This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Organizing the Mind; Samadhi (18) Organized Mind. 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. Welcome to this meditation that’s part of the series on Samadhi.1 As an introduction, I’d like to say that Samadhi is a very personal experience, a very personal way of being in the world and being with oneself. And so no one, including myself, can give you precise instructions or metaphors that are tailor-made for you. But I’m hoping in this series that I’m teaching enough that there will be things, even just one thing, that really supports you, that really helps you as an entryway into this mind which is undistracted, a mind which becomes clear and really enters into the meditation in a meaningful and deep way for you.
One of the ways to understand the instructions I am giving is that they’re all meant to be ways for you to understand yourself better. So even if some of the instructions I give here don’t work for you, that doesn’t mean that you should dismiss or ignore them. Rather, they are a means by which you can understand yourself better—to understand what doesn’t work and by that, maybe have a better sense of what does work. Or maybe there are ways of understanding what doesn’t work that teach you something about how your own mind works, so that you can have more clarity and understanding.
With that in mind, the emphasis I want to make today is that the unification and inclusivity of Samadhi practice can also involve what I call organizing ourselves, bringing together all the disparate parts of us and kind of bringing them together, almost like puzzle pieces that fit together, that are working together. Maybe it’s an unfortunate metaphor, but rather than puzzle pieces, maybe it’s like Lego blocks that we put together so they all fit together nicely, as opposed to having a centrifugal force in our thinking that spins us out into many preoccupations and concerns. We keep spinning, we keep scattering ourselves, scattering our attention, scattering our focus and our concerns because we have too much going on and too strong a pull into the fascinating worlds of desire, aversion, and fantasy.
It’s not just simply that these thoughts and activities pull us away from the present, but they also pull apart the mind. They pull apart the body. If we get tense and preoccupied, there can be a tensing and a lifting that kind of removes us from a settled, unified feeling. Sometimes that lifting goes all the way up into the head, and we mostly live in our head, where we’re no longer—all the building blocks of who we are haven’t come together so that they are settled on each other.
The thinking mind also can sometimes not even be in the present moment; it can be ahead of ourselves, behind ourselves, in another place. But physically, we can sometimes feel that the energy, the thinking mind, the tension, the agitation, what’s activated maybe in our head, in our brain, is in the front of the brain, or maybe the brain is now more kind of zeroed in on the eyes, and the mind has gotten small. Or it’s gotten maybe mostly preoccupied on the left side or the right side of the mind. There’s a kind of way in which the mind starts feeling not complete, not whole, not settled on itself.
There’s a way of organizing the mind, bringing all the pieces together so they are right there. Similar to how you would organize your body if you were going to play ping-pong, and you’re ready for someone to serve the ball to you, you would kind of get your body ready, organized, and the whole body is coming together to be there for that activity. The orientation of the mind’s attention is now oriented and brought into the tabletop, the other person’s hand, the ball—just right. Everything’s kind of organizing itself in order to be there for the game of ping pong.
The same thing with the mind. This is where most people don’t have a very good sense of the physicality, the physical sensations of their mind, and what is activated, agitated, or energized in the mind, and where, and what’s included and what’s not, or the directionality of the different kind of centrifugal forces of thinking in the mind and preoccupations. The mind, too, can come together into a whole, into a settled, interconnected peace. So that’ll be the instructions today, and it’ll maybe work for some of you. And for those of you for whom it doesn’t, maybe it helps you see and understand something about yourself.
So, assume a meditation posture that is a posture of organizing your body, so that as much of your body as possible is now going to be participating in the meditation. How your feet are positioned, so the feet themselves support attentiveness, presence, being grounded. Maybe the soles of the feet are touching some surface. Maybe the positioning of the legs… and if you’re sitting on a chair or a cushion, the way that the cushion or chair receives the weight of your body. Can you move a little bit, sway back and forth, so that weight feels grounded, feels full, feels solid, to support being here? And adjusting, organizing your torso, your spine to be here, participating, ready for anything in meditation.
Gently closing your eyes. And just as you’re breathing, feel your body on the inhale. Feel where you’re agitated, tense, where you’re activated, maybe so there’s a prioritization of certain parts of your body at the expense of others. Feeling that on the inhale, and then on the exhale, to relax the body, settle the body, with the idea that as the body settles on itself, the body is coming together, being organized so that all the parts are somehow cooperating or here in the same way.
Is there any way that your body, your chest, your heart, any part of your body is energized or engaged or activated by some emotional state? And is it a state that’s more likely to take you away from a kind of wholeness of who you are, to have you preoccupied with a particular emotional state? Just knowing that, feeling how that emotional state might be alive in some part of your body. Feeling that as you inhale, and on the exhale, relaxing the emotional state, relaxing the body associated with that state. Maybe the emotion doesn’t go away, but maybe it’s allowed to settle more deeply into some place where you feel more grounded with it, where the wider body is there to hold it or support it, so it doesn’t need to be a preoccupation. It’s okay.
