Developing Inner Resources
January 02, 2013

When you settle down with the breath right here, it’s like creating a home for the mind: a place where you can stay in comfort, you can rest, you can gather your strength, you can be protected from things outside.

If the mind doesn’t have a good solid foundation like this and you go out to talk to people, you hear and see and experience a lot of things that can be pretty negative. It’s very easy for the mind to go get shaken up because of that.

But if you have a good foundation here, you can hear these things and see these things and not be shaken by them at all. What people say is what people say. What people do is what people do. But it doesn’t have to come into your mind and create problems there. You’re aware of these things and you can see clearly when you need to say something, when you don’t need to say something, but you’re not feeling threatened.

And that’s an important part of meditation: You have this sense of safety inside, that the happiness of the mind doesn’t need to depend on things outside. It’s got its own internal resources that you’ve developed. And when these resources are well developed, it really does provide a sense of well-being.

That way, when things outside go up, the mind doesn’t have to go up with them, and when they go down, you don’t have to go down. The mind can be on an even keel. You’re more reliable, to yourself and for the people around you.

So it’s not just a sense of safety in the sense that you’re not a victim of things outside. You’re also safe from your own impulses to do something unskillful. You can see for yourself that an action is going to lead to harm and you can say No, because you’re coming from a position of strength.

This is why we say that the meditation is like a home for the mind, because this is where you gather your strength. When the mind needs to rest, it can rest here. When it needs to do work, you can do work right here.

You can also dig down inside and discover that there’s gold under your house. You can bring it out and you can use it.

That’s why this is an important skill to develop. As I said last night, it’s part of our education so that we can become complete human beings, safe both inside and out.