New Year’s Day

Close your eyes and watch your breath all the way in, all the way out. Try long breathing to begin with, to energize the body. And if long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can change. Try to see what rhythm of breath feels best for you right now. And then stay there. It’s in the staying that you make a difference. If you think about the breath, you can think about other things—wander around—come back to the breath a little bit, wander around some more, it doesn’t really change anything in the mind. You’re trying to develop good qualities in the mind.

We’re beginning the new year right now. It’s good to think about what’s going to be of value that you’re going to do in the course of the year. Working on your mind is probably number one priority, because all the things of the world—material gain, status, praise, physical pleasures—leave you very easily. And they always come with their opposite. Wherever there’s material gain, there’s going to be loss. Wherever there’s status, there’s loss of status. Wherever there’s praise, there’s criticism. Wherever there’s sensual pleasure, there’s pain. These things trade places back and forth. If you’re trying to find your happiness in the desirable side, you’re going to meet up with the undesirable side as well.

It’s like a shadow. Wherever you go, your shadow goes with you. You can’t tell your shadow to go away. Wherever you go, it follows you. So the bad side of the world follows the good side. Then the good side comes back and follows the bad side. So where are you going to find anything of real value, or worth, or substance? Well, in your own mind. But the mind needs to be trained. If the mind isn’t trained, it just follows around with whatever. Whatever strikes its fancy, it just goes right there. If the mind is trained, though, we can tell it to go someplace and stay—and it stays. Then you gain some control over your happiness.

As we enter the new year, it’s good to think about what you need to do to train the mind. The Buddha offers generosity, virtue, meditation as the three main ways of training your mind. In the course of training your mind, you find happiness, because generosity is happy for you and it’s happy for the people you give the gifts to. Being virtuous is happy for you and happy for the people who are not oppressed by your behavior. And meditating is happy for you because you’re getting some control over your greed, aversion, and delusion. And your greed, aversion, and delusion don’t bother anybody else.

So this is the kind of happiness that’s good all around. And it’s training the mind to look for happiness in the long term. That, the Buddha said, is the beginning of wisdom, when you ask yourself: “What, when I do it, would lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?”—realizing that your happiness depends on your actions and long term is better than short term—and long term is possible.

So you have to look to your actions. Where do your actions come from? They come from the mind. So the mind has to be trained so that it knows what’s going on inside. When an impulse comes to do something, you want to know why you want to do it, what your purpose is. All too many times, people ask, “Well why did you that?” and you have to stop and think. You weren’t thinking about it. You were acting on impulse. If that’s the way you live your life, it’s like giving the keys of your car to a crazy person. The crazy person has no sense of where he wants to go. He just gets in the car and drives. And he ends up running into things. You don’t want to run into things in your life. You want to know where you’re going and why you’re going. And for that, you have to train the mind.

So. Give the mind some time every day, every day. You can brush your teeth every day. You can wash your face every day. Well, clean your mind every day as well. In that way, 365 days of the new year, when you do that every day, it’ll be a good year. As the Buddha said, days are auspicious not because of the stars, not because of the date. They’re auspicious because of the good things you do. So you can make the whole year an auspicious year by choosing every day to train your mind well.