This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Samadhi Review Day 5 Guided Meditation & Dharmette. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Unknown at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Hello everyone and welcome to this broadcast on YouTube from IMC. At 7 a.m. in the morning, we call it YouTube. This week, I’m away teaching an eco-chaplaincy retreat and so could not be here. The other teachers that substitute for me are also not available, so we’re doing a replay, a rerun of the third week in the samadhi1 series that is a precursor for this series we’re doing now on insight.
It might be nice to go back to near the beginning of samadhi, at the basics of practicing with breathing, as a reminder that we always want to come back to the beginning and get established and not be in a hurry to have insight. So I hope you enjoy a repeat of this week. For those of you who have heard it before, and for those of you who are new to this section on insight, it might be nice also to come back to something more foundational to create a better context for these teachings on insight.
I’ll be back on July 28th, so next week. I hope you enjoy these days returning to the beginning of samadhi. Thank you.
Hello and welcome to this Friday meditation session. I’ll say a few words to prepare us for the meditation.
The phrase for today is that samadhi is sweetness. Samadhi has a kind of sweet quality to it. In case the word sweetness doesn’t have such positive associations for you as it does for me, there are other words that speak to the goodness that comes with samadhi. There can be a feeling of beauty. More classically, people talk about there being joy, gladness, happiness, sometimes bliss. A more simple and maybe a little more humble way of saying the same thing is there can be pleasure. Samadhi involves pleasure. Something starts becoming very pleasant as the state of samadhi begins to develop.
At first, it might be something very specific, like a feeling of pleasure that seems to radiate or come with the experience of breathing. Sometimes the experience of breathing can feel just beautiful. It could be that there’s a tingling and warmth and joy, maybe similar to what would happen if you had a half-smile and turned up the corners of your mouth. There might be a little bit of physical delight that appears, maybe in the eyes or the cheeks or someplace.
I’m calling it sweetness today, and that sweetness can start to be pervasive. The sweetness becomes a feedback loop where we feel the sweetness of samadhi. Allowing yourself to feel that—we’re allowed to feel it. We’re allowed to feel the pleasure, the joy that comes with samadhi. It becomes a kind of biofeedback. We feel it, and it’s there to help us to stay focused, to keep doing what we’re doing so we can keep growing and developing.
The second thing to say before we start is that when Buddhism arrived in China and they had to translate Indic Buddhist texts into Chinese, the way that they translated samatha-vipassana2 (samadhi-vipassana) is for concentration, they use the word “stop,” and for vipassana (insight), they use the word “see.” So together, the practice of samatha-vipassana is to stop and see. There’s something about samadhi that does involve a kind of stopping. A stopping which is a relief, a stopping which is pleasant. It feels good. “Oh, I’m here. I don’t have to do anything anymore. I don’t have to keep accomplishing or proving myself. I don’t have to finish my to-do list.” For these minutes of meditation, of samadhi, it’s a radically alternative way of being alive, fully alive here without needing to accomplish anything. Just to be here. Let all the accomplishing and doing activities stop.
With that, assume a meditation posture. That, in a way, is the beginning of stopping. A clear sense that now we’re not going to be doing the activities of daily life. It’s a time for a sacred pause, for something that’s more important, invaluable. Maybe you can feel the relief of stopping to just be in this posture.
For these minutes in meditation, the only person who is going to be talking is me. So for all of you, you can stop the ordinary activity of talking, and something gets quiet. Maybe it feels like a relief, or maybe not.
There can be an appreciating of the stopping of needing to think about things and solve things, and to feel the relief that now nothing needs to be accomplished, including accomplishing meditation. To feel the relief, the goodness of just being alive as you are.
Is there somewhere inside some sweetness, some goodness, some maybe very subtle pleasure somewhere for just simply being alive and awake and present?
And then gently breathing in in a deeper way to feel your body more fully. And as you exhale, to relax. Relaxing the body. Relaxing is more a stopping of something than a doing of something. It’s the stopping of being tense, of holding the muscles tight. As you relax the body, if there’s anything that approaches pleasure in that relaxing, in the midst of the relaxing, feel that pleasure or feel that goodness.
Letting your breathing return to normal. As you breathe in, feel some place in your body that’s tight, where the muscles are a little tense. And gently on the exhale, soften, relax. If it doesn’t relax, soften around it. Make space for it. And if there’s any subtle pleasure or relief in that, just feel that.
If there is now any feeling of sweetness or goodness, relief or pleasure, just sitting here without needing to accomplish anything, just being here. Allow your breathing to be in the middle of that sweetness. Breathing with it, through it.
