Talk to Yourself

There are lots of ironies in the way Buddhism is taught. One of the big ironies is the idea that mindfulness means just being aware, without any commentary. But actually, mindfulness is all about how you talk to yourself, what you have to remember to apply each moment. After all, you’re constructing each moment, and you need directions. And the directions you get come from where? They come from your experience with constructing moments in the past—how you did it well, how you did it poorly. You need to remember that.

When we sit here meditating, you have to be mindful: In other words, talk to yourself about staying right here. If you catch yourself wandering off, then come right back. Wander off again? Come right back again. That involves alertness and ardency—the alertness to notice that you’ve wandered off, and the ardency is to want to come back. It’s through the ardency that your mindfulness and alertness get more developed.

But you need to have that inner conversation going on. You’re sending messages from the past into the present moment. Sometimes the very, very recent past—i.e., just the past moment—about where you’re supposed to stay right now. Other messages come from further back. But you want to have them on call to use them when you need them.

So with mindfulness, you are talking to yourself, and you do have a purpose. You do have an agenda. Right now your agenda is to try to get the mind to settle down. So anything that’s relevant to that issue, you want to have that on hand. And just keep reminding yourself: “Stay right here. Be with the breath.” Then try to find ways of making the breath attractive, comfortable, interesting so that you will want to stay. That’s part of the ardency: just the desire to stay here.

You need all these things for the concentration to develop.

So keep on talking to yourself. Just learn how to talk to yourself in the right way. We read about directed thought and evaluation as the mind gets into the first jhāna, and people have asked, “How do I start doing that?” And the answer is, you’ve been doing it all along, you have to learn how to do it well. If you have been doing it well, you have to learn how to do it well in a way that’s appropriate for getting the mind to settle down.

When it settles down, it’s going to stay with a perception. In other words, at that point all you have to do is just keep reminding yourself with one word or one image: stay, stay, stay; or breath, breath, breath. But before you get to that point, you have to do a lot of talking.

So take some lessons from what you’ve heard in Dhamma talks, what you’ve read in Dhamma books, and what you’ve learned from your own experience in getting the mind to settle down. You realize that mindfulness is just more than awareness. It’s that whole complex of how you stitch things together, how you talk to yourself. There’s going to be a strong sense of you in there, but that’s okay. You’re going to get to know it well as you do it.

When they say that you want to see not-self, there are points in the practice where, yes, you have to learn how to disidentify with the inner voices. But you don’t want to disidentify with them out of anger or out of frustration. You want to train them well so that when they’ve done their work well, then they can rest. And you can let them go with a sense of appreciation. That’s a sign that the letting go really is genuine, and it’s coming from a good place.

So practice talking to yourself. Be very conscious of talking to yourself. And learn how to do it well.