This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Spacious Equanimity; Samadhi (53) Happy, Equanimous Body. 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 again from Spirit Rock Meditation Center. This is the last morning I’ll be here for this time, and it’s been a wonderful time with my three teachers: Tuere Sala, Darra Williams, and Kaira Jewel Lingo. And also with the retreatants here and all of Spirit Rock, it’s a wonderful place to practice. As you see in these wonderful, kind of rolling hills behind me, we’re nestled into these hills and spend much of the time when we have to go between places outdoors. As you can also see these days, if you’ve been following, the weather changes quite a bit, and that’s part of the joy of being at Spirit Rock, being outdoors. I’ve been coming here for 35 years, and no matter what the weather is, I’m happy—hot, cold, stormy. So, welcome to the meditation.
One of the factors that come into play in meditation that stands out in the third jhāna1 is equanimity. It becomes even more significant in the fourth jhāna, but it already appears here, together with mindfulness (sati2), awareness, and clear comprehension (sampajañña3).
One of the meanings of the word upekkhā4, or equanimity, is to have a kind of overview, a bird’s-eye view of our situation—how we are at the moment, the current experience. This puts it into a wider context that allows us to hold it in a spacious way, hold it generously, hold it without getting caught in any reactivity—the reactivity of being for and against, the activity of translating the experience into a story or a prediction of the future, without the reactivity that wants to assign meaning to the experience, or the orientation to measure the experience or relate it to ideas of me, myself, mine, “this is who I am.”
Just this wide, spacious overview with no inclinations to have thoughts about “who am I?” “what am I?” “where am I?” because the overview, the broad perspective, the spacious, open perspective feels so complete, so satisfying, that none of the reactivity is needed. We see that, we feel that, we know that for the time of the meditation. We understand there’s something much better to do in this wide, equanimous overview that sees and knows but allows each thing to be itself. The metaphor for the third jhāna that we talked about yesterday is lotus flowers, and in a certain kind of way, everything becomes a flower. It’s seen that way in this kind of equanimous, open, expansive view.
So, assume a meditation posture. And while you’re sitting, establishing your posture, see if there are small adjustments you can make that soften your posture, that settles your body. Oddly enough, maybe there’s a way of being well-aligned in the posture that allows for a deeper relaxation. If we relax everything seemingly, we can’t relax the most.
If you haven’t already, gently close your eyes. Taking a few deeper, longer inhales and exhales to begin entering into the body, meditating.
Letting your breathing return to normal. Orient yourself around the body, as if it’s the body that’s meditating, as if it’s the body that generates awareness, maybe through the way the body can sense sensations, the broad fields of sensing in the body. And in that broad field of sensing in the body, there’s the movement, the sensations of breathing.
Perhaps with every exhale, let it be an opening, a widening of awareness through the body, open to possibilities, open to what’s there. And with every inhale, also an opening of the awareness—a wide, broad field of sensing, a field of awareness open to possibilities, open to what’s here, without the need to think about it. In fact, appreciating that by suspending discursive thinking, you become more open, more sensitive through the field of sensations and the vast space around sensations, around your body—the space of awareness within which the body meditates.
Letting go of thinking as you exhale, and letting go into the body, the field of awareness, open to a spacious field of sensing. Awareness as you inhale, letting your thoughts float away, and again, open to the spacious awareness of what is here and now as the body meditates, the body senses. And the quiet mind provides an openness to the vast space all around the sensations of the body meditating.
Just like the sky is not disturbed by a cloud that drifts through it, so the field of awareness is not disturbed by whatever is known. The field of spaciousness around all things does not react to anything. Everything is like a cloud drifting through, or like a lotus flower floating in the vast waters of the body’s lake.
One of the qualities of the third jhāna, and for all the jhānas, is to abide, to dwell here, to rest in whatever goodness, whatever is good in this meditation.
And to consider that whatever is good in this meditation, as you enter the world, making contact with things of the world, the people of the world, it makes a difference to contact them through this field of goodness. It’s very different than encountering the world and people through our field of reactivity and judgment.
May it be that all that is really good in you—the goodness, the calm, the peace, the love—is in the forefront of how you encounter the world.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may all beings be loved.
Loved by the goodness of our hearts. And if it helps you to love more, no one needs to know you’re loving them, but you are with your goodwill, your care, your compassion. May all beings be loved.
Thank you. And again, without the bell, end the sitting with a bow.
Hello everyone, and welcome to this next talk on the samādhi series. It’s the third talk on the third jhāna. As we go deeper into absorptions, deeper into a unified, concentrated, absorbed state, the experience of our body begins to change.
One of the ways that I’ve come to understand this, at first maybe through my own practice, is I started to feel that in these immersive states, I would leave my karmic body behind. One of the bodies we can experience is our karmic body, and that’s the body that we feel and sense that is a product or a byproduct of our reactivity—the ways we’ve reacted to the world, the way that we have resisted, tightened, tensed. Now, you might want to blame the world for the ways in which you are tense or afraid or contracted, and that’s okay. But still, it’s something which the mind, the inner life, is doing: the contraction, the tension, the holding on, the resisting. It’s very deep, and we should have tremendous respect and care and carefulness around this karmic body we have.
This body is conditioned by the regularity or the frequency in which we think the same thought over and over again. If you repeatedly think that you are somehow inadequate, it becomes kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy because if it’s repeated enough, it’s just depressing; it just kind of drains us. And so that drained body, I would call the karmic body. If what you love to do is to watch horror movies—the excitement and thrill and liveliness of being afraid—and you do that enough, and in fact, you tell yourself horror movies in your own mind, then you have a fearful body. The fear body is predominant. Some people live in their fear body, and that’s what I call a karmic body. It’s a body that’s somehow been shaped by the reactivity of the mind.
