The Mind in Action

When you make up your mind you’re going to stay with the breath, you have to give the mind good reasons to stay. Some of those reasons have to do with long-term benefit: It’d be good to have the mind trained. It’d be good for you, good for the people around you.

But other reasons have to do with right here, right now. That means you have to have a sense of pleasure right here, right now because, otherwise, those voices in the mind—the ones that want pleasure immediately—are going to rebel. As soon as they have a chance to slip out, they slip out, and they take you with them. So breathe in a way that feels really satisfying.

Ask yourself what would really feel satisfying right now? Long, deep, shallow, heavy, light? Fast or slow? And where would you want to emphasize the sensation of breath in the body?

When the Buddha talks about breath, he talks about it as one of the elements or properties of the body itself. It’s not a tactile sensation. So you’re not limited to just the feeling of the air coming in and out through the nose. Anywhere in the body where you feel that now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out, you can focus your attention there. Then you can choose whatever spot you want.

What spot would you like to have gratified right now? Usually the areas around the stomach, around the heart, around the throat are very sensitive. So try to give them what feels really good for them. Then the mind will have a lot of good reasons to want to stay.

Also, you can remind yourself that you’re learning a lot about the mind right here, right now.

So much of our life is done in ignorance. We don’t know what we’re doing; we don’t know why we’re doing it. No wonder we end up doing things that don’t bring the results we want. So focus very carefully on what you’re doing right now with the breath and you’ll begin to see the mind in action in the present moment.

I’ve heard some people say, “Why focus on the breath? You’re going to need a meditation object when you die, and the breath is going to leave you at that point.”

Well, the breath is not the only thing you’re going to learn about once you focus on the breath. There’s the conversation of the mind around the breath. There are the perceptions you hold. You hold one perception of the breath—say, think of the body as a sponge with the breath coming in, going out: That’ll have one effect on the way you actually experience the breath.

You can think of the body as a bellows with two little holes that the air has to come through, and if you hold that perception in mind, that’ll have a different effect. Then you can ask yourself which has a better effect and then think about it. Just the picture you hold in mind is going to change the way you experience the breath.

That’s a fascinating fact because it has implications for all other kinds of things as well. The perceptions you hold in mind are going to influence the way you experience life as a whole. Have you sorted through your perceptions to see which ones are really useful and which ones are not? Or which ones are useful for some times and should be put away for other times? There’s a lot to explore here.

When you focus on the breath, you’re going to learn a lot about the mind—a lot of important lessons—so that when the time does come to die, you’re really familiar with the territory. You know where the dangers can come from, and you know how to counteract them because you’ve really familiarized yourself both with the body and with the mind.

So there are a lot of good reasons to stay here. You have to create some of them to remind yourself. And that fact, in and of itself, is interesting, too. The reasons are already there, but you have to keep reminding yourself so that you stick with them.

So develop that quality of keeping these things in mind. That’s what mindfulness is.

There’s an awful lot to learn. * *