Training in Commitment & Reflection

Try to breathe in a way that feels nourishing to the body. Ajaan Lee recommends starting out with some good, long, deep in-and-out breaths as a way of energizing yourself and emphasizing the process of breathing, so that you can see clearly: Now the breath is coming in; now the breath is going out. Wherever it feels most prominent, focus your attention there.

Then ask yourself if it’s comfortable. “Comfortable” can depend on the state of your body and mind right now. If you’re feeling tense, you’ll want to breathe in a way that’s more relaxing. If your energy level is low, you’ll want to breathe in a way that gives you more energy.

So make adjustments as necessary. You may find that the breath will require adjustment several times as the needs of the body change in the course of the hour. This is a good test for your alertness: watching what you’re doing, watching the results of what you’re doing, and then using what you’ve seen to change what you’re doing, if necessary. This is how the process becomes nourishing to the mind.

The Buddha says there are two activities that nourish the Dhamma—in other words, they nourish the Dhamma within you. One is commitment and the other is reflection. You commit yourself to doing this and then you reflect on how well it’s going, what you’ve learned. As we meditate we’re training ourselves in both activities: how to commit in a skillful way, how to reflect in a skillful way.

Sometimes you put in so much energy that you wear yourself out. That’s not the right kind of commitment. You want to learn how to pace yourself like a marathon runner. If you sprint for the first hundred meters, you wear yourself out and then you can’t finish the marathon. So, what would be a good steady pace that you can maintain?

The important part is the steadiness—that you stick with it. Ajaan Fuang had a comment on this one time. The Thai was, “ryang pen nit, tae tawng tham pen nit,” which basically means, “It’s a little something that you’re doing here, but you have to do it continually.” There’s a pun on the word nit, which can be spelled two different ways: One way means, “little bit,” the other way means, “continually.”

The little thing, of course, is just being mindful. It’s not that difficult to try to remember to stay here. The difficult part is remembering continuously. That’s the commitment. And then from remembering what you’re trying to do here—remembering to stay here—you’re alert and you’re ardent. You try your best. You notice what you’re actually doing and the results you’re actually getting.

This is where the reflection comes in. If you have a sense that the meditation is not going well, what can you do to change things? In some areas, it’s very easy to decide. You’ve made up your mind to stay with the breath and all of a sudden you find yourself thinking about, what: Los Angeles, next week, last week—things totally unrelated to the breath. So you pull yourself back to the breath. If the mind wanders off again, you bring yourself back again. Try not to get discouraged.

When you are with the breath, the question is, “Does the mind feel snug with the breath? Are you really sensitive to what’s going on?” Here again, you have to use some reflection. What kind of breathing would be easiest for the mind to stay with right now? What kind of breathing would be good for the body right now? You can experiment.

This is how any skill develops. You do it and then you reflect on the results of what you’ve done. Ajaan Lee uses this image a lot. He says meditation is like making a basket. The teacher tells you how to make a basket, the different ways you can weave the wicker, and you go ahead and weave your first basket. But it doesn’t look like the teacher’s basket at all. It’s unbalanced. It’s got the wrong proportions. The weave is not all that even. So you reflect on it, and then you go back and do it again. This time, you figure out, “What did I do wrong?” You have to observe yourself as you’re weaving so that you can see, “Oh, this is why the weave wasn’t even. This is why the shape was unbalanced.” And you can make adjustments.

This involves two sides of the mind: the side that does things, and the side that watches things. The side that watches, however, has to be trained so that it’s not just sitting there watching and not passing any judgment. Sometimes you hear people say that ideally the observer doesn’t pass judgment at all; it accepts whatever comes up. Well, that’s a very lazy observer, except in cases where you don’t know what’s happening—in other words, you can’t interpret what’s happening as being either skillful or not skillful—in which case you do just observe and you don’t rush to judgment.