And then on the inhale, feeling any sensations associated with the thinking mind. Is there any tension or pressure, contraction, any activation, agitation in any parts of your head or anywhere else in the body that seems connected to thinking? Is there a preoccupation with thinking, with thoughts, that takes you away from yourself, divides you from the rest, the whole? A prioritization of the concerns you have?
And as you exhale, soften the thinking mind. Let it relax. Maybe with the image of a wide lake with waves, that the waves begin to settle and slow down and get smaller until the lake becomes wide and flat and still. So the thinking mind quiets, slows down, settles, becomes broad and still. Maybe allowing all the water of the lake, all the activity of the lake, to rest on the lake bottom, where the weight of the mind is allowed to settle into the body.
In that settling, if there’s any sense of the mind having different parts, different pieces, where not everything is included, as you exhale, let all the mind settle together into a settling place where the thinking mind can be received and supported, reassured. That kind of reorganizing of the mind, so everything comes together.
And however close and whole, complete the mind may feel, orient the mind to rest, focus, and include the experience of breathing. Where every exhale allows all the parts of ourselves to settle together into the experience of breathing, the gathering place, the settling place.
As a way of organizing the mind to be more here and unified, let your thinking mind be involved with the thought of counting the exhales, one to ten. And if you lose count, no problem, begin again at one. Counting not as a strain and not as something to worry about or to be successful at, but each count a settling, a relaxing, helping the mind come together in an organized way to settle into the gathering place of breathing.
And then as we come to the end of this sitting, to allow for a fuller settling on the exhale. And even if you’re unsettled in some way, to feel the way that you are settled now. Settled in your body, in your heart, in your mind. Maybe with every exhale, a soft wholeness in this settling. All of yourself letting go, settling in, gathering together in the gathering place, maybe at the very end of the exhale, letting go here.
And from this settled place, to gaze upon the world kindly. To gaze upon this world peacefully. To take in and include the whole world compassionately, almost like you’re inviting it all in to sit and be settled with you. Almost as if you’re making space and room and accompaniment with the world, so that whatever comes into your orbit also has a chance to settle and be at ease.
Being settled and gazing upon the world kindly: May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.
And may the way that we can be settled on ourselves be a support for the welfare and happiness of others. Certainly, at least, may the ways that we get agitated and reactive not spill out to influence more of that in the world.
May all beings be happy.
Thank you.
Hello, and welcome to this series of talks on Samadhi. Samadhi is not an abstract topic for intellectual interest only, but it’s a topic about ourselves, about how we can be present and engaged in really whatever we’re doing. The general focus of the series is on meditation, and that connection to Samadhi is so strong that sometimes the word Samadhi is a substitute for the word meditation.
But really, the ability to be fully present, oriented, organized, and absorbed in anything makes anything a subject for Samadhi. For those of you who are going along with this series and wanting to cultivate Samadhi in meditation, it’s greatly supported by beginning to take what you’re learning about yourself—about how you can be settled, how you can be oriented, organized, simple, still, spacious—and bring that into different activities in your life. So it’s not just something you do in meditation, but something that you’re beginning to spread through your day. That way, when you come to meditation, you’re already familiar with the territory. You haven’t been out of touch with it for a long time, and it’s more easy to be connected to it.
I learned this when I was in the monastery and I had a very busy, full job in the kitchen, being a cook for the large monastery. I didn’t have a lot of time for meditation, but I started to practice this in the monastery with the activities I did. I had a question that I carried with me that was my contemplative question for the year I was in the kitchen, and that was the question: “How can I participate more fully with what I’m doing in the kitchen?”
So whatever I was doing—if I was chopping vegetables, if I was washing pots and pans, if I was putting together ingredients in a pot, if I was walking around with a dirty pot to bring it to the sink and there were other people working—whatever I was doing, how could I be in that activity in a sense of really participating in it? Why it was important for me was that right away when I started work in the kitchen, I didn’t want to be there. My mind was elsewhere, I had other plans and other aspirations, and I was preoccupied with other issues with people I’d been talking to. I felt myself scattered. I felt myself being propelled out of the present moment, propelled out of what I was doing. The antidote to that, as a way of learning about myself, was: “How can I participate with what I’m doing here?”
The consequence of that, after some months of doing this, was that if I would go to the meditation session after working in the kitchen, I would show up in the meditation already concentrated, already there, present. And it was relatively easy to enter into Samadhi.
So this is a plug for you to participate, to organize, to start taking some of these lessons and applying them into your daily life where you can, where it makes sense. One of these ideas, in the theme of unification and inclusion that’s a big part of it, is the idea that might work for some of you to organize your body, mind, and heart to be participating in the settling, in the gathering at some central place within. At the heart or center of your breathing, or as for me, I was trained and have spent decades now attending to my breath in my belly—the movements of the belly, the sensations there, the subtle feelings of pressure and release of pressure as I breathe, keeping it soft. For the early years of practice, I held my belly always tight and tense. I would relax it and soften and soften, and it took a while to really have that be settled.
