Training Your Minds

When you sit down to meditate, you have to figure out what kind of mind you’re training tonight, because you do have many minds. There’s the mind of lust, the mind of anger, the mind of fear, greed, jealousy, the mind that’s tired from the long day, the mind that’s wired and overactive. There are lots of “yous” in there. So you have to ask yourself, which you is going to be the subject of your training tonight? Then try to remember that the Buddha has lots of checklists, lots of different ways of dealing with the mind when it’s obstreperous.

In terms of the seven factors for awakening, there are the factors that help to solve the problem of a mind that’s too active and too energetic. There are others = for when the mind is too sluggish.

So you may want to have a nice quiet mind tonight, but it turns out the mind is too sluggish, and you just go to sleep. Other times, the mind is thinking all over the place. Although the Buddha says in cases like that you want to emphasize calm, equanimity, and concentration, I’ve also found that there are times when if the mind is going to think, well, give it something good to think about. If it’s yelling at you or telling you that you can’t settle down, you’ve got to think about something, you can respond, “Okay, I’ll think about something, but I’ll think about a better topic.” Or if the mind is telling you you’ve got to think about one particular thing, and you realize you’ve thought through that thing many, many times, and further thought is not going to help, then whatever it says, repeat it back to it with a sarcastic tone of voice. That usually puts it down.

As for things to think about, this is where we get into the Buddha’s five ways of dealing with distractions, and it’s good to remember them—because, as he says, these are the five ways in which you can deal with almost anything in the mind.

The first one is that if the mind is going off and thinking about something unskillful, give it something better to think about. Now, if you’re working with the breath, this might mean changing the way you breathe. If the breath is calm, you may need to breathe in a more energetic way—or vice versa. Or you may decide that tonight’s not a night for the breath.

If the problem is lust, you can think about the different parts of the body. Make a thorough survey. Think of taking them out of your body and putting them on the floor in front of you. As the Buddha said, lust starts with being attracted to your own body and then goes to somebody else. So work with your own body first. Ask yourself, when you’re lusting for somebody, which part of the body is the trigger? Then take that part and make it separate. On its own, would it be attractive? Well, no. Then you think about the parts inside the body—the liver, the intestines. That’s all part of the package, too. They’re ugly, and yet could you have a body without those things? Well, no. Think about this in different ways.

Sometimes, of course, the problem with lust is not the object of the lust. It’s the stories you tell yourself around it. Some of the stories get their attraction from the object; some of them have their attraction in how you play a role in those fantasies. So try to poison the fantasy right where the attraction is. Change the story into one that turns you off.

If anger is a problem, if you’ve been dealing with difficult people, goodwill is the standard solution. Remember that as you’re sitting here thinking black thoughts about those people, who’s suffering? You’re the one who’s suffering. They’re pretty oblivious, usually. Yet here you are all worked up. For what purpose? Have some compassion for yourself.

Part of the mind will say, “Well, if I don’t think about this hard enough, justice won’t be done.” That’s when you have to call into question the whole idea of justice, because you don’t know when the story started between you and those other people, how many lifetimes it goes back. Whoever’s coming ahead in the game, it’s a bad game either way. Just pull out.

As for fear, ask yourself: What are you afraid of losing? What do you have that you feel threatened about? Think about the world outside. Things could fall apart pretty easily. They are falling apart. Your only safety is developing qualities inside that the world can’t touch. They can take your things, they can harm your body, but they can’t take your virtue. They can’t take your concentration. You lose those things only if you throw them away. So work on some genuine wealth, some wealth that’s really yours.

That’s one way of dealing with an obstreperous mind: Find something else to think about. You may have come here thinking, “I just want to settle down, have a nice peaceful time with the breath, get into a couple of nice jhānas, breathe in and out really satisfied with the breath,” but the mind is just not willing to settle down. OK, de-think whatever the thinking is. Take it apart. Think in an opposite way until you lose interest in the first kind of thinking, and then maybe you will be ready to settle down and really enjoy the breath.

