The Problem of Distraction

We’re practicing mindfulness of breathing. One of the qualities we’re trying to develop as we do so is concentration. The Pāli word here is samādhi. Sometimes you hear people object to “concentration” as a translation for samādhi because getting the mind into a state of concentration requires desire, and desire is bad. However, as we’ll see in the course of this retreat, desire, skillful desire, is required for the path as a whole. In fact, the Buddha points to concentration as a prime example of a path factor based on desire.

Another reason that people give for objecting to translating samādhi as “concentration” is that it sounds tense, too narrowly focused. Now, it is true that the images and similes the Buddha uses to describe samādhi indicate a broad, full-body awareness: a lake filled with the waters of a cool spring; lotuses saturated with still water from their roots to their tips; a person wrapped in a white cloth from head to foot. But still, the mental state indicated by samādhi is much more strongly focused and firmly established than a simple state of calm.

For one thing, the Pāli language has a separate word for calm, passaddhi. It’s one of the factors of awakening. Samādhi is a separate factor of awakening that builds on calm, but is more unified. This is indicated by the word the texts use to define samādhi, which is cittass’ekaggatā: unification of mind. Literally, that’s cittassa, of heart or mind; eka, one; agga, gathering place. Tā is a suffix that changes the word into a noun. Added up, that means a state in which the mind stays gathered around a single object, support, or theme. The theme is single both in the sense that it’s the one thing you’re focused on, and in the sense that it fills the entirety of your awareness.

Now, this would merely be an interesting case of semantics if it weren’t for the fact that these definitions have a very practical impact on what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to keep the mind gathered around one thing, which is the breath. And because the texts describe it as a gathering place or a vihāra, a dwelling place, we try to settle in and stay there. We don’t let the mind follow many different topics. We’re not just accepting and aware as it wanders around wherever it will. If it wanders away from the breath, we try to drop the distraction so that we can bring it back. If it wanders off again, we drop that distraction, too, and return to the breath—again and again, until it finally settles down. We’re working on a skill, and we’re trying to make a difference in the mind. If we simply follow the mind as it wanders around, even if we do it mindfully, it doesn’t make much of a difference. But if we train the mind to stay with one thing consistently, we can make a big difference.

One difference is that the mind gathers strength. It’s like exercising a muscle that you didn’t exercise before. At first the muscle seems weak and the exercise awkward, but with steady practice the muscle becomes stronger, the exercise easier, and you find that you can do things you couldn’t do before.

The mind also gets to see things it didn’t see before. As it stays gathered around the breath, it sees and comes to appreciate subtleties in the breath that it didn’t detect before. You become a connoisseur of your breath. This enables the mind to settle down with a greater and greater sense of satisfaction, stability, and well-being in the present moment.

At the same time, as it stays focused on the breath, it sees more clearly how it plays a role in creating feelings of pleasure and pain in the present moment. This is an important aspect of insight, and a topic we’ll talk about more tomorrow morning.

And finally, when the mind tries to gather itself around the breath, it gets to see itself more clearly. This is one of the prime reasons why the Buddha taught mindfulness of breathing more than any other meditation topic. When you focus on the breath, you get to see events in the mind more clearly because the breath is your anchor in the present moment. You can’t watch a past breath or a future breath. When you watch the breath, you know you’re in the present. And the breath is right next to the mind. As you observe the mind in relation to the breath, you’re not just speculating about your mind in the past or the future. You’re observing it in action in the present. And you’re not just observing it. You’re also learning to train the mind to abandon unskillful thoughts and desires, and to develop skillful desires in their place. This is something you have to do from the very beginning of the practice all the way through to the end.

Ajaan Lee notes that when you’re alert to what you’re doing as you try to stay focused on the breath, your alertness is like a pulley that you can pull in two directions—toward the breath and toward the mind—to make sure that they stay together. If the mind wanders off, you have to be alert to the fact, so that you can drop the distraction. Alertness is what enables you to see the problem. Mindfulness recognizes it as a problem, as you remember that you’re not here to wander around. And then ardency is what tries to solve the problem.

Here, mindfulness also plays a second role. It enables you to remember what strategies you can use to bring the mind back. Remember: The Buddha defined mindfulness not as full awareness or bare awareness, but as a faculty of memory, the ability to keep things in mind, even things that were said or done a long time ago. Alertness doesn’t mean being generally aware of what’s going on in the present moment. It means specifically knowing what you’re doing when you’re doing it, along with the results that come from what you’re doing.

