On Being Non-reactive

There’s a passage where the Buddha is going to teach meditation to his son. He starts out by having the son take a survey of the different sensations he has in his body. In Pali they’re called dhātu. They’re potentials you have in the body. There’s a potential for energy, movement, called wind. There is the potential for heat, called fire. There’s the potential for coolness: water. There’s the potential for solidity, earth, and a potential for space. Where do you feel those things right now?

In those days, they believed that these are actually the elements from which the body was made. Now, at the very least, we can look at them as the elementary qualities from which our sensation or our experience of the body is made. The world outside is the same sort of thing. There’s energy, heat, coolness, solidity, space: the same sorts of things.

Then the Buddha said, “Try to make your mind like earth.” People throw garbage on the earth, and the earth doesn’t shrink away. They can pour perfume on the earth, and the earth doesn’t get gladdened by it. The same with water, fire, wind: You can use water to wash dirt away, and the water doesn’t complain. You can use fire to burn trash; it doesn’t complain. Wind can blow trash around; it doesn’t complain.

Now, if the instructions ended right there, it would be a lesson in equanimity, saying that that’s all you have to do: just be with things and noting: “This is what trash is like. This is what perfume is like. It’s like this.” But the Buddha doesn’t stop there. He goes on and gives instructions in mindfulness of breathing.

There he recommends that you actually get proactive. You start out by looking at short breathing and long breathing. Notice when the breath is short; notice when it’s long. Then he says to train yourself. In fact, all the remaining steps in breath meditation are trainings: You’re going to be doing something as you breathe.

In this particular instance, the first thing is to try to be aware of the whole body as you breathe in, the whole body as you breathe out. In other passages, the Buddha gives analogies for the state of mind you’re trying to develop. When you’re working on mindfulness, he says you’re trying to work on getting the mind into concentration. We’re not just here to be noting things coming and going. We’re directing the mind in the right direction, to concentration—because, after all, the path includes right concentration. You can’t do without it.

In the analogies he gives for right concentration, the first is of a bathman. Back in those days, they would use bath powder and water to make a kind of dough that you would rub over your body. It was like making bread dough: You take flour, mix it with water, and try to get it so that the flour is all moistened. There’s no dry patch here or there, but at the same time the ball of dough doesn’t drip. In the same way, he says, when you focus the mind and get it concentrated, there should be a sense of ease, a sense of refreshment, and you should allow that to seep throughout the whole body.

Ajaan Lee’s recommendations come in handy here. He talks about the breath energy flowing through the different parts of the body, starting at the back of the neck going down the spine, then out the legs, going down the shoulders out the arms. Starting at the middle of the chest—right around the heart—and going down through the different organs in the torso, down through the lower intestines. Think of the energy moving around in those areas and picking up whatever sense of ease there is as you focus on the breath and letting it spread.

So, you’re not just sitting here seeing things and saying, “Well, that’s the way it is. It’s like this.” If the breath is uncomfortable, it doesn’t have to be like this. You can change. You can think of different ways of breathing. Nobody’s here forcing you to breathe in a way that’s uncomfortable. So why do it? You can change. And the Buddha encourages you. In some of the later steps, he says to breathe in a way that gives rise to a sense of refreshment, gives rise to a sense of ease and pleasure.

So, the whole purpose in the beginning for getting the mind to be non-reactive is not to keep it there. It’s to get so that you’re observant. When the mind is still like that and non-reactive, then you can be in a better position to judge what’s comfortable and what’s not, what’s working and what’s not. And if things aren’t working, you don’t get upset. You don’t berate yourself for being a bad meditator. You just notice, “Okay, that’s the way things are right now, but they don’t have to be that way. What other way could they be?”

This is where you explore.

As you maintain that whole-body awareness, and any sense of ease or refreshment comes up, you let it spread. Some people find the whole body a bit too big to deal with in the beginning. So you can focus on one spot, get that one spot comfortable, and then go through the body section by section, breathing in a way that feels comfortable for that particular section of the body. You start around the navel, come up the front of the body, over the head, down the back, down the shoulders, out the arms. Go around and around like this, section by section, until you get a sense that you can connect all the different sections so that they all feel like they’re breathing together—coming in, going out, with a sense of ease, a sense of harmony.

