This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Don’t Make it Worse; Insight (18) Insight into Suffering. 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 to our morning meditation. In coming down here this morning, I felt kind of happy with the idea of what I’m going to talk about today. Today, I’m going to introduce the second insight, which is, conventionally in English, the insight into suffering. Why someone like me would be happy to come down talking about it, when it could be a seemingly very depressing thing, is perhaps part of the message.
For today’s meditation, I’d like to suggest four words that can guide you: don’t make it worse. Whatever you do when you meditate, don’t make the situation worse for yourself. I’ll do a little bit of guided meditation to set the stage for why this is so useful. But track yourself, monitor yourself. A very important part of mindfulness is this self-monitoring, so you know what you’re doing. If you start thinking about things and that train of thought is not good for you, it’s making the situation worse. If you’re tracking how you’re relating to the meditation practice—maybe you’re straining or judging your experience—you can feel how it makes things worse. It makes you feel worse, it drains your energy, or is difficult. Don’t believe that you have to have these thoughts, these attitudes, this way of practicing. Make an adjustment. Choose to not make the situation worse. At least go back to doing what you were doing before you started to do that.
So, to assume a meditation posture and gently close your eyes.
In a slow, comfortable way, take some fuller breaths. After you breathe in fully and comfortably, have an extended exhale. Ride the exhale to the end. Keep doing that for a few moments, but as you exhale, relax your body. Soften into here.
Then, let your breathing return to normal and start the important work of relaxing as you exhale. Relaxing, softening the muscles of the face. Breathing normally, but feeling the face as you inhale, relaxing as you exhale.
As you inhale, feel the shoulders. On the exhale, soften the shoulders.
And then as you inhale, feel the belly, softening the belly on the exhale.
As you inhale, feel the thinking mind. And as you exhale, soften the thinking mind.
As you breathe in, feel how you are emotionally—your mood, your attitude. And as you exhale, relax, soften around your mood, how you feel.
And then find the settling place, the grounding place for your breathing. Maybe where the exhale ends, the inhale begins. As you exhale, relax into, settle into the grounding place. As you inhale, allow breathing to arise from that place.
As you breathe in, feel whatever calm there might be here. And as you exhale, let the calm spread. Open to receive more of the calm.
As you breathe in, feeling whatever degree of ease, the easy feeling of being alive that you have. And as you exhale, let yourself settle more into a sense of ease.
Now, from the vantage point of your ease, whatever calm or relaxation you have, let that highlight for you, help you see and feel any way that you are making it worse. Any ways that you strain or contract, any way you start being caught in thoughts or ideas that make the situation worse for you. For these few minutes, any thought or idea you have that somehow makes you feel worse, makes the situation worse—for the duration of the meditation, you do not need to believe those thoughts. You don’t have to believe what you’re believing that makes the situation worse for these minutes. Let go of whatever makes the situation worse. No matter how small the movement is, stay close to your ease and notice when you start losing it.
There’s a way that being caught in thoughts, even good thoughts, is a form of alienation, a separation from a deeper sense of inner well-being that maybe is felt to be intimately connected to the inner sensations of breathing, an easeful breath.
Find within you where you feel the most ease or the most calm, and let go of anything that takes you away from that for the last few minutes. Breathe with your ease. Breathe with your calm, trusting that the best place to be is right in the middle of it.
As we come to the end of the sitting, take a few moments to appreciate, if you can, that there can be an inner reference point of calm, of ease, of stillness, maybe spaciousness. That can be an important reference point for seeing more clearly how you lose those things, a reference point for noticing what you start doing that loses touch with that. And right there, with that information, is where wisdom can support us. The wisdom not to sacrifice our well-being for the activities of mind that bring stress, tightness, and agitation.
Don’t make it worse.
And in being ready to go into the world of people and work and activities, communities, how might this simple phrase support you to be in the world in a nice way, a supportive way for others? Don’t make it worse. If what you’re going to say or do is going to make the situation worse, maybe don’t do anything until you can find what makes it better.
May it be that this meditation practice, this mindfulness practice, supports us in not making this world worse, not challenging our relationships. May it be that we go about our day caring for everyone, including ourselves. And in that care, may we keep in the forefront the idea that may others be happy, may others be safe, may others be peaceful, may others be free.
And may we contribute to this.
Hello and welcome to this next talk in the insight series. I’ve decided that it’s time to move on to the second insight. The first insight is insight into the inconstant nature of our experience, the impermanent, changing nature of experience as we experience it. There’s a lot of wisdom that comes from becoming attuned to, seeing clearly, the impermanent, inconstant nature of it all. Part of it is the ability to hold our ground, to be present in a non-reactive way, to find our stability in the face of change. This becomes invaluable when we come to the second insight.
In English, the word for it is usually translated as suffering. The Pali word is dukkha1. It’s a big word, and maybe “suffering” is not quite the best way of characterizing it, but for now, what’s wonderful about this word is that people do suffer. The second insight implies that we’re learning how to be present for suffering—not to turn away, not to close our eyes, not to avoid, but to have a very honest and clear recognition that there is suffering.
