This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Connecting and Sustaining with Calm Attention ; Samadhi (26) Approaching Samadhi. 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.
Good morning and welcome. For these next few weeks, the idea is to slowly put together the pieces, the little steps to understand and to practice samadhi1. It’s not really possible in a short time to give all the instructions that would really help understand the elements of samadhi practice, so we’ll go through it really slowly. Some of you might from time to time be able to follow along closely to the instructions or the guidance in one day, and some of you won’t, and that’s okay. The idea is to take it in anyway. Don’t write it off because maybe you’re agitated today or something. Follow along the best you can, maybe even with your imagination, maybe even remembering a time in your life where something like this was the case. This way, it somehow begins to register deeply, so it’s ready in meditation when it becomes relevant for you.
Today, I’m going to say a few words, do a little guided meditation to start us off, and then do a little exercise that involves opening the eyes and then closing the eyes again before getting started.
Two things first. The topic of pleasure last week was very important because we’re using the symptoms of things going well in meditation, the benefits of it, as a kind of funnel or as a way of helping us gather and keep us in the practice. With time, there’s a direct feedback loop between really being settled on an object of samadhi and the strengthening of those symptoms. Whatever we’re doing with our mind, and maybe our body, whatever attitudes we have, they’ll have an influence on the rest of us. If we spend a lot of time angry, there will be symptoms of that in the body, and chances are they’re uncomfortable. Those uncomfortable sensations then may subconsciously predispose us to feel unhappy about what’s happening to us. So there’s an unconscious, subconscious kind of reaction-response feedback loop we get into. The anger makes us uncomfortable, the discomfort makes us more angry, and so it goes. Often, this kind of feedback loop goes unrecognized.
In samadhi, we’re using that feedback loop to feel the pleasure, the goodness of it, just enough to stay focused. The focus is not to hold attention fixed, but rather there’s a gentle… The ancient texts talk about taking a nice soft cloth and putting it against a brass bowl, placing it there and then rubbing it, cleaning it. So these two steps: placing there and then gently rubbing it. Or a bird that’s going to fly will flap its wings strongly to get up, or if it’s flying but needs to soar a little bit higher, it will flap its wings and then soar, flap its wings and soar. This is called applied and sustained attention. Very gently, there’s a kind of returning to the breath, staying on it, surfing on it, sustaining attention there, and then there’ll be a reapplication of attention. We’re not just holding our attention there, but there’s a relaxed, soft kind of massage, in a sense. Touching, kneading, touching, kneading, touching, petting, touching, petting that we do. This is called in Pali, vitakka and vicāra2.
So these two things, the feedback loop and this application of attention and sustaining it, that massage, is part of what’s keeping the symptoms—the pleasure, the well-being—moving along and sustaining it. So now we’ll do the short settling meditation, and then I will do an exercise with the eyes, with looking, before we close our eyes again in order to apply this.
Take a meditation posture and for now, gently close your eyes. With your eyes closed, take a few gently deeper breaths, not too deep, comfortably deep, and a comfortably long exhale. Breathing in fully, and on the exhale, relaxing the body.
Then, letting your breathing return to normal. Taking a few moments to feel your global body, the way your body is grounded or settled in the seat that you’re on, the surface that’s receiving your body weight. As you exhale, gently release your body into the pull of gravity, into being grounded in your seat.
Breathing normally, relaxing on the exhale. Relaxing the face, softening in the shoulders, softening the belly.
Then centering yourself on the breathing. Maybe allowing the weight of attention to settle into the settling place, the grounding place of your breathing. Maybe at the end of the out-breath, the very beginning of the in-breath.
And now, to do the exercise with the eyes, open your eyes and find a particular spot that’s in front of you that you can stare at, that you can hold your eyes on. A very small spot. Don’t let your eyes leave that spot. Hold your eyes still so it really stays on the spot. We’ll do that for about 15 seconds.
Notice with your eyes fixed if there’s any tension anywhere in your body—the shoulders, the belly, the eyes—that comes with that kind of fixing.
