Medicine for the Mind

Close your eyes and take a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths. Where do you feel the breathing in the body? Wherever it’s clearest, focus your attention there. And try to stay there all the way in, all the way out. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can change the rhythm, change the texture, make it shorter, more shallow, heavier, lighter, faster, slower. Try to see what feels good for the body right now: relaxing if you’ve been feeling tense, soothing if you’re feeling frazzled, energizing if you’re feeling tired.

The breath is like medicine for the body. When the mind can stay with the breath, that’s medicine for the mind. We have lots of diseases in the mind—greed, aversion, delusion. These have power over the mind because the mind doesn’t feel healthy. We go running after things, looking for pleasure, when inside us doesn’t feel good. The Buddha’s approach, though, is to say: Look inside. Maybe the source of the problem is not outside; it’s inside. And maybe the solution is inside as well.

A lot it has to do with how the mind talks to itself. If you want to see how it’s talking to itself, you’ve got to get it as quiet as possible, because there are lots and lots of voices chattering in the mind. So try to get everybody chattering about one thing, about the breath, and how you’re going to stay with the breath.

As you begin to zero in on the breath, and it feels good, you feel less and less inclined to want to go outside. Then you can see more clearly what’s going on inside the mind. As the Buddha said, the mind is what precedes everything else. It’s not simply on the receiving end of things outside. We’re out looking for things. What are we looking for? We can look for good things; we can look for bad things.

So you want to see what the mind is searching for, what its intentions are. As you get the mind more quiet, you’re less likely to go for unskillful intentions. You can warn yourself, “If I act on intentions like that, I may get what I want, but then there’s going to be trouble down the line.”

Act on intentions that come from a good place inside. Intentions that aim more toward generosity, toward virtue, toward goodwill for all. These are qualities you can develop inside. They’re good for you, and they’re good for the people around you.

When you’re generous, of course, people benefit from what you give them. But you develop a broader mind, a more spacious mind, a more spacious heart inside.

When you’re virtuous, you don’t harm anybody. Of course, other people benefit from that. And you benefit from that too. If you look back on your actions and you realize you haven’t harmed anybody, there’s no need for regret. There’s no need for denial. You feel a greater sense of your own self-worth.

And then thoughts of goodwill: If you don’t wish anyone ill, no matter what they’ve done in the past, then you can trust your own actions a lot more. If you use their mistakes, their bad actions, to excuse your bad actions, you’re just pulling yourself down to their level. But if you know that you’re operating with goodwill, then even though there may be mistakes in your life, still you realize, “Okay, I didn’t do that out of ill will.” It’s a lot easier to live with yourself that way.

So these are just a few of the beginning steps that the Buddha recommends for finding some happiness inside rather than looking for it outside. And when you get to know your mind like this, and you get more and more in control of which intentions you’re going to act on, which ones you’re not going to act on, then you find that things calm down inside. Those diseases that the mind has get weaker and weaker.

As you develop strength, the strength that comes from being convinced that your actions do matter, and you try to do your best to make sure that you act skillfully, this provides a good foundation for deeper insights into the mind—as you get more mindful, develop greater powers of concentration, develop more discernment as to what inside the mind is actually causing you to suffer and how you can stop.

So. Do your best to strengthen your mind in this way by feeding it well. Feed it with the breath, feed it with concentration, feed it with generosity, virtue, goodwill. Then it’s a lot less likely to fall for the diseases that come up from within, and you don’t catch any diseases from anyone else.