Mind the Gap

When you make up your mind to stay with the breath, one of the first things you notice is how often it disobeys. It starts wandering off someplace else. You can ask yourself, what happened? There was a lapse of mindfulness. Just a little gap. But you can lose a lot of things in a little gap.

It’s like walking off a platform into a subway and all of a sudden, if there’s a hole in your pocket, all your money goes out into the little gap between the subway and the platform. So be very careful. There will be these gaps, but you have to learn how to bridge them. Learn how to bore through them without losing anything.

One of the ways, of course, is to try to make the breath as interesting as possible. Here it is, the energy that keeps you alive, and it’s coursing through the body all the time. When the Buddha talks about breath, he’s not talking about the air coming in and out through the nose. It’s not a tactile sensation. It’s the property of the body itself.

So where do you feel it? If you get really sensitive, can you feel it in more parts of the body? It’s like listening to music far away. If you want to hear the details of the music, you have to make yourself very, very quiet. To understand the subtleties of the breath, to sense the subtleties of the breath, you have to get yourself quiet, too.

Where is the breath in your legs right now? Where is it in your feet and toes? Where is it in your arms? Your fingers? Make a survey all around.

This is where you learn to depend on yourself. As the Buddha said, the self has to be its own mainstay—because who else can be your mainstay? You have to make yourself reliable. If you can’t rely on yourself, who are you going to rely on?

So you’ve got to develop those good qualities inside. They start out with something simple like this: You wander off; you come right back. Wander off, come right back. It may get a little tedious after a while, and you ask yourself which is more tedious, the wandering off or the coming back? It’s the wandering off. You’ve been doing that for a long, long time. Now is the time to learn some new skills: skills of mindfulness, skills of alertness, skills of ardency—really trying to do this well.

When you learn that you can depend on yourself in this way, you become a lot more dependable in other ways as well. You can use this mindfulness, you can use this alertness throughout the day. This is how you make yourself safe. Because that’s what a mainstay is for: someone to provide protection.

So. Learn how to provide protection for yourself. Whatever goodness you do, that’s part of making yourself a reliable person. So it’s not just the meditation, it’s also the generosity, the virtue—all the things the Buddha said lead to your long-term welfare and happiness. Those are the things that protect you. From what? Well, from your own bad impulses.

So the problem is inside, but the solution lies inside as well. Look for it. It’s there.