This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Simplicity for Insight; Insight (13) Insight Revealed. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
Hello everyone, and welcome to this morning’s meditation.
One of the possibilities that can come from meditation is being refreshed, and one of the great refreshments is becoming simple—a simplicity of being. One of the values of developing samadhi1 with the inconstant, changing nature of experience is how it’s endlessly refreshing. It simplifies so much in the mind to just be. As we stay with the changing nature of the present moment experience—resting in it, trusting it, relaxing with it—we start seeing how it’s the thinking mind that, more often than not, keeps us in the old groove, in the old familiar thought patterns that can sometimes be debilitating or undermining.
To step out of the normal stream of thoughts and thinking into this different stream of direct experience and direct sensations—and to develop the samadhi of change, the samadhi of inconstancy, the samadhi of the changing nature of the present moment—is one way to be refreshed, one way to appreciate a simplicity of being. A simplicity of mind, a simplicity of thinking, no longer needing to interpret, no longer needing to judge and evaluate, no longer a need to remember or plan or fantasize. For the duration of the meditation, allow yourself a simplicity of being with direct experience. That samadhi of change is one of the places to experience that—with the changing sensations of breathing.
So, to assume a meditation posture. I find it helpful sometimes to view it, to feel it, as a kind of temple. I’m entering a sacred sanctum, a sacred space, a sacred grove of trees—someplace that’s special by assuming this posture.
Gently close the eyes and feel whatever is familiar about being in your meditation posture. Maybe make small adjustments in the posture to be a little more comfortable.
Then, take a few fuller breaths, where the in-breath is a time to feel your torso more fully, and the exhale a time to relax and settle.
Letting your breathing return to normal, but still stay close to the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out. As you breathe in, feel the muscles of your face, and as you breathe out, soften the face, as if your muscles can fall away from the skull. As if the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out is a bit of a massage for the face, through feeling and relaxing.
Breathing in and feeling the shoulders; exhaling and softening the shoulders. Let the gentle rhythm of breathing be there to help you connect to your shoulders, to relax your shoulders.
And then doing the same with your belly. If the belly moves as you breathe, feel the belly as you inhale, releasing the belly as you exhale.
Staying close to that alternation of breathing in and breathing out. On the inhale, become aware of whatever sensations are associated with your thinking mind—maybe energy activation, a little contraction or pressure. Maybe you think from a particular location where there are some subtle sensations of a gathering or coalescing. As you exhale, relax the thinking mind.
Then, relax into the body breathing. Wherever you feel your breathing in the body, wherever it’s easiest for your body itself to experience the sensations, the rhythm of breathing, relax into that place. Maybe at the beginning of the inhale and the end of the exhale, there’s the gathering place for attention, for awareness.
As you breathe in and breathe out, orient your mind towards breathing, almost as if from the back of the mind, the back of the skull, you establish a direct line, like the light of a lighthouse that touches down on the physical experience of the body breathing.
As you inhale, receive the sensations of inhaling. As you exhale, allow the sensations of the exhale to come and float away. Like gentle waves washing up on a sandy beach and receding, this constant movement and change of breathing in the body.
You might notice how thinking can pull you away from that, into old habits of thinking, into the repetition of familiar themes, ideas, and feelings. For now, return to breathing. Reorient yourself to the radical simplicity of the rhythm of sensations coming and going as you breathe.
Like the sand that continuously feels the movement of the waves coming and going in shallow water by the beach, your body is continuously feeling, sensing the changing nature. In the mind, becoming simple, quiet, as it enters the samadhi of breathing.
Relaxing the mind, letting go of the complexity of thinking in favor of the simplicity of the body breathing. Letting that be a vacation, a sacred Sabbath from all the thinking that you normally do. The simplicity of breathing.
With a little bit of simplicity, maybe there can be a little bit of samadhi of simplicity, a samadhi of simple breathing. A gathering, a settling together with breathing at the center of all things—a center which shifts and changes and oscillates, moves gently in the body. And awareness receives it. Awareness doesn’t go out to find or search, but settles back and receives the experience of breathing.
And then, as we come to the end of the sitting, with your eyes still closed, imagine gazing upon the world with a receptive gaze, where the experience of the world comes to you. You don’t have to search. You don’t have to do the looking, but allow the world to come into sight.
Imagine that you can do that with the people in your lives. And as they come into view, as they appear in the mind and your memory, appreciate the simplicity of seeing that wants nothing, searches for nothing. A seeing which is receptive and fresh. And in that receptivity, that freshness, to wish simplicity of being, freshness, joy, safety, and peace to others as you experience for yourself.
May it be that how we learn to be in meditation—the simplicity, the peace, the non-assertiveness, the care—helps us to go out into the world to care for the world itself.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.
Hello and welcome to this continued series on insight. Today, I want to emphasize that I think of insight in insight meditation as being more like revelation than it is like searching. It is not straining to see and understand something; it’s an understanding, a seeing that reveals itself to us. We’re not searching for something; we’re allowing something to show itself to us. But we are preparing ourselves to be good recipients of what gets shown to us.
