The Skill of Maintaining

Let’s meditate for a few minutes. When we have a short meditation like this, you want to make up for the lack of quantity with quality. You probably know, by now, where the most sensitive spot in the body is to the breathing, where the mind tends to gravitate when it settles down. Well, go right there.

We have a tendency, when we have the whole hour to sit, that the mind is like a glider—it just gradually comes down. We’re afraid that if it went down too fast, we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves. Well, you learn lessons about keeping the mind in place, learn lessons about maintaining.

As Ajaan Fuang used to say, there are three steps: There’s doing the practice, maintaining it, and then putting it to use. The maintaining is hard because you have to keep wanting to stay here, stay here, stay here, while the mind gets bored and wants to do something else. So you have to learn how to talk to it, get it to stay down and give it work to do right away, working with the breath energies in the body.

If that doesn’t fascinate you, think about the breath in the bones. You can think about the bones in your first joints, second joints, third joints of the fingers, the bones in the palms of the hands. The wrists. Up the arms. Then starting again at the toes, coming up through the feet and the legs. Up the spine. Visualize the bone in that part of the body, make yourself sensitive to that part of the body, and if there’s any tightness in that part of the body, allow it to relax.

In other words, give the mind work to do that it finds that it’s interesting to stay. It’s good to stay. That’s a skill that we lack. We’re so good at jumping around—and not only jumping around; we do a lot of multitasking. Here the Buddha wants you to do one task: Get the mind to settle down with a sense of oneness and stay right there. That’s an important skill. It tends to be overlooked.

There are people who say that it’s actually not necessary in the meditation, that the Buddha just had an extra piece of room in his path but threw in right concentration at the end—for the real work was mindfulness. Well, mindfulness is all about getting the mind to settle down and, once it’s settled down, learning how to keep it there so that its concentration develops.

When you’ve been keeping the breath in mind and maintaining your focus, that’s when you can start putting it to use. If you’re not good at maintaining it, then when you try to use the concentration for discernment, it all falls apart.

It’s in the course of maintaining that you’re going to learn a lot about the mind and a lot about how to keep the mind in one place. That’s the beginning of discernment right there, and it’s a good foundation for discernment.

So. Work on maintaining. Then, when the insights you want start coming, they’ll be solidly based.