At Home Wherever You Go

Close your eyes and settle in. Watch the breath all the way in, all the way out. Stay with the breath. In Pali that’s called vihara-dhamma, a home for the mind. Wherever you go, you’ve got the breath with you. You’ve got your home inside here. And you want to fix it up so that it’s a good place to stay.

So. Pay attention to how it feels. Is it too long, too short? Too heavy, too light? Experiment for a bit. You can be your own interior decorator, and you have lots and lots of options. The fortunate thing is that if you have an option that you don’t like, you don’t have to go to all the trouble of carrying it out of the house. You just drop it, and you can try something new with the next breath, and then the next, until you find something you like.

Then stay there, because the mind has a sense of well-being when it can stay in one place and doesn’t have to jump around all the time. A lot of people say that jumping around is a lot of fun. But the Buddha said, “There’s no happiness other than peace.” The happiness we get out of something is the amount of time we can spend with it and not get pushed out.

Here the breath is not pushing you away. Nobody else can come in and elbow their way into taking your breath from you or to push you out of the way so that you can’t watch it. You can watch it as much as you like. So make this your home. That way, everywhere you go you’re at home. When you’re operating from home, you’re coming from a place where you can rest, get nourished, take care of yourself. Then as you go out into the world, you’re coming from a good place, and you have a good place to go back to.

So try to decorate this house well. Make it a comfortable place to be, an interesting place to be. There’s a lot to explore here with the breath energy in the body. Wherever there’s pain in the body, wherever there’s illness, think of the breath energy flowing there, flowing through there. Try having it flowing down. Try having it flowing up—in, out—radiating from that spot, going into that spot. See what variety of ways you can treat any illness you might have with the breath.

In that way, you learn a lot about the elements in the body. We’re not talking about the chemical elements. We’re talking about the elementary feelings of solidity, liquidity, energy, warmth. You learn that you can manipulate them to at least some extent, enough to give yourself a good place to stay, an interesting place to stay. So wherever and whenever you are with the breath, you really are at home.