All-around Practice

The word meditate in Pali is bhavana. It means to develop, and you can develop good qualities all the time, not just while you’re sitting here with your eyes closed. In fact, it’s important, if you want your practice to be balanced and complete, that you think of the opportunities to develop the mind as you’re with other people, doing other jobs, doing other things. You take it as an opportunity to develop good qualities in the mind: Sometimes it’s patience; sometimes it’s endurance; sometimes it’s goodwill. All the perfections can be developed, and in that way your practice is balanced.

The Buddha didn’t just sit and meditate with his eyes closed. You look at the stories of his past lives, and you can see that he was engaged in many activities, developed many skills, helped many people. That’s how his insights were solidly based—and particularly with the quality of virtue. You want your virtue to be solid because basically you’re being honest with yourself. You notice when you’re causing harm and you stop. You notice when you’re doing something that’s unskillful and you stop. That way you put some brakes on the mind.

When you’re sitting and meditating, there are times when insights come, and they may not be genuine insights. You have to test them. If you just run with whatever goes into your mind, it’s like a car without any brakes. It can run for a while and not be in any danger, but as soon as any danger comes up, you have no protection. So you want to make sure that you have brakes on your mind, brakes on your activities—doing the things you know are good, avoiding things you know are bad. That counts as meditation as well. That counts as developing the mind as well. In that way, the heart and the mind both get developed, and the strengths they develop are complete.

Otherwise, it’s like someone who exercises one muscle but doesn’t exercise any other muscles. That one muscle is going to pull everything else out of balance. So you want to make sure that everything good in the mind is balanced and complete. And that’s when you’re safe.