Momentum Through Restraint

Once you’ve started a meditation practice, the next step is learning how to maintain it and develop it, how to give it momentum. That moves beyond just sitting with your eyes closed or doing walking meditation. It also involves bringing the meditation into your daily life—or you might say, bringing your daily life into the meditation—because you’re not going to develop momentum by starting and stopping, starting and stopping. You should try to make the practice as continuous as possible.

Think about the basic principle of the meditation, which is: You’re trying to get some intelligent control over your mind, so that it doesn’t wander off into thoughts and emotions that are harmful to you or to other people; you want to encourage the emotions and thoughts that are actually helpful, skillful.

When you’re off the cushion and off the walking meditation path, that comes down to a practice called restraint of the senses.

A lot of us don’t like the word “restraint”—it sounds like we’re being confined or imprisoned. But Ajaan Lee has a nice image: He says it’s like having a house. You can’t leave the windows and doors open all the time, otherwise pests will come in. If you have anything bad in the house, it’s going to go running out of the house to harass the neighbors. So you have to know when to open the doors, when to close them; when to open the windows, when to close them. That’s the basic principle of restraint.

It governs two things: One is the things you bring in through your eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body and mind—in other words, the things you focus on coming in through the senses.

As you go through the day, you look at something, you listen to something, and if you see that the way you’re looking or listening will create greed, lust, anger, or delusion in the mind, you have to ask yourself, “Why are you looking in that way?”

Restraint doesn’t mean that you put blinders on your eyes or plugs in your ears. It means that you look at your reasons for looking and your reasons for listening, and so on through the rest of the senses. If you act on those reasons, then that encourages those mind states. The more you encourage unskillful mind states in the course of the day, then the harder it’s going to be to get rid of them as you sit down to meditate. So it’s basically a process of what’s called metacognition: You step back and look at how you’re running your mind.

This is going to be especially clear when you get on the Internet. When you click on something, you have to ask yourself, “Why am I clicking? What am I expecting? What part of the mind is being fed by this stuff that’s coming in?” If you see that looking at things in a certain way gives rise to unskillful emotions, unskillful mind states, ask yourself, “Can I look at these things in another way?” There are ways of looking at certain things that give rise to greed, but you can also look at them in another way that makes them less attractive.

This is why we have body contemplation—you can look at the body in a way that makes it very attractive or you can think about what’s inside the body. If you took all the different parts of the body out, what would you have? It’d be a mess on the floor, and you’d want to run away. Yet, when they’re all sewed up inside, you can see the body as attractive, even though all that other stuff lies immediately under the skin. What’s going on? How is the mind talking to itself? What reasons is it giving for looking in that particular way?

When you find something that makes you angry, you have to ask yourself, “Is there some way of thinking that can keep me from getting overwhelmed by the anger?” In other words, you’re running your mind the same way as you would when you’re meditating. When you’re meditating, you set up a certain rule that you’re going to stay with the breath, stay with whatever your object is, and as for anything else that’s not related to your object, you’re going to let it go. In the meditation, you’re not thinking so much about why you would want to think about those things—you just say, “No, I don’t need that right now” and you let it go.

Then, to keep the mind from feeling starved, you give it something good to focus on, which is why we work with the breath, trying to make the breath comfortable, trying to make the breath energy interesting in the body, realizing that, if you have any chronic illnesses or chronic pains, you can use the breath energy to help alleviate those illnesses and pains. So you can make the breath an interesting and pleasant place to be.

In fact, when the Buddha talks about sense restraint, he realizes that a lot of the reason we go out looking for sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, is because the mind is hungry—hungry for pleasure. So he advises that you give it something pleasant inside to feed on.

In the analogy he gives, it’s like having six animals: a bird, a snake, a crocodile, a dog, a jackal, and a monkey, with each of them on a leash. You tie the ends of the leashes together but if you don’t tie the ends of the leashes to a post, then they’re going to pull and pull and pull to go in different directions—the monkey’s going to go up a tree, the bird into the sky. What’s probably going to happen is that the crocodile will go down to the river and drag everybody else down there and they’re all going to drown.

