Good Food
October 10, 2023

Close your eyes. Take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths. Focus on where you feel the breathing in the body. Try to stay there with each breath coming in, each breath going out. And notice what kind of breathing feels good. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t feel good, you can change. Make it shorter, deeper, more shallow, heavier, lighter, faster, slower. Take some time to see what breathing feels good for the body right now.

This is food for the mind. Just as the body has to eat, the mind eats, too. The body has physical food, and the Buddha says the mind has the food of sensory contact, the food of consciousness itself, and the food of our intentions. This last one is especially important because if we just try to feed off of pleasant contacts, pleasant consciousness—these things come and go, come and go, come and go, and they don’t just go without a trace. They leave traces behind. Certain pleasures really have a deep impact on the mind. Certain pains have a deep impact on the mind. But they’re not necessarily good for it.

What’s good for the mind is good intentions. So we make up our minds we’re going to stay right here. This is what the Buddha’s teachings are all about—learning how to take our intentions and make them skillful. We go from a mixture of good and bad intentions to good intentions, and from good intentions to skillful ones. We may mean well as a good intention, but we may be deluded about what really would be good. That’s why it’s not yet skillful. It becomes skillful when you become more and more observant of the actual results of what you’re doing. You see what you thought it was going to be a good thing to do, but it wasn’t. It turned out it caused harm to somebody—either yourself or other people. So you learn. You don’t do that again. It’s because of this that you can’t just trust your goodness as it chooses what to do. You have to educate your goodness as well. And as you’re educating your goodness, then you’re also training your mind to feed on better and better food. You get better and better nourishment all the time.

So when you’re giving gifts of generosity, observing the precepts, meditating—these are all good intentions. and as you do them, you want to observe what you’re doing, and then fine-tune them so they become more and more skillful. This way, you become a better and better cook for your own mind.

As for the food of the world, as Ajaan Suwat used to say, “The sensory pleasures you had last week—where are they now?” Well they’re gone. There may be a little bit of a memory, and there may be a karmic trace about the skillful or unskillful things you did to get those pleasures, so you have to be very careful about how you look for a pleasure outside.

But the pleasure that comes from developing the mind: That sticks with you. It’s good as you think about doing it, it’s good while you’re doing it, and it’s good after you’re done. So look for your food here by doing good rather than in the things outside. Because they’re not nourishing. Sometimes they’re actually bad for you. But the good food inside, as it becomes more and more skillful, is more and more nourishing for you. You have the strength to keep on doing good. And that just piles more and more benefits on the mind.