This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Dissolving Tension; Insight (25) Dissolving the Tension of 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.
Hello everyone, and welcome to this guided meditation session. This is part of a larger series exploring what the insight of insight meditation points to. Surprisingly, the topic for about seven sessions now has been the second insight—not surprising that we’re doing it, but surprising that we would spend seven sessions talking about suffering, the insight into suffering. This is the ability to recognize something profoundly important about how we suffer, how we feel distress, how we get caught in stress, and how we get caught in unnecessary emotional pain, reactivity, attachments, clinging, and resistance in our life.
Maybe this will be the last time on suffering before we move to the third insight. One of the very significant approaches to insight meditation is when we’re able to see our suffering and recognize it in contrast to, or together with, the first insight: seeing change, inconstancy, non-continuity, and the impermanence of experience.
One way or another, the kind of suffering that Buddhism is addressing, called dukkha1, involves a freezing or tightening of the mind. It involves holding the mind tight and caught in something, where that caught-ness feels like a continuity of attachment or pressure. It’s a kind of solidification or stopping of the mind, a preoccupation where mental activity has gotten glommed onto some concern, thought, idea, or emotion. In doing that, there’s a semblance of feeling that we’re no longer moving along, letting things flow in the river of change. It’s as if we’ve picked up a bucket of water and think the river is the water in the bucket. It’s really heavy to carry that bucket, and if you have to carry it all the time, the burden and tiredness will get stronger and stronger until we return the water to the river where it belongs. Then the water flows. We can float in the river; we don’t have to carry the water, the water carries us.
The practice is to begin recognizing where the mind has stopped around thinking or some preoccupation. Of course, it hasn’t stopped completely; it may be chewing or ruminating on our concern, but something has gotten solidified. Some people like the idea that it’s gotten frozen because then it can thaw. For others, it’s the idea that it has become permanent, a continuity, just like if you held your fist tight all the time. The continuity of that tightness is more prominent than a hand that’s fluid, changing, and moving with things as they are.
So, we begin by appreciating how the mind seizes up. It could be very mild, with the lightest of thoughts that we just get involved in, where we can feel a little tightening, or it can be quite strong. The practice is then to allow the mind, the concerns, and the attention to be set free—to make it loose, to let it flow, to not hold on to anything or reject anything. Oddly enough, it’s about finding a third option: neither accepting nor rejecting, but flowing with all things without having to believe or not believe anything, and without needing to act on whatever arises. And perhaps also not needing to not act, unless it’s going to cause harm or continue the way we get locked in.
Assume a meditation posture. Maybe sway back and forth a little bit, shake, move the shoulders, or rotate your head. As you sit down to meditate, let there be movement and flow to loosen things up a little bit in your body. You can flap your elbows or tap and shake your fingers so the hand loosens up.
Then, gently close your eyes and feel whatever feels loose in your body, whatever feels light. Wherever there’s a sense of ease in your body, even if it’s just a little square centimeter somewhere, feel the ease. Maybe feel the pleasure of the lips touching, or a small half-smile on the lips.
Feeling into your body, deep within where the breathing begins, feel a place of stillness and ease. A stillness where nothing is held, a stillness that’s more like the still, quiet air of a dawn above a still lake.
From within, an inhale arises. Maybe the inhales come quickly and forcefully, or maybe they come slowly and gently. Perhaps you can have a feeling of receiving the sensations of breathing in, allowing them to appear. Receive the inhales and allow the release of the exhales.
As you exhale in an easy way, with the kind of ease where there doesn’t have to be success, relax your body. Soften different parts of your body.
As you inhale, feel any way that your mind or brain is tense or solid, maybe locked in some way, tight like a fist in the mind, caught in anything at all, even the slightest thoughts. Feel that pressure, tension, stress. And as you exhale, soften the mind. Soften the tension and pressure.
As you’re aware of the rhythm of breathing, let that rhythm carry a gentle massage to your mind. Let it carry up to the mind a flow of awareness that’s like water, softening and dissolving whatever is hard in the thinking mind, whatever is tight in our preoccupations.
Feel the fixations of the mind, no matter how light or small they are, but don’t become fixated on them. That’s the role of breathing—to help us be aware gently and softly, neither accepting nor rejecting anything. Just hold the fixation in the flow of awareness, massaging it, softening it, melting it.
If you have a concern that you’re caught in or preoccupied with, you don’t have to let go of the concern. Let go of the tension and the pressure behind having the concern. Feel that tension, feel that pressure, and notice how it creates a solidity or a hardness that keeps you from flowing in the changing river of now.
