A Good Attachment

Close your eyes and try to be comfortable with the breath.

Experiment with some long breathing for a while to see if long breathing feels good. If it does, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can change.

You’re trying to create a place where the mind can feel at ease in the present moment, with a sense of well-being, a sense of belonging here.

One of the Pali terms for meditation or the state of the mind in concentration is vihara-dhamma, a home for the mind. And as with any house, as they say, “It takes a heap of living to make a house a home.”

That means you’ve got to stay here for a while and get to know the breath well, figure out what’s comfortable for you, and what you need right now. What you need today may not be what you needed last night. So keep on top of the body’s needs in the present moment. That way you can feel really stable here.

The mind needs to be stable in the present moment because there are so many things in the world outside that are going to knock it off balance. So it needs its stable center.

You want to work on this. Protect this. Anything that comes up in the mind that would disturb this, you’ve got to say, “That’s a cause of suffering right now. I don’t want to go with it.” Do what you can to let it go.

You’ll see that the mind finds some allure in the things that pull it away. So you’ve got to learn how to see through that allure. And the best way to see through it is to give the mind a sense of well-being now.

Otherwise, if the mind is hungry and tired, it’s going to go for anything at all. But if it’s well-rested and has a sense of well-being, a sense of sufficiency in the present moment, then you look at other things and can say, “I don’t need that anymore.” You can see right through the appeal. It’s nothing worth really going to.

So giving the mind a sense of well-being in the present is an important part of the strategy of getting it past a lot of its other attachments.

As for people who say you’re stuck on pleasure, it’s a good pleasure to be stuck on. The pleasure of a centered mind, the pleasure of being able to be in your own body and feel like you belong here: That’s a good attachment to have.

Hold on to it for the time being, because it will see you through a lot of other issues in life.