Red Ant Tenacity

When you have a short meditation like this, it’s good to know how to get right in place. Where is your favorite spot in the body? Where is the spot that’s most sensitive to how the breathing feels?

It might be around the chest. It might be down in the stomach. It could be in the throat. Well, go right there. Usually, when you have a long time to meditate, it’s like a glider just gradually coming down to earth. But when we have a short time like this, you realize that if you want to get anything out of this, you’ve got to be right in place and stay right there. Be really determined that no other thoughts are going to pull you away. And if they do, you’re going to come right back.

A thought appears on the horizon, think of it exploding. You protect what you’ve got here, right now. Because with lack of quantity, you make up for it with quality. Really alert. Really mindful. Really ardent in what you’re doing. This way, the mind, even though it’s exercising, gets rest.

Years back, when I was taking the Dhamma exams in Thailand, having to memorize all that Thai and Pali all at the same time, my brain would just get fried. that I realized if I could take little meditation breaks every now and then—five minutes, ten minutes—and be really earnest in staying right here, then the mind got refreshed. It got rested even though it was working.

So this is good work. It refreshes you at the same time that you’re working. When you come out and have to do what you do in the course of the day, you have a place to go every now and then. You can stop, take a little break, and refresh your mind. And then keep going.

This is one of the tricks to endurance. The ability to stick with things means that you have to figure out: Where is the pleasure in sticking with this? Where are the comfortable spots? Where are the strong spots that you have? Go there. Rely on those. Don’t keep thinking about how hard it is, whatever it is you’re doing, or how long it’s going to take, because those thoughts just wear you down. Remind yourself that you have sources of strength inside. So in a short meditation like this, get in touch with that source of strength and stay right there.

The image they give in Thailand is one of those big red ants, the ones that guard mango trees. If they bite, they bite so hard and so consistently that if you try to pull them off, many times the head will detach before the jaws let go. As the ajaans say, that’s the kind of tenacity you want to have as you meditate.

So work on developing it with short periods like this, and then you find you can work on it with longer periods as well, where you can have both quantity and quality at the same time. So don’t regard these short periods as just a ceremony but as a place where you really can get some refreshment and learn some important skills.