A Good Foundation
May 02, 2024

One of the messages of the four noble truths is that you’ve been making some pretty big mistakes. Everything you do, say, think, is for the purpose of happiness, pleasure, and well-being, yet so much of it actually leads to suffering. When you learn how to admit that fact, then you’re ready to grow in the Dhamma.

But it means that, as you practice, you’re going to see a lot of things about yourself that you don’t like to see. The mind will need some nourishment, a good foundation, so that these insights don’t knock it off balance.

This is why the Buddha discovered that an important part of the path is the sense of pleasure, refreshment, that comes from getting the mind in good concentration. It’s also why he has so many different techniques for getting the mind into concentration.

Breath is number one. As Ajaan Lee says, it’s your home base. All other meditation methods are foraging places for the mind, places where you go when you have a specific need. Home base is here, because the breath can be used to create a good sense of well-being in the body.

Breathe in, breathe out. You can do it in so many different ways: long, short, or in long, out short, in short, out long, fast, slow, heavy, light, deep or shallow, or any combination of those. And you can think of the breathing going into different parts of the body.

Years back, when I had malaria, I realized I was getting some really heavy muscle aches. My breath was getting labored because the malaria parasite basically was eating up the red blood cells that delivered oxygen to the muscles. The muscles were getting starved.

I realized that a lot of the problem had to do with where, in my mental picture of the breathing, the breath was coming in. That tended to activate certain muscles and made them do the work. So I learned to change the spot where I thought the breath was coming in, so as to share the load. The muscles I had been working got to rest, and other muscles pitched in. Then, as they got tired, I’d move my picture of the spot again.

So how you picture the breath to yourself is an important part of the meditation. Realizing this not only teaches you how to picture the breath in a way that allows the breath to be comfortable, but it also teaches you about the power of perception. The way you visualize things makes a huge difference in how you actually experience things.

What we’re doing as we meditate is learning how to focus on the way in which we put the present moment together, and to do it consciously. One of the big areas of exploration is going to be the movement of the energy in the body.

Think about it: When we first got these physical bodies, we didn’t have any language. We had feelings of energy flowing here, flowing there. Some were painful; some were pleasant. It took a long time for us to make any sense out of them. And even before we made sense out of them, we encountered quite a few that we didn’t like. We had our ways of counteracting them, again, without any guidance from anybody else.

So some of us learned how to suppress energies, bottle them up, keep a tight lid on things, and that way we felt we could exercise some control. But often that control became really debilitating and very limiting. Yet there’s a part of the mind that feels threatened if we abandon control.

One of the ways we have to counteract all that is to adopt some new maps, like Ajaan Lee’s maps of where the breath flows in the body, so that we can allow the energy to flow. Sometimes the energy’s been held in for so long that it’s going to take a while for the new habit to become habitual. If we’re not alert, we automatically go back to our old ways of holding the body, holding the energy, and doing this pretty unconsciously.

Part of the problem is the fact that our society, our culture, doesn’t talk about these things very much, so we don’t have much of a vocabulary. We don’t know how we would discuss it with anybody else. So it’s good to pick up some new vocabulary from outside, and see how it works.

Then adjust it to your specific problems. After all, each of us has a different breath history: how we’ve been holding things, where we hold the body more tightly, where we let it go more loosely. Sometimes you’ll find that as you consciously change the way you think of the breath energies flowing in the body, some memories of the past will come up.

I’ve worked with energies in different parts of the body until there was a release at some point, and as the energy was released, a memory of a particular accident when I was young came up: the time I got a nail in my foot, another time when I fell face down on a concrete sidewalk. Somehow, I had been carrying the tension of those accidents around. Once it gets released, it has an impact throughout the body, just as if the body’s put together with lots of rubber bands. You remove one rubber band and it’s going to change the tension on all of them.

So there’s a lot to explore here.

Ajaan Lee, as I said, gives us some pointers. Fortunately, because concentration is meant to be pleasant, if you find that his way of visualizing things doesn’t help you, well, try some things on your own: different spots in the body where you can focus your attention, different images of where the breath energy comes in the body when you breathe in, and how it flows through the body.

Or you could change it around: Think about the fact that the breath energy actually originates inside. When Ajaan Lee talks about the resting spots of the breath, those are also some of the originating spots—and those are just a handful of the many spots you could focus on. When you breathe in, where does the energy seem to start? As it ripples through the body, where are the places that resist it? Can you open them up? Can you relax them?

If you find that, in opening them up and relaxing them, your posture gets better, that’s a good sign. But we’re not here to create perfect posture. We’re here to explore how the body feels from within and how we can make it a pleasant place to stay, a good foundation, so that we feel secure in the present moment. Because, as I said, the insights we’re going to gain can sometimes be pretty painful. Especially if you don’t like seeing your own stupidity.

Ajaan Suwat once said that when you talk about avijjā, you can call it ignorance, but you can also call it stupidity: things we do again and again and again, they cause stress, they cause suffering, but we don’t have the imagination to believe that we could stop doing those things and still be happy.

There are so many things we do because we feel, “Well, you just have to do it that way. There’s no other way”—even with something as simple as the breathing, or something as simple as how you talk to yourself. The images you hold in mind, here, your idea of what’s really going on in your body, what’s really going on in the world outside: A lot of these images can be really debilitating, yet somehow we believe we have to hold on to them.

