On Good Terms Inside

When you focus on the breath, try to be friends with the breath. After all, you’re going to be staying together for a long time, so it’s good that you be on good terms with each other. In other words, you want to breathe in a way that’s good for the body and also good for the mind. If the breath gets too refined, sometimes you’re not able to follow it, and you get lost—which is why the Buddha gives you exercises to do once the breath is clear to you. You try to breathe, aware of the whole body. Now, that takes some doing.

All too often, our range of attention is very small. Here you’re trying to make it all around. Think of your mind not facing in any one direction. Your mind is facing in all directions. Just because your eyes are facing forward in your head doesn’t mean that that’s the direction that your mind is facing. Have your mind face all around. That takes some doing, but it establishes something really important: that when the breath gets really subtle, you’ll be prepared for it. You can still maintain the whole body as your range of awareness.

At the same time, as the mind gets expansive like this, it feels good with the breath energy flowing throughout the whole body. When the mind is expansive like this, it’s good for the body, good for the mind, and the more easily they can stay together. For your mind to go back to the past, to go to the future, it has to get very small again so that it can fit into those thoughts. But here you want to be bigger than your thoughts.

So try to be expansive in your awareness, expansive in your breath. Think of the body, the breath, the mind, your awareness, and a sense of ease all together in the same place, filling the same place. That way, they get along. The blood is allowed to flow smoothly through the body. There are no tight places where the blood gets cut off or the energy gets cut off, which is good for the health of the body. At the same time, the mind isn’t kept in a narrow focus. It’s all around. It can be expansive, too. This way, they get along for the benefit of both.

So try to work on this whole-body awareness. It does have a tendency to shrink, especially with the out-breath. So think, whole body, whole body, whole body, as you meditate. That way, you have a good place for the mind to stay, a good place for mind and the body to get together and stay together on good terms. When you have a friendship like this going, then both sides benefit.