Meditations
Forty Dhamma Talks
by
Thanissaro Bhikkhu (Geoffrey DeGraff)
Copyright © 2003 Thanissaro Bhikkhu
For free distribution only.
This book may be copied or reprinted for free distribution
without permission from the publisher.
Otherwise all rights reserved.

Contents
" Introduction
" Generosity First
" The How & the Why
" Watch What You're Doing
" The Interactive Present
" Imagine
" In the Mood
" The Story-telling Mind
" How to Fall
" Tuning-in to the Breath
" Bathed in the Breath
" The Steps of Breath Meditation
" The Observer
" Judicious vs. Judgmental
" Impossible Things
" Contentment in the Practice
" Patience
" Training the Whole Mind
" The Grain of the Wood
" A Good Dose of Medicine
" Life in the Buddha's Hospital
" Vows
" The Dignity of Restraint
" Fears
" Skills to Take with You
" Maintenance Work
" Sensitivity All the Time
" The Path of Questions
" Admirable Friendship
" Heightening the Mind
" Respect for Concentration
" The Uses of Pleasure & Pain
" An Introduction to Pain
" A Dependable Mind
" The Components of Suffering
" Giving Rise to Discernment
" Producing Experience
" Mastering Causality
" The Six Properties
" Fabrication
" At the Door of the Cage
" Glossary

Introduction
The daily schedule at Metta Forest Monastery includes a group interview in the late afternoon, and a chanting session followed by a group meditation period later in the evening. The Dhamma talks included in this volume were given during the evening meditation sessions, and in many cases covered issues raised at the interviews -- either in the questions asked or lurking behind the questions. Often these issues touched on a variety of topics on a variety of different levels in the practice. This explains the range of topics covered in individual talks.
I have edited the talks with an eye to making them readable while at the same time trying to preserve some of the flavor of the spoken word. In a few instances I have added passages or rearranged the material to make the treatment of specific topics more coherent and complete, but for the most part I have kept the editing to a minimum. Don't expect polished essays.
The people listening to these talks were familiar with the meditaiton instructions included in "Method 2" in Keeping the Breath in Mind by Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo; and my own essay, "A Guided Meditation." If you are not familiar with these instructions, you might want to read through them before reading the talks in this book. Further Dhamma talks are available on the Metta Forest Monastery website.
* * *
I would like to thank Bok Lim Kim for making the recording of these talks possible. She, more than anyone else, is responsible for overcoming my initial reluctance to have the talks taped. I would also like to thank the following people for transcribing the tapes and/or helping to edit the transcriptions: Paul and Debra Breger, Richard Heiman, Jane Yudelman, Dhammattho Bhikkhu, Gunaddho Bhikkhu, Susuddho Bhikkhu, and Khematto Bhikkhu. May they all be happy.
Whatever merit there may be to these talks comes from the training I received from my teachers, Ajaan Fuang Jotiko and Ajaan Suwat Suvaco. This book is dedicated to their memory, with utmost gratitude.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Metta Forest Monastery
August, 2003

Generosity First
March, 2003
Several years ago, when Ajaan Suwat was teaching a retreat at IMS, I was his interpreter. After the second or third day of the retreat he turned to me and said, "I notice that when these people meditate they're awfully grim." You'd look out across the room and all the people were sitting there very seriously, their faces tense, their eyes closed tight. It was almost as if they had Nirvana or Bust written across their foreheads.
He attributed their grimness to the fact that most people here in the West come to Buddhist meditation without any preparation in other Buddhist teachings. They haven't had any experience in being generous in line with the Buddha's teachings on giving. They haven't had any experience in developing virtue in line with the Buddhist precepts. They come to the Buddha's teachings without having tested them in daily life, so they don't have the sense of confidence they need to get them through the hard parts of the meditation. They feel they have to rely on sheer determination instead.
If you look at the way meditation, virtue, and generosity are taught here, it's the exact opposite of the order in which they're taught in Asia. Here, people sign up for a retreat to learn some meditation, and only when they show up at the retreat center do they learn they're going to have to observe some precepts during the retreat. And then at the very end of the retreat they learn that before they'll be allowed to go home they're going to have to be generous. It's all backwards.
Over in Thailand, children's first exposure to Buddhism, after they've learned the gesture of respect, is in giving. You see parents taking their children by the hand as a monk comes past on his alms round, lifting them up, and helping them put a spoonful of rice into the monk's bowl. Over time, as the children start doing it themselves, the process becomes less and less mechanical, and after a while they begin to take pleasure in giving.
At first this pleasure may seem counterintuitive. The idea that you gain happiness by giving things away doesn't come automatically to a young child's mind. But with practice you find that it's true. After all, when you give, you put yourself in a position of wealth. The gift is proof that you have more than enough. At the same time it gives you a sense of your worth as a person. You're able to help other people. The act of giving also creates a sense of spaciousness in the mind, because the world we live in is created by our actions, and the act of giving creates a spacious world: a world where generosity is an operating principle, a world where people have more than enough, enough to share. And it creates a good feeling in the mind.
From there, the children are exposed to virtue: the practice of the precepts. And again, from a child's point of view it's counterintuitive that you're going to be happy by not doing certain things you want to do -- as when you want to take something, or when you want to lie to cover up your embarrassment or to protect yourself from criticism and punishment. But over time you begin to discover that, yes, there is a sense of happiness, there is a sense of wellbeing that comes from being principled, from not having to cover up for any lies, from avoiding unskillful actions, from having a sense that unskillful actions are beneath you.
So by the time you come to meditation through the route of giving and being virtuous, you've already had experience in learning that there are counterintuitive forms of happiness in the world. When you've been trained through exposure to the Buddha's teachings, you've learned the deeper happiness that comes from giving, the deeper happiness that comes from restraining yourself from unskillful actions, no matter how much you might want to do them. By the time you come to the meditation you've developed a certain sense of confidence that so far the Buddha has been right, so you give him the benefit of the doubt on meditation.
This confidence is what allows you to overcome a lot of the initial difficulties: the distractions, the pain. At the same time, the spaciousness that comes from generosity gives you the right mindset for the concentration practice, gives you the right mindset for insight practice -- because when you sit down and focus on the breath, what kind of mind do you have? The mind you've been creating through your generous and virtuous actions. A spacious mind, not the narrow mind of a person who doesn't have enough. It's the spacious mind of a person who has more than enough to share, the mind of a person who has no regrets or denial over past actions. In short, it's the mind of a person who realizes that true happiness doesn't see a sharp dichotomy between your own wellbeing and the wellbeing of others.
The whole idea that happiness has to consist either in doing things only for your own selfish motives or for other people to the sacrifice of yourself -- the dichotomy between the two -- is something very Western, but it's antithetical to the Buddha's teachings. According to the Buddha's teachings, true happiness is something that, by its nature, gets spread around. By working for your own true benefit, you're working for the benefit of others. And by working for the benefit of others, you're working for your own. In the act of giving to others you gain rewards. In the act of holding fast to the precepts, holding fast to your principles, protecting others from your unskillful behavior, you gain as well. You gain in mindfulness; you gain in your own sense of worth as a person, your own self-esteem. You protect yourself.
So you come to the meditation ready to apply the same principles to training in tranquility and insight. You realize that the meditation is not a selfish project. You're sitting here trying to understand your greed, anger, and delusion, trying to bring them under control -- which means that you're not the only person who's going to benefit from the meditation. Other people will benefit -- are benefiting -- as well. As you become more mindful, more alert, more skillful in undercutting the hindrances in your mind, other people are less subject to those hindrances as well. Less greed, anger, and delusion come out in your actions, and so the people around you suffer less. Your meditating is a gift to them.
The quality of generosity, what they call caga in Pali, is included in many sets of Dhamma teachings. One is the set of practices leading to a fortunate rebirth. This doesn't apply only to the rebirth that comes after death, but also to the states of being, the states of mind you create for yourself moment to moment, that you move into with each moment. You create the world in which you live through your actions. By being generous -- not only with material things but also with your time, your energy, your forgiveness, your willingness to be fair and just with other people -- you create a good world in which to live. If your habits tend more toward being stingy, they create a very confining world, because there's never enough. There's always a lack of this, or a lack of that, or a fear that something is going to slip away or get taken away from you. So it's a narrow, fearful world you create when you're not generous, as opposed to the confident and wide-open world you create through acts of generosity.
Generosity also counts as one of the forms of Noble Wealth, because what is wealth aside from a sense of having more than enough? Many people who are materially poor are, in terms of their attitude, very wealthy. And many people with a lot of material wealth are extremely poor. The ones who never have enough: They're the ones who always need more security, always need more to stash away. Those are the people who have to build walls around their houses, who have to live in gated communities for fear that other people will take away what they've got. That's a very poor kind of life, a confined kind of life. But as you practice generosity, you realize that you can get by on less, and that there's a pleasure that comes with giving to people. Right there is a sense of wealth. You have more than enough.
At the same time you break down barriers. Monetary transactions create barriers. Somebody hands you something, you have to hand them money back, so there's a barrier right there. Otherwise, if you didn't pay, the object wouldn't come to you over the barrier. But if something is freely given, it breaks down a barrier. You become part of that person's extended family. In Thailand the terms of address that monks use with their lay supporters are the same they use with relatives. The gift of support creates a sense of relatedness. The monastery where I stayed -- and this includes the lay supporters as well as the monks -- was like a large extended family. This is true of many of the monasteries in Thailand. There's a sense of relatedness, a lack of boundary.
We hear so much talk on "interconnectedness." Many times it's explained in terms of the teaching on dependent co-arising, which is really an inappropriate use of the teaching. Dependent co-arising teaches the connectedness of ignorance to suffering, the connectedness of craving to suffering. That's a connectedness within the mind, and it's a connectedness that we need to cut, because it keeps suffering going on and on and on, over and over again, in many, many cycles. But there's another kind of connectedness, an intentional connectedness, that comes through our actions. These are kamma connections. Now, we in the West often have problems with the teachings on kamma, which may be why we want the teachings on connectedness without the kamma. So we go looking elsewhere in the Buddha's teachings to find a rationale or a basis for a teaching on connectedness, but the real basis for a sense of connectedness comes through kamma. When you interact with another person, a connection is made.
Now, it can be a positive or a negative connection, depending on the intention. With generosity you create a positive connection, a helpful connection, a connection where you're glad that the boundary is down, a connection where good things can flow back and forth. If it's unskillful kamma, you're creating a connection, you're creating an opening that sooner or later you're going to regret. There's a saying in the Dhammapada that a hand without a wound can hold poison and not be harmed. In other words, if you don't have any bad kamma, the results of bad kamma won't come to you. But if you have a wound on your hand, then if you hold poison it will seep through the wound and kill you. Unskillful kamma is just that, a wound. It's an opening for poisonous things to come in.
The opposite principle also works. If there's a connection of skillful behavior, a good connection is formed. This sort of positive connection starts with generosity, and grows with the gift of virtue. As the Buddha said, when you hold to your precepts no matter what, with no exceptions, it's a gift of security to all beings. You give unlimited security to everyone, and so you have a share in that unlimited security as well. With the gift of meditation, you protect other people from the effects of your greed, anger, and delusion. And you get protected as well.
So this is what generosity does: It makes your mind more spacious and creates good connections with the people around you. It dissolves the boundaries that otherwise would keep the happiness from spreading around.
