To See What You’re Doing

When the Buddha first introduced his teaching, he introduced it as a path of action. This is basically to announce that the questions he was going to answer had to do with: What are you doing? Like right now you could say, in terms of your body, that you’re sitting here very still. In terms of your words, you’re not saying anything. But your mind is very active. So, what is your mind doing right now? Some of the actions you do can lead to suffering, and others can lead to the end of suffering. That was the basic message of his first talk: that it is possible, through your actions, to put an end to suffering.

So you want to pay careful attention to your actions, having a strong sense that you do have the choice as to what you’re going to do or say or think. And those choices will have consequences. So you want to learn what the pattern is. Basically, if you’re acting under the power of greed, aversion, or delusion, suffering will follow. If you act on the power of a mind free from greed, free from aversion, free from delusion, that leads to the end of suffering. The big problem there is your delusion: All too often, you don’t really know what you’re doing, and you don’t connect the actions you’ve done with the results you’re getting. So you need to learn to be more observant.

This is what the meditation is for. Try to get the mind as still as possible, so that you can see its movements clearly. Otherwise, it’s like trying to find a mouse in the wall when you’ve got the radio blaring, the TV on, and the stereo, the refrigerator’s running, and you’re singing to yourself. You’re not going to hear anything clearly. You’ve got to get still. You’ve got to turn off all those appliances. Then the sound of the mouse in the wall will be clear. You’ll know where it is and you can do something about it. In the same way, if you want to see your delusion, you have to get very, very still.

So we focus on the breath. In the beginning, the mind may not be that still. The breath may not be all that still. But you’re working in that direction. You want to breathe in a way that makes the mind more and more interested in staying here, because one of our big problems in seeing the connection between our actions and their results is that we run around. We do something and then we run off. We come back. We see that something has happened, but we’re not sure: “Is that the result of my action, or is it the result of something else? Or which action is leading to that result?”

It’s like watching a show on your TV. You’re in the room for five minutes watching the show, then you wander off for 15, 20 minutes, and you come back. Things have changed. The characters are saying different things. You don’t really know why, because you weren’t there as the changes happened.

So stay right here. If there’s any desire to go off someplace else, you have to counteract that desire with the desire to stay. And the desire to stay gets fed by making this a comfortable place to stay. You lead up to this by the way you lead your life in general. This is one of the reasons why we have the precepts and the principles of restraint of the senses, so that as you go through the day, you’re not cluttering things up. You’re not doing things that you’re going to later regret.

When you’re trying to get the mind still, you don’t want to have to run into regret. You want to be able to look at the events of the day and say, “I didn’t harm anybody. I didn’t harm myself. So there’s no need for recrimination there. No need for regret.”

At the same time, as you’re trying to observe the precepts, you’re learning some of the skills you’re going to need to meditate well. We’re practicing right concentration, which begins with right mindfulness. As the chant said just now, keep focused on the body in and of itself—ardent, alert, mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world.

The body in and of itself means the body simply taken on its own terms: what you’ve got right here, right now. You’re not thinking about the body in terms of the world—whether it’s good looking to other people, whether it’s equal to whatever work you have to do, whether it’s strong enough to keep on going. You’re just concerned with what it feels like to experience the body right here.

An aspect of that experience, of course, is the breath. Of the different properties of the body right now, the breath is the easiest to control. If you want to have an effect on your heart rate or your blood pressure, you do it through the way you breathe.

So, focus on how you breathe right now. What kind of breathing feels good? And what does the body need in terms of feeling good? Sometimes when you’re tired, you want to breathe in a way that’s more energizing. If you’re tense, you want to breathe in a way that’s relaxing. If you’re feeling frazzled and beaten up by the day, try to breathe in a way that soothes your nerves. And if you’re not sure what kind of breathing will do that, well, experiment. Watch for a while. This is how you learn: Set up a question about what kind of breathing might be good, and then try breathing in different ways to see what the results are. There’s a lot in the meditation that depends on your willingness to experiment, because that develops your curiosity, it develops your ability to frame a question properly, and then to test it.

So. Stay with the breath. The more it feels right for the body, the more you’ll be happy to stay here. Some people find that their breathing is really tight and over-controlled, in which case you just tell yourself, “Let the body breathe whatever way it wants to. I’m not going to force it.” See what happens.

