Choices that Matter
November 26, 2023
When you sit down to meditate, you’re making choices. You could choose to be with the breath or to wander around. If you choose to be with the breath, you can decide what kind of breathing you want to do: fast, slow, heavy, light. You can decide where you want to focus in the body. You can choose what kinds of perceptions you hold in mind about the breath. You can perceive the breath as the air coming in and out through the nose, or you can perceive it as the energy flow that goes through the body that allows the air to come in and out.
The Buddha would actually recommend the second because when he talks about breath, he treats it as part of the wind element in the body. It’s not a tactile sensation from outside. It’s the energy you feel inside the body.
But here again, you can perceive that in different ways, too. You have the choice of thinking of the breath energy coming in from outside, or you can think of it originating inside the body. You can have it originating at one point or two points, or think of every cell of the body breathing in, breathing out. You have lots of choices.
This is probably one of the most important themes in the Buddha’s teachings. When he taught the four noble truths, he didn’t present them simply as four interesting facts about suffering and stress. He said, here are four different things you can do: You can try to comprehend the stress and suffering—looking to see that in the action of clinging there is suffering right there—and to see how that’s true. Then see how that changes your relationship to suffering. Understanding it that way, you can abandon the cause, which is craving. You can develop the path, so that ultimately you can realize the cessation of suffering.
These are all choices you can make as to what you can do, and these choices make a difference.
One of the biggest misunderstandings about the teachings is that the Buddha’s simply teaching you to accept things as they are, that the basic cause of suffering is that we have a neurotic refusal to accept things as they are—and that when you learn to accept them, it’s okay.
I was listening to a Dhamma talk given recently by a monk in which he was talking about how when he was a young monk he suffered an accident. He realized that the worst thought that came to him as he was going through the accident was: He hoped nobody would see him doing the stupid move that caused the accident. And he observed, “Oh yes, I have a problem with vanity.” Then he talked about another incident forty years later that again showed his vanity—as if it were just a constant that he had to accept about himself, and somehow accepting it made it okay.
That wasn’t the Buddha’s approach. As he said, he taught people to develop skillful qualities, abandon unskillful ones, because they can do it—and because by developing skillful qualities and abandoning unskillful ones, it would lead to happiness.
So you can make these choices, and the choices do make a difference between whether you’re going to suffer or not going to suffer.
Now, some people don’t like being held responsible. They like to think that whatever they’ve done wrong wasn’t their fault. But if that’s your attitude, you’re never going to learn anything, and the end of suffering will elude you. So learn to appreciate the fact that you can make choices, and the choices do make a difference—so that when the mind begins to settle down, you can choose to try to maintain that sense of stillness. There’ll be some frustration as the mind slips away, but don’t give in to the frustration. Just keep coming back, coming back, coming back. Try to figure out, what is it that makes the mind want to slip away? And what can you do to make it want to stay instead?
Ajaan Lee recommends thinking of the breath as a whole-body process and allowing it to be comfortable. Now, he does admit that some people find it hard to start out with the whole body, so in that case he recommends that you start with a smaller area. But still, try to make that spot comfortable. Notice which way you breathe has a good effect on it, which way has a bad effect on it. And don’t just stop with noticing. Try to breathe in a way that has a good effect.
It all sounds very simple and very basic, but it’s so basic that people say, “The Buddha must have been a lot more sophisticated than that. There must be something tricky about the way he taught.” But the Buddha was not a tricky teacher. He was very straightforward, honest, direct.
Good qualities are good. They can be developed and have a good impact on your mind. So we start with mindfulness. Give mindfulness a good foundation. Combine it with alertness—the ability to see what you’re doing while you’re doing it. And ardency, the desire to do this well.
That kind of desire, the Buddha said, is good. It’s not the case that all desires are bad. The desire to develop skillful qualities and to abandon unskillful ones is actually part of the path. It comes under right effort. It’s simply a matter of learning how to relate to your desires skillfully.
You’ve probably had the experience where you want the results so badly that you’re not paying careful attention to what you’re doing. That’s a good intention, but it’s not skillful. It’s not focused in the right place. You want to focus your desires on the causes.
Each time you breathe in, stay with the breath. Each time you breathe out, stay with the breath. Desire that. And as long as you’re going to stay together, try to breathe in a way that allows the mind to feel at ease with the breath. At the same time, have your mind place just the right amount of pressure on the point of your focus: not so much that you constrict the breath, and not so little that everything slips away. You want it just right. Then try to maintain that sense of just right. The mind, which in the beginning may not be all that calm, can begin to calm down some.