When you come to the meditation with that state of mind, it totally changes the way you approach meditating. So many people come to meditation with the question, "What am I going to get out of this time I spend meditating?" Particularly in the modern world, time is something we're very poor in. So the question of getting, getting, getting out of the mediation is always there in the background. We're advised to erase this idea of getting, yet you can't erase it if you've been cultivating it as a habitual part of your mind. But if you come to the meditation with experience in being generous, the question becomes "What do I give to the meditation?" You give it your full attention. You give it the effort, you're happy to put in the effort, because you've learned from experience that good effort put into the practice of the Dhamma brings good results. And so that internal poverty of "What am I getting out of this meditation?" gets erased. You come to the meditation with a sense of wealth: "What can I give to this practice?"
You find, of course, that you end up getting a lot more if you start with the attitude of giving. The mind is more up for challenges: "How about if I give it more time? How about meditating later into the night than I usually do? How about getting up earlier in the morning? How about giving more constant attention to what I'm doing? How about sitting longer through pain?" The meditation then becomes a process of giving, and of course you still get the results. When you're not so grudging of your efforts or time, you place fewer and fewer limitations on the process of meditation. That way the results are sure to be less grudging, more unlimited, as well. So it's important that we develop the Noble Wealth of generosity to bring to our meditation.
The texts mention that when you get discouraged in your meditation, when the meditation gets dry, you should look back on past generosity. This gives you a sense of self-esteem, a sense of encouragement. Of course, what generosity are you going to look back on if there is none? This is why it's important that you approach the meditation having practiced generosity very consciously.
Many times we ask, "How do I take the meditation back into the world?" But it's also important that you bring good qualities of the world into your meditation, good qualities of your day-to-day life, and that you develop them regularly. Thinking back on past acts of generosity gets dry after a while if there's only been one act of generosity that happened a long time ago. You need fresh generosity to give you encouragement.
So this is why, when the Buddha talked about the forms of merit, he said, "Don't be afraid of merit, for merit is another word for happiness." The first of the three main forms of merit is dana, giving, which is the expression of generosity. The gift of being virtuous builds on the simple act of giving, and the gift of meditation builds on both.
Of course, a large part of the meditation is letting go: letting go of distractions, letting go of unskillful thoughts. If you're used to letting go of material things, it comes a lot easier to begin experimenting with letting go of unskillful mental attitudes -- things that you've held on to for so long that you think you need them, but when you really look at them you find you don't. In fact, you see that they're an unnecessary burden that causes suffering. When you see the suffering, and the fact that it's needless, you can let go. In this way, the momentum of giving carries all the way through the practice, and you realize that it's not depriving you of anything. It's more like a trade. You give away a material object and you gain in generous qualities of mind. You give away your defilements, and you gain freedom.

The How & the Why
November 14, 1996
Two important questions you have to answer about meditation are "how?" and "why?" -- how to do it and why you are doing it -- because meditation is not just a technique. There's a context for the practice, and only when you see the practice in context can you really understand what you're doing and get the most out of it.
The "how" is pretty simple. With breath meditation, sit straight, hands in your lap, right hand on top of your left hand, your legs crossed, right leg on top of the left leg, your eyes closed. That's getting your body into position. Getting your mind into position means focusing it in on the present moment. Think about the breath and then notice how the breath feels as it comes in, how it feels as it goes out. Be aware of the breathing. That means you have two qualities at work: the thinking or mindfulness, which reminds you where to stay; and the alertness, which tells you what's happening with the breath. Those are two of the qualities you want.
The third quality is what the Buddha called atappa, or ardency, which means you really put an effort into it. You really focus on what you're doing. You're not just playing around. You give it your whole attention. You try to be ardently mindful and ardently alert.
Ardently mindful means that you try to keep your mindfulness as continuous as possible, without any gaps. If you find that your mind has slipped off the breath, you bring it right back. You don't let it dawdle here or sniff at the flowers there. You've got work to do and you want to get it done as quickly, as thoroughly, as possible. You have to maintain that kind of attitude. As the Buddha said, it's like realizing that your head is on fire. You put it out as fast as possible. The issues we're dealing with are serious issues, urgent issues: aging, illness, and death. They're like fires burning away inside us. So you have to maintain that sense of ardency because you never know when these fires are going to flare up. You want to be as prepared as possible, as quickly as possible. So when the mind wanders off, be ardent in bringing it back.
Ardently alert means that when the mind is staying with the breath, you try to be as sensitive as possible in adjusting it to make it feel good, and in monitoring the results of your efforts. Try long breathing to see how it feels. Try short breathing, heavy breathing, light breathing, deep, shallow. The more refined you can make your awareness, the better the meditation goes because you can make the breath more and more refined, a more and more comfortable place for the mind to stay. Then you can let that sense of comfort spread throughout the body. Think of the breath not simply as the air coming in and out the lungs, but as the flow of energy throughout the whole body. The more refined your awareness, the more sensitive you can be to that flow. The more sensitive you are, the more refined the breath becomes, the more gratifying, the more absorbing it becomes as a place to stay.
This is the basic trick in getting the mind to settle down in the present moment -- you've got to give it something that it likes to stay with. If it's here against its will, it's going to be like a balloon you push under the water. As long as your hand has a good grasp on the balloon, it's not going to pop up, but as soon as you slip a little bit, the balloon pops up out of the water. If the mind is forced to stay on an object that it really finds unpleasant, it's not going to stay. As soon as your mindfulness slips just a little bit, it's gone.
Or you can compare it to parents raising a child. If the parents are constantly beating the child, the child is going to run away from home as soon as it finds the chance. Even if they lock the windows and doors, it's going to look for an opening. As soon as they turn their backs, it's gone. But if the parents are kind to the child -- give it good things to play with, interesting things to do at home, lots of warmth and love -- the child will want to stay home even if the windows and doors are left wide open.
So it is with the mind. Be friendly with it. Give it something good to stay with in the present moment -- like comfortable breathing. Maybe you can't make the whole body comfortable, but make at least part of the body comfortable and stay with that part. As for the pains, let them be in the other part. They have every right to be there, so make an arrangement with them. They stay in one part, you stay in another. But the essential point is that you have a place where the mind feels stable, secure, and comfortable in the present moment. These are the beginning steps in meditation.
This kind of meditation can be used for all sorts of purposes, but the Buddha realized that the most important purpose is to get the mind out of the whole cycle of aging, illness, and death. And when you think about it, there's nothing more important than that. That's the big problem in life and yet society tends to slough off the problems of aging, illness, and death, tends to push them off to the side because other things seem more pressing. Making a lot of money is more important. Having fulfilling relationships is more important. Whatever. And the big issues in life -- the fact that you're headed for the sufferings and indignities that come with an aging, ill, or dying body -- get pushed off, pushed out of the way. "Not yet, not yet, maybe some other time." And of course when that other time does arrive and these things come barging in, they won't accept your "not yet," won't be pushed out anymore. If you haven't prepared yourself for them, you'll really be up the creek, at a total loss.
So these are the most important things you need to prepare for. A lot of other things in life are uncertain, but a couple of things are certain. Aging comes. Illness comes. Death is going to come for sure. So when you know something is going to come for sure, you have to prepare for it. And when you realize that this is the most important issue in life, you have to look at the way you live your life. Meditation -- the practice of the Buddha's teachings -- is not just a question of sitting with your eyes closed every now and then. It's about how you order your priorities. As the Buddha said, when you see there's a greater level of happiness that can be found by sacrificing lesser forms of happiness, you sacrifice the lesser ones. Look at your life and the things you hold onto, the little places where the mind finds its pleasure but doesn't gain any real fulfillment: Are those the things you really want to hold onto? Are you going to let them be the factors governing your life?
And then you can think of larger issues. The chance for a happiness that goes beyond aging, illness, and death: Will that be the first priority in your life?
These are questions we all have to ask within ourselves. The Buddha doesn't force our answers. He simply sets out what the situation is. He says that there is a possibility for happiness lying beyond the happiness that comes from simply eating and sleeping, looking after the body and having a comfortable time. This possibility is the good news in the Buddha's teachings, especially since most of the world says, "Well, this is all there is to life, so make the most of it. Satisfy yourself with these immediate pleasures and don't think about other things. Don't let yourself get dissatisfied with what you've got." When you think about this attitude, it's really depressing because all it means is that you grab at what you can before you die. And when you die, you can't take it with you.
But the Buddha said there's a form of happiness, there's a form of knowing in the mind, that goes beyond aging, illness, and death, and that can be attained through human effort if you're skillful enough. So that's both good news and a challenge. Are you going to let yourself just live an ordinary life frittering your time away? Or are you going to accept the challenge to devote yourself to more important things, devote yourself to this possibility?
The Buddha was the sort of person who put his life on the line. He didn't have anyone telling him that this was a possibility, but he thought that the only way life would have any dignity, any honor would be if you could find a happiness that doesn't age, doesn't grow ill, doesn't die. And he ran up against all the things he would have to sacrifice in order to find that happiness. So he made those sacrifices -- not because he wanted to sacrifice those things, but because he had to. As a result he was able to find what he was looking for. So the story of his life and his teachings are meant as a challenge for us -- how are we going to lead our lives?
Here we are sitting together meditating. What are you going to do with a still mind, once it's become still? If you wanted to, you could simply use concentration practice as a method of relaxation or a way of calming the nerves. However, the Buddha says that there's more to it than that. When the mind is really still, you can dig deep down into the mind and begin to see all the currents that lie underground within it. You can start sorting them out, understanding what drives the mind. Where is the greed? Where is the anger? Where are the delusions that keep you spinning around? How can you cut through them?
These are the questions, these are the issues that can be tackled in the meditation -- as long as you have a sense of their importance, that they're your real priorities. If you don't have that sense, you don't want to touch them because they're big issues and they snarl at you when you get near. But if you really dig down, you find that they're just paper tigers. I once saw a meditation manual that contained a drawing of a tiger. The face of a tiger was very realistic -- all the details were very scary -- but its body was made out of folded paper. And that's what a lot of issues are in the mind. They come at you, looking really intimidating, but if you face them down they turn into origami.
But in order to face them down you've got to have a sense that these are the really important issues in life and you're willing to give up an awful lot for their sake. You're willing to give up whatever you have to give up. That's what makes the difference between a practice that goes someplace, that really knocks down the walls in the mind, and a practice that simply rearranges the furniture in the room.
So when you practice meditation, you realize there is both the "how" and the "why," and the "why" is really important. Often the "why" gets pushed off to the side. You simply follow this or that technique, and then what you want to do with it is up to you -- which is true in a way, but doesn't take into account the possibilities. When you put the possibilities into the context of the Buddha's teachings, you see the values that underlie the practice. You see how deep the practice goes, how much it can accomplish, and what an enormous job you're taking on. It's enormous, but the results are enormous as well.
And the issues are urgent. Aging, illness, and death can come at any time, and you have to ask yourself, "Are you prepared? Are you ready to die?" Ask yourself in all honesty and if you're not ready, what's the problem? What are you still lacking? Where are you still holding on? Why do you want to hold on? When the mind settles down and is still, you can start digging into these issues. And the more you dig, the more you uncover within the mind -- layers and layers of things that you didn't suspect, that have been governing your life since who knows when. You dig them out, you see them for what they are, and you're free from them. You realize all the stupid things that have been running your life, picked up from who knows where. You can't blame anyone else. You're the one who picked them up and you played along with them.
Now, when you realize that nothing is accomplished by playing along -- that it's better not to play along with these things, and you don't have to -- then you can let them go. And they let you go. What's left is total freedom. The Buddha said that it's so total it can't even be described by words.