As we settle and get more and more focused, concentrated, unified, and relaxed, the ways in which the body is tightened up, tensed up, knotted up, held tight, become rigid—the fear body, the anger body, the desire body, the grief body—that conditioning begins to loosen up. As we go deeper into meditation, that falls to the side; that no longer is operating for us. It’s not a loss of who we are; it’s like taking off a coat that has become overly heavy or overly hot as the weather warms up. We no longer need it.
Sometimes, in leaving the karmic body behind, the body feels very different. In the third jhāna, one of the ways of understanding it is that it’s a happy body, a happiness body. The body is filled with a kind of happiness where the karmic body is no longer operating. Sometimes I’ve called it the diamond body, the adamantine body, because it feels so clear and solid but transparent all the way through, like a jewel. Sometimes, in going through the jhānas, the posture of the body changes. Sometimes it gets very aligned, and you can actually feel the body aligning itself with the concentration. It’s almost like there’s an energetic force in the body that kind of lifts the spine, opens the chest, and you feel very present. I call that the diamond body. Some people might call it an energy body that happens because all that’s left is this tingling, flowing, vibrating field of energy, seemingly.
So as we leave this karmic body behind, we’re leaving behind the ways that we’ve been conditioned by the world, by our own behavior, our own thoughts, by the influence of others. It can be very healing. It’s one of the reasons why these jhānas are prescribed sometimes—because they are such deep medicine for the heart and the mind. It touches the very deep subconscious places that are very hard to otherwise contact. The usual instructions, at least that I’m familiar with or value a lot, is if you’re fortunate enough to begin to go through these jhānas, do it slowly. Don’t be in a hurry to get somewhere, because the idea is to allow yourself to be reconditioned, to allow yourself to feel the goodness of it, the healing of it, to allow yourself to get a very different message into your heart, into your body, than the message of danger, or the message of being left out, or the message of not being good enough—all these messages that we live with that are not so healthy for us. To be able to have this other way of receiving a different, healthy message is one of the values of these deep states.
In this happiness body of the third jhāna, the karmic body, the conditioning we have, the reactivity we have, really settles dramatically. There’s a lot less potential for being reactive. What becomes clear, what stands out instead, is equanimity. The equanimity that is not for or against something, that’s not wanting or not wanting something. The equanimity just allows each thing that arises to be there, like the sky allows a cloud to be in the middle of the vast sky, or like a vast sky allows a bird to fly through it. The sky is not disturbed; it’s not for or against the bird. It’s just a vast space and non-reactivity, an openness to whatever comes.
The metaphor in Buddhism is often that of a path. Buddhist practice is a path, and a path is a clearing in the forest that’s open so we can walk through it. The path is, to a great degree, defined by the absence, the openness, the emptiness that’s there above the physical trail. The path includes this open space, and a path in the woods, the open space is not disturbed by you walking through it. So the mind, so awareness, so this happiness body allows everything just to be there in the quiet, equanimous mind.
For me, very closely associated with this is the feeling of spaciousness, as if there’s lots of space around each individual thing. For the Buddha, it seems to be, rather than space, something similar: the vast space that’s underwater in a lake. There, the space has a kind of viscosity; it has a certain kind of weight, a little bit of physicality to it, that you feel the contact of the water against the skin, and maybe the refreshing, comfortable temperature and stillness of the water. So it’s not just simply empty space, but in the third jhāna, it kind of feels like this wonderful, soothing texture or viscosity or soft butter of spaciousness in which we are breathing or being.
One of the characteristics of that spaciousness, this vast water, is a feeling of contentment, happiness. It’s physical; the body just feels like it’s maybe almost beginning to disappear, getting very soft or having no boundaries, but the body is saturated or filled with feelings of pleasure. Some translators prefer to translate sukha5 in the third jhāna not as happiness but as pleasure, because it’s so embodied. For me, at least, pleasure just doesn’t seem to capture how good it is, how wonderful it is, so I prefer happiness. But for some people, happiness is too complicated a state, so maybe pleasure or contentment is the middle way for these words—deep, deep contentment or satisfaction.
So, equanimity—not equanimity from understanding something, but an equanimity of being larger than everything. The awareness is large and spacious and open; it has room for what’s happening here and now, giving breathing room to all things. You might today, as you go through your day, find times to give breathing room, space, to what’s happening. And notice how it’s the thinking mind, maybe the reactive mind, that narrows the space of awareness, that sometimes makes a claustrophobic mind that’s much more affected, troubled by what’s happening. Maybe by giving breathing room and opening up, expanding outwards, you get some of the benefit—peacefulness or happiness or at least equanimity—of a spacious, open, wide awareness.
May your day be a good one. We’ll continue this series tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll be at IMC, and I think I’ll miss a little bit being here on these rolling grasslands outside. So, thank you very much.
Jhāna: A state of deep meditative absorption or concentration. There are traditionally eight stages, divided into four material jhānas (rūpa jhāna) and four immaterial jhānas (arūpa jhāna). ↩
Sati: A Pali word meaning “mindfulness” or “awareness.” It is the faculty of remembering to pay attention to what is happening in the present moment. ↩
Sampajañña: A Pali term for “clear comprehension” or “clear knowing.” It refers to the ability to understand the nature of reality as it is, without distortion. ↩
Upekkhā: A Pali word for “equanimity.” It is a state of mental balance and non-reactivity, a calm and steady mind that is not swayed by pleasure or pain, gain or loss. ↩
Sukha: A Pali word that can be translated as “happiness,” “pleasure,” “ease,” or “bliss.” In the context of the jhānas, it refers to a deep, embodied sense of well-being that arises from concentration. ↩