Make the Practice Your Own

When you focus on the breath, pay careful attention. This is one of the bases for success: citta. It means being really intent on what you’re doing. You’re not just going through the motions. You commit yourself to doing this, and then you reflect on what you’re doing and seeing if it goes well. If it’s not going well, then you can ask yourself what might be going wrong. And this is where the meditation becomes your own. When you use your own powers of observation to see what’s what. What’s good, what’s not good.

It’s like learning a language. They can teach you a lot in school, but when you go out into the country where that language is spoken, you begin to notice: When they say this, this is what they mean. When they say that, that’s what they mean. You learn how to read the situation, without anybody having to tell you what the words mean. You figure it out. The language becomes yours. And in the same way, it’s in figuring things out that the meditation becomes yours.

So. You pay careful attention, and then you use your powers of observation and reflection to see what could go better. If we just do things that we’re told to do but without making them ours, then they don’t have much effect. They’re like a cream you put on your skin but doesn’t go into the skin. It just rubs right off.

But if you use your powers of observation, you begin to see: This means that; that mean this; this is good; that’s good; when you do this, you get these results; and when you do that, you have to do something else afterwards. You figure this out on your own and you remember that a lot more, for a lot longer time. Then you begin to get more interested in observing things, which is what the meditation is all about: observing what’s going on in your mind.

As the Buddha said, we suffer because we do things in ignorance. Ignorance is not simply not knowing about what’s going on in your mind. It’s not seeing the potentials of the mind for what they are. You can listen to the words and, in about a half an hour, you can get the basic teachings down. But, as Ajaan Lee says, to really understand even one of those teachings in practice sometimes takes years. So be willing to put in some time. And use your own powers of observation, because that kind of knowledge goes deep. It really can make a difference in the mind.