To Certify Yourself

Okay, let’s meditate. Close your eyes and be aware of your breath. Take a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths and notice where the feeling of breath is most prominent in the body. Focus your attention there. Then try to stay there. If you notice the mind wandering off, just bring it right back.

Ask yourself, “What kind of breathing would feel good now?” The breath is one of the few processes in the body that you can control. So, why not make use of that ability to make it a good place to stay?

Choose some spot in the body that’s sensitive to how the breathing feels and ask yourself, “How long or short would be just right? How deep? How heavy? How fast? How slow?”

If you’re not sure, you can experiment with different ways of breathing for a while and see what feels best. The important thing is that you learn how you observe your own mind, observe your own breath.

This principle applies all the way through the practice of the Dhamma. There’s a spot where the Buddha says the Dhamma is nourished in your mind by two things: by committing yourself to the practice and then by reflecting on the results. If the results are good, you keep it up. If the results are not good, you change.

So, right now, experiment with the breath. See what kind of breathing feels best for the body and is easiest for the mind to pay attention to. If the condition of the body changes, and what felt comfortable for a while doesn’t feel comfortable anymore, you can change again.

When my teacher, Ajaan Fuang, was teaching in Bangkok, he had a book written by his teacher, Ajaan Lee, which described the steps to breath meditation: being aware of the breath all the way in, all the way out; noticing what kind of breathing feels best; and allowing a sense of ease—whenever it develops with the breath—to spread throughout the body.

In other words, you’re asking yourself questions about what kind of breathing is best and then answering your questions based on what you can observe in what you’re doing. You keep on checking the answers, so that the mind and the breath get more snuggly together.

At the end of Ajaan Lee’s instructions, he also described how breath meditation fits into the four levels of right concentration—what the Buddha calls jhana, or absorption.

There’s always the temptation, when you read that there are different levels of concentration, to wonder: “What level am I on? Where is my practice taking me? How far have I gone? How do I compare with other people?

Ajaan Fuang never encouraged those questions. He would never answer peoples’ questions about where they were. Instead, he would ask them, “How does the breath feel? Is the mind consistently with the breath? If it’s not, what’s getting in the way?” If the breath doesn’t feel comfortable, how can you change it so that it feels more soothing when it feels frazzled, energizing when it needs to be energized, relaxing when it’s been too energized. In other words, he was encouraging people to observe things for themselves and put their observations into their own language.

There was a Navy officer who was practicing with him. For a long time, he had trouble getting his mind to settle down. Then one day he happened to be riding in a bus, and his mind just settled down naturally. The adjective he used to describe his breathing was “delicious.” It felt really delicious to breathe in that way.

He later mentioned this to Ajaan Fuang, and from that point on, every time Ajaan Fuang would teach him, he would say, “Okay, now try to get in touch with that delicious breath”—the point being that it’s how you observe things, how you note things, that’s really important. You don’t need other people to certify that you’re on this or that level. You just need to notice, “Is my mind calming down, settling in? Does it feel comfortable here?”

Sometimes things outside the meditation are disturbing you, and you have to learn to how not be interested in those things outside.

Years back, we had someone come here to meditate. He’d been used to meditating indoors, in hermetically-sealed environments. His first day here, after he’d meditated under the tress, he complained that the orchard was so noisy: There was the sound of lizards running around through the leaves, insects scurrying here and there.

Of course, it’s up to you as to whether these things are going to disturb you or not. They don’t have to. If the breath gets really interesting, there can be any number of lizards running around and they’re not going to have an impact on your mind. So you realize that it’s not the sound outside that’s the problem, it’s the mind’s interest in keeping track of sounds outside. If you can make the breath interesting, your interest in things outside goes into the background.

As for thoughts about the past, thoughts about the future, it’s the same sort of thing. They can come into the mind, and either you latch on to them—in which case, you lose your concentration—or you can just let them pass right through, like wind going through a screen on a window. The screen stays in place; the wind goes through; the screen is not disturbed. Try to develop that open quality in your awareness, so that you can stay with the breath and not let things outside or inside get in the way.

