Respect for Our Potential

Close your eyes. Take a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing in the body. Wherever it’s clearest that the breath is coming in and going out, focus your attention right there. And then ask yourself if long breathing is comfortable. If it is, keep it up. If not, you can change. Use your own discernment to figure out what kind of breathing feels good for the body right now—whether long, short, heavy, light, fast, slow, deep, shallow: whatever combination of those feels good. Experiment. Develop your powers of judgment.

The breath is something that’s really close, and yet we tend to overlook it. It’s so close, but we’re looking someplace else. Yet the Buddha said that if you focus on your breath this way, you’re going to learn a lot—both about the body and the mind. So show some respect for it.

You may notice that we bow down a lot around here. We show respect for the Buddha because he teaches us to have respect for ourselves, the things in ourselves that are really worthy of respect: our desire for true happiness, a happiness that doesn’t harm anybody, a happiness that lasts. We respect our ability to find this.

The world outside doesn’t care about our desire for true happiness. They want us to look for happiness in things that they can sell us. They can’t really promise all that much. But it is possible—through training your own mind, developing the good qualities you already have, abandoning whatever unskillful qualities you have—that you can find true happiness within you. So we try to respect that possibility—because if we don’t, we just have to content ourselves with the less-than-the-best.

The Buddha would have us raise our standards. He said we’re capable of a much higher level of happiness, a happiness that’s responsible in the sense that it doesn’t harm anybody. So we should take advantage of those possibilities, those potentials that we have inside.

Right now you’re developing your potential for mindfulness, your ability to keep something in mind. If the mind wanders off, you bring it right back to the breath. Remember that this is where you’re going to stay.

Alertness: watching what’s actually happening—not waiting until the mind is far, far away before you realize that you’ve slipped off. Try to catch it right away and bring it back.

And ardency: Try to do this well. You know that if the mind does have a tendency to want to wander off, what can you do to make it want to stay? You can try to make the breath comfortable and learn how to take that sense of ease and well-being that come from the breath and spread them around: out to the tips of the fingers, out to the tips of the toes; from the head down, all the way down through the body. Try to breathe with a sense of ease. Think of the breathing as a whole-body process. Your whole nervous system is involved. So allow the breath to flow freely through the body.

This is just a first step in getting the mind under control, beginning to take advantage of the good qualities that we have inside. So have some respect for your potentials—because when you learn how to train them, they can take you far.