The Karma of Distraction

When you set up the intention to stay with the breath, you’ll find that other thoughts and intentions come bumping into that original intention, to deflect it.

This is where it’s good to remember the Buddha’s teachings on how your experience of the moment is based both on past karma and on present karma.

The fact that a distracting thought has appeared in the mind could be the result either of past karma or of present karma. In either case, what matters is what you intend to do with it now. That will be your most important present karma. If you go along with the thought, turn it into a thought world and go traveling in that thought world, your present karma has been kidnapped by unskillful intentions.

For instance, if a thought arises about what you’d like to eat for lunch, in ordinary circumstances you might make it your intention to dwell on that thought. You might tell yourself that it’s a perfectly innocent and natural pastime. You might even tell yourself that once the thought arises, you have to follow through with it. This, by the way, is one of the mind’s favorite excuses for following through with a thought it knows to be unskillful. You tell yourself that once the thought is there, you’re committed to following through. This is one of the mind’s favorite ways of lying to itself.

In any event, when you believe these excuses, you’ve allowed your intentions and acts of verbal fabrication help in pulling the mind in the direction of the distraction.

But here you’re meditating, and have more important work to do. So in this context, the skillful way to deal with distractions is to recognize that they’re not what you intend to focus on, and then use the present-moment-karma factors we’ve been discussing—intention, attention, and the three fabrications—in whatever forms are necessary to get the mind back with the breath.

Now, the first step in dealing with distracting thoughts is to recognize them as distractions when they come, and to remind yourself of your freedom to choose the skillful option in the present moment: The simple fact that those thoughts have arisen doesn’t commit you to following through with them.

Those are acts of appropriate attention.

But you don’t stop there. The next step is that, once you recognize distraction, you try to cut away any causes that would give rise to more distraction. The Buddha gives five examples for how you deal with distracting thoughts. As he says, when you master these approaches, you’ll be able to think the thoughts you want to think, and not think the thoughts you don’t want to think. What he doesn’t say is that you will also gradually become more discerning in detecting what’s really worth thinking and what’s not.

Each of these approaches involves asking more questions in line with appropriate attention, and using verbal and mental fabrications—in particular, perceptions and your inner conversation of directed thought and evaluation. These approaches will work, however, only if you can maintain your original intention to get mind to settle down. If you can do that, the battle is already half-won.

The first approach is to replace an unskillful thought with a more skillful one. The skillful thoughts you try to use will depend on your state of mind and the particular distraction.

The first question to ask is what caused you to slip off the breath. The state of the distracted mind, as the Buddha said, can fall into three sorts. Here we’ll focus on the first two. One is when the mind has too little energy, when it’s depressed, when it feels discouraged or lonely. The second sort is when you have too much energy, when the mind is excited or worried.

When you’ve figured out the cause, then you can apply the appropriate remedy. For the first instance, when you have too little energy, the Buddha recommends trying to gladden the mind, and several ways of thinking can do this. One is to develop the sublime attitudes: thoughts of goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, or equanimity for all beings. You may find that those thoughts lift up the mind. Another topic can be your own generosity. Think of times when you gave a gift because you freely wanted to give it. This particular thought works well if you have lots of acts of generosity you can think back on. In other words, if you can think of only one time in your life that you were freely generous, it doesn’t work as an uplifting thought for very long. This is why continuous generosity is a good basis for meditation. Another gladdening theme would be to think back on your own virtue, remembering the times when you could have done something harmful and may have gotten away with it, but you saw that it was beneath you, so you didn’t do it. That gives you a sense of self-esteem. You can also think of the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Saṅgha: any aspect of those three things that gives you a sense of inspiration. Any of these themes can help gladden the mind.

The second problem is when the mind is too excited or worried about the future. The Buddha says you should try to steady the mind, and a good theme for that is contemplation of death. In other words, death could come at any time, which means that your worries about the future would be totally useless.

Once there was a woman who came to practice at Wat Dhammasathit with Ajaan Fuang. Her plan was to stay for two weeks, but on the second day she came to say goodbye. Ajaan Fuang asked her, “Hey, I thought you were going to stay two weeks. Why are you going back so soon?” She said, “I’m worried about my family. Who’s going to cook for them? Who will wash the clothes?” He said, “Tell yourself that you’ve already died. They’re going to have to look after themselves some way or another.” And it worked. She was able to stay for the two weeks. So if you find yourself worried about what will happen after the retreat, tell yourself you’ve already died, and that can help stabilize your thoughts.

