Say No

Close your eyes. Take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths. Where do you feel the breathing in the body right now? Focus your attention there. And if long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can change. Make it shorter, more shallow, heavier, lighter, faster, slower. Experiment for a while to see what kind of breathing feels best. When you find a rhythm that feels good, stick with it for a while. If the mind wanders off, bring it right back. Wanders off again? Bring it back again.

If you really want to learn about your mind, you have to say No to it. Give it something good to do. It’s comfortable to be with the breath; it’s easeful. But the mind finds that it wants to move on. Well, why? The best way to know why is to say No. Bring it back. Bring it back. It might give you reasons for why it wants to wander around. But don’t believe the first set of reasons it gives you. Just keep reminding yourself, you’re here to develop a new skill.

It’s like a muscle in the body that you haven’t exercised. You want to go back to your old patterns, but if you want to keep the body balanced and strong, everything has to be exercised properly. So this is a muscle of your mind that hasn’t been exercised, which means your mind is going to be lopsided. You want to be able to catch yourself when you see, “Okay, this is not where I want to go”—and come back. You try to perfect that skill.

As the Buddha said, one of the purposes of the meditation is to think the thoughts you want to think and not think the thoughts you don’t want to think.

But first you’ve got to get exercise in how not to think thoughts, whatever thought it may be, no matter how interesting or important or pleasant it may seem. You’ve got work to do. Your mind needs more mindfulness, the ability to keep something in mind. It needs more alertness to know what’s going on inside. And this is how you develop those two qualities.

Remember to stay here, and if you catch yourself wandering off, you bring in a third quality, which is called ardency. In other words, you try to do this well. You realize that this is for the sake of your own happiness, to get the mind well trained—to be trained all around. So this particular aspect of the mind hasn’t been exercised? Well, exercise it so that it can get strong, too. Get quicker and quicker at bringing the mind back. You see more and more the different steps by which the mind can fool itself into thinking something that it doesn’t really mean to think.

But the idea comes in, and part of the mind says, “Yeah, let’s go with that.” Well, you want to understand why, and the best way to understand why is to say No. It’s going to complain, but you don’t give in to its complaints. This is how you really come to understand the mind, by gaining some control over it. We’re not a control freak, we’re a control master. Do it well, and the mind will reward you. It’s like an animal that you’ve trained. It’s so much more useful to have one around the house than one who hasn’t been trained.

So. Train your mind well. Exercise it well. Exercise it all around, and it will be able to do a lot of good things for you.