So, practicing samadhi, quieting the mind, getting focused and still, cultivating a simplicity of being with our experience so that the mind is not jumping around so much—the mind settles down, the mind gets steady and quiet. Then, the insights of insight meditation can arise. Again, it is not a searching. It can arise out of radical simplicity. All the insight that you need in a deep way can come from resting your experience with the breathing.
One of the primary insights that we’re looking for, or waiting for, or allowing for in insight meditation is that of inconstancy, change, impermanence—how things are constantly arising and disappearing, appearing and disappearing. And that insight, that revealing of change, can happen completely with the breathing. All that you need to see about change and impermanence and inconstancy can be experienced, first and foremost, in the changing experience of breathing.
The advantage of this is that the breathing is relatively simple. The advantage is that when sitting in meditation, the breathing is generally the largest movement, the biggest changing sensation that we experience. And so, we don’t have to go searching for it; it’s there for us to experience. (Sometimes breathing is contraindicated when people get too anxious around the breath, or it awakens difficult emotions, or sometimes the breathing gets very, very subtle.) But generally, in insight meditation, the way I was taught was to have the central focus be on breathing. I found that really beneficial to help with the simplicity of the practice. I wasn’t looking around for things to have insight about.
We talk about the insight into impermanence, change, and inconstancy, but the idea is not to go looking for that so much as to relax and open to receive it, to let it find you rather than you find it. And it will find you if the thinking mind is not predominating, if we’re not seeing the world only through our thoughts. If the only part of the world we’re seeing is our thinking, we’re inhabiting our thoughts, living in our thoughts, consumed with our thoughts, making up worlds with our thoughts. If that whole movement can be quiet for a while, and we step out of the constant stream of thinking all the time, and into this other stream, the river of change within us.
Today, I’m emphasizing the breathing to help with that simplicity of being and to gather ourselves, orient ourselves not just around the breathing, but allowing ourselves to take in all the sensations of breathing that come and go. It might simply be recognizing the coming and going of the in-breath and out-breath. It might be seeing the individual sensations that occur even within an in-breath or an out-breath. In doing that, one of the advantages is we can see how much we disconnect from that and return to the old habit of thinking.
Thinking is a leading cause of all kinds of psychological challenges. Depression can come from a lot of rumination. Thinking about oneself a lot is said to be one of the leading causes for all kinds of psychological challenges, because if we’re thinking about ourselves all the time, we’re often repeating challenging, debilitating, undermining thoughts, or an attitude that is not so healthy, with excessive self-preoccupation.
So, to be willingly refreshed, or to trustingly know that it’s okay to put that aside, it’s okay not to be thinking so much about oneself, thinking so much about reality, thinking so much about our desires. Not only is it okay, but over time we begin appreciating that it’s really refreshing, it’s really healthy, it’s really beneficial to keep coming back to the direct experience in the body with breathing and its rhythm. It’s easier for the mind to get focused, to get centered, if there’s actually a subtle movement in the focus of attention. It’s almost restful for the eyes, restful for the mind, to follow a simple, ordinary movement that comes and goes, that arises and passes, or that flows peacefully through us.
As I say many times, it’s like sitting on a riverbank and watching a river go by, or sitting at the beach and watching the waves come up on the shore and go down. I can do that for long periods of time. It’s something very refreshing and nice and renewing to watch the very simple rhythm of something coming and going. So, to ride that, to surf on the movements of the breathing, to receive it, to let it wash over you, and to enter into the samadhi of breathing as an alternative to the kind of unhealthy samadhi of thinking, where we get absorbed in the world of thinking.
For some of us, the level of concentration we need to be with the breathing is comparable to the absorption, the concentration we have for our thoughts. There’s a phenomenal kind of zeroing-in focus on thinking which many people have at some point in their life. What we’re learning to do here is to kind of turn that around. So rather than a straining focus on thinking, there can now be a wholehearted, relaxed focus on the breathing.
In having insight around the changing nature of breathing, don’t look to have insight, but cultivate a receptivity, a simplicity, just an allowing of experience to be seen carefully. And then, the magic of insight reveals itself to you. You can certainly sometimes see inconstancy and change, but the magic of it is when it really begins to be compelling, and you’re right there with it in a delightful way. Some of the qualities of samadhi, some of the jhanic2 factors of joy and happiness, can arise with this receptive, open entering into the world of change and the changing nature of the breathing.
The same thing can happen in daily life, where we discover the delight, the joy, the benefit, the refreshment of stepping out of our thoughts in daily life and being here for the simplicity of our experience, here and now. The richness of it might be more boring than reading a great novel or watching a great movie, but the art of meditation is to teach us that it’s wondrous to be alive, to be present, to be conscious, and to be here connected in a three-dimensional or multi-dimensional way with our present moment reality, rather than in the one or two dimensions of mental preoccupation.
So, insight as a form of revelation. Thank you, and may the world of change, moment by moment, be refreshing for you.