Potentials in the Present

An important principle of practicing is gladdening the mind, teaching yourself to be happy to be here, focusing on your breath. It doesn’t seem like much to begin with, but the Buddha says you can breathe in ways that makes you sensitive to rapture inside, pleasure inside. Where are the potentials for those things? They’re in the way you feel your body right now, learning how to look at it in a different way.

Think of the breath bathing the whole body. Focus on one spot in the body and relax all the little muscles there: You can focus on your hands. Think of all the little muscles in the fingers and the thumbs, the palms of the hand, the back of the hand. Allow them all to relax. Then notice that sometimes when you breathe in, you’ll slightly tense up there. Well, try not to tense up. The breath can come in without you having to tense up your hands.

Or, if there’s any tendency to squeeze the breath out when you breathe out, resist that tendency as well, so that the blood has an opportunity to fill all the vessels in the hands. There’ll be a sense of fullness, a sense of ease. Think of that sense of ease spreading up your arms into your chest.

Or you can start at the chest, right around the breastbone, and do the same thing there.

Take a different attitude toward your sensation of the body, realizing that you have some things you can do here. You’re not just stuck with the feelings as they arise. You can nurture good feelings, nurture comfortable feelings, and then maintain them.

So it’s not just a matter of accepting whatever is there. Accept the fact that you have this power. When you learn these skills, you can use them at any time you want.

That’s just one way of gladdening the mind.

The other way is to talk to the mind about what a good thing it is that you have the time to rest and be by yourself and have an anchor for the mind here in the present moment. Develop the skills you’re going to need, because aging, illness, and death are going to come. And they’re going to be real challenges when they come. So you need the skills you can to find a sense of well-being in spite of them.

So talk to yourself about how important it is to develop these skills. And here you have the opportunity. You can be more mindful, more alert, more ardent in doing this well. These skills will see you in good stead.

These are some of the ways in which you accept the fact that you have the power right now to change things. There are good potentials here. It’s just a matter of recognizing them and knowing how to develop them.

Ajaan Lee made this point many times: that we human beings have lots of potentials in our bodies and our minds that we really don’t make use of because we don’t understand that they are potentials. We just take them as whatever is given right now and that’s it.

But accept the fact that you can change things. There are potentials here that you can nurture. Learn how to nurture the right ones and learn how to do it well, and you can provide yourself with a sense of well-being that you can carry through the day.

Ajaan Fuang talked about how when he was staying up in the forests of Northern Thailand, he missed his teacher. He was alone on a little mountaintop. But he found that he could breathe in a way that gave rise to a sense of rapture all day long. That helped to see him through.

You may have more challenges in terms of dealing with more people, but you can develop the same skills as well.