So that's the possibility the meditation points to, and it's up to each of us to decide how far we want to go in that direction, how much we do really care for our true happiness, for our own true wellbeing. You would think that everyone would say, "Of course I care for my happiness and true wellbeing." But if you look at the way people live their lives, you can see that they really don't put that much energy or thought into the quest for true happiness. People usually see other people do things in this or that way, so they follow along without looking for themselves, as if true happiness were so unimportant that you could leave it up to other people to make your choices for you. Meditation, though, is a chance to look for yourself at what's really important in life and then do something about it.

Watch What You're Doing
August 19, 2003
"Days and nights fly past, fly past: What am I doing right now?"
The Buddha has you ask that question every day, both to keep yourself from being complacent and to remind yourself that the practice is one of doing. Even though we're sitting here very still, there's still a doing going on in the mind. There's the intention to focus on the breath, the intention to maintain that focus, and the intention to keep watch over how the breath and the mind are behaving. Meditation as a whole is a doing. Even when you practice non-reactivity or "being the knowing," there's a still an element of intention. That's what the doing is.
That was one of the Buddha's most important insights: that even when you're sitting perfectly still with the intention not to do anything, there's still the intention, and the intention itself is a doing. It's a sankhara, a fabrication. It's what we live with all the time. In fact, all of our experience is based on fabrication. The fact that you sense your body, feelings, perceptions, thought-constructs, consciousness -- all of these aggregates: To be able to experience them in the present moment you have to fabricate a potential into an actual aggregate. You fabricate the potential for form into an actual experience of form, the potential for feeling into an actual experience of feeling, and so on. This element of fabrication lies in the background all the time. It's like the background noise of the Big Bang, which hums throughout the whole universe and doesn't go away. The element of fabrication is always there, shaping our experience, and it's so consistently present that we lose sight of it. We don't realize what we're doing.
What you're trying to do as you meditate is to strip things down so you can see the very elemental fabrications going on in the mind, the kamma you're creating with every moment. We're not making the mind still simply to have a nice restful place to be, a nice experience of ease to soothe our stressed-out nerves. That may be part of it, but it's not the whole practice. The other part is to see clearly what's going on, to see the potential of human action: What are we doing all the time? What are the potentials contained in this doing? Then we apply that understanding of human action to see how far we can go in stripping away the unnecessary stress and suffering that come from acting in unskillful ways.
It's important that we always keep this in mind as we meditate. Remember: We're here to understand human action, in particular our own human actions. Otherwise we sit here hoping that we don't have to do anything, that we can just wait for some Imax experiences to come whap us upside the head, or some nice glowing sense of oneness to come welling up inside. And sometimes things like that can come unexpectedly, but if they come without your understanding how or why they came, they're not all that helpful. They're restful for a while, or amazing for a while, but then they go away and you have to deal with your desire to get them back. And, of course, no amount of desire is going to get them back if it's not accompanied by understanding.
You can't totally drop human action until you understand the nature of action. This is really important. We like to think that we can simply stop doing, stop doing, stop doing, and things will settle down, get calm, and open up to emptiness. But that's more like zoning out than meditating. There is an element of stopping in the meditation, an element of letting go, but you can't really master it until you understand what you're trying to stop, what you're letting go. So try to watch out for that. When you come out of a good meditation, don't simply get up and go back to the kitchen, have a cocoa, and go back to sleep. Reflect on what you did so as to understand the pattern of cause and effect, to see exactly what you fabricated in the process of bringing the mind down to a state of calm. After all, the path is a fabricated path. It's the ultimate fabrication. As the Buddha said, of all the fabricated phenomena there are in the world, the highest is the noble eightfold path. This is the path we're trying to follow right now. It's something put together, and you won't understand it until you see the putting-together in as you're doing it.
So always have that in the back of your mind: that you are doing something here. Sometimes it seems frustrating that the whole hour may be spent just pulling back, pulling back, pulling the mind back to the breath. It wanders off, so you pull it back again, and then it wanders -- when is the peace and calm going to come? Well, before it can come you have to develop some understanding. So when you pull it back, try to understand what you're doing. When it wanders off, try to understand what's happening, what you did to encourage or allow it to wander off. In particular, try to uncover all the skillful and unskillful intentions that go into this back-and-forth process. When you understand how the mind goes back and forth, you'll reach the point where you can keep it from going back and forth. At the same time, you'll develop the kind of insight we want in the meditation: insight into actions.
The Buddha said discernment involves comprehending the process of fabrication, the process of action that's going on in the mind all the time. And all the basic building blocks of action are right here. There's the physical fabrication that leads to action -- in other words, the breath. Without the breath you couldn't do any other physical actions at all. Then there's verbal fabrication: directed thought and evaluation. Without those you wouldn't be able to speak. And then there's mental fabrication: perceptions and feelings. Without those, the process of mental fabrication wouldn't have any building blocks to build with. These are all the most basic forms of activity: physical, verbal, and mental. So we bring them all together right here when we've got the mind with the breath. We're focused on the breath, directing our thoughts to the breath, evaluating the breath, aware of all the mental labels that label the breath, and all the feelings that come with the breath, pleasant or unpleasant. All the basic building blocks are right here.
These building blocks are not things, they're activities. You might call them basic activity units. These are the things you have to bring together in order to get the mind to settle down. Otherwise it goes off and elaborates all kinds of other worlds to inhabit, pulling its attention away from the basic activity units and hoping to live in their end-products. So you keep reminding yourself to come back to this level, this level, this level where things are basic, and you try to manipulate these things skillfully so as to still the mind. It's an intentional stilling, so there's an element of doing even in the being still, but it's a doing for the purpose of knowing. Most of our doing is for the purpose of ignorance. It comes out of ignorance and heads toward ignorance, covering up our intentions so that we can forget the effort that goes into the doing and simply enjoy the end-product experiences that our doing creates.
Some people think that Buddhism is a religion of experiences. We want to have a religious experience when we come here, we want to have an experience of release or an experience of peace. Actually, though, the Dhamma is meant to take us beyond our incessant habit of producing and consuming experiences. And to do that, we have to understand the nature of action that underlies the producing and consuming, to see exactly what it is to be a human being who acts. What does it mean to act? How does the mind act? What is an intention? Why does the mind have intentions? Are these process really pleasant or are they burdensome? What would it be like if we didn't have to do them? We need to look into these things, we need to understand these processes before we can get to where we really want to go. If you don't understand human action, you won't be able to explore the full limits of human action. You won't be able to understand how far human action can take you. So we're here to study, we're here to learn from our actions.
This teaching on action is something particular to the Buddha's teachings -- this sense of what an action is and how far an action can go. It's easy to say that all the great religions focus on having experiences beyond what words can describe. Sounds nice. Very friendly. Very ecumenical. But when you compare what the various religions say about action -- what it means to act, what the potentials of human action are -- you see that they differ greatly. Some teachings say that we don't really act at all, that there's an outside force acting through us, that everything's pre-determined. Others say that we do act, but our actions have no real consequences. Or that there are lots of limitations on what we can do to produce true happiness, so we need some outside power to help us. You can't lump these various teachings on action together and pretend that the differences don't count. The fact is: They don't jibe. They're diametrically opposed. They get in one another's way.
This was why the early Buddhists kept insisting that the teaching on action was what set Buddhism apart, that it was the most important issue where people have to make a choice and take a stand. And this was why the Buddha's last words were that we need to be heedful. He didn't end his teaching career with some nice platitudes on emptiness or nibbana. He said to be heedful -- to see our actions as important and to keep that importance in mind at all times.
So this is where you have to make a choice: Which theory of action are you planning to place your hopes on? That's what you're asked to commit to when you take refuge in the Triple Gem: the teaching on action, the teaching on kamma. Taking refuge is not a warm, fuzzy, cowardly cop-out. It's the act of taking on full responsibility for your choices and intentions. How far are you planning to go with your actions? How far are you willing to push the envelope? These are questions that we all have to answer for ourselves, and no one can force the answer on us. But just remember: The Buddha said that it's possible for human action to go to the end of action -- in other words, to go to a dimension in the mind where ultimately there is no more intention. He says that that's the highest happiness. Now, we can take that statement merely as an historical curiosity or we can take that as a personal challenge. It's up to us.
At the very least, when you're sitting here meditating and things don't seem to be going right, don't blame it on the weather. Don't blame it on the time of day. Just look at what you're doing. Look at the raw material you have to work with and your skill in fashioning that raw material into a state of calm. From the Buddhist point of view, that raw material comes from past actions. You can't change the fact that this is the raw material you have at hand, but you can fashion that raw material in different ways. That freedom of choice is always present. So if things aren't going well in your meditation, look at your intentions to see what you might change. Look at your perceptions, at the questions you're posing in the mind. Experiment. Improvise. See what makes a difference.
When things are going well, try to maintain them well. See how you can develop that sense of wellness even further. This is Right Effort. This is where we encounter the element of intention, the element of action directly in our own minds. If you sit here complaining about how things aren't going well in your meditation, that's your choice: You chose to complain. Is that the most skillful thing to do? If it's not, try something else. You've always got that freedom.
When things are going well, you can always choose to get complacent. If you get complacent, where does that take you? You can choose to manipulate things too much, too little, or just right. The choices are here. It's important that we keep that in mind. Otherwise we find ourselves trapped in a particular situation and can't think our way out, because we don't realize the range of available possibilities.
Try to keep your sense of those possibilities as alive as possible, so that the doing of the meditation becomes a skillful doing and not just a thrashing around. You observe, you watch, you look into this question: "What does it mean to have an intention? How can I see the results of my intentions? Where do they show their results?" They show their results both in your state of mind and in your breathing, so look right here, make your adjustments right here.
And even if you're not consciously thinking about the nature of human action, you're learning a lot about your own actions as you work with the breath, trying to keep the mind with the breath, trying to make the breath a good place for the mind to stay. You're muddling around here in the basic elements of human action, like a young kid fooling around with a guitar: After a while, if the kid is observant, the fooling around turns into music. The more observant you are in the way you relate to the breath, the more your muddle will turn into a process of discovery.

The Interactive Present
August, 2002
When you try to settle into the present moment, sometimes you find sticks, rocks, and thorns. They can be either in the body or in the mind, and you have to do your best to deal with them. It would be nice if you could simply follow some easy, step-by-step instructions: 1,2,3,4, first you do this and then you do that, and then the results come without your having to figure anything out on your own. And sometimes there are instructions like that in meditation books -- but often the mind doesn't fall in line with them. Ideally you should be able to let the mind settle down and grow calm and then deal with difficult issues, but sometimes before you can settle down you've got to deal with some difficulties first.
It's not only the case that discernment requires concentration. Concentration also requires discernment -- learning how to bypass whatever issues you can bypass and how to deal directly with the ones you have to deal with before you can get the mind to settle down.
If there's rampant lust or anger in the mind, you've got to deal with it. You can't pretend it's not there. You can't shove it off into the corner, for it'll keep jumping out of the corner back at you. So you remind yourself of the drawbacks of that kind of thinking; you look to see where there's a lack of reasoning or a lack of logic in that kind of thinking. Many times that thinking simply comes at you with a lot of force, just as a belligerent person comes at you with a lot of force to make up for his lack of reason.
So you look at your lust, look at your anger, look at your fears, and try to see, "What are they actually saying?" Sometimes you have to listen to them. If you listen really carefully you'll see that after a while they don't make any sense. When you can see that, it's a lot easier to put them aside. When they come back at you, say, "You're not making any sense at all." Then you've got a handle on them.
