Your Trusted News Source

We live in a world of uncertainties. You look at the news, and the question always is, who’s sending you the news? What is their purpose? What agendas do they have? Why are they focusing on these stories rather than other stories? It’s all very uncertain.

Then you look into your mind. If you haven’t trained your mind, you tend to be a pretty uncertain source of news about your own self.

So we’re going to train ourselves to be trusted news sources. Pay attention to something really close to you, like the breath. Notice how it feels as it comes in, how it feels as it goes out. Try to put aside your preconceived notions of where the breath flows. Look to where you see how it actually feels. Try to keep your attention there.

Then use the Buddha’s vocabulary for analyzing what’s going on in the body. There are the solid parts, and the liquid parts, the warm parts, and then energy. We’re focusing on the energy right now. What is your mental picture of energy? How does it affect the way you actually breathe? Can you picture it in ways that make the breath more comfortable?

Think of breath as something that can penetrate anything. Think of all the atoms being filled with space, and with the energy can flow right through. What does that do to your perception of how you feel the body? If there are pains anywhere in the body, tell yourself, “The breath was there first.” All too ofte,n we feel that the pain is there first, and we have to breathe around it. So we tend to tense up around it, make it even more real, more solid, than it has to be. So tell yourself, “The breath is there first.” It still is there first.

Try to get in touch with the breath energy, even in the blocked parts. You’ll find that the breath gets a lot slower as you take in energy in areas that have been starved for a long time. Well just notice that. The more you get to know the territory in here, the closer you are to what’s going on right here, right now, then the more you see what’s going on in your mind. That’s where the real issues are. The issues of the news outside often don’t really concern us. And, unfortunately, a lot of the issues outside that do concern us don’t get put in the news. But looking into your mind—the issues that really concern you—why is it that you keep creating suffering when you don’t have to?

Nobody wants suffering, and yet people all over the world, as the Buddha said, are on fire with the fires of greed, aversion, and delusion, burning themselves again and again and again. Do you want to keep on doing that? Here he’s saying there’s an opportunity where you don’t have to do that. Otherwise, we run around setting one another on fire. We keep on doing it, coming back again and again and again.

So take some time out. Get to know yourself so that you can trust the news coming from inside. After all, that is the one possibility you can really trust—what’s coming from inside. But you have to train yourself to be a trustworthy observer, a trustworthy reporter. In that way, you can find some certainty in life.