The Joy of Growing

As the Buddha says, one of the skills that you develop as a meditator is learning how to think the thoughts you want to think and not think the thoughts you don’t want to think. In other words, you have to be able to step back from your thinking and pass judgment on it as to what’s worth thinking and what’s not.

Now, a lot of people don’t like to be judged. They’ve been subjected to some pretty harsh and useless judgments in the past, but that doesn’t mean that judgment is bad. It just means that there’s skillful judgment and unskillful judgment. You want to train yourself so that the judgments of your inner commentator become a helpful part of the path. After all, we come here to grow, we come here to change, to increase our level of skill.

That requires that we have a very objective and matter-of-fact way of judging our actions: to admit that, yes, we have made a mistake. If you don’t recognize your mistakes and admit them, there’s no way you’re going to grow. Skill comes from understanding a mistake: seeing that you harmed yourself, you harmed others, and trying to figure out how not to do that again, realizing that the harm is unnecessary.

Although sometimes the word “harm” may be a little bit too strong.

Like right now, you’re trying to get the mind to settle down. There are thoughts that are going to get in the way. You have to say to them, with a very firm attitude, “No, we’re not going there. We’re going to stay with the breath.” That requires that you be strict with any thoughts, as the Buddha said, dealing with greed and distress with reference to the world, and say Yes to the thoughts that will bring you to the breath.

If you find yourself slipping off, you have to come back as quickly as you can—and be extra vigilant to see why the mind was able to slip off. You made the intention to stay with the breath. What happened? If you say, “Well, I forgot,” but if you leave it at that, you haven’t learned anything.

You have to figure out why. What part of the mind wanted to forget—wanted to go out and travel around? You’re dealing with a lot of minds in here, a lot of voices. We talk about training the mind, but it’s more like training the minds. So on the one hand, you have to be strict with anything that wanders away, and you have to encourage the thoughts that would like to stay. And use your ingenuity in staying.

The Buddha talks about breathing in ways that are sensitive to rapture, sensitive to pleasure. He says, “Once there is a sense of rapture or pleasure, you let it spread around the body”—to the point where no part of the body at all isn’t saturated with rapture and pleasure. And where are you going to find that?

The Buddha simply says there’s a potential. He recommends that you put the mind in a good mood to the meditation. Think about the ways in which you’ve been generous. Think about the ways in which you’ve held to the precepts. Think in any way that helps you feel confident that you’re doing something good here and that you’re capable of doing it. But that attitude has to be confirmed as you get the mind to settle down.

This is why Ajaan Lee’s instructions are so helpful. He talks about the breath energy in the body and ways you can manipulate the breath: in long, out long; in short, out short; in long, out short; in short, out long; heavy, light; fast, slow; deep or shallow; broad or narrow. There’s a lot to play with here. And as you play with the breath, that makes it more interesting—because simply “in, out, in, out” gets pretty dull after a while, and the mind’s going to find an excuse to slip away.

But if you pose some questions in the mind and then try to answer them by being observant, that makes it a lot more interesting. It engages you. So you’ve got to use some strategies to get the mind to want to stay and, over time, you find what works for you.

You can start with Ajaan Lee’s instructions on where to start with the breath in the back of the neck, down the spine, down the shoulders, down the arms. But after a while, you can get a better sense of what works for you. Some people find that starting at the navel is easier because the movement of the body there is easier to observe. So you start there.

The important thing is that you work through the whole body, loosening up any patterns of tension, any sense of blockage, so that the breath energy can flow freely. And as the breath energy can flow freely, then when a sense of pleasure or a sense of fullness comes into the breath, it’ll flow along with it.

So, that’s one of the ways of translating piti, that we usually translate as rapture: You can translate it as fullness. A sense of fullness can move through the body, and then you learn how to maintain that. Allow the body to find some pleasure in the breath, pleasure in being still.

Usually, it finds its pleasure in running around, looking for variety, looking for new things to think about. But here we’re going to make it think about one thing. After all, you want to get it so that it thinks about the things you want to think about, and doesn’t think about the things you don’t want to think about, and you’re going to develop your attitude to be more discerning about what you want to think about based on what you’ve noticed, based on what you’ve observed.

