2023-12-04-Gil-Gil's Story pt2 (1 of 5) Discovering Release

4:24PM Dec 7, 2023

Speakers:

Gil Fronsdal

Keywords:

practice

deeper

zen

burma

ims

meditation

vipassana

life

zen center

learned

months

people

teachers

teach

release

good

weariness

joseph goldstein

follow

talk

So hello, and welcome to this Monday when we begin another five days of talks. And I thought I would finish my life story around in relation to Buddhism last week. I kind of thought that was plenty of time. But there's still some more to talk about. So we ended up on Friday with my decision to go to Burma to follow up with my first experiences with Vipassana in Thailand. And then it took a while to get the visa. Burma had been, they didn't know this, but was close to any foreign or at least Western travel. And, until about maybe, June or so, and I was able to get there September. I was there for eight months at a meditation monastery. And those eight months, was the headquarters of what's called the Mahasi meditation movement. It was probably the biggest, you know, Tera Vaada, Buddhist meditation movement of the last century. And monk named Mahasi Seido kind of formulated a way of teach of practicing Vipassana that was very effective for many people. And it spread very quickly. There's definitely when I was there, there were maybe 300 centers of this practice in, in Myanmar, and had it spread to first to Sri Lanka and then to Thailand and then bit came to United States. And one of the kind of initial people who really got established here was Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield. And Sharon Salzberg and Jacqueline Schwartz, they came and had come out of that scene in Asia and Keemstar, teaching it here. So I went to the headquarters, the source of it all. And there was a very large monastery, kind of like a community college campus with some 5000 people meditating there at a given time spread around the complex. And, and there was to do intensive meditation, and we're supposed to get something like four hours of sleep a night, and there was practicing throughout the day, two meals a day, breakfast and lunch. And then most days, there was a meeting with the abbot for about 10 minutes. And most days, he gave a dharma talk around four o'clock in the afternoon. And then otherwise, I practice mostly there in good eight months, in my small, smallish room, it was small enough, it was big enough to have two beds in it, and I had one that I met, slept in and meditate on, on, and often did the walking meditation in the room, sometimes outside in the hallway. And, and it was, some, I would say, one of the most wonderful times in my life, I had a lot of joy and happiness, and just delight to be doing the practice. And I came there out of my Zen practice, having, you know, I was still a Zen priest. And I had this idea that I was going to continue with my Zen practice, which I defined to myself as an unconditional acceptance of the present moment. And, and but I was going to learn to do it better. And that that was going to follow the instructions of meditation teacher, who Pandita Seidel, and in order to do that unconditional acceptance, because what I had learned from doing a personal practice, is that my unconditional acceptance of the present moment that I learned to do in Zen, what was very meaningful for me very helpful for me and, and I learned to be pretty settled and calm and peaceful, and, and resilient in my life. But it was only kind of in the macro moments and the larger picture of scale of things. And what are learned through the past noise in the micro moments, the small, you know, in between everything, or underneath in a deeper layer. There was a lot of non acceptance going on a lot of wanting, resisting not wanting a judging criticize critical illness, it was very much more deeper. And so the kind of the surface kind of issues in my life had kind of been settled in a very important way. But there were still deeper roots deeper, active activation there that I wasn't often aware of. But in the past I practice in a more careful moment to moment attention and the deeper calm situation I could see was still operating. And so I was going to follow the instructions very carefully. And in order to do this unconditional acceptance, this was extremely important for me because the teacher who Pandita he was very, he was like a little bit of general, he's kind of like, you know, if you know, he was gonna like, he wanted us to strive, he wants us to try harder, try harder, try harder, stay up all night, it was always kind of pushing us to strive. And it was for some Westerners under his tutelage, that crashed, it was really difficult for some people who, somehow their Western psychology didn't match very well, the striving effort that he he was often pushing for. But I didn't buy into it, I had this resiliency and this acceptance that I had from Zen, that I did together with the careful attention that he wanted us to have. And so and so it worked for me fairly well. In the beginning, first two months I was there, I did kind of try to, you know, put in more effort than I usually would. And then it was hoping maybe, in order to kind of, because Pandita was so demanding. Now you can, okay, I'm gonna really try to practice here. And we had to run an account every day, we saw him of how much sitting meditation walking meditation we'd done in the last 24 hours, we have to kind of sum it all up. And, and he would hear if we had to be honest, right? So we had to hear how much we were practicing alone in our rooms. And if it wasn't enough, his eyebrow would go up and hear it having this kind of fierce generals eyebrow goes up was enough to get we didn't want to do that again. And so I would sit and walk as much of the day much as I could. And I would never do laundry. On the on the days, I was going to see him once a week, we had a day off from seeing him. And that was the day that I would do my laundry and do a few other kind of cleaning things. So that because I didn't want to report less time for meditation. So I practiced along and I was happy to practice. But then this mazing a wonderful thing happened is that he left for Australia for two months to teach a retreat there. And as soon as he left, I was poised. And the nice way I think was it wasn't conscious of this, that something in me relaxed. And when and I had the momentum, and then I relaxed and let go and settle into a much deeper place of well being of peace that, you know, that was really wonderful. And that became then the entry point for me to go deeper into the Parthenon. And I had experiences of release and freedom that had never had before in my life that were life changing for me. And teaching me how deeply release can be I had a sense of peace, I descend to the value of letting go had a sense of clarity and a lot of things before from practice. But I felt like I reached kind of the deepest possibility of that, in my experiences there under that those eight months or practicing there. And, and it was, I didn't realize it at the time. But that over time, I came to realize that this was life changing. At some point, I decided to continue doing the practice by going to I wanted to now really teach practiced with Western teachers who I could really make sure that I had good communication with rather than through a translator. And also I found that we didn't eat anything after noon. And I found that it didn't quite work for me that I would better if I could have just a little bit of a snack in the late afternoon or early evening and to sustain me, it was very thin, was I think I weighed 140 pounds and so I had no reserves to manage to get through the the evening. So I came back to America and and was gonna go to IMS Insight Meditation Society. But something told me at some point I felt too weary to go I was signed up to go but I fell to something inside me some deep weariness that was not I didn't identify what it was. But I said no, I'm not ready to go. And so by then I was back at the San Francisco Zen Center. And I was asked to take a kind of leadership position there and the meditation hall got And meditation hall manager

