Be Steady

Try to keep your mind steadily with the breath. Stay with the sensation of breathing all the way in, all the way out. Someone once said that you can’t get the mind really absorbed in the breath because the breath changes so much. But actually, it is absorbing when it gets comfortable. A sense of ease fills the body, and the mind gets more and more steady. That’s what you’re looking for. You’re looking for a quality of steadiness in your mind because you want to see things clearly.

If you’re running around all the time, everything is a blur. You run past a tree. If someone asks you, “What was in the tree?” you can’t really say for sure how many squirrels there were, how many birds, what the leaves were like, what the fruit was like. But if you stand still, you can see the squirrels and the birds; you can see if there’s anything wrong with the tree, and then you can do something about it.

We’re not just here to watch squirrels come and go. We’re here to look at that tree to see what needs to be done. Again, you can’t see that clearly unless you’re really still. We’re looking for little movements of the mind, and sometimes they’re very subtle. It’s like listening for the sound of mice in a wall. If you’re making a lot of noise, you’re not going to hear the mice. You have to be very quiet. Then you can figure out where they are.

Most of us live our lives like this, as if we’re born on a train and the train is moving. You look out the windows, and the people move, cars move, trees move, mountains move, because you’re moving. If you want to see clearly what moves and what doesn’t move—or what’s moving fast and what’s moving slowly—you have to get very still. So even though there are a lot of things in the world that are inconstant, you don’t really appreciate their inconstancy until you make your mind more and more constant.

As Ajaan Lee said, when we’re practicing meditation, getting the mind still, we’re fighting against those three characteristics. Even though the mind has been inconstant, we’re trying to make it constant. Even though the mind is stressed out, we try to make it feel at ease. And even though the mind has been running all out of control, we’re trying to bring it under our control. There are a lot of things we can’t control, but we can get some control over the mind, at least enough to create a path, to get some stillness inside. Then you learn how to appreciate that stillness, both for the sense of ease that it gives and for the opportunity it gives you to see your own mind more clearly—to understand what you’re doing that’s causing suffering and how you can stop.

So try to get the mind still. Get it steady. That way, you clearly see what’s what, and what needs to be done. This is a path of right effort. And so you want to be clearly still so you can see what effort needs to be done at any given time. The more clearly you see the problem, the clearer the solution will be.