Gather Around the Breath

We’re practicing mindfulness of breathing—and because it’s a mindfulness practice, some people think it means just following the breath wherever it’s going to go or following the mind wherever it’s going to go; being non-reactive; non-judgmental.

But mindfulness means keeping something in mind. In this case, you keep in mind that you want to stay with the breath. As the Buddha says, you’re doing this practice to get the mind into a state of concentration.

Here again, there’s some conflict or disagreement as to what the word samādhi, which most people translate as “concentration”—actually means. Some people say “concentration” sounds too tense—it’d be better to think of samādhi as “lucid calm.” But calm is one of the factors for awakening that’s separate from concentration—it’s one of the precursors for concentration.

And the way samādhi is defined in the texts, it definitely is staying with one thing. Cittass’ekaggatā is the Pali term, which basically means having one gathering place for the mind. You’re going to stay with the breath and other things coming up in the mind that are related to the breath. When you breathe, there are going to be feelings of pleasure or pain in the body that are related to the breath. The fact that they’re related to the breath means that they’re not outside of the realm of your concentration. And there’s the state of your mind as you try to stay with the breath—you’re going to be aware of that, too. So you stay focused around the breath—everything gathers right here.

Some people object to the idea of working on having one focus for the mind, because it requires desire. But the Buddha is very clear that desire is part of the path. It’s part of right effort: You’re trying to generate desire to give rise to skillful qualities, and this is one of them—to get the mind still, focused on the breath. The breath is your anchor in the present moment, so that you can see what the mind is doing in the present moment. As long as you’re with the breath, you know you’re in the present. Then, you can get to see how the mind is shaping things in the present moment. You can observe it directly, in action.

So you’re not thinking about the mind in the past or the mind in the future. You’ve got the mind right here—ideally.

But then there are some times when the mind is not right here—it comes and goes, in which case, you have to work with it. Here, the Buddha says, there are three things that you do with the mind, as you’re mindful of the breathing: One is that you try to gladden it. The second is that you try to concentrate it. And the third is that you release it.

Gladdening means, basically, making yourself happy to be here. That’s the quality you want to develop proactively to reduce the likelihood that you’ll get distracted or wander away. If you’re glad to be here, you can more easily resist the pull to go away.

There are lots of reasons to be glad to be here, right now: You have an opportunity to get to know your own mind. You get to know the potentials for the breath and the mind in the present moment. You’re practicing the teachings of a noble one.

Sometimes it’s good to think about the Buddha as you sit down to meditate. Ajaan Suwat used to talk about how it’s important to develop an attitude of confidence and conviction in what you’re doing here. And part of that has to do with thinking about the person who found this path—someone who sacrificed everything to find the ultimate happiness. Then, when he had found it, he didn’t try to sell it. He offered his instructions for free. In fact, he would wander around, on foot, finding people who were ready for his instructions, all over northern India, for 45 years. It would be hard to find somebody like that now.

So it’s good to think that you have the opportunity to practice the teachings of someone who had that much integrity and that much commitment. Whatever about the Buddha inspires you, it’s good to think about that as you settle down to practice.

Then, of course, there’s the breath itself. You can make the breath very comfortable so that it feels good to be here. Or you can think about how the breath energy in the body has an impact on your health. If you have any chronic illnesses or pains, you can explore how the breath energy can be of help—because it’s the energy in the body we’re talking about here. When the Buddha classifies the in-and-out breath, he doesn’t classify it as a tactile sensation, say, at the nose. It’s part of one of what he calls the wind property in the body itself, the energy property. That energy property is something you can sense wherever the nerves go, wherever your blood vessels go. In fact, that relates to the type of concentration the Buddha’s trying to get you to develop.

That’s the second proactive thing to do with the mind: to concentrate it. When it’s concentrated, we tend to think of it being centered at one point. But the Buddha’s analogies for the state of mind you’re trying to develop all carry the same message that we’re trying to get the mind to develop a full-body awareness: The breath fills the body and the sense of ease that goes along with the breath fills the body, as well. The image the Buddha gives is of a lake fed by a cool spring, and the cool waters of the spring fill the lake. Or lotuses that are growing immersed in the water, saturated from their roots to the tips of the flowers in water.

Or a person sitting with a white cloth covering his whole body, in the same way you’re trying to develop a pure, bright awareness that fills the whole body—that’s the quality you’re trying to develop here. It’s a lot more solid than a one-pointed awareness.

One-pointed awareness can be very intense sometimes, and there will be times when you do want to emphasize the one-pointedness of your focus. But the problem with one-pointedness is that if anything comes up to disturb it, you’ve lost your concentration. Whereas with full body awareness, things can come in and go out but they don’t disturb the frame of your awareness—which is the body as a whole.

So try to develop that sense of the whole body all at once. The whole body breathing in, the whole body breathing out, and you’re aware of the whole body—all at once. Awareness of your feet is in your feet, awareness of your hands is in your hands, awareness of the eyes is in the eyes—all at once. That’s the state you’re trying to maintain. xx

As for releasing, there are many levels of release. We can talk about releasing on the most basic level, which is getting the mind away from its distractions. Even though you’re trying to develop this sense of being gathered together around one thing, other vagrant notions will come through the mind—which are part of your past karma. The question is: “Are you going to go with them or not?” If you’re really solidly with the breath, you’ll realize you don’t have to go. But before you get solidly there, there will be a lot of temptations to follow other things around. So it’s good to know how to deal with them.

