Your Own Territory

Take a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing in the body. Focus your attention there. Then stay there. You’ll notice, as you stay there, that nobody else is coming to push you out. This is your territory. The problem is, the mind pushes itself out, looks to the breath for a little bit, doesn’t see much there, so it goes looking someplace else. The problem is that the other places you could look are not really yours.

The Buddha talks about how before he left home to go into the forest he had a vision of the world, which was that everything was already laid claim to. If he was going to find his happiness based on things outside, he was going to have to fight people off, dispute their claims. But then what would he have? He said it was like fish in a stream that was drying up, fighting one another for the last little bit of water, yet they were all going to die at some point anyhow. In the meantime, they would have the karma of having been fighting.

He realized that there was one place, though, where he could look for happiness that nobody else could claim, and that was inside his own heart. We might expand that to include his sense of the body as he felt it from within.

So this is your territory. Make the most of it. You can breathe in ways that feel good. And as the breath feels good, you can start thinking of it going through different parts of the body.

The Buddha’s image is of a bathman. Back in those days they didn’t have bars of soap. If you went to a public bath, they’d give you a ball of soap dough, where the bathman had mixed soap powder with water. A good bathman would mix it in such a way that the whole ball was nicely moistened, but there was no water dripping outside—by kneading the water into the powder.

In the same way, you take that sense of ease and well-being that comes from the breath and you knead it through the body, so that the whole body can feel good as you breathe in; the whole body feels good as you breathe out. Now this is your territory. You don’t have to fight anybody else’s claims. So make the most of it.

Even more so with your own mind: Once the mind settles down with the breath, then you can see it clearly. People have asked, “Since we’re trying to get to the mind, why do we have to spend so much time with the breath?” We first need to give the mind some good ballast to keep it here in the present moment, because it’s so easy for it to miss the present moment, go veering off to the past, veering off to the future. You need something to keep it right here so that you can see it clearly.

So. Tie the mind down to the breath here in the present moment, and then you can watch it, examine it, figure out what’s inside the mind that’s causing trouble—and how you can do something about it—because that’s where the real problem is. As the Buddha said, the arrow that was in his heart could be removed. He removed it through meditation just like this.

So this is an area where you have free range, and it’s an area where you can find true happiness. No one else can take it away from you. Just make sure you don’t get too distracted outside, because no one else can do this work for you. You’ve got to develop the skills that are needed to get the mind to be still, to see through its greed, aversion, and delusion—to get rid of the things that are weighing the mind down.

This is your work, and now is the best time to do it. It doesn’t get easier as you get older. So take responsibility here inside. Make the most of your territory, because it has a lot to offer.