There’s Work to Be Done
November 07, 2023

When you start out meditating, it’s important to remember that there’s work to be done. You’re not here just to rest. You’re not here just to watch the present moment. There are certain qualities of mind that you’ve got to develop in order to get the mind to settle down.

You start with the instructions on right mindfulness: that you keep track of either the body in and of itself, feelings, mind-states, or mental qualities in and of themselves. The Buddha mainly recommends starting with the body. At the same time, you put aside any greed and distress—any thoughts, really—with reference to the world. So there are two activities you’ve got to do here: trying to maintain focus on one topic like the breath, and fending off all the other thoughts that might pull you away.

You can start out with a strong intention, but the intention needs some help. This is why Ajaan Lee recommends that you don’t simply watch the breath do whatever it’s going to do. You intentionally direct it. The first thing you direct your attention to is to see what rhythm of breathing feels good. He recommends long breathing to start with, to energize the body, and as long as long breathing feels refreshing and energizing, keep it up. When it starts feeling tiring, then you can let it calm down, get it shorter, more shallow.

And take an interest in the breath. The in-and-out breath is part of the breath element in the entire body. You might want to see how it relates to the way you’re feeling the different parts of the body—any kind of energy flow in your hands, in your arms, your feet, your legs, torso. If the breath energy doesn’t circulate well throughout the body, it’s going to be bad for the health of the body. Check your posture to make sure you’re not putting undue pressure, say, on your shoulders, your stomach. Sit comfortably straight. Explore this aspect of your awareness. Take an interest in it.

If you simply watch the breath coming in, going out, coming in, going out in one spot, it gets very boring, very fast. Sometimes it gets calming, but if you just stay with in-and-out, in-and-out, the mind begins to drift off. It loses interest in the breath and gets more interested in the sense of comfort that comes. That’s how we blur out, which we don’t want.

Remember, to get into right concentration, you have to use directed thought and evaluation. You have to evaluate the breath, while you keep your thoughts focused here on the breath. So there’s work to be done.

The Buddha recommends three qualities that you bring to the breath. One is that you’re mindful. You keep remembering to stay with the breath each time it comes in, each time it goes out. Each time a thought presents itself, you remind yourself, “That’s not what I’m here for,” then let it go. The letting go is part of what the Buddha calls ardency; that’s the second quality. It builds on another quality, of course, which is alertness, just watching what’s going on, and in particular watching what you’re doing right here, right now.

Your suffering in the present moment may not seem like much, but there’s subtle stress because of what you’re doing. You’re not suffering because of the sound of the crickets, the temperature of the air. Whatever suffering is going on in the mind is coming from the mind itself, from its actions. So you want to watch what you’re doing.

At the moment, the suffering is very subtle. In fact, it’s so subtle that it doesn’t feel like suffering at all. There may be pains here and there in the body, but again, the problem is not so much the physical pain in and of itself, it’s how the mind talks to itself about the pain, how it creates perceptions around the pain.

So you want to be alert to what you’re doing, and the results you’re getting from what you’re doing. Then you continue using ardency. If you notice that you’re doing something wrong, you can ask yourself: What exactly are you doing wrong? Mindfulness comes in and tries to remind you, “What have you done in the past that’s helped?”

One of the things that helps is to take that sense of comfort and work with it.

You don’t just sit in it. You try to maintain it and then you try to let it spread throughout the body. In the beginning, it’s going to require some working through the patterns of tension in different parts of the body, because these are the things that keep the breath energy from flowing well. They can force you to have a restrictive sense of what’s actually going on in the breathing.

You can explore the body section by section, starting down around the navel and gradually working up the front of the body, into the head, then down the back, down the shoulders, out the arms, down the back, out the legs. You can continue this survey again and again until you’re ready to settle down because now you’ve become familiar with the breathing in the different parts of the body. You’ve gained a sense of what can be connected and what’s not yet connected. Then you want to think about putting it all together so that the whole body’s breathing in, the whole body’s breathing out. You’re working up to a solid, full-body awareness, and then you do what you can to maintain that.

The breath fills the body; your awareness fills the body. Again, this requires mindfulness, ardency, and alertness. There’s work to be done, but it’s good work. You’re working with a sense of well-being.

It’s like having a job that pays well. When some people get a job and get their first paycheck, they quit the job and go out and spend their money. When they run out of money, they have to come back. If the employer’s kind, he might give them another job, but if they keep this up, they’re never going to advance.

