Space to Breathe

I saw a cartoon one time. A woman is sitting and meditating, and all of a sudden the word “think” is written across her forehead. Then in the next panel, there’s a “think” on her arm and a “think” on her leg. It goes through several more panels with more and more “thinks” until she’s nothing but a blot of “thinks.” There’s no room for her body at all. You can’t see her at all.

That’s the way a lot of us go through our lives. We have so many thoughts in our mind. And each thought has a little pattern of tension someplace in the body, so that we can remember it. It’s kind of our way of tying a string around a finger to remember something. We carry these patterns of tension as we go through the day.

I was reading a piece on Chinese medicine one time saying that mental work takes three times as much out of your body as physical work does. With physical work, when you stop, you stop. You can rest. But with mental work, if you’ve got a project that takes several days, you’re carrying it around the whole time. I know when I was working on The Buddhist Monastic Code, it was as if my whole body was filled with this rule and that rule because I couldn’t forget one rule, because it was related to another rule, which was related to another rule.

When we meditate, we’re trying to provide ourselves with a space inside where there’s no extraneous thinking going on. The only thoughts we have are thoughts about the breath. That allows the breath to flow throughout the whole body—because it can be a whole-body process. The breath is not so much the air coming in and out the nose, it’s the movement of energy through the body that allows that air to come in and go out. The more room it has, the better it is for the body: t nourishes you, relaxes you, soothes you, gives you a good place to stay in the present moment.

So give the body and the breath, some space—space to breathe, with harmony throughout the whole body. That’ll be nourishing. It’ll be healing. As for other thoughts that come up right now, you tell yourself: “This is not the time or place for them.” If you can notice where the physical corollary for that thought is, just breathe right through it. That way, the breath has a chance to do its work in the body.

Of course, at the same time you get to know your mind. Little thoughts that come up sometimes are very insistent. You have to remind yourself that not everything that’s pressing is really important or has to be done right away. And it’s not necessarily the case that the little children in your mind who are the most demanding are the ones who need the most help. Right now your mind needs some help.

After all, it’s the mind that negotiates with the world. Whatever thoughts you’re going to be doing as you leave meditation will depend on the mind’s being in good shape. When the mind gets to rest like this, especially with a sense of the body breathing freely, then it’s in a much better position to pick up its other work when it has to, deal with it effectively, and then know how to put it down.

As the Buddha said, one of the purposes of meditation is to be able to think the thoughts you want to think and not think the thoughts you don’t want to think. And as you develop the meditation, you get a better and better idea of which thoughts really are worth thinking.

So we stop thinking for a while. The only thinking we have, as I said, is about the breath and about ways it could be made more comfortable, and when it is comfortable, how to maintain that sense of comfort. Then, when the breath feels really good throughout the body, you can put even that thinking aside and just have the thought, breath, breath, breath. You’d be amazed at how healing that can be.