So, what do you keep in mind when you’re dealing with distractions? The Buddha’s instructions on how to treat the mind as you develop mindfulness of breathing cover three activities: gladdening, concentrating, and releasing. Those are the three activities I’d like to focus on this morning.

The gladdening and concentrating are things you do proactively to keep the mind from wandering off. In gladdening, you make yourself happy to be here focused on the breath. Another term the Buddha uses for this ability to make yourself glad is “delight.” The Pāli word is nandi. It’s a term we’ll discuss in detail further on in the retreat.

You start out by using what are called verbal fabrications. We’ll talk more about the word “fabrication” tonight. Here just note that verbal fabrication means the way you talk to yourself. You can talk to yourself about what a good thing it is to be here with no other responsibilities so that you can focus on getting to know your own mind much better. You have the opportunity to develop a skill that has helped people for thousands of years, from the time of the Buddha to now. You can breathe in ways that feel refreshing and soothing. In this way, you’re using the breath to gladden the mind. If you have chronic illnesses or pains, you have the opportunity to learn how to use the way you breathe and spread the breath energies in the body to help alleviate the pain and the illness.

In other words, breathing is not only pleasant, but also interesting, as it allows you to learn more about the potentials you have in the present moment, both in body and in mind. Remember, when we speak of the breath, it’s not just the feelings of air touching the nose. It’s part of the energy or wind property in the body, which can be felt anywhere in the body at all.

This relates to the next step, which is concentrating. In concentrating, as we noted with regard to the images the Buddha uses to describe concentration, you’re trying to develop a state of full-body awareness. Once the rhythm of the breath is comfortable, you can allow that comfortable breathing to spread along the nerves, throughout the body, out to all the pores of the skin. To do this, you also have to broaden your awareness to encompass the entire body all at once. When you’re able to maintain that full-body awareness, full-body breathing, and full-body pleasure, you give your mind a sound foundation here in the present moment.

If the mind’s awareness were limited to one point, it could easily get knocked off balance. Here, though, other things may appear in the context of this larger frame of reference, but as long as you don’t lose touch with the frame, those things don’t disturb the stability of your concentration. They’re like clouds that float through the sky but don’t disturb the sky. However, it takes some skill to develop this full-body concentration and to maintain it. That’s because the mind has a tendency, when something new comes along, to drop what it’s doing and then go running after the new thing.

It’s like a bird with a piece of food in its mouth. You put a mirror in front of it, it sees another bird with a piece of food in its mouth, so it drops the food in its mouth to go after the reflection of the food in the mirror. Hold that image in mind throughout the week, okay? See how many times you act in the same way.

This is where we have to engage in releasing the mind. The word “release” has many levels of meaning, all the way from releasing the mind temporarily from distractions, to releasing it once and for all from its limitations. But this morning, we’re going to focus on the most basic level: the Buddha’s five strategies for releasing yourself from distracting thoughts as you try to get the mind into a state of concentration.

The first strategy is replacing the distraction with another more skillful topic to focus on. This can mean simply bringing it back to the breath, or it can mean bringing up another topic related to the Dhamma that would make you glad to get back to the breath. For example, you can think about the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Saṅgha in a way that makes you feel inspired to practice harder. Or you can recollect some of your own generosity and virtue to give yourself a sense of self-confidence that, yes, you can do this practice as well.

Or if you find that the mind is lazy, you can recollect death. You don’t know when death is going to come. You do know, however, that you’ll have to develop some skills before it does come—and this is your opportunity to develop those skills right now. Recollection of death doesn’t mean simply thinking, “Death, death, death.” Instead, you try to make yourself more heedful: There’s work that needs to be done in the mind and you don’t know how much time you have to do it, but you do have right now.

The Buddha’s image for this first strategy is of a carpenter who uses a small peg to remove a larger peg of wood. In other words, you use one thought to take another thought out. That’s the first strategy.

The second strategy is to focus on the drawbacks of the distraction. If you were to think those thoughts for a whole day, what would you accomplish? Either it would be a simple waste of time or it would get you to do things that are unskillful. “Skillful” means harmless and leading to the end of suffering. “Unskillful” means that it would cause harm. You already know that you don’t have much time in your life, so why waste even a few minutes of it?

One technique that I like to use here is to ask myself, “If this were a movie, would I pay to watch it?” Most of the time, the answer is No. The acting is horrible. The storyline is bad. The roles aren’t being played by Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. So why waste your time?

The Buddha’s image here is of a young girl or a young man looking in the mirror and seeing the carcass of a dead snake or a dead dog around their neck. They would try to get rid of it as fast as possible. The same with unskillful thoughts: When you see the drawbacks of the distraction, you want to get rid of it as soon as you can. That’s the second strategy.

