Checklist

There are times when you look back on your practice and you don’t seem to be making any progress. Or even worse, you seem to be falling backward. Here’s where you have to take the attitude of someone who’s been injured and has to learn how to walk again. The exercises in physical therapy are mind-numbingly simple. They all seem unfair. You used to be able to walk with ease. Now you have to go back and take tiny baby steps, exercise little tiny muscles here, little tiny muscles there, that you tend to overlook. It may seem pointless, but you find after a while that you actually do recover your ability to walk. The important thing is that you not let your impatience get in the way.

The same principle applies to the meditation. Sometimes, early on in the meditation, things went well because you had the extra force of good past karma pushing you along. Maybe you got a little complacent. Then that impetus from the past falls away, and you’re left with what you’re doing right here, right now.

So there are two things to do: One is to review the steps, and two is to develop the right attitude. You may tend to anticipate where things were and you look at what you’ve got, and it doesn’t seem to measure up. It doesn’t seem to have any potential.

You have to erase that sense of anticipation because it’s pulling your attention into the past and the future. When you do the steps, you do the steps for the sake of the steps. Pay careful attention to what you’re doing right here, right now. And in paying careful attention to the steps, you develop your qualities of mindfulness, alertness, and ardency, which is what the meditation is all about.

Ajaan Fuang used to say that when people had problems with their meditation, he would review Ajaan Lee’s seven steps and figure out which one was missing. So here they are:

1. Start with three or seven long in-and-out breaths, saying bud- with the in-breath and dho with the out-breath, making the meditation syllable as long as the breath.

2. Be clearly aware of each in-and-out breath. Don’t go jumping to the next breath. Stay with the breath where you are.

3. Observe the breath to see whether it’s comfortable. If it’s not comfortable, you can allow it to change. When it is comfortable, let it spread through the different parts of the body. Use whatever map of breath channels in the body that you find is useful.

4. Learn how to adjust the breath in four ways: long in, long out; short in, short out; long in, short out; short in, long out. Ideally, learn how to breathe comfortably in all four of these ways.

5. Find a base to focus your attention on. It could be the tip of the nose, the middle of the head, the palate, the base of the throat, the breastbone, or the navel, or a point just above the navel. In other words, find your spot.

6. Spread your awareness throughout the body.

7. Unite the breath sensations throughout the body so that they all flow together.

Those are the basic steps.

As I said, you do them for the sake of the steps, as when using buddho together with the breath, and being clearly aware of each and every breath. Those are your baby steps, the little tiny exercises you need to master in order to learn how to walk again. Don’t tell yourself, “I was so good before; why am I so bad now?” Just put those thoughts out of your mind.

You’re here to be with the present moment, and here’s the present moment for you. So watch it. Make the breath comfortable. Spread that comfortable breath throughout the body. Find ways of adjusting the in-and-out breath.

We tend to forget the in-and-out breath when we’re spreading the breath throughout the body, but it’s important that you see what kind of breathing feels good right now, what feels too long, what feels too short, realizing you don’t have to have the in-breath and the out-breath at the same length. Sometimes long in, short out is energizing. Short in, long out is relaxing.

But as Ajaan Lee says, learn how to be comfortable with any one of those four ways of adjusting the breath.

Find your spot. The spots that Ajaan Lee recommends are just opening possibilities. Sometimes you find that focusing on your hands helps to drain intense energy out of your head; focusing on your feet can drain intense energy out of the legs. Or focus at the base of the spine: If there’s a lot of tension in different parts of the body and you can’t find a good spot where the breath is comfortable, the base of the spine is always fine.

Then spread your awareness and harmonize all the breath energies in the body so that they feel like they’re breathing together as you breathe in, breathing together as you breathe out.

Those are the basic steps. You can take this as a checklist.

And as I said, the important thing is that you focus on doing the steps, focus on what you’re doing. That’s alertness. Don’t focus on anticipating how quickly the mind will settle down, or how much ease you want to feel when it does settle down, or asking why the mind is not settling down right now. Tell yourself, “I’m here to do the steps for their own sake.”

Dogen makes this observation: There’s a passage in the Mahayana teachings where it says that the path is the same thing as the goal. He says, “No, that’s not quite right. The duty of the path is the same thing as the duty with regard to the goal.”

In other words, the duty with regard to the fourth noble truth is to develop it. The duty with regard to the third noble truth, the cessation of suffering, is to realize it. Now, you realize it by doing the path, developing the path. It’s not something separate. So to see the cessation of suffering, you give your full attention to what you’re doing as you develop the path.

Be satisfied with doing the baby steps. That’s the other key to physical therapy. Take satisfaction in what little things you’re able to do and you’ll find that you can do more, bit by bit by bit.

But again, don’t anticipate the more. Focus on what you’re doing right here, right now.

That’s the checklist. You check the steps, and you check your attitude.

Before, maybe you were able to get away with being a little bit sloppy, and things still went well because of the force of past good karma. But now you realize that you’ve got to get meticulous, and you’ve got to get continually meticulous in what you’re doing.

Put your energy there and not into your thoughts of disappointment, thoughts of discouragement. Put your energy into the little steps, and the little steps will reward you, if you give them your full attention.