Control Without the Freak

When you make up your mind to stay with the breath, you want to keep your mind made up. In other words, you set the intention and then you try to maintain that intention, act on that intention, all the way through the session. If there are thoughts that wander off, you don’t have to follow them. You stay with the breath.

Try to get interested in the breath. See what ways of breathing make you comfortable—relaxing when you’re feeling tense, energizing when you’re feeling tired, soothing when you’re feeling frazzled. There are lots of different ways you can breathe and you can exert some control over the breath.

Part of it is learning how to exert control. You don’t tense up around it. You just think long breath and allow the breath to get longer. Think shorter breath and allow it to get shorter. This is learning how to exercise wise control. And it’s something you really need. If you can’t control your own mind, what are you going to control? There are so many things in this world that are beyond our control. We read the news and see the world is going crazy. It doesn’t seem there’s much we can do.

But we can control our own minds. That’s what the Buddha taught. He said if it weren’t possible for people to change from unskillful to skillful qualities, there wouldn’t have been any point in his teaching. But they can, and they will benefit from it. That’s the other reason he taught these things. So learn how to exercise wise control.

This is very different from being a control freak. Control freaks try to control things that are really, ultimately, beyond their control. But there are these things inside the mind that you can. Some people come away from their first meditation saying, “I learned I can’t control my mind.” That’s because they haven’t learned the skill yet. It is something you can do. Just give yourself the time and the determination to stick with it. It’s a skill that you can master.

As for things outside that you can’t control, well, part of controlling your mind is learning how not to get upset by those things and to focus on what the Buddha said are things you don’t accept. You don’t accept unskillful qualities taking over your mind. They’re going to appear sometimes, now and then, but you have the choice to go with them or not to go with them. And you want to really exercise that choice wisely. That’s how you exert some control.

Then try to encourage skillful qualities to come in. As the Buddha said, when mindfulness is in charge, any skillful qualities that haven’t arisen yet, you make them arise. And once in there you try to make sure they don’t pass away. In other words, we don’t just watch things arising and passing away. We figure out which things are worth having around.

This is called penetrative knowledge of arising and passing away. In other words, something arises, and you recognize it immediately as something that you should or shouldn’t go with. If it’s something you should go with, you encourage it. If it’s not, you let it go.

This is the skill the Buddha taught: learning how to have some control over your mind. Because when you have control, then you can teach it how not to create suffering. After all, the things we suffer from are not so much the things happening outside. It’s the way we react to things outside, the way we create states of mind inside: That’s where the suffering is. And that’s something you can learn how to put an end to.

But it starts with learning to get some control over your mind so you can observe it—because you have to pin the mind down so you can watch it. Otherwise, it’s like trying to watch a butterfly, study a butterfly, while it’s flitting around. You learn a little bit about its flight patterns, but you don’t learn much about the butterfly itself. You’ve got to get it to stay still, then you can observe it. I don’t like the image of pinning it down because it sounds like you’re going to kill it. You don’t have to kill it but just think of some way that you get the butterfly to stay still. Then you can watch it, observe it, see its details.

It’s the same with the mind: You’re going to learn a lot about the mind by getting to stay with one thing. Give it something it likes, like the breath. You’re going to teach it how to stay and then watch it carefully. Then you’ll learn a lot from the fact that you’re trying to exert control.