Mindfulness of Breathing: Mind

This morning we’ll focus on the third tetrad in the Buddha’s instructions on mindfulness of breathing. This tetrad focuses on the mind, although as was the case with feelings, remember that you try to stay grounded in the breath as you observe and train the mind.

One of the paradoxical aspects of meditation is that when you meditate, the mind is training the mind. It’s both teacher and student—or, if you see meditation as a sport, both the trainer and the athlete being trained. As teacher, it learns instructions from outside, but it has to oversee the actual training. As student, it has to follow the instructions. This means that, as you meditate, the mind has to learn how to read itself: to see what state it’s in as you begin to meditate, and then to try to get itself to act in a way that brings it into a better state, to reflect on how well it’s succeeding, and then to continue to make adjustments until it settles into a state that’s just right.

Two points are relevant here: When we think of the mind training the mind, it’s useful to think of the mind as a committee, with different members playing different roles. These are the different senses of self you have inside that are in constant dialogue. In meditation, we’re training three of these senses of self in particular: (1) the self who wants to enjoy the results of the practice and provides motivation; (2) the self who is developing the skills needed to bring those results about; and (3) the self who watches over the whole process, to see how well the other selves are doing and to suggest improvements. That’s the first point.

The second point is that for the mind to bring itself into balance, it will need a variety of meditation techniques for dealing with specific problems. The Buddha didn’t teach a one-size-fits-all vipassanā or concentration technique. He emphasized breath meditation as his central technique, teaching it in more detail and more often than any other technique, but he would also teach it in conjunction with other techniques. As he said, if you try to stay with the breath but there’s a “fever” in the body or the mind, switch to another theme that you find inspiring, one that allows the body and mind to calm down, and then return to the breath.

Or in Ajaan Lee’s terms, the breath is a home for the mind; the other themes are places where it goes foraging for whatever food it needs that the breath doesn’t provide.

So as you’re practicing, reflect every now and then on the state of your mind. If it’s not falling into the three ideal steps that this tetrad sets out for the mind—gladdened, concentrated, and released—then you might want to make some adjustments in your practice. Remember: You’re meditating on the breath, not for the sake of the breath, but for the sake of the mind. Always keep the well-being of your mind as your top priority.

The steps in the third tetrad are these: The first step is to breathe in and out sensitive to the state of the mind, the second step is to breathe in and out gladdening the mind, the third step is to breathe in and out concentrating the mind, and the fourth step is to breathe in and out releasing the mind.

The first step is simply a matter of noticing what state of mind you’re bringing to the meditation as you sit down, and watching it as you try to get it to stay with the breath, to see whether it’s happy to stay with the breath, or if something is getting in the way.

This sounds simple, but it’s actually a central skill in the practice: the ability to step back from your own moods and to recognize whether they’re skillful or not. If they’re not, you have to be willing to change them.

The Buddha said that his own practice got on the right path when he was able to step back from his thoughts and divide them into two sorts: skillful and unskillful. Instead of judging them as to whether he liked them or not, he decided to see where they came from, and where they would lead. If they came from unskillful attitudes—the desire to fantasize about sensual pleasures, ill will, or harmfulness—he knew that they would lead to unskillful actions, and that would lead to long-term harm. So he had to be willing to bring those thoughts under control. If his thoughts were based on skillful attitudes—like renunciation, goodwill, and compassion—he let himself think them until he was ready for the mind to settle down to rest in concentration.

As you’ve probably noticed, you won’t succeed in stopping unskillful thoughts simply by telling them to stop. You first have to convince yourself that you don’t secretly side with them. Instead, you’d be happy to have them stop. This is where the next step comes in, gladdening the mind: You actively try to make yourself take delight in abandoning unskillful thoughts and developing skillful thoughts in their place.

If, when you try to stay with the breath, you notice that the mind is happy to stay there, then you can keep your focus on the steps of the first and second tetrads.

If it’s not happy with those steps, then you have to talk to the mind to get it in the right mood—what the Buddha calls verbal fabrication, or directed thought and evaluation: You try to talk yourself into being happy that you’re here mediating and that you’ve got this opportunity to watch your own body and mind, to gain freedom from your attachment to thoughts that you know are not good for you.

Sometimes you can get the mind in the right mood simply by changing the way you breathe, to give both body and mind more energy. This is where you can tell yourself to emphasize the steps of breathing in a way that gives rise to refreshment and pleasure, and to stay with those steps as long as it takes for the right attitude toward the practice to permeate the mind.

