Established in Full
October 06, 2023

When you establish mindfulness, you’re doing two things. One, you put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. Two, you try to keep track of something here in the present moment. It can be the body in and of itself, feelings in and of themselves, mind states in and of themselves, but we usually start with the body and we don’t really leave it. When the Buddha talks about establishing mindfulness with the breath, he notes that when you’re with the breath, when you’re alert, mindful about what you’re doing, you create a feeling of well-being or ease. So the feeling is right there. And of course your awareness is right there. The good and bad qualities of the mind are right there as well. So all four frames of reference are here as you try to stay established with the breath.

For the past couple of nights, we haven’t been doing much chanting because there’s a case of COVID here in the monastery. But the chanting is usually useful for helping to put aside any thoughts about the world right now. Think thoughts of goodwill for all beings, including the people you’ve been arguing with or having fights with in the course of the day. You realize you don’t want those thoughts to come and invade your mind right now. There’s an example in the Canon where the Buddha says that thieves have pinned you down and they’re cutting you up into little pieces with the two-handled saw. Even for them, he says, you should have goodwill. When you think about people who have been saying bad things to you or doing bad things in the world, bring this image to mind. At least they’re not cutting you up into little pieces with a saw. If can have goodwill for the bandits, you should be able to have goodwill for these other people, too.

Think about what that means. You’re not asking them to be happy cutting you up into little pieces. You’re thinking, “May they understand the causes for true happiness and be willing and able to act on them.” Then you let them go. And in letting them go, you free yourself from those thoughts. You’re releasing yourself.

If any thoughts of lust come up in the course of the evening, we have the contemplation of the 32 parts of the body. If you were to take your body apart, which part would you say that you’re lusting for? You realize that the lust is based on being very selective in what you think about when you think about somebody’s body. But if you open up your mind and are aware of the whole body, you realize that there’s nothing much there to get excited about. So you can let that go.

And in letting that go, your mind is released as well. It can come into the present moment and be here with the breath. You breathe in, breathe out, and notice where you feel the breathing in the body. It can be anywhere. We’re not focusing so much on the air coming in through the nostrils. We’re focusing more on the feeling of the body as it expands and contracts, bringing the air in, letting the air go out. You could ask yourself: Where do you feel that? Settle your attention there.

Then ask yourself if it’s comfortable. After all, as you’re practicing mindfulness, you have to remember what mindfulness means. You’re keeping something in mind. And you develop not only mindfulness, but also alertness and ardency. Alertness is watching what you’re doing, watching the results of what you’re doing, and ardency is trying to do this well.

Sometimes you hear there’s no such thing as a good or a bad meditation, but that’s really not true. There are times when the mind settles down well, other times when it doesn’t settle down well. You’re should try to figure out the reasons. Meditation doesn’t have to be a black box where you don’t understand what’s going on inside. In fact, understanding what’s going on is what discernment is all about. And the first way you’re going to understand what’s going on is to try to get the mind really quiet, really still. As the Buddha says, you want your awareness to spread, to fill the whole body. You want a sense of ease and well-being, refreshment, to spread and fill the whole body, too. So you have to start with a sense of ease and refreshment in the breath.

What kind of breathing does your body need right now? In the areas where you can feel the movement of the breath, refresh the chest, refresh the abdomen. Refresh the shoulders. If you feel a movement of energy in the head, think of it being refreshing. This is where you bring in your perceptions of what’s going on as you breathe. For the most part, we think of the body as being a solid lump with some liquid, and the breath is air coming in, going out of that solid lump. But what if you were to change your perception: that your most immediate perception of the body, your most immediate sense of the body, is energy? And it can flow. It’s the flow of the energy that allows the air to come in and go out of the lungs. Without that flow, nothing much would happen.

Where do you feel that? When you think of your sense of the body as energy, you can focus on parts that are tight and tense, where you allowed it to be tight and tense because you thought that that was part of being solid. You can ask yourself, suppose that really were breath energy that was blocked? Can you open up that blockage? What happens when you do? You breathe in, breathe out right there.

