You Wanted to Be Born
October 23, 2023

We focus on the breath because it’s the part of the body that responds most quickly to what happens in the mind. Anger comes in, greed comes in, fear comes in, and it immediately has an impact on the breath, and from the breath it has an impact on the heart and the rest of the organs in the body. So you want to reclaim the breath. Bring it over to the side of the Dhamma, so that it doesn’t turn the body into your enemy.

You have to be very careful with this body you have here. You moved into it, and it never signed on to any contract, never made any promises. It’s the same with the world. We were born here. We saw something that we wanted and we said, “That looks good,” without looking all around. We find ourselves in this world where there are a lot of people with a lot of other opinions, there’s physical pain: all kinds of things that we don’t like about the world. But the world never made any promises that it would be in love with our desires.

So some things you can change, but a lot of things you have put up with. But there’s a skill in putting up, as when you’re dealing with people with opposing opinions. You have to make sure you don’t get angry about the fact that they don’t see things the way you do. If you see anger coming up, you have to remind yourself: The sound of their voice made contact at the ear. That was it. What they said then disappeared. But then you take it, and you stab yourself saying, “Why doesn’t this person respect me? Why doesn’t this person honor me?” You can create all kinds of narratives that really are painful to the mind. Or you can just remind yourself, “The contact came, the contact left. It’s gone now. Any reverberations now are my responsibility.” If you learn how to deal with those, you can live in the world a lot more easily.

So even when you do have to argue with somebody else, it doesn’t have to be out of anger. You can maintain your cool.

Then you can learn to look around and say, “Well, maybe what they said was right.” Because if you get upset about something people say, then it’s hard to see that it’s right and hard to admit that it’s right. This is one reason we have trouble getting along with one another. But if you can put the anger aside, put the pride aside, and just say, “Well, that was that person’s opinion. They have their reasons. There are reasons for my opinions. Who’s got the better reasons?” When we’re more reasonable in this way, we can get along together.

The same with physical pain. You can learn how to get along better with your body if you learn how to separate your awareness from the pain. After all, the body has every right to have pains in it. It’s under no obligation to function perfectly all the time. So you have to put up with the fact that sometimes it’s not going to be comfortable. Again, it didn’t sign any contract. You were the one who moved in. So you have to learn how to deal with the situation that you moved into.

We live in this world; we live in this body. There are a lot of good things we can do in this world with this body, with this mind, but if we let ourselves get upset by the things we don’t like, that gets in the way of the goodness we could do.

So learn how to get some control over the mind. Keep reminding yourself, “I was the one who butted in here. Nobody asked me to come. But now that I’m here, I want to make sure that I give something good to this world, give something good to this body.” That way, when the time comes to leave, you leave without regret, without a lot of recriminations. That’s how both you and the world can be more at peace.