Working from Home

Try to settle in with the breath. The Buddha calls concentration a vihara-dhamma, a home for the mind. So you want to make the home comfortable. Bring the right attitude: Think of all the goodness you’ve done with your life, all the good things you’ve done in terms of being generous, being virtuous—things that lift your mind. Bring that mind to the breath.

With that attitude of well-being, it’s a lot easier to think of ways of breathing that are comfortable. If you notice that the breathing is tight, loosen it up a bit. Ask yourself what kind of breathing would feel best for the body right now: long or short, fast or slow, heavy or light, deep or shallow—or any combination of those. You can experiment for a while.

It’s like moving into a house and making it your home. You can move the furniture here, move the furniture there, to find if you’ve got the furniture where you want it. Then you can rest. But, of course, you don’t just rest in concentration. Once the mind is rested, with a sense of strength and well-being, then you do your work. You’re working from home. You’re examining this home that you’ve built.

This is an example of what the Buddha calls becoming. You’re creating a good state of becoming so that you can understand what goes into the process—the way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself, the perceptions you hold in mind—in other words, the images you have of how the breath moves in the body.

When it comes in, where does it come in? When it goes out, where does it go out? Where does it originate in the body? Be conscious of these things. All of this goes into a state of becoming, and it’s all right here. It’s all in the construction details of the house.

So you’re working from home, and the work is to analyze this house that you build. It’s the best house you can build. The image the Buddha gives is that going from one life to the next is like going from one house to another. And in each case, you’ve built the house. We build samsara, and this is how it’s done. When you get into a good state like this, where the mind is at ease, at rest, settled in, you can see the processes most clearly. You can see that even here in this state of concentration, there’s still some stress. There’s still some inconstancy. You have to keep working at maintaining it.

Ultimately, the mind gets to a point where it inclines to the deathless, where you don’t have to do any maintaining. You don’t have to do any upkeep. That’s when you dismantle the house—because at that point, you don’t need houses anymore.

But in the meantime, make sure you’ve got this good house to stay in. And it’s a house you can take with you wherever you go. It’s not just here on the meditation seat. The breath is always there with you. The ability to be sensitive to the breath in the body is always there. Keep that in the back of your mind wherever you go.

So you build a house consciously, and then you can learn how to take it apart. In the meantime, learn how to enjoy it, because without the enjoyment, you don’t have the strength to take it apart. So get really good at the concentration. Master it as a skill, and it will reward you many times over.