As we come to the end of this sitting, notice now if there is any way that you are calmer than you were at the beginning. Is there any way that there’s a deeper place of ease or stillness? This is a balm, a medicine for any way in which the mind might still be tight, hard, tense, or under pressure.
With whatever calm you have, see if you can not be troubled by any mental tension, pressure, or preoccupation you have. Let the calm appreciate the changing nature of mental tension, pressure, hardness, and solidity. Hold it all lightly. In doing so, identify more with the calm and the lightness than with the heaviness, tension, or pressure. Be the calm, be the lightness that knows what is not calm.
Then, without accepting or rejecting any part of yourself, can you gaze upon the world kindly? Can you gaze upon the world calmly? Gaze upon the world with generosity, wishing well for everyone. As you would wish well for yourself, wish well for others.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.
Thank you.
Welcome to this series of talks on insight—the core recognitions that arise from doing mindfulness practice, the core recognitions that help set us free, loosen us, and liberate us from clinging and suffering. One of those deep recognitions, deep seeings, deep revelations, is a deeper understanding of suffering. It’s a big word, and we’ve been talking about it now for a number of days.
One important aspect of it is to appreciate that whatever Buddhists are talking about when they talk about suffering, it comes with tension. It comes with holding on tight. It comes with a solidification of some inner parts of ourselves. The mind, the heart, the inner life gets frozen, stuck, or locked into something. There’s a whole series of words that can be used that are near-synonyms; maybe some of these words work better for you than others.
If I am angry about something and I believe I have to express that anger to other people, I might make a fist to express myself and pound my fist into my other hand, insisting, for example, that “the English language has too many letters to keep track of! It’s too many letters! We should have fewer letters!” I can be in a campaign to change the English language, but I could be suffering if I’m trying to do that, trying to get everyone on the bandwagon, insisting how right I am and how important this is. There might be good reasons for this idea, but I’m suffering because of it.
I could be looking at my suffering and trying to understand why I have this idea, the philosophy behind it, the linguistic elements of it, what the real right count for letters is, and just get caught up in the ideas of it. And in all this, I don’t notice that I have my hand in a fist. Independent of whether I solve the issue of the number of letters in the English language, if I just relax my hand, life becomes so much easier without that fisted hand, without that tightness, contraction, and eventual spasming of the hand. I can separate the concern about letters from the tension in which my hand is held.
In the same way, we might have very good concerns—much more important than the number of letters—things that we’re attached to, things that are really precious and important for us. And we’re suffering because of it, we’re stressed because of it, we are burdened by it. Sometimes we feel oppressed, sometimes we feel fear, ambition, disappointment, or hurt—many things. If we’re concerned with the subject of the suffering, then we might be caught in a maze of concerns and “he said, she said, they said” preoccupations.
Instead, go look and see where the tension is. Where’s the pressure? Where’s the locked-in feeling? Where’s the tightness, the agitation, the clinging, the craving? Where’s the leaning forward or the pulling back? The deeper way to really address the topic of suffering in this insight is not to stay with the details and complexity of the subject we’re concerned with, but rather to really take responsibility for the relationship we have to that subject. But in doing that, don’t think even more. The art of mindfulness is to learn to feel, to sense, to experience the sensations that come with suffering: the tightness, the tension, the pressure, the clinging, the locked-in-ness, the shutting down, the turning off, the giving up—all these different ways that can feel like, “Oh, there’s where the holding is,” or “There’s where the pulling back and escaping is.” Feel all that.
Then you start feeling where we’re resisting change, where we’re standing against change, where we’re solidifying, tightening up, and artificially making something more constant. It’s artificial in the sense that it’s an artifact of the mind, of our attitudes that are holding on tight.
The art of mindfulness is to take a deep look at where the solidity is, where the constancy is, where there’s a continuity that comes from holding on tight, from a physical—and even in the mind it can feel physical or almost physical—pressure, the tight constellation, the narrowing that happens in the awareness of the mind around some concern or preoccupation. We talk about the weight on our shoulders. The weight of a responsibility is not in the responsibility itself; it’s in the ways in which we have almost physically tightened up, solidified, locked in, or gotten frozen around something.
There’s a wonderful story of Ajahn Chah2, the famous Thai monk who was a teacher for many of the early vipassanā3 teachers. He was going for a walk with someone and pointed to a really big boulder and asked, “Is that boulder heavy?” The student said, “Oh yes, it’s really heavy.” And Ajahn Chah said, “No, it’s not heavy. It’s only heavy if you try to lift it.”
