This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Breathing with Pleasure ; Samadhi (33) With Support From Pleasure. 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. Here we are in our meditation session. One of the arts of samadhi1 is the careful orientation towards pleasure. More fundamental is the way that mindfulness practice, Buddhist practice, is meant to be a very realistic understanding, seeing, and acknowledgment of suffering, of our difficulties. To see them clearly, one of the ways to care for it is not to do so directly, but to do it indirectly through the path of samadhi. That should be done carefully and wisely, not as an aversion to our difficulties, but rather with a care for them, a love for them, a love for ourselves.
The orientation towards pleasure is done with a gentle message that you care for yourself, you care for the suffering, and this is a way of doing it. Then, to be modest in the orientation towards pleasure. When we first sit down, it might be to notice just the relief of sitting down after maybe a busy day or a lot of activity, and just the simplicity of just breathing and being. Like you have permission to not accomplish anything, not to go through a to-do list, but just to be breathing and to feel the relief, the pleasure, the goodness of that.
Is there any sense of pleasure or enjoyment or goodness or rightness in the body, in the mind? Gently allow it to be there, to appreciate it, to let it be part of the meditation. Sometimes the priority or the bias is towards the difficulties and the pain and the suffering. Sometimes the priority is overdone towards the pleasure and the joy.
So, to begin the meditation, assume a meditation posture that gives you the pleasure of being alert, the pleasure of being present through your embodied body. That means not the pleasure of relaxing in a couch or something, but the pleasure of being with the body in the appropriate way, whether it’s laying down or sitting or standing. Some appropriate way where there’s an intention expressed through the body to be here in a way that has some pleasure to it, that feels like it’s inspiring or good to be alert.
Gently close the eyes and then take time to scan through the body to recognize where it’s pleasant and comfortable in your body and where it isn’t. A kind of matter-of-fact, simple acknowledgment of how it is in different parts of the body, so that parts that are uncomfortable are at least acknowledged and known.
Maybe continuing this way, but taking a few long, slow, deep breaths. As you breathe in, you’re connecting to some part of your body, and as you exhale, you’re softening, relaxing, opening that part of the body.
Let your breathing return to normal. There’s a pleasure or pleasant feeling that can come with relaxing. So as you breathe in, feel the muscles of your face, and as you exhale, soften, relax the face around the eyes, the jaws, feeling this subtle pleasure or goodness that comes with relaxing.
On the inhale, to feel the shoulders, and on the exhale, to relax.
On the inhale, to feel the belly, on the exhale, to soften the belly.
On the inhale, to feel the thinking mind, and on the exhale, to soften, open, expand the thinking mind into the quiet around you.
And then on the inhale, feeling the body’s experience of breathing in, wherever that is pleasant or connecting or appreciated. And on the exhale, relaxing the body.
Breathing in a normal way, feel if there’s any pleasure or pleasantness or sweetness or rightness in the direct experience of the body breathing. It can be quite subtle, the pleasure.
If you feel some of the pleasure or pleasantness of breathing, can you slightly adjust your breathing to let there be more pleasure? Maybe extending the exhale, extending the inhale. Maybe by relaxing something in your torso.
Maybe the pleasure is not connected directly with breathing, but rather the gentle influence that the movements of breathing have beyond the edges of the movement.
Connecting to the inhale at the beginning of the inhale. Connecting to the exhale at the beginning of the exhale. And then, in a way that feels pleasant, easeful, sustain the attention through the whole length of the inhale, the whole length of the exhale. Staying close to the feelings of pleasure so that it’s easier to stay with the breathing, because the mind enjoys pleasure.
Whatever way you’re calm, settled, peaceful, feel the pleasure of that.
And then as we come to the end of this sitting, to again feel whatever is pleasant, sweet, or pleasurable in our body, our hearts, our minds. And to imagine that it’s a light—the light of pleasure, the light of sweetness—that can radiate from us out into the world. Staying close to a feeling of well-being, of being comfortable in our bodies and minds, allows us to be with other people in ways that can spread goodwill, spread the sweetness, the goodness, the joy, the pleasure.
As we experience meditative joy, well-being, peace, and calm, may it spread from us in our words, our deeds, and our attitudes. May it be that the way that we practice creates the conditions for us to go into the world to make the world a better place for others.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may we contribute to that possibility.
To continue this series on samadhi, at a certain point, as the mind and body get settled, collected, unified, as it gets stabilized, the means for the support for entering into the temple of deep samadhi is through the doorway of pleasure. Not necessarily sensual pleasure, but certainly an embodied pleasure that begins to feel like a sense of well-being, joy, and happiness. You’re allowed to take in, feel, be nourished by, saturated by well-being when you’re doing samadhi practice.
So, to be oriented towards it in just the right way—to not be attached to it, expecting it, pushing for it—but rather to be open to it, to allow it, to acknowledge it when it’s there, to appreciate it. And as it’s there, to gently allow there to be a kind of a feedback loop between the joy, the pleasure, and the meditation, and the focus on breathing, your primary object. The joy, the pleasure keeps you connected. It’s a feedback loop where, as you get more stable, more engaged, more fully in the experience of the breathing, of the meditation, you can feel that the well-being shifts and changes, gets richer, gets stronger.
