Heedfulness

When you focus on your breath, you want to be with each breath as it comes in, each breath as it goes out, as continually as possible. The Buddha once asked the monks if they were heedful. He asked them, “How often do you think about death?” One monk said, “I think about death once every day, thinking that today I can do something important in training my mind.” Another monk said that he thought about death twice a day, that he could do something important each half-day. As the different monks made their claims, the time periods got shorter and shorter until it finally got down to one monk who said, “Each time I breathe in, I say, ‘May I live for the time it takes to breathe out, so I can accomplish a great deal with my mind. Each time I breathe out, may I live to breathe in once more so I can accomplish a great deal with my mind.’” The Buddha said that of all the monks, only the last one was heedful. All the rest were careless and complacent.

The work that needs to be done has to be done right now. If you put it off, saying, “Well, I’ll do it in a few minutes from now or a few hours from now,” you don’t know what’s going to happen in those minutes, in those hours; but you do know that you have right now. And the work has to be done right now.

As the Buddha said, you get the most out of a Dhamma talk when you don’t have too low an opinion of yourself, as when you tell yourself that “The things I’m listening to are too difficult, they’re beyond me—so I’ll just listen.” The talk is meant for you to listen to and then to look into your mind and say, “What is the talk talking about that’s happening in my mind right now?” In other words, you can do something about it. If you’re engaging in a habit that leads to suffering, you can change your ways; have the confidence that you can do that. That’s an important part of being heedful.

We usually translate heedfulness as a sense of danger, but it should also be translated as a sense of possibilities—that your choice of what you’re going to do and say and think right now can have a wide range of results, so aim at the really good results. Be confident that when teachers talk about staying with each breath, it’s something you can do. It may require a few new habits, but those are things you can develop right now.

The Buddha never talked about the present moment as being a wonderful moment, but it is a moment where you can do the work that needs to be done. If you decide that you’re not going to put it off to the future, that’s when you’re being heedful. As the Buddha said, the root of all skillful qualities, all the goodness in life, comes from heedfulness: the sense of how important your actions are, and the sense that you have power in your power of choice—so you want to use that power well.

Heedfulness is often equated with a sense of fear, but it’s a skillful kind of fear: the fear that you’re not going to use your powers to the best of your ability, that you’re going to misuse your powers. It’s not like the kind of fear where you have a sense of powerlessness; it’s a sense of fear that comes with a sense of power. As the Buddha says, if we couldn’t make a big change in our lives for the better by being skillful in what we do and say and think, he wouldn’t have taught these things. It’s because our actions do have power, and that power can be put to really good purposes: That’s why he teaches.

So, if your thoughts are wandering off someplace else, you have to say No. Now, you can say No in two ways. One is, “I won’t let myself think those thoughts at all.” The other is, “No, I’m not going to follow those thoughts.” You can think of the mind as being like a committee. Some people in the corner of the room are talking, but you don’t have to get involved in their conversation. Just think of it as someone else talking—not you.

You’re focusing on the breath. You’re focusing on making the breath as comfortable as you can. This is going to require getting interested in the breath. If you see the breath simply as the air coming in and out of the nose, there’s not much to get interested in. It comes in, goes out, comes in, goes out. That’s it. But if you connect it with other aspects of the wind element in the body, the flow of energy in the body, you begin to see that how you breathe has an impact on the entire body. That makes it interesting.

If you’re suffering from illnesses, suffering from pains, there are ways you can breathe to mitigate the illness, mitigate the pain, or at the very least, make it lighter. Sometimes you can make it go away because there are a lot of pains that come simply from the fact that you’re not paying attention to certain parts of your body, and the breath energy in those parts gets stagnant. But if you take an interest and breathe freely through those parts of the body, the pains will go away.

Sometimes the pain in one part of the body is related to a blockage in your breath energy in another part. When I was first meditating, I found that my knees would get sore pretty fast, and sometimes my legs would go numb. But then I realized there was a blockage in the breath energy flowing down my spine, and if I could release that blockage, the pain in the knees and numbness in the legs would go away.

So, give yourself something to get interested in. When the body feels uncomfortable, to what extent is it caused by the way you breathe? To what extent is it caused by how well the breath energy flows in the body? And is it a problem with the breath energy right there where the pain or the blockage is felt, or is it someplace else? There’s plenty you can survey in the body. You begin to realize that the present moment is a lot more interesting than you thought—and that’s just the body.

After all, the Buddha says that the reason we’re suffering is because of things we’re doing in the present moment in the mind, and that’s much more interesting than the body. We suffer because of our craving, we suffer in our clinging, and those are things you can see.

Sometimes you cling to your sense of the body.

Sometimes you cling to feelings—feelings of pleasure or pain, neither pleasure nor pain.