And so, to have this participating there, to organize yourself. I have this sense, not always available to me, but there are sometimes where when I sit down to meditate, I spend some time feeling and sensing what the thinking mind is like. Is it tense? Is it tight? Is it scattered? And sometimes I can feel that I could kind of bring it together and organize it, kind of put all the pieces together. Like maybe my mind has five major pieces or blocks or something, and I have this sense that I can, just like I could take a deep breath and bring my shoulders down—there’s an organizing of my body here in the torso, the weight against my seat—I can do the same thing with the mind. I can sense and feel my mind a little bit, and then as I exhale, I kind of imagine I’m putting the pieces back together. So the mind becomes whole; all the parts of the mind are there.
To what degree this is only something of my imagination, or to what degree it is something that feels more actual that’s going on and I’m putting the mind back together, is not that important for me. What’s important is that the tensions I feel, the different ways—maybe it sometimes feels like the blood is going in different places, or the blood is going all into a central place, not flowing into the whole brain. So there’s some kind of way in which I feel the brain, feel the thinking muscle, and then kind of let it settle and come together, gather together, let it kind of spread. And what happens often is the mind gets settled and calm. It tends to feel larger, more spacious. It feels like it’s expanding, partly because any idea of an outer limit of the mind is an artifice of my imagination, and we are unconscious of how we’re doing it.
If we no longer box the mind in with a concept or idea that it’s just inside the skull, there can feel like there’s no barrier, no limit to the size of the mind. And when we don’t imagine a limit to the edges of thoughts, the edges of the mind, there can be a feeling of it kind of softening and relaxing. So this unifying and then relaxing.
With the risk of offering too many images, the image that worked well for me also is that of a surface of a lake that’s spreading and becoming wider and stiller and quieter. Not pushing it, but kind of allowing it. So this organizing of the mind, having the mind oriented, and then in that orientation, bringing together the other pieces of the mind so everything is working together, settling, orienting, organizing things.
One way that I emphasized in the last meditation was getting everything kind of coming back, coming together in the gathering place, the gathering spot that’s at the center of all things. Not to exclude anything, not to be laser-focused, but kind of a soft, round bowl for attention where everything is rolling down, flowing down, coming to where it comes together. And everything can settle there and be resting in the weight of the sides of that bowl, resting in the lake bottom, the bowl of the lake.
So, I hope that some of what I said today will be useful for some of you. As I said in the beginning of the meditation, I don’t expect that all that I’m teaching about Samadhi will feel right for all of you, and that it’s all of a piece, all fit for who you are. Samadhi is a deeply personal phenomenon; it’s very personal and unique to each person how they discover and understand their own mind, body, and heart so that it becomes whole, it becomes organized, becomes fully gathered together. So there’s a feeling of being whole and here and absorbed in what we’re doing without being scattered in distracting thoughts and activities and feelings.
So if anything that I say doesn’t work for you, you’re welcome not to use it. But maybe it’s even more important if it doesn’t work for you to take some time to use it as a mirror to understand yourself better. What is it about your mind that maybe is why it doesn’t work? And is there something else like it or a different thing that does work for you? The more you become familiar with yourself and what the elements of who you are are, then the easier it is to gather all those pieces and unify them into the absorption that is Samadhi.
Thank you very, very much, and we’ll continue tomorrow. Thank you.
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. Welcome to this meditation that’s part of the series on Samadhi.1 As an introduction, I’d like to say that Samadhi is a very personal experience, a very personal way of being in the world and being with oneself. And so no one, including myself, can give you precise instructions or metaphors that are tailor-made for you. But I’m hoping in this series that I’m teaching enough that there will be things, even just one thing, that really supports you, that really helps you as an entryway into this mind which is undistracted, a mind which becomes clear and really enters into the meditation in a meaningful and deep way for you.
One of the ways to understand the instructions I am giving is that they’re all meant to be ways for you to understand yourself better. So even if some of the instructions I give here don’t work for you, that doesn’t mean that you should dismiss or ignore them. Rather, they are a means by which you can understand yourself better—to understand what doesn’t work and by that, maybe have a better sense of what does work. Or maybe there are ways of understanding what doesn’t work that teach you something about how your own mind works, so that you can have more clarity and understanding.
With that in mind, the emphasis I want to make today is that the unification and inclusivity of Samadhi practice can also involve what I call organizing ourselves, bringing together all the disparate parts of us and kind of bringing them together, almost like puzzle pieces that fit together, that are working together. Maybe it’s an unfortunate metaphor, but rather than puzzle pieces, maybe it’s like Lego blocks that we put together so they all fit together nicely, as opposed to having a centrifugal force in our thinking that spins us out into many preoccupations and concerns. We keep spinning, we keep scattering ourselves, scattering our attention, scattering our focus and our concerns because we have too much going on and too strong a pull into the fascinating worlds of desire, aversion, and fantasy.