The Buddha sets out five strategies altogether. The first one is that when you realize that you’ve left the breath, just bring yourself right back. In other words, there’s been a slip in mindfulness, a slip in your alertness, but now you’ve regained mindfulness, you’ve regained alertness, so bring the mind right back.

Sometimes you have to ask yourself, what was it about the breath that allowed you to go to begin with? You might want to change the way you breathe so that it’s more gratifying, more satisfying.

Or there are times when you’re wandering off, and before you can get back to the breath, you have to think about something to remind yourself of why you want to go back to the breath. You can think about the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha.

If you’re having doubts about your ability to do this practice, remind yourself of the good things you’ve done in the past: the times you’ve been generous, the times you’ve been principled in your actions when it was a challenge.

Or you can think about death. That’s one of the topics of meditation that the Buddha recommends. And it’s not just thinking, “Death, death, death.” It’s thinking, “There’s work that has to be done. My mind needs to be brought into good shape before I die. I don’t know when I’m going to die, but I do know I have the opportunity to work on the mind right now.” So mindfulness of death is basically a lesson in heedfulness: There’s important work that has to be done, and if you don’t do it now, when are you going to do it? It doesn’t get easier as you get older.

That’s the first strategy. Just remind yourself that you’re not here to wander around, you’re here to do work. You’re here to make a difference in the mind by getting it skilled at staying with one thing.

The second strategy, if the mind keeps going back to a particular topic, is to remind yourself of the drawbacks of thinking about that topic. If you were to think about that topic for a whole day, what would you accomplish? Either it would be a total waste of time or it would actually get you to do something unskillful. So why give it any time at all?

The image that the Buddha gives us is: Think of your mind as a young man or a young woman fond of adornment, fond of the beauty, looking in a mirror and suddenly discovering that there’s a dead snake or a dead dog hanging from his neck. He’d want to get rid of it immediately. So try to develop the same sense of real distaste for that kind of thinking. Then you can get back to the breath.

The third strategy is to ignore the distraction. If it keeps coming back again and again no matter how much you think of its drawbacks, just tell yourself, “I don’t have to pay attention to it.” Here the Buddha’s image is of a man who sees something he doesn’t want to see, so he turns his gaze away. You can think of yourself as being in a large room like this: You’re sitting in one corner. You’ve got work to do. There are people chattering away in another corner. If you pay attention to what they’re saying, your work isn’t going to get done.

Or you can think of those thoughts as stray dogs coming around asking for food: You know that if you feed them, they’re going to keep hanging around. So you just don’t feed them. They’ll whine and they’ll whimper for a while, but if you’re firm in not giving them anything to eat, eventually they’re going to go away. The same with thoughts in the mind: If you don’t pay them any attention, they’re going to hang around for a while but then they’ll go. And you’ve learned an important lesson—things that come up in the mind feed on the attention you give to them. So why pay them any attention?

The fourth strategy is to notice that when a thought comes into the mind, there’s going to be a pattern of tension in the body. You’ll sense this especially if you’ve been getting sensitive to the breath energies in different parts of the body. So if you can locate the tension, just release it, relax it. It’s as if there’s a marker in your body around which the thought will coalesce, and you remove the marker—the thought has nothing to depend on, nothing to stand on.

The image the Buddha gives here is if a man who’s walking. He says, “Why am I walking? Why don’t I just stand?” As he’s standing, he says, “Why am I standing? Why don’t I sit down?” While he’s sitting down, “Why am I sitting here? Why don’t I lie down?” In other words, you get into more and more relaxed positions that take less energy.

We talked about the energy that’s required for the concentration. Well, distraction requires energy, too. As long as you’re going to be putting energy into your thinking, put energy into thoughts that are going to be useful—like getting the mind to settle down.

The final strategy, if nothing else works, is to press your tongue against the roof of your mouth, clench your teeth, and tell yourself, “I will not think that thought,” and just squeeze it out of the mind. The Buddha’s image here is a strong man who’s overpowered a weak man and bends him down. You might use a meditation word. Buddho is a popular word in the forest tradition. Just repeat it really fast in your mind, like a machine gun—Buddho, Buddho, Buddho. You have to be very firm in your determination that you’re not going with the thought. Of the various strategies, this is the one that requires the least insight and the most force. You may not be able to keep it up for long, but it can clear the air. Then you can go back to one of the other techniques. You’re going to need a complete toolbox here—and this is the sledgehammer.

There’s not just one way you can deal with distractions. There are five main ways. Then there are specific ways of dealing with specific distractions, like sleepiness or lustful thoughts. But everything falls under these five main categories. As the Buddha said, when you’ve mastered these strategies, then you can think whatever thoughts you want to think, and you don’t have to think any thoughts you don’t want to think.

And what he doesn’t say, but what’s actually true, is that you get more and more skilled in deciding what’s worth thinking. Your standards for what’s worth thinking grow higher. And you’re more inclined to want to let the mind rest when it can—so that it’s not thinking unnecessary thoughts, not wasting its time, not wasting its energy.

This way, you can maintain that state of being gathered around one thing: You release the mind from its distractions. You get it concentrated in the sense of being solidly filling the whole body. And you’re glad to be here.

When you’ve worked with the mind in these three ways, then your mindfulness of breathing gets really strong. And you do get into good, strong states of concentration that are very clear—because the whole purpose of concentration is to get to see your mind more clearly.

When it’s still and fully aware like this, that’s when your sensitivity to what’s going on in the mind will grow. And you’re in the best place to be, to see what’s happening, as it’s happening—and be able to do something about it.