Gil Fronsdal explores practicing in accord with nature, showing how mindfulness and honesty help us release resistance and move with the natural flow of the Dharma.
Today’s podcast is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/beherenow and get on your way to being your best self.
This time on the BHNN Guest Podcast, Gil Fronsdal lectures on:
- Being in accord with the dharma, with truth, and with nature
- The painful attitudes that we often bring to change
- Accepting our feelings rather than pushing them away
- How resistance to reality causes more suffering
- Mindfulness: creating the ideal conditions for the natural process of healing
- Floating down the stream of Dharma rather than struggling up a mountain
- Studying nature rather than rushing into conclusions
- Becoming an observer of our own lives with child-like openness and adult-like resolve
This recording was originally published on Dharmaseed
“To be in accord with nature, to discover by investigation, by not forcing change, but really understanding what you most need to practice. Do you sit with child-like openness and adult-like resolve? Or, if that’s not appropriate, to really be honest with yourself. What do I really need? What’s really going on with me? What is the way that is more like water and less like a jackhammer?” – Gil Fronsdal
About Gil Fronsdal:
Gil Fronsdal is the co-teacher for the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California; he has been teaching since 1990. He has practiced Zen and Vipassana in the U.S. and Asia since 1975. He was a Theravada monk in Burma in 1985, and in 1989 began training with Jack Kornfield to be a Vipassana teacher. Gil teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center where he is part of its Teachers Council. Gil was ordained as a Soto Zen priest at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1982, and in 1995 received Dharma Transmission from Mel Weitsman, the abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center. He currently serves on the SF Zen Center Elders’ Council. In 2011 he founded IMC’s Insight Retreat Center. He is the author of The Issue at Hand, essays on mindfulness practice; A Monastery Within; a book on the five hindrances called Unhindered; and the translator of The Dhammapada, published by Shambhala Publications. You may listen to Gil’s talks on Audio Dharma.
“We’re in this stream of the dharma, this stream of practice. It is not fighting up a mountain and struggling so much. It is finding a place to rest in the stream and we find ourselves being carried along beautifully into the ocean. The ocean is so big it can hold all of us. Isn’t that nice? It’s not like you’re going to be king of the mountain. We’re all going to be brothers and sisters in this great ocean of the dharma.” –Gil Fronsdal
Photo via by edb3_16
More Be Here Now Network Podcasts:
Lama Rod Owens covers the dharma of freedom, loving ourselves, ancestral work, and the power of meditation: Dedication to Liberation
JoAnna Hardy shares a guided meditation all around the first foundation of mindfulness – mindfulness of the body: First Foundation Guided Meditation
Through bearing witness, love & service, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee shares how we can collectively heal the crisis of disconnection & ecological devastation: Love & Service
Buddhist Master Thich Nhat Hanh explores how we can joyfully bring mindfulness into everyday activities like phone calls, driving, and walking: The Ojai Foundation Presents: Under the Teaching Tree with Thich Nhat Hanh