It’s not just simply that these thoughts and activities pull us away from the present, but they also pull apart the mind. They pull apart the body. If we get tense and preoccupied, there can be a tensing and a lifting that kind of removes us from a settled, unified feeling. Sometimes that lifting goes all the way up into the head, and we mostly live in our head, where we’re no longer—all the building blocks of who we are haven’t come together so that they are settled on each other.
The thinking mind also can sometimes not even be in the present moment; it can be ahead of ourselves, behind ourselves, in another place. But physically, we can sometimes feel that the energy, the thinking mind, the tension, the agitation, what’s activated maybe in our head, in our brain, is in the front of the brain, or maybe the brain is now more kind of zeroed in on the eyes, and the mind has gotten small. Or it’s gotten maybe mostly preoccupied on the left side or the right side of the mind. There’s a kind of way in which the mind starts feeling not complete, not whole, not settled on itself.
There’s a way of organizing the mind, bringing all the pieces together so they are right there. Similar to how you would organize your body if you were going to play ping-pong, and you’re ready for someone to serve the ball to you, you would kind of get your body ready, organized, and the whole body is coming together to be there for that activity. The orientation of the mind’s attention is now oriented and brought into the tabletop, the other person’s hand, the ball—just right. Everything’s kind of organizing itself in order to be there for the game of ping pong.
The same thing with the mind. This is where most people don’t have a very good sense of the physicality, the physical sensations of their mind, and what is activated, agitated, or energized in the mind, and where, and what’s included and what’s not, or the directionality of the different kind of centrifugal forces of thinking in the mind and preoccupations. The mind, too, can come together into a whole, into a settled, interconnected peace. So that’ll be the instructions today, and it’ll maybe work for some of you. And for those of you for whom it doesn’t, maybe it helps you see and understand something about yourself.
So, assume a meditation posture that is a posture of organizing your body, so that as much of your body as possible is now going to be participating in the meditation. How your feet are positioned, so the feet themselves support attentiveness, presence, being grounded. Maybe the soles of the feet are touching some surface. Maybe the positioning of the legs… and if you’re sitting on a chair or a cushion, the way that the cushion or chair receives the weight of your body. Can you move a little bit, sway back and forth, so that weight feels grounded, feels full, feels solid, to support being here? And adjusting, organizing your torso, your spine to be here, participating, ready for anything in meditation.
Gently closing your eyes. And just as you’re breathing, feel your body on the inhale. Feel where you’re agitated, tense, where you’re activated, maybe so there’s a prioritization of certain parts of your body at the expense of others. Feeling that on the inhale, and then on the exhale, to relax the body, settle the body, with the idea that as the body settles on itself, the body is coming together, being organized so that all the parts are somehow cooperating or here in the same way.
Is there any way that your body, your chest, your heart, any part of your body is energized or engaged or activated by some emotional state? And is it a state that’s more likely to take you away from a kind of wholeness of who you are, to have you preoccupied with a particular emotional state? Just knowing that, feeling how that emotional state might be alive in some part of your body. Feeling that as you inhale, and on the exhale, relaxing the emotional state, relaxing the body associated with that state. Maybe the emotion doesn’t go away, but maybe it’s allowed to settle more deeply into some place where you feel more grounded with it, where the wider body is there to hold it or support it, so it doesn’t need to be a preoccupation. It’s okay.
And then on the inhale, feeling any sensations associated with the thinking mind. Is there any tension or pressure, contraction, any activation, agitation in any parts of your head or anywhere else in the body that seems connected to thinking? Is there a preoccupation with thinking, with thoughts, that takes you away from yourself, divides you from the rest, the whole? A prioritization of the concerns you have?
And as you exhale, soften the thinking mind. Let it relax. Maybe with the image of a wide lake with waves, that the waves begin to settle and slow down and get smaller until the lake becomes wide and flat and still. So the thinking mind quiets, slows down, settles, becomes broad and still. Maybe allowing all the water of the lake, all the activity of the lake, to rest on the lake bottom, where the weight of the mind is allowed to settle into the body.
In that settling, if there’s any sense of the mind having different parts, different pieces, where not everything is included, as you exhale, let all the mind settle together into a settling place where the thinking mind can be received and supported, reassured. That kind of reorganizing of the mind, so everything comes together.
And however close and whole, complete the mind may feel, orient the mind to rest, focus, and include the experience of breathing. Where every exhale allows all the parts of ourselves to settle together into the experience of breathing, the gathering place, the settling place.
As a way of organizing the mind to be more here and unified, let your thinking mind be involved with the thought of counting the exhales, one to ten. And if you lose count, no problem, begin again at one. Counting not as a strain and not as something to worry about or to be successful at, but each count a settling, a relaxing, helping the mind come together in an organized way to settle into the gathering place of breathing.
And then as we come to the end of this sitting, to allow for a fuller settling on the exhale. And even if you’re unsettled in some way, to feel the way that you are settled now. Settled in your body, in your heart, in your mind. Maybe with every exhale, a soft wholeness in this settling. All of yourself letting go, settling in, gathering together in the gathering place, maybe at the very end of the exhale, letting go here.
