This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Approaching Well-Being; Samadhi (36) Approaching Subject Well-Being. 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. As we now approach entering into samadhi1, appreciate that there starts to be a turning to be really here, present, as if here is a home, here is our nest in which to settle into. That here is a really good place to be. And so to begin today with assuming a meditation posture.
In this posture of meditation, appreciate doing nothing for a few moments. In the doing nothing, of being able to put aside the agendas, the things we feel we have to do, even putting aside doing meditation, just doing nothing. Doing nothing in the posture of meditation as if it’s a homecoming here now, where the meditation posture is a nest that holds everything about you—what’s wonderful and what’s difficult. It all has space just to be in a situation where it doesn’t have to do anything about it at first.
So beginning a meditation is turning away from the usual activity of doing, of accomplishing, of getting away.
And then gently taking a few deeper inhales, and let the exhale take care of itself. Let the exhale just release the body, the tensions. A deeper inhale is a kind of a clear intention to be here now, and the exhale allows there to be a softening, a relaxing here and now.
And then to let your breathing return to normal. The inhale can be an opening, awakening into the body, the breathing body. And the exhale, a softening, a settling. The inhale can be a time to clear the mind, and the exhale a time to soften the tensions of the mind. Breathing in, breathing out.
To come into the approach stage of meditation, of samadhi, is to feel the call, feel the welcome into something that feels pleasant, a sense of well-being. Even if there are things about your experience now which are uncomfortable—pain, emotional pain, anything—it’s okay. But to feel more deeply in this meditation posture, in the settling, is there a way to give yourself over to the pleasant sensations of breathing wherever they might occur? However brief the pleasantness is, the goodness of breathing, the relaxing of breathing, or a sense of well-being that’s broad through the body, maybe very faint, within which the experience of breathing occurs.
Putting aside the usual way of thinking about having sensual pleasures, sensual desires, even in meditation, for something that is deeper, a deeper sense of at-homeness, a deeper sense of well-being. Maybe at the core of where you are. Maybe it’s associated with a certain relief for these minutes to not be involved in the usual preoccupations with any kind of sensual pleasure. That the mind is able to put those aside is good, in favor of turning towards a depth of contentment, a depth of wholeness, a depth of being nested here. Maybe at the grounding place, the settling place of breathing.
Staying close to the entire inhale, the entire exhale, as if that is the thread that’s keeping you gently connecting to a deeper place that feels wholesome, good. Just being here, just being present. A wholesome sense of well-being that maybe spreads a sense of health, goodness throughout your body. As if the rhythm of breathing is the massage, is the kneading of the dough of meditation.
There comes a time in meditation when rather than focusing on thoughts, instead of focusing on the thoughts that are about our experience, about things, the focus switches to the direct experience here in this body. As if awareness arises out of the body, arising with the inhale, with the exhale, with a delight of having the mind no longer centered on thoughts that are about things that objectify. A delight in being centered in the body with the subjective experience.
As we come to the end of this sitting, take a few moments to feel in your body and mind any shift that’s happened for you through the meditation. Are you a little calmer, more settled? Are there any feelings of well-being, however subtle, that are in your body now that were not there before? Do you feel if there’s been a reorientation from preoccupation to being centered in your body?
Whatever beneficial change has happened over the course of the sitting, that shift is important and valuable to recognize so that we can feel the shifts that support entering samadhi. And so we can appreciate how we are and how it might support us in going into the world. How would you stay close to the sense of well-being with the ringing of the bell to end the sitting, listening to the little talk that I’ll give, and getting up to begin your day or continue your day with some reference point, some reference to this shift that’s happened in meditation, a shift in understanding or orientation?
And may it be a shift that heightens our care, our awareness of the well-being of others. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may we have confidence that the people we encounter today can in fact be happy, safe, peaceful, free, at least in our presence with how we are with them.
