This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Flowing with Change; Insight (16) Insight with Samadhi. 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.
Welcome. I am sitting here up in the hills above Lake Tahoe in California, where I’ve been on a vacation for almost a week, hiking in the mountains at a fairly high elevation. This is our last morning here before driving back home to Redwood City, and we’ll be broadcasting from IMC tomorrow again.
So, this is different than how it usually is, which speaks to the theme I’m still focusing on: change, inconstancy, and impermanence. Surprisingly, here is a new place, a new situation. The central focus that Buddhism has on anicca1, the Pali word that’s usually translated as impermanence, more literally means inconstancy. It is in the family of words like change. The Buddha has these three expressions he uses together: inconstancy, change, and becoming different.
Change has three important characteristics. As we become wiser about impermanence, change, and things becoming different, it’s useful to keep in mind these three aspects. One is that change means that something that was will no longer be. Another is that things that were not happening are now happening. So, change can be welcome and unwelcome. Something that is unfortunate can come to an end, and we celebrate, perhaps, or it’s a relief. Things that are fortunate and wonderful come to an end, and we’re sad. The ending of one thing means the beginning of something else, and the beginning can be unfortunate, or the beginning of something that’s fortunate and wonderful can happen. And sometimes there’s what’s in between: things don’t change fast enough, or they change too slow, staying constant for a while.
In all these ways, impermanence is not just a depressing word; it also makes possible all the important changes that happen in your life that are useful, important, and wonderful. Not having change is sometimes the unfortunate thing. We need change in order to grow. A child grows with change; we grow with change.
It makes a world of difference in Buddhist practice whether we situate ourselves in the middle of the change, in the middle of the changing world. Even though our thoughts and ideas can emphasize that things aren’t changing or some aspects don’t change, there’s always change here in the present moment. It’s possible, in being attuned to change, to find a degree of freedom—a freedom where we don’t hold on to anything, we don’t resist anything. A freedom where we surf or float with the changes, but not randomly. It’s not chaos. There’s a gentle, appropriate way that we steer the boat, the raft that goes down the river. The river carries us downriver, but we keep it in the current. We can influence the change that happens; we create the conditions for it to be different. So we meditate.
In meditation, we learn to situate ourselves in the change and to understand where the rudder is that keeps us going in a good direction, keeps us flowing, keeps us in the current rather than leaving the river to be in the land of thoughts, ideas, memories, and futures. To stay in the river and not get caught in the eddies or the sandbanks, here now. And one of those places to find the current is in the breathing. To breathe, to be with the changing, flowing sensations of breathing.
Assume a meditation posture and gently close your eyes.
With your physical body as an antenna, as a sense apparatus, sense and feel the body’s experience of breathing.
And as you breathe, feel the sensations of change in your torso, the movements of your rib cage, the movements of the belly, the movements of the diaphragm.
Then, in a gentle way that’s just right for you, take some fuller inhales—just a little fuller—and a more extended exhale, so that you begin entering into the full physical experience of breathing, as if your whole body is participating. Breathing in and breathing out.
Remember the extended exhale to relax in your body, to soften.
Letting your breathing return to normal. Not so much following the breath or watching the breath, but allowing your awareness, your sensing, your sensations to participate in the changing, shifting rhythm of breathing in and breathing out.
As you exhale, relax the thinking mind, softening the thinking mind.
Quieting your thinking. And if you like, in the quiet thinking, think the kind of thoughts that keeps you participating in the changing, shifting rhythm of breathing in and breathing out. Very quiet, soft thoughts about breathing that support a quieting, a stilling.
Entering into the ever-changing sensations of breathing, one breath at a time.
Your contribution is to notice how thinking takes you out of the flow of breathing, the flow of attention participating with breathing. Place yourself in the rhythm of breathing, so that the mind doesn’t get fixated on any idea, thought, or judgment. Everything is allowed to move and pass through with awareness, with attention, staying in the river of change.
As if mindfulness, awareness, is a rudder that you gently move in the river of change to stay in the flow—the flow of breathing in and out. So awareness itself doesn’t get fixated anywhere; it flows along, like a boat flowing on the surface of a river.
There is an art for you to have awareness, mindfulness, participate with breathing, gently flowing along with the breathing. Awareness is massaged by the breathing, so awareness stays soft and gentle, relaxed. And so the awareness of breathing allows the breathing to settle and quiet. There can be a very satisfying and healthy way of breathing that comes with this careful, caring attention to breathing, to what keeps us alive. It allows us to live with caring attention for what keeps us alive.
As we come to the end of this meditation, just as caring for our breathing can allow breathing to care for us, so we care for the wider world so it cares for us. Sitting here in the forests of Northern California, in the midst of this natural world upon which our human lives depend—without which there would be no human life—may it be that we use our awareness, our attention, our compassion and kindness to care for what cares for us.
As we end this meditation, may it be that our ability to have a heightened attention to the present supports us to care for the natural world that we live in and the natural world that we are within us. May all of life be supported to move through its natural cycles freely and caringly.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.
I don’t have a bell today to ring, so I end this meditation now with bowing to all of you. Thank you.
Hello everyone, and welcome to this continuing series on insight. Today is the end of my vacation up in the hills of Lake Tahoe, and I’m glad to have you along.
In this series on insight, which I’ve been doing for a while now, with many talks on the first insight, usually called in English “impermanence” but more literally meaning “inconstancy,” this emphasis on insight can sometimes lead people to believe that mindfulness or insight meditation is meant to be a form of thinking about things. But in fact, the deeper insight that is being developed in insight meditation certainly has a cognitive side to it, but it involves a deep samādhi2—a deep subtleness and peacefulness, a quiet and focus of the mind.
