Direct Yourself Rightly

Close your eyes. Take a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing in the body. Where it’s clearest that now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out, focus your attention there. Then keep it there. Keep it focused right there. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can change—make it shorter, more shallow; heavier, lighter; faster or slower. See what kind of breathing feels good for the body right now. And keep your mind directed right here.

This is an important part of blessing yourself. There’s a whole sutta devoted to ways that we can bless ourselves. Back in those days, people would run around to other people for blessings. But as the Buddha pointed out, the best blessings are the ones you give yourself. And among the list, there’s a set of three: having made merit in a previous lifetime or in the past; staying in a place where the Dhamma can be practiced; and then, directing yourself rightly.

That third one is the important one, because we all here have merit from our past. The fact that we’re human beings—we have a human mouth, we have human hands and feet—means we’ve done good in the past. If we hadn’t done good in the past, we wouldn’t have these kinds of mouths or feet or hands. We’d be much more restricted.

But what are we going to do with those mouths and feet and hands? That’s the important thing. That’s where being rightly directed, or having yourself rightly directed, comes in. We look around us and we see people who are wealthy, powerful, and they’re abusing their wealth; they’re abusing their power. They have merit they’ve made in the past, but they’re not directing themselves rightly. So you have to make up your mind to make sure that regardless of what they do, you keep yourself pointed in the right direction.

This is what’s really important: How you come into the world is not so important as how you behave here in the world and what you take with you from your actions. So think about that.

As Ajaan Lee used to say, “Bow down to your mouth every day.” You went to all the trouble of making the merit that allows you to have a human mouth that can say all kinds of things, good and bad. So say the good things. The same with your hands, the same with your feet: Use them to do good things, because the fact that we’re human beings means that we have a much wider range of possibilities, both in the realm of what’s good and in the realm of what’s bad.

I mean, think of all the beings that have been killing human beings. Which kind of beings are they?—mostly human beings themselves. Whatever ways bears or mammoths or saber-toothed tigers have killed human beings, they’re nothing compared to the way human beings have killed one another. The harm that people can do to one another is really intense. So there is that possibility.

But we also have the possibility of developing good qualities inside. Developing mindfulness, alertness, ardency, discernment, gaining freedom in the mind in a way that’s totally harmless: We have that possibility, too. And that’s how you really bless yourself, how you direct yourself rightly.

So think of all the different blessings you can give yourself right now. They do depend on the fact that you have some goodness from the past, so you want to make sure you appreciate all that goodness you’ve done in the past and don’t let it falter. Continue to do good with what you’ve got, so that it gets better and better. That way, you really bless yourself as you bless the people around you, and you keep heading in the right direction.