A Position of Strength

The Buddha’s teachings are all about the importance of action: how you shape your life and how you have an impact on others by what you do and say and think.

Yet they also put a lot of emphasis on being very still.

The two teachings actually go together, because when you’re acting, you have to come from a position strength. Stillness provides that strength. Ajaan Lee’s image is of a person walking: You get the strength from the foot on the ground, not from the foot that’s moving. If your actions are going to be skillful, they have to come from a place where the mind can consider things carefully, clearly, and quickly. The more the mind is still, the more it’s able to do these things. Above all else, the mind needs strength, and it gathers its strength from meditation.

When you sit here with the breath, tell yourself that you have no other responsibilities right now—at work, at home, in the family. Just let them all go. As soon as a thought begins to move in the direction of any of those things, just cut it off. And when you cut it off, have a sense that you’ve liberated the mind, not that you’ve cut off anything vital. You’ve cut off all the vines that come to entangle and pull you down. The mind can now stand tall and free.

Give the mind time to be right here and settle into your body. We’re always so focused on running out all the time. To counter this, think of yourself backing into your body—feeling the back, feeling the legs, feeling the arms, all from within, being very conscious of where all the parts of the body are right now. If you give the mind this task, it won’t have any extra ability to take on other things. It’s as if the mind has only so many hands, and you’re filling all its hands with the work of being right here with the breath. So notice how the breath energy feels in your physical hands, in your wrists, coming up your arms, your shoulders. If it doesn’t feel good, think of it flowing more freely to nourish those parts of the body. Then start again with the feet—coming up the ankles, the calves, the thighs, the pelvis, up the back, through the neck and all the muscles around the skull and in the head.

Try to be fully aware of these things as much as you can, and that should occupy your awareness. If the mind tells you it has other things to think about, you can tell it, “not right now.” This is one of the reasons why we have a Dhamma talk, because the mind has so many ways of getting out of the meditation, and the Dhamma talk is meant to give you ideas for how you can say No to these things.

First off, you need strength for all the important duties you have to take care of. If you’re coming from a position of weakness or fatigue, you’re not going to do well. The actions that shape your life will shape it in a very weak and fatigued way. So you start with the first strength, the strength of the conviction: that your actions really are important, they require care, and they require this kind of foundation.

Then you need persistence or effort. This has to build on conviction, because you might find yourself getting more and more tired when the days are long or your body’s not feeling strong. On those days, it’s very easy to give up and say, “Well, it doesn’t matter. I’m not going to care about that anymore.” Of course, there are some things that don’t really require a lot of care, but there are things that do, and you want to be prepared for them whenever they may come. They don’t signal themselves ahead of time, saying, “Tomorrow there’s going to be a big issue you’ve got to prepare for, so get ready.” Sometimes they just spring up at you, so you want to be in a position where you’re ready for whatever they might do to challenge you.

This combination of conviction and persistence is what keeps you going and trying to do your best. Then, when the time comes, you can rest.

Take time and really move into this time fully, move into your body fully, right now, because this awareness filling the body is what heals the body and heals the mind. Then keep at it. This requires mindfulness, the ability to keep something in mind. That’s another strength, because if you forget, all of a sudden you find yourself off in Omaha or New Jersey or wherever. Then you wonder: how did you get there? Well, you forgot. Something came bubbling up from inside and now here you are.

These little thought worlds bubble up in your mind, and then you get inside them and they can carry you anywhere. It’s like getting into a television set. You want to be able to see these little television sets as they come up and say, “No, I don’t want to get into that.” Then they’ll float away.

If you can just stay here with the breath as you stick with this intention, your mindfulness turns into concentration.

Sometimes you hear that mindfulness is one thing, concentration is something else, but they really do go together. Mindfulness means keeping something in mind. And, of course, you can’t be concentrated unless you have something in mind and you stick with it. The topics of mindfulness of the body, mindfulness of your feelings, mindfulness of your mind states: Those are the objects of your concentration. At the same time, as you get more concentrated, it’s easier to remember things. In fact, it’s in the really strong levels of concentration that your mindfulness becomes pure.

So be mindful to stay right here and do your best to make things comfortable right here, because mindfulness doesn’t mean just remembering to be here. It remembers other things as well:

How do you settle in right here so that it feels really good?

When something else comes up, what do you do with it?

When something unskillful comes up, can you remember how not to fall for it?

When something skillful appears, can you remember how to nurture it and keep it going?

Mindfulness is the governing principle in that it reminds you of what to do. If you can’t remember whether you’ve encountered something before, or if what you thought would work doesn’t work, that’s when you bring in your discernment.

Discernment is also very closely related to concentration, although it’s not the same thing. Some people can get their minds concentrated without much effort and without much discernment. They just plop down. For most of us, though, it requires figuring things out: What’s wrong with the mind that it won’t settle down? Is it something having to do with the breath? Is it something having to do with ideas you’ve been carrying in from the day, or emotions you let yourself get entangled with? In that case, you have to do a little work.

Ajaan Maha Boowa has a good image for how discernment can help you get into concentration: You’ve got a tree in the forest and its branches are entangled with vines and the branches of other trees. If you want to bring the tree down, you’ve got to cut those branches and vines, get rid of the entanglements, and carefully choose the direction in which it should fall. Then, when you’ve trimmed it, you can make it fall to the ground.

So whatever comes up, you say, “Nope, that’s not for me.” If the mind argues, don’t try to get involved in long, drawn-out arguments. See if you can find the karate-chop argument that can cut things right through so that you’re right back where you want to be. That’s what your discernment is for. And as you begin to understand these things that have been entangled in the mind, your concentration gets more and more firm. If they come up again, you can strike them down again without as much effort.

It really does strengthen the mind to be very still right here. Getting still takes some effort, but when the stillness gets really strong, the mind gets strong. This is where exercising the mind is different from exercising the body. To strengthen the body, you need to make it move. Of course, if it doesn’t rest, you can wear it out. But the real strength of the mind comes from its stillness, and from that stillness you develop your discernment and your mindfulness. Everything else gets strengthened as your concentration gets strong.

So settle in right here. The rest of your life really needs this strength, and regardless of what responsibilities you may have, you can’t let them occupy your mind for the whole time you’re awake. The mind needs some time to settle down. Sleep helps to some extent, but mindfulness, concentration, and all the other qualities developed by concentration practice do a lot more for the mind. So you’re not just resting here. You’re also gathering your strength, gathering your discernment, so that when you need to act, you can act with awareness, you can act with clarity, and your actions don’t pull you off your center. Your center of gravity stays right here. It’s from being right here that real strength comes.