Now, keeping your eyes open, look into space and let your eyes float in the eye sockets. Just kind of let your eyes roam around the room, the place you’re in, without any purpose, without staring at anything. Almost like tracing the outlines of things or floating around. Maybe not even looking at things, but almost as if you’re not focused on any particular thing, but your eyes are roaming around as if you’re following the trail of a fly flying around very slowly and relaxedly, and your eyes just kind of gently do what they want to do. No will, no intention, no directing your eyes, just let them float around the room.
Now feel your eyes, feel your face, your body, your shoulders. Is this more relaxed for the eyes to be this way than it was to hold them fixed on a spot? Of course, it will be different for different people, but a fair number of people find that fixating, fixing their eyes on something, is more of a strain than letting the eyes float and roam around.
The same thing with breathing. If we try to fix our attention on breathing, it can become stressful. But if we do something equivalent with attention as we did with our eyes, letting attention roam around with the breathing, it can be more relaxing.
So now, still with your eyes open, find a relatively small spot, not as small as before, some object that you can maintain your focus on. So you’re not roaming around the whole room, but within the scope of this object, let your eyes roam, looking at it, seeing it. So you see it with some clarity, but the eyes are also relaxedly floating around the object.
And now, closing your eyes. Let your awareness, your attention, settle on the breathing in and out, the movements of the body breathing, the sensations of breathing, maybe coming and going from your centering spot for the breathing. In the same way, let your attention be relaxed and soft, but follow, trace, roam around within the sensations of breathing.
Then there’s a settling or placing the attention there again and resting there, sustaining this free, relaxed, floating attention. So you feel and sense clearly the sensations of breathing, but there’s a feeling of freedom or ease in the awareness.
Very gently, there is a kind of reapplying awareness in the transition from breathing in to breathing out, from breathing out to breathing in. So let there be a soft reapplying, reconnecting. A connecting to the in-breath when it begins, connecting to the out-breath when it begins, and then sustaining attention in a soft, relaxed way. If the in-breath is momentary, just let it be like a spark that appears in the night sky. If it’s longer, let it be like a wave or a river in which you gently walk, flowing by.
If your attention slips away from breathing, see if you can avoid any judgments or reactions to that happening. Just see it as an opportunity to reapply attention, to put the cloth back on the edge of the bowl and then to rub it, to flap the wings again and then to glide on the breath.
Be careful not to try too hard. This whole exercise is just short of doing nothing, mostly. It’s you’re continually returning and opening awareness to the small area where breathing predominates. Maybe breathing is the cloth, and the movement of breathing is the cloth polishing your awareness.
Sometimes wandering off into thought is a very small movement that takes you not very far away. And even if it’s a small moving away in thought, return, reconnect to breathing in a relaxed, soft way, almost like an act of love. Connecting and sustaining attention with breathing.
If there’s any pleasure associated with applying and sustaining, connecting and staying with the breathing, allow that pleasure to be there to remind you how good it is to stay with the breathing with a relaxed, soft attention, not fixating attention. Almost as if it roams in the particular area where breathing sensations occur, or the sensations of breathing roam around in awareness at the center of being aware.
As we come to the end of this sitting, imagine you’re sitting on a park bench on a nice, warm, sunny day, gazing upon the trees, the birds, the gophers, squirrels, with a relaxed gaze, not fixating on anything, not staring, but letting your eyes roam, be at ease, soft.
There are people who come by, but in this scenario, you feel safe and comfortable, and nothing’s asked of you. You allow your roaming eyes to gently roam around with the people, seeing them in a relaxed, soft way. Maybe there are no judgments, no conclusions about people, just soft and gentle gazing upon the world. As if this kind of gazing is a vehicle to transmit our goodwill.
Smile. Gently smile on the people in your life. Smile thinking about the people and strangers you might run into today, gazing upon them with a relaxed awareness, and wish them well. Let your goodwill, your goodness, your kindness travel into this relaxed awareness from you to them, as if you touch their hearts with a medicine of kindness.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may we all care for each other with kindness.
