Hold On to Let Go
January 09, 2024

The breath is coming in and out all the time.

What makes the meditation different is that you’re paying attention to it. The more attention you pay, the better. This quality is called citta in Pali. It means mind but also means intent. You give your full awareness to what you’re doing, because everything that’s causing suffering in your life is happening right here: little movements of the mind, coming and going. If we’re not paying attention to them, we have no idea what’s going on.

So you have to get the mind really still, one, so that you can see them; and two, so that you can have a sense of well-being as you look at them and not get carried away with them. All too often when greed arises, anger arises, lust arises, fear arises, we just go with them because we have nothing else to hold on to.

An important principle is that you give yourself something good to hold on to. Ajaan Maha Boowa’s image is of climbing a ladder. You don’t let go of the lower rung until you have a firm grip on the higher rung. Then you can keep going higher and higher and higher, letting go only when you’ve got something higher to hold on to.

So pay attention to the breath. Get the mind to settle down right here. Have a sense of belonging right here. Think of a cat lying in a patch of sunlight on the carpet. It relaxes, relaxes, relaxes, until it’s just a pool of cat. Try to get your mind as relaxed and into the breath as possible. When you have that sense of well-being, then you can look at other things going on in the mind and see that you don’t want to run with them, because you’ve got something better right here.

There’s always the principle that when you let go, there’s got to be something better. Sometimes it’s because you actually see it; sometimes because after a while you begin to trust the Buddha—that when he tells you to let go of things, you let go—confident that there will be something better.

But until that point, give yourself something really good to hold on to right here: something that you can see, something that’s visceral, immediate. And what’s more immediate than the breath? It’s right here. It’s the closest part of the body to the mind. Of all the elements, it’s the one most sensitive to the mind. So pay attention right here.

As you pay attention to the breath, you’ll begin to see the mind a lot more clearly, too. And if you’re coming from a sense of well-being, you won’t fall so easily for the tricks of the mind. In the past the mind would promise you: Greed would make promises, anger makes promises. They don’t fulfill, but a least they promise you something—maybe give you a little scrap here and there., and you go for the scraps because you’re not well fed. But now when you feed yourself well with a sense of well-being, staying with the breath coming in, going out, then when the defilements throw scraps at you, you can just look at them and say, “No thanks.” That way, you can get beyond them.