You might also want to look into your whole attitude about meditating. If you feel that it’s a chore, you’ve got to change the attitude. Think of it more like, “Here’s your opportunity to breathe in a way that’s fulfilling, to breathe in a way that’s satisfying, gratifying. Think of your whole body as just wanting more breath, and you can provide it, and you have no other responsibilities right now.”

That takes care of the Buddha’s first two steps. One is just going back to a skillful thought, and then two, thinking about the drawbacks of the unskillful thinking that’s got you enmeshed.

Now, there are times when, no matter how much you think about the drawbacks, the mind still goes for it. That’s when you can tell yourself, “Okay, it can think those thoughts, but I don’t have to get involved.”

This is when the committee of the mind is a good image. The committee is going crazy. They’ve latched onto one of those topics that sparks endless debates. You need to say, “I’m out of here.” It’s as if you’re in a large hall, while they’re on the other end of the hall, arguing, but you don’t have to get into that part of the hall. You don’t have to get involved. You stay over here, where it’s more quiet, and even if the conversation seems to be coming at you stereo from all sides, you can just let it go through you. You’ve got work to do. You try to ignore those discussions.

As Ajaan Lee says, it’s like chasing a shadow. The more you run after the shadow, the more the shadow is going to run away from you. It’ll pull you away, pull you away. So if the shadow wants to go running, let it run on its own. You don’t have to run after it. Of course, when you don’t run after it, the shadow has to stop.

It’ll take a while, and it may keep coming around—here we have to change the analogy. It’s like a stray dog that you’ve fed in the past. It’s flea-bitten. You’ve decided you don’t want it around anymore, so you stop feeding it. It’ll keep whining and whining for a while. Or you can think of it as a crazy person coming and wanting to talk to you. The crazy person will start saying things that are crazier and crazier to get your attention. You have to be resolved that you’re not going to get involved. If you’re patient enough, resilient enough, then after a while that other thinking will fall away.

The fourth technique is to recognize that when a thought comes up, there’s going to be tension in the body. It’s as if the mind has to use tension in the body as a marker to keep track of the thought from moment to moment to moment. If you’re sensitive to the breath in the body, you can figure out where that pattern of tension is. Sometimes it doesn’t require that you be all that sensitive, though. It’s pretty obvious. Tightness in the chest, tightness in the stomach, tightness around the wrists, in the hands: Wherever the tension is, breathe through it. Disperse it. Think of each breath flowing right there, right there, right there.

Say it’s in your wrists. You don’t have to think of the breath flowing down the arms to the wrists. Have it flow right into the wrists and out through the other side. That way, the thought has no place to stand. You’ll start losing the train of thought and you’ll have some time to breathe. Then, of course, the fact that it feels really good to relax those patterns of tension will remind you that breathing meditation really can be fun, it can be enjoyable. Even though it’s part of the duties of the four noble truths, the duty doesn’t have to be a chore. There are lots of duties that you can learn how to enjoy.

The fifth approach is to stamp down on the thoughts. The Buddha’s image is of two strong men beating down a weaker man. He says to press your tongue against the roof of your mouth and just tell yourself, “I will not think that thought.” This is where having a meditation word that you repeat rapid fire like a machine gun is useful: Buddho-buddho-buddho, really fast. You may tell yourself, “I don’t like that kind of meditation.” It feels like you’re applying a sledgehammer to your mind. Well, sometimes the mind needs a sledgehammer. You don’t have to keep it up all through the period. After a while, the mind will get tired, and then it’ll be more willing to settle down and rest.

So take stock of which mind you’re working on tonight, and use some of the Buddha’s checklists.

There’s a list of the four bases for success. When things are not going well, ask yourself, “So which one is missing?” If you sit down, telling yourself, “I have to sit down because it’s time to sit down,” there’s no real desire to sit down. Talk to yourself for a while to remind yourself of why it’s good to be meditating. Learn to generate desire. That’s part of the right effort, generating the desire to do this. See this as a rare opportunity. You’ve got the time. You’ve got the ideal place. You’ve got the opportunity to meditate. How often does this come? If you don’t do it now, when are you going to do it?

