A Thorough Cleaning

Ajaan Fuang had a student, a nun, who had lots of bodily illnesses. He told her, “Every day, make sure that at least one of your meditation sessions is devoted to getting into all the little pains here and there in the body, using the breath to clear them out as best you can—a once-a-day a medical checkup a once-a-day medical treatment. But try to do as thorough a job as possible,” he told her. “Even the slightest little bit of tension in the body that might have an effect on the breath: Work through it, work through it, because a lot of these tensions are not just physical tensions. They’re related to things going on in your mind.”

This is an important principle in the meditation. Often we approach, say, goodwill practice or breath practice like a cook whose foods are not all that good, so she just slathers them with gravy. In other words, you just think pink clouds of goodwill to everybody without stopping to think, “Do you really think thoughts of goodwill? Are there people for whom it’s hard to feel goodwill? How do you get past that?” We’re not trying to pretend that we have goodwill for people for whom we don’t have it. But we can teach ourselves to develop goodwill. We’re not stuck in the way the world conditioned our old habits. We can change them.

So when you’re thinking thoughts of goodwill, don’t just go through the phrases again and again. Actually stop and ask yourself, “Is there anyone out there for whom you cannot feel goodwill?” And think about what goodwill means: wishing that people will be skillful in their actions. After all, goodwill means, “May they be happy.” And how are they going to be happy? They have to do skillful things in their actions. That’s the principle of karma. That’s an attitude you should have for everybody without hypocrisy.

Of course, there may be some people for whom you have some long resentments, and there’s the thought, “Well, maybe they should suffer a little bit first before they can be happy.” If their karma has really been that unskillful, you don’t have to arrange for it to happen. But still, if people have been acting in unskillful ways, the world would be a much better place if they could voluntarily change their ways. That’s the thought you should have.

Now, you may think this is not realistic. There are a lot of people out there who are not going to change their ways very easily. But we’re talking here about your state of mind, your attitude toward other people—what, in ideal circumstances, you would wish for them, and what, even in unideal circumstances you should wish for them. After all, if you allow yourself to have ill will for anyone, your actions toward that person are not likely to be skillful. That then becomes your karma.

So for your own sake, you want to have goodwill for everybody. This is not an impossible ideal, but it does require detailed work. And in getting down to the details, you’re going to be cleaning out a lot of misunderstandings in your own mind, a lot of bad attitudes, a lot of the crud that develops in the mind as you go through the day. Think of this as doing a detailed cleaning, a thorough cleaning.

The same with your breath: You get one spot in the body comfortable and just think, “Okay, everybody. Connect, connect.” Well, there’s some connecting work you have to do. Develop that one spot that feels good by the way you breathe—say, down around the chest, down around the abdomen, in the throat. Try to find spots that tend to be very sensitive, that—in the course of the day—tend to tense up quickly, and work on those first.

They’re like intersections that have gotten clogged with traffic. If you clear up the intersection, then the traffic in all the neighboring streets begins to flow. Then, when you’ve got a good, comfortable sense of breath going, think of it spreading around. Go through the details, down the spine, every vertebra, down around the legs, down the shoulders, down the arms, down the front of the body. Just keep going around and around and around, dispersing little bits of tension here and there that you might have missed the first time around. As the major blocks of tension get cleared up, then the more subtle ones begin to appear. Well, deal with those, too.

Again, this is a good way of cleaning out mental attitudes that have gotten lodged in the energy of the body. We do carry on a lot of things in our minds that get into our body as we go through the day. If you don’t clean them out, they just build up, build up, like crud in old pipes. If you don’t clean them out, then they’re just going to be there in the background, resistant.

So be willing to do the work. It’s nitty-gritty, but it’s in the little details like this that things begin to open up. Areas where you just stashed away a few bad attitudes get cleaned out, and you’re amazed how much lighter you feel. So do the detailed work. Don’t rush through things.

Ajaan Fuang had another student to whom he taught body contemplation. He told her to take out her hair and then to replant it. So she started meditating, and after five minutes she said, “Okay, that’s done.” He said, “Wait a minute. Once you’ve pulled out the hair, plant it one strand of hair at a time. Get used to doing detailed work because the details reveal a lot of things that tend to get sloughed over.”

So when you’re doing metta meditation, when you’re doing breath meditation, whatever the topic, get to the details. Clear out the details. At least once a day, do a cleaning job inside your body, inside your mind. You’ll be amazed how much lighter you feel.