Thank you.
So, while I drink my water, it might be nice and helpful for me if there were some comments about what it was like to do that exercise and if that taught you something different about how to be closely attentive to breathing.
Thank you for those of you chatting about the exercise. I’ll read more of them after I’ve finished now.
Welcome to this next talk on samadhi. For this week, we’re going to be looking at something that in English is commonly called “access concentration” or “access samadhi,” though the word “access” never really quite sat well with me. The word in Pali, upacāra3, my understanding is that it means something more closely to “approach.” Cara means to wander, and to wander towards something. Based on that meditation we just did, the idea is that attention has a little bit of a quality of wandering, of soft roaming, but it’s roaming towards a particular place. It’s moving towards something.
When I think of access concentration, I think of a door I have to go through. But if I think of “approach,” wandering towards, approaching, then it’s more of a gentle movement, like a river flowing, or I’m in the groove of something and now I’m gliding along. I’m in the slide, sliding. I’m approaching. We’re approaching a shift that will happen when the samadhi kind of clicks in, when the samadhi becomes kind of… envelops us or begins to have a life of its own, in a sense. When we don’t have to make as much effort, it’s not so much dependent on us practicing, but it’s more that we’re being practiced at some point. We’re approaching this point where the shift begins to happen.
There are a number of things that begin coming together in this stage, the stage called the approach. One of them is that we get in the rhythm or with a sense of ease with these two factors of samadhi, which is connecting attention and sustaining attention. The awareness that places attention and the awareness that stays there. Some people emphasize that sometimes this involves a little bit of very rudimentary thought. The thought is, “Oh, come back to the breathing,” and the thought that kind of begins to feel and sense what’s going on more carefully. “Oh, that’s a smooth inhale, that’s a smooth exhale. That’s a step-by-step inhale that just moves up, up, up in kind of steps, or that’s smooth, that’s pleasant.” So the thoughts are not so consciously done, but there can be very simple thinking that keeps us in the flow of it.
The classic analogy, that we’ll review and talk about again later, is akin in the modern world to mixing water into flour to make dough. We start kneading the dough in order to really spread the moisture into all the flour particles so they become moist. In some way, there’s kind of a kneading and a folding, and maybe it is like folding bread and kneading bread. If you are very relaxed and enjoy making bread, enjoy kneading bread, it can be a delightful activity to just be kneading it and folding, kneading and folding.
Or I associate it sometimes with when I have received a massage. Sometimes in certain massages, I like to breathe in the rhythm of the masseuse kneading my muscles. This breathing with the slow kneading of the different muscles just feels like such a nice way of flowing and being really present and connected to what’s happening. So it’s not a fixing of attention, it’s not staring at something. Some people, when they think of concentration, they feel like they have to have this laser focus that’s unwavering, and that can create a lot of strain. But rather, it’s a very soft… I like to think of it as just short of doing nothing. Just enough. And at different times of day, different situations, that “just enough” is different, how much effort we have to make. But we’re trying to make a very light effort so that some of the natural way in which awareness kind of roams and explores and moves around an object happens, just like with the eyes. Relaxed eyes will roam around an object to see it in different ways with very relaxed movements, not staring at something. If we want something from the object that we were looking at, then we stare, and then there could be a strain. But if we just kind of want to know it in a relaxed way, it’s the same thing with feeling and sensing.
For some people, it’s much more physical; it’s a sensing and feeling. Sometimes it’s more of an observing, sometimes it’s more of a knowing that goes on, but it’s really right there with the breathing. What’s nice about the rhythm of breathing, for people for whom this works, is that the rhythm of the breathing is a little bit akin to the rhythm of connecting and sustaining attention. Connecting and sustaining attention. Stay right here, stay right here. If that can be done, it’s almost like the concentration that builds doesn’t build from sustaining, but it builds in action, in the activity of connecting and sustaining, connecting and sustaining. The art of this is to know how to do that so that it just feels natural for you, the natural rhythm, or easeful, or absorbing to do it.
