This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Let Go, Let Go, Let Go; Samadhi (37) Releasing into 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.
Hello and welcome. This week, the idea is to say less at the beginning of the meditation so we can have a longer meditation. So, assume a meditation posture and find a nice balance on the sitting bones and your spine. Find a nice way in which maybe the spine straightens a bit, regardless of whether you’re lying down or sitting up. Maybe allow the chest to be a little bit broader and maybe more room in the belly for the belly to relax.
And to gently close your eyes.
Often in these beginning minutes of the meditation, I emphasize relaxing. Today, I’d like to encourage not relaxing, but releasing. Releasing is almost like allowing whatever tension or holding there is, whatever tightness or attachments there are, to allow them what they want deep inside. They want to be released. And that samadhi1 has a lot to do with releasing, thoroughly, repeatedly, just releasing anything the mind is holding on to, and releasing into the very center of the meditation, which I’ve been emphasizing is the experience of breathing—the body’s experience of breathing, wherever that is the easiest to follow.
Imagine that the breathing is like a river that’s flowing, and your awareness is like a raft or canoe that stays right on the surface of the river but gets picked up and carried along, floating along. So release yourself into the body breathing. Release yourself into the current of breathing in and breathing out.
At some points during the exhale or the inhale, the current might be faster. Maybe in the transition from breathing out to breathing in, the current has slowed considerably. But float along, be carried along. Stay close, stay intimate with the sensations, the river of sensations of breathing.
And if and when the mind wanders off, when any preoccupations come, release. Release back into breathing. The word “release” points to something a little bit different than “letting go.” Letting go has a little bit more to do with something we do. It’s fine to relax, it’s fine to let go, but for entering into samadhi1, there’s also this allowing for the release. Maybe you do a little bit of it, but some of it is also just the meditation releasing itself.
Following the breath, maybe following when it comes on, the pleasure, the joy, sometimes even the thrill of being carried along by the current of the river, the river of breathing, one breath at a time.
Remember to release with a quiet, deep, deeper sensitivity to whatever way you’re caught, preoccupied, tense. Release and release. Settle your awareness into the onward-leading experience of breathing, where awareness rides the sensations of breathing as the only thing that is important during these minutes.
Staying with your breathing and remembering to release, to let go. And in deeper meditation, release comes with joy, comes with a delight or well-being, comes with a “yes.” It’s okay in these minutes of meditation to take the chance, take the risk of letting go of everything and letting go into the stream of breathing. Release whatever you’re holding on to or whatever is holding on to you. Let go, let go, let go into the simplicity of breathing.
The deeper the letting go, the deeper the release, the better we can meet the next moment clearly, freshly. And as we come to the end of this sitting, to let go and release enough to be renewed in our vision and how we see the world, see others, for a few moments at least, without prejudice, without bias, without preferences. Just see where what we see has been released from the hold of our attachments and preferences, desires. We give freedom to each thing.
And may it be, as we return to this our usual world of people and activities, may it be that we see with wisdom how to release others from our attachments, so we see them freshly, freely, so that the way that we see others makes it easier for them to feel free, peaceful, safe, and happy.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.
And may the very way that we walk in the world support this possibility.
So, welcome to this next talk on samadhi1. Samadhi is the Buddhist word for being deeply immersed in the meditation, deeply immersed in anything that we’re doing, where in that immersion there is no holding back, there’s no resistance, there’s no self-consciousness in a kind of attached way. There’s a giving ourselves over to the meditation, to the attention, to the present moment. And a lot of that has to do with letting go.
I think I mentioned some time ago that one of the first instructions that I received about going into samadhi1 was in Thailand when I first went there to practice. I met a monk who was a little bit dismissive, I think, of samadhi, and he said that samadhi just involves letting go. Just let go, let go, let go. But I don’t think we need to be dismissive of it. It’s kind of remarkable that if you place yourself in a nice meditative posture and then let go, this natural process occurs that is a kind of a releasing, a freeing, a deepening, a sense of well-being that wells up. It’s almost as if the natural state of being immersed in activity brings joy, without there being any worldly reason for that joy to be there, except for the complete immersion in the activity that we’re doing with the meditation.
So this deeper release into the meditation, we’re releasing a lot of things, but one of the things we’re releasing is any strain or expectation around the meditation, any pushing, trying to make something happen, any thinking, anything that the thinking mind is doing, trying to do in this kind of superficial, coarser way. It all gets let go, let go, let go. But don’t just let go; let go into the object of meditation, a release into the body breathing, so that you’re really finding a way to immerse yourself in it. And that immersion then becomes the totality, where everything that we are is unified with it.
The analogy I gave yesterday was of someone on the edge of a lake on a hot day. There’s a nice, wonderfully cool lake, but the person sits there, being very hot, and thinks about the lake, thinks about going into an air-conditioned room, thinks about getting a fan—thinks about all kinds of things while sitting there being hot. The mind is just busy thinking, planning, and wanting, while the lake is right there. All the person has to do is immerse themselves in the lake. And then there’s an immersive feeling of the water, the coolness, the sensations of it. It’s clear that we’re immersed in something that’s wonderful now, and all those thoughts, planning thoughts about going someplace where it was cool, fall away because they’re clearly not needed anymore. And maybe for a little while, there’s no need to think of anything. It’s just so good to be immersed in that cool, refreshing pool of water.
