Considering how we relate to the world, Gil Fronsdal offers insight into freedom from our mental constructs through stillness of mind.

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In this episode, Gil Fronsdal offers wisdom on:

• The relationship between fundamental insight and fundamental happiness
• Dividing the present moment into three parts (what's happening, our relationship to it, and the self)
• The Anicca Vata Sankhara chant, an important chant among Theravada Buddhists
• Seeing happiness through stilling our mental constructions
• Objective reality versus human-made conventions
• Understanding the world of relatedness and settling it down
• Being aware of the breath within the breath
• The season of being in relationship and the season of letting things be
• The ever-presence of awareness and the freedom it can bring
• Buddhist practice helps us see when something is a construction
• Seeing the arising and passing of all mental activity 

We have all these conventions and they’re useful, we play with them, they’re antidotes, they settle things. It’s also possible to relate to the breathing, to be present for the breath, without a convention, but present. The mind doesn’t go towards the breath, the breath doesn’t go to you, the breath arises in awareness. The awareness doesn’t go anywhere.” – Gil Fronsdal

This 2008 recording was originally published on Dharmaseed

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. Gil has an undergraduate degree in agriculture from U.C. Davis where he was active in promoting the field of sustainable farming. In 1998 he received a PhD in Religious Studies from Stanford University studying the earliest developments of the bodhisattva ideal. 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.

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