This can seem like you’re clinging or trying to make something happen. Some people get tense, but the idea is to stay relaxed, almost as if you’re not expecting anything to happen, but you’re allowing it. Samadhi is willing. Let the joy, the well-being spread. One of the little tools for this is to have a little half-smile. Turn up the corners of your mouth just a little bit until you feel a sense of pleasure there, and let that pleasure be the support to keep you connected, keep you here in the present moment. Some people will shift then from the breathing to the pleasure, the physical pleasure of the smile, and get absorbed in that. But I recommend that you just use it as a background support, as a pointer, as an encouragement. Stay with the breath, continue stabilizing, continue entering into the world of breathing.
As we do this massage of connecting and sustaining, it can be in harmony with breathing in and breathing out, where we gently, lovingly connect to the beginning of the inhale. That massage of sustaining is there as the chest, the torso, fills with air. We feel the expansion, the movement, and the becoming larger. Then we connect to the exhale and sustain the attention, feeling the pleasure of the smoothness, the release, the softening, the settling that can be there in the exhale. Sometimes it’s nice to feel the slight pause at the end of the exhale, if that’s really easy to do, and feeling the emptiness of it, the lack of anything, the relief in a sense of just being for a moment or two in that pause. Because of the pause, the call to breathe in is maybe a little bit stronger, so it’s a little bit more pleasant to breathe in because the body somehow wants it. We’re not holding the breath for a long time; there’s no holding, really, just a pause to accentuate being there with the breath and enjoying it.
Part of this then is that this focus on samadhi, on breathing and the pleasure of it, is meant to be a way to help the thinking mind become quieter. The thinking mind is fueled by focusing on thinking itself. The food for discursive, distracted thinking is that we lose our attention in the thinking. But if the attention goes somewhere else, then the thinking is not being fed so much. It might be there in the background, but the preoccupation, being caught in it, is not being fed, and often the thinking becomes quieter. But it’s also possible to participate in quieting the mind by relaxing the thinking muscle, to relax the tension, the pressure, the contraction around thinking, and maybe softening the mind, opening the mind, making the sense of the mind become expansive and open. Sometimes that can happen on the exhale. As you exhale, let the thoughts evaporate, float away, so that there’s more space in the mind. The absence of thoughts is not just a pure absence; it’s an absence that will kind of make room to feel the joy, the pleasure. It’s an absence that makes you feel it almost with the experience of samadhi, with the goodness of it, with the breathing, with the sensations, with the pleasure.
There is a kind of art in samadhi of knowing how to give yourself fully to the experience without straining, of giving yourself fully to it while you relax and while you let go. The first time I ever got instructions in samadhi, specifically for the purpose of samadhi, I was told it was all about letting go. I thought that was a useful instruction to get because then I kind of understood not to cling, not to crave, not to be pushing, not to be trying to make something happen, but just keep letting go. It’s almost letting go into breathing, letting go into samadhi, letting go into this settled, enjoyable place within.
What’s really special that can happen is that the pleasure, the joy, the well-being of samadhi belongs to a different operating system within us than the operating system of difficult emotions—sadness, grief, depression, distress. It’s a different operating system than physical aching and pains in our body. And so because it’s a whole different operating system, it can operate beautifully, wonderfully, without feeling that we’re being somehow disloyal or somehow bypassing, or that we have to kind of fix the emotional difficulties we have first so we can get concentrated. It’s more the opposite. As we get into samadhi, it puts us in a much better place to meet and understand and address our suffering. This is one of the great possibilities from samadhi: enter into meditation to get really stable and settled and calm, and then when you come out of meditation, glance and look at your challenges you have and see if you can see it now with different eyes, see it from a different context, a different frame of reference. You might find yourself living in a kind of different world with a stable, quiet, settled body and mind than the world you see when you’re spinning in your thoughts and preoccupations, spinning in your suffering. It’s almost like the glasses by which you see are the glasses of suffering. If the glasses you’re seeing with are the glasses of calm, well-being, and peace, then you can address and understand and have room and capacity to be with your difficulties in a much better way.
The art of samadhi includes the art of being attuned to our body, heart, and mind’s capacity for pleasure, for well-being, which moves into joy and happiness. Some of the most sublime forms of happiness can come as we dip into deeper and deeper samadhi. And if sometimes the joy or the happiness gets quite strong, be rest assured that there’s better things than joy, and there’s better things than happiness. These are just waypoints along the way. That strong pleasure, if there is strong joy, the well-being—these are just means along the way; they’re not the end.
So for today, as you go through your day, you might want to see if you can spend more time appreciating the pleasures that are already here. So don’t go out and buy pleasurable food so you can have pleasure. Just as you go about your daily life, check in regularly today to notice the pleasures that are already here. Many people are so busy they don’t avail themselves of the pleasure that’s already here, the simple pleasures of life. Stay closer to it. And maybe staying closer to the pleasures of life will also keep you close to being calm in the middle of it, because giving time for the pleasures means that you’re not fueling and continuing the spinning mind, the pressured mind, the tense mind. Take time today. You have permission, if I’m allowed to give you permission, to spend the day being attuned to the simple pleasures of life as they become available and see what difference it makes by the end of the day.
Thank you very much. I’ll continue this on samadhi tomorrow. 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. ↩