Continuous Attention

Close your eyes and stay with your breath all the way in, all the way out—and all the way in the spaces between. You want to make your awareness continuous so that you can see connections. When you do something, you want to stay with your awareness in the present until you see that it gives results. Then you know what caused what. You begin to get a better understanding of how your actions really do shape your experience of the world. Because it’s not the case that we’re simply on the receiving end of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, ideas. We go out looking for them. And in looking for them, we shape them.

It’s like those people who try to find a partner and who take whatever they can find and then say, “I’ll just turn this person into somebody else, the person I want.” That’s what we do all the time with our engagement of the world. Sometimes we do it skillfully, sometimes not. You want to observe yourself in action, so you can see when it’s skillful, when it’s not. That requires that your attention be continuous.

So stay here as consistently as you can. Make this a good place to stay, both comfortable and interesting. Comfortable in the sense that different kinds of breathing will feel right for the body, to bring it into balance—relaxing when you’re tense, energizing when you’re tired, soothing when you’re frazzled. And interesting in the sense that you want to see the effect that the breath can have on the body and the mind.

As you allow the breath energy to flow to different places in the body, wherever there are pains, think of the breath flowing right through it. Wherever there’s a sense of blockage, don’t think of it being a solid part of the body. Think of it as being just blocked breath, stagnant breath. And what do you do with stagnant breath? You provide outlets for it to move. In this way, it gets interesting to stay here, and you learn a lot.

One of the images the Buddha gives for the practice is a mirror. You’re looking at yourself in a mirror. Actions are your mirror. Watching them, that’s where you get to understand your mind and get some control over it. After all, we’re not here just to watch things coming and going. The Buddha talks about having penetrative knowledge of arising and passing away. The emphasis is on the penetrative. In other words, you’re not just passively seeing things coming and going.

It’s in the course of making decisions in your life as you practice virtue, as you practice concentration that you want to see what sorts of things are skillful and what sorts of things are not. That kind of knowledge is penetrative. So we’re active in our engagement of the world and we have to learn how to be more skillful in our engagement, more skillful in our actions. That’s when our insights really do bear fruit.