And from this settled place, to gaze upon the world kindly. To gaze upon this world peacefully. To take in and include the whole world compassionately, almost like you’re inviting it all in to sit and be settled with you. Almost as if you’re making space and room and accompaniment with the world, so that whatever comes into your orbit also has a chance to settle and be at ease.
Being settled and gazing upon the world kindly: May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.
And may the way that we can be settled on ourselves be a support for the welfare and happiness of others. Certainly, at least, may the ways that we get agitated and reactive not spill out to influence more of that in the world.
May all beings be happy.
Thank you.
Hello, and welcome to this series of talks on Samadhi. Samadhi is not an abstract topic for intellectual interest only, but it’s a topic about ourselves, about how we can be present and engaged in really whatever we’re doing. The general focus of the series is on meditation, and that connection to Samadhi is so strong that sometimes the word Samadhi is a substitute for the word meditation.
But really, the ability to be fully present, oriented, organized, and absorbed in anything makes anything a subject for Samadhi. For those of you who are going along with this series and wanting to cultivate Samadhi in meditation, it’s greatly supported by beginning to take what you’re learning about yourself—about how you can be settled, how you can be oriented, organized, simple, still, spacious—and bring that into different activities in your life. So it’s not just something you do in meditation, but something that you’re beginning to spread through your day. That way, when you come to meditation, you’re already familiar with the territory. You haven’t been out of touch with it for a long time, and it’s more easy to be connected to it.
I learned this when I was in the monastery and I had a very busy, full job in the kitchen, being a cook for the large monastery. I didn’t have a lot of time for meditation, but I started to practice this in the monastery with the activities I did. I had a question that I carried with me that was my contemplative question for the year I was in the kitchen, and that was the question: “How can I participate more fully with what I’m doing in the kitchen?”
So whatever I was doing—if I was chopping vegetables, if I was washing pots and pans, if I was putting together ingredients in a pot, if I was walking around with a dirty pot to bring it to the sink and there were other people working—whatever I was doing, how could I be in that activity in a sense of really participating in it? Why it was important for me was that right away when I started work in the kitchen, I didn’t want to be there. My mind was elsewhere, I had other plans and other aspirations, and I was preoccupied with other issues with people I’d been talking to. I felt myself scattered. I felt myself being propelled out of the present moment, propelled out of what I was doing. The antidote to that, as a way of learning about myself, was: “How can I participate with what I’m doing here?”
The consequence of that, after some months of doing this, was that if I would go to the meditation session after working in the kitchen, I would show up in the meditation already concentrated, already there, present. And it was relatively easy to enter into Samadhi.
So this is a plug for you to participate, to organize, to start taking some of these lessons and applying them into your daily life where you can, where it makes sense. One of these ideas, in the theme of unification and inclusion that’s a big part of it, is the idea that might work for some of you to organize your body, mind, and heart to be participating in the settling, in the gathering at some central place within. At the heart or center of your breathing, or as for me, I was trained and have spent decades now attending to my breath in my belly—the movements of the belly, the sensations there, the subtle feelings of pressure and release of pressure as I breathe, keeping it soft. For the early years of practice, I held my belly always tight and tense. I would relax it and soften and soften, and it took a while to really have that be settled.
And so, to have this participating there, to organize yourself. I have this sense, not always available to me, but there are sometimes where when I sit down to meditate, I spend some time feeling and sensing what the thinking mind is like. Is it tense? Is it tight? Is it scattered? And sometimes I can feel that I could kind of bring it together and organize it, kind of put all the pieces together. Like maybe my mind has five major pieces or blocks or something, and I have this sense that I can, just like I could take a deep breath and bring my shoulders down—there’s an organizing of my body here in the torso, the weight against my seat—I can do the same thing with the mind. I can sense and feel my mind a little bit, and then as I exhale, I kind of imagine I’m putting the pieces back together. So the mind becomes whole; all the parts of the mind are there.
To what degree this is only something of my imagination, or to what degree it is something that feels more actual that’s going on and I’m putting the mind back together, is not that important for me. What’s important is that the tensions I feel, the different ways—maybe it sometimes feels like the blood is going in different places, or the blood is going all into a central place, not flowing into the whole brain. So there’s some kind of way in which I feel the brain, feel the thinking muscle, and then kind of let it settle and come together, gather together, let it kind of spread. And what happens often is the mind gets settled and calm. It tends to feel larger, more spacious. It feels like it’s expanding, partly because any idea of an outer limit of the mind is an artifice of my imagination, and we are unconscious of how we’re doing it.
If we no longer box the mind in with a concept or idea that it’s just inside the skull, there can feel like there’s no barrier, no limit to the size of the mind. And when we don’t imagine a limit to the edges of thoughts, the edges of the mind, there can be a feeling of it kind of softening and relaxing. So this unifying and then relaxing.
