Self Healing

Focus on your breath. Try to notice where you feel it in the body. When we speak of breath, it’s not just the air coming in and out through the nose: It’s the flow of energy in the body. The energy goes through the nerves; it goes through the blood vessels. Without that energy, you couldn’t feel the body or move it. There would be no in-and-out breath.

So notice where you feel it. It might be in places you don’t expect. So watch it for a while.

Start with some good long, deep, in-and-out breaths to highlight the feeling of breathing. And if long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can change: Make it shorter, more shallow, heavier, lighter, faster, slower. Ask yourself, “What kind of breathing feels good right now?” You can experiment with different kinds and see what feels most satisfying to the body. As you ask these questions of yourself, that’s called directed thought and evaluation.

In other words, you direct your thoughts to a certain topic and then you make comments on it; you ask questions, answer the questions—try to figure things out.

What you’re trying to figure out here is how to breathe in a way that feels good: energizing when you’re tired, soothing when your nerves are frazzled, relaxing when you’ve been tense.

As you stay focused on the breath, you’re going to need some perceptions to remind yourself: What is the breath? Where can you expect to feel it? You can use different perceptions that will actually make the breathing more comfortable—or make it less comfortable. So try to figure out which perceptions are most helpful right now.

The word “perception” in English has two meanings. I’ll give you an example: The other day there was a squiggly line through the sand up here on the top of that hill. I detected the squiggly line: That’s one type of perceiving; the line was kind of subtle, and the first level of perceiving involved detecting that it was there. But then there was another kind of perceiving which was identifying, well, what is that squiggly line a sign of? It was a sign that a snake had come across the sand. This second meaning of perception, when you see the meaning of something—you can label it as to what it is and what it means: That’s the kind of perceiving we’re talking about here and now.

So these are the things you need to use to get the mind to settle down: Focus on the breath. Talk to yourself about the breath until you figure out what kind of breathing is most comfortable. And then you create feelings and use perceptions: an image of the breath flowing through the body, say.

You can ask yourself, “Where does the breath come in when it comes in? Does it come in one spot, or does it come in many spots?” Again, we’re not talking about the air here, we’re talking about the feeling of energy.

There’s one level of breathing where you feel like it’s coming in and out of the body. There are other levels of breath that are more constantly in the body itself, circulating around or simply staying present. Learn to picture those to your mind and see what picture is most conducive to breathing easily, breathing well, with a feeling that it’s good to be here just doing nothing but breathing—and protecting the mind from anything else that would come in and interfere.

We focus on these activities because, as the Buddha said, this is how we put together our experience in general.

Experiences don’t come ready-made. There are potentials that come in through the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind, but on their own they don’t make sense—just sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, ideas. If we want to function in this world, we have to make sense out of them. If we want to find any happiness in this world, we have to make sense out of them. And this is where the problems begin.

The way we breathe, the way we talk to ourselves, the perceptions we use, the feelings that we focus on: These all play a part in how we decide what we like, what we don’t like, what makes sense, what doesn’t make sense. And then we feed on these things.

In some cases, the way we feed can make us sick: one, because there’s a lot of bad stuff coming in from the outside; and two, because of the unskillful ways we try to make sense out of it, internalize it.

But we could also use these processes to heal ourselves, as we’re doing right now. Ordinarily, we can scar ourselves, we can wound ourselves by the way we try to make sense out of things. We take things in and we internalize them. The affairs of the world can be pretty bad, and the question is: How much do you want to feed on them? How much do you want to take in? And how are you going to process them?

The Buddha recommends processing them in a way that doesn’t make you suffer. He says it is possible to live in this world even when you hear things, see things that are really bad. You don’t have to suffer from them.

This doesn’t mean that you’re unfeeling. You see that people are suffering, but you don’t have to take their suffering on. When you don’t take their suffering on—when you don’t feed on it—then you’re in a better position to help. You’re not wounding yourself; you’re not making yourself sick.

So try to create a space in here through these new skills: focusing on the breath; breathing in a way that feels really good, nourishing for the whole body. Talk to yourself about the breath until things get so good that you don’t have to talk about it anymore; you can just be with that sensation.

