Don’t Go With the Flow
December 30, 2023

Take a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths. You want to establish your awareness right here. All too often our thoughts are wandering off, and our awareness is wandering off. Bring it back home. Bring it back, right here. Establish it. If the mind isn’t established, it tends to get pushed around—and it’s often not aware of the fact that it’s being pushed around by things. It’s just part of the flow.

We’re here to go against the flow. The flow just keeps going on and on. They call it samsara. We see it as our mind wanders in the course of the day. And it’s going to keep on wandering even if we have to leave the body and find some other place to go. We keep on, keep on, keep on flowing around.

So instead of going with the flow, we’re trying to stand against the flow. For that we need a good foundation. You start with the breath, because you know you’re in the present moment when you’re with the breath. There’s no future breath you can watch, no past breath you can watch. But you can watch the breath here in the present moment. That’s what guarantees your frame of reference here.

From there you can watch how the breath is going through the body and how you can use the breath to create a sense of well-being. We have so many resources inside that we don’t take advantage of.

Ajaan Fuang tells the story of when he was out on tudong, wandering through the forest. One night he set up his umbrella tent, and he looked around to make sure there wouldn’t be any storm coming up. The sky was clear, so he set up the tent in a fairly unprotected place.

Well, a storm did come up in the middle of the night: lots of wind and lots of rain. His only protection was his mosquito net and the little bit of umbrella tent above him. So he put all of his robes except for his under robe into his bowl to keep them dry. Then he sat there and meditated. The theme of his meditation was: “The body may be wet, but the mind isn’t wet.” He was able to keep focused on that theme, and he got so that the mind wasn’t the least bit concerned about the fact that it was cold, wet, and rainy outside. He could create a sense of well-being inside simply by what he focused on, what he talked to himself about.

That’s just a very simple example of how we don’t have to suffer from the changes in the world outside. We have our inner resources, so try to make the most of them. You start with the breath, and that quickly moves into the mind. Some people say, “Why focus on the breath? When you die, the breath is going to leave you. What’s going to happen then—you’ll lose your meditation.”

That’s not the case. As you focus on the breath, you also get to know the mind well—how the mind can create suffering for itself and how it can create well-being for itself, how it can direct its thoughts in the right direction and resist temptations to go in places that you know are not good.

There’s lots to develop in here. Lots of resources. So don’t think of yourself as poor and lacking. You’ve got lots of potentials. What you lack is simply skill in understanding them and making the most of them. But that skill can be developed. So make the most of what you’ve got. Then you’ll find that you have more than you might have thought. The potentials keep growing and growing as you take advantage of them.