces around the world. Gil, I love how at the end of every meditation you invite us to send goodwill to all people and all beings, and that no one is excluded. That really helps me settle. I find that in my loving-kindness metta, it’s quite easy for me to do that when I’m sitting. Yet at the same time, I’m finding it really difficult these days to witness suffering in humans and in animals when what I perceive is injustice and everything that’s happening in the world. I’m super sensitive and I get activated so easily by hurt. So I’m finding myself asking friends to not talk to me about politics and to stay away from news and TV and social media, and basically just be with my horse and be in this community and just shut it all out. I’m wondering if you can maybe say a word or two about how to practice with that sensitivity to the world.
Gil: Thank you. I think the first thing to do is to be very caring and respectful for how you are with all this. Without starting there, there’s not going to be much. Given this challenge you’re describing, what in you needs loving-kindness and compassion? Maybe it’s premature to do it for all beings. Something in you needs to be attended to first. The chances are there’s something unresolved in you that needs to be recognized, met, loved, cared for, understood. I’ve seen very, very many times that when people have this level of difficulty, it’s because something unresolved deep inside is being touched by the suffering of the world. It’s kind of like putting a magnifying glass on the suffering of the world or a magnifying glass on our own heart, the unresolved emotional issues that are there. They need to be cared for, loved, attended to in a wise, caring way. Sometimes just sitting in meditation and being really present for these unresolved places of suffering is a way forward. But sometimes that’s a slow process, and maybe what’s needed is to get some kind of ongoing support from a loving, caring person who can really attend and support you and accompany you into this territory. In the modern world, it would generally mean some form of therapy. I put a lot of value on somatic therapy because it’s a way that uses the body to be present for these unresolved things that is very akin to what we do in mindfulness practice.
Wendy: I want to incorporate more forgiveness in my practice. I heard the Dharma talks on forgiveness and I’ve done the forgiveness meditations, but what I’m looking for is maybe more or just other ways to forgive others and myself, and even those who don’t know that they’ve done something when I’m holding a grudge. What to do? I guess what I’m looking for is more of an action-related meditation.
Gil: This is a very welcome question. I put a tremendous amount of appreciation and value on this desire to address the challenges of our life with forgiveness. Rather than answering your question directly, I’d like to offer you the more classic Buddhist response to the same situation. Generally, in early Indian Buddhism, the kind of Buddhism that I base my teachings on, there’s not really an emphasis on forgiveness the way that it’s understood in the West. In Western culture, where forgiveness is deeply embedded, it comes out of theistic religions and relationships to God. Indian religion doesn’t have the same worldview. For the challenges you’re describing, what Buddhism offers might look like forgiveness, might have the same effect, but it doesn’t involve forgiveness. What it involves is letting go of one’s own anger and resentment, and the other is to cultivate loving-kindness and goodwill. Those two things do almost the same thing as forgiveness, except we’re not actually forgiving or condoning what someone has done. We let that be their karma, and we’re just telling them we’re no longer going to hold it against them with our anger and resentment. We’re going to meet them with goodwill, but they are responsible for their actions and the consequences. I’m just not going to hold it against you, and I’ll meet you with goodwill. For some people, that makes the whole idea of forgiveness a lot easier.
Charlie: Thank you so much for your online meditations; they help my life very much. My question would be about samādhi. I really appreciate the recent samādhi teachings. There are two things that I’ve learned to fold into my meditation over the years that helped me to settle and expand my awareness, and they’re both not the breathing. One is that I use sound, what I hear. It feels like it’s less inside me and I’m more connected with the world when I use sound as the object of meditation instead of the breathing. The other thing is metta. Over the years, I’ve realized that just being with the breathing sometimes, there’s a boredom or a lack of purpose. When I start meditation with metta or include an aspect of that, something really light, just like connection, my bodhisattva vow, and bring that into my meditation and use that to settle my mind—those two things are what I tend to do. I know the breath is so simple, and sometimes I come back to just that, but those two things seem to work better for me. I just wonder about your guidance on working with those things.
