Momentum Through Restraint

For a lot of us, meditation is a start-stop, start-stop process. We do a little bit and then we stop. A little bit more and then we stop. That’s no way to develop momentum. So try to stick with it as long as you can. Of course, when you’re up and around, the rules are a little bit different from what they are when you’re sitting here with your eyes closed.

When you’re up and around, the rules have to do with what’s called restraint. When you look at something, you have to ask yourself: “Why am I looking?” When you listen, “Why am I listening?” When you’re looking at the news, why are you looking at that particular news story? What are you getting out of it? What’s your motivation? A lot of times our motivation has to do with greed, lust, or anger. If you act on those mental qualities, you’re strengthening them, which makes it harder to deal with them when you sit down and close your eyes again.

If you have good reason to look or listen, there’s no problem at all. As the Buddha said, he’s not asking you to weigh yourself down with pain or to restrict you unnecessarily—simply have a sense of what’s appropriate and what the effect is going to be on your mind. Usually when we’re looking for pleasure, we don’t think about the long-term effects. We’re just looking at the pleasure we get right now. But he’s asking you to look at the long-term effects.

Some pleasures have no problems at all down the line. Other pleasures have lots of problems. So when you’re looking at something, ask yourself, “Why am I looking? And how am I looking? What is this doing to my mind?” See it as part of a cause-and-effect process. What motivations are you nourishing? What qualities of mind are you nourishing by the way you look or listen or taste things? In this way, you can get some control over the mind. It’s a word that has bad connotations in a lot of circles. But we’re trying to exert intelligent control over the mind.

Think about the opposite—the mind out of control. You don’t want that. You want to develop the good qualities in the mind so that you have friends inside. As for the unskillful qualities, you can just let them starve. You’re not responsible for keeping them alive. As you feed the good qualities and starve the bad ones, then the mind has a chance to settle down. Its concentration has momentum because you’re looking after it all through the day.

As I said, the rules change a little bit when you’re up and around because you do have to look and listen. While you’re sitting here with your eyes closed, you don’t have to be responsible for anything else at all except for you and the breath. When you’re out and around, there are other responsibilities. But take on the things that really are your responsibility. Try to avoid the things that are going to excite greed, aversion, or delusion. Try to maintain your sense of the breath in the body as much as you can.

It may be a little bit too much to ask to be aware of every in-and-out breath, but try to be aware of the quality of the breath energy that fills the body. If you sense it tensing up or tightening up someplace, just allow it to relax, to loosen up. That way, you can have a sense of well-being to feed on as you go through the day. You’re not so hungry for sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations that are going to be bad for the mind.

When the practice develops momentum like this, you see that it gets more solidly based, and you can rely on it more and more. You can rely on yourself more and more.

This is what it means to become your own refuge: to look after yourself, train the good qualities of the mind, starve the unskillful ones. The mind will become more and more a tool for finding genuine happiness. You’re not wasting its time on the little pleasures that come from sights, sounds, etc. You’ve got something bigger and better in mind.