You’ve got to learn how to work at the same time you’re enjoying your wealth. You’re working with that sense of comfort. You’re seeing what you can do with it. The important thing here is that you have a strong sense of interest: exploring this element of the body, the energy flow, because it can do so much for the body. It can calm you when you need to be calmed, energize you when you need to be energized. Of all the elements in the body, it’s the one that’s most responsive to the mind, and the one that you can have the most direct control over.

Sometimes you’re told that you’re not supposed to control the breath, but I never saw the Buddha say that. In his instructions on breath meditation, he says: Breathe in such a way that you’re aware of the whole body. Breathe in such a way that you’re calming the breath. Breathe in such a way as you’re giving rise to a sense of rapture. Breathe in a way that gives rise to pleasure. First, physical pleasure, then breathe in a way that allows you to gladden the mind, concentrate the mind, release the mind.

So you’re training yourself. You’re exploring the possibilities of this breath element in the body, and if you do it properly, it should keep you awake. If you start drifting off again, it’s a sign that your range of awareness has gotten too small. The breath starts getting more and more refined until you’ve lost it. You simply focus on the comfort, ignore the breath, and you blur out. That’s a lack of mindfulness, a lack of alertness, a lack of ardency.

Always keep those three qualities uppermost in your mind. These are the things you’re working on right now. Your focus is on the breath, but you’re also trying to bring good qualities of the mind to the way you focus, and also to what you do with what you find—because one of the things we have to learn in the present moment is that things are not just a given.

We’re not here simply to see things arise and pass away on their own. We’re trying to see how we’re complicit, what we’re doing that makes them arise, makes them pass away, what we’re doing just in the simple act of being engaged with them. That’s where the insight is going to be. You’re going to find that your engagement in the present moment goes a lot deeper and plays a much bigger role than you would have thought.

It’s all too easy to read the Buddha’s teachings, see what he has to say about inconstancy, stress, and not-self, and say, “Well, yes, I agree.” But why do you agree? Do you have good basis to agree? You may have had an experience here and there, a little bit, but he’s not asking you to agree with these things. He’s asking you to take these perceptions and use them to develop a sense of dispassion—and to see what happens when there really is genuine dispassion.

A lot of us are like that book I saw one time, a kind of Zen Cliff Notes that listed all the major koans in Zen and then gave the answers—as if that were helpful at all. What do you learn when the answers are handed to you? It’s better to approach the Buddha’s teachings as a series of questions, and you’re going to find the answers yourself. The Thai ajaans recommend that instead of just forcing the Buddha’s insights onto your mind, you take the attitude, “Well, where is he wrong? To what extent are his insights true, and to what extent are they not true?”

Sometimes it sounds as if with everything is inconstant, stressful, and not-self so you should have no control over anything in the present moment, just be on the receiving end, and not hope for things to go in any particular direction. But again, the Buddha never said that.

We are directing the mind. We are creating skills, developing skills, and we are shaping things, so you want to see how you’re shaping them. Ajaan Lee talks about seeing where you do have some control over things: where you can fight against the perception of inconstancy by creating a sense of constant well-being and a constant focus; how you can fight against the perception of dukkha, stress, pain, by creating a sense of well-being, and allowing it to spread throughout the body. And you’re fighting against the perception of not-self. You ask yourself, “Well, what can I control?”

As you fight against these things, you learn a lot, and then you find that ultimately you bump into what really is inconstant, stressful, and not-self. But you don’t learn those things unless you fight. You don’t learn those things unless you challenge them.

So there’s work to be done.

We’re not here just to copy the Buddha’s insights and paste them on our brains. We’re here to explore, and we explore by experimenting. As you know with any experiment, you don’t just sit there and watch things happen on their own. You try to change some factors and see what happens when you change them. Then you change other factors and see what happens when you do that, so that you can get an idea of cause and effect. After all, when the Buddha talks about penetrative insight into arising and passing away, he’s not simply watching them arise and pass away.

Penetrative means that you see what’s causing them, which causes are good, which causes are not. And you learn causation only through experimenting. So experiment with the breath; experiment with your mind focused on the breath.

Take an interest in this, because this should be the most interesting thing you can think of: exploring how the mind relates to the body, seeing how the mind has been lying to itself, how it can get past its old lies, and how it can get a better sense of what it’s actually doing. And because the breath, of all the elements in the world, is the closest to the mind, this is the best place to do your exploration.

As long as you can find the breath interesting, as long as you find your own mind interesting, that should be enough to keep you with this process throughout the hour. Then, as you leave the hour and go back to your room, go back to your tent, keep watch on the breath, keep watch on your mind. See what you can learn as you explore.