In a way that you stay with a natural enough breathing, if there are any small, tiny ways you can adjust your breathing so that it’s more pleasant, there’s more pleasure in any part of the breathing. Or if there’s already some pleasure in breathing, feel it. Some people will feel a certain pleasure, goodness, or relief during the exhale. Some people in the inhale. Some people in the pause, if there is a pause at the end of the exhale.
As you breathe, breathe with whatever pleasure, sweetness there might be here. Maybe one that’s very closely related to doing almost nothing. The relief, the pleasure of just being, just being with something so simple and fundamental as breathing.
For some people, the pleasure might come from the gentle rhythm of breathing in and breathing out. Maybe like being comforted, gently rocking in a rocking chair.
Sometimes the sweetness related to breathing is just beyond the edges of the sensations of breathing. So in the body, maybe almost like radiating from breathing. The influence that breathing has in the areas close in around what is moving as you breathe. An area of space, spaciousness. Maybe the spaciousness that’s here has a kind of pleasure or relief, a space for joy.
If you need to let go of your thinking and relax your thinking mind, let go so that awareness drops into the sweetness in your body connected to the meditation. Relax the thinking mind to feel the pleasure of relaxing. Letting the thinking mind be quiet so that you can better feel the sweetness of being present here and now. Breathing one breath at a time.
If there’s anything that resembles sweetness, pleasure, contentment, as you’re meditating, let that be an encouragement for the mind to be quieter and the body to be more open to the experience of breathing and the experience of sweetness, however subtle.
There’s an art to feeling the sweetness, the goodness that’s here. And within it, allowing whatever is not sweet, not pleasant, to float, to be there in the background. To not zero in or fixate on what is difficult, but allow it to float in a wider ocean of the sweetness of meditation, that’s gently massaged by the breathing.
And then as we come to the end of the sitting, to again begin to feel whatever sweetness, goodness, calm, relief, pleasure, contentment, well-being, however small. To sense and feel into how it is right now for you in your body, your heart, your mind.
Maybe having some sense that it can radiate out into the spaciousness, the space around you. Even if it’s just an inch beyond your body. Imagine that your goodness, your sweetness is something that you can transmit to others. Not what you say, not what you do, but how you are. To share the sweet feelings you have, letting it radiate out into the world. Imagine that’s your gift today to the world.
Whatever goodness, whatever pleasure, well-being that comes from meditation, comes from being mindful and present, may that be a gift that somehow is transmitted, somehow radiated out into the world for the people that you’ll encounter. May it be that how you are today is for the welfare and happiness of others and for your own.
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 15th talk in this ongoing samadhi series. One of the things that you perhaps would have noticed this week is how seldom I use the word “concentration.” In the phrase that I use for each day this week, the quality that’s being emphasized is not concentration.
Samadhi is simplicity. Samadhi is settled. Samadhi is steadiness. Samadhi is spaciousness. And today, samadhi is sweetness.
Maybe the closest thing to concentration in those five is steadiness. But to be steady with your presence, be steady in your awareness, to be steady here with the practice. These five qualities don’t have to be separate. They can be part of the same state that we’re in. We can be sitting in a state of simplicity, where meditation is not something complicated. It’s not an engineering feat. It’s almost like an undoing, a not-doing more than it is a doing.
And it is settling, a settling into something and not a concentrating on something. It might be that the consequence of settling is that we settle so fully in a relaxed, full way that the world around the place we settle kind of falls away or recedes into the distance. It’s almost as if we’re concentrating on this subtle place, but rather than poking it from the control tower, it’s more like we’ve settled into it like we would settle into a nice soft mattress. If it’s a nice comforter that we lay down in, it just feels so good to settle into that. We’re fully, completely here in that small little world where the body touches the comforter in the bed, and the rest of the world falls away. You could say we’re concentrated there. But to concentrate on that experience, for some people, immediately gets us tense, to strain, or gets us in the control tower. But to settle into it becomes something that is embodied, something that includes the whole body. It’s a fullness.
The steadiness, holding steady—there’s something in us that I think loves being steady. It’s kind of like a commitment or a devotion or a simplicity of being just this. Because when we’re steady, something can relax into it, settle into it. I love to go hiking. Sometimes as we go hiking—it used to be when I went running—if I just keep walking steadily, at some point, something settles in me. I arrive, and I’m just there in the walking, steady in the walking. But I have to walk steadily for the gathering of all the different parts of myself, where the distracted mind and concerns of the day fall away. And I’m just steady. It’s kind of like the steadiness allows something to gather around it.
Spaciousness is such an important quality for samadhi because to have a sense of being spacious, open, lots of openness, makes room for the sweetness that can arise in samadhi. Maybe some of you don’t care for the word sweetness, but in samadhi there is a pleasure. There is a sense of well-being. For me, one of the most wonderful words for the state of samadhi is beauty. There’s a feeling of a beautiful state that kind of radiates out, or the breathing has gotten quite beautiful and it radiates a sense of beauty into the body.