With the risk of offering too many images, the image that worked well for me also is that of a surface of a lake that’s spreading and becoming wider and stiller and quieter. Not pushing it, but kind of allowing it. So this organizing of the mind, having the mind oriented, and then in that orientation, bringing together the other pieces of the mind so everything is working together, settling, orienting, organizing things.
One way that I emphasized in the last meditation was getting everything kind of coming back, coming together in the gathering place, the gathering spot that’s at the center of all things. Not to exclude anything, not to be laser-focused, but kind of a soft, round bowl for attention where everything is rolling down, flowing down, coming to where it comes together. And everything can settle there and be resting in the weight of the sides of that bowl, resting in the lake bottom, the bowl of the lake.
So, I hope that some of what I said today will be useful for some of you. As I said in the beginning of the meditation, I don’t expect that all that I’m teaching about Samadhi will feel right for all of you, and that it’s all of a piece, all fit for who you are. Samadhi is a deeply personal phenomenon; it’s very personal and unique to each person how they discover and understand their own mind, body, and heart so that it becomes whole, it becomes organized, becomes fully gathered together. So there’s a feeling of being whole and here and absorbed in what we’re doing without being scattered in distracting thoughts and activities and feelings.
So if anything that I say doesn’t work for you, you’re welcome not to use it. But maybe it’s even more important if it doesn’t work for you to take some time to use it as a mirror to understand yourself better. What is it about your mind that maybe is why it doesn’t work? And is there something else like it or a different thing that does work for you? The more you become familiar with yourself and what the elements of who you are are, then the easier it is to gather all those pieces and unify them into the absorption that is Samadhi.
Thank you very, very much, and we’ll continue tomorrow. Thank you.
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. Welcome to this meditation that’s part of the series on Samadhi.1 As an introduction, I’d like to say that Samadhi is a very personal experience, a very personal way of being in the world and being with oneself. And so no one, including myself, can give you precise instructions or metaphors that are tailor-made for you. But I’m hoping in this series that I’m teaching enough that there will be things, even just one thing, that really supports you, that really helps you as an entryway into this mind which is undistracted, a mind which becomes clear and really enters into the meditation in a meaningful and deep way for you.
One of the ways to understand the instructions I am giving is that they’re all meant to be ways for you to understand yourself better. So even if some of the instructions I give here don’t work for you, that doesn’t mean that you should dismiss or ignore them. Rather, they are a means by which you can understand yourself better—to understand what doesn’t work and by that, maybe have a better sense of what does work. Or maybe there are ways of understanding what doesn’t work that teach you something about how your own mind works, so that you can have more clarity and understanding.
With that in mind, the emphasis I want to make today is that the unification and inclusivity of Samadhi practice can also involve what I call organizing ourselves, bringing together all the disparate parts of us and kind of bringing them together, almost like puzzle pieces that fit together, that are working together. Maybe it’s an unfortunate metaphor, but rather than puzzle pieces, maybe it’s like Lego blocks that we put together so they all fit together nicely, as opposed to having a centrifugal force in our thinking that spins us out into many preoccupations and concerns. We keep spinning, we keep scattering ourselves, scattering our attention, scattering our focus and our concerns because we have too much going on and too strong a pull into the fascinating worlds of desire, aversion, and fantasy.
It’s not just simply that these thoughts and activities pull us away from the present, but they also pull apart the mind. They pull apart the body. If we get tense and preoccupied, there can be a tensing and a lifting that kind of removes us from a settled, unified feeling. Sometimes that lifting goes all the way up into the head, and we mostly live in our head, where we’re no longer—all the building blocks of who we are haven’t come together so that they are settled on each other.
The thinking mind also can sometimes not even be in the present moment; it can be ahead of ourselves, behind ourselves, in another place. But physically, we can sometimes feel that the energy, the thinking mind, the tension, the agitation, what’s activated maybe in our head, in our brain, is in the front of the brain, or maybe the brain is now more kind of zeroed in on the eyes, and the mind has gotten small. Or it’s gotten maybe mostly preoccupied on the left side or the right side of the mind. There’s a kind of way in which the mind starts feeling not complete, not whole, not settled on itself.
There’s a way of organizing the mind, bringing all the pieces together so they are right there. Similar to how you would organize your body if you were going to play ping-pong, and you’re ready for someone to serve the ball to you, you would kind of get your body ready, organized, and the whole body is coming together to be there for that activity. The orientation of the mind’s attention is now oriented and brought into the tabletop, the other person’s hand, the ball—just right. Everything’s kind of organizing itself in order to be there for the game of ping pong.
The same thing with the mind. This is where most people don’t have a very good sense of the physicality, the physical sensations of their mind, and what is activated, agitated, or energized in the mind, and where, and what’s included and what’s not, or the directionality of the different kind of centrifugal forces of thinking in the mind and preoccupations. The mind, too, can come together into a whole, into a settled, interconnected peace. So that’ll be the instructions today, and it’ll maybe work for some of you. And for those of you for whom it doesn’t, maybe it helps you see and understand something about yourself.
