Skills to Take Home

When you come to the monastery, you get to enjoy some physical seclusion away from your ordinary responsibilities, your ordinary concerns. And hopefully, while you’re here, you’re also learning some mental seclusion—in other words, being able to seclude yourself from distracting thoughts inside, thoughts of greed, aversion, delusion, sleepiness, torpor, doubt, anxiety. You want to be able to maintain that mental seclusion as much as you can.

Even when you go back into places where there’s no physical seclusion—or not much—you want to learn the skills of separating yourself from the thoughts that would pull you away. Try to develop this ability to step back and look at what your mind is doing. It’s called metacognition. The mind is acting, but there’s also another part of the mind that’s watching the mind that’s acting. That can observe things and see what you’re doing: what you’re doing that’s skillful, what you’re doing that’s not. Or if thoughts are coming in that you don’t need to get involved in, you know how to deal with them. You’re not just jumping into every thought that comes your way.

So step back. Step back. When you have this ability to seclude yourself from your thoughts inside, then you can go out into the world outside, and it’s easier to step back from the world, too, even if you’re physically involved with other people. The may be all around you, but the mind can be separate. Learn how to keep a sense of this separate mind. That way, you’re safe wherever you go.

You can’t take the monastery with you, but you can take the skills that you learn here with you. And of course your breath is always here. That’s your place to stand as you step back. If it’s a good, solid place to stand, balanced, even, comfortable, then you’re more likely want to step back because you see the benefits that come from it.

So take the skills, and that way you have your own inner monastery wherever you go.