Strength Training

There was a lot of activity today. There’s going to be a lot of activity tomorrow. So now’s a good time to forget about today and tomorrow. Let’s be right here. Wherever you feel the breath, hang on right there.

As you breathe in, as you breathe out, be sensitive to that sensation wherever you feel it in the body. The important thing is that you stick with the breath. You know that there’s no future breath you can watch, no past breath you can watch. So when you’re with the breath, you’re in the present.

As for other thought worlds that might come up, just let them go. Think of them as being like bubbles. They burst. They’re going to burst anyhow, but we have this tendency to move into them. We lose our bearings in the body and go someplace else. The bubble floats away and bursts. Then we create more bubbles. But we don’t really have to. We can stay right here.

Take a survey of your body right now. Where is your head? Where are your shoulders? Where are your legs? Where are your arms and hands?

One really good way of staying focused right here is to go through the body and think about the different bones. Start with the bones in the tips of the fingers and the thumbs. Where are those bones right now? Try to be aware of that location. Then ask yourself, is there any tension around the bones? If you sense it, just let it relax. See if you can keep it relaxed all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out-.

Then move up to the bones of the second joints, third joints, bones of the palms of the hands. You can think of them as the bones of the backs of the hands, whichever is more relaxing, or whichever needs more relaxing.

Then work up through the wrists, the forearms, the elbows, upper arms, shoulders. Then start down with your toes, all ten of them. Work up through those joints, up through the feet, the legs, the pelvis, up through the spine. If you can do vertebra by vertebra, so much the better, until you arrive at the neck and then the skull. Think of all the different bones in the skull. Relax any tension you feel around those bones.

Ajaan Fuang would actually have you think of the breath energy in the bones themselves, if you can detect that. But anything to keep you grounded.

Years back, I was teaching a course on the ten recollections. And for mindfulness immersed in the body, I taught this exercise. There was a woman there who had come from a background in Tibetan Buddhism. At the end of the meditation, she was crying. It was the first time her mind had ever really settled down. At first I thought those were tears of joy. Well, actually, they were tears of sorrow, because she felt this meant that she was a Hinayanist, and only a Hinayana technique would work for her. But, hey, you take whatever you can get.

Think of Ajaan Lee going to India and seeing the sadhus standing out under the sun, lying on beds of nails, doing all kinds of strange things, with lots and lots of endurance. His question was, how did they do that? He asked the question in his meditation, and the answer came up that they worked with the breath energy in the body. So he worked with the breath energies in his body. That’s how we ended up with the book, Keeping the Breath in Mind: first Method One, then later on Method Two.

It didn’t occur to him that breath energies had to belong only to the Hindu tradition and that Buddhists shouldn’t be dealing with them. When they’re in the body, the breath energies are common property. So you take what works.

And in working with the breath energies in that way, he actually solved one of the riddles that’s left in the Pali Canon, where the Buddha talks about how you get the mind to settle down with a sense of pleasure and rapture, and then you allow that pleasure and rapture to spread through the body, so that there’s no part of the body that’s not saturated with that sense of pleasure and rapture.

The Buddha doesn’t say how to do that: That’s the riddle. But Ajaan Lee gives you some good mental pictures to use. So take advantage of them. They may not be in the Pali Canon, but they help answer a question in the Pali Canon.

The point is, you want to see what works for you to get the mind to settle down and be really grounded here. Then, once it’s grounded, the next question is: How do you keep it here? There will be a part of the mind that says, “Okay, enough of that. What’s next? I’m in a hurry here. I’ve only got a week or two here at the monastery. I want to go home with at least the third jhāna.”

Well, the third jhāna is not going to happen by thinking about jhāna. It’s going to happen by just really developing the strength of staying right here with the breath.

I remember one time, walking on my alms round in Thailand, and a thought suddenly went into my mind, “What you’re doing is really stupid, just staying with the breath all day long, trying not to think of anything else. How are you going to learn anything? What insights are you going to gain this way?” Fortunately, an answer came: “I’ve gained insight in how to do this skill.”

After all, we are working on skills here. We’re exercising the mind. We’re developing strengths in the mind. It’s like developing strength in the body. You have to exercise the body, and then it can do things it wouldn’t be able to do otherwise.

You’re strengthening your mind so that it develops strengths of conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and even discernment. Discernment is not a matter of coming up with clever insights, or taking concepts you’ve learned from the books and slapping them on your mind.

I got a phone call the other night from someone who was talking about how he was trying to apply the three characteristics to everything that was happening to him. And it was just all concepts.