As your concentration deepens and outside disturbances don’t have much of an impact, you begin to see that the way you focus on the breath may not be as easeful as it could be.

It’s like a little child learning how to walk. You notice that when a child is first walking, it’s not sure which muscles are necessary to walk and which ones are not. So it tends to tense up a lot of muscles that it doesn’t have to tense up. But with practice, the child begins to realize, “I don’t have to tense up my arms so much, I don’t have to tense up my neck or my back so much,” and you’ll notice that the child’s walking gets more natural, more and more graceful.

It’s the same with meditation. When you first settle down, you have to fight off distractions, so the mind will tend to tense up a little bit around the breath, just to make sure that it stays, to hold on. But as distractions get weaker and weaker, you don’t need to keep fighting things off, and that tension becomes a disturbance. In other words, there’s a disturbance in the concentration itself. If you notice that, you can let it go, and yet the mind can still stay in place.

After a while, the process of the mind’s talking to itself about the breath becomes unnecessary too, because the mind is right here. Ajaan Fuang’s analogy is that it’s like having a water buffalo and you call the water buffalo to you. As long it’s not there, you keep calling its name. But once it has come to you, you don’t have to keep calling it. In other words, if your mind is settled in on the breath, you don’t have to keep talking to yourself about the breath. Just have the perception in your mind—“breath, breath, breath”—along with the intention to stay, and that’s enough.

You find that when you can keep the mind still with even less activity, the deeper the concentration grows—the more refreshing, the more energizing, the more solid it becomes—all because you’ve learned how to observe yourself.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re in the first jhana or the fourth jhana or the whatever jhāna. What matters is that you learn to observe your own mind.

After all, the problem that we’re ultimately trying to solve is not the problem of trying to get a certificate to say that we’ve reached this or that level of concentration. We’re trying to train the mind to see why it is that, even though its actions are aimed at happiness and well-being, it manages to cause suffering for itself.

When the Buddha set out the four noble truths, the first truth was the truth of suffering. He says suffering is something you want to comprehend. That means you want to see it in action—exactly, what is the suffering in the mind? Then you want to see the cause, because if you’re going to put an end to suffering, you have to attack the cause. And you’re going to see that only if learn to be really observant and develop the qualities of mind that allow you to trust your observations.

So these are the qualities you’re developing as you stay with the breath:

mindfulness—the ability to keep something in mind;

alertness—your ability to watch what you’re doing as you’re doing it and seeing the results; and then,

ardency—trying to be really good at this.

It’s in the ardency that your discernment develops, because ordinarily you could be mindful of anything and it would count as mindfulness. You could watch yourself doing things, no matter what you’re doing—good or bad—and that would count as alertness. But ardency means that you’re trying to do this well. That’s what makes the other qualities good. And as you’re developing these three qualities together, you become a more and more reliable observer of your own mind.

So, remember that’s what you’re here for, not for a certificate. We’re not suffering because we have a lower level of concentration than somebody else. Or if we are suffering from that, we’re suffering from the wrong thing.

The real thing we’re suffering from is that we’re clinging to things that are going to disappoint us. Although there may be lots of other things outside that we say are causing us to suffer, the suffering is really coming from within. So you’ve to learn how to observe from within—both when you’re acting in ways that are causing suffering and then when you’re acting in ways that are putting an end to that suffering.

Learning how to watch your mind as you’re settling down into concentration is an important part of this training because you’re seeing the subtle ways in which the mind creates unnecessary suffering—even around something as simple as watching the breath. Of course, suffering might be too strong a word here. In Pāḷi, they use the word dukkha, which we translate as suffering, to mean anything from a slight disturbance to really heavy misery.

In this case, you’ll be learning how to look for the slight disturbances in your mind and learning how to drop what’s causing them when you can detect them. Then you have a good chance of seeing how it is that you cause yourself unnecessary suffering in other areas as well.

So develop the qualities that allow you to be a good observer inside, a reliable observer inside.

And as for where you are in the map of right concentration—that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you learn how to see your mind in action and direct it in the direction of causing less and less stress, less and less suffering for itself—because that’s what the meditation is all about.