Your Changeable Mind

Close your eyes and watch the breath—although, it’s less watching the breath than feeling the breath. When you breathe in, where do you feel it? Where does the energy move in the body? Focus there. Then notice if the way you’re breathing feels comfortable. You can try longer breathing, shorter, faster, slower, heavier, lighter, deeper, or more shallow. Try to find what rhythm of breathing, what texture of breathing, feels good for the body right now. When you’ve found something good, stick with it until it changes and it’s not so good anymore, in which case you may want to make some more adjustments. But the important thing is you stay with the breath.

We live in a very changeable world. Change is happening very fast. And we have a very changeable mind. Now, that can be good or bad. If you’ve been behaving in unskillful ways, then you can change your ways. As the Buddha said, that’s why he taught: If people couldn’t change their ways, there wouldn’t have been any purpose in teaching. But he points out how some ways we act lead to suffering, and other ways we act lead to the end of suffering—and we have the choice. If we’ve been going down the wrong path, we can switch paths.

But once you get on the right path, you don’t want to change. You want to hold on. Here you have to watch out for the fact that the mind is so changeable. The Buddha says there’s nothing else in the world that’s nearly as quick to change. He was a master of similes, but he couldn’t find any simile for how fast your mind changes. Even the twinkling of an eye is too slow. So you have to watch out.

This is why we have to be heedful. Once you’ve found something good, you hold on to it. People may say, “Let go, let go,” but you have to figure out when to let go and when not to let go. If letting go of something takes you back to your old unskillful ways, then hold on to that.

One of the Buddha’s images for the path of practice is a raft you’re taking across the river, and it’s a dangerous river. If you get swept off the raft, you’re going to get swept downstream to whirlpools, rapids, waterfalls, and dangerous animals. So you want to hold on to your raft until you get over to the other side. Then you can let it go. But in the meantime, hold on.

When you know something is good, something is skillful, maintain that attitude. As the Buddha said, we can do a lot of good in our lives, but when the time comes to die, sometimes people change their attitudes. They adopt wrong view. They repudiate all the good they’ve done. The good they’ve done is not going to go away—it’ll be there—but they’re not going to experience its good results for a while, because the state of the mind has fallen.

On the other hand, if you’ve been doing unskillful things but you change your mind—maintaining goodwill, maintaining right view—all the way to the end of your life, okay, then that takes you to a good place in spite of your bad karma.

So you want to make sure what kind of change is good and what kind of change is bad. The Buddha didn’t say that all change is good or bad. You have to be selective. If you’ve found something really good, hold on tight, because that will take you to where you really want to go.