Symptom Management
January 23, 2024

Close your eyes and try to find some pleasure in the breath. It can offer it to you. It’s simply a matter of listening to the body, listening to your mind right now. What would please the mind to be with? What way of conceiving the body and the breath energy would be helpful right now?

Sometimes we come in to adjust the breath right from the start, and we have to realize that we can’t do it with a heavy hand. When you do something with a heavy hand, whatever you’re doing is heavy. So it has to be light. Sometimes all you have to do is just think, may the breath go there, and see what happens without trying to push it. This way, you learn to listen to what’s actually going on and adjust things so that they really are pleasant to settle down with.

The mind needs this place to rest. We’ve got a lot of work to do. Our defilements are deeply rooted in the mind, and they spread their influence in lots of directions.

They’re like these big vines that spread throughout the orchard. We had a vine one time down near where Than Skip’s hut is at the moment. No matter how much we cut it back, cut it back, it kept growing and growing and growing again—until finally one time we had a large group of visitors and we decided to tackle it. They dug down and found a huge root ball two or three feet across. That was the end of the problem. So you can cut back the plant as much as you like, but you really have to dig up the root if you want to be done with the problem.

What we’re doing when we concentrate is basically symptom management. In psychology they talk about symptom management and then cure. Symptom management is when you basically get the patient to calm down and to be in the right mood to begin looking inside. So here there are periods where you don’t think at all, abd other periods when you have to think.

So give the mind, first, a place to rest so that it’s more in the mood to do the kind of thinking that needs to be done. We’re dealing with our defilements, many of which we identify very strongly with. It’s almost as if we’re cutting ourselves out of our minds, and the mind is not going to be willing to do that unless it has a sense of real peace, so that it can see that these things really are causing problems and not just part of you that has to be expressed.

So. Get the mind to be still. Get the mind to be calm. Rest it up so that it’ll be prepared for the real work that has to be done.