In other words, if there’s no restraint, you go after sights, sounds, smells, tastes, or tactile sensations, and your efforts to gain some control over the mind be killed. So what the Buddha recommends is that you tie all those leashes to a post. In this case, the post is mindfulness of the body. You’ve been making it comfortable by the way you breathe. So as you go through the day, try to maintain a sense of ease in the body.

It may be too much to ask to be aware of each in-and-out breath, but you can have a general sense of the breath energy in the body as a field of energy. Keep it relaxed; keep it open and wide as you go through the day. If you see it tightening up anywhere, just relax it. If it tightens up again, relax it again. That way, the mind has something good to feed on, so you’re not so hungry for sights, et cetera, et cetera, outside.

In that way, you can look more objectively, with less hunger, at your process of looking; look at your process of listening. You can get some distance from it; see it as a cause-and-effect process. You realize that you’ve been feeding your mind in very unskillful ways, but you can learn how to feed it in better ways. As you can go through life maintaining your sense of center, maintaining your sense of control inside, that helps give some momentum to the practice.

That’s opening and closing the doors with regard to things coming in.

As for things going out, this refers the practice of the precepts. We abide by the precepts not because somebody’s going to give us a reward for being good little boys and girls, abiding by the precepts, but because it’s a training for the mind. You make up your mind that you’re not going to kill, you’re not going to steal, you’re not going to have illicit sex, you’re not going to lie, you’re not going to take intoxicants. And you try to hold by that intention.

Now, that requires that you develop some good qualities in the mind that are conducive to the meditation: mindfulness to keep the precept in mind, alertness to watch your behavior to make sure it stays in line with the precepts, and ardency to stick with this—because there will be times when your precepts get challenged.

Say you’re asked for some information that you know the person asking will probably abuse or misuse. How do you avoid giving that information without lying? And how do you avoid the temptation to tell little white lies to smooth things over with other people?

The practice of the precepts digs up a lot of interesting things inside your mind. Again, you’re learning about your intentions, which is what the practice is all about. As the Buddha said, it’s through our intentions that we shape our present experience out of the raw material coming from our past kamma, and all too often we’re in the dark about our present-moment intentions. That’s what ignorance means—we’re not really clear about why we’re doing things. So you take the precepts to clear up that ignorance.

The Buddha saw the precept against lying as the most serious, because if you lie to somebody and give them misinformation, that misinformation can affect their behavior for a long time. As he said, it’s even worse than killing them in some cases. So you’ve got to be very careful.

It’s so easy to tell a little lie. Yet, as we start justifying the little lies, we start justifying bigger lies, and then the value of our speech gets reduced. We start putting up walls inside, walls of denial, which are not what you want as a meditator. You want everything to be open wide inside your mind.

So even though we’re exercising restraint in this house of ours—opening and closing the doors, letting only good people into the house, letting only good people out into the neighborhood—within the house we have a wide, expansive state where everything is open inside. In that way, it’s a lot easier to see what you’re doing. If you’re used to putting up little walls inside, walls of excuses, then when you’re meditating, those walls will get in the way.

Again, it’s hard to develop momentum when you run into a wall here, run into a wall there. What you want is for your mind to be as open as possible. You want to be clear about your intentions, because that power we have to shape our experience: If we use it in ignorance, it’s going to lead to suffering. But if we’re clear about our intentions, we can use our powers of intention to create a path inside—a path in our actions, our words, our deeds, our thoughts, that can lead to the end of suffering.

So in the case of restraint, it’s not just a matter of holding ourselves in. It’s being wise in how we, basically, run our house. In that way, we create a good Dhamma foundation inside.

And the influences that go outside will be good influences as well. This is what we need. We’re responsible for our actions more than for anything else, so we want them to be good for our own sake and good for the people around us.

It’s very hard to find a secure refuge in this world. But if you can develop a be very clear about what you’re doing while you’re doing it, and do only the best things you can think of, you’re providing a secure refuge for yourself and for other people as well.