Light & Open

Ajaan Lee would say, when you’re sitting in a sala like this with other people, create the perception in your mind that you’re sitting outside with nobody else around. The air is clear. The sky is open. The sun is not too warm, not too cold. In other words, create in your mind the ideal conditions that allow your sense of the breath to open up—so that you’re breathing in through all your pores. This way, when excess energy comes up in the body, it has a place to disperse.

They talk about Kundalini experience as sometimes being very disorienting for some people, and it’s because there are blockages. One blockage is removed, and that energy runs into another blockage, it’s like having a pipe that’s clogged: If you unclog it, then it moves further down the pipe, but it runs into another clog. To prevent that, try to keep things clear and open all throughout the body as much as you can.

When anything comes up that’s disturbing in terms of the energy in the body, think of it dispersing. It has plenty of places to go. The sense we have that it’s pressing against something, that’s not breath. That’s the blood—blood pressing against the solidity of the walls of the vessels. You want to think they, too, are porous. After all, they’re made out of atoms, and there’s a lot of space in atoms.

So have a broad sense of spaciousness as you sit here. It makes it much more pleasant to be right here. And then you can see what’s going on.

One of the things you’ll see going on is the mind is talking to itself. What we’re trying to do is train that habit of the mind to comment on this, comment on that, to be a useful habit. As the Buddha said, you can turn it into one of the factors of jhana.

But for most of us it’s very un-jhana: talking about this, that, and the other thing. Sometimes we can get ourselves all worked up over very little. That kind of speech is useless. As is the inner critic that’s very dismissive, that doesn’t give you any chance to do anything at all. You’ve got to train your critic. In other words, be critical of your critic, saying that we all want to have happiness in here. So if the critic can be helpful, figure out new ways of focusing on the breath, new ways of directing your mind where it should be going, then that’s good. You don’t want to totally erase your inner critic because then you just accept everything, and that doesn’t get you anywhere. Just leaves you right where you were to begin with.

Like the therapist I knew one time whose job was in a walk-in clinic in a part of Vancouver where there were a lot of druggies. He found that the druggies wouldn’t come in for the help unless he gave them encouraging pep talks, teach them to be more accepting of themselves. So they accepted the fact that they were druggies, which didn’t help anything at all.

So you need an inner critic, but your inner critic needs to be trained.

You need training in how to breathe, training in how to picture things to yourself in your mind, training in how to talk to yourself: all these different forms of saṅkhāra. And as you’re meditating, you have lots of time to train them.

Because that’s what the teaching is all about. It’s a training. It’s not just a body of knowledge to discuss and argue about. The Buddha’s teachings are there to give you advice—how to do this, how to do that, in order to find true happiness—but it requires that you train all the different members of your mind. There may be a lot of them, but they’re not infinite. The more they’re trained, then the more they work together, so that there’s harmony in the body, harmony in the mind.