Take Care of Your Big Sister

Be quiet for a moment and then notice, when you breath in, where you feel the breathing. When you breathe out, where do you feel it? Focus your attention there. And try different ways of breathing to see what kind of breathing feels best for the body right now. You can try long breathing, short breathing, fast, slow, heavy, light, deep, or shallow. Get to know the breath. It’s been with you all this time, but for the most part you haven’t paid much attention to it. So. Pay some attention.

Ajaan Fuang said it’s like an older sister who’s been looking after us ever since we were born, but we haven’t paid much attention to the older sister. Now’s the time to give her a chance, see what she can do for you. Because the breath, when you pay attention to it, you find has more than just “in-and-out.” There are the different qualities of the breathing, different ways of the breathing, different parts of the body that can get involved or not get involved in the breathing. Once you’ve found a spot that feels good, then think of the breath energy spreading from that spot so that the whole body breathes together, breathing in, breathing out.

In other words, look after your sister. She’s taken care of you all this time. If you take care of her, she’ll do more for you. So give her time, give her attention. As the Buddha said, if you want to know somebody, you have to spend time with that person, and you have to pay a lot of attention. You have to see them in times of difficulty, see them in times when in might be tempting for them to break the precepts but they don’t. That’s when you learn about them. You find out who you can trust and who you can’t trust by paying careful attention and giving time.

So give time to the breath. This is not one of those exercises where you can do it for twenty minutes and then forget about for the rest of the day. You try to be with the breath all the time. And you learn a lot of things about the mind, how the mind, when it drops the breath, goes running after…whatever. It’s one way of learning what things the mind does run after. We’re not that aware of our own minds. They go all kinds of places. If you ask yourself, “In the past five minutes, where did my mind go?” you probably wouldn’t be able to answer. You forget very quickly. You jump from one topic to another like a person hopping trains. You find yourself out in the middle of Saskatchewan, and you have no idea how you got there. And it wasn’t a very direct route, either. You went by Florida. You went down by Colombia. The mind can wander all over the place. If we were to create a map of it, it would be like a bird’s nest, all very tangled. Here it is, our own mind, and we don’t really know it.

So. Take some time to know your breath; get to know your mind. Try to put the two of them together, and you’ll learn a lot about both.