Restraint
November 26, 2023

Close your eyes and take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths. Ask yourself, “Where do you feel the breathing in the body?” Focus your attention there. It can be any part of the body. Watch it for a while to get a sense of whether long breathing feels good. If it doesn’t, you can change. If it does, you can keep it up. You can try different kinds of breathing—long, short; fast, slow; heavy, light. Try to see what feels best for the body right now, because you want the mind to settle down in the present moment so that it can watch itself. And a good way to keep it in the present moment—and not go wandering off after other things—is to make the breath comfortable.

And to make it interesting. Think of the breath going to different parts of the body. If you know you have a chronic illness, think of the breath going to the parts of the body that have that illness. Give them some energy.

And then stay right here. If the mind wants to wander off, you have to say No.

Part of meditation is developing mindfulness, which is your inner teacher reminding you of what you should be doing. Then there’s alertness to watch and make sure that you’re actually doing it. Then you’re ardent to try your best. These three qualities—mindfulness, alertness, ardency in doing your best—are necessary for any task. And they’re particularly necessary for the task of training your mind, because the mind is the most important factor in life. And if it’s not trained, it can create a lot of trouble.

So you need a teacher inside. You want to practice this quality of looking at your actions and reminding yourself that certain actions tend to lead to suffering. So why do them? There are basically four types of action. Things that you like to do that lead to long-term happiness. Things you don’t like to do that lead to long-term pain. Those two are no brainers. The difficult ones are the things you like to do, but they lead to long-term suffering; and things you don’t like to do but will lead to long-term happiness. This is where you need your inner teacher to keep reminding you: You want to go for the long-term.

This is why meditation is not the only thing the Buddha taught. He also taught virtue and he taught sense restraint. Virtue is basically the precepts we took just now: No killing. No stealing. No illicit sex. No lying. No taking intoxicants. You know these activities are going to cause trouble, both for yourself and for other people around you, so why engage in them? Think about the long-term harm that can be done when you break the precepts.

But the impulse to break them: Where does that come from? It comes from the way you look and listen, engage with your senses. If you’re used to looking for things that will excite your lust, of course, then you’re going to start acting on your lust. If you look or listen for things that are going to incite your anger, you’re going to start acting on your anger. So you’ve got to back up a bit and ask, “When I’m looking at something, who’s doing the looking? Is my discernment doing the looking, or is my greed doing the looking? My lust? My anger?” If you find that these defilements are taking over, then you’ve got to change the balance of power inside. Keep reminding yourself, “If I keep looking in this way, or listening in this way, what is it going to do to my mind? It’s going to have a bad effect. So why engage in it?”

Think of your mind as being like a house with doors and windows that you can open and close. All too often we leave everything wide open. It’s as if our house was a bus station. Everybody can come in; everybody can go out. People come in and sometimes they do strange things in the dark corners. In other words, your greed lets something into the house and then keeps it there. Then greed festers inside your house. Anger brings something in—you keep that there, too. That begins to fester. Then these things start going out in your thoughts, your words, and your deeds.

So learn to open and close your doors properly. If you see that you’re looking at something through anger, learn how to look at it from another perspective. The Buddha’s not saying not to look or listen to things. Just change your reasons. If you can change your reasons, then just the simple fact that you’re looking at the world and listening to the world becomes part of the training.

This is where your inner teacher comes in, to remind you that everything you do is going to have consequences. So you want to make sure that you don’t create the causes for actions that will want to go out and cause harm.

So turn your bus station back into a house. Train the teacher inside so that the teacher will remind you, okay, these are things you should do, and you benefit from them. There are other things that you do when you’re going to harm yourself and harm others. Keep that in mind. Then you can go through the world safely. The world may do things to you, but that’s not nearly as important as the things you do. Your actions are the things that shape your life more than anything else. The media tell us that the important things in the world are things other people are doing someplace else. But the Buddha says Mo. The important things are what you’re doing right here, right now. Make sure you’re careful about what you’re doing.

When you have that voice inside, then you have an inner teacher you can trust. You can go wherever you want and you’re safe.