As I said, sometimes you can almost use the inhale and exhale as the speed and rhythm of that massage. So, to connect with the beginning of the inhale, sustain it to the end; connect to the beginning of the exhale, sustain it to the end. These two little activities, connecting and sustaining, give us just enough to do that it might be easier to stay focused there on the breathing in a relaxed, absorbing way. There might be thoughts, but they kind of go to the periphery; we don’t have to be focused on them.
At this point, this stage in the meditation, yes, there will be thoughts that begin taking you away. That’s normal at this stage, the approach stage. But they don’t take you very far. Now you can kind of watch and see the mind beginning to go, and because you’re in this rhythm of connecting and sustaining, you see the thinking beginning to go away, and then you kind of fold it back in, fold thinking back into the activity of staying with the breath rhythm.
Some of you might find that it works better if you can always maintain a very quiet counting, a very still, soft count, because it gives the thinking mind something to do that keeps you focused, rather than having the thinking mind idle so it wanders off. For some people, rather than counting, there might be a single word like “in,” “out,” or even the word “yes” works very well. I found the word “yes” to work really well when I’m also at the same time starting to become aware of the good influence that the meditation has on the rest of me—the pleasure that we talked about last week. The pleasure becomes like the supporting actors, or the pleasure becomes the cheerleaders, or the pleasure becomes the encouragement. “You’re doing well, this is good.” It’s almost like the pleasure is teaching you, “Oh, this is a nice way of doing it.”
For example, kneading the bread. If you’re in a hurry and you have to finish it quickly, and maybe there are people around you wanting your attention and they’re upset with you because you’re not paying enough attention to them, then you start kneading it really fast and in a stressful way, and it doesn’t feel good. But if no one’s there and you love doing the bread, you like the quiet and peace of the kitchen, the lighting is coming in from the window just right, and everything is clean around you in the kitchen, and you don’t have any pressing responsibilities at the moment, it just feels such a wonderful delight to feel the texture and the moisture and the movements of kneading the bread. Something inside of you kind of begins to relax and soften that says, “Oh, this is good.” Almost like you don’t want to stop doing it, even though you’re kneading it way beyond what’s really necessary. It’s just such a nice thing to do.
So, whether you could follow all that in your own practice, the idea is that all this is supposed to, if nothing else, not be what you should do, but it could be a reference point to understand what you do do, what works for you, and what doesn’t work for you. Maybe some of you will know clearly that counting doesn’t work. Other people will say yes, it works. Some people will say, “Oh, this thing about connecting and sustaining, I don’t quite understand it. I already have a good way of being with the breathing, so I think I’ll stay with it for now.” So you’re kind of finding your own way, but I’m offering you all these different elements, and hopefully some of them will work for you, support you in the process of becoming really absorbed in the meditation practice, absorbed in such a way that the thinking mind becomes quieter and stiller and softer, and there’s a feeling of well-being connected to meditation.
May your connecting and sustaining of attention, may that movement be one that can bring you joy through the day. That maybe throughout the day, there’s a gentle massage of things you have to connect to and then sustain, even if it’s as simple as connecting to a door handle and sustaining that connection until the door is open. May it be a way of entering the present moment more fully. Thank you.
Samadhi: A Pali word for a state of meditative concentration or absorption. It is a key component of the Buddhist path, leading to tranquility and insight. ↩
Vitakka and Vicāra: Two Pali terms that describe aspects of meditative concentration. Vitakka is the initial application or “placing” of the mind onto the meditation object (like the breath). Vicāra is the sustained examination or “rubbing” of the mind on that object. Together, they create a stable but not rigid focus. ↩
Upacāra: A Pali term that translates to “approach” or “neighborhood.” In the context of meditation, upacāra-samādhi refers to “access concentration,” the state of mind that approaches but has not yet fully entered the deep absorption of jhāna (meditative states). ↩