Q & A

Q: In order to make the practice of working with the body more pleasant, can we do mettā for each part of the body?

A: There’s the name of a French ship that over-wintered in Antarctica, called “Pourquoi Pas?” So why not? You can have as much goodwill for your body as you like. There was a book I was reading one time about an American man who was suffering from some maladies in his spleen. One night he yelled at his spleen. A few days later, he met with a psychic friend. She meditated to see how his body was doing and then asked him, “Did you yell at your spleen? Never yell at your spleen.”

Q: This question is from the person who had headaches. We suggested to try first to relax her focus, but added that there were other techniques. So now she’s saying, “It’s not working. What are these other techniques?”

A: Some of the other techniques would be to focus on the space around the body, holding the perception that there’s no boundary to that space. When the breath gets comfortable, you can think of the whole body, without having to go through the step-by-step survey. That global, boundless awareness can help release the pressure of the headaches.

Another technique is to think of whatever pressure there is in the head going down your spine, through your tail bone, and down into the earth.

See if those techniques work.

Q: How does one deal with very strong agitation that seems to be throughout the entire body? It has been difficult trying to deal with this during the retreat, and I’m having trouble trying to breathe through it. Should I just bear with the agitation?

A: One thing you can do here is, again, to think of space around the body. Another is to spend an entire hour doing mettā meditation. For everybody. As for the excess energy in the body, think of opening up the exit channels, through the palms of your hands, the soles of your feet, or out your eyes, and see if you can allow the agitation to disperse from the body through those spots. If that doesn’t work, come back again, and we’ll try some other things.

Q: Dear Ajaan, I am having trouble finding joy in meditation. I can settle my mind down into awareness of the breath, but after some point, tensions build up in my upper back. I think these tensions come from an important dilemma. I have trouble relaxing them without changing my posture or stretching. Should I be able to experience joy through tension or pain? Should I desire joy in practice, as it appears to be the next step forward?

A: Again, with tension in the upper back, think of it going out the arms and out the palms of your hands. Or you could think of the breath coming in from the back when you breathe in. If the tension doesn’t go away, then tell yourself, “I’ll focus on the parts of the body that are not tense right now.” Again, you’ll find some joy in staying there.

I have a brief story to tell. I had a student one time who had Marfan syndrome. It’s a hereditary disease of the connective tissue, and people who have it tend to die about age 20 or 30. In addition to having the disease, and she was a co-founder of the National Marfan Foundation. She died around the age of 50 from a stroke. Before she died, she asked that I preside at her memorial service. So at the service, there was a combination of her Buddhist friends and her Marfan friends.

At the beginning of the ceremony, I gave a guided meditation, like the guided meditation I’ve been giving to you. Afterwards, people gave eulogies. One woman talked about how her nephew had Marfan syndrome. When he was 13, he had to go in for a heart operation, and when he came out of the operation, no amount of medication could help relieve the pain. So my student went to visit this boy to see if she could help. She listened to his symptoms for a while and then she said, “Breathe through your butt.” The woman who was giving the eulogy then turned to me and said, “It worked. And now I know where she got that idea.” So, if nothing else, breathe through your butt.

Q: I’m so glad to hear that so many people in the retreat are feeling pleasant sensations during their meditation and concentration. But as for me, it’s nothing. Zilch. And I’ve been practicing for years. Is this due to an inadequate method? Or is it a matter of past kamma?

A: It could be either. But what you have to do is to try a different method to see if something else might work for you. Breath meditation is not for everybody. What’s important is: Can you find an object that you enjoy focusing on?

And also, the previous question is a proof that not everybody is having pleasant sensations.

When I first started meditating as a young monk in Thailand, there was another young monk who would meditate in the same meditation hall with me. After about 15 minutes, my legs were sore, my back was sore. I looked at the other monk, and he was sitting very peacefully. I said, to myself “I have to preserve the good name of America.” So I continued sitting.

I found out later that the other monk was going through a lot of pain. And he looked at this American sitting peacefully over there, so he said to himself, “I can’t lose to the American.”

So don’t assume that the people around who look peaceful are actually peaceful. Send them some thoughts of compassion in case they’re in pain.

Q: Would there be a difference between the whole-body awareness that we cultivate in sitting meditation and the one in walking meditation? It seems to me that for walking, it’s enough to concentrate on the movement of the feet and the legs, and the whole-body awareness is not needed as you recommended it in sitting meditation. So would you please clarify?

A: In the beginning you may find it enough to focus on the feet and the legs. But eventually you do want to develop a whole-body awareness while walking. The only difference from sitting is that this whole-body awareness should be firmly anchored in one spot of the body that’s relatively immobile, such as the middle of the chest, the middle of the head, or the stomach. That’s because your awareness has to keep going in and out, in and out, as you’re walking so that you don’t run into things. To compensate for that, you need to have a very strong sense of center as you’re walking.

Q: The ultimate desire to not be suffering anymore is a bit abstract for me. How can I give this more meaning to know how to align my life and function with that?

A: Keep in mind the question that the Buddha says lies at the beginning of wisdom, which is, “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” Every time you’re faced with a decision as to what to do, ask yourself which choice will most likely lead to long-term welfare and happiness. Then follow that choice.

Q: How to give incentives to the consumer to prioritize the long-term goal instead of focusing on the short-term one? I find that my long-term projects or skill cultivations often get put on the back burner because the mind prefers to get the quicker satisfaction of accomplishing something right now.

A: Try to remind yourself of the last time you chose something for the short-term benefit at the expense of the long term. Then remind yourself how much you regret it and ask yourself, “Do you want to make that mistake again?”

