This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Enter, Abide, and Open; Samadhi (50) Opening to Joy and Happiness. 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, and welcome to Spirit Rock—Spirit Rock Hillside, that is. Behind me, up in the hills, is the Spirit Rock meditation hall, where I’m teaching a retreat this week. One of the ways that Spirit Rock is designed is that you have to be outdoors to go between almost anything. So there’s a constant going outdoors and experiencing the land, the sky, the weather, the turkeys, and the different animals. The day before yesterday, there was a really beautiful, healthy-looking coyote stalking the hillsides up here. And as I showed some of you, there was this white egret that’s been here for a year or so. It’s well known; it’s been given a name. Someone asked for the name; it is called Paul.
For the meditation today, continuing the exploration of samadhi1, the descriptions of the jhāna2 are each different, but they all contain similar wording: one enters and abides in these states of being. So, this idea is about entering, not staying apart, not staying up in the head looking down, but dipping into it, entering. One way that I understand this, or that helps to understand it, is entering into an embodied state—but an embodied state that is not exactly our physical body, but rather the sensations in the body that are born from the meditation, from being settled, from being connected, unified, calm, and clear. Just as if you get angry, you can feel new body sensations in your body, and if you enter those difficult sensations, maybe you’ll be more angry.
So when we start getting more and more involved with meditation, there are these samadhi sensations that we can enter and abide in, which I take to be “rest in.” Enter and rest in them. This resting is very different than pushing or wanting more or trying to have something happen. It’s closer to “enter and be in them,” a kind of sense of beingness, resting in them, abiding in them.
And then one more step that is not exactly in the text, but it’s my interpretation of the classic instructions, is to open to some of these sensations—direct experiences that come with meditation that have to do with well-being, joy, happiness, delight, and contentment. Open to it so that it seems to have more space in the body. It’s an embodied opening. So we enter into the maybe very subtle at first sensations that seem connected or associated with meditation, rest in them, and open for them to become more expansive, to open up, to spread throughout our whole being.
So, to enter, abide, and open.
Assuming a meditation posture, I recommend that you close your eyes.
And with your eyes closed, feel and sense maybe some of the leftover or associated experience of feelings of delight or awe or openness in seeing the hillsides and the sky behind me, if that somehow had an influence on your body, your heart, your mind. Let that be there, however subtle it is.
The art of entering into it. If simply assuming your meditation posture is familiar, there’s a contentment, there is a familiarity, there’s a relief. There are a lot of some kind of good feelings that can come with assuming our meditation posture. Feel those in the body and enter into them, or lower yourself into them in the body, rather than associating yourself with the efforts and the choices and the strivings of the mind, the brain up in the head, up in the control tower. Drop down into the body, into the middle, maybe like it’s a lake of whatever subtle, small, mild good feelings there might be.
And if it’s accessible, in the middle of that or deeper underneath it or around it, become aware of your body breathing. Aware of the expansion and contraction of your torso as you breathe. And that the impulse to breathe in is inside the breathing itself, the breathing body. Enter into your breathing to feel that impulse, the movement, the expansion of breathing in.
As you exhale, let that be a settling into your body, entering your body like you would enter a refreshing lake, into the water. As you exhale, relaxing any tension or pressure in the thinking mind, letting go of your thinking. And doing so by letting go into whatever good feelings there are in your body. Even if you feel off or feel uncomfortable anywhere in your body, for now, see if you can drop yourself into that which is pleasant, with a very modest idea of what that is. Breathing naturally, maybe at some point in the cycle of breathing, there’s something pleasant.
Enter and abide in.
If in the course of this meditation you get pulled into your thoughts, notice how that might be pulling you away from an intimacy of your body and those wholesome sensations of just sitting here. Let go of your thoughts and allow yourself to enter, settle into the pleasant, enjoyable sensations. Abide in those as you breathe, breathing through it, with it, around it. And open the body, open the heart, open up so that the pleasant sensations, the good feelings, the joy can spread through you.
In these three steps—enter, abide, and open—done very, very gently, kindly, softly, as if you have all the time in the world at each step. Encouraging the thinking mind to be quieter, letting go of thoughts in favor of a more intimate connection to the goodness of this moment in your body.