Ajaan Lee recommends that you think of the breath energy flowing in different parts of the body. Think of energy coming in at the back of the neck, going down the spine, or coming in the back of the neck, going down the shoulders, down the arms, out to the tips of the fingers. Breath energy coming in right in the middle of the chest and going down through the liver and the abdomen. Do it in a way that feels refreshing. Think of the breath energy going all the way down to your toes, so that your legs sitting here are not just dead lumps. There’s a flow of energy that keeps them alert, keeps them awake, keeps them from falling asleep.

What you’re doing here is looking at your sense of the body as you feel it from within with new eyes. This is an area where in English we have a very poor vocabulary. We’ve picked up some words from other languages, like chi or prana. There’s also warmth, coolness, feelings of solidity, but you want to emphasize right now the feelings of energy. You can perceive the body as one big bundle of energy, so that when the breath comes in, it’s energy mingling with energy. And even when it goes out, there’s still energy in the body. That allows a feeling of fullness to develop, which doesn’t get depleted with the out-breath. Then you can think of that fullness spreading.

Remember that as we develop mindfulness, it’s for the sake of developing concentration. And as the Buddha describes concentration, it’s a full-body awareness, with a sense of ease and well-being filling the body. You’re alert to the entire body from the top of the head down to the toes, fully inhabiting the present. These potentials are here, but all too often our preconceived notions get in the way of our developing them properly.

So allow for the possibility that the breath can flow through the nerves, the breath can flow through the blood vessels. Of course, again, this is not air, it’s energy. It’s subtle, but it’s there. Without that subtle energy, you wouldn’t feel the body at all. You wouldn’t be able to move the body at all.

So take advantage of the fact that you’ve got this energy and you can allow it to fill your awareness of the body. As you do this, it gets easier and easier not to go wandering after distracting thoughts. For the mind to wander into those thought worlds, your awareness has to make itself very small. You have to block out large parts of the body so that you can focus on creating a little thought world. But if you consciously make your awareness large and prevent it from shrinking down like that, it changes your relationship to the thought worlds as they begin to appear. Instead of going into them, you’re standing outside of them.

You realize you have the choice: You can go in or not, but right now, no matter how interesting or important those thoughts may seem, you want to develop another skill, which is the ability to be fully present right here, because this large awareness of the body is really healing for the body and healing for the mind. When we go into thought worlds, we tend to tense up parts of the body, tense up parts of the mind, in order to keep each thought world going. It’s for this reason that mental work is a lot more exhausting than physical work, because you’re creating patterns of tension throughout the body and holding on to them. As you try to keep one thought going, as you compare it with another thought, those patterns of tension stay. Now, though, you’re trying to breathe through them.

There’s a cartoon I saw one time of a person meditating, and the word “think” appeared in her forehead. And then another “think” appeared in another part of her body. And then it was “think, think, think, think, think,” until the whole body was obscured by the words, “think, think, think, think, think.” That’s how we live most of our lives. But here we’re trying to recover our awareness of the body, so that we don’t have to go into those thought worlds. Or more precisely, we can choose which thought worlds we want to go into, and then get out when we need to. We’re in charge of our thoughts. But to do that, you need a good foundation where you can stand outside of your thoughts. This is what we provide as we practice mindfulness leading to concentration.

For some people the word concentration seems to evoke images of getting the mind in a very narrow focus. This is a different kind of concentration, though. The mind is centered, which is why we call it concentration, but your awareness fills the body the same way as when you look at a painting: You focus on one spot that may be the most interesting spot in the painting, but you’re also aware of the whole painting at the same time. So think of the concentration here as being like concentric circles. Your main awareness may be at the tip of the nose or the middle of the chest, the tip of the sternum, any particular place in the body, but it connects to your full-body awareness. That’s how you can be solidly established.

So take advantage of this hour. You have nothing else to do but to develop this centered but broad awareness, as you’re fully aware of the body right here. Let this awareness do its healing work, both in the body and in the mind.