To Look after Yourself with Ease

You can sit here breathing in lots of different ways: ways that feel good, ways that don’t feel good. All too often, we’re not paying attention to how we breathe and we don’t get the most out of it. So here’s our chance. We have no other responsibilities right now. That means that you can get to know your breath. See what you can make out of it.

There’s a phrase we have when we extend thoughts of goodwill to ourselves: “May I look after myself with ease.” That’s related to the principle of being unburdensome. As the Buddha said, when you practice the Dhamma, you know the Dhamma is true when it makes you unburdensome. And part of being unburdensome is having the ability to look after yourself, where you don’t have to depend on other people for all your well-being. You can develop some of the resources you have inside and you can depend on those, so that you’re not leaning on other people all the time.

All too often, we hear the principle of being unburdensome simply as meaning learning how to do without: being tough, being resilient, being willing to live in uncomfortable circumstances, not asking too much from other people. Actually, the skill of being unburdensome is more of a challenge: How can you live in uncomfortable circumstances and yet still find ease, still find well-being? How can you best develop your inner resources so as to find well-being from within? That’s what it means to be unburdensome. And that’s what it means to have goodwill for yourself. It means obviously you have goodwill for others, you don’t want to weigh them down. But you have goodwill for yourself when you develop your inner resources, your inner abilities.

So here’s something free: the breath. When it comes in, it comes in free. When it goes out, it goes out free. They haven’t figured out a way yet to charge you for it. So take advantage of it to learn its potentials while it’s free, while you can.

When you breathe in, where do you feel the breathing in the body? With the word “breath,” here, we’re talking about the movement of energy through the body, not so much the air that comes in and out through the nose, because the air that comes in and out through the nose, aside from when you breathe really heavily, isn’t really pleasant or unpleasant. Usually, it’s kind of neutral. But the movement of energy in the body can be painful, it can be pleasant. If you’ve broken a rib, it can sometimes be very painful. Or if you’re tense and tight in different parts of the body, the breath doesn’t feel all that nourishing.

But you can think of all the little tensions in the body relaxing, relaxing. Start with the tips of your fingers, work up your hands, up your arms, the shoulders. Or start with the tips of the toes, work up the feet, the ankles, calves, knees, thighs, pelvis, up through the torso, into the head. Anywhere there’s the slightest bit of tension, allow it to relax. Sometimes you’ll notice that the spots of tension are actually connected to one another. You release one spot of tension and it has a ricochet effect going through your body. If the tension moves over there, well, you release that, and if it moves over to another spot, you release that. But when you’ve worked through the body like this and there’s a sense of well-being throughout, then you try to maintain that sense of open well-being.

And there you are. You can be sitting anywhere and have a sense of well-being inside. That’s a good skill to have—because the more skills you have, the more you can depend on yourself.

I knew a woman in Thailand one time whose father was the chief of the orchestra for Rama VI. Now, their orchestras were smaller than we think of in America. He lived in the palace compound, and she was born in the palace compound. Of course, they didn’t have royal blood, so they weren’t really part of the royal family. But she picked up a lot of skills there.

She hung around the kitchen. She learned how to cook. Different members of the royal staff taught her different skills. She could take strips of bamboo, weave them into fishes, weave them into other things. Because of her skills, she had lots to offer to other people, and lots of entertainment for herself.

She could take a fish, break the spine, pull the spine out through the gills, squeeze all the flesh and everything else out through the gills, mix it with spices and stuff it back into the gills, then fry it. It looked like a regular fish. But you bit into it, and it was not a regular fish. It had no bones. It had spices inside. So she had more to offer herself and more to offer to other people because of the skills she had developed.

This is what it means to be unburdensome in the right way: that you have all kinds of skills that you can depend on.

Luang Lung, the monk we knew from Bangkok: His father knew a lot of magical chants. Some of them were for curing diseases, and some of them were just for the fun of it. Luang Lung tells of when he was a young child, they’d be going to a fair in a village nearby, so they would have to walk across the rice fields at night. To entertain the kids, the father would take off his phaa khamaa — that strip of cloth that farmers wear around their waist — tie it into a knot and blow into it, and it would turn into a rabbit. The kids would chase the rabbit as it hopped around. When they caught the rabbit, it would turn back into cloth. That was just an entertaining skill. The father also had other skills that were more useful.

The family was hemophiliac. The father wouldn’t teach any chants to Luang Lung unless he was promised never to disrobe. Luang Lung was too young at that point to make that kind of promise. But the father did teach him one skill: how to stop blood. If there was a wound, you could place your finger on the wound, chant the chant, and the blood would stop. If you’re a hemophiliac, that’s a useful skill to have.

One time Luang Lung was crossing a street in Bangkok, when a car went through the red light, hit him, flipped him over the hood. He fell on the street. The last thing he heard before he went unconscious was somebody saying, “Well, that one’s not going to last long.” He woke up in the hospital, and the nurses were running around, trying to stop the blood from a wound on his head, but they couldn’t. So he said, “Can you please put my finger on the wound?” So they did. He chanted the chant, and the blood stopped.

So the more skills you have, the more you can depend on yourself, and the less of a burden you are on other people. This is especially important as you get older, as you get sick. If you can take care of the state of your mind, then that’s a huge burden off of other people.

This is one of the reasons why we develop our powers of mindfulness, our powers of concentration, our powers of discernment: so that we have the skills within us to provide a sense of well-being inside, to stay alert inside, and make sure that whatever pains there may be in the body, they’re not going to invade the mind and remain. That’s the important thing—because it is possible for the body to be in pain, but the pain does not have to invade the mind.