The third strategy is to ignore the thought. If it’s there and it won’t go away, you don’t have to pay attention to it. It’s as if you’re in a large room, like this one. You’re in one corner and you have work to do. There are other people in the other corner, chatting away. If they won’t stop talking or go away, you just don’t pay attention to them. You don’t have to drive them out.

Another image that I like to use is of a stray dog begging for food. When you give attention to thoughts, that feeds them. So, if you don’t pay attention to the thoughts, it’s like not giving any food to the stray dog. It’ll whine for a while, but after it sees that you’re not interested, it’ll go away.

You learn some important lessons from this strategy, one of which is how paying attention to your thoughts actually feeds them. It’s an important lesson on how to deal with old kamma—of thoughts coming in unbidden in the mind. The Buddha’s image here is of a man closing his eyes so that he doesn’t see something he doesn’t want to see. That’s the third strategy.

The fourth is to relax the fabrication of the thought. Look for any pattern of tension in the body that corresponds to that thought. The more sensitive you are to the breath energies in the body, the more easily you’ll see this. When you sense that tension, relax it, and the thought will disappear.

People sometimes complain about concentration as being tense, but it’s tension with a purpose. Random thinking also involves tension, but it serves no purpose at all. When I was in Thailand, one of the other monks was wondering how I would get exhausted simply doing translation work. He said, “You’re just sitting there scratching with a pen. How can that be tiring?” I told him, “Just thinking of the translation has my whole body tense.”

So he tried translating Ajaan Lee’s biography from Thai into northeastern Thai, which is like Lao. After one day, he said his whole head itched all over. That’s a pattern of tension in the body that goes with thinking.

The Buddha’s image for this strategy is of a man who is walking, and he finally says, “Why am I walking? It’s easier to stand.” Or a man standing, deciding, “Why am I standing? Why don’t I sit down?” Or a man sitting, saying, “Why am I sitting? Why don’t I lie down?” You relax the tension.

Finally, the fifth strategy: If the other strategies don’t work, you clench your teeth, place the tip of your tongue against the roof of your mouth, and tell yourself, “I will not think that thought.” In Thailand, they recommend using a meditation word rapidly, machine-gun fast: “Buddhobuddhobuddho.” This is the last resort. It’s as if you have a toolbox with many refined tools, but also a sledgehammer. If your refined tools don’t work on a particular job, you bang it with the sledgehammer. This works only for a little while, but at least it clears the air for a bit. The Buddha’s image here is of a strong man beating down a weak man.

So think of these five strategies as five different tools, tools for releasing your mind from distractions. And it’s good to have a complete toolbox. That way, as you’re sitting here and a distraction comes in, you have a wide range of strategies you can choose from.

The rewards of being skillful with these strategies is that you can think the thoughts you want to think, and you don’t have to think the thoughts you don’t want to think. And, over time, you develop higher and higher standards for what kinds of thoughts are worth thinking.

In addition to these five strategies, the Buddha also teaches specific strategies for specific hindrances to concentration—hindrances like sleepiness or sexual desire. We’ll treat these in more detail the day after tomorrow.

As we’ve seen, the Buddha’s strategies for dealing with these distractions come down to those three activities for bringing the mind to a state of full-body concentration. Two of them are proactive—gladdening and concentrating—and one is a first-aid cure, which is releasing the mind. Always keep these three activities in mind as you try to get the mind happy and skillful at gathering and staying gathered into one.

(Meditation)

In a few minutes we’ll have a period of walking meditation. Basically, you’ll stay focused on the breath, just as you do when you’re sitting, simply that you add the extra activity of walking. It’s a good practice for carrying your concentration practice into daily life.

Find a spot on the grounds where you can have a path that’s at least 30 paces long. Keep your hands clasped either in front of you or behind you. Walk at a fairly normal pace—slightly slower than normal, but fast enough so that if a car came along, you’d be able to get out of the way.

When you get to the end of the path, stop for a second. Turn one direction or the other. Always try to turn in the same direction, though. Make sure that you’re with the breath before you start down the path again, determine that you’ll stay with the breath until you get to the other end of the path, and then start walking.

The image they have in the Canon is of a man walking between a beauty queen singing and dancing on one side, and a crowd of people on the other side, excited about the queen singing and dancing. The man has to walk between the two, with a bowl of oil filled to the brim on top of his head. Behind him is another man with a raised sword. If the first man spills even a drop of oil, the man behind him will cut off his head. So, don’t drop any oil. Come back at 10:30 with your heads well-attached.