Challenges

There are two big dangers when you try to get the mind to settle down. One is pain and the other is pleasure. And it’s through learning how to be intelligent around pain and pleasure that we can stay settled down. Otherwise, the mind goes flying off in other directions.

With pain, of course, the issue is how not to feel irritated by it, how not to feel oppressed by it. One way is to remind yourself that not all of the body is in pain. Ajaan Lee compares the body to a mango. There may be a rotten spot in the mango, but you don’t have to eat the rotten spot. You eat all the good flesh around it. It’s very easy when we sit down to meditate to focus immediately on where the pains are and to ignore all the other parts of the body. This is because our mind seems to be primed to look for where the problems are. So we can retrain it, re-prime it. There may be pain in the back, but there doesn’t have to be pain in the chest. There may be a nice okay sensation in the shoulders, in the head, in the arms, in the feet. Focus there instead. As for the pain, remind yourself you don’t have to go into it. You can let it have that part of the body. If you go in to claim the area where the pain is, you’re putting yourself in the line of fire.

Now, there will come a time when you do go in to examine the pain very carefully. But before you can do that, you need a good foundation, a place where you feel secure, a place where you feel safe, so that when the time comes to look at the pain, you can look at it with interest, curiosity: What is this pain, after all? But as with any warrior, you have to realize there are times when you’re ready for a battle and there are times when you’re not. If you’re not up for the battle, you go hide out. You wait until you’re strong enough and have some chance of coming to some understanding.

Then you can probe into the pain a little bit and see what’s going on. What is this sensation? You can ask yourself, “How am I relating to it?” Because that’s going to be the big issue. Pain in the body is something that everybody has. Even arahants have pains in their bodies. It’s how they relate to the pain that makes all the difference.

So you can start asking yourself simple questions. “What side of the pain am I on? Am I on top of the pain or below the pain? And that sensation that I’m interpreting as pain, is it really painful? How much of the sensation that I’ve labeled as pain is painful and how much is just kind of glommed on to that sharpness that we identify as pain?”

Try to parse things out in this way and you find that you can approach the pain with a sense of interest, without the fear or the dislike you used to have. If you find that that kind of probing makes things worse, just pull out and go back to another part of the body and allow that to be as comfortable as possible. Allow a sense of fullness to develop there, the fullness of the blood flowing through all the vessels in that area, bathing all the cells there, everybody getting nourished. Give the mind something good to feed on. As long as it’s going to feed, feed it the food of concentration, feed it the food of mindfulness.

The pleasure of what they call form, i.e. the body as you sense it from within, is a higher form of pleasure than the pleasure of sensuality: the pleasures of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations. The pleasure of form is something is totally independent of things outside.

To appreciate it, the mind has to be still. This is why it’s a special kind of pleasure. It actually strengthens the mind as opposed to weakening it. The pleasures of sensuality sap your energy. They leave you weak and dependent on more sensuality. Things have to be just a certain way. You’re like a sick person who has to have a certain temperature in the room and only certain kinds of food and only certain kinds of contact with people. You’re not robust enough to be able to handle different situations. But the sense of well-being that comes from experiencing the body from within and learning how to maximize the pleasure of that internal sensation: That requires concentration, discernment, alertness, mindfulness, lots of good, strong mental qualities. Then you become like a healthy person who can go anywhere, eat any kind of food, sleep on any kind of bed. That gives you a greater sense of freedom. Even though it may not be absolute freedom, it gives you a much wider range of things you can handle.

But even this pleasure does have its dangers, particularly in the beginning stages. You settle down with a breath and everything is relaxing. When things get pleasant, you lose your grip. The mind begins to wander off or its attention begins to unravel a little bit. In the beginning, it’s not too much. You don’t notice it. It’s just a fraying at the ends. But bit by bit, other things begin to penetrate. The ease you had begins to disappear or you get bored with it. A sense of irritation comes in. You want something else. You want something more. “Enough of this pleasure. What else can we have?” The mind gets antsy.