The most classic way of talking about it is there’s joy and happiness. Some people add the word gladness. Each of those is a deeper and fuller experience that’s more and more satisfying. Some people use the word “satisfy.” There’s a feeling of satisfaction. This feels really good here. And some people maybe like the word goodness. This feels good. Sometimes I’ve liked the word health, because settling into a good state of samadhi feels like an embodiment of health. Even at times when I’ve been sick, if I could settle into a samadhi state, it just feels like there’s this healing energy that courses through the body. It just feels so good. The healthiness of it.
So I’m not saying that this is easy, and I’m not saying that it should happen today or tomorrow, but this is one of the characteristics of samadhi. And so as we settle into the practice, it’s good to start becoming sensitive, aware when some of these good feelings begin to arise. These are good feelings which are symptoms of samadhi.
One of the interesting things in the teachings of the Buddha is that he puts happiness as a precursor for samadhi. It’s a little bit odd to say that because many people are suffering a lot and they’re meditating in order to not suffer so much or to be free of their suffering, to work through it. And now to have samadhi you have to be happy to begin with. But we always have the mindfulness practice to fall back to. For five years now on YouTube, the primary practice I’ve been teaching is mindfulness. So for those of you who’ve been following, you can always have recourse to go back to just being mindful of the experience until something settles and you feel like you’re able to be present with what’s happening in a simpler way. And then you can develop this quality of samadhi, this primary focus.
A lot of samadhi has to do with having a primary focus of attention, a primary place to settle, a primary place to be at home in, to relax into. The idea is moving into a kind of absorption, to be absorbed in the experience. Maybe you can have as a reference point something you do in your life that you get absorbed enough into that you feel a kind of well-being in doing it. All the difficult thoughts and difficult feelings that are there in life have fallen away as we do this simple thing that we get absorbed in doing. For some people, it’s reading a book. Some people it’s doing a craft or playing an instrument. For some people, it feels really good just to go into a shower. It lets everything else fall away, and it’s just nice to be in the shower, and some people start singing in the shower. It might be being with a friend that does that, or a walk in the park, or listening to music.
So there might be something that you already do that gives you a sense of what it’s like to have these qualities of this week: of simplicity, becoming simple just to listen to the music, just to do this one thing; where there’s a settledness in it, where we’re not preoccupied and agitated by other things, just here with this; where there’s a steadiness, an absorption; and that there’s a spaciousness around it because we’re not limiting ourselves in some kind of tight way, but we’re relaxing into something. Something opens. Sometimes with samadhi, things will get smaller and more narrow first before the spaciousness opens up. So don’t look for spaciousness too early, just when it starts becoming available.
And then, partly I’m choosing the word sweetness because it has an ‘s’ in it to be complete for the week. I think that if it wasn’t for wanting to stay with S’s, I probably would have chosen beauty for myself.
So these are some of the characteristics of samadhi, and not necessarily easy to tap into, but they can be very subtle. If we already have a disposition in the mind to orient ourselves to what’s difficult, to our problems, to the pain we have, sometimes inadvertently that’s actually where the samadhi is going. That’s where the concentration is going. And if we concentrate on things this way, where there’s fear or aversion or something that is not so healthy, that focus on the problems can actually make the difficulty feel worse. Not to ignore it, but it’s possible with samadhi to shift the primary focus to breathing, to the settling place, to keep settling, knowing that you’re not betraying the difficulties you have, but you’re placing them in a different context.
It’s a real delight to be able to sit in a state of samadhi, a state of goodness, a state of health, where the difficulties we have might be just like jellyfish floating in the vast ocean. They aren’t the ocean. They’re there and they’re recognized, but they’re being held by the goodness of samadhi.
At the beginning of the week, I encouraged you to count your breathing because that can support the steadiness and it can support all these qualities, provided you find a really nice way for the mind to do the counting: gentle, soft, beautiful, settled, spacious. See if you can find a way to count. There are different ways of counting as I described. But if you find yourself being able to settle into the counting, you might see if counting from 1 to 10 and then starting over again begins to support the settling and the steadiness that really brings you into getting absorbed in this experience of breathing, of samadhi.
Thank you.
Samadhi: A Pali word for a state of meditative concentration or absorption, where the mind becomes still and unified. ↩
Samatha-Vipassana: A Pali term referring to the twin practices of tranquility (samatha) and insight (vipassana). Samatha calms and concentrates the mind, creating a stable platform for vipassana, the deep seeing into the nature of reality. ↩