But the Mind Isn’t Hot

Ajaan Fuang tells the story of when he was on tudong one time. One of the traditions of the forest tradition is that once you set up your umbrella tent for the night you don’t move it. So you have to look around carefully before you set it up anywhere. He found a spot between two trees. He hung a line between the trees. Looked around. There were no ants, no bugs of any kind. The sky was clear. So he decided to put his tent out in the open, where it’d be a little bit cooler.

Around midnight, a storm came up from who knows where. Wind and rain. An umbrella tent doesn’t give you much protection against those things. So he took all of his robes except for one and put them in his bowl to keep them dry. So he sat there with just his underrobe. The topic of his meditation was: “The body may be wet; but the mind isn’t wet.” He found that he could separate his mind out from the conditions of the body, and he was able to get into concentration.

The same principle applies to heat. Today’s going to be a hot day. Tell yourself the body may be hot, but the mind—even though it knows the heat—doesn’t have to be hot. What makes the mind hot? Wkhen it’s talking to itself all the time about how miserable it is, how bad it is. But you don’t have to do that talking. Let the heat do it’s own thing. It’s going to come and then it’s going to go. You do what you can to make sure your body stays healthy in the heat. Make sure you get plenty of water, plenty of salt. Find a cool spot, relatively cool, out someplace in the shade.

But then make sure your mind doesn’t get hot with the heat of the day. After all, the heat is going to do it’s own thing. You have to allow it to do its own thing. What you experience in the body, though, depends on what you focus on. There is a water element in the body. There is an element of coolness in there. It’s as if each sensation down in the body has four sides. There’s a cool side; there’s the hot side. There’s the solid side; there’s the energy side. So just think of all the cool sides that you can find. Focus your attention there. If you can’t find any of those, then use Ajaan Fuang’s theme: The body may be hot, but the mind isn’t hot.

Heat can’t do anything to the mind, because the mind is just a knowing element. It knows the heat, but it doesn’t have to be hot along with the heat. Keep that thought in mind.

That kind of thinking helps you endure a lot of things that you otherwise couldn’t endure. We’re not here just to put up with things. We’re here to realize, okay, the conditions may be not what we want, but there are ways that we don’t have to suffer from them. That’s the skill we’re trying to master here. Learn how to master something simple like this, and then you can learn how to master things that are more complex.