Joy on the Path
April 10, 2024

Ajaan Fuang used to say we should approach meditation as a game, something that you play at, but you want to be good at it. It’s like an athlete who has to be good at a particular sport. There has to be a combination of enjoyment and dedication for this to work.

So, start out by thinking about how fortunate you are that you have the good karma to be free to sit here focusing on your breath with no other responsibilities right now. All you have to do is to be aware of the breath coming in and the breath going out. Breathe in a way that feels comfortable. Experiment for a bit to see what kind of breathing feels best right now – long or short, fast or slow, heavy or light, deep or shallow. If you find something that feels good, stick with it and see how long you can stick with it. If you fall off, tell yourself, “Next time, I’m going to stay longer.” If you fall off again, just keep coming back, coming back.

There’s a story told about a Zen master in the Midwest who had a student who wanted to come out here to California to try his luck at the movie industry. The master asked the student, “Suppose they knock you down, what are you going to do?” The student said, “Well, I’ll just have to accept it.” The master said “No. They knock you down, you get up again. They knock you down again, you get up again.”

You’ve got to have that kind of determination, that kind of dedication, in your practice. After all, you’re doing this not just to have a pleasant place to stay in the present moment, but because you’re trying to develop good qualities in the mind. That’s the serious part of wanting to win. When the mind is not under control and is not well trained, it can cause you a lot of trouble. So, you’ve got to learn how to train it now, with something simple like this: keeping it with one thing, having a sense of being at ease, filling the body with that ease as you stay with one thing.

And then from there you can look at the world with a lot more objectivity. In other words, you can see things more clearly for what they actually are and how they actually function. In particular, you can see your own mind. You begin to see, when a thought comes into the mind, how it comes and when you can tell if it is skillful or not, how you can let it go if you see that it’s not skillful, and how you can encourage it if it is skillful. This is a very important skill.

There are so many things they teach in school that are irrelevant to your life, whereas things that are more relevant like this don’t get taught. You have to learn to master this skill on your own. But again, it’s like learning to enjoy a sport, or to enjoy learning how to master a musical instrument. That’s something you voluntarily do. Nobody is forcing you to meditate, but you realize it is a good thing to do.

So, encourage yourself. Give yourself a sense of joy in being here, and then a more serious sense of realizing, okay, this is important work that you’re doing right now.

When we get born into this life, everything seems positive from the beginning. When we’re children, the body is getting bigger, we’re getting stronger, we’re getting smarter, everything seems to be heading in the right direction. Then as you get older, things back up and turn around, going in the other direction again. We have to be prepared for that. When aging, illness, and death come, you want to have some skills in the mind so you don’t have to suffer from them.

So, we’re heedful, we’re persistent—that’s the serious side. But we want to learn how to enjoy this, because after all, the fruits of the path are not all saved for the end of the path. Learn how to enjoy being on the path right now, because it is a good place to be, a good place to walk, a good place for developing your mind.