I said, “You apply those perceptions to things that you’re attached to, because you want to see that they’re not worthy of attachment. Sometimes realizing their inconstancy will be one way to end the attachment. Sometimes seeing the stress involved in them is another way. Sometimes seeing that you can’t really totally control them, so why claim them as yours? That’s another way.”

But the Buddha lists other perceptions as well, and your sense of when to apply those perceptions is going to come more and more naturally as you work on strengthening the mind.

So you’ve got the strength of conviction to start out with, that this really is a good thing to be doing. If the mind wants to wander off, you can say No and you’ve got good reasons for saying No. There are skills you need to develop. The mind will whine and complain that it’s much easier to gain insights by reading books, so why go through all this, distracting yourself with the breath? It doesn’t seem to be going anywhere at all. But if you have conviction that this is really going to develop a strength you need, then you stick with it.

That’s the second strength: You develop that quality of the mind that’s persistent. That’s going to be necessary for discernment, too. Because often an insight can come, and you get carried away by the insight and lose your bearings. You want to see the insight as just an event. And then ask yourself, “To what extent is this true and to what extent is it not?” If you latch on to the insight, you can miss what happens next. So the persistence here is from moment to moment to moment, working with skillful qualities in the mind, trying to deal with whatever unskillful qualities come up so that when insights do arise, you can watch out for the attachment with which you can spoil the insights by getting carried away.

Then there’s the strength of mindfulness, which combines the ability to keep something in mind, to have something in mind while you’re practicing, and being alert to what’s actually going on. And again, maintaining that sense of persistence—the ardency. These two qualities have to go together—persistence and mindfulness—because the mindfulness is what gives the directions, and the quality of persistence is how you talk yourself into wanting to follow the directions.

That’s part of wisdom, too: getting a good sense of how to motivate yourself so that when things are not going well, you can give yourself encouragement, so that you don’t just give up.

When you have these strengths developed, then the mind is going to get concentrated because it gets more and more used to staying with one thing, keeping one thing in mind and learning how to relate to that one thing in a way that gives rise to a sense of ease and well-being.

So when insights arise, they’re not coming out of desperation. They’re coming out of a sense of stability. You read sometimes about the idea that you have to go through the dark night of the soul if you’re going to gain any insights. And sometimes you do have to have a sense that everywhere you look around you, it’s not worth going.

When you look at the world as a whole, there’s a lot that’s pretty discouraging. But at the same time, you need to have a sense of solid well-being inside, so that you’re not knocked over by any insights that come. After all, a lot of the insights, when they do come, are about your own stupidity. You’ve been doing things that you should have known better that you shouldn’t have been doing. You’ve been doing things half aware that you’re doing them, but not really giving them your full attention.

Often those are lessons you don’t want to hear. But if the mind has a sense of inner well-being, it’s in a much better mood to see where you’re causing yourself unnecessary stress, where you’re placing unnecessary burdens on yourself. That’s a lot of what insight is: seeing what you’re doing that’s unnecessary and stressful, so why keep doing it?

This is the kind of strength that comes when you learn how to be more efficient in how you run your mind, seeing that you’re carrying a lot of burdens around, sending burdens from one moment to the next, to the next, through your perceptions. Now you don’t have to do that.

So this is a strength that comes from the other strengths. You exercise the strengths of the mind so that you get strong, just like the body. You can call this strength training for the mind.

That strength comes when your mind actually goes through the steps. That’s when it develops the ability to see what’s really worthy of paying attention to and what insights really do make a difference. You’re sensitive to things that you wouldn’t have been sensitive to before. Which is why the ajaans are always critical of people who have read a lot of books and know too much and don’t want to do the necessary steps. They just want to go straight to the strength of discernment. They don’t even see it as a strength so much as a series of words and labels that you apply.

But if you really want your discernment to be strong and effective, it’s got to develop on the strengths of conviction, persistence, mindfulness, and concentration. When you exercise the mind with these activities, then you can be a lot more sensitive to what’s actually going on inside.

In fact, the act of following the path itself becomes the object of your meditation, the object of your analysis. You see how all the factors of the mind that the Buddha would describe in dependent co-arising, or in the different kinds of fabrication, all play a role in developing these strengths. You get hands-on experience in using them. That’s when they’re easiest to see.

Which is why these basic strengths lie in just coming back, coming back, coming back. Staying, staying, staying. Settling in, settling in. They’re the foundation for all things good. They put you in a position where the insights that come really are reliable and really will make a positive difference.