Enter, abide, and open. Maybe an opening of all your senses, nothing left out, but you abiding at the center of it all. Abiding in the center of all the well-being that’s available, letting it spread through your body.
If during the time of this meditation your body feels more subtle, more calm, if you feel a greater contentment or ease in any way, if there’s a joy, enjoyment in your body of meditating, however small it might be, enter into it. Drop into the embodied experience of it, letting your body feel it, sense it more fully.
Abide in it, rest in whatever good feelings, wholesome feelings there are sitting here meditating. And open to those feelings, open beyond the edges of them so they either expand, spread, or so that there are no boundaries, no edges to the good feelings.
Enter, abide, open.
And then opening your body, your heart, your mind beyond your meditation, beyond where you are, out across the lands, across the hillsides, the forest, the trees, the oceans, the lakes, the skies, the clouds. And allow your goodwill, allow a kind of inner seeing that sees all things with kindness, with care. A care where we want to care for what cares for us. So much on this earth is constantly caring for us, providing oxygen, food.
May it be that the way, the purpose, the dedication of regular meditation practice is to contribute to a better world, starting with ourselves, that brings forth a better us, brings out the best in us so we can share that with the world, spreading kindness, compassion, support, care for the whole world.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings be free.
Thank you. And with this bow, we end this meditation.
Welcome to our next talk on samadhi, the last talk on the second jhāna. Most people who experience the second jhāna feel that it’s much more satisfying than the first. With the first jhāna, there is maybe a little bit of evaluation in the mind, a kind of sense of relief of not being caught in the thinking mind, the desiring mind, the aversive mind anymore. In the second, there’s an ability to just be in the experience itself in a deeper way. It’s not in reference to what we’ve left behind and how good it is to no longer be caught up in the hindrances.
The thinking mind, the active mind, becomes quieter and quieter, more peaceful, more open, and there’s virtually no thinking. One of the ways to move into this or enter into it is to begin appreciating the difference between ordinary thinking—conversational thinking, commentarial thinking, thinking with words or images—and begin appreciating that there are nonverbal ways of knowing. We can know without there needing to be thoughts that tell us so.
When we get into these deeper states of samadhi, there is a kind of knowing. There is a deeper place inside that maybe even guides us a little bit because it knows: stay here, enter here, be present. This is good. But the ordinary verbal thinking or vision-making kind of thinking has gotten quiet. It’s taken a wonderful, delightful vacation. Finally, it could rest. But still, there can be a deeper knowing that somehow keeps us connected here in the present moment, a kind of nonverbal knowing.
It’s that kind of knowing that recognizes the joy and the happiness that characterizes the second jhāna. So, pīti3, the Pali word, and sukha4, the Pali word that I translated as joy and happiness. Other people who practice jhānas are sometimes not happy with me using the word “joy” and “happiness” because they feel like generally that’s too modest, that it should be something more like “rapture” or “bliss.”
But as we get into this, especially in the second jhāna, it becomes important to open to the joy and the happiness when it’s there—the joy and happiness of being fully engaged, fully involved with no distractions, with the practice itself. It’s such a wholesome feeling. It feels like there’s such a rightness being here and now, and it feels so complete. Like, this is good. This feels more deeply satisfying than a lot of things that people can experience in life.
So there are these two things: joy and happiness. And as this second jhāna matures—matures means we become more familiar with it—the joy and the happiness spreads, it becomes more fully embodied, we open to it more. We start seeing the distinction, the difference between the joy and the happiness. Until this point, we talk about joy and happiness, but maybe we don’t really see them; they just kind of mingle together and there’s no real difference between them. But as everything gets quieter and calmer, and the thinking mind becomes even quieter and softer, and the excitement—very subtle, but excitement—of entering into these states begins to abate, we can start seeing the difference between the joy and the happiness.
One of the common ways to see it is that the joy is a little bit more mental, whereas the happiness is a little bit more physical. Now, the physical sensations of the joy can be quite strong. Some people are a little bit confused to hear that it’s more of the mind than it is of the body. But there’s a kind of a mental excitement you start feeling. There’s a mental thrill, a mental kind of uplift, energy, excitement. “Ah, this is good! Oh, yes!” Not that we say those words to ourselves, but there’s a little bit of energy like that. And that energy is a higher level of activity, of excitement, than the happiness.