You can’t expect the comfortable breath to do all the work for you. You have to keep reminding yourself, “Calm down, calm down, be at ease here. This will get good soon.” They’ve noticed that even babies are able to soothe themselves. They call it a process of “self-soothing,” where a baby is upset and so, as it’s lying there alone on its back, it learns how to calm itself down, put itself to sleep. And that’s without having any meditation instructions at all. So we all have this ability within us someplace to calm ourselves down.
Realize that you’re doing delicate work here, so get calm, and then the delicate work will increase the calm and make it last—all because you choose to do this. You start out with a good intention and then you try to maintain that intention. Simply making the intention doesn’t guarantee that it’ll last, so you have to keep following up.
These are choices you make continually each time you breathe in or out, each time there’s a mental moment where something else presents itself to you. You could go wandering off for a while, but you choose, “No, I’m going to stay right here.” And if the mind complains, “What’s happening? Nothing’s happening.” You can tell it, “That’s the whole point. You’re trying to get used to being still, because only when the mind is still can it see itself clearly.”
And here again, you make choices: How still does it have to be? Sometimes you say, “My mind isn’t still enough yet to understand anything, so I’ll just keep on working at the stillness.” Other times, though, problems come up in life that you can’t avoid. You’ve got to deal with them somehow, so you take what powers of concentration you have, what powers of discernment you have, and you put them to use. It’s in this way that they get developed.
It’s like when you’re hungry. You look in the refrigerator, and the food is a little bit spoiled but not so badly spoiled that you can’t eat it. You tell yourself, “If I were to wait until the food was perfect, I might not eat at all.” So you make the best use of what you’ve got. In some cases, by doing that you learn a lot more than a person who always has good ingredients.
They talk about software designers back in the 90s, and how the software designers from India tended to design really elegant software, very simple but powerful software, because the computers they had were limited. So they realized they had to find the elegant solution that could be run on a computer with low power. As a result, they became really good coders, really good software designers, better than the people who had lots of power to work with and tended to squander it.
Sometimes when you’re dealing with limited resources, you can learn to use your ingenuity to develop skills you wouldn’t have developed otherwise. So there are times when you can’t wait until your concentration is perfect or your discernment is perfect before you use them. In fact, they never get perfect unless you begin using them beforehand, and you get a sense of what their powers are. But again and again and again, it’s always a matter of realizing that you have choices.
When I started out meditating, the different methods I was taught told you that you had no choice: “Just stay with the breath as it’s going to come in on its own. Don’t try to change it.” You had to limit your attention to the spot at the tip of the nose. Or if you were doing insight practice, you had to make sure that your mind didn’t think about anything. If it did think, you just had to note, note, note, note, note, and that was your only choice. Your only tool was the noting. There weren’t many choices available. I found my mind rebelling. Instead of trying to find freedom through those methods, I tried to get free from those methods.
Only when I encountered Ajaan Lee’s teachings about how you can work with the breath in many different ways—choosing your point of focus, trying to get your awareness to fill the whole body, giving it more space—that’s when I began to realize that the process of freeing the entire heart and mind requires that you use the entire heart and mind.
In other words, you use your desires, you use your persistence, you use your powers of analysis. Things that the other methods said that you had to cut off, were things you actually used. Your heart was engaged as well, as you looked for a happiness that was lasting, a happiness that wouldn’t harm anyone. It’s by using the whole heart and mind that you can free the whole heart and mind.
An important part of using your mind is realizing that you have choices. You notice this in the world outside: When people want to exert power over you, they’ll tell you that you have no choice, or they limit the number of choices they present to you. They don’t want you to think outside the box.
But when we’re meditating, a lot of the thinking does go outside the box. You notice in the Buddha’s instructions for meditation he gives you some ideas of what you can do. But as to how you’re going to accomplish those things, he leaves that up to you to discover through your own powers of observation, through your own experimentation.
That’s how you get engaged in the meditation, not by simply following the rules, but by understanding the basic principles, and then learning how you can apply them to your specific needs right here, right now.
That’s how you develop sensitivity; that’s how you develop discernment. That’s how the whole mind and body grow in such a way that the whole mind and body can eventually gain release.