So welcome to this series on samadhi. Today also marks maybe the five-year anniversary of beginning these YouTube mornings together. Some of you have been along for the whole ride for five years, and I’m very grateful for all of you who come. I have some confidence that the goodness of our time together spreads from you into the world. So this kind of radiating network of bringing good to the world is a great thing to be part of, and thank you for these five years.
So, samadhi. This week we’re going to cover the territory more of the approach, called access concentration usually in English, but the stage of approaching samadhi. This is when it’s relatively easy to stay in the present moment. If we lose the present moment, it’s almost like it’s obvious, it’s easy to come back, or there’s almost a call inside to come back, be here. There starts to be a shift of orientation towards the goodness of meditation, the joy, the happiness, the well-being of meditation or of concentration, of really staying present, over the mind not wandering, not being scattered, not being caught by other things. To really be here. It’s a kind of almost a little bit of a quantum shift, like, “Okay, now we’re here.”
It is a reorientation of some kind, and with that reorientation, it becomes a form of joy, a form of delight, that this is good. In the classic teachings about going into samadhi, going into jhānas2, the penultimate activity that is done is to learn to let go of the hindrances. We’ve talked about this before, but here the five hindrances are very subtle. They can be very big forces in the mind, huge and destructive for people. But in deeper meditation, we’re getting into the subtlety of it. How easy it is to drift off into thoughts, concerns of sensual pleasure. How easy it is to get involved with movements of aversion. How easy it is to move into getting kind of sloth and torpor, rigid and resistant. The subtlest versions of restlessness and regrets, the subtlest versions of uncertainty, like, “What am I doing here?”
And so, it’s somehow settling those and appreciating the goodness, the rightness, the pleasure, the well-being of not having the mind caught in those kinds of concerns. I think of this as a switch, a shift from objectifying thoughts to a subjective feeling. What I mean by objectifying thoughts is that when we’re caught in desires for sensual pleasures, they usually go with thoughts about the experience of sensual pleasure, about the object of sensual pleasure. Same thing with aversion. There’s no aversion without something we’re averting, pushing against, wanting to go away. And that involves engaging the thinking mind, where whatever we have aversion for or desire for is now an object of the thinking mind. To the degree we’re not strong, it keeps us disconnected from ourselves. We’re no longer present for the deeper subjective experience of what’s actually the feeling of being alive, the vitality of being here.
The shift that begins happening deeper and deeper as we approach is that we’re no longer satisfied or content to be objectifying, to be caught in thoughts that are about the world, about desires, about aversions. There’s a shift to trusting or resting in the subjective experience. With the breathing, for example, it’s the deep subjective experience of the breathing that we linger with, we stay with.
To give a little sense of what the subjective experience is like, how directly, almost somatic it is, it’s kind of like if you take two fingers, your thumb and your pointing finger, and press them together, you’ll feel some sensations—maybe of pressure, maybe heat, maybe firmness, something there. Those sensations you feel as you press your fingers together occur together with sensing them. If we didn’t have the capacity to sense, to feel, we wouldn’t know that there was pressure. The sensing of the pressure and the sensation of pressure are one and the same. You can’t really separate them. Linguistically, we can say there’s a sensation, a thing out there that we’re aware of. But in order to sense the sensations, that’s not out there, that’s in the fingers. The sensing and the sensation together make up the subjective experience.
Now, I can be objectifying it by saying, “I’m not having the right kind of feeling of pressure. There’s a particular right way of doing this, and I’m not quite getting what the sensation is supposed to be. It’s supposed to be maybe harder or softer or more pointed or more spread out.” And this makes me think about, “I wonder why Gil is doing this as an exercise? He could be doing it with some really pleasant, delightful sensations of the body. That would be the way to get my attention.” Those thoughts are in the objectifying world. The subjective world here is the place where sensing and sensations occur together.
So with the breathing, it’s those sensations of breathing that are known, where they are being sensed, where the awareness is, the attention is. To stay right there in that subjective world of sensing and sensations. And as we stay there, the subjective experience can grow because there’s a goodness, there’s a sweetness, there’s a well-being that can arise that is not the well-being that comes from physical pleasure that we know as sensual pleasure.
