Wash Your Mind
November 15, 2023

Close your eyes. Take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing in the body. Pay attention there. And then ask yourself if long breathing feels good. If it does, keep it up. If it doesn’t feel good, you can change. Try shorter breathing, more shallow. Heavier, lighter. Faster, slower. Try to find what rhythm and texture of breathing feels good for you right now.

When we meditate, we’re developing good qualities in the mind. That’s what the word for meditation in Pali, bhavana, means: to develop. As you stay with the breath, you have to keep reminding yourself, because the mind does have a tendency to wander off. In fact, that’s how it spends most of its time—wandering around, inspecting this thought here, that thought there. Traveling here, traveling there. Past, future. It’s used to being on the move. Now you’re trying to get it to stay. So it requires that you be mindful: You remember to stay here.

And you’re alert to watch what’s actually happening—what the mind is doing. If it does wander off, you’re ardent in bringing it back. If your mind wanders off again, you bring it back again. Each time it comes back, try to reward yourself with a breath that feels especially good. The meditation isn’t all work. It’s actually a process of developing a sense of well-being through mindfulness, alertness, and ardency—a sense of well-being inside that makes you much less likely to run after things outside that you know it shouldn’t be running after.

When the mind feels weak, when it doesn’t feel nourished, it just goes for anything. But when you can provide a sense of well-being right here, then it’s much less likely to go.

So, focus on being comfortable with your breath, adjusting the breath as you like. And you’ll find that you’re developing good qualities in mind—qualities you can use for any purpose, not just for the meditation. Any task you take on in life, you have to be mindful to keep in mind what you’re doing it for and what the best ways are of doing it; alert to make sure you are doing it the best ways; and then if you find that you aren’t, you’re ardent in trying to correct your actions.

Any activity you bring these qualities to is going to be more and more of a skill. And the more skills that you have in life, the more you’re able to deal with things that otherwise would knock you off when greed comes, when aversion comes, when delusion comes. Ordinarily, we get knocked off by these things. We get pushed under their power. But when you’re more mindful, alert, and ardent, you can fight them off. And when you fight these things off, it’s good not only for you, but also for the people around you.

So it’s good to meditate every day, every day. Give the mind a chance to look after itself instead of running around after things outside, getting knocked around by things outside. Have it take care of itself. As the Buddha said, this is the sign of a wise person, realizing that if you really want to be happy, you have to take care of the mind, train the mind. So do this every day. We can brush our teeth every day; we can wash our face every day. We should be able to wash our minds every day as well, because they’re a lot more valuable.