Listen to Yourself

Learning to meditate is like learning any skill. First you work at just getting the steps right. Can you stay with the breath? If not, what can you do to learn how to be more consistently with the breath? What mental games can you play to get the mind to stay more and more consistently—to want to stay more and more consistently. How do you encourage yourself? How do you pat yourself on the back when you do things right, to make it a more pleasant place to be, a more pleasant skill to master?

But there comes a point where you’re not just doing it. You have to observe yourself doing it as well. It’s like playing a musical instrument. First you try simplyto get the notes right, and then you begin to listen to yourself as you play. What does it sound like? It’s like listening from the outside. Then you get an idea where your playing is lacking. You can make it more and more pleasant to listen to. That gives even more joy to you and to the people listening to you.

When you meditate, there comes a point where you have to step back and observe the mind. What is it doing? How does it really feel? What could it do better? When we talk about getting a sense of pleasure, where is the pleasure right now? “And how can I relate to it in such a way that I can soak in the pleasure, benefit from the pleasure, but not get swallowed up by the pleasure?”

It’s this ability to step back and listen, step back and look—that’s what turns meditation into a real skill. And, of course, some people are going to be better than others at that. But that’s the basic quality that we need to develop: the ability both to do the meditation and to observe the mediation while we’re doing it. That’s how the lessons the Buddha wants us to learn are going to be found—watching the mind in action.

When he talks about things being inconstant, stress, or not self, he’s not concerned about trees and mountains and birds and things outside like that. He’s more concerned with what’s going on in your own mind. The thoughts you tend to rely on, the desires you tend to hold to: Are they really reliable? What kind of results do they get? That’s where those three perceptions are really useful because they can pry away the points where you really are attached, where you really do cling and you really do crave.

Otherwise, if you go around just observing things outside—clouds move; cars move; everything moves; everything is impermanent—the extent to which that really has any implications for you is up to question. But when you see that your own perceptions are impermanent, unreliable, stressful, or when your own thoughts are unreliable and stressful—then can you develop a sense of dispassion for them. That’s the dispassion that’s going to make a difference. That’s what’s going to set you free.

So think of this as a skill. And a large part of the skill is learning how to judge your own actions, with an eye to making them better and better. The judging voice that says, “You’re hopeless; give up,” is one you want to banish. It doesn’t help you develop any kind of skill at all, aside from the skills of laziness—and laziness has its skills, you know. It has very elaborate ways of explaining itself and justifying itself.

But those skills, you’ve had enough of. You’ve mastered them enough. You want to master the skills of being more persistent, more observant, better and better at getting reflective. Those kinds of skills are the ones that can set you free.