Directing Yourself

Close your eyes and focus on the breath. Watch it all the way in, all the way out. And notice where you feel it most clearly. Focus there and then ask yourself if the breathing feels comfortable. You can try experimenting with long breathing and short breathing. Fast, slow. Heavy, light. Deep or shallow. See what combination feels best right now. As for thoughts of the world outside, you can put them down for the time being. You’re here to work directly on your mind.

After all, what does the world have to offer? There’s gain, but there’s also loss. There’s status; there’s loss of status. There’s praise and there’s criticism. There’s pleasure and pain. That’s pretty much it. And those things, you notice, come in pairs. Nobody ever lives a life with nothing but gain, high status, praise, and pleasure. We live in the human realm here, and it’s a mixed realm because we have mixed karma. If we wanted to live in a higher world, we’d have to improve our karma.

This is an important thing to think about. As the Buddha said, “The world is swept away, and there’s no one in charge.” You’re not in charge of saying that the world has to be the way that you want it to be. And even the good things of the world get swept away. You want to make sure that you have something in the mind that’s solid.

The problem is that, when the world gets difficult, when things are hard, we tend to wonder about all the good we’ve done. Why isn’t it showing its results? But as the Buddha said, it’s when you’re suffering: That’s when you have to develop your conviction as much as possible, because that’s the only way out. It’s as if you’ve fallen into a hole. You’ve got to do the work to get yourself out. Other people can throw down a ladder or maybe give advice, give you a hand, but a lot of the work has to be done by you. Yet, all too often, right when we’re feeling the least able to do the work, when the world seems to be pretty heavy, that’s when we need to do the most.

So you have to learn how to talk to yourself to encourage yourself. Remind yourself that the people who’ve gotten out of this back and forth of the world are the ones who made a lot of effort. As the Buddha said, it’s through effort that we can get past suffering. We can’t just float our way, or relax our way, to nirvana. There’s work that has to be done. And even if the work is difficult, you can tell yourself, “I’ll take it and divide it up into small pieces and do what I can right now—but keep on doing it.” Because a lot of times a slow but steady effort is what gets you out. So keep at it.

And don’t believe the voices that say, “Well, I’ve done all this good in the past. Why isn’t it showing its results now?” It’s like planting a rice plant. You can’t decide, "I want the rice right now." It takes time for the plant to yield its fruit, for the fruit to ripen. So sometimes what you want is not going to be there quite yet. But you’ve got to have the determination that “I’m not going to let myself fall back. The reason I’ve fallen into something bad is because of past, bad karma when I was lazy, when I was discouraged.” If you just give in to the discouragement, it just gets worse, and worse, and worse.

The only way out is to give yourself hope, to learn how to give pep talks to yourself that what the Buddha taught is worth listening to: that it’s through our own efforts that we can get out of this mess. If you don’t believe in the power of your own efforts, you’re not going to make any effort. So you’ve got to believe in that. And then stick with it. That’s how you get out.

Think of all the examples we have of the people in the past who went through difficulties. Think about the ajaans. Some of them were stuck out in the forest. Their meditation was miserable, but they didn’t give up. They figured, “Okay, I’ve fallen this far, I don’t want to fall any farther. I’ve got to work my way out.” It’s in that way, having that attitude—that’s what gets us out.

So even though the world is swept away, we have something good inside that’s not swept away. How you talk to yourself is entirely up to you, so make sure you talk to yourself in the right way, in a way that gives encouragement, a way that gives you strength. After all, we do have these resources inside. It’s when you’re discouraged that you tend to deny them. But they’re there: the resource for making an effort, the resource for having faith in the power of your efforts. That potential is always there, so try to tap into it as best you can, realizing that the only way out is through your efforts.

Do what you can, and you’ll find that the down times of the world are not forever. They, too, change backwards, back to what’s good. So you want to make the most of the good times when you have them, and don’t get careless. Don’t get complacent. As for when the bad times come, you have to learn how to talk to yourself. As Ajaan Lee says, all the bad things of the world have their good side. When you lose your material wealth, you find out who your friends are—and the same when you lose your status. When people criticize you, you have the opportunity to look at yourself and say, “Is it true what they say?” And when there’s pain, as the Buddha said, you can study the pain. You can learn how to comprehend the pain so that you can go beyond it.

So there is a good side to all the bad things in the world. Make sure you have the right attitude, and you’ll be able to find it.