In Alignment

Close your eyes and watch your breath. Feel the breath all the way in, all the way out. Where do you feel it? Focus your attention there and then ask yourself if long breathing feels comfortable. If it does, keep it up. If not, you can change—make it more shallow; make it shorter. Heavier, lighter. Faster, slower. Experiment for a while to see what kind of breathing the mind feels comfortable with—because you’re trying to bring the mind together with the body.

Most of the time, the mind doesn’t stay here, and yet the body should be its home. The mind is like a child who runs into the house, grabs a sandwich, and then goes running off someplace else. Or like an owner of a house who doesn’t stay there very much and, as a result, both sides suffer. The owner of the house doesn’t have a good place to take shelter, and the house doesn’t have anyone to look after it.

But if you stay here, bringing the body and the mind into alignment, bringing them into harmony, they help each other, as with the house. When the owner’s there, he can see if a pipe is broken; mice have gotten in; or there’s dry rot in some of the walls. When you see these things, you can catch them quickly before they do a lot of damage. As for the house, it provides shelter. So when it rains, when the sun is too hot, when the wind is too cold, you have a good, safe place to stay.

The same principle applies with the mind and the body. While you’re here breathing in, breathing out, you can notice if there are patterns of tension in different parts of the body. Those correspond to areas where the energy is not flowing well in the body, which may ultimately lead to some disease. So if you open things up, allow the breath to flow, you’re looking after the body.

At the same time, you have a safe place to stay. Otherwise you go wandering into thoughts that can lead you to—who knows where they’re going to lead you.

Or like a person standing at the side of the road. Someone drives up in a car says, “Hop in.” You hop in, without asking, “Who are you? Where are you going?” The mind just goes with whatever thought comes in. If we lived our lives like that, we’d be dead by now. We’re lucky we’re still around.

You want to put yourself in a good position so you’re not so tempted to go running off with any thought. It’s like having an air-conditioned house at the side of the road. The sun may be hot outside, but you’re in your air-conditioned house. The person drives up in the car, and you have the luxury of asking, “Who are you? Where are you going?” You’ve got your comfort here inside, so the mind is a lot less likely to go after thoughts that it knows are unskillful. We know that greed is bad, anger is bad; delusion is bad, and yet we fall for them again, and again, and again, because we don’t see that we have anything better.

So here we’re creating something better: harmony with the body, harmony in the mind—the two of them working together.

This principle, of course, applies everywhere, both inside and out. The more harmony there is, the more you can accomplish. So you learn how to put up with little discomforts here and there, because you know you can work with them, especially when you have the breath as your tool.

The breath is not just the air coming in and out through the nose. It’s the flow of energy in the body. And that’s something that can be good for the whole body—if you allow it to be good, if you allow it to spread around. That way, when there are pains here and pains there, you can actually do something about them.

When you realize you have these tools to help you make a change here in the present moment, it’s a lot easier to make the adjustments that are needed for harmony, so that the body is in alignment with the mind; the mind’s in alignment with the body. Working together like this, they can accomplish a lot.