Strength of Mind

We live by two kinds of strength: strength of body and strength of mind. Of the two, strength of mind is the more important, because no matter how much strength you have in your body, if your mind is weak, you’re going to do a lot of things that are not really in your own best interest. You mistake right for wrong, and even when you do have an idea of what’s right, you may not have the strength to do it, in which case your strength of body is worthless. And sometimes if you have a lot of strength of body, you can do a lot of harm, which is why we meditate, to strengthen the mind.

You make up your mind that you’re going to stick with one thing right now, and then develop all the qualities that are needed to stay here. In doing that, the mind gets stronger. Then—just as when you go down to the gym and exercise, you come back, the body is not strong only in the gym, it carries its strength around with it—the strengths you develop as you meditate can get carried into your life.

So focus on your breath. Think thoughts of goodwill for yourself and for other people. Remind yourself that’s what you’re here for: a happiness that doesn’t harm anybody. And you have goodwill for yourself, which is why you’re here. Then you focus on the breath with the conviction that this is going to make a difference.

Conviction is one of the first strengths. Technically, it’s conviction in the Buddha’s awakening, which in practical terms means you’re convinced of the power of your actions, that your actions will make a difference. Where do your actions come from? They come from the mind. So you’ve got to train the mind so that your actions will be skillful. That means we’re doing good groundwork here. You remember to stay with the mind, that’s mindfulness. You’re alert to what the breath is doing, you’re alert to what the mind is doing. That’s alertness. And then you try to do this well. That’s a quality called ardency, which is identical with persistence, the second in the Buddha’s lists of the five strengths: your ardency, your persistence, your energy. Because your mind is so important, you want to really do this well.

There are a lot of jobs in the world that you can do and sort of do a good enough job to get them done. But this is the kind of work that requires your full attention. Because if you don’t train your mind, who’s going to train it for you? And if you don’t train it now, when is it going to get trained? It doesn’t get easier as you get older. So if you find the mind slipping off from the breath, you bring it back. Then you do your best to try to make the breath comfortable so that it’s a good place to stay. You can try long breathing, short breathing, fast, slow, heavy, light. Keep at it. Try to find a rhythm of breathing that’s just right for the body right now: energizing when you need energy, relaxing and soothing when you’re feeling wired and tense. Get a sense of what the body needs and how you can provide for those needs with the breath. And keep at it. Once you’ve found something good, keep at that, too. In other words, try to maintain it.

Try not to squeeze the breath too much. Sometimes, when we’re focusing on the breath and we’re told to stay with the in-breath and stay with the out-breath, we try to squeeze it a little bit at the end of the in-breath and a little bit at the end of the out-breath to mark it clearly. But that makes it uncomfortable. Think of the in-breath and the out-breath flowing into each other. Think of the whole body being nourished by this.

Once the breath gets comfortable, one of the exercises you can try is to go through the different parts of the body and ask yourself, how does that part of the body feel when you breathe in? How does it feel when you breathe out? Does it feel good? Try adjusting for that part. You can start down around the navel, work up the front of the body, then go over the head, down the shoulders, out the arms, then back in the neck, down the back, out the legs. Make a thorough survey of what you’ve got here. xx

One of the important steps is going to be that once the breath gets comfortable, you want to be able to breathe in and out aware of the whole body. Otherwise, your awareness tends to get blurry. Or if the range of your awareness is too small, as the breath gets more and more still, more and more refined, you lose it. You may drift off. You latch on to the comfort, and the comfort can take you for a while, but then it stops. Or you fall asleep.

So as soon as the breath gets comfortable, start surveying the body. Try to get to the point where you can sense the whole body as you breathe in, the whole body as you breathe out. It feels like the whole body is breathing. Then you’re right here. All of that strengthens your energy, strengthens your ardency, because you’ve got to give it your full attention.

