Your Full Attention

When you watch your breath, try to make it special. People all over the world are sitting around breathing, so what’s special about people sitting around watching their breath? It’s the amount of attention they pay to their breathing.

What does the breath feel like all the way in, all the way out—each breath as it comes in, each breath as it goes out? You want to be right here, fully here, fully alert, fully attentive.

That requires that you be attentive to your mind as well. If it’s about to slip off, what can you do to prevent it? And how can you even know that it’s about to slip off? For too many people, it’s slipped off for quite a while before they realize: Oh, they were there with the breath, and now they’re someplace else?

One way to break that habit is that as soon as you realize that you’ve slipped off, you come right back. Try to get quicker and quicker and quicker at this, until you begin to realize that there are warning signs before you slip off. There’s a little bit of dis-ease in the breathing, a little bit of dis-ease in the mind.

And there are some subterranean conversations going on, saying that as soon as you get inattentive, the mind is going to go someplace else. If you’re really alert and really attentive, you’re going to see these things, and then you’ll be able to do something about them.

So. Give this your full attention. After all, when the Buddha gained awakening, what was he watching? He was watching his breath. What’s the difference between his breath and your breath? Nothing, really. What’s different is the quality of the attention that he gave to the breath and to his mind as he was watching the breath.

So you can develop those qualities of attention as well. As I said, he was heedful, ardent, and resolute, realizing that if you wander off, there’s going to be trouble. Think of the image of the monkeys in the mountains. As long as the monkeys stay in their territory, they’re safe. It’s when they go into the territory where human beings go as well, that’s when they get into danger.

So stay in your territory, which is the breath right here, the body right here, right now. Anything else is dangerous territory. That’s heedfulness.

Ardent—you’re trying to do this well.

Resolute means that you don’t let yourself get pushed around by other thoughts. You make your determination to stay here strong. That way, something good will come out of this, so you’re not just sitting around breathing. You’re sitting around learning about the mind, seeing how the mind creates unnecessary suffering for itself, seeing why it’s unnecessary and what you can do about it. Those are important lessons.