Concentrated Inside

You find your breath.

If the mind’s been wandering around in the morning, try to let it settle down.

You have to learn how to cut off the thoughts. The mind is telling you things, but you don’t have to complete the sentence. You can just let it drop.

Let your thoughts take care of themselves. You take care of your attention to the breath. This is your center. This is where the mind can gain a sense of belonging here in the present moment, so that you can make the house of your body at the moment into a home by breathing in a comfortable way. It’s like moving into a new place and arranging the furniture the way you like it, repainting the walls, getting things just comfortable, the way you like it.

So, work that way with the breath. The difference here, of course, is that you can leave your home for a little while and come back and it’s in the same way that it was before. But when you leave your breath, you come back and things have happened. The thoughts you allow yourself to wander off with: They’re going to have an impact on the body.

If you’re not careful, you find yourself fixing the same old problems over and over again. Anger comes in and it’s going to have an impact on the breath, an impact on the body. Greed, aversion, delusion: All these things will have an impact on the body. If you allow them to come in, then you have to go cleaning up after them again.

It’s like leaving your home and leaving the doors and windows open so that all the animals in the grove can come in.

So you’ve got to stay with the breath as much as you can throughout the day. Make this your point of operations. In other words, this is your main office. You don’t need to leave the body. You can look out the window to see what’s going on. It’s not that you don’t know what’s going on, but you want to stay here inside the house. Keep yourself with a sense of well-being regardless of what’s happening outside. As for the other issues that come up in the house, you can focus directly on them with a sense of well-being.

I was talking with someone yesterday about suffering a sense of depersonalization or alienation from doing the meditation. That’s a meditation without much concentration: a lot of emphasis on trying to gain insight but not giving the mind a firm foundation so that when things like inconstancy hit you or stress hits you or not-self hits you: If you don’t have the right amount of concentration, it’s going to knock you over.

You want to have a sense of well-being and a sense of really belonging here, a sense of stability in the mind. Then you can see the thoughts that come up and say, “Oh yeah, I don’t need to identify with those because I’ve got something better.” That way, so seeing that they’re inconstant, stressful, not-self is no problem.

It’s like seeing the wind blowing outside your window. As long as you don’t open the window and let the wind in, it’s not going to blow you around. It’s there, it’s blowing around, but you’ve got something better here inside.

So work on this. Make sure you maintain this. Don’t let the wind and the animals come in and destroy the work you’ve done.