Gil: Thank you. First, I’d like to say that yes, there are people for whom there are better objects or focuses of meditation than breathing. Especially if you’ve done one for a long time, you’re welcome to continue with that. As we go further with the samādhi practice, I’ll keep referring to breathing, but you’re welcome to translate it into these other practices you’re doing. One approach is to do these means that you have for developing your concentration and being settled, and when you’re feeling really settled, then switch. Don’t start with the breath, but pick it up once you’re really settled, and then you might find that it actually supports you to go further into the samādhi than what you’re already doing. Listening meditation can be very helpful because you can’t interfere with the sound. You can’t make a better sound; you can’t get entangled with it in the way some people do with their breathing. So it’s a way of being spacious and allowing. Metta is a classic one in our tradition for developing concentration. Some people will start every meditation with 5-10 minutes of metta to get somewhat settled and concentrated and to create a good atmosphere in the mind. However, I still orient myself to something like breathing because at some point, the orientation to listen to sounds… the sounds begin receding away, and you want to be able to keep staying focused on something that’s more basic. Breathing in the body tends to remain as we go into samādhi; sounds can usually disappear entirely at some point in deeper samādhi. And metta, if you’re using metta phrases, they become at some point a little bit too coarse and the phrases have to go away as well. Then you’re dropping into the body to feel the radiance of the metta rather than the mental side of it.
Lou: We were all very grateful that you have been online now for four or five years and available to us. I just wanted to mention what we have formed here in Nevada City, Northern California. There are about 10 of us locally who follow you and have been doing that for years, and we have formed our own sangha. We meet weekly, we discuss your teachings, and it’s provided an opportunity for us to share at a deeper level and also form a community that supports one another in times of need. Your teachings have been the basis for our gathering, so thank you very much. It’s an example, I think, of what others could possibly do at the local level.
Gil: Lou, thank you. That was wonderful to hear. It’s very gratifying to hear that kind of initiative.
Debbie: After I fell last week, a friend said, “Oh, tatra majjhattatā.” What is that?
Gil: It’s a word that’s sometimes translated as equanimity, but it means more like balance. It literally means something like “in the middle of it all.” So it means something like standing in the middle of it all and being able to hold your balance in all the difficult challenges of daily life. Upekkhā (equanimity) has more to do with wisdom; we have an overview of the situation that’s wise, so we’re not going to be reactive to it. But tatra majjhattatā4 means more that we have an inner strength to be able to stand there, be present, but we’re not reactive because there’s a strength, like standing on a rocking boat and you have the strength to stay balanced. You don’t have any wisdom, but you have strength and balance.
Karissa: I just want to say thank you so, so much, Gil. That was really, really beautiful. I just wanted to share that in our group, to feel the common humanity of the suffering that has brought us all here was very beautiful. I felt so connected. It felt like a place where all of our tiny little squares… there’s so much life in each one. This is just a silly little example of something that I do to feel common humanity when I’m feeling like I’m really suffering. I imagine this person that I’ve named Lucy who lives in Senegal. When I’m hurting and when I’m feeling pain and when it becomes suffering, I imagine that she, this imaginary person, is feeling the exact same way for her own situation, and that we’re both in this suffering together. We realize that there’s common humanity with us, and we both send our spirit energy, our metta, to each other, and it kisses over the Atlantic and comes back to us. That’s what I feel here. I feel that we’re all suffering and we all have this pain in different ways, and as we connect, then it can go back to each one of us because of this support in the sangha. I really felt that in the breakout rooms, and I’m just really, really grateful.
Gil: Karissa, that was wonderful to hear. All of what you said was very meaningful, to hear it and know that this orientation, this understanding is happening here in this community. Thank you very much.
Cindy: When Matthew was teaching for a week, we had a lot of discussion about grief and loss, and so he did a Zoom meeting for us, which was really great. Maybe some of the substitute teachers could do that, because I think it’s really meaningful to this group to see each other and have the exchange.
Gil: That’s a great idea. I will recommend it to them. Thank you. Okay, so until next time. You’ll have Liz next week, and I’ll be back the following week. Thank you, bye-bye.
Samādhi: A Pāli word for a state of meditative concentration or collectedness of mind. It is a key component of the Buddhist path, leading to tranquility and insight. ↩
Samatha-Vipassanā: A Pāli term referring to the twin practices of tranquility (samatha) and insight (vipassanā). Samatha calms the mind, while vipassanā develops insight into the nature of reality. ↩
Metta: A Pāli word meaning loving-kindness, friendliness, or goodwill. It is one of the four “brahmavihāras” or sublime states, cultivated through meditation. ↩
Tatra majjhattatā: A Pāli term for equanimity or balance, specifically referring to the ability to remain centered and balanced in the midst of life’s changing conditions. It implies an inner strength and stability. ↩