Strength for Your Goodness

Close your eyes. Usually we say, “Watch your breath,” but that might not be the best way of phrasing it. You want to feel your breath, wear your breath. Think of the breath as surrounding you—because when we talk about the breath, it’s not so much the air coming in and out of the lungs. It’s the feeling of energy flow in the body, and you can feel that anywhere in the body. So notice where it’s most prominent: the sensations that tell you now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out. Focus your attention there. Then see if the breath can be comfortable.

You might try lengthening it for a while or shortening it. Making it deeper, more shallow. Heavier, lighter. Faster or slower. Or any combination of these. Whatever the body needs right now. Try to provide that by the way you breathe. We’re going to get the mind into concentration, and for the mind to stay in concentration, it has to have a pleasant sensation to stay with. So make the breath pleasant.

You don’t have to force it, just think of allowing it to be pleasant. When the needs of the body change, the breath can change as well. As the mind settles down, you may find that what at first felt good when you were breathing long doesn’t feel so good anymore. You might shorten the breath. So try to get an intuitive sense for what feels best now in providing the mind with a good, strong place to stay.

We live in a world where there are a lot of challenges to our goodness. We try to do good in the world, and there seem to be people out to destroy whatever good we’ve done. We can’t give up in the face of that. So we need to develop strength inside.

The Buddha says that inner strength comes from heedfulness, realizing there are dangers in life but there are also ways to avoid those dangers. If you couldn’t avoid them, heedfulness wouldn’t serve any purpose. If there were no dangers, you wouldn’t need heedfulness. But there are dangers, both inside and out. So you need to strengthen yourself based on that heedfulness.

The Buddha lists five kinds of strength that you need to develop. The first is conviction. Traditionally this is said to be conviction in the Buddha’s awakening. But what does that mean for you right now? It means that it is possible to make a difference in life through your actions. Actions based on skillful mental states lead to happiness. If they’re based on unskillful mental states like greed, aversion, and delusion, they lead to pain. And it is possible through your efforts to find an end to suffering. In other words, the potentials you have in your actions are quite large. If you believe that your actions do make a major difference, then you have the strength to act in ways that you know are going to be good even when they’re hard. You don’t get discouraged by setbacks.

Think about the Buddha. He was determined to find true happiness. He followed a lot of wrong ways, arrived at a lot of dead ends, but he didn’t give up. He was determined: If there was a way through human action to find the deathless, he was going to find it. It was through his determination, through his conviction that there had to be a way out: That’s how he found it.

It’s like a person lost in the jungle. If you don’t believe there’s a way out, you’re not going to find it. If you believe there’s a way out, then you have a much greater chance of finding it. And if you’re confident in the power of your actions, then you realize that the good you do is not wasted, even when it seems to be erased by other people. You’re still putting good energy in. And you have the choice to do that.

This is one of the points of the Buddha’s teachings on karma that’s most misunderstood. People think the Buddha taught karma as a kind of fatalism, that whatever you’re going to experience right now comes from something you did in the past. But that’s not what he taught. In fact, he criticized that idea very strongly. What you experience right now is partially shaped by the past, but it’s also partially shaped by the decisions you’re making right now. And you’re free to make those present-moment decisions as skillful as you want.

So you do have power in your hands and you’re convinced of that. That’s a strength. Just the fact that you’re convinced of that is a strength to begin with.

Then you exercise that power. That’s the second strength: persistence. It’s the same as right effort.

Now, right effort is not just brute effort. It involves learning how to motivate yourself to do what you know is skillful. If something unskillful has arisen in the mind, you get rid of it. You figure out the skillful way to get rid of it. Once it’s gone, you figure out skillful ways to keep it from coming back. You try to give rise to skillful qualities that are not there yet. And if they are there, you try to develop them even further.

You can motivate yourself to do this in various ways.

Heedfulness is one of the reasons we want to follow right effort. But we can also think in terms of compassion: how you will benefit, other people will benefit. There are a lot of people in the world who are suffering, and if you behave in a skillful way, you can help to alleviate that suffering, both for yourself and for others.

Sometimes you feel inspired by stories of the great teachers of the past. Again, you think about the Buddha’s example, the example of all the noble disciples: men and women who, in many cases, were worse off than you are now, but they were able to get their act together and find awakening.

There’s a story in the Canon of a monk who’s sick in the wilderness. There’s no doctor. He asks himself, “Am I going to try to get back into town to find a doctor?” But then he says, “No, I’ll think of the great disciples of the past, how they battled their diseases with the five strengths, the seven factors for awakening, all the good qualities that the Buddha taught.” Because it is the case that sometimes an illness is caused not by physical factors but by mental ones. So strengthen your mind. Other people have done that in the past. You can give it a try, too.