for the year. So since I wasn't going to IMS and I had nothing else to do. I was, you know, I was a Zen priest. And you know, I had no other life plans. So I was I felt very lucky to be able to spend another year back at Zen Center, practicing there. And that was a nice integration practice for me from this intensity of being so full on in Burma to then being a community in a monastery and and then during that time, there was a man who had been at Burma with me, he was a monk had been a monk, and, and he can't deceive me a green Gulch. And in the conversation with him, I've reviewed and talked about what had happened to me in Burma, I realized that the way I practiced, I had over emphasized concentration. And that I didn't realize that, and Pandita tried to tell me that but the way he told me I couldn't understand and couldn't understand what to do with it. And so the amazing thing happened when my friend when I realized this and talking to my friend, immediately that weariness evaporated. And immediately I said, Okay, now I'm ready to go to continue at IMS. And so that I went in the fall of 1987, I went to do a three month retreat at IMS, with studying with Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein. And then to continue their practice. And, and that was also quite wonderful for me to do, I'd had different challenges than I had before. But it was really wonderful. And, and in the process of doing that, I had a similar kind of deep release as I had in Burma, that clarified for me kind of an understanding of this possibility of, of what the work was about, oh, now I felt like now I understand that, that oh, they just with a practice at the essence of it, is this deep release of all holding all clinging. But what I learned at IMS, which I, which I hadn't learned before anupassanā, was I learned about Goodwill, I learned about mettā. When the teachers there, they didn't do this in Asia, but the teachers in America included guided metta meditation as part of their three month retreat. And as a Zen student, a post that was too artificial or too sweet or to not authentic to do this kind of phrases and stuff about mettā. So I tuned out the teachers when they did the guided meditation, until in this deep, deeper releases that I was having in practice mettā Rose, and then said, Oh, that's what they're talking about. And then I had something as a foundation for practice of mettā. And living from that metaphor place. Well, I did Zen practice, I was compassion, doing Vipassana I was mettā. It was good willed. I don't know if these two different movements were inherent with a practice that I was doing, or whether it was really the phases of my life. Because Zen really was contending with a lot of my suffering a lot of the conventional suffering of my life. And in in doing Vipassana, there was not much suffering. There was a lot of physical pain at times when I was at IMS, but not a lot of suffering. And then i i And but there was a lot of joy, a lot of happiness. And it was it was kind of being softened and softened and softened in a very different way than I had been in Zen, or during that Zen time. And in that there are woken me this myth, kindness and friendliness and then became a kind of the orientation around my practice leaving IMS was very much had to do with this release this deep freedom and this mettā this warmth that came out of it. And that seems like a good place to leave off. Because then I came back to California to Zen Center and wondering what to do next. I'd spent that time I spent almost 10 years in monasticism of monastic life and wondering what to do next. And that will be where I pick up tomorrow. Thank you