But sometimes you might have to abandon the breath for the time being and focus on some other topic that will energize the mind: A few examples include contemplating how inspired you are by the Buddha, Dhamma, or Sangha. Another example would be developing the sublime attitudes: unlimited goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, or equanimity. When any of these contemplations succeeds in gladdening the mind, you can return to the breath.

The third step in this tetrad is to breathe in and out concentrating the mind. In this case, you’re trying to get the mind steadier and more focused. Sometimes, when there’s too much energy, you have to clamp down on it a little bit if the mind is getting too scattered.

Here again, you first try to use the breath to get the mind more concentrated. If focusing on the whole body is too distracting, focus on one spot and make the breath there as satisfying as possible, so that it feels really good to direct all your focus on that spot. If any pressure builds up, think of it radiating out from that spot in all directions. Don’t follow it out. Just stay focused in your center. I’ve found that a spot in the middle of the head is good for this kind of practice. Then, when the mind feels more firmly established, you can think of letting the range of your awareness expand until it fills the whole body. Then your concentration will be firmly established in a larger frame of reference.

Sometimes, though, to get the mind more concentrated, you have to talk to it so that it loses its interest in thinking about other things. This is where you can bring in an alternative topic of meditation that’s more sobering, such as recollection of death. You don’t know when death is going to happen, but you do know that when it does happen, you’re going to have to be well prepared, because your mind could easily latch on to some vagrant craving. If you’re not in control at that point, it’s like handing your car keys over to any crazy person who comes running past you on the street. You have no idea where the crazy person is going to drive you. So you want to have some control over your mind. This kind of reflection can get you more solidly focused and can calm the mind down.

Finally, the last step in this tetrad is to breathe in and out releasing the mind. Now, this can mean release on many levels. To begin with, you’re releasing the mind from its fascination with sensuality, its fascination with sensual thoughts and plans, and from the hindrances in general, which, in addition to sensual desire, include ill will, sloth & drowsiness, restlessness & anxiety, and doubt. When you can drop that fascination, you can get into the first jhāna.

When you’ve been there for a while, you can bring back the step of being sensitive to the mind. Is there any disturbance in your concentration? Here we’re not talking about disturbances coming from outside. We’re talking about disturbances in the concentration itself.

In some cases, the disturbances are the beginnings of thoughts that would distract you. In a case like that, once you’re established with a full-body awareness of the breath, you can keep watch to see if any thoughts are beginning to form. Usually, they’ll start as a little stirring in the breath energy, in an area where it’s hard to detect whether it’s a physical sensation or a mental sensation. It’s a little bit of both. If you decide that it’s a mental sensation, you tend to put a label on it—that it’s a thought about such and such—and then you get into it and ride with it.

So you’ve got to stop the process as quickly as you can. It’s like being a spider on a web. The spider sits in one spot on the web, but because the strands of the web are all connected, it’ll sense any disturbance anywhere in the web. As soon as there’s a slight vibration in the web, it’ll run over and deal with any insect that’s gotten caught in the web, and then return to its spot.

In the same way, if you sense a little disturbance anywhere in the breath energy in the body, you leave the center of your focus and go over to zap that little stirring to disperse it. Then you return to your spot.

That’s one kind of disturbance.

Another kind of disturbance is in the actual state of concentration itself. For instance, when you’re already in the first jhāna, you’re engaged in directed thought and evaluation. After a while, though, you reach a point where you realize you don’t need to do that anymore. The breath is really good, feels fine—you don’t have to keep thinking about adjusting the breath and spreading the breath, you can just be with the breath—then you can drop the directed thought and evaluation, and yet still stay with the breath. In fact, you can settle into the breath even more firmly, with a strong sense of oneness.

A similar process continues through the various levels of jhāna: You release the mind from the rapture, you release it from the pleasure, release it from the need to breathe—not that you force the breath to stop, simply that the breath energy in the body is so full and well-connected that you don’t feel any need to breathe.

You can even release the mind from the need to focus on the body. You can have a sense of space or sense of awareness as your topics.

Those are some of the ways you can release it, ultimately on the way to total release.

It’s in this way that you can use the mind to train the mind—to read its moods, to make it glad to be abandoning unskillful thoughts and developing skillful ones, to get it more concentrated, and to release it, step by step, from its various burdens.

So even though, in breath meditation, we’re focusing primarily on the breath, we can’t help but learn about the mind—and learn how to train the mind—at the same time. In fact, that’s what the practice is all about. We’re not here to get the breath, we’re here to use the breath to get to the mind. When you can learn the skills of making the mind happy to be here, you’re well on your way to getting the most out of the practice.