Stay Home

Close your eyes, take a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths, and try to stay with the breathing as best you can. If you find that you wander off, just come right back. Wander off again, come back again. Show the breath that you mean business. You want to stay here. It gives you an anchor here in the present moment.

The mind needs this anchor because it tends to wander off into the past and the future. It’s like a little child wandering out of the house. It can get run over by cars, kidnapped by strangers. All kinds of unfortunate things can happen because the child isn’t protected.

If you don’t have anything for the child to do in the house, the child’s not going to want to stay. So you’ve got to give it something to do. You can play with the breath. Experiment with the breathing. You can try thoughts of goodwill. You can think of where the bones are in your body right now. Where are the bones of the fingers? Try to establish a sense of where those bones are right now, and then work your way through the hands, the wrists, the arms, shoulders. And then, starting at the toes, come up though the bones all the way to the skull.

The mind does need work to do. You can’t bring it to a sudden stop. It’s like a big truck. If you took it to an immediate stop, everything in the truck would go crashing forward. It has to gradually slow down.

So if the mind won’t settle down with the breath, give it some good work to do. Keep it entertained here in the present moment. And remind yourself: You don’t have to think about the past. You don’t have to think about the future. All too often, thinking about the past begins to weigh you down, fears about the future weigh you down, and that places just too much weight on the present moment.

If you look at what you’ve got right here, right now, it’s not unbearable. It’s when you add other things on top that you make it unbearable.

So look for what you’re adding. As I said, give the mind other work to do. Because sometimes, if it sits around idle, with nothing to do, it picks up its old issues again. So give it some new issues to work with. Something you find engaging. Something you find interesting. Something that gives you grounding here in the present moment.

In that way, you’re safe, like a child in a home. You don’t have to lock the windows; you don’t have to lock the doors. You give the child something to entertain itself with, and it’s happy to stay. It doesn’t have to wander into dangers outside.