So there’s a shift of orientation in the approach stage from being concerned, interested, enamored with the objectifying thinking mind, and instead feeling like we’re at home. This is where it’s good. It feels delightful to be here in the subjective experience where sensing and sensation occur together. That subjective experience can be quite broad through the body. There could be a tingling, a warmth, a vibration, a flow, an opening, a lightness that happens even as we stay very close to the inhale and exhale, maybe counting them to really stay right there with them. The idea is not to be in the control tower, tightly focused, but rather to be relaxing into the subjective experience, letting go into it, trusting it. Thinking of that subjective experience of breathing as kind of like the nest, the resting place, the grounding place for our sense of being in our life.
The Buddha talks about how as we make this shift from the hindrance of sensual desire to this deeper subjective experience, it just feels good. It can feel like a relief. It can feel like a happiness or contentment that now we know something that’s more satisfying. This is good, and it’s less exhausting. Thinking about sensual desire is exhausting. The mind is kind of restless, forceful, agitated, sometimes with a contraction and tightness. Resting in the subjective experience allows the mind to soften, to open. The control tower no longer has to work so much. It can just settle back and allow for the subjective experience to inform it, to arrive, to be there.
There can be a great sense of well-being in the approach stage of practice. This is where you’re allowed or encouraged to start feeling the well-being that’s there in meditation, however subtle it is, to recognize it and trust it, allow it to be there. There’s something about giving our attention, giving awareness, making room for what is wholesome that lets the wholesome grow. And the wholesome gives us a different subjective way of being with everything in our life.
I know that our lives are difficult. I know that there are all kinds of difficult emotions and sensations in the body that can happen. But as we get into this approach stage, we’ve learned how to be mindful of them, how to relate to these difficulties in a good way through mindfulness practice. It’s okay to recognize them, allow them to be there on the edges. In this approach stage, it feels just right to open to the deeper feelings of well-being, however subtle they are. So, breathing into the sweetness, breathing with the beauty, with the subtleness, with the contentment—this is the work of the approach stage. But maybe I shouldn’t use the word “work.” Some people think of it as play. Some people think of it as an act of love, love-making. Some people think of it as nurturing and caring and nourishing ourselves.
The deeper experience of this kind of joy, sometimes explained because of a wordplay in Pali where pīti3 also means “to drink.” We’re drinking the goodness. We’re drinking the wholesome.
So for today, as part of this ability to make a shift in orientation, I’d encourage you to spend a day feeling the difference between the objectifying world of thoughts, especially thoughts of sensual desire—whether it’s food or sex or some other pleasant, wonderful experience—and the subjective experience. The metaphor that I have for this is that a person can be on a hot day or a cold day sitting at the edge of a beautiful lake and thinking about all kinds of sensual pleasures that would be wonderful to have, daydreaming and wishing, being angry for not having them, and preoccupied by how difficult it is to have these sensual desires. And right there in front of the person is this delightful lake. On a hot day, it feels so refreshing to go into it. On a cold day, maybe it’s hot pools; it’s so good to go into it. And as soon as we go into it, what brings a tremendous sense of “ah,” relief, joy, happiness, is the subjective experience. And it’s not just simply the subjective experience of being in the wonderful water; it’s also the subjective experience of putting to rest, putting aside all those objectifying thoughts from the control tower. “Ah, this is good.”
So study that during the day: the objectifying mind versus the subjective mind. And maybe you can step into the lake more often through the day than you realize. Thank you.
Samadhi: A state of meditative consciousness. It is a meditative absorption or trance, attained by the practice of dhyāna (meditation). ↩
Jhānas: States of deep meditative absorption in which the mind is fully concentrated on a single object. ↩
Pīti: A Pali word often translated as “rapture,” “joy,” or “bliss.” It is a factor of enlightenment and a key component of the jhānas. ↩