The happiness is almost like a very deep contentment in the body. It’s a very deep sense of well-being that the mental excitement or the mental activation of joy is no longer there. And with the mental activation of joy, the sensations in the body tend to be a little bit stronger, more active, and sometimes quite active, quite strong, like big waves of bliss that kind of wash over us. Sometimes it feels like a lot of movement. But with the happiness, the movement feels like a gentle hum or vibration or warmth, or it might still feel like there’s a flow, but the flow feels very harmonious within us. And there isn’t any of the subtle, maybe not-so-subtle, excitement of the joy.
So as the second jhāna matures, being able to distinguish these two becomes very useful in terms of moving further into the third jhāna, which I’ll discuss next week. And so, learning to feel the distinction or the difference between joy and happiness becomes part of the task as we go deeper into this meditation, into the jhānas.
But either way, don’t be in a hurry. It’s best with jhānas never to be in a hurry. Take all the time in the world to become familiar, to feel it, to look around, to spread whatever goodness there is, to enter into, to abide. This idea of abiding means we’re not in a hurry. And opening, so that—and the quote from the classic traditional teachings—the practitioner fills, pervades, saturates, and permeates this body with a joy and happiness born of concentration, so no part of the body is not touched.
This expression, “this body,” is not referring to the ordinary physical body we might think about, but rather the body that we experience in meditation itself. In a kind of way, the experience we have of our body is very much conditioned by our mind, except when the physical pain of the body is quite intense—they would acknowledge that that was not mind-made. But so many of the sensations in our body have a very close, strong conditioning, very strongly conditioned by the quality, the characteristics of our mind. Our posture shifts and changes with the moods of our minds, the preoccupations. The negativity bias we have sometimes brings us into parts of our body where we’re reacting to them or pushing them away or have aversion to certain emotions and attitudes that cause a lot of tension in the body.
So as we meditate and the mind becomes softer, more relaxed, no longer preoccupied, no longer caught in things, then the body responds accordingly. You start feeling a very different feeling in the body. It’s almost like we have two different bodies: we have the body in ordinary life, and we have the samadhi body that kind of glows and is luminous and light and open and has a very different sensation. So to appreciate, enter into this kind of different body, even when just the feelings of it are just beginning to happen. Enter into it, help it support you to be willing to put down, put to rest the ordinary thinking mind. Enter into the state, the feelings, the sensations. Enter, abide, rest in it, so it can kind of spread, so you can appreciate it, you can be nourished by it, you can let it register in a deep way, let it recondition you in a nice way. And then open to the goodness of it, open to the joy and the happiness of it.
And then next week, when we start the third jhāna, we’ll talk about this distinction between the joy and the happiness, which becomes particularly important because the joy will fade away, and we’ll be able to enter and abide in the happiness of meditation, of the jhānas.
So in the meantime, you might want to over this weekend keep these three steps in mind, maybe throughout the day as much as you can. Maybe have a sticky note that you put on something that reminds you: enter, abide, and open. And just see if you can do that in ordinary life, everyday life. Maybe when you drive someplace and you arrive, don’t get out of your car right away. Sit there a little bit and relax. Enter, abide, and open. If you’re standing in a line in a supermarket, don’t read the headlines on the news that’s there. Rather, stand there, maybe with your eyes closed but looking down. Enter, abide, and open with what’s happening here for you. And maybe being attuned to what is good and right, right now, that you want to be attuned to. If you’re just in your thoughts, thinking a lot, enter and abide and open through the weekend, and then we’ll go further on Monday.
So thank you very much. I’ll still be here at Spirit Rock Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and you’ll get to see these wonderful hillsides here.
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. ↩
Jhāna: A state of deep meditative absorption. There are traditionally eight jhānas, each representing a progressively deeper level of concentration. ↩
Pīti: A Pali word often translated as “joy,” “rapture,” or “bliss.” It is one of the factors of the jhānas and is characterized by a sense of upliftment and exhilaration. ↩
Sukha: A Pali word meaning “happiness,” “ease,” or “pleasure.” In the context of the jhānas, it refers to a more subtle and sustained sense of well-being than pīti. ↩