This orientation for Buddhists to be very clear-headed, clear-minded, and have a willingness to say, “Yes, there is suffering,” is a radical thing to do when many people are avoiding their suffering at all costs. Some people are unwilling to be present for their discomfort, present for their distress. They distract themselves, they medicate themselves, they run away, escape. Sometimes there are wonderful strategies of blaming and attacking and looking outside. Sometimes we feel suffering, but we don’t just face it directly and see it; we believe in it. We get overcome by it. We collapse into it.
What Buddhism is saying is, “Yes, there is suffering in this world. Be present for it. See it clearly. See it from a place of stability.” This requires a certain kind of attitude that’s not for or against it. Even if there’s suffering we’re going to fix and try to change, there’s an ability to hold a place of just being willing to be present, to see it clearly, and to be honest about it—an honest recognition that we have suffering in ourselves and in the world around us.
And then, it’s invaluable to see it, to know it, if what we want to do is to become free of it, if what we want to do is to address the suffering in a beneficial way. All the ways of avoiding it, all the ways of collapsing under the weight of it, tend to make the situation worse. The idea in Buddhism is, don’t make it worse if you have a choice. When there’s suffering in the world and there are huge challenges, it’s very unfortunate that the attitudes, the beliefs, the emotions, the reactions we have to what goes on in the world around us are actually making it worse. It’s bad enough, some of the things that go on, but then we despair or get angry or blame or all kinds of ways in which we respond to it that we’re adding second arrows. We’re adding to the weight of the suffering.
For example, if someone invites you to their house for a meal and just as you arrive, they burn the meal. They’re angry with themselves, they’re angry with the food, they’re angry with their stove, and they’re even irritated that you’re there. It’s a very uncomfortable situation. How can we make the situation worse? We might make it worse by being angry with them. We might make it worse by blaming ourselves for coming too late. We might make it worse by running away. We might make it worse by trying to fix the charred food. There are all kinds of ways we make the situation worse than it has to be. Our contribution is to show up and react in such a way that we’re contributing more suffering to the situation, making it worse. It’s bad enough to begin with. Don’t add anything to it.
So when things are happening on a national or global level and people are doing things which we feel are quite distressing and upsetting, that they’re causing a lot of suffering, don’t add even more suffering to the world by your reaction. Instead, have a clear, level-headed look, seeing, “This is suffering, but I’m not going to suffer because of it.” That is a radical thing to do. That is a phenomenal thing to do—to be able to see and be present for suffering and show up in such a way that we’re not going to suffer because of that suffering. Even if someone is harming us, which we should stop, we can make it worse for ourselves with the attitudes, the attachments, the reactions that we have.
As we learn to meditate in mindfulness, as we learn to be present for experience—not trying to have a good experience, not trying to avoid being uncomfortable—one of the most powerful things about mindfulness practice is learning to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. A willingness to have a stable, clear, honest mindfulness. And we really can be present for what’s there. If we only know how to be present when things are going deeply well and we’re calm and relaxed and peaceful, riding on a cloud of samadhi2, we’re not really getting the benefits of this practice. The benefits of the practice come when we’re able to be calm and still enough to be able to look suffering right in the eyes and say, “I see you,” and not add more suffering on top of it.
So even if we’re suffering personally inside, we can learn to be able to see that clearly, kindly, openly, and don’t add second, third, and fourth arrows to it. This is invaluable and very important. That’s why we’re learning to track ourselves to see, “Oh, I’m making it worse now.” As we meditate and get calmer or more settled, one of the benefits of that is not to stay calm, not to identify with the calm and say, “Oh, I’m such a calm person now, this is great,” but to appreciate that the calm gives us a vantage point to see more clearly when we start losing that calm. When we have a sense of ease, we learn how we lose that ease. And in that losing of it, that might be where we are making the situation worse. That is where we have left behind our ability to just be present and to see clearly, “Oh, this is difficult, and I’m going to be here. I’m going to be present and see it and be mindful. Even if I don’t know what to do, at least I know not to make it worse.”
This very simple exercise, that maybe is difficult to do but simple to explain, goes this way: Set yourself at ease, whatever ease that you can, and notice what takes you away from it. Notice what causes you to lose your ease and see, are you contributing something to make it worse that you actually don’t have to do? It’s extra to the situation. Maybe you don’t have to make it worse. Set yourself at ease and see what takes you away from it.
That’s my recommendation for what you could do for the next 23 hours until we meet again. And this is an entry point now for this deeper dive into the second insight, the insight into suffering, dukkha. In order to do this well, we need to be able to learn not to add suffering to suffering. We need to learn well how to stay with our ease, stay with our stability and calm even when we’re feeling lousy. And that is a phenomenal thing to learn. That’s where you can start finding your freedom. You might even find a smile at a time when you’re suffering in some way that in the past despaired you, saddened you, upset you. With mindfulness of it, your suffering won’t bring you a smile, but your mindfulness might bring you a smile as you find this wonderful capacity to be present without adding, without making it worse.
So, I hope that you enjoy, or at least value, this turn that we’re taking now. And remember, we’re building this on the foundation of all that we’ve done now over this year so far—samadhi and insight. And now there’s a dive for the next week or so into this world of the second characteristic, the second perception, the second insight into dukkha, suffering. Thank you.
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It refers to the fundamental unsatisfactoriness and pain inherent in all forms of conditioned existence. ↩
Samadhi: A Pali word that translates to “concentration” or “unification of mind.” It refers to a state of deep meditative absorption, where the mind becomes still, focused, and unified. ↩