Commit, Reflect, Commit Again

Close your eyes and take a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing in the body. When we talk about breath, it’s not the air coming in and out through the nose, it’s the movement of energy through the body. It expands the rib cage, lets the air go down, but it doesn’t stop there. It goes throughout the whole body. Your whole nervous system is involved. So you can focus anywhere, anywhere in the body that’s especially sensitive to the breathing. And notice: Does long breathing feel good? If it does, keep it up. If not, you can change. Try shorter, more shallow. Or in-short, out-long. In-long, out-short. Heavy, light. Fast, slow. See what breathing feels best for the body right now. And there’s no one else to tell you that you’ve got it wrong. You decide what you like.

But you also want to look for the long-term consequences. As the Buddha said, “The Dhamma is nourished by commitment and reflection.” So you commit yourself to doing it, and then you watch for the results. When the results come, you ask yourself, “Are they up to standard or not?” If they seem okay, continue that way. If not, you can change. This applies for all aspects of the path: as you’re following the precepts, as you’re practicing generosity, as you’re meditating. It’s all a matter of really committing yourself to doing it and then watching the results. And then you learn from the results. This is how you turn the Dhamma into a skill.

Because it’s not just a series of ideas. It’s recommendations for action. When the Buddha set out the four noble truths, he set out duties for the truths: to comprehend suffering, to abandon its cause, to realize its cessation, and to develop the path going there to that cessation.

When you approach the question of skillful and unskillful qualities, you don’t just sort them out like beans in a box. If something is skillful, you try to develop it. If it’s unskillful, you try to abandon it. These are all instructions for how to act. You take the instructions and you follow them. Then you look at the results. Then you start deciding whether the results are good enough or not.

This is where the practice becomes more and more yours. You’re trying to develop your powers of discernment, and this is how it begins—by comparing things. Is this better than that? Is that better than this? Go for whichever seems better. And keep doing that over and over and over. As you do that, your powers of perception, your powers of discernment, get more and more refined, more and more effective.

It starts with something simple like this: Which kind of breathing feels best right now? Which kind of breathing can you keep up for a long time so that the mind is happy to stay here; the body feels comfortable staying here? You’re the one who has to do the action. You’re the one who gets to judge the results. That’s how your discernment becomes your own. We borrow the Buddha’s discernment to begin with. But then as we observe our actions in this way, we become masters of the Dhamma, too.