So, what are we lifting? The burdens of the world? We’re holding up the burdens of the world because we’re trying to lift them. Maybe it’s not necessary to lift or hold anything. The benefit of this is that when we tighten up, when we contract, when we get fixated, when we cling to things and crave for things, we’re actually narrowing our intelligence, narrowing the scope of our heart and our emotional and mental sensitivity. We’re losing touch with the wide range and scope by which our understanding, our wisdom, our care, and our love can operate.
It’s counterintuitive because the preoccupations we have can feel so important: “I need to protect myself. I need to have this. I have to take care of this. I have to criticize myself. I have to figure something out.” That insistence is part of that tightness, part of that sense of physical pressure. It has so much authority. But we learn over time that we are wiser, more caring, more open, and more intelligent when we don’t get locked in, when we don’t get caught, and when we’re free.
This insight into suffering in Buddhism is very much supported by really being mindful, really seeing and recognizing the actual tension that’s there with our suffering. So, you might have some cause, like changing how many letters there are in the English alphabet, but pay attention to how you’re insisting that things should be different, how they have to be a certain way, and how you’re going to change the English language and all the dictionaries. Pay attention to how you’re making that fist. Don’t tighten up. You can still make an effort to change the English language, but at least don’t compromise your hand. Don’t compromise your heart. Don’t compromise your mind. Don’t compromise the quality of your inner life. Your inner life is precious. Letting go of tension, letting go of pressure allows the inner life to grow, mature, free, and develop in beautiful ways. It is possible.
This insight into suffering is such an important part of not suffering.
So, thank you very much. I believe that will be the end of the discussions here about suffering. Maybe we’ve suffered enough now. But there’s one more area of suffering that is so important that it is considered the third important insight to have, and that is into the perplexing topic for many people of not-self. That will be the topic when I start this up again, unless for some reason a revelation happens and we need to discuss suffering some more.
I’ll be away for two weeks. Next week, Ying Chen is coming, and she’s a wonderful teacher. She’s been here before on YouTube, and I’m very happy that she’ll be with you. The following week, in the way things are working out, we’re going to do a replay from right near the beginning of the year when we were doing samādhi4. Samādhi is the foundation for insight, and I thought it might be nice while I’m away to go back to the beginning. So we’re going to do a rerun and play the third week in the samādhi series that had a lot to do with developing samādhi around breathing. Hopefully, that’s a good foundation for when I return after that to pick up the insight into not-self.
Finally, for those of you who would like to study more, I’m going to be offering three programs in the fall. One is called Anava5, which is an 11-month program on looking at one’s practice life, dharma life, and spiritual life through the lens of the pāramīs6 (the perfections) and 10 spiritual themes that come out of the Western world of chaplaincy7 and spiritual care. The other is the chaplaincy program itself. It’s a beautiful, wonderful program that we offer both online and in-person; I do the in-person part. This is for people who want to be involved, either as a volunteer or professionally, in the world of spiritual care. Both of those are through the Sati Center. The third is offered through IMC and is called “The Equivalence of Ethics and Enlightenment.” It’s an eight or nine-month program looking at the foundational teachings of ethics in the teachings of the Buddha and how they apply to our life, appreciating that ethics and enlightenment are not really two different things and are deeply integrated from the beginning to the end of the path of practice.
So, may you suffer wisely over these next two weeks, and when we come back, we’ll continue this series. Thank you very much.
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It refers to the fundamental unease and dissatisfaction inherent in conditioned existence. ↩
Ajahn Chah: (1918-1992) A highly respected Thai Buddhist monk and a master of the Thai Forest Tradition. He was a key figure in establishing Theravada Buddhism in the West. ↩
Vipassanā: A Pali word that means “insight” into the true nature of reality, specifically the three marks of existence: impermanence (anicca), suffering (dukkha), and not-self (anattā). ↩
Samādhi: A Pali word for a state of meditative concentration or a collected, unified state of mind. It is a key component of the Buddhist path. ↩
Anava: Original transcript said ‘Anua’. Corrected to ‘Anava’ based on the name of a known program offered by the Sati Center. ↩
Pāramīs: A Pali word for the “perfections” or virtues that are cultivated on the path to enlightenment. There are traditionally ten pāramīs, including generosity, virtue, and wisdom. ↩
Chaplaincy: Original transcript said ‘chapency’. Corrected based on context. ↩