Throughout the Day

For many of us, concentration is like a fragile object you hold in your lap while you’re sitting here. As long as you’re sitting still, the object is safe. When you get up, it falls off your lap and breaks. Then the next time you come to sit, or the next time you do walking meditation, you have to pick up the pieces.

An important part of the practice is learning how to hold the concentration as you get up, as you go through the next movements after coming out of the sitting posture, and as you begin to take on your responsibilities for the day.

How do you hold it?

It’s an extra duty, what the psychologists call metacognition: the mind watching itself. It’s a skill that every mature person has to develop, but the Buddha is asking you to develop it to the nth degree. In other words, be aware all the time of what your mind is doing, where it’s going, whether it’s going in the places it should be going or not.

Because this is an extra duty that requires more energy, you need to get a sense of well-being with the breath, taking the breath as your basis. In the past, I’ve used the image of going through the day juggling: Instead of thinking of the meditation as one more ball you have to juggle and keep in the air, think of the breath as the place where you stand. Learn how to stay there and to return there when you slip off and go away—because it’s going to happen, for sure.

Think back to your early days of practicing concentration. You find yourself with three breaths and you’re gone. Well, you come back. Next time around it may be five breaths. At least you’re heading in the right direction. You learn how not to get discouraged. Over time, as you’re sitting here you can get more and more continually focused on the breath.

The same principle applies outside. As you’re walking around, as you’re taking on duties, the mind will slip off and forget itself. So as soon as you remember, just come right back to the breath.

Here you may want to use a shorthand version of the meditation you do as you sit, because you do have other things to do. So you want to learn how to figure out what are the essentials for keeping the mind centered, keeping it solid, keeping it aware of itself as you take on other duties.

One is to have a range of images to hold in the mind about what the breath is doing as you breathe in, as you breathe out. Then figure out which image is right for which activity.

One image I’ve found useful is to remind myself that the breath doesn’t have any clear boundaries. It’s a field of energy. Energy doesn’t have the clear boundaries, say, that a solid does. So think of yourself walking through the day in a cloud of breath energy. Figure out how to make it as peaceful and as coordinated as possible.

In other words, the cloud is not a storm cloud. It’s a peaceful cloud. And within that cloud, you’ll find that you have certain parts of the body that are more sensitive to the breath than the others.

Those are the parts that tend to seize up, say, when something makes you a little bit angry or gives rise to a little bit of desire or fear. Those spots can be your centers, and you want to keep in touch with them.

Even if you lose focus on the body as a whole, make sure that you’re sensitive to those spots. Then as soon as anything tightens up inside them, relax. Tightens up again, relax. At first, you don’t have to ask yourself why it’s tightening up. Just take it as a sign: Something came into the mind—an old habitual way of thinking, an old habitual way of relating to the body. Then just breathe right through it. Drop it, drop it, drop it.

Make that center in the body, that sensitive spot, as open and wide, as comfortable as you can, and try to protect that. That’s one shorthand way of doing it.

Another, if you have some mental work you have to do, is to give yourself frequent breaks. As long as you’re focused on the job at hand, you’re doing okay. If you find your mind wandering, ask yourself, “Why can’t it wander to the breath?”

But then, every now and then, give yourself regular intervals throughout the day when you stop and get in touch with how the breath energy is going in the body—because mental work does take a lot out of the energy of the body.

I read a Chinese treatise on medicine one time, saying that mental work takes three times as much energy out of the body as physical work does. That’s because it doesn’t stop. If you’ve been shoveling all day or working in the fields all day, when you stop, you stop. But if you have mental work, you come to the end of the day and you carry the work home. It’s there in the back of the mind, sometimes in the front of the mind, taking up energy.

So remind yourself: You have to take regular breaks to rest, restore. The important thing is that being with the breath is something you find to be energizing, so it has to be comfortable, it has to be nourishing for this to work. Otherwise you get frazzled. It’s like you’ve put the mind into a prison, and you’re doing prison labor. It may work for a while, but then the mind will want to rebel.

So instead, give it a good place to stay. The important thing is that you don’t get discouraged by the fact that you’re not 100% present with the breath all through the day. Whatever percentage you can manage at any particular time, take it as a good sign.

Often the insights that come as you go through the day, trying to keep the mind centered, come in those little moments when the mind is about to slip off, and you catch it. You begin to see, “Oh, this is the kind of thing the mind does. This is how it slips off.” Or you can catch not only when it’s happening, but you also see why it’s happening: You get insight into that question of the allure of things that you’re trying so hard to figure out—why the mind likes anger, why the mind keeps gravitating back towards fear.

Sometimes when you’re not fully observant, fully vigilant, you catch things out of the corner of your eye. There’s that part of the mind that thinks it can slip past without your noticing. But you’re there enough to see, “Oh, there’s this. This is why I do this. This is why I say things this way. This is why I act in this way. And it’s stupid.” When you can see that, you’ve gained some important insights.

Ajaan Suwat once said that his best insights came when he was doing walking meditation, because when you’re doing walking meditation, you’re not only centered in the body, but you also have to be aware of the world outside. You can catch the mind as it’s moving from inside to outside and back. You can see the times when something else tries to slip in.

In Thai they have the phrase “suam roi,” which means basically to step in the footsteps of someone else so that your footprints can’t be detected. It’s what thieves do as they try to sneak undetected into your house.

This is what a lot of our defilements do. As you’re innocently looking outside to make sure you’re not running into the end of the path, something else will come in. Well, if you can catch that, you’ve seen something that you wouldn’t have seen when the mind was fully here—sitting—with nothing else to do.

It’s like being a teacher. Sitting meditation is like being in the room with the kids, so they behave themselves. When you’re doing meditation throughout the day, it’s as if you’re outside the room. You don’t see everything going on in the room, but every now and then, you overhear something: The kids saying x, saying y, things they wouldn’t say in your presence. But now you’ve caught them. Now you’ve seen what they’re all about. You see who the troublemakers are.

So even though the concentration or mindfulness you develop as you go through the day may not be perfect, still it helps you to see things you wouldn’t have seen if you just allowed the mind to wander as it liked.

An important part of sticking with the breath as you go through the day is not getting upset when you’re not there. Just take it in stride.

At the same time, remember that as you stay with the breath, it gives you a new opportunity to relate to your body in a new way.

The breath is kāya-saṅkhāra. But any movement of the body is also kāya-saṅkhāra. Any kamma done by the body is kāya-saṅkhāra.

Some people say that this means that kāya-saṅkhāra has two totally different meanings—breath on the one hand and bodily action on the other—but that’s not a useful way of looking at the issue. A more useful way is to realize that every movement of the body has to start with the breath.

So when you’re with the breath, you’re back at square one and you’re learning to relate to the body back from square one. That gives you a greater sense of being centered in the body, in touch with the body. As you go through the different postures of the day, you can do it with more fluidity—because you’re coming from square one and you’re making it a good place.

As you begin to see the little things that slip in, you realize how important it is to maintain as much of this sense of being mindful throughout the day as you can. If your mindfulness slips, well, pick it right back up.

Have a positive attitude about this. You’re not standing over yourself with a whip. You’re learning to relate to your sense of the body, your sense of yourself, as you go through the day in a new way. And that’s all to the good.