In the course of doing that, you’re going to be strengthening your mindfulness, too. Mindfulness, as it’s defined in the popular culture, means simply being aware of things as they’re happening, but that’s not how the Buddha defined it. Mindfulness for him is the ability to keep something in mind. Here you’re keeping in mind the fact that you want to stay with the breath. And if you’ve had meditations in the past that have been helpful, where you’ve learned lessons about how to stay with the breath comfortably, well, you remember those lessons and apply them. So we’re not just sitting here watching things come and go. We’re trying to make good things come and prevent good things from going, and prevent bad things from coming and making sure they go if they do come. In this way, your mindfulness works together with your persistence.

When you do that, the mind gets into concentration. That’s another one of the strengths of mind: your ability to stay with one thing comfortably, steadily. It feels nourishing. There’s a sense of ease that comes with that, a sense of pleasure, sometimes a sense of fullness. The mind is content to be here, and the body feels nourished.

When the mind gets steady like that, solid like that, that’s when the ultimate strength comes, which is the strength of your discernment, your ability to see cause and effect as they happen in the mind. You can see it starting with the effect of the breath on the mind itself. When something disturbing comes in, you begin to see, “Okay, this has an impact on the breath and it has a bad impact on the mind. Why go with it?” The mind may have some reasons, saying, “I want to think about this, I want to get involved in that.” But when you can create a sense of well-being here, you begin to change your values as to what’s really worth going with in your thoughts.

And you begin to see that a lot of the things that you wanted in the past have been harmful to you. They’ve caused a lot of unnecessary stress, unnecessary suffering. Why go with them? You’ve got something better here.

Now, this is an acquired taste. Sometimes a sense of ease comes with the breathing. It doesn’t seem like all that much. We stick with it. Give it a chance to grow. As you get more and more used to these moments of stillness, you want to connect them and they get stronger. That’s what changes us. It changes the balance of power in the mind as to which thoughts you really want to identify with. And you find that you can let go of a lot of your old habits that have been causing unnecessary suffering for yourself or unnecessary stress for others.

When you have the mind trained like this, then it’s a lot easier for the mind to see what should be done, what shouldn’t be done—and you’ve got that sense of inner well-being and inner strength that says, “I’m up for it.” If what needs to be done is hard, you don’t let the fact that it’s hard get in the way. If there are things you have to let go of that you really like, you find it easier to let go. And this is what strength of mind means. It doesn’t mean that you just stick with something all the way through, regardless. Now, that is a quality of concentration and persistence, but you have to use your discernment as to what really is worth sticking with. And if you see that it’s causing harm, then you let go. You have the strength to let go.

As the body begins to age, get ill, weaken, you find that you’ve got this source of strength in the mind. Because as illness comes and death approaches, the mind is going to be all over the place if it hasn’t been trained. And its going all over the place is going to create a lot of needless suffering. Whereas if your mind is strong enough, and a thought that comes up is going to be harmful, it’s going to be causing a lot of pain and distress, you can say No. Effectively. You can let it go.

After all, that’s one of the skills we develop as we work on our concentration and our mindfulness. Something comes up in the mind that’s not related to the breath, you can let it go, let it go. You realize that even though that thought is there in the mind, you don’t have to run with it. You’re not committed to it. After all, it’s not committed to you. That way you learn how to think the thoughts you want to think and not think the thoughts you don’t want to think, and you get a better idea of what things really are worth thinking about.

This is all to the good. This is why meditating like this, developing strength of mind like this, is an expression of goodwill for yourself. And as you cause less suffering for yourself, you’re going to be less of a burden on people around you. So take some time to strengthen the mind in this way. Because this kind of strength is good for you and for the people around you. It’s good long-term, unlike strength of the body. Strength of the body develops as you grow up and then begins to fall apart, which is why we need a different refuge. And strength of the mind is just that refuge. When you work on it, when you train the mind, you find that you really can depend on it.

So take this opportunity now. Opportunities like this don’t always come, but here it is now.