Sometimes you cling to your perceptions, the images and labels you use to identify things, as when you see a stoplight: One, you know that it’s red; that’s a perception. Two, you know what it means; that also is a perception. And then three, you notice how important it is—you really do have to pay attention to that red light. There are other red lights in other places that don’t mean stop, and they’re not that important; but this one means stop, and it is important. Those are all different types of saññā or perception.

We have a perception of who we think we are, what we identify with. What happens when you drop those perceptions?

Then there are thought constructs, thought fabrications: the means with which we talk to ourselves—as when you’re talking to yourself right now. Are you talking to yourself about the breath, or are you talking about something else? How about talking about the breath and talking about the way your mind is relating to the breath, how your awareness is relating to the breath, and keep that conversation going until you don’t need it anymore as the mind settles down.

Ajaan Fuang said it’s like raising a water buffalo. He was born in a farming family and, as a child, was in charge of looking after their water buffalo. When he wanted the buffalo to come, he would call it by name. When it came, he knew: You don’t have to call it anymore.

It’s the same with the mind as you’re settling down with the breath. In the beginning, you have to talk to yourself about the breath: How does the breath feel? Is it long? Too long? Too short? Too heavy? Too light? Too fast? Too slow? What happens if you adjust the breath in different ways? Which way is the most comfortable? Those are things you can talk about.

Then, once the breath is comfortable, how do you maintain that sense of comfort? How do you let it spread through the body? When you finally work through the different blockages in the body so that the breath feels good everywhere, then the conversation grows less and less and less, until you don’t need much conversation anymore—all you have to do is stay with the perception of “breath.”

Then, there’s your awareness of these things: That’s the consciousness aggregate.

So all the aggregates are right here. In the beginning, we use them to create a good state of concentration. Then, when the concentration is solid, we can begin to let them go.

As you can see, there’s a lot to be interested in here. There’s a lot going on.

Even as you try to get the mind as still as possible, there are different things happening with the breath, different things happening in the mind that you have to get sensitive to first, and then you calm them down. In doing that, you learn two lessons: One, the Buddha was right—this state of concentration is one of the best things that you can fabricate, one of the best things you can make happen here in the present moment. But two, you also see that it has its limitations. Remember, it’s just part of the path.

The Buddha’s image for the path, of course, is the raft. It’s going to take you across a dangerous river to safety on the other side. Where you are is dangerous, and the river you’re going to cross is dangerous, but you have trees with branches and leaves and twigs and vines on this side of the river. You bind them together to make a raft and you can use that raft to take you across. When you get to the other side, then you can let the raft go.

That’s what we’re doing here. We’re taking branches and leaves of our ordinary mental activities and making them into a state of concentration. We’re making a raft and beginning to go across the river. While you’re on the river, you hold on. Don’t let go until you’re totally safe.

After all, the river has its dangers—the dangers of wrong views, the dangers of hanging on even to right views at the wrong times, the dangers of sensuality, the dangers of ignorance—so you have to hold on to the raft to resist these things. So hold on to your breath, take an interest in your breath. Realize how important it is that you develop these qualities in the mind right now. As life goes on, your body gets weaker, and even though there may be things you know you should be doing, if you haven’t made them habitual, it’s going to get harder and harder to do them as you get older. But if you’ve been developing good habits all through your life, the mind will tend to go in those directions, even as the body gets weaker and weaker.

So, as you meditate, you’re showing that you do have a strong sense of heedfulness that there are dangers in the mind that you have to watch out for,

but there are also potentials in the mind that you can develop that can take you to safety. It’s that combination of a sense of danger but confidence that you can deal with those dangers: That’s what goes into heedfulness. If there were nothing but dangers, if there were no safety at all, there’d be no reason to try to be heedful, because no matter what you did, no matter what you thought or said, you’d still end up in danger. If there were no dangers at all, there would be no need for heedfulness, either. Everything would be safe.

The problem is we live in a world where there are dangers and potential islands of safety. Our actions are going to make a difference between whether we stay in the flood that will carry us away, or we stay on the raft that takes us over to total safety on the other shore.

What this means is that you have to believe in the power of your actions. There is a possibility that you could misuse that power, but there’s also the possibility that you could use that power to find the ultimate happiness.

We human beings have these potentials within us, these potentials both for good and for bad. Which means that we have to be sensitive to the dangers that we pose. It’s not just that there are dangers out there. We also create dangers from within. But also be sensitive to the good parts of the mind, that you do have a potential for mindfulness, you do have a potential for being alert, you have a potential to put forth more energy.

And where are you going to find these potentials? By bringing them up from within and working on them right now. If you sense the importance of right now, then there’s hope for all your good qualities to develop. Your heedfulness of the importance right now forms the basis for all the other good qualities in the mind—and for the potential to develop them as far as they can go.