So, assume a meditation posture that is a posture of organizing your body, so that as much of your body as possible is now going to be participating in the meditation. How your feet are positioned, so the feet themselves support attentiveness, presence, being grounded. Maybe the soles of the feet are touching some surface. Maybe the positioning of the legs… and if you’re sitting on a chair or a cushion, the way that the cushion or chair receives the weight of your body. Can you move a little bit, sway back and forth, so that weight feels grounded, feels full, feels solid, to support being here? And adjusting, organizing your torso, your spine to be here, participating, ready for anything in meditation.
Gently closing your eyes. And just as you’re breathing, feel your body on the inhale. Feel where you’re agitated, tense, where you’re activated, maybe so there’s a prioritization of certain parts of your body at the expense of others. Feeling that on the inhale, and then on the exhale, to relax the body, settle the body, with the idea that as the body settles on itself, the body is coming together, being organized so that all the parts are somehow cooperating or here in the same way.
Is there any way that your body, your chest, your heart, any part of your body is energized or engaged or activated by some emotional state? And is it a state that’s more likely to take you away from a kind of wholeness of who you are, to have you preoccupied with a particular emotional state? Just knowing that, feeling how that emotional state might be alive in some part of your body. Feeling that as you inhale, and on the exhale, relaxing the emotional state, relaxing the body associated with that state. Maybe the emotion doesn’t go away, but maybe it’s allowed to settle more deeply into some place where you feel more grounded with it, where the wider body is there to hold it or support it, so it doesn’t need to be a preoccupation. It’s okay.
And then on the inhale, feeling any sensations associated with the thinking mind. Is there any tension or pressure, contraction, any activation, agitation in any parts of your head or anywhere else in the body that seems connected to thinking? Is there a preoccupation with thinking, with thoughts, that takes you away from yourself, divides you from the rest, the whole? A prioritization of the concerns you have?
And as you exhale, soften the thinking mind. Let it relax. Maybe with the image of a wide lake with waves, that the waves begin to settle and slow down and get smaller until the lake becomes wide and flat and still. So the thinking mind quiets, slows down, settles, becomes broad and still. Maybe allowing all the water of the lake, all the activity of the lake, to rest on the lake bottom, where the weight of the mind is allowed to settle into the body.
In that settling, if there’s any sense of the mind having different parts, different pieces, where not everything is included, as you exhale, let all the mind settle together into a settling place where the thinking mind can be received and supported, reassured. That kind of reorganizing of the mind, so everything comes together.
And however close and whole, complete the mind may feel, orient the mind to rest, focus, and include the experience of breathing. Where every exhale allows all the parts of ourselves to settle together into the experience of breathing, the gathering place, the settling place.
As a way of organizing the mind to be more here and unified, let your thinking mind be involved with the thought of counting the exhales, one to ten. And if you lose count, no problem, begin again at one. Counting not as a strain and not as something to worry about or to be successful at, but each count a settling, a relaxing, helping the mind come together in an organized way to settle into the gathering place of breathing.
And then as we come to the end of this sitting, to allow for a fuller settling on the exhale. And even if you’re unsettled in some way, to feel the way that you are settled now. Settled in your body, in your heart, in your mind. Maybe with every exhale, a soft wholeness in this settling. All of yourself letting go, settling in, gathering together in the gathering place, maybe at the very end of the exhale, letting go here.
And from this settled place, to gaze upon the world kindly. To gaze upon this world peacefully. To take in and include the whole world compassionately, almost like you’re inviting it all in to sit and be settled with you. Almost as if you’re making space and room and accompaniment with the world, so that whatever comes into your orbit also has a chance to settle and be at ease.
Being settled and gazing upon the world kindly: May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.
And may the way that we can be settled on ourselves be a support for the welfare and happiness of others. Certainly, at least, may the ways that we get agitated and reactive not spill out to influence more of that in the world.
May all beings be happy.
Thank you.
Hello, and welcome to this series of talks on Samadhi. Samadhi is not an abstract topic for intellectual interest only, but it’s a topic about ourselves, about how we can be present and engaged in really whatever we’re doing. The general focus of the series is on meditation, and that connection to Samadhi is so strong that sometimes the word Samadhi is a substitute for the word meditation.
But really, the ability to be fully present, oriented, organized, and absorbed in anything makes anything a subject for Samadhi. For those of you who are going along with this series and wanting to cultivate Samadhi in meditation, it’s greatly supported by beginning to take what you’re learning about yourself—about how you can be settled, how you can be oriented, organized, simple, still, spacious—and bring that into different activities in your life. So it’s not just something you do in meditation, but something that you’re beginning to spread through your day. That way, when you come to meditation, you’re already familiar with the territory. You haven’t been out of touch with it for a long time, and it’s more easy to be connected to it.