The third strength is mindfulness. Now, mindfulness for the Buddha means keeping something in mind. It’s a faculty of the active memory. You’re trying to get the mind into concentration. And you remember, one, you have to stay with one object. And two, you remember what has and what hasn’t worked in the past so you that can apply that knowledge to what you’re doing right now.

When something unskillful comes up in the mind, you recognize it. When greed comes or anger comes: You’ve seen these things before. And if you’ve been able to work with them in a way that you can get past them, you try to remember that and apply it. Sometimes it’ll work this time around. Sometimes it won’t. Your greed has lots of varieties. Your anger has lots of varieties. So try to use your ingenuity.

The basic principles are always the same. If you see something unskillful in your mind, first you have to look to see: How does it arise? Where does it come from inside? And you want to look for the cause inside rather than outside. Then, in the second step, you look to see: Does it last? You’ll see that these mind states come and they go. Then they come again and go again. It’s not that they’re going to be there all the time.

Then the question is: When they go but they come back again, why did you pick them up again? What’s the allure? That’s the third step. What’s attractive about greed? What’s attractive about anger? Sometimes you have to dig down really deep inside. The mind will give you some reasons, but those are not the real reasons. It’s kind of embarrassed by the real reasons. So you have to keep looking, keep asking, keep looking, keep asking, until you come across something and say, “Oh, that’s the real reason why I went for this.”

Then you compare that with the drawbacks — that’s the fourth step — until you see that the drawbacks really outweigh the allure, and that you don’t have to follow that mind state.

As with anger: Anger will tell you, “If I’m not angry, I won’t get things done.” Well, actually you get things done better when you’re not angry. You see something’s wrong, you try to fix it. When you get angry, your vision gets reduced to tunnel vision, and you’re convinced about something because that’s the only thing you see in that narrow range. But then when the incident has passed, you look back at what you did, you say, “Oh my gosh, that was really stupid.” So you want to see the stupidity of your anger while you’re angry. That way, you develop dispassion for it. That allows you to escape from the anger. That’s the fifth step.

These are all techniques that we use to deal with unskillful qualities. That’s the basic framework. The details will depend on your specific instance of anger or greed or fear or jealousy or whatever, but the outline is always the same. It’s when you see that what you liked about it is not worth the suffering it causes: That’s when you let things go.

These are some of the things you keep in mind as you try to stay with the breath, as you try to stay centered. When you do, the mindfulness develops naturally into concentration. There’s a sense of being really stable right here, of belonging right here. It’s as if your center of gravity gets lower. You’re less likely to be knocked over by things.

When the mind gets settled like this, there’s going to be a sense of well-being, a sense of refreshment, a sense of ease. Allow that sense of refreshment and ease to fill the body. If you allow the breath energy to fill the body, then let that ease go along with the breath. Let the refreshment go along with the breath until the whole body is saturated with feelings like this. That, the Buddha says, is food for the mind.

He has an image where he compares the practice to defending a fortress on the frontier. You’ve got the soldiers, which are your right efforts. You’ve got the gatekeeper, which is mindfulness, who knows who to let in, who not to let in. The soldiers and the gatekeeper need food, and their food is concentration. When you can develop a sense of well-being simply by the way you breathe, you become more independent from things outside. The pleasures you used to really need, you find you don’t need them so much anymore because you’ve just got something better inside. When the mind is well-fed like this, then it’s going to pursue that process of looking for the origination, the passing away, the allure, and the drawbacks, with a lot more precision. That’s what the work of discernment is.

You’ve got discernment, mindfulness, and concentration all working together, based on the conviction that the good things you do in your mind, the strengths you develop in your mind, will make a difference. And the good you do is not going to be washed away by other people’s actions, other people’s words. When you have that confidence that, yes, you can make a difference, and you have the strength inside — you’re well-fed and sheltered inside — then your goodness can survive this world. When you leave this world, the goodness goes with you, but you also leave goodness behind. That’s one of the good things about the happiness that the Buddha teaches in the path. It’s a happiness that makes other people happy, too.

Most people in the world pursue happiness in ways that make them happy, along with a narrow range of their friends, but it can cause a lot of trouble for other people. They go into the world looking for material gain, status, praise, sensual pleasures. The things they gain are taken away from other people. They gain, other people have to lose. That’s why divisions come into the world.

But if your happiness is based on doing skillful things — being generous, being virtuous, having goodwill for all, training your mind — then the happiness spreads around. It doesn’t have any boundaries. It erases boundaries. That’s why this practice, even though you’re focusing on your own mind, is not a selfish practice. The strengths you develop here, you can carry into the world, and they provide the foundation so to make sure that your goodness survives the world. Not only survives, but thrives.