The cure for that is that as soon as there’s a sense of pleasure in the body, you try to maximize it. The image the Buddha gives is of kneading water through dough. You’ve got this pile of powder or a pile of flour. You add water and you turn it into dough. You have to knead things so that everything gets well mixed. In the same way, when there’s a sense of ease that comes with being with the breath, think of working it through the body. How is it going through the shoulders? How is it going through the neck? How about all the little muscles up in the head, around the eyes, around the ears and the jaws? How is the blood flow around your teeth? Then you go down in the body, down through the lungs and all the different organs in the torso, down through the legs, down to every little toe. Start going down the arms, down to the fingers. Allow the sense of ease and fullness to penetrate as much of the body as you can handle. Pose questions in the mind. Remember, this sense of ease really is healthy for the body. If you’ve got any diseases or chronic conditions, improving the circulation of the different parts of the body really can help you.

So give yourself work to do. Take an interest in what’s going on here.

And just as you have to take an interest in pain, learn how to take an interest in pleasure. What are its uses? You don’t just take pleasure as an end in and of itself and wallow around until it’s gone. That’s not making the best use of pleasure. Learn how to move it through the body. To what extent can you move it through the body before you start turning it into pain? That requires a deftness of touch that you have to practice.

What it comes down to is that we play with the breath, we work with the breath—playing in the sense of learning how to enjoy being with it, and working in the sense of giving ourselves something really important to do with the breath, to develop good qualities of mind and, as a side effect, to improve the health of the body.

Of course, aside from pain and pleasure, there’s another danger you face in concentration, and that’s distraction—particularly the thoughts that come in and say, “This is dumb” or “This is not right, you should be doing something else.” To whatever extent you can, you want to put those thoughts aside.

If they’re really insistent, then you have to turn around and argue with them. The best arguments are the ones that are quick, when you can figure out what’s the weak point in their argument and go straight for the jugular. Ask yourself: Where is this thought coming from? Is it expressing an attitude that you really believe in, or something you’ve just picked up? Often you can identify where a particular attitude has come from—your parents, your friends, TV, the Internet. You have to ask yourself, “Do I really believe that? I’ve been carrying these attitudes around for so long. Are they really things that I hold to, that I want to hold to?” When you can see a clear reason for why you don’t want to hold to that thought, then you can drop it a lot more effectively than just pushing it away.

Now, there are times when you search and search and search, and nothing seems to open up. That’s when you say, “Okay, I’m not ready for this right now.” You remind yourself that if you’re going to deal effectively with issues like that, you need to improve your concentration, you need to improve your mindfulness, your alertness. So you go back to the breath, with the thought in the back of the mind that the next time you’re ready, you’re going to take that distraction on again.

So there’s work to be done. There are dangers all around you. When you deal with them effectively, they actually strengthen you. This is part of what the work of concentration and discernment is all about. You see what’s going to pull you away from the breath and you learn from it how not to get pulled away. And when you learn how not to get pulled away, you’ve learned some important lessons about the mind. You begin to see through your fear of pain. You begin to see through your attraction to pleasure—the old habits you had around pain, the old habits you had around pleasure. And you begin to see through the false reasoning that would pull you away from really wanting to develop the mind. There’s a huge measure of freedom right there.

So as you face these dangers, don’t get discouraged. They’re part of the landscape. And don’t feel overwhelmed by them. They’re problems that you can handle as you develop your tools in mindfulness, alertness, and ardency. You learn that you’re developing these things not only by focusing on the breath, but also by fending off the things that would pull you away. It’s all part of training the mind. Just give yourself the encouragement so that you’re up for it, that you can take these things as challenges and not as obstacles. Approach them with interest, with curiosity.

After all, these are the things that have been controlling your mind for who knows how long—pleasure and pain. Big issues in our lives. All the issues that would pull us away from training the mind are also big issues in the mind. What we do as we meditate is that we learn how to make them small. Take them apart bit by bit so you can manage the little parts, and after a while you begin to realize that they’re all made of these little bits, little manageable parts. And they don’t seem so big anymore. As Ajaan Lee says, you get to the point where you see that pleasure and pain really aren’t all that big an issue after all. They’re words that people speak in jest. You’ve got something much more valuable when you’ve got a well-trained mind.