I learned this when I was in the monastery and I had a very busy, full job in the kitchen, being a cook for the large monastery. I didn’t have a lot of time for meditation, but I started to practice this in the monastery with the activities I did. I had a question that I carried with me that was my contemplative question for the year I was in the kitchen, and that was the question: “How can I participate more fully with what I’m doing in the kitchen?”
So whatever I was doing—if I was chopping vegetables, if I was washing pots and pans, if I was putting together ingredients in a pot, if I was walking around with a dirty pot to bring it to the sink and there were other people working—whatever I was doing, how could I be in that activity in a sense of really participating in it? Why it was important for me was that right away when I started work in the kitchen, I didn’t want to be there. My mind was elsewhere, I had other plans and other aspirations, and I was preoccupied with other issues with people I’d been talking to. I felt myself scattered. I felt myself being propelled out of the present moment, propelled out of what I was doing. The antidote to that, as a way of learning about myself, was: “How can I participate with what I’m doing here?”
The consequence of that, after some months of doing this, was that if I would go to the meditation session after working in the kitchen, I would show up in the meditation already concentrated, already there, present. And it was relatively easy to enter into Samadhi.
So this is a plug for you to participate, to organize, to start taking some of these lessons and applying them into your daily life where you can, where it makes sense. One of these ideas, in the theme of unification and inclusion that’s a big part of it, is the idea that might work for some of you to organize your body, mind, and heart to be participating in the settling, in the gathering at some central place within. At the heart or center of your breathing, or as for me, I was trained and have spent decades now attending to my breath in my belly—the movements of the belly, the sensations there, the subtle feelings of pressure and release of pressure as I breathe, keeping it soft. For the early years of practice, I held my belly always tight and tense. I would relax it and soften and soften, and it took a while to really have that be settled.
And so, to have this participating there, to organize yourself. I have this sense, not always available to me, but there are sometimes where when I sit down to meditate, I spend some time feeling and sensing what the thinking mind is like. Is it tense? Is it tight? Is it scattered? And sometimes I can feel that I could kind of bring it together and organize it, kind of put all the pieces together. Like maybe my mind has five major pieces or blocks or something, and I have this sense that I can, just like I could take a deep breath and bring my shoulders down—there’s an organizing of my body here in the torso, the weight against my seat—I can do the same thing with the mind. I can sense and feel my mind a little bit, and then as I exhale, I kind of imagine I’m putting the pieces back together. So the mind becomes whole; all the parts of the mind are there.
To what degree this is only something of my imagination, or to what degree it is something that feels more actual that’s going on and I’m putting the mind back together, is not that important for me. What’s important is that the tensions I feel, the different ways—maybe it sometimes feels like the blood is going in different places, or the blood is going all into a central place, not flowing into the whole brain. So there’s some kind of way in which I feel the brain, feel the thinking muscle, and then kind of let it settle and come together, gather together, let it kind of spread. And what happens often is the mind gets settled and calm. It tends to feel larger, more spacious. It feels like it’s expanding, partly because any idea of an outer limit of the mind is an artifice of my imagination, and we are unconscious of how we’re doing it.
If we no longer box the mind in with a concept or idea that it’s just inside the skull, there can feel like there’s no barrier, no limit to the size of the mind. And when we don’t imagine a limit to the edges of thoughts, the edges of the mind, there can be a feeling of it kind of softening and relaxing. So this unifying and then relaxing.
With the risk of offering too many images, the image that worked well for me also is that of a surface of a lake that’s spreading and becoming wider and stiller and quieter. Not pushing it, but kind of allowing it. So this organizing of the mind, having the mind oriented, and then in that orientation, bringing together the other pieces of the mind so everything is working together, settling, orienting, organizing things.
One way that I emphasized in the last meditation was getting everything kind of coming back, coming together in the gathering place, the gathering spot that’s at the center of all things. Not to exclude anything, not to be laser-focused, but kind of a soft, round bowl for attention where everything is rolling down, flowing down, coming to where it comes together. And everything can settle there and be resting in the weight of the sides of that bowl, resting in the lake bottom, the bowl of the lake.
So, I hope that some of what I said today will be useful for some of you. As I said in the beginning of the meditation, I don’t expect that all that I’m teaching about Samadhi will feel right for all of you, and that it’s all of a piece, all fit for who you are. Samadhi is a deeply personal phenomenon; it’s very personal and unique to each person how they discover and understand their own mind, body, and heart so that it becomes whole, it becomes organized, becomes fully gathered together. So there’s a feeling of being whole and here and absorbed in what we’re doing without being scattered in distracting thoughts and activities and feelings.
So if anything that I say doesn’t work for you, you’re welcome not to use it. But maybe it’s even more important if it doesn’t work for you to take some time to use it as a mirror to understand yourself better. What is it about your mind that maybe is why it doesn’t work? And is there something else like it or a different thing that does work for you? The more you become familiar with yourself and what the elements of who you are are, then the easier it is to gather all those pieces and unify them into the absorption that is Samadhi.
Thank you very, very much, and we’ll continue tomorrow. Thank you.