Stay on Course

Close your eyes and pay attention to your breath. Know when it’s coming in; know when it’s going out. Notice where you feel the process of breathing in the body. When the Buddha talks about breath, he’s not talking about just the air coming in and out through the nose. He’s talking about the flow of energy throughout the entire body that allows the air to come in and go out. You can feel that anywhere in the body. So wherever it’s clearest, focus your attention there.

Then ask yourself if the breath is comfortable. If it is, keep it up. If it’s not, you can change the rhythm. Make it shorter, faster, slower, heavier, lighter, deeper, more shallow. Find a rhythm that feels best for the body right now. Then try to stick with it.

This is an important part of the meditation. You can focus on the breath but then run off to something else, and it doesn’t make any difference at all. But if you stay with it, you’re developing good qualities in the mind. You’re making up your mind to do something good, and then you stick with it.

This is called aiming the mind in the right direction. The problem is that the mind is so quick to change direction. Even the Buddha, who was a master of similes and analogies, said there was no adequate simile or analogy to illustrate how fast the mind can be when it changes direction.

So set it in a good direction. Take advantage of the fact that it can change, if you’re not in a good direction right now. When it’s in a good direction, try to keep it there. This means that you have to keep remembering what your good direction is. This is why we try to develop mindfulness.

You start out with the precepts. You decide that you’re going to avoid behavior that’s harmful. Thinking in the abstract, it sounds good. But then you suddenly find yourself in the midst of saying something or doing something that goes against the precepts. You’ve got to remind yourself that you made a vow to yourself, you made a promise to yourself to stick with the precepts. What’s pulling you away? Whatever it is, it’s not worth it. You have to have that attitude—that your desire for a true happiness, a long-lasting happiness, is more important than your desire for a quick fix.

In this way, when you get good at maintaining the precepts, it helps you as you try to stay concentrated on the breath. Again, you have to keep your principle in mind. That’s what mindfulness is all about.

Sometimes we’re told that mindfulness means just being aware of whatever comes up—not judging it, just accepting it. But the Buddha never said that. For him, mindfulness is a quality of the memory. You try to remember the good things in the past that got good results. You remember the things in the past that got bad results so that when you’re confronted with a situation like that again, you know what to do. You’ve learned your lessons. All too often, we learn our lesson and then we forget. It’s as if we never learned it at all. If you want your lessons to have value, you have to be able to remember them.

This is why the Buddha said mindfulness is essential. It’s your guardian—that, together with alertness, the ability to notice what you’re actually doing. You develop these two qualities to keep the mind on course. When you see it’s about to change direction, you remind yourself: “What do you want? Do you want just a quick fix, or do you want true happiness?” Sometimes true happiness requires that you make sacrifices, that you have some endurance, that you have some self-control—all of which are good qualities to develop.

Years back, I was giving a Dhamma talk and I mentioned the word “dignity.” After the talk, a Russian woman in the group came up. She said she’d been in America for ten years, and she’d never heard anyone use the word “dignity” before. That’s a scary thought. It’s a word we all know. But if we don’t use it anymore, it means it doesn’t have much meaning.

We’ve got to give some dignity to our lives. We’re not going to go for the quick fix. Otherwise we’re like fish that go for the bait—and then we get stuck on the hook. You want to make sure that what you do, say, and think is for long-term welfare and happiness. Keep that in mind. And keep the importance of that in mind. In that way, you can stay on course, keeping the mind headed in the right direction.