The same with physical pain. Sometimes when you sit down to meditate there's pain in the body and it has nothing to do with the meditation posture. It's simply there no matter what your posture. So you have to learn how to deal with it. Focus on other parts of the body so you get at least some sense of having a beachhead in the present moment, a place where you can stay and you're okay. Then you work from that position of strength. Once you get a sense of the breath going smoothly and comfortably, you let it expand from that spot into other parts of the body, moving through the part where there's pain and out the feet and out the hands.
You begin to realize that those thorns in the present are not just a given. There has to be a part of you that's playing along with them, that's making them a problem. Once you see that, the thorns are a lot easier to deal with.
Sometimes there's a pain in the body and the way you're breathing is actually maintaining it. Sometimes the problem is your fear that it's going to spread, which makes you build a little shell of tension around it -- and while that shell of tension may keep the pain from spreading, it also keeps it in existence. The breath energy doesn't flow smoothly there, and that helps maintain the pain. When you catch yourself doing this, you get an interesting insight: The present moment is not just something given. You're participating in it. An element of your intention is shaping it.
Then you can turn around and use this same principle with the mind. When there's lust or anger, part of it may be coming from past habit, but another part from your present participation. It's easy to understand this in the case of lust. You're enjoying it and so you want to continue it. Actually, part of the mind is enjoying it while another part is suffering. What you want to do is bring the suffering part out, give it voice, give it some space to express itself.
This is especially needed in our culture. People who don't submit to their lust are said to be repressed and have all kinds warped beasts in the basement. So the part of the mind that thrives when it's freed from lust doesn't get a chance. It gets pushed into the corner of the basement. It becomes the repressed part. But if you can ferret out the part of the mind that's really enjoying the lust and say: "Hey, wait a minute, what kind of enjoyment is this? How about that stress over there? How about that discomfort over there? The sense of dissatisfaction that comes along with the lust, the cloudiness that comes into the mind because of the lust -- how about that?" You can start to highlight the part of the mind that really doesn't enjoy the lust. Then you have a better chance of dealing with the lust and working your way out from under its thumb.
The same with anger: Try to find the part of the mind that's enjoying the anger. See what kind of happiness it gets from indulging in the anger. See how piddling and miserable that happiness is. That way you strengthen the part of the mind that really doesn't want to play along.
The same goes with other emotions, such as fear or greed: Once you catch the part of the mind that's enjoying it -- participating, keeping it going right now -- learn to undercut it. Learn how to emphasize the part that doesn't want to play along.
Then you can start applying the same principle to positive mind states, the ones that you're trying to develop. If you're conscious of the part of the mind that doesn't want to stay with the breath, try to find the part of the mind that does, that really appreciates having a chance to settle down and let go of its burdens. The potential is there, simply that it's not emphasized.
So learn to give yourself pep talks. People who get easily discouraged are the ones who haven't learned that talent. You have to learn how to give yourself encouragement: "See? You did that. You brought the mind back. See if you can do it again the next time. See if you can do it faster." That's the kind of encouragement you need, the kind that keeps you participating in getting states of concentration going. After all, if the present isn't just a given, why don't you learn how to shape a good present? Emphasize the positive things, so they really do get stronger. That way you find that you're less and less a victim of events. You come to play a stronger, more positive role in shaping your experience of the present.
We talk many times about how ultimately you want to discontinue that participation in the present so that you can open up to the Deathless. But before you do that, you've got to get skillful in how you participate in the present moment. You can't skip straight from unskillful participation to the ultimate skill of learning how to open up to the Deathless. You've got to go through all of the stages of learning how to make the present a more positive experience -- through the way you breathe, the way you focus on the breath, the way you deal with the various states, positive or negative, that come up in the mind. You've got to learn how to be a better manager of the present moment before you can develop the even more refined skills of learning how to take all of this participation apart.
So when you sit down to meditate, you've got to realize that not everything is a given. You're participating right now. What kind of participation do you want to develop? What kind of participation do you want to discontinue, to drop?
These pains -- the stones and thorns and all the other things that make it hard to settle down: They're not just a given. Your element of participation helps create the stones, helps sharpen the thorns. If you can catch yourself doing that and can unlearn the habit, you find it a lot easier to settle down and stay settled. You can see more clearly what's going on, and your skill in dealing with the present gets more and more refined.

Imagine
April 20, 2003
Psychologists have done studies of people who've mastered skills, trying to figure out why some people are simply very good at a particular skill while other people really master it. One of their discoveries is that for people to really master a skill, it has to capture their imagination. They like to think about it. They like to try different ways of conceptualizing the skill, approaching the skill, applying the skill in unusual and unexpected ways. And although we often don't think of imagination as being involved in meditation -- in fact, we think that meditation is anti-imagination -- actually that's not the case. To master concentration, it has to capture your imagination, just as with any other skill.
When you practice concentration, what are you doing? You're creating a state in the mind. That requires imagination. The noble eightfold path as a whole is something fabricated, something put together. It brings you into the present, but when you get into the present you discover how much input your intentions have in each present moment. The practice of the path is designed to make you more and more sensitive to that fact: to see how you put things together, how you can put things together in a way that creates suffering, or how you can get more skillful at putting things together in a way that creates less and less suffering until finally you reach a point where the whole thing gets taken apart and there's no suffering left.
But to get to that last point you have to understand what you're doing. You can't simply make up your mind that you're going to be totally uninvolved in the present moment and simply be an observer without participating, because what happens is that your participation goes underground. You don't see it, but it's still there. So, instead, you have to be very open about the fact that you're shaping the present moment simply by choosing what you focus on. That's a decision right there: The sensations you choose to focus on, and the way you focus on them, are going to shape your experience of the present moment. You're creating a state of becoming -- the Pali word here is bhava -- and although one of the things we're trying to learn to overcome is the process of becoming, we can't simply drop the process. We have to understand it before we can let it go. We have to understand it to the point of dispassion and then let go. To do that we have to keep creating more and more and more of these states, but we have to create a type of state that's comfortable to stay with, easy to analyze, easy to take apart -- which is why we practice concentration.
A senior monk in Bangkok once asked Ajaan Lee, "When you're practicing concentration, aren't you creating states of becoming in the mind?" And Ajaan Lee responded, "Yes, that's precisely what you're doing." He went on to say that you can't take the process apart until you can do it really well. He said, "It's like having a hen that lays eggs. You use some of the eggs to eat, while the others you crack open and take apart." In other words, part of the role of concentration is to keep the mind nourished on the path. The other part is to give you something to take apart, while at the same time putting the mind in a position where it can take these present states apart.
So when you're conscious of that fact, look at the way you put the present moment together. You have choices you know: different things you can focus on, different ways you can focus on them. If you focus on the breath, you discover that there are many different ways of conceiving and monitoring the breath: your way of labeling the breath sensations, the way you decide when an in-breath is long enough, when it's too long, when it's too short. A lot of these decisions get put on automatic pilot, but as you're meditating you have a chance to examine them. You can look at them carefully and adjust them to see if there are more skillful ways of deciding how long a good long in-breath is, what signs indicate that the breath is just long enough. The same holds true with the out-breaths, the depth, the rhythm, the texture of the breath.
There's a lot to play with here, and the word "play" is important because you've got to enjoy the process. Otherwise there's no enthusiasm for the meditation; you simply go through the motions because it's time to meditate. And when there's no enthusiasm, no joy in the process, you have a hard time sticking with it. The mind is going to lose interest, get bored and try to find something else to think about, something else to fill up the hour. And what you end up doing is filling up the hour with filler -- straw, shredded paper, and Styrofoam peanuts -- things that are not nearly as helpful as learning about the breath. The reason we're here is not just to put in time. We're here to see how the mind is creating unnecessary suffering for itself and to learn how to stop doing it.
One helpful way of understanding the process is to look at the ways psychologists have analyzed imagination. They've discovered that it involves four skills. The first is being able to generate an image in the mind -- simply giving rise to an image of one kind or another. The second is to maintain the image. The third is to inspect it, look at its details, explore some of its ramifications. And then the fourth ability is to alter the image, making changes and then inspecting it again to see what happens as you alter it. And although the psychologists who discovered these four skills were concerned primarily with mental pictures in the mind, you'll discover that any kind of creative work -- writing, creating a tune, whatever -- involves these same four steps.
When you compare the four steps to concentration, you find that they apply here as well. In fact, they correspond to the four bases of success: desire, persistence, intentness, and ingenuity.
In terms of concentration, the first step corresponds to giving rise to a nice pleasant state right here in the present moment. Can you do that? If you want to, you can. As the Buddha said, all phenomena are rooted in desire. So how are you going to use desire to give rise to that pleasant state? You can adjust the breath. You can adjust your focus. Breathe in such a way that gives rise to a pleasant feeling in at least one part of the body.
Then the next step, once you've learned how to generate that state, is to maintain it, keep it going. And you'll discover that you need mindfulness, alertness, steadiness to do that. Sometimes you find it's like surfing: The wave changes beneath you, but you learn to keep your balance. In other words, the needs of the body will change, but you can keep that pleasant sensation going in spite of those changes. When you first sit down, the body may need a fairly heavy rate of breathing in order to feel comfortable, but then as it feels more comfortable, the body's needs will change. And so you have to learn how to ride that change in the wave. Adjust the rate of breathing so that it's just right for the body right now, right now, right now. This makes you more and more sensitive to the fact that the body's needs change, but you can learn how to maintain a particular balance as you get more and more sensitive in responding to those needs, in giving the body the kind of breathing it wants. Of course, the body's not going to sit there saying, "I want this. I want that," but you get more and more sensitive to the signs, the sensations that tell you that certain parts of the body are starved of breath energy, and you can consciously breathe into them.
The third step is inspection. You look at the state you have in the body: Are there places where it's still uncomfortable, places where it still feels tense, where it feels tight? Well, you can think of ways to change the breath. That's the fourth step. The third and fourth steps play off each other in this way: Once you change things, you inspect them again to see if the change has made any improvement or if it's made things worse. If it's made things worse, you can try another change. Keep inspecting, keep adjusting. In Pali this is called vicara, or evaluation. And as things get more and more comfortable, you find that the range of comfort you've been able to create for yourself begins to expand. You can breathe in with a sense that the breath energy in the body is connected in all its parts. You breathe out and the energy feels connected; your awareness keeps filling the body, saturating the body.
After a while you get to a point where you really can't improve the breath any further. It's just right as it is. As Ajaan Fuang once said, it's like pouring water into a water jar. You finally reach the point where you've filled the jar and no matter how much water you try to add after that, you can't get it any fuller than that. So you stop adding water. The same with the breath: When you reach the point of fullness, you stop making so many adjustments, so many changes. You can just be with the breathing. From this point on it's more a question of how the mind relates to the breath, whether it feels that it's separate from the breath and watching it, or whether it's more immersed in the breathing. As it gets more immersed, the rate of breathing is going to change, not so much because you made up your mind to change it, but simply because you've changed your relationship to the breath.
As you get more fully immersed in the body and breath, you develop a sturdy feeling of unification and ease. The breathing will grow more subtle to the point where it finally stops, not because you've forced it to stop but because the mind has slowed down enough to the point where it needs less and less and less oxygen. The oxygen exchange at the skin is enough to keep the body going so that it doesn't have to keep pumping in, pumping out. Ajaan Lee compares this state to an ice cube with vapor coming off of it: The body feels very still, but around the edges there's a kind of effortless vapor that you feel with the in-and-out breathing. Then after a while even that stops and everything is perfectly still.