I’d like to talk a little bit more about this insight into impermanence before we move into the second insight, which is the insight into dukkha3. The deeper insight into change, into impermanence, arises when the insight practice becomes co-joined with samādhi. The first part of the year, the series emphasized samādhi, and I hope those of you who came along with it had some feeling for the possibility of a deep, quiet, focused, silent mind. That is a state of being collected, unified in a quiet, peaceful way. This sense of samādhi, this state of unification, of settlement, of peace, usually gets unified around something, like around the breathing or around loving-kindness—something that allows everything to settle.
One of the things that we can get unified around is the experience of change, especially if that experience of change initially is a very simple one. That is the function of breathing. To enter into the current of changing, flowing, moving sensations—with time, the minute sensations that come into play with one inhale, one exhale—is a ripple of sensations that are coming and going. Of course, we don’t have to look for the ripple or the subtle sensations, but as we are staying more mindful of the changing nature of breathing, staying in the present moment with that, this allows the mind to get unified around breathing.
For deep jhānic4 work, the samādhi gets organized around something that’s more stable; the changing nature of what’s happening is less important than the stilling of the mind. For insight practice, the stilling of the mind together with the changing nature of the object of attention—in this case, the breathing—come together in harmony; they work together.
The deep insight of insight meditation begins to come into the forefront when the mind gets very still, quiet, absorbed, and unified around the experience of breathing. At least, that’s the way I was taught when I was in Burma. At some point, as we get absorbed into this world of change, as we get unified around it, it no longer is limited to the experience of breathing. It could open up into the whole field of changing sensations in our experience. Sometimes that opens up to something that’s called “choiceless awareness,” where we’re not choosing something like the breathing as the focal point for seeing change, but rather we’re just allowing change to show itself to us in whatever way that it shows itself. There might be a sound, then a sensation in the body, then a feeling, then a thought arises. All this stuff happens, but not that we’re chasing it or following it, but rather that we’re in the midst of it—settling, quieting, becoming unified.
Sometimes with the choiceless awareness of opening up too quickly to include everything, it’s too easy to limit the quieting and settling of the mind. It’s sometimes too easy to mistake a kind of cognitive awareness of everything for the deep, non-thinking mode of being. And so, people sometimes find it very helpful just to stay with the breathing. All the insight that we need to have for insight meditation can be found or can arise from being with the changing, shifting sensation of breathing. As a mindfulness and insight teacher, my preference is to encourage people to stay with the breathing as long as that’s compelling, as long as that’s an easy place to be, and just to flow, because it works as a great place to develop this unification of samādhi, so that samādhi and insight are working together, hand in hand.
However, if anything becomes more compelling than the breathing—say, there’s a strong sensation in your body elsewhere, or a strong feeling, or a strong emotion, or a strong sound outside—then, with as relaxed a mind as possible, fold that into the mindfulness, the awareness. Let that become the focal point or the organizing center for this unification. It isn’t so much to go out and really understand the sound if it’s a loud sound; it is to take it in also as a changing, flowing part of the present moment. And then there’s a knee pain, and you do the same thing with the knee pain. You don’t start thinking about the knee pain, but rather that becomes the place to stay with the changing, flowing sensations, so the samādhi is arising in relationship to change, the relationship to things constantly shifting and moving and becoming different.
In the process of doing that, a meditator might go through similar stages of samādhi as we do in pure samādhi practice. There might be states comparable to going through approach concentration and the approaching jhānic-like states—deep absorptive states that go through the quantum leaps of deep joy, deep happiness, deep peace, contentment, to deep equanimity. As it works in samādhi practice, it can also happen in insight practice, because the flow of inconstancy, of impermanence, the comings and goings of things, becomes the resting place for samādhi, the home base, the grounding place for our experience of being attentive.
In this way, it isn’t that we’re looking for change, trying to understand it cognitively, evaluate it, or believe in it. Rather, awareness is flowing in it, unified in it, almost as if awareness is becoming the change, the changing, shifting flow of the present moment. In this regard, I sometimes like to think of “now” as a river, the river of now. We’re always in that river of now, but it’s a river because whatever is in the now is always shifting and changing. The more we can rest in the river of now, the more we’ll see it as a river, as a constant shifting and moving of sensations, thoughts, and experiences arising and passing, coming and going, flowing along, sometimes through only very minute little shifts and changes in the texture, the quality, the intensity of what’s going on. But to stay with it in such a soft, settled, restful awareness that the whole psychophysical system that we have can get settled, peaceful, and quiet into this flow of change.
Until at some point, with deeper insight, oh, all there is is change. And at some point, in deep insight practice, it doesn’t really matter what’s changing. It just simply feels so nice for the mind to be absorbed in a samādhi state where the change, the flow, the current of the river becomes the delight, not necessarily the kind of water we’re in or the details of the experience. It’s just that things are flowing that becomes deeply satisfying, partly because it’s deeply freeing. It’s deeply freeing to not have the mind latch on to anything, not to have the mind caught by anything, reacting to anything, wanting something, judging something, but rather having the mind at ease, resting, flowing along in this current of the present moment.
So thank you very much. I’m very happy to be able to be here and very grateful to my friend who allowed my family to come up here for our vacation. I’ll be back at IMC tomorrow morning, and I look forward to continuing then. Thank you.
Anicca: A Pali word for “inconstancy” or “impermanence,” one of the three marks of existence in Buddhism. ↩
Samādhi: A Pali word for a state of meditative concentration or unification of mind. ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It is the first of the Four Noble Truths. ↩
Jhānic: Related to the Jhānas, which are states of deep meditative absorption characterized by profound stillness and concentration. ↩