Stand Firm

When you make up your mind to stay with the breath, find a place in the body that’s comfortable. Because you’re going to have to withstand a lot of other thoughts that will pull you away, you want a place that feels really good to be here.

Think of the breath not as being just one spot in the body, but bathing the whole body. It’s as if you’re wearing the breath, you’re surrounded by the breath. Allow it to feel energizing if you’re feeling tired—or calm, soothing, relaxing if you’re feeling tense—because you need a firm place to stay.

When we practice meditation, we retrain the mind. We’re going against a lot of currents of the world, many of which are in the mind itself already. Your greed, aversion, and delusion will pull you in other directions. The world will pull you in other directions, so you have to take a stance.

There’s an important principle that the Buddha said starts with ordinary everyday life: You have to take initiative. Make up your mind you’re going to do something different from what everybody else does. You’re going to do something special with your life. Then you do whatever is needed to maintain that intention.

Otherwise, where does the flow of the world go? It just goes around and around, and goes nowhere. If you want to go someplace in particular that’s out of the ordinary, you have to make an extraordinary determination that you’re going to stay right here instead of following the temptations to go flowing around, wandering around.

That’s what samsara is. We think of samsara as a place. It’s actually an activity—the mind moving on, moving on, moving on. Sometimes it’s pushed by who knows what. You want to take a stance to see what’s been pushing you around to go all these places that don’t offer any real satisfaction? They offer some satisfaction, but it’s not lasting.

If you want something that’s lasting inside, you have to be firm in your intention that you’re going to stay right here. Whatever currents come through the mind, you let them go through, but you don’t have to flow with them. You begin to understand what they’re doing, how they’re happening, where they go.

That’s the Buddhist definition of discernment: watching arising and passing away in a penetrating way. You don’t just see things coming and going. You try to understand why. Where do they come from? Where do they go? If something is skillful, what can you do to maintain it? If something is not, what can you do to just let it go?—though the practice is not just letting go, letting go. A lot of it is standing firm.

So learn how to stand firm right here. Make this a good, secure place to stay, so that you have something of value inside that you can use to withstand the currents of the world. If you don’t, they’ll just pull you down.