That leads to the fourth step, which is to breathe in and out calming what the Buddha calls “bodily fabrication,” which is another term for the in-and-out breath. The reason he uses that term is because he wants you to notice the extent to which you’re actually shaping the breath through your intentions, and how you can calm those intentions down. In the beginning, Ajaan Lee recommends deep, long breathing to energize the body because if you start out with the thought, “I’m just going to calm things down,” you can put yourself to sleep. So energize yourself first. Then think of calming things down.

How do you calm things down? You don’t suppress the breath. You let the mind be as quiet as you can, as still as you can. Think of all the different breath energies in the body connecting up until you have a clear sense that the breath isn’t coming in from outside; it’s actually coming from within the body itself.

The touch of the breath, say, at the nose: That’s a tactile sensation. That’s the air coming in. But when the Buddha classifies the in-and-out breath, he doesn’t classify it as a tactile sensation. He classifies it as part of the energy property, the wind property in the body itself. He also classifies it as a kind of fabrication: something you shape through your intentions. So, the energy actually comes from within.

When you feel that clearly, then you realize you can make the energy full throughout the body without having to take anything in from outside. The more there’s a sense of full energy in the body and stillness in the mind, the calmer the breathing becomes. And as long as you’re fully alert, there’s nothing to fear if the breath stops, because you’re not suppressing it. It’s just that the body’s energy needs are filled. If it has any need to breathe in, it will.

But if you can stay with the breath, very, very still, it’s like tuning in a radio station. You tune it in so that there’s no static. Then you can hear the message—whatever the message is on that station—very clearly.

In the same way, when the breath energies in the body are very still, you can sense the movements of the mind very clearly, and that’s what we’re here for. The breath is like a thread that you follow through a maze to get to the mind in the middle. When the breath gets still, the mind becomes more and more clear, and you can see its movements.

Here again, that practice you had in being non-reactive is going to come in handy. You see that there are lots of things going on in the mind. There’s a lot of chatter. Even when the mind is fairly still, there’s going to be a little bit of chatter around the edges. It’s going to be saying good things; it’s going to be saying stupid things, relevant things, irrelevant things. And you want to notice: What are the things that the mind picks up on and runs with when it drops the breath? And why does it choose those things? When everything is very still, you’re going to see this clearly.

That’s when you come to understand the mind. Because there is that big question of the mind: Why is it that we all want happiness, we all want well-being, and yet so many of the things we do for the sake of well-being and happiness end up creating the opposite: pain, suffering, stress? The Buddha’s answer is that we’re not fully aware of what we’re doing. We’re not paying appropriate attention, seeing it in the terms of what we’re doing that’s causing stress and what we’re doing—or what we could do—to put an end to that stress.

That requires that you step out of the different thought worlds that you’ve made and look at them as patterns of cause and effect, events leading to other events, sometimes skillful, sometimes not. When you can see why the mind picks up on things that it really shouldn’t be picking up on, and you’re not blown away by that fact, you simply see it as a fact, and you see that you don’t have to do it—then things become clear. You don’t have to stick with those unskillful things.

Here again, that lesson in being non-reactive is going to be useful. All too often, when you see something you don’t like inside yourself, you either deny it or you tell yourself, “Well, maybe it’s not so bad after all. Maybe that’s just the way I am.” But if the way you are is causing you suffering, why hold on to it? Why keep doing it? It’s a lot easier to simply note the fact, “Okay, this particular action is causing stress and I don’t have to do it.” Being matter-of-fact in this way is really useful in the meditation, because it allows you to change your ways without a lot of fuss and bother.

So, those preliminary instructions that Buddha gave to his son—you’re noticing the things that are there, pleasant and unpleasant, and you don’t have to react—put you in a better position to see more and more clearly what you have to do with things that are pleasant and unpleasant, rather than just simply going through your old kneejerk reactions. Those instructions are not telling you, “Don’t do anything at all, and that will constitute awakening.” They’re saying, “Really look carefully. Don’t be too quick to react. Don’t be too quick to come to a judgment about things. That way, you’ll see things you didn’t see before, and you’ll be able to do things you didn’t do before, as things get clearer and clearer in the mind.”

So that’s the role of non-reactivity. It’s not the goal: it’s one of the mental skills you want to develop as part of a whole range of skills you’re going to need. When you know how to use it correctly, then it can do a lot for you.