What this means is that you learn how to be judicious rather than judgmental. Being judicious sometimes involves just watching for long periods of time. Other times, you know what you should be doing, in which case you bring your knowledge to bear. That’s what mindfulness is for. We’re learning lessons as we meditate that we can apply the next time around. It’s not the case that every moment is totally fresh and unprecedented. Over time, you begin to gain a sense of when the breath is too heavy, when the breath is too light, when the mind’s focus is in the wrong place, when it’s focusing too hard, or its focus is so one-pointed that it’s actually disturbing the flow of energy in the body. You begin to notice these things and then you learn how to compensate. If you can’t figure out on your own how to compensate, this is why you have a teacher: to ask questions.

In my time with the Ajaan Fuang there were times when I would ask questions and he would look at me askance as if to say, “Can’t you solve that problem yourself?” So I’d have to go back and work on it on my own. Other times, he would actually give advice. But the important thing is that you try to observe on your own as much as you can so that the observer in the mind, the part of the mind that reflects, becomes more and more perceptive, more and more reliable.

For many of us, the observer inside is way too judgmental, which is why—to compensate—some people will tell you, “Don’t pass judgment at all. Just accept wherever comes up.” But that’s going from one extreme to another. The observer side has to learn when to try to make differences and when to just watch. This comes with time, as with any skill.

So commit yourself to being with the breath for the rest of the hour. Commit yourself to trying to be as comfortable with the breath as you can. Let the breath flow throughout the body. Upasika Kee, one of the foremost women teachers in Thailand, used to say, “Go through and relax all the joints in your body.” Think of the joints in your fingers, the joints in your wrists, your elbows, shoulders. Relax them as you think about them. Then go from the toes up through the ankles, the knees, the pelvis, the spine, up into the skull. Breathe in a way that all the joints in the body can stay relaxed all the way in with the in-breath, all the way out with the out-. Have a sense of the whole body breathing in, the whole body breathing out, and your awareness is “whole-body” as well. Fully present. This is the commitment part.

If you fall away, that’s when you have to reflect, “Okay, what went wrong?” Sometimes when the mind falls away, all you need to do is just get it back to where it was—pick up what you were doing where you left off and carry on. Other times, if a particular thought is pulling you away insistently, you have to try other techniques. One is reflecting on how unskillful that thought is, what its drawbacks are. If you were to think it for 24 hours, where would it take you? What would it make you do? You see that it’s not worth thinking.

Or it may not necessarily be all that horribly unskillful, but it’s a total waste of time. In cases like that, ask yourself, “If this were a movie, would I pay to watch it?” Nine times out of ten the answer is No. And even in the one time out of ten that you would pay to watch it, is this the right time for that kind of thing? You’ve got more important work to do.

Or you can just tell yourself, “The thoughts can go on, but I’m not going to pay them any attention.” This is where it’s useful to think of the mind as being like a committee. You have lots of commentators commenting on what’s going on, what you should and shouldn’t be doing, and you’ve got a ferret out: “Which is the commentator I want to believe?” If you’re wise, you’ll choose the one that wants you to stay here, the one that says, “Okay, they can talk as much as they like, but we don’t have to pay any attention to them.” Hold on to that commentator. Hold on to that observer in the mind. Then get back to the breath.

Another technique is to realize that distracting thoughts require energy. There’s part of the body that will tense up as soon as you start a thought. That’s your way of marking the thought so that you can keep with it. So try to figure out where in the body the tension comes—and it can come in any part of the body. This is one of the reasons why it’s so useful to be aware of the whole body breathing in, the whole body breathing out, because you might detect that there’s a pattern of tension that arises, say, in your arm or in your pelvis. Okay, relax that tension and the thought will go away.

Or you can try force. Pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth and say to yourself, “No, I will not think that thought.” As the Buddha says, “Crush your mind with your mind.” This is where the ajaans in Thailand will recommend using a meditation word, doing it really fast, like a machine gun: buddho, buddho, buddho, or whatever your meditation word might be. Just to jam the circuits.