The other activity is to put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. This means any thoughts about the world right now, about how you want things to be a certain way and you’re happy or not happy that they’re the way they are. Just put those aside. You can deal with those issues some other time. Right now, you want to get in touch with this body, this breath that you’re going to take as your anchor—because we need an anchor. Otherwise, the winds of the world blow us around, and we end up who knows where.

Now, to do this, the Buddha recommends three qualities. Ardency, which is the desire to do this well. Alertness, noticing what you’re doing and the results you’re getting. And mindfulness, the ability to keep something in mind.

Sometimes mindfulness is translated as choiceless awareness or nonjudgmental awareness. That’s based on a particular technique of meditation that was developed in the early part of the 20th century. The Buddha used the word mindfulness to mean to mean something else: basically, the ability to keep something in mind. Here, you’re keeping in mind the fact that you want to stay with the breath. And you want to keep in mind also what lessons you’ve learned as you’ve been meditating: on how to recognize a vagrant thought that could pull you away, how to recognize it before it pulls you away, and what techniques you’ve learned in the past, as you’ve meditated, that help the mind to settle down.

Take a survey of the state of your mind, the state of your body right now. And if you have some experience meditating, you ask yourself, “When I’ve had this state of body and state of mind in the past, what did I do to help the mind settle down?” If you can remember it, apply it. Also remember that you’ll want to take note of what you’re actually doing right now and the results you’re actually getting. That way, if you learn anything really interesting, you can remember it for the next time you meditate.

One of the things you should ask yourself at the end of the meditation is when the mind does settle down, what did you do that led up to it, getting at ease, getting a sense of solidity? Then you try to remember those things you’ve done: what the breath was like, where you were focused. That makes it easier to create those conditions again the next time you meditate, so that you can get quicker and quicker at settling down, noticing where in the body is your spot.

When the mind does settle down, where are you focused? Even though we talk about developing a full-body awareness here thinking of the breath running throughout the body—and by “breath” here we don’t mean the air coming in and out the nose, just the flow of energy, which is here all the time; your blood is flowing through your vessels, impulses are flowing through your nerves; the fact that you know you’re sitting here has to come from your sense of the breath energy in the body flowing: Even though we’re trying to stay with all of that, there will be one part of the body where the mind feels more centered than others. As you practice meditation, try to notice where are the spots in the body where it feels good to stay centered, where the mind naturally centers down. There may be one spot, maybe several. Try to notice that.

Then, once the mind settles with the breath, try to keep it there. You don’t clamp down on it. You try to keep it there with a sense of well-being.

It’s like raising a child. If you lock the child in a room, it’s going to try to get out any way it can. But if you give the child something to play with, then you can open the windows, open the doors, and the child’s not going to run away. It’s going to get engrossed in its play. Here your play is adjusting the breath, seeing what long breathing feels like, short breathing feels like, fast, slow, heavy, light. What feels good right now? And when it feels good, can you stay there?

Here again, the ardency comes in. You want to do this well. The ardency is what makes the difference. Mindfulness could keep anything in mind. Alertness could watch anything in the present moment. But when you’re ardent about doing this well, you keep in mind the things that are relevant to what you’re doing, and you try to stay alert to what you’re doing right now and the results you’re getting. As for other things happening in the present moment, you don’t have to pay them any attention at all—because you still want to work on that big question that the Buddha asked: What are you doing, and is it causing suffering? If it’s causing suffering, he gives you some advice on how to change what you’re doing. That’s what the noble eightfold path is all about.

So here we’re working on one of the big factors of the path, which is right concentration. The Buddha called it the heart of the path. The other factors of the path, he said, are its requisites or its supports. And of the different factors, this is the one that’s most difficult to master. Even with right view, although it may be subtle, you can understand it pretty easily after an hour or two of explanation. But to get the mind to settle down can take a long time.

So you have to be patient, you have to have a good attitude toward this, that no matter how long it takes, this is a skill worth mastering. And you see that as the mind does get more and more at ease with the breath, you do feel more solid, more grounded. You can see your mind more clearly, what you’re doing right now. You get a sense of what the results are.

So take this opportunity to see if you can get the mind to be still, to get it to feel at home being still—because there’s a lot you’re going to learn when you do.