Strength for the Heat

It’s that time of year when the heat becomes a concern, becomes an obsession. The question is how to meditate in the heat. A lot of the answer is common sense. Make sure you get plenty of water and some electrolytes, or at least some salt. Look for a cool spot in the monastery. Some spots are cooler than others. Find a nice shady spot, preferably one where there’s a breeze. If you have some choice in where you’re going to be in the orchard, remember that some sections have the water on. They tend to be cooler than others. Don’t exert yourself too much out in the sun.

The rest of it has to do with the strengths — the Buddha talks about the five strengths — because you need of mind in order to deal with the heat.

First is the conviction that it’s really worth doing the meditation now. As the Buddha said, the way to hell has many different routes, but one of them is laziness. Laziness has lots of excuses. And he gives a list of the excuses: “It’s too cold outside. It’s too hot outside. It’s too early. It’s too late.” You don’t want to give in to those voices. It’s never too hot to meditate. You just have to know how to do it.

You have to realize you don’t know how much more time you have. Maybe this hot day will be your last. So you want to make sure your mind is in good shape. Do what is required to get the mind into concentration.

The coolest mind is the mind that’s still. You’re mindful of your breath, mindful of your body. If focusing on the body seems to aggravate the heat, then think thoughts of goodwill. Let the heat have the body. You’re going to stay with the thoughts of goodwill. And you realize they are separate. The thoughts are one thing; the sensation of the body is something else.

But even if you’re working with the breath, there are parts of the body that are cooler than others. So ask yourself, where are these cooler sensations? They’re there. Focus on those. And think, “Water. Coolness.” Hold that thought in mind. They may not be that much cooler than the other parts of the body, but at least they’re relatively cooler. And the strength of your focus is not going to be aggravating the heat. It’s a cool focus. Try to maintain that.

Here’s where you bring in the strength of your persistence and mindfulness, just remembering where to stay, remembering that whatever the level of concentration, it may not be as strong as you’d like or as pleasurable as you’d like, but you maintain what you’ve got. It’s in the maintaining of what you’ve got that better things happen. So have some conviction in your meditation.

These five strengths don’t operate separately. Ideally, we talk first about conviction, then persistence, then mindfulness, then concentration, then discernment. But they all work together. Have some conviction in your concentration. It may not be all that great, but maintain what you’ve got.

In this case, if you’re going to stay with the breath, stay with the cool sensations of the body. Survey around and around and around those cool sensations. Keep alert, because that’s where the effort is in the meditation. It’s not in sitting long hours or in walking long hours. You can lie down and meditate, as long as you don’t fall asleep. But make your mind active, protecting what you have.

You’ll notice that there are little stirrings here and there in the breath energy in the body. If you allow those stirrings to develop, they’ll turn into thought worlds. So this is where the effort is best focused: on being really sensitive to these little stirrings, little knots in the energy field of the body, and then zapping them, dissolving them. It’s kind of like whack-a-mole, although not as distracting. You’re in one spot in the body, but you’ll notice that these little stirrings can happen anywhere in the body.

If you notice one happening, you go over, deal with it, and come right back to your spot. Like a spider on a web: The spider stays in one spot, but it knows the whole web. Anything that touches the web anywhere, it knows exactly where that sensation is. It goes there, deals with the insect, then goes back. In your case, you’re not killing insects. You’re zapping little knots of energy by dissolving them with good breath.

The important thing is to have the conviction that, yes, it is worth maintaining what you have. The mindfulness is for reminding yourself that you don’t just zone out when things get quiet. You’ve got to be active in protecting what you have, and it’s in the protecting that the effort is best spent, best focused.

As for the heat, this is where your discernment comes in. The heat will do what it has to do. You don’t have to run a commentary on it. You’re not responsible for saying, “Heat is like this.” You’re responsible for finding a place where the mind can find ease. So find your places where you can hide out from the heat, where you don’t have to be dealing with the heat so much. The heat’s going to be there, but you don’t have to make a running commentary on it, because the more you make a running commentary on it, the more intense it gets, the bigger a slice of your awareness it takes up. You want to find parts of your awareness where the heat is not oppressive and you’re not the victim.

This is the way it is when dealing with any pain: It all depends on the commentary that you make on it.

So find the spots in the body that are cool. Stay there if you can. If you can spread them out a little bit to cool down other parts of the body, fine. But learn how to hang out, how to survive.

It’s the same principle as when there’s a storm. You don’t go running out into the storm. You find a safe sheltered spot and wait there for the storm to pass—but you don’t just sit there waiting, waiting, waiting. You tell yourself, “I’ve got work I need to do here.” Don’t let the storm interfere with something that’s more important, which is maintaining your mindfulness, maintaining your alertness, getting some concentration while you’re here.

As for the heat, you’re not responsible for it. You’re responsible for your concentration. Make the distinction. And however long it takes before the heat dispels, you’ve got your good place to stay. You’ve got good things to do inside. And have the conviction that this is really worth doing.

When the Buddha was saying the type of people who go to hell are the ones who say, “It’s too hot. It’s too cold,” he was making fun of them. Do you want the Buddha to make fun of you?

You can use your discernment, you can use your conviction to realize that what you’ve got in terms of your stillness of mind right here is really worthwhile. Maintain that. It may seem small and not as impressive as it has been at other times when you’re meditating. But as I said, don’t destroy what you have. Maintain what you have. Look after what you have. Value what you have, and it’ll grow in value. Have the conviction that it really is worth doing this. After all, it is your mind. They tell us that the climate is going to get hotter and hotter, so this is going to be a good skill to have. You can be with the heat but not be oppressed by the heat.

It’s the same as with any pain. Pain can be there in the body, but you don’t allow it to invade your mind and remain. The heat may be in the body, and you’re aware of it, but it’s not invading the mind.

Invading the mind is when the mind gets obsessed with it. Remaining is when it keeps on obsessing. Here we want you to be more obsessed with the cool breath energy you can maintain, that you can discover and work on. It may seem small, but big things grow from small things.

Think of the Buddha on the night of his awakening. What was he focused on? He was focused on his breath. He wasn’t focused on the world as a whole. He did get visions of the world as a whole, but to get to those visions he first had to make his mind stay right here in the present moment. It was him alone out in the forest, but he stuck with it.

And while it may seem like quite a stretch to compare ourselves with the Buddha, he meant to show us that these are things that we as human beings can do: We can deal with the cold. We can deal with the heat. We can maintain a sense of well-being inside. That’s the important thing. Just keep reminding yourself of the goodness you have right here where you can get the mind really still and absorbed in the stillness. Even if it’s not fully absorbed, the fact that you maintain what you’ve got: That’s how absorption happens—by working with what you’ve got, sticking with what you’ve got, maintaining what you’ve got. Even if it seems small in the beginning, you’re not going to gain anything by throwing it away.

So there are good lessons to learn from the heat as you develop the strength to stay with the breath, stay with your meditation object. Don’t add to the heat. Don’t obsess about the heat. Let it be in the background. You’ve got work to do, good work to do, so don’t let the heat get in the way. Maintain your conviction that this is worth doing. Stick with it. Maintain what you’ve got. Learn to keep the right things in mind. The mind will settle down.

Underlying all this, of course, is discernment. As the Buddha said, “Heedfulness is what underlies all these strengths”: the realization that there are dangers out there if you let your mind obsess about the wrong things, but you can escape those dangers by obsessing about the right things. Make sure you’re clear about your responsibilities. You’re not responsible for the heat. The heat can do its own thing. You’re responsible for where your mind stays. Make sure you know the difference.