Q: If I have, for example, three hours a day to study the Dhamma, how much time do you recommend spending on meditation, and how much on reading/studying?

A: This will vary at different stages in your practice. There are times when you find that you really do want to read in order to understand things, especially when you come across a problem in your meditation. There will come other times when you say, “I’ve read enough, I just want to practice.” So the amount of time you spend on studying and meditation will vary over the course of time, back and forth. But as a general rule of thumb, I would say start with half an hour for study and two and a half hours for meditation.

Q: Ajaan, I understand that what is happening to one today is a result of one’s kamma in the short term and long term. But, when it comes to catastrophes that are blindly making lots of victims—like the Twin Towers, the tsunami in Southeast Asia, or recently the earthquake in Myanmar—all these thousands of victims must have had very different kammas. Some of them possibly had very good kammas for many lifetimes. So how do we explain this kind of situation on a karmic plane?

A: There’s a general misunderstanding about kamma, which is that each person has one kamma account and what you see at any one moment is the running balance in the account. Actually, we have many karmic accounts. Or to use the Buddha’s image, we all have a big field of kamma with many different karmic seeds, good and bad. What you see at any one moment are the seeds that are sprouting right now. So it is possible that you have many good seeds in your karmic field, but some bad seeds happen to be the ones that are sprouting at the moment. So in the case of a large-scale catastrophe like that, what you have is people who happen to have bad karmic seeds all sprouting at the same time.

It’s not the case that they all did the same bad kamma together. But they individually did bad kamma of that sort at some point in the past, and it just so happens that those are the seeds that are sprouting right now. As for where those people will go after the event, it’ll depend on other seeds in their karmic fields.

Q: What is the unborn?

A: The unborn is the same thing as the deathless. It’s a dimension that has no space and no time. When you arrive at that dimension, you realize there’s no beginning point because there’s no time. Also, there will be no ending point because there is no time. That’s what you discover when you take apart all the different fabrications that you’re doing to hold the present moment together, which is why it’s called the unfabricated.

Q: Yesterday you said compassion for someone doesn’t require that you have to spend time with them. Isn’t it the same with love, that loving someone doesn’t mean you have to spend time with them? For example, a family member that we love and have compassion for but with whom we do not get along: Is this a reason to not spend time with them? Is this related to the role we give ourselves as parents, etc.?

A: Basically, if you find that after spending time with this person, you’re yelling at each other every time, it might be a good idea to spend some time apart. Now, if this person is your mother or father, you do have responsibilities to them. In other words, even if you can’t get along with them, you want to make sure that they don’t fall into poverty. And if they fall sick, make sure that there’s somebody to look after them well. As for your children, if they’re difficult to get along with, you’re under no obligation to spend time with them.

Q: Fermentations = rumination?

A: The word Pāli word for fermentation, āsava, can mean “effluent” or a kind of wine. The image is that sensuality, becoming, and ignorance keep bubbling up in your mind and coming out in your thoughts and your words and your deeds, leading to the flood of rebirth. When you gain full awakening, these fermentations will stop.

Q: Lying is against the precepts, but we can lie to ourselves without knowing it, can’t we? We can lie by omission, is that not right? Why, then, is it such an important fundamental element? Can you clarify these elements?

A: In the practice of the Dhamma, we’re trying to find the truth, so we don’t want to consciously tell a lie to anybody. This is specifically defined as saying something that you know is not true. That’s the basic element.

As for lying through omission, you have to stop and think: Every statement you make omits something. If somebody asks you, “How are you?” and you feel obliged to go through every single sensation you feel, you’ll find that when you’ve finished, they walked away a long time ago. So the question is, if you’re leaving something out, what is your intention in leaving it out? In this way, the precept forces you to look at what you’re saying and what you’re not saying to get an idea of what your intentions are. For example, there are examples where, if you give information to somebody, you know they’re going to abuse it. In a case like that, you can legitimately omit that information. But you can’t say anything that, in and of itself, is false.

For example, there are Nazis at the door. You have Jews up in the attic. The Nazis ask, “Do you have Jews in your attic?” You can say, “I have nothing shameful here.” What you say is true. But in another case, when you hold back the information out of a bad intention toward the other person, that wouldn’t break the precept, but it would be against the Dhamma.

Q: When doing mettā meditation, some teachers have you imagine that you’re looking at a puppy or kittens or a baby, so that you could generate feelings of care, love, and protection. Would you have other advice or tips about this? When we start the meditation at this retreat, the mettā at the beginning of the session is so quick that I feel that in my practice it’s more mental than deeply felt.

A: We can imagine having a goodwill for a snake. In other words, you don’t have to protect the snake or love the snake, but you wish it well. What this means is that mettā doesn’t have to have a strong emotion associated with it. All it needs is the understanding that you need to spread goodwill to all the beings you encounter, especially those you don’t love or like, because if you act on ill will toward them, that will become your bad kamma.

There’s a passage in the Pāli that’s often translated as saying that you should have love for all beings in the same way that a mother would love her only child.

A couple years ago, when I was teaching here, someone wrote a little note saying that it’s not the case that every mother loves her child.

However, what the passage actually says is that you should protect your goodwill in the same way that a mother would protect her only child. In the Buddha’s days, when there was no social safety net, if you were a mother with only one child, that child was your future, so you would protect it with your life, whether you loved it or not.

So you should have the same attitude toward your goodwill: You’ve got to protect it in all situations. The image the Buddha gives is that two bandits have pinned you down so that you can’t move, and they’re cutting you into little pieces with a two-handled saw. The Buddha says that even in a case like that, you have to have goodwill for them, because if you have any ill will for them, then you will be reborn with an attitude of ill will, and that will take you to a bad rebirth.