So we’re sitting on the edge of a wonderful, refreshing—or if you prefer the different metaphor, a warm, nurturing—pool of samadhi1. Don’t think about it. Don’t be involved in planning and wanting and expecting. Release, let go into it. And don’t let go too hard. Don’t let go too quickly or too often, because that itself is just more of the same kind of attachment and trying to manipulate and make something happen. Just let go in a relaxed, open way, almost like you’re not trying to make something happen.
Because any holding, any tension, in and of itself, there’s a desire, there’s a yearning, there’s a momentum to let go. Just like any ball that’s put on a slope will start rolling downhill. We could say the ball wants to; that’s what it wants to do. The pull of gravity is its desire. In the midst of any clinging, any holding, any attachment to self or to outcome or to pleasure, is a kind of holding the ball against gravity. And if we release the ball, it will roll downhill. There is an onward-leading nature of going into the experience more and more fully. Entering the experience fully is the direction that our whole system is designed to do if we let go of everything else.
There can be these surface kind of preoccupations and attachments, but as those get quieter, we can start feeling there’s something, a deeper movement, a deeper desire, a thing that wants to happen that is not really associated with our usual self, our usual desires. It’s more like a natural or deeper or freer kind of movement, desire, or approach that places us right there in the breathing.
And so, to think of the breathing, breathing in and breathing out, like a river that’s flowing, and we place awareness on the surface of that river. You can maybe think of awareness as a raft or a canoe, and we keep it that close, floating on top. And then the awareness is carried by the current and flows along the ups and downs, the twists and turns of the river as it flows with the in-breath and out-breath, all the different changing sensations, just right there.
To get really intimate, I find it useful to remember that any sensation that we experience, the sensing of it is nondual with the sensation. What I mean by that is that you cannot separate out as two different things the sensing in the moment and the sensations that are being sensed. These two occur together. There’s an intimacy and a closeness. We’re sensing—sensing is a little bit more what the mind does, maybe the nervous system does, and sensation is what is being triggered by some event, some place—but those things arise together. And that intimacy, to be right there, for awareness to sense and to feel, for feeling to be abiding in that place where sensing and sensations occur together, to really stay with that with the breathing, the sensations of breathing, wherever they might be.
And to release. There’s an art to letting go, releasing into the river of breathing, that recognizes also that you’re releasing into whatever pleasure, whatever joy, whatever thing that’s feeling, “Oh, yes.” Whenever, “Yes, this is good.” So we’re into the refreshing part, the sweet part, the—some people refer to it as a beautiful experience that goes on. Yes, we’re into this, the relief of it, the pleasure of it, the goodness of it, the healthiness of it. Yes. And you can’t make this happen. You can’t, you know, if you don’t feel that or know that as a lived experience, you can’t argue to someone that the experience is pleasant or wonderful. It either is or isn’t. But when it is, in whatever way it is, yes, let go into that goodness. Let go into, feel that, be it.
At some point with this approach stage of meditation, it becomes easier to stay with the breathing than it is to go away. You might still go away, but it’s almost like where you want to be is with the breath. There’s a desire, there’s a goodness, “Yes, here’s where I want to be.” And so, if the mind wanders off, it almost will come back by itself. I used to have this sense, the feeling like there was a rubber band attached to my thoughts. My thoughts would start wandering away, and when the rubber band got taut enough, it would bring the thoughts back into the present moment, bring myself back. It was not me doing it so much; it was like, “Here, stay here, be here, flow along.”
So this approach stage, the important part of it is that it’s not so much work anymore to stay present. It’s not like continually coming back and being here, coming back and being here. It’s not continually relaxing, softening. It’s now we’re here, and it feels like the right place to be. And certainly, there are plenty of times where even experienced meditators are beginners, and it’s just manual labor. We just come back out of confidence and trust in the process and just kind of do the manual work of coming back from thinking, letting go, starting over again, starting over again. So we need to be gracious and appreciate that this is an important part of meditation on a regular basis, to be feeling like a beginner.
But then at some point, when the meditation, the samadhi1, begins to… there’s a kind of a shift, a kind of a… something, either it can be a gradual shift or a sudden shift, that now it’s the right place to be is with the breathing. The right place to be is to be immersed. This is good. The system wants to be here. Anything else just is not so satisfying anymore. And this starts to become the approach stage of samadhi1, that we’re approaching a pivotal moment where the samadhi is going to… we’re going to drop into a deeper samadhi. That’ll be coming.
But this approach stage where it’s, “This is good, this is good.” And I describe all this to you so that you can recognize when you’re there and recognize that this is also part of meditation. So at the right time, you have a sense that this is possible. You’re allowed to do this. You’re allowed to start releasing into it. You’re allowed to immerse yourself. You’re allowed to immerse yourself in the joy and the pleasure and the goodness, the rightness. You orient yourself towards it. So the mind is getting organized, oriented, stable, steady, at ease here to flow on the surface of the river of breathing, breathing in, breathing out, just staying there and being massaged by it, being nourished by it, just there.
So I hope that what I’m saying makes enough sense for you, either intuitively or with your imagination or maybe even your experience sometimes, that you can kind of file it away and remember this. And inspire you that no matter what stage of meditation you’re at, this is an inspiring process to be part of. It’s an inspiring, very natural process that’s kind of built into our whole psychophysical system to have this ability. And it kind of brings a lot of faith, a lot of awe, a lot of inspiration to know, “Yes, yes, this is possible.”
So thank you very much, and we’ll continue with this approach tomorrow.