So, if desire is weak, strengthen it. If the desire is too strong, if you sit down and say, “I want to gain at least the third jhāna tonight,” remind yourself: If you’re going to get the third jhāna, you’ve got to get the causes right. And what are the causes? They don’t lie in thinking about the third jhāna. Jhāna is not the topic of jhāna. The topic of right concentration is your breath. So channel all your interest into the breath. Channel your desire into the breath. Whether you gain this or that level of concentration, that’s not the issue. You want to make sure that you get your attention on target and keep it on target. That’s how you get results.

The same with the other bases for success: Are you being persistent enough? Sometimes when you put away, it goes away for a while, but then it comes back again. You put it away and it come back again. You begin to feel that you’re going to lose out to it. You’ve got to show that you’re more determined than it is. So you keep at it. Every time it comes up, you put it away. It comes up, put it away. If you tell yourself, “I want to be quiet. I don’t want to be struggling like this,” remember: You’re not going to get to the quiet until you really are sincere in your struggle.

As for intent, are you really paying attention or are you just going through the motions?

And your powers of analysis: Sometimes you try to analyze things too much, too quickly. You have two or three breaths and then you check, “Is this going well?” Give it some more time. If you’re trying out different kinds of breathing, give them each enough time to show that they can have an effect on the body. Some ways of breathing will be obviously unpleasant, unskillful. With others, it’ll take a while.

Then the opposite problem: If you’re not analyzing anything at all—you’re just chugging away, chugging away, not happy with how things are going—you have to step back and ask yourself, “Well, what’s the problem? Where is the mind fixated?” Sometimes it’ll be willing to tell you very quickly; other times, it’s going to be a little more secretive. So you have to watch.

What this means is that you can’t sit down and determine ahead of time, “Tonight’s going to have to be this, this, this way.” You can have a plan, but you also have to be prepared for the fact that the mind you thought you were going to train is not here tonight. You’ve got another mind.

When you begin to realize that you have a certain repertoire of minds and you begin to develop a repertoire of techniques, that’s when the meditation goes better. But you also have to be prepared for the fact that sometimes something brand new will come up, a new member of the committee will show itself.

I know of someone who went to study pottery in Japan with a living national treasure. She’d make her pots and put them in the kiln, and they’d come out burned or raw or twisted. He—the living national treasure—would put his pots in, and his pots would always come out perfect, perfect, perfect, every time. Until one day she came early in the morning. They’d just opened the kiln, and it turned out that some of his pots had burned. So even a living national treasure can make mistakes. But how he responded to the mistake was the important thing. He was in the kiln trying to figure out what had gone wrong.

That’s what mastery is. It doesn’t mean that you’ve got every situation nailed down all the time. It does mean, though, that when something goes wrong, you don’t get knocked off balance by it. You try to figure out what went wrong. You’re always ready to improve your skill, expand your skill, so that you can deal with a wider and wider range of situations.

Think about it: When you’re going to die, you don’t know how you’re going to die. Are you going to die on the side of the road, die in a hospital, die at home, after a long illness, die suddenly? You don’t know. So you have to be prepared for all kinds of possibilities.

So sitting here meditating, different possibilities come up: the possibility of a lustful mind one night, the possibility of an angry mind the next night, the possibility of a mind that’s just tired of meditating another night. Master those possibilities first, and then you’ll be ready to master some of the bigger ones, the more challenging ones.

The important thing is you don’t let them get you down. There’s no problem in meditation that somebody hasn’t solved someplace. So when a new problem comes up, ask yourself, “Somebody’s mastered this before. How could that possibly have happened?” When you believe there’s a way out, you’re going to find it.

It’s like being lost in the forest. If you believe there’s no way out, then you’re going to give up with the slightest challenge. If you tell yourself, “There must be a way out. I made my way in here to begin with. There must be a way out,” you always keep open the possibility that you can get out. Challenges don’t get you down.

It’s the right attitude that makes all the difference.