All of this comes from creating that spot in the body where it feels good to stay focused. Then learning how to maintain it. Then inspecting it to see where you can expand it, where you can make it more stable. And then adjusting it in various ways: using your imagination to think at least of the possibility that the breath could be more comfortable, the breath could saturate the body. You could think of all the cells of the body being bathed in the breath -- whatever way you have of conceiving the breath that makes it more and more comfortable, a better and better place to stay.
In this way the four aspects of imagination apply to what you're doing right here, even though you're not trying to create a mental picture. Sometimes there will be mental pictures behind it, but you're more concerned with the actual sensation of the breath as you feel it coming in, as you feel it going out, as you play with it, as you create a sense of very intense wellbeing right here. Even though it's something created, something fabricated, it's a good thing to create, a good thing to fabricate. As the Buddha said, right concentration is the heart of the path. The other factors are its requisites. And for discernment to do its work of insight in the present moment, the heart of the path has to stay healthy and strong. You have to create and maintain a good solid basis through concentration.
So because it's a created state, you have to be creative about it, imaginative about it. And you find that the more your imagination opens up to the possibilities already present, the more new possibilities your imagination opens up. As long as you're frank about the process, that you're creating this state, you don't have to worry about getting attached to it -- even though you probably will get attached to it -- because deep down inside you know it's something you've created, and eventually you'll have to take it apart. But in the mean time, learn how to do it well. The more solid the concentration, the more you want to stay here. The more you stay here, the more familiar you get with the territory. And it's through that familiarity that the practice of concentration turns into the practice of insight, the kind of insight that can liberate you. Without this stability and familiarity, your insights are simply ideas you've heard from Dhamma talks, read in books, notions you've picked up from outside. They don't seep deep into the mind because the mind hasn't softened up the territory here in the present moment. Only through the practice of concentration can the hardness in the present moment begin to soften up and give the insights a chance to seep deeper and deeper.
So when you have this kind of understanding about what you're doing, you find it a lot easier to go about it. And you begin to realize it's not a mechanical process. It's a creative process. That way it can capture your imagination. When it captures your imagination, you get more interested in what you can do with the breath, not just when you're sitting here with your eyes closed, but any time of the day. How you deal with the breath, how you get centered in the breath can help you deal with anger. It makes you more sensitive to what anger does to the body, and you can breathe through the physical manifestations of the anger so that you don't feel like they've taken over.
When there's fear, you can try using the breath to deal with fear. Get in touch with the physical side of the fear and breathe right through it. Notice how the breath can help deal with boredom, how it can help deal with illness, how it can help deal with pain. There's a lot to explore here. And as the possibilities of the breath capture your imagination, you find that this skill is useful, not only when you're trying to sit with your eyes closed, but also wherever the present may be, wherever you may be in the present. Whatever the context, whatever the situation, you find that the breath has something to offer -- if you explore it. And to explore it, you have to get a sense that it can capture your imagination. It gives you that kind of challenge, along with the sense of reward that comes when you've explored something and discovered something new, a valuable skill.
This is how meditation can start permeating your whole life. When it permeates your whole life, when you're more and more familiar with it, that's when the insights arise: unexpected insights sometimes, insights that you won't always find in the books, but very personal, very much relevant to how you relate to events in the body and mind. And you realize that they've come to you because you've opened up your imagination to what's possible with the raw materials of the present.

In the Mood
November 23, 2002
Ajaan Suwat often recommended putting yourself in a good mood each time before you meditate. This may sound a little backwards for many of us because we meditate in order to put ourselves in a good mood, and yet he says to start out with a good mood. But when you stop to think about it, there's really no way you can get good results out of the meditation unless the mind has at least some good qualities in it, some cheerfulness, some patience, some wisdom. These are qualities that act as seeds, that allow the meditation to develop. We're not totally empty-handed when we come to the meditation. We do have good qualities in the mind, and there are plenty of things we can think about to put the mind in a good mood.
This is why we have the chant on goodwill to start out the meditation each and every time. Goodwill is a good thing to think about. You look at yourself spreading thoughts of goodwill and you feel good about yourself. You're not totally selfish, not totally angry, vindictive, whatever. There's at least some goodness inside you. You take that as your starting capital. As with any investment, you need to have something to begin with. If you don't have money, at least you've got strength, or you've got your intelligence. You take whatever good things you've got and you invest them. That's how they grow.
So when we sit here to meditate we do our best to make the mind patient, to lift it above its ordinary cares and concerns of the day, and then bring it to the meditation object. That way you can relate to the breath, or whatever your object, in a friendly way.
Being in a good mood puts the breath in good shape as well. If you feel frustrated about your breathing or frustrated about your meditation, that's going to do funny things to your breath, make it harder and harder to stay with the breath. So think in whatever way helps the mind get ready to meditate, in the mood to meditate. This is part of the first basis of success: chanda, the desire to meditate. You want to meditate. You feel an inclination, an attraction to the meditation.
If you sit down and you feel yourself totally disinclined to meditate, don't just force yourself to do it. Remind yourself of the good reasons for why you're doing it. Think of ways to make it interesting, ways to make it entertaining. You can do all kinds of things with the breath. Look at Ajaan Lee's Dhamma talks: When he defines the different levels of breathing in the body, he hardly ever repeats himself. There's always something new, something different that he's found from his meditation. We don't have to memorize all his ways of analyzing the breath. We should give them a try, of course, but we should also look at our ways of analyzing the breath energy and see what works for us. When you feel depressed, what kind of breathing feels uplifting and energizing? When you feel manic, what kind of breathing feels grounding? When you feel lazy, what kind of breathing energizes you? When you feel tense, what kind of breathing relaxes you? There's a lot to explore, and in the exploration you get absorbed in the breath without even thinking about forcing yourself or holding a whip over the mind.
This way the mind can be on good terms with the breath, the breath can be good, and it's easier and easier to settle down. So always take stock of your mind before you meditate, to see what kind of shape it's in.
Don't let thoughts of frustration or discouragement take charge of the mind. The Dalai Lama once said the thing he found most surprising about Westerners was their self-hatred. In Tibet, he said, only the village idiots feel self-hatred. Of course, he said that smiling, but it's a pretty harsh judgment. And it's also true, I noticed, in Thailand. Perhaps not so much any more: As modern culture moves in, it really does teach people to hate themselves, to feel bad about themselves. It holds up all sorts of images of physical and financial perfection that nobody can live up to. But in traditional culture, one of the basic skills of being a human being was, essentially, how to feel good about yourself, how to love yourself, how to wish yourself well, and how to act intelligently on that wish. Only really stupid people would hate themselves, and yet that kind of stupidity is rampant now in the modern world. Be careful not to pick it up.
The mind has the potential for all kinds of moods. Sometimes simply sitting and taking stock of things for a few minutes, learning how to use our powers of thought -- not to destroy ourselves as many of us do, but as an assistance to the meditation -- can make all the difference. We often think that to meditate is to stop thinking. Well, you have to learn how to think properly before your thoughts can stop in a skillful way.
If you're thinking in ways that are self-destructive, in ways that are really harmful to yourself, and you simply stop, it's like running a truck into a wall. You can get thrown through the windshield or suffer whiplash. But if you learn how to think in ways that are for your own true benefit -- like the things we chant about every evening, which are always beneficial to think about -- then when the time comes for the mind to settle down and think less and less and less and get more and more absorbed in the present moment, it's a lot easier. There's a natural deceleration.
So the way you prepare yourself to meditate, the attitudes you bring to the meditation, are very important. This doesn't mean that you should meditate only when you're in a good mood. If you're in a bad mood, think in ways that will improve your mood, that will improve your attitude toward the meditation, your attitude toward the object that you're going to be focusing on. Remind yourself that the breath is your friend, and you're here to develop the friendship even further. In that way your thinking, instead of being a distraction, is actually a component part of the meditation. It's an important step that can't be overlooked.

The Story-telling Mind
June, 2001
We've all read how the practice of meditation can dismantle our sense of self as we take a good hard look at the things we identify as me or mine. When you meditate you're supposed to come into the present moment and drop all reference to the future or the past and simply look at things as they arise. But some futures and pasts are easier to drop than others. Even if you can drop them for the time you're in meditation, you've got to come back and live with them when you come out of meditation.
This whole issue of the narratives of our lives, the stories we tell ourselves: If we could just drop them and be done with them, life would be awfully easy. Meditation would be easy. But some narratives are stickier than others. We know that the Buddha's teachings involve learning to drop a lot of things, but in some cases, before you can drop them, you have to learn how to do them skillfully. The stories you tell yourself about your life are among the things you have to learn how to do skillfully. Otherwise, you can come out of a nice, peaceful meditation, and meet up with the same old rotten story all over again. You'll find yourself relating to it and getting tied up in it again and again and again. Or else you find that you can't even get into the meditation to begin with, because no matter how hard you try to drop the story it stays stuck to your hand.
So a good part of the meditation is often not just being with the breath but -- if you find you've got a story that keeps obsessing the mind, stirring up greed, anger, delusion, fear, whatever -- learning how to deal with that story, learning how to tell yourself new stories. Learn a corrective to the old stories. One of the basic ways of doing this is to reflect on the passage we chanted just now, developing thoughts of goodwill, compassion, appreciation, and equanimity. Try to develop these attitudes with respect to those stories so that you can tell yourself new stories that are easier to let go of in a liberating way.
In other words, you don't just push the stories away. You weave a new story and then you get to the point in the story where it's time to settle down and meditate. That way the story will leave you alone. When you come back out of meditation, the story may still be there but it's not the kind of story that's going to get you all worked up. It's been refashioned.
Learn to get more and more skillful at the way you tell stories in the mind, starting out with an attitude of goodwill. First, goodwill for yourself. You realize that if you sit here telling yourself bad stories over and over again, you're going to suffer. Do you want to suffer? Well, no. Do you want other people to suffer? Well, maybe. You may think about people who've wronged you, and of how much you'd like to see them get their just desserts. In cases like this, you have to ask yourself what you're going to gain from their suffering. You don't benefit in any way from their suffering. The fact that you're sitting there wishing suffering on them is harming you right now, getting in the way of your meditation.
So what you want is a story for yourself that ends up with your being happy and their being happy. That's your wish. That's the basic foundation for all the rest of the sublime attitudes.
Now in some cases you see where people are actually harming themselves, harming you, harming others. That's where you need compassion. Think about it. You really wish they could stop. And of course the same thing applies to you. When you're harming yourself, you wish you could stop causing that harm. "It would be good for that harm not to happen. It would be good for those people not to suffer." Remind yourself of that attitude.
For appreciation, you remind yourself of your goodness, of the goodness of other people, the things you've done that make you deserve to be happy, the things that other people have done that make them deserve to be happy. You're not jealous or resentful of their happiness and you don't downplay their good points.
Finally, equanimity, when you realize that some things are simply beyond your control: No matter how much goodwill you feel for other people, no matter how much appreciation and compassion you feel, some things lie totally beyond what you can change. Number one, the past cannot be changed. You have to develop equanimity toward the past. Look at what the Buddha has you think about to develop equanimity: the principle of kamma. Old kamma is old kamma and cannot be undone. What's important is your new kamma, what you're doing right now. Now, that can effect some things, but there are other things beyond the power of new kamma, largely through the continuance of old kamma. You've got to think about that and learn how to develop equanimity in cases where equanimity is appropriate.
