Free to Choose
October 18, 2023

As you’re sitting here, you have some freedom of choice. You can choose to stay with the breath, or you can choose to wander around. You ask yourself, which would be better for you? If we didn’t have this ability to choose, the Buddha wouldn’t have bothered to teach. He wasn’t the sort of person to go out and pick fights with other people, but there are a couple of times in the Canon where he would seek people out if they were teaching seriously wrong view and argue with them.

One of the serious wrong views was that everything you experience right now is the result of past actions. In other words, it’s set in stone that this will happen, that will happen, and you can’t do anything about it. He said if you teach people that, you leave them unprotected because urges come up, ideas come up, feelings come up in the mind, and it’s so easy just to give into them, especially when they come on strong. Then, when you give into them, what happens? You suffer. And if you’re told that you can’t make any changes, that you have to accept these things, then you’re left defenseless. “Bewildered” as the Buddha put it—in other words, not knowing what to do to put an end to suffering because there’s no opportunity to make any changes to anything.

So it’s important that you realize you do have choices right now. Make the most of them. You can choose to suffer or not to suffer, and that requires, of course, that you understand the causes of suffering and learn how to observe them in your mind.

This is what mindfulness is for—you keep in mind that there are skillful actions and unskillful actions. Then you’re alert to see what you’re doing. If you see that you’re doing something that’s not going to be skillful, then you can change, you can stop yourself. You can be ardent in doing something better.

So as you’re sitting here, keep making the choice to stay with the breath, stay with the breath, and then do your best to reinforce that choice by making the breath as comfortable and as interesting as possible. You might ask what’s interesting about the breath—it’s just in and out, in and out. Well, the way you breathe has a huge impact on the rest of the body, and through the body, it has an impact on the mind. You can change the way you breathe, try different ways of breathing. You can have different ways of perceiving the breath, thinking of it as energy, not so much air coming in and out of the lungs but energy flowing through the body. And the body is open to receive this energy and let the energy out as feels best.

See what that does to your experience of the present moment. You can change the present moment by your choices right now. Just learn how to explore that possibility and see how you can make the most out of it.