Second Wind

If you’ve ever walked or hiked for a long distance, you may have had the experience where you start out and you begin to run out of steam, but you’re determined to keep on going, and suddenly you catch your second wind. The body adjusts, and you can go for a much longer distance than you thought you could have.

Meditation can be like that too. You start out and get the mind to settle down, and after a while, after it’s been quiet and peaceful for a while, it begins to unravel. It’s possible to give up right then and say, “Well, that’s as far as my concentration goes.” Or you could remind yourself that you’re not here just to rest. You’re here to understand your mind—and by sticking with the effort to maintain concentration, you’re going to learn about it.

In the beginning, you’re going to learn how things fall apart. But then you begin to get a sense of what you can do to keep things going. Part of it is just that: reminding yourself you’re here to understand, not just to rest.

So try to take an interest in what’s coming in to disturb the mind at that point. A thought may come that says, “This is boring,” or another thought may come in saying, “I’m running out of steam.” But then you have to remind yourself to think that these other thoughts also require energy, so you want to take that energy and plow it back into the concentration.

One way you can do that is to get interested in what’s going on right now as the mind and the body are sitting here together. What keeps them together?

There’s got to be some mindfulness. In other words, you keep reminding yourself, “Stay right here. Stay right here.” There has to be that message that gets passed on from breath to breath to breath. Sometimes the unraveling happens because the messages have stopped. You’ve forgotten.

So be very careful to remind yourself. And be alert when there’s a little stirring in the mind. If you really want to learn about how distraction happens, don’t go into the distraction, don’t go into the stirring. Step back from it, watch it. You’ll see how distraction begins.

Where did the Buddha learn all about clinging, craving, and becoming—all those factors of dependent co-arising? It came from watching what was going on in his mind as he was trying to keep it in concentration and other things would come up. He would see how they would come up, how would they get put together.

When you start out, you may not have the sophistication and precision of his vocabulary, but you can notice for yourself how a little world appears in your mind based on some desire, and then you go into that world. Can you allow the world to form and then not go into it? See what happens.

When you go into it, it’s like blowing a bubble and then getting inside the bubble and traveling with it. It’s going to pop someplace, and you fall out. You land someplace else.

But here you can watch the bubble go away. And when you don’t go with it, it doesn’t go very far. Then you find that the framework of your concentration is still there.

This is why it’s so important that your concentration be a full-body awareness rather than one-pointed. That’s one of the things you can work on to make sure you don’t go floating away: Is there any part of the body that you’re not fully conscious of? You might take a survey, a very detailed survey, down to the spaces between your fingers, the spaces between your toes, all the little muscles in your face. Then be fully aware of every square inch. Think of every cell breathing in, breathing out together. This grounds you more firmly.

That’s one way of catching your second wind.

Another way is to ask questions.

I’ve been going through the Canon, trying to find all the passages where people gain awakening while listening to the Buddha or one of his disciples give a Dhamma talk. It’s amazing how many of those talks are in the form of questions, trying to get the listener to look into his or her mind from a new perspective.

You can play with the perceptions that are holding you here right now, to see which way of perceiving the breath is most helpful for staying here. You can perceive it as coming in from the outside, in which case you might want to think of it coming in and out through all the pores. Or you can perceive it as starting inside. You might want to have it start in one spot or two spots. Think of one spot in the head, another spot, say, down at the base of the spine, or down at the soles of your feet, and then think of a line connecting all those spots. Think of the breath coming in and out of that line. What does that perception do?

Or you can ask yourself about perceptions of front and back. Sometimes a pain will come up and you locate it in your stomach, say, or in your chest, in the front. You can ask yourself: What if that’s actually a pain that’s in the back? And how would that relate to your sensations of the back if it were?

Then there’s your sense of the mind looking in a certain direction: It has that sense because the body is looking in a certain direction, your eyes are focused out front. But does your mind have to be focused out front? Does it have a front? Does it have a back? Can you think of it looking out in all directions?

One of the epithets of the Buddha was the All-around Eye. It has a lot of meanings, but this is one of them: When his mind was in concentration, he was not focused just in one direction, he was focused in all directions. Aware in all directions.

As you play with these perceptions, you begin to see how you put things together in the present moment. And you begin to ask questions about it: “Do they have to be put together in that way?”

When you’re dealing with pains, this is especially useful. Ordinarily, when we’re dealing with pain, we want to know precisely where the pain is so that we can have a sense of what’s going wrong where in the body and what we need to do to treat it. But when you’re sitting here meditating, you don’t need to know where the pain is. So you can ask yourself, “Is it really where I think it is, or could it be someplace else?”

In other words, start asking questions about what’s going on.

There’s a famous Zen teacher, Dogen, who taught what was called “just sitting.” Some people think that’s all he meant, just sit there. But actually, there’s a passage where he asks questions about what’s going on as you sit. Is the body sitting in the mind? Is the mind sitting in the body? Where is your mind in relationship to the body right now? In other words, be curious of what’s going on right here, right now. Begin to take things apart so that you can see how you put it all together. When there’s distraction, we drift off in other places to create a little state of becoming. And you might ask yourself about what the Buddha says goes into becoming: Clinging conditions becoming. So you might tell yourself, “I want to see what I’m clinging to right now.”

You can cling to sensuality, you can cling to habits and practices, you can cling to views, or you can cling to your sense of self. Those are all the raw materials for becoming. The views are the world of the becoming, you sense your self is you in that world, and habits and practices have to do with how that world functions.

It may be too much to try to see these things as they form around a distraction, but they’re very much there as you create a state of concentration. You’ve got the body here that you’re trying to inhabit as the world, and what are your views about this body? As I said, you can ask different questions about the perceptions, of the breath, the pain, the front and back.

And you want to create a sense of well-being. The Buddha says there is the potential for rapture here, there’s the potential for ease and pleasure. Where are those potentials? And how do you develop them?

Ajaan Lee gives a lot of recommendations for dealing with the breath. You can take those as a jumping-off point and then come up with some observations and questions of your own. After all, you do want to make this your meditation, your concentration, so that you understand your mind.

And then you can ask yourself, where are you in the body right now? And to what extent can you control things? How do you control things?

Some people, when we talk about adjusting the breath, get very tight. In that case, it’s better to think of allowing things to happen, allowing things to dissolve, allowing blockages to dissolve, allowing patterns of tension to dissolve. Make that part of your skill set as the identity you’re taking on here.

When you come to the body, the breath, and the mind with these questions, you find that you can go for a long distance, much longer than if you just want to rest for a bit.

Then when you have a sense that you’ve had enough rest, you can ask, “What can I do now?” Remember, what you can do now is to try to understand the mind as it’s in concentration. So do whatever is needed to maintain that concentration. And often it’ll be a sense of interest. Boredom is what kills concentration.

So start thinking about questions you can ask about what’s happening right here, right now, as the mind tries to settle down, as your awareness tries to fill the body, as you try to get the breath to fill the body, a sense of ease to fill the body. How do you do that? Take an interest. That’s what allows you to become a long-distance meditator.