Healing Your Energy

Start with a couple of good long, deep, in-and-out breaths. Try to sit comfortably. You’re going to be here for an hour, so try to sit up straight. Think of relaxing all the muscles in your arms and legs. Start with the toes. Work up through the feet and the legs, relaxing the muscles in all the different joints. Then start with the fingers and do the same thing up through the hands and the arms.

Try to breathe in a way that feels healing and comfortable. The breath is not just the air coming in and out of the lungs, it’s also the energy flowing through the nerves. If the energy flows in strange directions, it’s going to be bad. It’s going to be uncomfortable.

As you get more and more sensitive to how the body feels when it’s breathing, you’ll begin to notice that there really is an energy flow. It’s not just something made up or imagined. It’s there. It’s just a question of allowing yourself to perceive the sensations in the body as breath, and becoming more and more sensitive to them. As you get more sensitive, you begin to realize that you’ve been breathing in some unhealthy ways, and some of the energy flow in the body hasn’t been good for you.

So think of everything breathing together. As the breath energy comes in, it comes in through the nose but also through other spots in the body. It can flow down the nerves in a way that feels relaxing. Or if you’re feeling too tired and you want a little more energy, you can think of the breath energy coming up. You find, as you get more sensitive, that you can manipulate these things.

This is a really important skill because the mind needs a comfortable place to stay. It also needs new habits in how it deals with the energy flow in the body. All too often, the energy flow is at the mercy of your greed or your lust or your anger. When you get angry, you’ll notice that the body feels different from when it’s at normalcy. When you feel greed, when you feel lust, it feels different as well. That’s because the energy is flowing in different ways. You don’t know how it happens. It just seems to happen that way. But subconscious habits in the mind are actually making it happen.

When you meditate, you’re backing up a bit and you can begin to see, “Okay, this is how the energy flow gets started, and this is how it can build up unnecessary tension or a feeling of blockage or a feeling that the different parts of the body are working at cross-purposes.” What you want is a sense that the energy-flow in the whole body feels good and is all in harmony. Then you want to be able to maintain that. It’s in the maintaining that you develop your mindfulness, alertness, and concentration.

So take some time to study this feeling of the body as you’re breathing in and breathing out. Notice where you’re causing yourself unnecessary stress.

One of the analogies for this practice we’re doing here is that it’s medicine for the body and medicine for the mind. We’re doing healing work. Some medicines are quick—you get a shot and the disease will go away. Other medicines take a long time, like a cream on a rash. You put the cream on the rash and then you leave it there. You don’t put it on and then wipe it off right away, because the cream takes time to work.

It’s the same with the quality of your awareness. You want to be able to balance your awareness so that it actually is healthy for the body and healthy for the mind, and the energy flow in the body gets healthier. Then let it stay that way. It soothes a lot of the different wounds you’ve suffered. We’ve picked up wounds, not just physical wounds, but also mental wounds from things people have said and done to us—and also from habits we’ve picked up. Those are the worst ones, because we wound ourselves again and again. Sometimes even just the way you breathe is wounding.

So it’s good to learn new habits—to be a true friend to yourself; to be your own doctor; to figure out what kind of energy the body needs right now, what kind of energy the mind needs right now, and then figure out how the breath can provide for those needs.

You’re trying to put the mind in a good place, because as those chants we had just now said again and again, we’re the owners of our actions. We receive the results of our actions. So it’s important to figure out, well, what are we doing right now? Is it going to lead to good results or bad results?

The quality of the action is going to be very much determined by the quality of the mind. The quality of the mind is determined by how you feel here in the present moment. If you’re feeling that this is not a good place to stay and you want to run away, what kind of mind is a running mind? What does it see? It doesn’t see things clearly, and it’s not really in a position of strength. When you’re running, it’s very easy to get pushed over.

But if you’re standing still with a good, solid stance, you can see things clearly and not get knocked over by them. You can look very, very much in detail at things around you, because you’re still. You can detect even little bits of movement or little bits of things that you wouldn’t have seen if you were running. It would be just a blur.

If you’re staying here with a sense of clarity and well-being, you’re much less likely to cause harm to yourself or harm to other people. It’s when you’re feeling ill at ease that you tend to do unskillful things, hurtful things. Then it comes back at you. It’s like a boomerang. You don’t like it, so you throw it away again, and it comes back at you again.

What you want to be able to do is develop a state of mind that can take whatever’s been coming back from what you’ve thrown out in the past, yet not react in an unskillful way. Try to break that cycle.

Also, when you’re feeling good and nourished inside, it’s a lot easier to think about the well-being of others, so you won’t harm them, either.

So this is putting you in a really good place: feeling at ease in the present moment, the blood is circulating well through the body, the energy in the nerves is flowing well. It heals a lot of old wounds and it helps you to refrain from creating new wounds with unskillful thoughts, unskillful words, unskillful actions.

As you treat these wounds and care for yourself, the benefits spread out to other people, too. So take some time to really get to know how the body feels from within and how the energy flow can be directed. Sometimes you force it too much, so you have to learn how to notice when that’s happening and back off a bit.

Over time, this becomes a skill.

The more skills we have in life, the more opportunities for happiness we can find. This is a skill that many people overlook—getting in touch with the energy flow in the body and using that in-touch sensitivity to create a really good place for the mind, a good home for the mind. You learn to cut through a lot of the old cycles of feeling ill at ease and so doing something really unskillful that will come back and make you feel even more ill at ease.

Here’s a place to cut the cycles, right here in your awareness of the present moment. Try to make the mind as solid as you can here in the present. When the Buddha was giving meditation instructions to his son, one of the first things he said was, “Try to make your mind like earth.” People throw disgusting things on the earth, yet the earth doesn’t react.

In the same way, you want to get your mind to be non-reactive. There will be pains as you meditate, there will be feelings of discomfort, and sometimes the breath will get very much out of balance. Just learn to be patient with it and allow things to settle back into balance. This process of training the mind, getting sensitive to the body in the present moment, is going to take time.

As with any really good skill, it requires that you do it again and again and again. And as you do it again and again, you begin to see things you didn’t see the first time. You begin to see connections: what’s causing what, and how you can change the causes so that the results get better.

You develop that kind of patience and the sensitivity that goes with it by being here again and again. You begin to realize there are a lot of potentials here, simply by being here with the breath in the present moment and using this as a place where the mind can really settle in with a sense of well-being. That way, its actions—the things it chooses to say and do and think—are actually going to be healing actions: healing for your own wounds, healing for the wounds of other people.

Many of us live in a world where we’ve been damaged a lot, and we’ve been damaging other people, too. So try to settle in right here and get a sense of bringing things back into balance, so that the actions you do will be balanced actions, actions that you don’t regret, actions that will be healing, actions that you’re actually proud of having chosen to do.

That’s part of our dignity as human beings, the ability to live in difficult circumstances but without having to be a slave to them and just reacting to them. We can choose to rise up above them. That ability is what makes life worthwhile.