Lessons for a Hot Day

We have this body. We wanted to have this body because we could think of all the pleasures it could bring, all the pleasures we could find by having a body. But it also has its drawbacks, one of which is that it leaves us exposed to cold, heat, and other extremes in the world. So we want to make sure that we can make a distinction between the mind and the body so that when the body is suffering, the mind doesn’t have to suffer along with it.

When you’re dealing with pain, you want to be able to see that the pain is one thing, the body is something else, and your awareness is something else still. To do that, you have to get the mind really concentrated and very still to see where you make the bridge between these things.

On a day like this, there’s a bridge between the heat outside, the warmth in the body—and then the mind: your awareness. It’s possible to be aware of these things but without laying claim to them. As the Buddha said, wisdom lies in seeing these things as separate. They separate out only when you let them be still.

It’s like a salad dressing of vinegar and oil. If you keep shaking it up, shaking it up, the vinegar and oil are going to be mixed all the time. But if you let it sit, they separate out on their own.

Or like milk and cream—in the old days, when I was a child, we didn’t get homogenized milk. They would deliver milk to the back door: The cream was on the top, and the milk was down on the bottom, naturally. They hadn’t provided a factory that would separate those things out. As soon as you shook up the bottle, everything got mixed.

So make sure you don’t shake your mind too much today. Try to keep it quiet. You notice what the animals do when there’s heat. They hide out and they’re very quiet. They come out in the cool of the evening and the cool of the morning. But in the middle of the day, they know to conserve their heat, conserve themselves. So. Keep the mind still like that.

There may be activities you have to do in the course of the day, but try to keep the mind as still as possible. If you find it going into thoughts of how hot it is outside, remind yourself heat is a property of the body, of physical things, whereas the mind is something separate. You can see that more clearly the more you can make the mind still. So learn to keep the mind still with the breath.

Here again, the breath is just one of the properties of the body. The heat property is one thing; the breath property is something else. So allow the breath to be cool. Keep your mind cool with the breath. And of course you take care of the body. Make sure you get plenty of water and plenty of salt. Don’t go exposing yourself to the sun too much.

Otherwise, the main issue is going to be in your mind. This is an important skill you’re going to have to learn in all kinds of areas. We live in a world of aging, illness, and death. We live in a world of separation. We have to learn how to live in this world but not suffer from the aging or the illness or the death or the separation.

That means we have to develop good, solid qualities inside, qualities we can depend on. This is why we have the concept of refuge. You take refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha. It’s not so much taking refuge in the Buddha who lived 2,600 years ago. It’s taking refuge in the qualities of the mind that he developed and he taught you to develop. They become your refuge even though we live in this world with all kinds of things going on. Still, we don’t have to suffer. And we also don’t get tempted into misbehaving the way a lot of other people are misbehaving.

So there is that sense in which we’re separate. There’s a wisdom in seeing where we’re interconnected, but there’s also wisdom in seeing where we’re separate. And part of being separate is having your own independent source of goodness and wisdom inside.

That’s something no one else can do for you. But with proper training, you can do it for yourself. And one of the skills is seeing things as separate—so the body is one thing, and the mind is something else. The heat may affect the body, but the mind doesn’t have to be hot.