The Buddha isn't saying that equanimity is better than the other three attitudes. You just learn which situations require which attitude: which situations require goodwill, which require compassion, which require appreciation, which require equanimity. In this way, equanimity is not simply passive acceptance. It's an ordering of your priorities, telling you to stop wasting energy on things that can't be changed, and to focus it instead on areas where good will, compassion, and appreciation can make a difference.
So you look at the stories you're telling yourself and try to inject them with these attitudes, and especially the teaching on kamma. There's no wrong that goes unpunished, no good that goes unrewarded. That's simply the way kamma is. Therefore, we don't have to carry around ledger sheets -- which person did this, which person did that -- with the fear that if the ledger sheet disappears then that person's not going to get the retribution he or she deserves. The principle of kamma takes care of that. But remember that it also takes care of you as well.
When you look at the satisfaction you get out of unskillful storytelling, you realize that it's pretty miserable. It's nothing you really want. It's nothing that stands up to any real scrutiny. When you see this, you find it easier to let go. You've got these other attitudes that will bring you into the present moment in a way that allows you to feel good about yourself. You're not allowing yourself to be victimized. At the same time you're not wishing ill on anybody. You do what can be done given the situation. And when the time comes where the mind needs a rest, the mind needs to settle down, that's what should be done right now. That's the best thing you can do right now. And that way the narrative leads you into the present moment.
You want to look at the attitudes you're fostering in your mind and make sure they're skillful ones -- because the whole issue of kamma boils down to this: What you do right now is important. What was done in the past may have some influence on what you can do right now, but what you do right now is what's really important. And the possibility of doing something skillful right now is always present. When bad things come, you accept them as the results of past kamma, but if you realize you're doing bad kamma in the present as well, that's something you can't have equanimity for. You've got to change it. You can do your best in whatever the situation is, confident that it will work out -- that if you keep on doing and saying and thinking skillful things, the results will have to be good.
So no matter how bad the situation, your hope lies in what you're doing right now. And the more you think about this, the more it brings the mind into the present moment. That's when it's ready to meditate.
If you look in the texts where the Buddha talks about the past, some of them go back many aeons, many cycles of the universe, describing how this happened, how that happened, where this came from, where that came from: long stories about past lives or cycles of lives. But these texts all end up by pointing to the basic principle that has shaped these things and is going to shape the future: the principle of kamma. And where's kamma being made? Right here, right now. So focus right here.
The same with all the cosmologies. When the Buddha describes the levels of being, the discussion comes down to where these levels of being come from. They come from the mind, from what the mind is doing in the present. Right here, right now.
Whatever the narratives are, when you tell them skillfully they bring you back to the present moment. So learn how to be a good storyteller, telling yourself the right stories, stories that will bring you into the present with a sense of confidence in your own abilities, with a sense of wellbeing, a sense of the importance of stilling the mind. No matter what the stories are -- no matter what other people have done, no matter what you've done -- there's a way of looking at them that can put the mind at rest. To try to find that way: This is what all the teachings on kamma, all the teachings on the sublime attitudes, are about. You weave new stories in the mind, stories in which you have a change of heart, new stories that come together right here, enabling you to stay right here with a sense of wellbeing, clarity, concentration, mindfulness, and discernment. Without anything tugging you back into the past, pulling you into the future, you're able to just be right here, right now, aware right here, right now, healing the mind right here, right now.
That's how you use the mind's storytelling ability to bring it to a point where it can just stop telling stories and look at what you've got. Learn to be skillful with what you've got right here, right now.
That's what the Buddha's teachings all come down to, this principle of skillfulness. How skillfully can you relate to the different things going on in your mind, for your own wellbeing, for the wellbeing of others around you? Meditation doesn't mean that you're cutting off any mental faculties. The mind has to tell stories. Even arahants can tell stories, can reflect on the past and plan for the future. They've simply learned to do it in a way that doesn't cause any suffering. And it's not just from their bringing the mind into the present moment. It also comes from reflecting on things in a certain way, using the Buddha's teachings as proper tools to weave skillful narratives. Let all the ways that the mind relates to itself in terms of past, future, narratives, stories, worldviews, cosmologies -- all your views -- become skillful. Let them no longer be a cause for suffering.
Think of the practice as an all-around way of training the mind. You're not here just to get very skillful at noting or at being with the breath. You want the mind to become very skillful in all its activities. Ajaan Fuang once said to me, when I went back to reordain, that being a meditator requires being skillful in everything, not just sitting here with your eyes closed.
You approach everything as an interesting challenge: "What's the most skillful way of dealing with this? What's the most skillful way of dealing with that?" When you have that attitude, when you've developed it and trained it in your daily life, then when you come to the meditation, things go a lot easier.

How to Fall
December, 2002
A frequent question is: How can you tell if you're making progress in your meditation? And one of the answers is: When the mind slips off its object, you get faster and faster at bringing it back. Notice, the answer isn't: The mind doesn't slip off at all. It's: You're expected to slip off; it's a normal part of the practice, a normal part of the training. The point lies in being more alert to what's going on and quicker to remedy the situation when you've slipped off the breath.
So an important part of learning how to meditate is learning how to fall. They say that when you start learning Aikido, the first thing they teach is how to fall without hurting yourself. The purpose is that it makes you less and less afraid to fall, less and less damaged, of course, by the fall, and also less likely to fall, more willing to take chances.
So the trick when you meditate is learning how to bring the mind back with a minimum amount of recrimination, a minimum amount of self-criticism, with just the simple observation, "I haven't come here to think about next week's schedule or last night's fiascoes or whatever. I'm here to focus on the breath." Simply leave those other things and come back. Learn how to do it without tying your mind up in knots.
In our modern educational system, we're quickly channeled into the activities where we have a natural talent. As a result we don't learn how to become good at things that don't come easily. So when we make an effort at something that doesn't come naturally, the easiest thing in the world seems to be to slip and fall and then just go with the fall and plop down, fallen. That's called not knowing how to fall. The trick, when you fall, is to notice that there is a certain amount of momentum, but you don't have to give in to the momentum.
You can notice this when you've made a vow to give up something for a particular period of time. Last summer it was popular here at the monastery to give up chocolate in the evening. But then came the temptation: "What's wrong with a little bit of chocolate?" Well, there's nothing really wrong with chocolate per se, so it was easy to rationalize and come to the decision to drop the vow, to go for the chocolate. The problem, of course, is that the important part of the vow wasn't the chocolate, it was the training in sticking to your vow no matter what. All too often we assume that once that decision to drop a vow has been made, it can't be unmade; you're powerless and have to follow through with the momentum. But it is possible to unmake that decision -- in the next moment or two moments later, three moments later. This is called learning how to fall properly. In other words, you don't give in to the momentum that leads you away. You realize that you're always free to change your mind immediately and come back.
When you notice yourself slipping off the breath, don't just give in to the momentum of having slipped. Catch yourself: "I can just turn around," and you'll be amazed at how quickly you can turn around. Now, the mind may come up with other reasons: "Oh no, you can't turn around now; you've committed yourself." Well, that's interesting! You've suddenly committed yourself to the distraction -- which isn't committed to you -- and you don't feel you've committed yourself to your meditation. This is one of the many tricks the mind plays on itself. The important point is learning how to see through those tricks, not to believe them, and to have a few tricks of you own.
There's a part of the mind that says it's a lot more natural to take the easy way out, but that begs the question of nature versus nurture. If you go to a psychotherapist, you learn very clearly how your particular habits got developed by a particular way your parents raised you or by particular experiences you had when you were a kid. That means those habits are not necessarily natural. They were learned. They're there, they're ingrained, but you can unlearn them. You can nurture the mind in the other direction, which is what we're doing as we train it in meditation. We're re-educating the mind.
And not only are we teaching it how to stay on one topic as we stay with the breath, but we're also teaching it how to come back to the breath more quickly: how to catch yourself as the mind begins to let go of the breath and latch on to something else, and to just turn right around, without any problem at all, and latch back onto the breath. This way you learn to discipline yourself without the harshness that we usually associate with the word "discipline." We're learning a more matter-of-fact way of dealing with our own mind.
You find that this cuts through a lot of the garbage. And as a result, there are fewer hooks for your defilements to hang on to. Instead of dealing with abstractions such as "my personality," "my character," "the way I am," just keep focused on the present moment. Whatever decision was made, it was made in total freedom, and if you see it's a bad decision, you have total freedom to make another decision. When you clear away your self-image -- which is another hiding ground for all kinds of defilements -- the playing field is a lot clearer, and there are a lot fewer places for the defilements to hide.
A woman I know in Laguna Beach once went to a meditation retreat where she was taught to bring meditation practice into daily life by viewing daily life as an interplay between the absolute and the relative. Those are pretty big abstractions, about as big as you can get. And after trying to think in these terms for a week, she came to the Sunday sitting group with a very convoluted question about how to manage her life in those terms. I must admit the question was so convoluted that I couldn't follow it, but the problem was obvious: The more abstract the abstraction, the more difficult it is to see your way clearly in the path, and the easier it is to get tied up in knots. We tend to think of abstractions as being clean and neat and Mondrian, but actually they leave room for lots of convolutions. They place lots of veils over what's really happening. When you clear away the abstractions, you have the mind right here with the breath. It can decide to stay with the breath or it can decide to move away. It's as simple as that.
The same principle applies throughout the practice. Once you've made up your mind to stick with the precepts, you keep deciding with every moment whether you're going to stick with that vow. Once you've made up your mind to stick with the breath, you keep deciding with every moment whether you're going to stick with that intention. And the more you keep things on simple terms, basic terms, down-to-earth, no-nonsense, straight-talking terms in the mind -- without bringing in issues about your past, without bringing in issues about your self-image to complicate matters -- you find it's a lot easier to stay on the path. It's a lot easier to bring yourself back when you fall off, because there are fewer convolutions in the terrain you're falling on. So not only when you're meditating, but also when you're practicing every aspect of the path, try to keep things as simple as possible, as down-to-earth, moment-to-moment as possible.
When I was staying with Ajaan Fuang he would sometimes ask me to do things like, "Tonight sit up and meditate all night long." "Omigosh," I responded the first time he said that, "I can't do that; I didn't get enough sleep last night and had a long, tiring day." And so on. And he said, "Is it going to kill you?" "Well, no." "Then you can do it."
As simple as that. Of course, it wasn't easy, but it was simple. And when you keep things simple, they eventually do become easier. You just stay with that moment-to-moment decision, not thinking about, "All night, all night, I've got to keep this up all night." You just think about, "This breath, this breath, this breath." Find ways to keep yourself interested in each breath as it comes, and you'll make it to morning.
That's how you bring the meditation into daily life: Keep things simple, strip them down. Once things are stripped down in the mind, the defilements don't have many places to hide. And when you do fall, you fall in a place that's easier to get up from. You don't have to give in to the momentum of the fall or get stuck in a quagmire. You catch yourself and regain your balance right away.
My mother once said that the event that first attracted her to my father happened during a meal at her home. My uncle, her brother, had invited my dad home from college for a visit. Then one day, during a meal, my dad knocked a glass of milk off the table but he caught the glass before it hit the floor. And that's why my mother married him. I know it sounds kind of crazy -- I owe my existence to my father's quick reflexes -- but it says something very interesting. And it's the kind of quality you want as a meditator: If you knock yourself over, well, you can pick yourself right back up. If you can do it before you hit the floor, so much the better. But even when you're flat on the floor, you're not a glass. You haven't shattered. You can still pick yourself up.
Try to keep it as simple as that.