Certain thinking may be fun for a while, but it leaves you worse off in the long run. Like potato chips: You enjoy eating them for a while, but they don’t really satisfy your hunger, and after a while, when you’ve had a lot of them, you feel sick. So, notice that. And realize, “Okay, that kind of thinking was enjoyable for a while, but I’ve got to stay away.” You learn how to recognize it the next time it comes back and say, “I went for it one time, but not now.” Then you learn how to stick with that determination.

Having a sense of well-being with the breath helps, because you’re not so hungry for other kinds of thinking. TShe important thing is that your powers of observation get sharper, and your powers of judgment get more discriminating. In other words, you see that what you thought was okay before is not really okay anymore. This is how you grow, and there’s a joy in growing. It comes from this ability to pass judgment wisely on what you’re doing.

As the Buddha said, he got onto the path when he decided to divide his thoughts into two types: those based on sensuality, ill-will, harmfulness on the one side; and those based on renunciation, non-ill-will, harmlessness on the other. In other words, he judged his thoughts as to where they came from and where they were going to lead. The ones in the first sort would lead to harm for himself or others. Those in the second sort would lead away from harm.

Now, the question of whether he liked that particular type of thinking didn’t enter into the equation. He looked at the results. He was looking more for the long term. That was the basis on which he was judging things. This required that he have the ability to step back.

That’s how we get on the path, too, not just by siding with our thoughts, or what we like in the moment. We observe: Which parts of the mind are responsible for different kinds of thinking? Which ones lead to different kinds of thinking? And what are the results? It’s when you can pass judgment like this that you can get on the path.

It’s not simply a matter of following instructions… You have to think for yourself, observe for yourself, as well This is how the Buddha found the Dhamma, and this is how we’re going to find it, too. We have the advantage that he came before us and pointed out what the good questions are. But it’s up to us to ask those questions of ourselves right here and right now—and to raise our standards, to be in line with his standards, when we give our answers.

You read his autobiographical accounts of how he pursued awakening, and he seems pretty superhuman. But he was extremely determined and very scrupulous, and that’s what’s going to be demanded of us.

Ajaan Lee talks about how he looked back on his practice, and he was amazed that he could do what he did. That’s the kind of practice you want to have: that you stretch yourself, that you grow, that you develop strengths you didn’t have before—strengths of endurance, stronger mindfulness, stronger concentration. It’s all about developing and growing—and finding joy in developing and growing

You’ve got to figure things out. The Buddha gives you the outline, and you’ve got to figure out how the outline applies to the particulars of your mind, the particulars of your breath and your body as you experience it right now.

So basically the Buddha’s asking that we become adult, we become mature, we grow up. Among the world religions, Buddhism seems to be unique in that it expects us to be adults. We’re not told to simply obey. We’re not told to place our hopes in somebody else doing all the work for us. We’ve got to do the work ourselves; we’ve got to be responsible.

But there’s a joy in being mature. It comes from your ability to learn new things, to do things that are hard, to learn that you’ve got the capability within you to do those things.

This is why the path is good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end, because it builds on good qualities you already have and makes them stronger and stronger as you learn that they may be good in potential, but they’re not yet good enough. The Buddha’s attitude—and one you should be sure to develop—is that you take pride in the fact that you’ve done something right, but then you use that as encouragement to do it better the next time. This is how we grow.

So it’s good to find joy in learning how to grow because you stretch yourself, and you find that you’re capable of more than you might have expected. After all, who, looking at that young prince in India 2,600 years ago, would have thought that he could become the Buddha?

He saw potentials within himself that nobody else saw. He realized that all human beings have those potentials—not to become Buddha, maybe, but to put an end to our suffering, to grow. He said that if people couldn’t develop skillful qualities and abandon unskillful ones, he wouldn’t have bothered to teach. But it’s because we have this ability to learn and to grow and to learn from our mistakes: that’s why the Dhamma is for us.

So make the most of it.