The Skill of Stillness

Close your eyes, take a couple of good long and deep in-and-out breaths, and notice where you feel the breathing in the body. It can be at the chest, it can be in the face, it can be in the abdomen—any place in the body where you have the sensations that tell you: Now the breath is coming in; now the breath is going out. Focus your attention there. Then ask yourself if long breathing feels good. If it doesn’t feel good, you can make it change. Make it shorter, more shallow, heavier, lighter, faster, slower. See what kind of breathing feels good for you right now.

We’re working on a skill here because we want to understand our minds.

One of the big problems in life is that we do things for the sake of happiness, but many times the results come out not happy. The question is: Why? Some people blame it on events or people outside, but the mature approach is to say: “Maybe there’s something I’m doing wrong. Maybe I’m not really clear about what I’m doing.”

That was the Buddha’s answer: We’re suffering because we don’t know what we’re doing. We have to be more and more aware of what we’re doing, because the cause of suffering comes from within the mind. If you want to watch the mind, to see the mind, it’s good to do it while you’re developing a skill, because that’s when you’re most conscious of what you’re doing and the results you’re getting. At the same time, you want to master a skill where you get the mind really still, because that’s when the mind can see itself most clearly. The skill here is the skill of concentration.

So breathe in a way that’s comfortable. Talk to yourself about the breath in a way that’s comfortable. Keep the mind on topic. Ask yourself, if long breathing doesn’t feel good, then what can you do to change it?

And think about the different perceptions you’re holding in mind. What picture do you have of what the breath does as it comes in? The breath can be the air coming in and out through the nose, but it can also be the flow of energy in the body that allows the air to come in and out—and that flow of energy is something you can work with a lot. You can make it extend down through the torso, even down through the legs, down the shoulders and out the arms, throughout the whole body. When you do that, it gives rise to a sense of ease and well-being. So, you can see that simply the way you picture the breath to yourself will help have a big impact on the breath, on how you actually feel it, and what you can do with it.

This is all part of the skill—what you’re doing right now—so try to be very alert to what you’re doing. Keep in mind that this is where you want to stay. If any other thoughts come up right now, you can let them go. You don’t have to chase them away or stomp on them. If they can come in, they can go out—and they will go out on their own if you don’t pay them any attention. They’re like little stray dogs. They come and if you feed them, they’ll hang around the house. If you don’t feed them, they’ll whine and make noise for a while, but then they’ll go away.

It’s the same with distracting thoughts. You’ve got work to do here. The work is getting the mind to settle down and be still with a comfortable sense of breathing in the body, so anything else that gets in the way, just let it go. In this way, you can become more aware of what you’re doing, and subtle things that are going on in the mind become a lot clearer.

This is the first step in getting some control over the mind and beginning to solve that problem of doing things with the hope of happiness, yet finding that we cause suffering, pain, disappointment instead. The more you can understand and solve this problem, the lighter your life will be.