Tuning-in to the Breath
December, 2002
When I first went to stay with Ajaan Fuang, one of the questions I asked him was, "What do you need to believe in order to meditate?" He answered that there was only one thing: the principle of kamma. Now when we hear the word "kamma," we usually think, "kamma-and-rebirth," but he meant specifically the principle of action: that what you do shapes your experience.
If you're convinced of this, you can do the meditation because, after all, the meditation is a doing. You're not just sitting here, biding your time, waiting for the accident of Awakening to happen. Even in very still states of meditation, there's an activity going on. Even the act of "being the knowing" is still a doing. It's a fabrication, a sankhara. In one of the suttas, the Buddha says that all the different khandhas, all the different aggregates that make up experience as a whole, have to get shaped into aggregates by the process of fabrication. In other words, there's a potential for a form, a potential for a feeling, potential for perception, fabrication, consciousness; and the act of fabricating is what turns these potentials into actual aggregates.
It sounds abstract, but it's a very important lesson for the meditation even from the very beginning. You sit here in the body -- and of course, that's a fabrication right there: the idea that you're sitting in the body -- but given all the many different things you could focus on right now, there's the possibility of choice. This possibility of choice is where kamma comes in. You can choose any of the sensations that are coming into your awareness. It's as if there were a buzz in all the different parts of the body. There's a potential for pain here, a potential for pleasure over there. All these different sensations are presenting themselves to you for you to do something about them, and you have the choice as to which ones you'll notice.
Doctors have done studies showing that pain isn't just a physical phenomenon. It isn't totally a given. There are so many different messages coming into your brain right now that you can't possibly process them all, so you choose to focus on just some of them. And the mind has a tendency to focus on pain because it's usually a warning signal. But we don't have to focus there. In other words, there can be a slight discomfort in a part of the body, and you can focus on it and make it more and more intense, more and more of an issue. That's one thing you can do right now, but -- even if you may not realize it -- you have the choice of whether or not to do that. You can choose not to make it more intense. You can choose even to ignore it entirely. Many times we have habitual ways of relating to sensations, and they're so habitual and so consistent that we think there's no choice at all. "This is the way things have to be," we think, but they don't.
That's the other implication of the principle of kamma: You can change your actions. If some parts of experience are dependent on choice and fabrication, you can choose to change. You see this really clearly when you focus on the breath. The breath is always there in the body, and if you look carefully you'll discover that it has many levels. It's like looking up in the sky: Sometimes you feel a breeze coming from the south, but you look up in the sky and see a layer of clouds moving east, and another higher layer of clouds moving west. There are lots of different layers of wind in the atmosphere and, in the same way, there are lots of different layers of breath in the body. You can choose which ones to focus on.
It's like having a radio receiver: You can choose to tune-in to different stations. The radio waves from all the nearby radio stations, all the different frequencies, are all in the air around us. There are radio waves from Los Angeles, radio waves from San Diego, even short wave radio waves from who-knows-where, all over the place. They're going through this room right now. They're going through your body right now. And when you turn on the radio you choose which frequency you want to focus on, which one you want to listen to. The same with the body. You sort out, of all the possible sensations, just one type of sensation to focus on: the breath-ness of the breath. Wherever you feel the sensation of the in-and-out breath most clearly, you focus right there. Now some of us have a radio we haven't taken very good care of, and as soon as we tune it in to one station it slips over to another. So you've got to keep tuning it back, tuning it back.
But the problem isn't just the tuning. It's what you do with the sensation once you've tuned-in to it. Again, you can focus on the breath in a way that makes it painful, or you can focus on it in a way that makes it comfortable. You're not faced just with the given-ness of the breath. What you do with it can make it more or less painful, more or less comfortable. To continue the analogy, it's like having a volume control on the radio: You can turn it way up loud so that it hurts your ears, or you can turn it way down soft so that you can hardly hear it at all. But as you get more skillful with your volume control, you get a sense of what's just right so that you can adjust the level and the pressure of your focus for maximum enjoyment.
As you get tuned-in more and more precisely, you discover there are other subtleties as well. Again, like the radio, when you really get tuned very precisely onto the frequency, the static goes away and you can hear subtleties in the signal that you couldn't hear before. You can play with them, turn up the treble, turn up the base, whatever you want. So even though the radio signal is a given, you can do a lot with it. That's the element of kamma in your meditation right now: It's what you're doing with the breath.
You can learn how to be more skillful in how you relate to it so that you can sense not only the very obvious breath of the air coming in and out of the lungs, but also the sensations that go through the whole body as you breathe in, as you breathe out, the patterns of movement in the body that actually bring the air into the lungs and let it go out. There's a wave going through the body each time you breathe. As you become sensitive to it, you begin to sense where there's tension in the body, and where there's not; where the subtle breath flows properly, and where it doesn't.
And, again, it's not just a given. You can do things with that flow. You can improve the flow. If you notice tension in a certain part of the body, you relax it; and oftentimes doing this improves the breath flow not only at that one spot but also in other parts of the body as well. You begin to have a sense of the body as a whole series of different interconnected energy patterns. A tightening up here may lead to a tightening up over there, and it all gets connected in a feeling of overall constriction, of bands of tension squeezing the body. Or you can loosen it up. That's your choice. You can relax this bit of tension here and find that it leads to an unraveling of tension over there. Or you might find that everything gets so loose that you drift off. This means that you've got to learn how to gain a sense of "just right" so that you can stay with the sensation, keep your focus, and even if the radio signal begins to drift a little bit, you can follow it precisely and stay right with it.
At this point you can let go of the sensation of the in-and-out breath -- the coarse breath, the obvious breath -- and focus more on the subtle breath flow in the body. As you work through all the different parts of the body where it feels tense or blocked or sort of squeezed out, you let the breath sensations fill all those little nooks and crannies, and there comes a greater and greater sense of fullness, refreshment. That's what piti means. It's the drinking-in of the good sensation. We normally translate piti as rapture, but it's also related to the word for drinking, pivati. You drink-in this nice sensation. It feels full, it feels refreshing all the way through the body because you've opened up all the little cells in the body and allowed the breath to enter. When you get that sense of fullness, it's easier to relax.
This may not be a pretty image, but the mind at this point is like a mosquito when it's finally hit a big vein in your body. It sticks its little proboscis in and just stays right there, bathed in bliss. Its wings go weak, its feet go weak, and no matter how much you try to brush it away, it just doesn't want to go. It's just drinking-in what it wants. The same with the mind: As soon as that refreshing breath sensation begins to fill up in the body, you let go of everything else. No matter what other disturbances come, you're not the least bit interested because you've got something really satisfying. You could almost say that it's a sensation to die for. You let down your guard, let go of everything else, because this sensation is so totally absorbing. You've opened up every part of the body, every part of your awareness for this sensation to come in.
As you stay there and the mind grows more and more still, you become aware of a deeper sensation of absolute fullness with no sense of flowing back and forth -- a real stillness in the body. There's a slight sense of air exchange on the very surface of the body, the surface of your awareness, but deep down inside there's a great stillness. There's no longer the sense of drinking-in because you're absolutely full. Ajaan Lee uses the image of an ice cube: There's a vapor coming off the cube -- a very vaporous movement around the edge of your awareness -- but everything else is solid and still.
And then finally even that vapor stops, and the solidity fills your whole awareness. It's accompanied by a sense of brightness, even though you may not sense this brightness as a light. It's a peculiar quality: a physical sensation, a feeling tone, of brightness, clarity, filling the whole body, and you're just sitting there in the middle of it.
There's no need to rush through these stages, no need to go jumping through hoops. In fact, it's best if you not try to rush. Just find one sensation you can tune-in to. Stay right there and it will develop on its own, simply because of the consistency of your focus. When you finally reach that sense of solid stillness and stay there, you begin to realize that you can choose to give a shape to it or not. You can focus on the sensations that give you a sense of the shape of the body or you can choose to ignore them. This is where you really see the principle of kamma coming into play in the meditation. It's almost as if the various sensations of the body have turned into a mist. There are these little breath droplets just shimmering there, and you sense the space in between them. The whole body is filled with this space, which also extends outside the body in every direction. Instead of focusing on the little droplets, you can focus on the space. This gives you a really clear lesson in how much choice you have in how you experience the present moment. Just the simple sensation of having a body here comes from subconscious shape-giving choices you've made. You realize there are lots of different sensations you can focus on, and there's a skill in how you choose your sensations, in how you magnify the ones you want, and how you just put aside the ones you don't.
So even though this is just training in concentration, there's also a lot of discernment involved. As the Buddha once said, both tranquility and insight are required for getting good strong states of absorption. And he never talked about insight without framing it in terms of kamma, in terms of the skillfulness of what you're doing.
So this practice is what lays the groundwork so that -- when the time comes to consider issues of inconstancy, stress, and not-self -- you've got the proper context. You've created a good space inside, a good space in the present moment, so that there's no hungry sense of having to grasp after this or grasp after that. When you've drunk your fill of the fullness and stillness, you're in a much better mood to consider things for what they actually are -- so that when insight comes it's not destabilizing. Without this solid foundation, thinking about inconstancy, stress, or not-self can get really disorienting. But when you start thinking about these issues in the context of what you're doing in the meditation, they make it even more stabilizing. This is where concentration, tranquility, insight, and discernment all come together in a healthy and balanced way.

Bathed in the Breath
December, 2002
When there's a Dhamma talk, you don't have to listen. The important thing is to stay with your breath. When the breath comes in, you know it's coming in; when it goes out, you know it's going out. Try to make that experience of the breath fill your awareness as much as possible. The Dhamma talk here is a fence to keep you corralled with the breath. When the mind wanders off, here's the sound of the Dhamma to remind you to go back to the breath, but when you're with the breath you don't need reminding. You do your own reminding. That's what the mindfulness does in the meditation. Each time you breathe in, each time you breathe out, remind yourself to stay with the breath. Make just a little mental note: "This is where you want to stay, this is where you want to stay."
And try not to think of yourself as inhabiting one part of the body watching the breath in another part of the body. Think of the breath as all around you. It's coming in and out the front, coming in and out the back, down from the top, all the way out to your fingers, all the way out to your toes. There's a subtle breath energy coming in and out of the body all the time. If you're in one part of the body watching the breath in the other part, you're probably blocking the breath energy to make space for that sense of "you" in the part of the body that's watching. So think of yourself as totally surrounded by the breath, bathed in the breath, and then survey the whole body to see where there are still sections of the body that are tense or tight, that are preventing the breath from coming in and going out. Allow them to loosen up.
This way you allow for the fullness of the breath to come in, go out, each time there's an in-breath, each time there's an out-breath. Actually the fullness doesn't go in and out. There's just a quality of fullness that's bathed by the breath coming in, bathed by the breath going out. It's not squeezed out by the breath. It's not forced out by the breath. Each nerve in the body is allowed to relax and have a sense of fullness, right here, right now. Simply try to maintain that sense of fullness by the way you breathe. Your focus is on the breath, but you can't help but notice the fullness.
If you can't get that sense of fullness going throughout the whole body, find at least some part of the body that doesn't feel squeezed out, that feels open and expansive, and then see if you can copy that same feeling tone in other parts of the body. Notice the other different parts of the body where it feels open like that and allow them to connect. At first, nothing much will happen from that sense of connection, but allow it to stay open, stay open. Each time you breathe in, each time you breathe out, maintain that sense of openness, openness, and the sense of connection will get stronger.
This is why the ability to stay with these sensations is so important, for your staying with them is what allows them to grow. If you move off to someplace else, if you're thinking of something else, there will have to be a tensing-up in the body to allow that thought to happen. Whatever sense of fullness might have developed -- say, in your arms or your legs, in different parts of the body, down your back -- doesn't have a chance to develop. It gets squeezed off because you're not paying attention to it any more.
