Exercising the Mind

When you meditate, you’re exercising the mind. You are resting, but to rest the mind requires that you hover around the mind as it’s beginning to settle down. Otherwise, it’s going to go back to its old habits of running here, running there, hopping from one train of thought to another to end up in Siberia someplace. You want to stay right here.

So. Protect it. And you protect it with three qualities. One is mindfulness, which for the Buddha meant keeping something in mind. Nowadays, you hear it defined as a non-reactive awareness of things, non-judgmental awareness, but that wasn’t the Buddha’s sense of the word.

When they originally used the word “mindfulness” in English translations of the Pali Canon, they took it from an old Anglican prayer: “to be ever mindful of the needs of others.” It was a perfect translation for the word sati, keeping something in mind, bearing it in mind. Here you’re bearing in mind the fact you want to stay with the breath and that any thoughts that go someplace else are not wanted right now.

The second quality is alertness, where you’re aware of what you’re doing while you’re doing it.

Third is ardency. You want to do this well. There’s an element of desire there, but it’s skillful desire.

When you have these three qualities working around your concentration, they’re going to protect it, because if the mind wants to wander off, one, you’ll see that it’s doing it, and two, you remember that this is not where you want to go.

The third quality, ardency, means you do your best to keep it here. One way, of course, is to make the breath interesting. Here it is, the breath energy that keeps you alive, keeps the body and the mind together. It stands to reason that the quality of that energy is going to have an impact on the health of the body and the health of the mind. Yet, for the most part, we tend to ignore it. We have other things that we think are more important to take care of. But it does really repay us to stay here with the breath.

So circle around your breath here. Try to give it as much interest and much attention as you can. As for anything else, you just say, “No, no, no, not right now.” If you find the mind is insistent, wants to think about a certain thing, try to think of the drawbacks of that kind of thinking. When you realize you don’t really want to go there, then you come back.

So: mindfulness, alertness, and ardency. These are the qualities that you exercise. And these are the ones that become strong with exercise. So you’re not just resting, you’re also strengthening the mind. And it’s through strengthening the mind that you’re able to deal with the issues that come up, not only when you’re sitting here with your eyes closed, but also as you carry these three qualities into your life. You find that they’re beneficial for any activity that you want to focus on.

So. Strengthen these qualities, day after day after day. We brush our teeth every day. We wash our face every day. We should look after the mind every day as well. In fact, we should look after the mind all day long, as much as possible, because it’s our most valuable possession.