Samadhi is an integral part of meditative development showing us the way to cultivate what the Buddha refers to as a well-trained heart and mind that comes to know the deepest peace and happiness.

Christina Feldman, co-founder of Gaia House and a guiding teacher emeritus at Insight Meditation Society, guides us through the cultivation of Samadhi in January's Dharma Talk series for Meditation Month.

Transcript:
"There are two words that you will come across as you travel the meditative path. One is samadhi, and the other is samatha. These are both Pali words. My understanding is that samatha refers to any training in calming the mind, calming anything that is agitated in the mind and the body. Samadhi is often seen as being the fruit of this calming—the mind that can sustain both intention and attention. Both words are frequently preceded by the word samma, which means right or wise attentiveness that has its roots in ethics and has the aspiration of freeing the mind and heart from agitation and traveling a path of awakening, of liberation. More accurately, the word samadhi, and samatha, too, translates as to gather. To gather together or to collect together.
The image that is sometimes used in the texts is one of gathering harvested corn or wheat and bringing it together into a kind of oneness, a unified whole. I think of this as the integration or the unification of body, mind, and present moment. And I think as we reflect on our own experience, we see that this unification is often absent—our body is in one place, our mind is occupying some other place, and the present moment is frequently just forgotten.
The image that I often refer to or use is the image of a very skilled sheepdog. In Wales, they have these sheepdogs that are sent out in the autumn to gather together the sheep that are spread over the hillsides. The sheepdogs gather the sheep from the pastures that have dried out and are no longer nourishing, where the sheep are not thriving. A wise sheepdog never intimidates or harms the sheep in this process, but it gathers them together and guides the sheep from these worn-out pastures to pastures where they will flourish and thrive.
In the practice of developing samadhi, we are doing much the same within the landscape of our own minds and hearts. We're gathering and collecting our attention from places, from pastures where we don't thrive: the fields of rumination, distractedness, obsession, and proliferating thought and narratives. The fields where we too often simply become exhausted. We're learning to gather our attention from those fields, and guide our attention into this mind, into this body, in a collected, unifying way. This is the pasture, this is the field, where we do begin to thrive. We're guiding our attentional capacity into the fields of calmness, mindfulness, and stillness; the landscape of heart and mind where we flourish, where there is creativity, where there is appropriate responsiveness, and where there is a way of inhabiting the moment that we find ourselves in."
•
Become a Tricycle magazine subscriber and watch the full Dharma Talk series at this link: https://tricycle.org/dharmatalks/medi...