Don’t Waste Time

While you’re sitting here with your eyes closed, be sensitive to where you feel the breathing in the body; be sensitive to what feels good. Try to keep your attention there. These are lessons not only for while you’re sitting with your eyes closed, but also for when you go through your day. Try to be grounded in the breath. Get a sense of what feels good and what doesn’t feel good in the breath. If it’s too much to be aware of the breath in the whole body, try to find one spot that’s especially sensitive to how the breathing feels. It could be in the chest, in the abdomen, in the throat. Try to stay grounded there.

Think of it as a place where you stand. All too many people think that to add the breath to what you’re thinking about during the course of the day is just one more ball that you have to juggle. It seems to be too much. But, one, think of it as the place where you stand, and then, two, ask yourself: All those balls that you’re juggling throughout the day, how many of them are really necessary? How many of them are really useful? You may say, “I’ve got all these things to think about.”* *When you’re working on a job you have a responsibility, but how many of your thoughts actually are really related to that job, related to that responsibility? There are a lot that are not. There’s a lot of extraneous noise in the mind.

So replace that noise with the breath. If you’ve got work to do, think about the work. When you’ve thought it through, then go back to the breath. When you find your mind wandering off nto other things, go back to the breath. You’ll find that being with the breath as you go through the day is not impossible, it’s just a matter of having the right attitude toward your thoughts: being vigilante, seeing what goes through the mind; realizing you’re wasting a lot of your energy with useless thoughts. Replace those thoughts with thoughts about the breath, how to make the breath comfortable so that it’s a good place to be here in the present moment. Then you find that you’re grounded as you go through the day, and there’s a connection between your different periods of formal meditation.

It’s like keeping the mind on a short leash. When the time comes to bring it back to the breath full-time, it’s right there. It’s not far away. Otherwise, it’s like a dog on a long leash. It wraps the leash around all kinds of different things. When you sit down to meditate, you have to unwrap all the different things it was wrapped around: all the trees and bushes and benches and whatever. It’s a waste of time.

That’s our problem. We waste so much of our time as we go through the day. As we go through life we latch on to our thoughts. Anything that comes up in the mind, you peek into it to see if it’s worthwhile. Well, you can assume that if it’s not really related to what you really have to do in the course of the day, it’s not better than the breath. So stay with the breath as much as you can.

When I was with Ajaan Fuang he said, “One of the rules you should have as a meditator is to ask yourself before you say anything: Is this really necessary? If it’s not, there’s no need to say it.”

Well. the same principle applies to your thoughts: Are these thoughts really necessary? A lot of our thoughts are not. They can be replaced with better thoughts: thoughts about getting the mind to settle down with the breath, with a sense of ease in the present moment.

So look at how you manage your time. Again, Ajaan Fuang would say to try to make your practice akāliko, timeless. Our days are divided up into times: time to eat, time to talk, time to work, time to rest—all these little times. It’s chopped up into little pieces. But think of each time you have any time to work is also time to work on your meditation. Anytime you have time to eat, it’s time to work on your meditation. That way, the practice isn’t chopped up. It becomes timeless, and you have the better chance of finding a timeless goal, one that’s not effected by time.

So manage your time well. Have a clear sense of what’s necessary and what’s not, what’s really beneficial and what’s not. Be careful not to waste your time, because we have so little time here in the human realm. Even if you live to 100 years, by the time the 100 years have passed by, they’ve all gone. So make the most of each moment as best you can, and you’ll find that a lot of good can be done. As the Buddha said, if you’re here and you think, *I only have this breath to breath in and breathe out, so I’m going to do something good with it: *If you do that with every breath, life becomes a lot richer, a lot fuller, a lot more productive—a lot more peace.