Medicine for the Mind

Think of the breath as medicine for the body, medicine for the mind. When you breathe in, what would feel soothing? What would feel healing in the body? Breathe in that way. If you’re not sure what’s healing or soothing, you can experiment for a bit. Think of the breath as being like a cream that you put on a rash. You have to stay with it for a long time for it to do its work. You can’t just put the cream on and wipe it off. You get to the breath and you stay there.

If you really want to see the mind, you have to get it really quiet like this, because there are many layers of noise in the mind. You get rid of the most blatant layers and then you find there’s another layer. And then another. Each one of those layers is a disturbance. This is how the breath helps soothe you. It feels good physically. And it gets the mind to calm down. It gets it really quiet, to the point where you can just stay with the breathing and don’t even have to think about the breathing.

There’s that passage where the Buddha says once you’ve gotten the mind in the first jhana, you stay alert, mindful, ardent, keeping track of the breath, but don’t think thoughts about the breath. Whatever your object, don’t think thoughts about it. In other words, just have that one perception in mind. Having that one perception allows the mind to settle down and to rest. Then it can see things that it wouldn’t have seen before.

This is why concentration is such an important part of the practice: getting the mind absorbed in one object, getting that object to fill the body, get your awareness to fill the body, get a sense of ease to fill the body. As they work together like this, then you can start seeing things you didn’t see before.

So try to get the mind as quiet as you can. Approach this as a skill. Some people find it easy to settle down. They just drop whatever their concerns are and they’re done with them. Other people have to think their way down for a bit, but find they have to get quiet, too.

In this way, you can move beyond just the healing work of concentration to the healing work of discernment, seeing things as they’re actually happening—not necessarily in line with what you’ve read in the texts but more what you actually see happening right here, right now.

The texts give you directions. They point you here. But what you’re really going to see is not in the texts. What you see is what you’re going to see right here. Sometimes the things you see in the mind are going to be a little bit disturbing, which is why you need to heal the mind and heal the body as much as you can so that you’ll be prepared to see things inside that you don’t like. But they’re there. If you don’t pay attention to them—if you run away from them—they’re not going to get healed.

Ajaan Lee makes a comparison. He says the breath is like a solvent in which the medicine is put. The real medicine, though, is your mindfulness, alertness, and your ardency. Those are the things that really heal the body, heal the mind. So let these things do their healing work.