What holds you in place then is the perception, the image you hold in mind of how the breath comes in, how it moves through the body, what kind of breathing feels good for you right now. Try to maintain that, because it can heal you.

As you get more sensitive to these processes, you can get more sensitive to how you employ them as you go through the world. If you see something bad or hear something bad, ask yourself, “How am I breathing? Do I have to breathe in a way that’s uncomfortable? How am I talking to myself? Do I have to talk to myself in a way that makes me suffer? And what perceptions am I holding in mind, what images that give meaning to things? What kind of meaning am I giving to these things that I’m taking in? What feelings am I feeding on?”

So as you focus on the breath in this way, you’re gaining two skills. One is the skill of healing yourself right here, right now—because as we take in the events of the world, they create a problem with the energy in the body. So you can counteract those problems simply by the way you breathe, so that your chest feels good as you breathe in; your stomach feels good; your arms, your legs, your head feels good as the breath energy is allowed to flow.

You talk to yourself, reminding yourself that looking after yourself in this way is not selfish, because nobody else can do this for you, and if you cause yourself suffering by the way you process things and feed on them, then you’re making it harder to actually be sensitive to what other people are going through, and harder to be really of help.

So keep reminding yourself: This is a good place to stay; this is a good thing to be doing. This is medicine for the energy in your body, medicine for the mind. That’s one thing you’re doing: finding a way of healing yourself.

The second thing—as I said—is to be sensitive to how you go through the world: what things you take in, how you process them. The word the Buddha uses is *saṅkhāra. *We translate in English as “fabrication.” In Thai, they translate it as prung deng, and prung and deng are the things that you do with food so that you can eat it.

So think about that. You’re feeding on the world. And you usually feed on the world in hopes of getting some pleasure out of it, but when bad food comes in and you fix it poorly, you’re going to get sick.

As you go through the day, try to be sensitive to how you’re breathing, how the breath energy is flowing in the body, and do your best to let it flow in a way that’s nourishing for the whole body.

And be sensitive to how you talk to yourself. It’s good to learn some good ways of talking to yourself. This is one of the reasons why we read the Buddha’s teachings, listen to the Buddha’s teachings. He has lots of advice on how to talk to yourself in a way that you don’t have to make yourself suffer.

One of the things he tells you is that you have to be very clear on what is your responsibility and what is not your responsibility, and make sure that what is your responsibility gets taken care of.

Your responsibility is in terms of your thoughts, your words, and your deeds—the things you choose to do and say and think. You want to make sure that they’re skillful: harmless, good for you, good for the people around you.

As to the extent that you can influence other people, you try to do your best. You treat them with goodwill. It’s one of the reasons why we have those chants on goodwill at the beginning of the meditation: “May all beings be happy.” What does it mean for all beings to be happy? How is that going to happen?

It’s not necessarily that we expect that everybody’s going to be happy, because everybody’s happiness is going to depend on the actions they choose to do. There are some ways we can influence their choices, and a lot of ways we can’t. Which is why we also balance those expressions of goodwill with expressions of equanimity: “All beings are the owners of their actions.” You have to accept the fact that if you have freedom of choice, well, they have freedom of choice, too. So the things you cannot influence, you have to let go.

Focus on the things that you can, and do your best to be as skillful as you can in doing them. And hold in mind the perception that “This is a good thing to do.”

When you put together the present moment in this way so that you can feed on it, you learn to choose which things you’re going to take in and how you’re going to fix them, in the same way that you choose your food: Some foods are poisonous, so you avoid them. You’re under no responsibility to take in things that are poisonous. With other things, it’s going to depend on how you fix them.

So learn your skills: Learn how to breathe in a skillful way; learn how to talk to yourself in a skillful way; hold skillful perceptions in mind; focus on your feelings in a way that gives you strength.

In this way, you’re taking care of what you have to be responsible for, you don’t make yourself sick, and you don’t place unnecessary burdens on other people.

This is how you can heal your body, heal your mind. And you’re not the only one who benefits. The people around you can pick up on some of your goodness as well.