So mindfulness of death doesn’t mean thinking “death, death, death” all the time. Think about it only long enough to motivate yourself to want to get back to the breath.

Another useful contemplation to steady the mind is to tell yourself that you don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but you do know that whatever comes up, you’re going to need more mindfulness, more alertness, more discernment, and more concentration, so the best way to prepare for the future is to get the mind back to the breath and to develop those qualities in the mind right now.

That’s the first way of dealing with distracting thoughts: replacing an unskillful thought with skillful thinking. The Buddha gives you an analogy to hold in mind as a perception to associate with this approach: You’re like a carpenter who uses a fine peg to remove a large peg from a piece of wood.

This also leads into the second approach, which is to think of the drawbacks of your thinking. This deals with the third sort of reason for why you fall for a distraction: Something about it attracts you. So to get past it, you have to focus on making it unattractive. For instance, if you fall for thoughts of lust, you can imagine taking your own body apart and placing the parts on the floor in front of the person you’re attracted to. Then remember that that person’s body is made up of the same parts.

If you fall for thoughts of ill will, thinking that someone deserves to suffer for their actions so that justice is done, remember that in light of the long course of saṁsāra, you don’t know when the back-and-forth of bad actions began, or who started it. When you don’t know when this bad game began, how can you even know the score? The best thing is to pull out of the game entirely.

Another way of thinking that I’ve found very useful if my thoughts keep going back to the same topic again and again: I ask myself, “If this were a movie, would I pay to watch it?” Usually the answer is, “No. The plot is predictable, the acting is even worse, so why am I spending time with it?” When you can see these thoughts as a waste of time, it’s a lot easier to go past them.

For this approach, the Buddha gives another simile: You’re like a young man or woman, fond of your own beauty, but you look into a mirror and see the carcass of a snake or a dog hanging from your neck. In the same way, when you can get disgusted with the distracting thought and drop it, that’s the second approach.

The third approach: If the thoughts keep coming back, you can simply ignore them and pay attention to your breath instead. Remind yourself that even though there is thinking going on in the mind, it doesn’t destroy the breath. You stay with the breath and let the thoughts take care of themselves. Ajaan Lee’s image is that the thoughts are like shadows. If you go running after a shadow with a bar of soap in your hand to try to clean it to make it white, you’ll never succeed. You just get drawn further and further away from your breath. So just let the shadows run around on their own. If you stay still, eventually the shadows will have to be still as well.

Another image you can think of is that your thoughts are like crazy people. You have work to do, and they want to come and talk to you. Even if you say just a word to them to drive them away, they’ve trapped you. So the only way you can deal with them is to pretend they’re not there. They’ll say things that are even crazier and crazier to get your attention, but the best way to deal with them is just not to respond at all. When you don’t feed them with your attention, eventually they starve and they’ll go away. That’s the third approach.

The fourth approach is to notice that when the mind is thinking, there’s going to be a pattern of tension somewhere in the body. If you can locate where that tension is and just breathe right through it and allow it to relax, the thought will have no place to stay. It’ll have to stop. This works especially well as you get more and more sensitive to the breathing energies in the body. Think of the image of a spider on the web. As soon as an insect touches the web, the spider moves from its spot, deals with the insect, and then returns back to its spot. In other words, as soon as you see a pattern of tension appearing in the body, you zap it with breath energy and then you return to your focal point. That’s the fourth approach.

The fifth approach, if none of these other approaches work, is to press your tongue against your palate and tell yourself, “I will not think that thought.” If you have a meditation word such as buddho, which means, “awake,” you can just repeat that word quickly again and again and again—rapid fire, like a machine gun—in your mind, and that will block the thought. This last approach is the one that requires the least discernment and the most force, so it doesn’t work for a long time, but it is useful to have as a tool if nothing else works. It clears the mind, at least for a short period. If we think of these different approaches as if they were tools in a toolbox, the first tools are the more refined ones, like a surgeon’s tools or a watchmaker’s tools. The last tool is like a sledgehammer.

The Buddha’s image for this approach is of two strong men beating down a weaker man.

These are the five ways of dealing with distracting thoughts:

In each case, you use the approach until it gets you back to the breath.

So when you see that you have a distraction, remember that you have a variety of tools of present-moment karma to free yourself from it. Try to understand what the distraction is and why the mind is attracted to it. Is it because there’s too little energy or too much energy? Or is it because there’s something in the thought itself that’s really attractive? Once you see what the problem is, gain a sense of which tool will work for that particular problem. This is one of the ways in which you can exercise the power of your karma to keep your meditation on track.