A Safe Landing Strip
October 28, 2023

Breathe in a way that feels good. You may start with long breathing or short breathing. See what feels best for the body right now. Give the mind a place to settle down and stay. After all, this is the mind’s problem. It doesn’t have places where it can stay for any long period of time. It finds something it likes, and then that changes, so it has to jump off and find something else. Sometimes when it jumps, it’s not looking where it’s going. It lands on some pretty bad places.

Ajaan’s Lee’s image is of an airplane that has no landing strip. It flies around, around, around, and because it has no safe place to land, it’s just going to come crashing down in the sea, crashing down in a forest, crashing down on other people. So give your mind a good place to settle down. That way you’re not going to cause trouble to anybody else, either. If the mind is wandering around, it starts making friends with greed, aversion, and delusion. It starts seeing things in screwy ways. That’s going to influence its behavior in the way it treats itself and in the way it treats other people.

So give the mind a good place to land, with the breath coming in, going out like this. Then think of the breath energy spreading throughout the whole body, so that the whole body feels good as you breathe in, as you breathe out. Even if there may be pains here and there, focus on the parts that you can make comfortable.

Again, another image from Ajaan Lee: It’s like eating a mango. There may be a wormy spot in the mango, so don’t eat the worms. Focus on the good mango flesh and leave the rest of it to the worms. They can have it. You have to learn how to take care of your own mind. We do this by being generous, by following the precepts, by meditating.

By being generous, we feel good about ourselves because we’re not just a useless weight on the world. We actually help other people, and that feels good. We have the choice. We have our belongings, and we can use them up ourselves, or we can share them with other people. You discover that by sharing them with other people, you have a longer happiness.

The same with being virtuous: You follow the precepts, then when you sit down and look at yourself—you look at yourself in the mirror in the morning, you look at your mind as you sit down to meditate—you’re not ashamed to look at your mind, because you realize you haven’t acted on any unskillful intentions.

This way, it gets easier and easier to create that safe place for the mind to land. When you land right here, you’re landing on skillful intentions. You’re landing on a comfortable state of mind that you can maintain, even as you go through the day and do other things. You can maintain this sense of well-being inside. That way you’ve landed safely. Nobody gets hurt.