Your Own Mainstay
October 09, 2023

Close your eyes and be sensitive to your breath. Take some good long, deep, in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing in the body. Focus your attention on the spot where it’s most prominent and where it’s easiest to stay focused. And then ask yourself: Is that kind of breathing comfortable? If it’s not, you can change. Trying shorter, faster, slower, heavier, lighter, more shallow. See what the body needs right now.

There’s so much you can do for the body just by the way you breathe. It’s one of those aspects of the body that we don’t pay much attention to. As a result, we don’t get the full benefit from it. But the breath is the element that brings the other elements in the body into balance. It can be used to strengthen the body when it needs strength, relax it when it needs to relax. It’s simply a matter of your noticing what works in what way.

You have to depend on your own powers of observation. The texts give some general principles, Ajaan Lee gives some general principles, but you have to figure out how to apply those principles and what they mean in your context of your own experience of the body, right here, right now.

So take some time. And be observant. This way you learn to depend on yourself. The Buddha says, “Attāhi attano nātho.” The self is its own mainstay. That’s something to aim for, because when we’re born, we can’t depend on ourselves much at all. We depend on our parents. After a while we find there are areas where we can’t depend on our parents. So we look around for somebody else. But as we grow older, we actually have more and more potentials inside—and the opportunity to learn about those potentials and to use them to our advantage.

So take some time. Explore the sensation of the body from within, in the context of breath. Wherever there’s any sense of the body at all, there’s going to be breath energy of some kind there, either subtle or blatant. Open your mind to the possibility that the subtle energies can have a good effect just like the blatant ones. And that they are energy.

Sometimes we think of the body as being just a solid lump, and we’re trying to force the breath into it. That gets uncomfortable. Instead, think of the body as being an energy field, and you’re bringing in more energy to mingle with the energy already there and then to go out. When it’s energy breathing energy, then a lot of the inner barriers in the body breakdown. The barriers that we build up around pains in the body—the areas that we build up when the muscles are sore, overworked—we can breathe right through them.

And as the whole body is breathing together, it develops greater and greater strength. It becomes a better and better foundation for getting the mind to settle down so that it can observe itself. After all, the things you’re going to need to observe in your mind are a lot more subtle than the breath. So get some practice with the breath, right here, right now, and the more you know the breath, then the more you’re going to know your mind. And the more you know the mind, the more you’re going to be able to figure out where you’re causing yourself unnecessary suffering and how you can stop.

So it all starts right here: paying full attention right here. We may have a sense of where this is going to go, but we don’t focus on where it’s going to go right now. Focus where you are and what you’re doing. That’s how you learn.