Consistency

Focusing your attention on the breath is easy. The hard part is in keeping it there.

The mind has a tendency to jump around, trying to take care of lots of different things all at once. Or just curious about lots of different things all at once. As a result, it never develops the skill of staying in place.

There is an advantage to learning how to stay. If you want to see something clearly, you have to be with it for a long time. Otherwise it’s like watching a TV show, coming into the room, then going out of the room, coming in a few minutes later, then going out again. You catch bits and snatches, but you don’t see the whole show. You don’t understand why the characters say what they’re saying. When things are taken out of context, you miss the meaning a lot of times.

It’s the same with the mind. You want to keep it here with the breath to see what happens, see the context of the different movements of the mind. You get a sense of which ones are really skillful and which ones are not.

But in the beginning, you just want to learn how to shoot down all the other thoughts that are not associated with the breath and stay right here as you breathe in, as you breathe out. You find that it stretches you. Well, that’s good. The defiled mind is shrunken. It needs to be stretched.

Those little bits and pieces of concentration, if you stitch them together, can become deeper and deeper. There’s a tendency sometimes when your concentration is not good to just throw away the concentration and say, “My concentration is horrible. What I have is worthless.” And you throw it away.

What you have to do is stitch together the fragments you’ve got. At the moments of the breath cycle when you tend to lose your focus—try to be very conscious. Do you tend to lose focus at the beginning of the breath? The end of the breath? Between the breaths? If you notice you have a tendency or habit of slipping off, say, between the breaths, make sure that you stay extra vigilant during the time between the breaths, so that one mental moment of concentration gets stitched to another, gets stitched to another, and another. And as they get stitched together like that, they not only grow longer, but also stronger.

So. Learn how to value what you’ve got and then improve it. This is the basis of any skill. If you find that your fingers are not dexterous, say, playing the piano, you don’t throw your fingers away. You take the fingers you’ve got and you practice with them. Over time, you get more and more skilled. Those fingers that were clumsy suddenly become more dexterous.

It’s the same with your concentration. Keep at what you’ve got. Value what you’ve got. Notice where the weaknesses tend to be, so that you can stitch things together more and more consistently. Then you can see the whole story. When the character in the TV show says, “I’m out of here,” you understand why.

The same with the mind: When the mind says something, you have a sense of where it’s coming from because you’re paying attention right here consistently. You uncover a lot of things you would have missed otherwise.