So there are techniques you can use to get the mind back once you observe that it’s going where it shouldn’t be going. You don’t just accept the fact, “Well, today my mind is wandering. I’ll be content just to let it wander.” That doesn’t develop anything in the mind at all except for bad habits. We’re here both to let go and to develop. As the Buddha said, one of the customs of the noble ones is that we delight in developing, delight in abandoning. In other words, we delight in developing skillful qualities and in abandoning unskillful ones. You bring the mind back and you’re happy you’re able to bring it back. You reach a point in the rhythm of the mind where you tend to let go of the breath, but this time you don’t let go. You hold on to the breath. Okay, delight in that fact.

Then there are the times you can see that you’ve actually let go of an unskillful thought. Well, delight in that fact, too. Delight plays an important role in the path. As the Buddha said, when you see that you’re doing well, take joy in that fact. It encourages you to stick with the practice. As you realize the range of things you can do, your observer—the part of the mind that reflects on things—has a better and better idea of what range of things you can do in any given situation. In other words, there’s not just one way to deal with distracting thoughts and there’s not just one way to get the mind to settle down. As you stick with a practice, you find that you gain a sense of what range is really skillful.

We’re here to learn a skill. The skill depends on committing yourself to doing the practice as best you can and then reflecting on it. This is how the Buddha taught Rahula, his son, from the very beginning. If there’s anything you want to do, say, or think, ask yourself before you do it, “What do I intend the results of this to be? What do I expect the results to be?” If you see that it’s going to lead to harm for yourself or others, you don’t do it. If you don’t foresee any harm, go ahead and do it. While you’re doing it, reflect on the results that are actually coming up, because—given the principle of causality—some actions give their results right away. You stick your finger into the woodstove, it’s not going to wait until your next lifetime before it burns. If you see that harm is happening, okay, stop. If you don’t see any harm, go ahead and continue with the action until you’re done.

When you’re done, you reflect on the long-term results. If you see that you did actually cause harm, resolve that you’re not going to repeat that harm, and if you can—if it’s an action in word or deed—talk it over with someone else you trust on the path, to get their ideas of how to avoid that mistake the next time around. But upon reflection, if you see that you didn’t harm anybody at all, then take joy in that fact. This is how you train the part of the mind that reflects so that it becomes a skillful observer. It passes skillful judgment, so that the part that’s committed to the practice gets better and better advice all the time.

When you do that, the mind isn’t refreshed just by the breath. It gets nourished with itself as well. It’s nourished not just with the sense of ease and well-being that comes from the breath, the sense of refreshment that comes from the breath, but also with the realization that the mind itself is more and more in charge of its own actions. It’s a better and better judge of its own actions. This is the sense of well-being, the happiness, that comes from mastering a skill.

So we’re not just working on pleasant feelings here. We’re working on the mind’s ability to look after itself, to care for itself. We have that phrase in the chant on goodwill, “May I look after myself with ease.” Well, this is how you do it: by committing yourself to do what you know is skillful, and then reflecting on it so that you can actually become more and more skillful with time. In this way, you’re showing goodwill for yourself and goodwill for the people around you, too. The more skillful you are in tending to your mind, caring for your mind, then the fewer burdens you place on others and the more energy you have to help them with their burdens, if necessary. So this is a kind of goodness—a kind of nourishment—that goes all around.

Years back, when Ajaan Suwat was teaching a retreat in Massachusetts, someone who was brand new to the practice said to him one afternoon, “You know, you guys would have a good religion here with Buddhism if only you had a god to give you a sense of support when things don’t go well in the practice.” Ajaan Suwat’s response was, “If there were a god who could ordain that when I eat a mouthful of food, everybody in the world would get full, I’d bow down to that god.” Of course, with physical food you can’t do that, but with mental food, you can. The goodness does spread around. The food that comes from commitment and reflection nourishes the Dhamma within you, and it provides nourishment to other people, too.