The reason it invades the mind is because we open the door to it and bring it in. That’s a lack of skill on our part. You want to be able to sit with the pain, realizing that the body is one thing, the pain is something else. The mind, your awareness: That’s something else. When they’re separate like that, then they don’t impinge on each other. The pain doesn’t invade. You can be at your ease. This is called knowing how to look after yourself with ease. And it’s related to that principle of being unburdensome.

When the Buddha was teaching his stepmother the basic principles for what counts as Dhamma and Vinaya, one of the signs of a practice or a teaching that would count as Dhamma and Vinaya would be that it would help you be unburdensome.

Now, the monks do have a lot of rules that require that they depend on other people, but they’re designed so that they’re not much of a burden. People give whatever food they want. Monks have no right to demand food. Monks can’t handle money. It means somebody else has to handle money for them, which means they have to be very careful about what they want to get, to be as unburdensome as possible. But they also want to learn how to develop the skills inside, so they don’t need many things outside. If you’ve got skills inside, then you’re well-provided for no matter where you go.

As Ajaan Lee once said, if you have discernment, then you’re safe wherever you go. Just as if you have a machete, if you know how to use a machete, then wherever you go, you know how to cut things. You can provide for your livelihood. So work on developing your inner skills, like this skill of being able to just sit here quietly with your breath along with a sense of ease.

Ajaan Fuang tells the story of when he was up in the mountains north of Chiang Mai during World War II, cut off from Ajaan Lee, living alone on a mountaintop. He said it was lonely up there, but he did have his breath. He had learned how to use his breath to give rise to a real sense of refreshment inside. So he’d sit and meditate and maintain that sense of refreshment. That’s what enabled him to survive.

So gather up your skills. The more skills you have, the safer you are, and you’re ready for all kinds of circumstances. That’s how you show goodwill to yourself, and how you show goodwill to others.

For several years when I was in Thailand, I was looking after Ajaan Fuang while he was sick. Although the sickness required all kinds of strange treatments, which were not easy sometimes, still there was one thing I didn’t have to worry about, and that was the state of his mind. He was sharp, clear, alert, all through his illness, because of the skills he developed.

A couple of years later I was back visiting my father, who had fallen ill. Now, my father had had good health all during his life, but when he got older and he began to get ill, he didn’t know how to handle illness. He was always very apologetic, always felt very sad and very depressed. So that added to the burden, looking after him not only physically, but also trying to cheer him up, support him mentally as well.

So if you can support your mind, then you’re not a burden on anybody, at least to that extent. One of the hardest things in life is when you see somebody who’s sick, and they’ve gotten to the point where they’re delirious with pain, and no one can get through to them.

There was a time I was in France. I had to go to the emergency room, and down the hall there was this an older woman who was just moaning, moaning, moaning all the time. I happened to pass the room where she was in, and you could see from the look in her eyes that she was delirious. The nurses said they’d given her what painkillers they could, but she was beyond them. That hurts: seeing somebody lying there in pain, and you can’t help them. That’s a huge burden.

This is why it’s a gift to other people if you learn how to look after your mind. No matter how bad the pain is, no matter how bad the situation is outside, you know how to support your mind, keep it in a good mood. Keep it cheerful. Keep it expansive.

You want to have goodwill not only for yourself, but also for others. You can think of all the living beings out there, feeling compassion for all the living beings who are suffering, because you’re not the only one suffering. But at least you’ve got skills. There are a lot of people out there who don’t have any skills. So you have to have compassion for them. The more you can broaden your mind like this, then the less the weight of your own difficulties will weigh you down. And when you don’t weigh yourself down like this, then you’re also not a burden on other people.

So learn the skills you need, like this skill of getting a sense of well-being, getting a sense of being alert, clear in the present moment, so that you can see what’s going on. Because it’s not just a matter of feeling good in the present moment. It’s also a matter of trying to understand what’s going on here.

As the Buddha said, we have intentions that arise in the present moment, and if we act on them in ignorance, it’s going to cause suffering. You have to be very clear—when you want to do something—why you want to do it, and what you expect the results are going to be. If there’s anything that would cause harm to yourself or harm to other people, you just learn how not to do it. You give the mind better things to do. Choose the intentions that are actually for your own long-term welfare and happiness—a happiness that doesn’t take anything away from anyone else; a happiness that’s built not only on concentration, but also on discernment.

So that whatever comes up, any painful things come up, they don’t invade your mind, because you’re not opening the door for them to come in. You know they’re there, but you’re not going to let them inside. It’s like knowing there’s a fierce dog outside, but you don’t have to open the door and let it in the house. When you keep things separate like this, that, the Buddha said, is the sign of discernment.

Sometimes we’re told that discernment means seeing the oneness of all things. The Buddha himself never said that. Discernment sees things as separate, because then you can see which things are actually connected, and which ones are not. You can see what causes what; what kind of results are the things you really want, what kind of results are the things you don’t want. When you’re acting from knowledge like this, then you’re really safe. You really can look after yourself with ease.

Think of the Buddha himself. He had found a happiness that was totally deathless, that didn’t require anything from anybody at that point. He was totally light, not a burden on anybody. And because he was not a burden on himself or anyone else, then he had so much more to offer to the world.

All too many people are just concerned with their own burdens. If you talk to them about helping the rest of the world, they just don’t have the strength. But if you can lift the burdens off your own heart, that enables you to be more helpful to the people around you.

So when you meditate like this, when you develop these skills, you’re showing goodwill for yourself, goodwill for others. You’re not a burden on yourself; you’re not a burden on anybody. That’s a sign that you’re really practicing the Dhamma and getting the results that the Buddha wanted us to get.