Feeding the Mind

When we meditate, it’s food for the mind. As the mind goes out looking for its nourishment outside, it gets a lot of junk food—the kind of food that gives it some strength but also it’s bad for its health and leaves you hungry for more because the body isn’t really satisfied. So you keep looking for more and more. It’s like potato chips: You eat one potato chip and it creates the desire for another one, but it doesn’t really nourish you that much. That diet of potato chips eventually could kill you.

It’s the same with the nourishment we get from a lot of things outside. So you have to turn around and look inside for your nourishment. In Pali terms, this is called *mano-sancetanāhāra. *It’s the nourishment of good intentions: intentions to do what’s skillful, say what’s skillful, think what’s skillful. That’s actually strengthening to the mind. It builds on the strength of conviction, persistence, and mindfulness, and it helps us to develop concentration and discernment, all of which are the strengths we need in order to live in this world and not have our goodness ravaged by the world.

So try to do your best to try to find a sense of well-being, a sense of fullness and rapture as you breathe. Each time you breathe in, think of the body getting full of energy. As you breathe out, let that full energy stay. It’s almost as if your body’s floating, you don’t have to squeeze things out or push things down again in order to get the breath out. The breath will get out on its own. The good part of the breath will stay, and the bad part will go out on its own. Just allow it to come in and nourish the whole body.

The sense of fullness, as the Buddha said, is an important kind of food. In one of the passages he says, “*We feed on rapture like the radiant gods.” *We feed on the sense of fullness and when you feel full in the body, the mind feels a sense of ease and serenity. And you look around and you say to yourself, “Why would you want to get involved in all that unskillful behavior you see around you in the world?” It may come in your direction but as long as you don’t pick it up and throw it back at other people, then it just stays right there, because you’re not gobbling down what they’re throwing at you.

And that’s because you’ve got a much better source of food here, inside. So keep looking after it, because it is really precious. You know you’ve got good food, so make sure that the flies don’t come and land on it. Look after it all the time.