(NR) Staying in Position

Get into position for the meditation. There are two sides to the process. The first is getting your body in position. Place your hands in your lap, your right hand on top of the left. Sit up straight, face forward, close your eyes. Then you want to get the mind in position. To do that, you focus on the breath. Try to notice where you feel the breathing process. It can be anywhere in the body. Choose a spot where the sensations tell you clearly that now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out. Allow the breath in that spot to feel comfortable. That’s getting into position. Both sides of the process are easy.

The hard part is staying in position.

In terms of the body, often the body isn’t used to sitting still for such long periods of time. There are bound to be pains here and there. So one thing you can do is learn how to use the breath to help the body stay in one position. When you breathe in, think of the breath flowing throughout the entire body. In addition to the in-and-out breath, there’s the breath energy flowing through the nerves and the blood vessels. As soon as you breathe in, it’s gone all the way through the body. It’s that fast. Hold that perception in mind. If there are parts of the body where the breath energy feels blocked, think of it as getting untangled. Think of that blockage dissolving. Or you can breathe around it, breathe through it—whatever way you find helps keep the breath flowing, keep the blood flowing.

And let this perception cover the whole body. Sometimes a pain in one spot of the body may actually be related to a blockage in another spot. For instance, pains in the hips, pains in the knees: They often come because someplace in the spine the blood isn’t flowing properly. So think of the breath going in all the way down the spine and out the legs.

If pain still arises, and no matter how you breathe it stays there, you don’t have to focus on it. Try to find one part of the body, or as many parts of the body, as you can get comfortable. Give your full attention to those. In other words, you don’t have to claim the whole body as yours. If the pain wants to have your knee, let it go ahead and have the knee. Make sure that you get out of the line of fire.

Then, as your chosen spot gets more and more comfortable, you can think of the comfort spreading from that spot to go down through the pain. But keep your primary focus in the comfortable spot.

If the pain gets so unbearable that you feel you have to move, give yourself five minutes and then move. In other words, don’t move immediately. Give yourself some time to work on your other skills. Otherwise, the pain will take over your meditation. That’s keeping the body in position.

Keeping the mind in position means that whatever else comes up in the mind, you don’t go after it. When a thought comes passing in, just let it go passing on. You don’t have to chase it down. You don’t have to complete it. All too often, a half-finished thought arises in the mind, and for some reason we feel compelled to finish the thought—as if we’re somehow responsible for accounting for all our thoughts. But to keep the mind with the breath, as soon as you notice a thought, drop it. Drop it. In mid-sentence. Don’t pay it any attention. It’s going to come passing in, and you’re not responsible for pushing it out. It’ll go passing on its own. The less you get involved in the thinking, the better.

And again, it helps to keep the breath as comfortable as possible—although the comfortable breath does have one big drawback, which is that people sometimes get drowsy when the breath is comfortable. After all, our normal experience of comfortable breathing is right before we fall asleep. So to counteract that tendency, as soon as you find the breath getting comfortable, spread your awareness to fill the whole body. Survey the body to see where the breath energy feels comfortable, where it doesn’t. Notice how you can take your comfortable breathing and help the different parts of the body that don’t feel so comfortable. This gives the mind something to do. It keeps it busy in the midst of its comfort, and that way it can stay awake.

Then maintain your intention to keep both the body and the mind in position. That’s probably the most difficult part of the meditation. This is where mindfulness comes in: your ability to keep remembering with each breath, “Stay here, stay here, stay here,” not letting other intentions move in and erase your first intention.

So getting into position is not the hard part. The hard part is staying in position. As for the part of the mind that asks, “What’s next?” Tell it, “This is what’s next.” In other words, you don’t gain insight by developing concentration and then dropping it. You gain insight by learning how to maintain your concentration in the midst of different circumstances, in the midst of different temptations to go off thinking about something else. That’s how you start understanding the mind.

Ajaan Khamdee, a teacher in the forest tradition, once said it was like being a hunter. The hunter has to be very still but very alert. You know, for example, that this is a path that rabbits go down. You want to get a rabbit, so you sit near the path. You have to be very careful not to make any noise, because otherwise you scare the rabbits away. But if you’re so still that you start falling asleep, the rabbits will hop right under your nose and you won’t know it. You have to be very still, very still, very still, and very alert, so that you can hear the slightest motions in the leaves. Now, with experience, you begin to recognize what’s the sound of a rabbit, what’s the sound of a lizard, what’s the sound of whatever else might be coming along. But this ability to stay still and alert is the basic skill of maintaining the mind in concentration. It’s also the basis of allowing insight to arise.

I once talked with an anthropologist who told me that when anthropologists go into villages, they try to learn every skill that the villagers have mastered so that they can get an insider feel for the culture. And one skill that no anthropologist has ever been able to master anywhere is the traditional skill of hunting. We in the modern world seem to have lost that. That’s because traditional hunting isn’t just a matter of going out and being violent. It requires training the mind in being still and alert.

So realize that this is the hardest part of the meditation, but it’s also the most essential. Otherwise, you’ll never catch the mind. So once the mind is in position, get it to stay in position. It’s all very simple, but it’s not easy. The trick lies in learning how to find a point of balance between your alertness and your stillness, and then learning how to maintain that balance. It’s to be expected that you’re going to fall off, but learn how to get back into balance as quickly as possible, so that this balanced state of mind—centered but full throughout the body, with the breath comfortable, the mind awake—becomes more and more your second nature, your normal way of operating.

Upasika Kee talks about the state of mind at normalcy, and this is what she means: still, balanced, alert. Not leaning into likes or dislikes; not wandering off after your thoughts and defilements. The mind at normalcy is the mind that’s still and alert, but for most of us, it’s not normal. That’s because we’ve been developing other skills, other habits. So take this opportunity to bring the mind to normalcy and keep it here, because right here is where all sorts of interesting things will begin to appear. You begin to see the processes of the mind as it forms a thought, as it drops a thought. You see more and more clearly the point where you choose to go with a thought. You see where that little decision is made when you’ve dropped your intention to stay with concentration, and you decide you want to go off with something else—and you realize you don’t have to go off.

It is a choice. The more you can bring the mind to stillness, the more refined your concentration, then the more you can make that choice consciously. In other words, the opportunity comes to either stay with a breath or go someplace else, and you learn how to stay, stay, stay. Keep making this choice to stay here. In the process of mastering that skill, you’ll get a lot of insight into the mind.