And of course, they’re going to shape the way we understand what we should do and shouldn’t do, and where we can look for our pleasure, all of which are the different forms of clinging:

sensuality—clinging to the places where we look for pleasure,

views—views about the nature of the world,

habits and practices—our ideas about how things have to be done.

And of course, views about the self—who we are, how we identify ourselves.

All of these are things we’ve been doing subconsciously, and they all constitute suffering.

All too often we feel that this is simply the way we have to function. So a large part of the training is realizing that you don’t have to view things that way. You don’t have to believe your clingings. To some extent this is going to be disorienting, because it’s through our clingings that we orient ourselves to the world.

It’s like doing massage work on your mind. You get someone who’s really expert at massage, and they can thoroughly rearrange the energies in your body. You come out from a session like that, and sometimes it’s hard to maintain your balance as you walk, because things don’t feel the way they used to.

So expect that there will be some surprises as you discover the things you’ve been holding on to, and you felt you had to hold to them. Remember that we don’t suffer simply from our random likes and dislikes. We suffer from our ideas about what we have to do in order to function.

Again, it’s good to have a good solid basis for the breath, so that these realizations don’t become disorienting.

I was talking to a vipassanā teacher one time, and he asked me “What do you do with students who find that the experience of stream entry is disorienting?” I said, “I’d tell them that it’s not stream entry.” That’s what can often happen when you’re told that certain things constitute insight, and you try to force those views on your mind without having an adequate foundation of well-being inside.

The foundation is where you should focus your work, because this is what enables you to accept certain insights that you wouldn’t have accepted otherwise. It also helps you to notice how you respond to new insights. After all, sometimes some new insights can come with a lot of pride. You say, “Ah, I saw that, I didn’t see that before,” and then the pride moves in. That’s not part of the path.

When you have the sense of the breath as your framework, as your foundation, you can step back from your insights and evaluate them more objectively.

As Ajaan Lee would say, see where they’re true and where they may not be true. After all, a lot of things, even in the Buddha’s own explanations of the Dhamma are good for specific circumstances, specific problems, but not for others.

There are only two teachings the Buddha said are categorical, i.e., true and beneficial across the board. One is the principal that skillful actions should be developed and unskillful actions should be abandoned. The other is the four noble truths, because the duties of the truths hold across the board.

A lot of other teachings have their time and place. The three characteristics, for instance: There are times when you use those perceptions, and other times when you shouldn’t. They can actually get in the way.

So you have to have a sense of which of the Buddha’s teachings are universally true and beneficial, and which ones are true and beneficial only for certain circumstances in your practice.

The same goes for your own insights. Ask yourself: When is this insight true, and when might it be detrimental to hold on to it? This, of course, requires that you have a place to back-off, a place to take your stance, so that you don’t get sucked into the worlds of your thoughts. This is what the breath provides.

So take some time to get on good terms with the breath energies in your body. Understand when they’re flowing well, when they’re not flowing well, and the ways in which you can nudge them in the right direction.

All too often we have a personal history of really man-handling our breath energies inside, and not even realizing what we’re doing. When we’re told “Okay, allow the breath energy to flow here, flow there,” we try to push it, force it, because that’s our way of handling energies in the past. It takes a while to realize that you just think “allow,” and after a while the breath energies will flow properly.

Which means you relate to the energies in the body in a new way. You listen to them more, and try to develop a more sophisticated sense of where things should go and, when things are out of balance, how you can bring them back in to balance skillfully. This teaches you both how to create a sense of well-being in the present moment, as a foundation, and also about the power of perception.

There’s a theme in the teachings of the forest masters that when working with the five aggregates, you don’t have to work on all five at once. You focus on one and then, as you focus on that one, you begin to realize that the insights you gain there will have implications for the others. We see this again and again and again as we deal with different types of meditation. No matter where you start, things come back to the aggregate of perception.

When you focus on the unattractiveness of the body, you begin to realize that the problem is not so much the body, it’s your perceptions around the body. You see this clearly. You could be doing analysis and visualizing all the different organs, take them apart, put them down on the floor, and see what a mess you’ve made. That’s what’s inside your body: a big mess.

Those pictures that show anatomy of organs being very discrete, relatively clean: You have to remember that, in the real body, they’re awash with blood and lymph.

Okay, you could be doing this analysis, and then the mind can turn directions 180 degrees and see the body as attractive. Same body. The issue is perception. From there you go to, “Well, the desire to have this perception of making the body attractive: Where does that come from?” It must be a thought-fabrication. What is that fabrication aiming at? In this way, you start with the body, and from there you start digging around in the different aggregates.

The same when you’re dealing with pain: A huge part of the problem of pain is the perception that claims the body, that part of the body, say, as you or yours. And now this pain has come and invaded it and it seems to have made itself your perception of that part of the body. That part of body and the pain seem to be one and the same thing. You have to learn to perceive that that’s not the case.

When you can see the body as one thing, and the pain as something else, and your awareness of the two as something else again—in other words, when you can develop this perception and see how it really does apply—you find that it loosens up a lot of the tightness and the solidity of the pain that wears the mind down.

When the mind is quiet and still with a sense of ease, it can do this kind of analysis and get the best results.

So try to make this foundation strong. Spend as much time as is necessary to really get to know your breath and the energies in the body, because they’re a huge help in the practice.

The more you develop this sensitivity to the body, then the more sensitive you’re going to be to the events in the mind. That’s one of the ways in which concentration leads to insight. It helps to increase the chances that your insights will actually be honest and helpful—because they have a solid base.