Get Off the Train

Close your eyes. Take a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing in the body. We’re not talking about the air as much as we’re talking about the feeling of energy that allows the breath to come in, allows the air to go out. Where do you feel that? Focus your attention there. And then ask yourself if it’s comfortable. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can make it shorter, more shallow, heavier, lighter, faster, slower. See what rhythm of breathing feels good for the body right now.

We’re giving the mind a place to stay here in the present moment because we want to watch the mind. We’re trying to catch it, to give it an anchor here in the breath, because when you’re with the breath you know you’re in the present moment. And it’s in the present moment that you want to observe your own mind, see what it’s doing. When it wanders away, why is it wandering away?

For the time being, don’t ask too many questions. Just keep coming back, coming back, coming back to the breath. You’ll begin to notice that you can see a lot more of what’s going on in your mind when you try to make it still like this.

It’s like having been born on a train. The train runs along the track. You look out the window. Everything seems to move. Cars move. People move. Houses move. Mountains move. All because you’re moving.

If you want to see the way things really are, you have to stop and get off the train, be still for a while. Then you can see, oh, the mountains and the houses don’t move. The trees don’t move. The cars and the people do move. You begin to see where their movements are going, where they’re coming from.

In the same way, you get to know your own mind. When a thought comes up, you can see where it’s coming from, where it’s going. And you can be a lot more discriminating as to which thoughts you’re going to run with and which ones you’re not. This way, you can get some control over your mind.

If you can’t control your own mind, what are you going to control? This is where things come from. Everything comes out of the mind. Everything comes out of your intentions. So you want to look at your intentions. See which intentions are skillful, which ones are not. Then you can sort out things in the mind, decide what you want to identify with, what you don’t want to identify with. As a result, you find that the mind causes itself a lot less suffering, a lot less trouble, because when anything troublesome comes up in the mind, you can nip it in the bud.

As for good qualities, when they come up and they’re still weak, you can learn how to strengthen them. This way, this committee you have in the mind with all its different voices, all its different opinions, gets sorted out. You can bring some order to the committee meetings because you know where the different members are coming from, what their intentions are, which ones should be allowed to have some power in the meetings and which ones should not. In this way you benefit, and the people around you benefit as well.

So it’s good to practice this every day. Get in touch with your own mind. Get in touch with what’s going on right here, right now, because once it’s done something, you can’t go back and change it. But while you’re here in the present moment, alert to the present moment, whatever comes up that’s not good, you can change it. Whatever comes up that is good, you can encourage it.

This is where you can make a difference.