This is why the Buddha talks about concentration as mahaggatam cittam: an enlarged awareness. If your awareness is limited just to one little spot, everything else gets squeezed out, everything else gets blotted out -- and what is that if not ignorance? You're trying to make your awareness 360 degrees, all around in all directions, because the habit of the mind is to focus its awareness in one spot here, then one spot there, moving around, but there's always the one spot, one spot, one spot. It opens up a little bit and then squeezes off again, opens up a little bit, squeezes off again, and nothing has a chance to grow. But if you allow things to open up throughout the whole body, you realize that if you think about anything at all you destroy that openness. So you've got to be very, very careful, very, very still, to allow this open fullness to develop.
So these qualities of consistency, care, and heedfulness are important in allowing this state of concentration to develop. Without them, nothing much seems to happen. You have a little bit of concentration, then you step on it, a little bit of concentration, then you squeeze it off as you go looking at something else, thinking about something else. And so whatever little bits and pieces of concentration you do have, don't seem very remarkable. They don't get a chance to be remarkable. Concentration takes time -- and our society's pretty extraordinary in fostering the expectation that things should happen quickly. If anything's going to be good, it has to happen quickly, it has to be instant. And so, by and large, we've lost the ability to stay with things as they develop slowly. We've lost the ability to keep chipping away, chipping away, chipping away at a large task that's going to take time and can't be speeded up.
When the Buddha gives images for practicing concentration, he often relates them to skills. Skills take time, and he was teaching people who had taken the time to master many useful skills. In Thailand, they still sharpen knives against stones, and it's a skill you have to learn: how not to ruin the knife as you're sharpening it. If you get impatient and try to speed things up, you'll ruin the sharpness, the straightness of the blade. So you have to be very still. The mind has to be still, and you have to maintain just the right amount of pressure constantly as you sharpen the blade. At first it may seem like nothing is happening, but over time the blade does get sharper and sharper. The consistency of your pressure is what guarantees that the blade won't get worn in one particular spot -- too sharp in one spot and not sharp enough in another, too sharp in the sense that the blade is no longer straight. You've worn it down too much in one spot. There are a lot of things you have to watch out for, simply in the act of sharpening a blade. But if you have that skill in your repertoire, then when the time comes to meditate, it's easier to relate to what you're doing: that same kind of consistency, that same evenness of pressure, the continual mindfulness and alertness that are needed to maintain the proper pressure.
Another skill sometimes used as an analogy is that of a hunter. A hunter has to be very quiet so as not to scare the animals off, and at the same time very alert so as not to miss when a particular animal comes by. In the same way, we as meditators have to be careful not to slip off in either direction: into too much stillness or too much mental activity. You have to find the proper balance. I was once talking to an anthropologist who said that of all the skills in primitive societies that anthropologists try to learn, the hardest is hunting. It requires the strongest concentration, the most sensitivity. So here we're not hunting animals, but we're hunting concentration, which is even more subtle and requires even more stillness and alertness.
Sometimes we in the West think that we come to the Dhamma with an advantage: We've got so much education, we're so well-read. But we have a major disadvantage in that we lack the patience and consistency that come with mastering a skill. So keep that in mind as you're meditating, when you find yourself getting impatient for results. You have to be watchful and consistent. You need that sense of being bathed by the breath, being open to the breathing sensations in all parts of the body down to every little pore of your skin. Then you learn the sensitivity that's required, the consistency that's required, to maintain that. That way the sense of fullness can grow and grow and grow until it becomes really gratifying, really satisfying, to give your concentration the kind of strength, the sense of refreshment, the sense of nourishment it needs in order to keep going.
Ajaan Fuang once said that without this sense of fullness, refreshment, or rapture, your meditation gets dry. You need this lubricant to keep things smooth and running: the sense of well-being and refreshment, the immediate visceral pleasure of being in a concentrated state.
At the same time, it heals all our mental wounds: any sense of tiredness, of being stressed-out, mistreated, abused. It's like medicine for these mental wounds. Now, medicine often takes time to work, especially soothing and reconstituting medicine. Think of the creams you put on chapped skin. The skin isn't immediately cured when you first rub on the cream. It takes time. The skin has to be exposed to the cream for long periods of time to allow the cream to do its work. The same with concentration. It's a treatment that takes time. Your nervous system needs to be exposed to the sense of fullness for a long period of time, giving it a chance to breathe in, breath out all around so that the mindfulness and the breath together can do their healing work.
So don't get impatient. Don't feel that nothing is happening. A lot of things that are very important require time, and they do their work subtly. If you give them the time they need, you find that you're more than repaid. After all, you could be sitting for the whole hour planning next week, planning next month, planning next year. What will you have at the end of the hour? A lot of plans. And part of you may feel satisfied that you've provided for the future, but when you reflect on how many of your past plans have actually borne results, you'll realize the odds against your new plans' ever amounting to much. What would you have to show for your hour then? Nothing very certain. Maybe nothing but mouse-droppings and straw. But if you give the breath an hour to do its healing work, totally opening up the body to allow the breath to bathe every nerve out to every pore, you know that you'll come out at the end of the hour with a body and mind in much better shape. The body will be soothed; the mind, bright and alert.
And you don't need to stop being bathed in the breath when the hour is up. You can keep it going in all your activities. That way, even though you may not be armed with a whole set of plans for facing the future, at least you're in a position where you don't need that kind of armor. You've got the armor of a healthy body and mind. You've got an invisible armor: the force-field of this all-encompassing breath, continually streaming out from your center to every pore, protecting you on all sides. That's something you feel in every cell of your body, something you know for sure, for you can sense it all around you, right here, right now. And you know that whatever the future brings, you're prepared. You can handle it.
This sense of fullness, brightness, alertness: That's all you'll need to keep the mind capable, healthy, and strong.

The Steps of Breath Meditation
November, 2002
When the Buddha teaches breath meditation, he teaches sixteen steps in all. They're the most detailed meditation instructions in the Canon. And the breath is the topic he recommends most highly, most frequently -- because the breath is not only a place where the mind can settle down and gain concentration, but it's also something the mind can analyze. It's where all the insights needed for Awakening can arise -- while the mind is being mindful of the breath, alert to the breath, and also conscious of how it relates to the breath.
In the later stages of breath meditation the emphasis is focused less on the breath than on the mind as it relates to the breath. In the beginning stages, though, the emphasis is on the breath itself, on using the breath to snare the mind and bring it into the present moment. In the first two steps you're simply with long breathing and short breathing, sensitizing yourself to what long and short breathing feel like. Beginning with the third step, though, there's an element of volition. You train yourself, and the first thing you train yourself to do is to be aware of the whole body as you breathe in, aware of the whole body as you breathe out.
When the Buddha describes concentration states, he doesn't use images of single-pointedness. He uses images of whole-body awareness. When a sense of rapture and pleasure comes from the breath, he tells you to knead that sense of rapture and pleasure through the whole body, the way you would knead water into flour to make dough. Another image is of the rapture welling up from within the body and filling the body just like a spring of cool water coming up from within a lake, filling the entire lake with its coolness. Another image is of lotuses standing in a lake: Some of the lotuses don't go above the water but stay totally immersed in the water, saturated from their roots to their tips with the stillness and coolness of the water in the lake. Still another image is of a person wrapped in white cloth, totally surrounded by the white cloth from head to foot, so that all of his body is covered by the white cloth.
These are all images of whole-body awareness, of a sense of rapture, pleasure, or bright awareness filling the entire body. That's what you want to work on when you get to know the breath, because the type of awareness that allows insight to arise is not restricted to one point. When you're focused on one point and blot out everything else, that leaves a lot of blind spots in the mind. But when you try to get a more all-around awareness, it helps eliminate the blind spots. In other words, you want to be immersed in the breath, aware of the breath all around you. One of the phrases they use for this -- kayagatasati -- is mindfulness immersed in the body. The body is saturated with awareness, and the awareness itself gets immersed in the body, is surrounded by the body. So it's not that you're up in one spot -- say, in the back of the head -- looking at the rest of the body from that one spot, or trying to block awareness of the rest of the body from that one spot of awareness. You've got to have a whole-body awareness, all-around, 360 degrees, so as to eliminate the blind spots in the mind.
Once you have this type of awareness, you work at maintaining it -- although the "work" here is not like other work. You work at not moving your attention, at not letting it shrink. You work at not taking on other responsibilities. With time, though, the work becomes more natural, more second-nature. You feel more and more settled and at home. As the mind settles in, its usual nervous energy begins to dissolve. The body actually needs less and less oxygen, because the level of your brain activity begins to grow calm, and so the breath gets more and more refined. It can even grow perfectly still, for all the oxygen you need is coming in through the pores of your skin.
At this point the breath and your awareness seem to have melted into each other. It's hard to draw a line between the two and, for the time being, you don't try. Allow the awareness and the breath to interpenetrate, to become one.
You have to allow this awareness, this sense of oneness, to get really solid. Otherwise it's easily destroyed because the tendency of the mind is to shrink up. As soon as we think, we shrink up the energy field in certain parts of the body to block them out of our awareness, which is why there's tension in the body every time a thought occurs. This part of the body gets tense so you can think that thought; that part of the body gets tense so you can think this one, back and forth this way. It's no wonder that the simple process of thinking takes a lot out of the body. According to some Chinese medical treatises, a person whose work is mental tends to use up energy at three times the rate of a person whose work is totally physical. This is because thinking involves tension in the body. And, in particular, thoughts that go off into the past or into the future have to create whole worlds for themselves to inhabit.
When we're getting the mind concentrated, we're thinking in a different way. In the beginning stages we're still thinking, but we're thinking solely about the present moment, observing solely the present moment, being alert and mindful to what's going on here, so we don't have to create worlds of past and future. This imposes less stress on the body. In order to maintain that present focus and not go slipping off to your old habits, you've got to keep your awareness as broad as possible. That's what keeps you rooted in the present moment, all the way down to your fingers and toes. When your awareness stays broad, it prevents the kind of shrinking up that allows the mind to slip out after thoughts of past and future. You stay fully inhabiting the present. The need to think gets more and more attenuated.
When fewer and fewer thoughts interfere with the flow of the breath energy, a sense of fullness develops throughout the body. The texts refer to this fullness as rapture, and the sense of ease accompanying it as pleasure. You let this sense of easy fullness suffuse the body, but you still maintain your focus on the breath energy, even if it's totally still. Eventually -- and you don't have to rush this -- the point will come when the body and mind have had enough of the rapture and ease, and you can allow them to subside. Or there may be times when the rapture gets too overpowering, in which case you try to refine your awareness of the breath so that it can come in under the radar of the rapture, and you move to a level of total ease. Then even the ease -- the sense of imbibing the pleasure -- subsides, leaving you with total stillness.
After you've become settled in the stillness, you can start looking for the dividing line between awareness and the breath. Up to this point you've been manipulating the breath, trying to get more and more sensitive to what feels comfortable in the breathing and what doesn't, so that your manipulation gets more and more subtle, to the point where you can drop the manipulation and just be with the breath. This allows the breath to grow more and more refined until it's absolutely still. When things are really solid, really still, your awareness and the object of your awareness naturally separate out, like chemicals in a suspension that's allowed to stay still. Once the awareness separates out, you can begin directly manipulating the factors of the mind, the feelings and perceptions that shape your awareness. You can w