2020/10/18

Bk | With Each & Every Breath

 | With Each & Every Breath


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Introduction
NAVIGATIONBooks/With Each And Every Breath/Introduction
MEDITATION: WHAT & WHY

Meditation is training for the mind, to help it develop the strengths and skills it needs to solve its problems. Just as there are many different remedies for the various illnesses of the body, there are many different types of meditation for the various problems of the mind.

The meditation technique taught in this book is a skill aimed at solving the mind’s most basic problem: the stress and suffering it brings on itself through its own thoughts and actions. Even though the mind wants happiness, it still manages to weigh itself down with mental pain. In fact, that pain comes from the mind’s misguided efforts to find happiness. Meditation helps to uncover the reasons for why the mind does this and, in uncovering them, helps you to cure them. In curing them, it opens you to the possibility of genuine happiness, a happiness you can rely on, a happiness that will never change or let you down.

That’s the good news of meditation: Genuine happiness is possible, and you can reach it through your own efforts. You don’t have to content yourself only with pleasures that will eventually leave you. You don’t have to resign yourself to the idea that temporary happiness is the best life has to offer. And you don’t have to pin your hopes for happiness on any person or power outside yourself. You can train the mind to access a totally reliable happiness, a happiness that causes no harm to you or to anyone else.

Not only is the goal of meditation good; the means for attaining that goal are good as well. They’re activities and mental qualities you can be proud to develop: things like honesty, integrity, compassion, mindfulness, and discernment. Because true happiness comes from within, it doesn’t require that you take anything from anyone else. Your true happiness doesn’t conflict with the true happiness of anyone else in the world. And when you find true happiness inside, you have more to share with others.

This is why the practice of meditation is an act of kindness for others as well as for yourself. When you solve the problem of stress and suffering, you, of course, are the person who will most directly benefit. But you aren’t the only one. This is because when you create stress and suffering for yourself, you weaken yourself. You place burdens not only on yourself but also on the people around you: both by having to depend on them for help and support, and also by damaging them with the foolish things you might do or say out of weakness and fear. At the same time, you’re hampered from helping them with their problems, for your hands are filled with your own. But if your mind can learn how to stop causing itself stress and suffering, you’re less of a burden on others and you’re in a better position to give them a helping hand.

So the practice of meditation teaches you to respect the things within you that are worthy of respect: your desire for a genuine happiness, totally reliable and totally harmless; and your ability to find that happiness through your own efforts.

To bring a total end to the mind’s self-inflicted stress and suffering requires a great deal of dedication, training, and skill. But the meditation technique taught in this book doesn’t give its benefits only to people who are ready to follow it all the way to the total cure of awakening. Even if you simply want help in managing pain or finding a little more peace and stability in your life, meditation has plenty to offer you. It can also strengthen the mind to deal with many of the problems of day-to-day life, because it develops qualities like mindfulness, alertness, concentration, and discernment that are useful in all activities, at home, at work, or wherever you are. These qualities are also helpful in dealing with some of the larger, more difficult issues of life. Addiction, trauma, loss, disappointment, illness, aging, and even death are a lot easier to handle when the mind has developed the skills fostered by meditation.

So even if you don’t make it all the way to total freedom from stress and suffering, meditation can help you to handle your sufferings more skillfully—in other words, with less harm to yourself and the people around you. This, in itself, is a worthwhile use of your time. If you then decide to pursue the meditation further, to see if it really can lead to total freedom, so much the better.
WHAT'S IN THIS BOOK

The meditation technique described here is drawn from two sources. The first source is the Buddha’s set of instructions on how to use the breath in training the mind. These instructions are found in the Pali Canon, the oldest extant record of the Buddha’s teachings. As the Canon states, the Buddha found the breath to be a restful meditation topic—both for body and mind—as well as an ideal topic for developing mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. In fact, it was the topic he himself used on the path to his awakening. That’s why he recommended it to more people and taught it in more detail than any other topic of meditation.

The second source is a method of breath meditation developed in the last century by Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo, a master of a branch of Buddhism known in Thailand as the Wilderness Tradition. Ajaan Lee’s method builds on the Buddha’s instructions, explaining in detail many of the points that the Buddha left in a condensed form. I trained in this technique for ten years under Ajaan Fuang Jotiko, one of Ajaan Lee’s students, so some of the insights here come from my training with Ajaan Fuang as well.

I’ve followed these sources in focusing on the breath as the main topic of meditation because it’s the safest of all meditation topics. The technique described here brings the body and mind to a balanced state of well-being. This in turn allows the mind to gain balanced insights into its own workings, so that it can see the ways in which it’s causing stress and suffering, and let them go effectively.

This technique is part of a comprehensive path of mind training that involves not only meditation but also the development of generosity and virtue. The basic approach in each part of this training is the same: to understand all your actions as part of a chain of causes and effects, so that you can direct the causes in a more positive direction. With every action in thought, word, or deed, you reflect on what you’re doing while you’re doing it. You look for the motivation leading to your actions, and the results your actions give rise to. As you reflect, you learn to question your actions in a specific way:


• Do they lead to stress and suffering, or to the end of stress and suffering?

• If they lead to stress, are they necessary?

• If not, why do them again?

• If they lead to the end of stress, how can you master them as skills?

Training in virtue and generosity asks these questions of your words and deeds. Training in meditation approaches all events in the mind as actions—whether they’re thoughts or emotions—and questions them in the same way. In other words, it forces you to look at your thoughts and emotions less in terms of their content, and more in terms of where they come from and where they lead.

This strategy of observing your actions and probing them with these questions is directly related to the problem it’s meant to solve: the stresses and sufferings caused by your actions. That’s why it underlies the training as a whole. Meditation simply allows you to observe your actions more carefully, and to uncover and abandon ever more subtle levels of stress caused by those actions. It also develops the mental qualities that strengthen your ability to act in skillful ways.

Although the meditation technique described here is part of a specifically Buddhist training, you don’t have to be Buddhist to follow it. It can help in overcoming problems that aren’t specific to Buddhists. After all, Buddhists aren’t the only people who cause themselves stress and suffering, and the qualities of mind developed through meditation don’t have a Buddhist copyright. Mindfulness, alertness, concentration, and discernment benefit everyone who develops them. All that’s asked is that you give these qualities a serious try.

The purpose of this book is to present the practice of meditation—along with the larger training of which it’s a part—in a way that’s easy to read and to put into practice. The book is divided into five parts, each part followed by a list of additional resources—books, articles, and audio files—that will help you explore the issues discussed in that part in more detail.

The first part of the book contains instructions in the basic steps of how to meditate. The second part gives advice on how to deal with some of the problems that may come up as you practice. The third part deals with issues that arise as you try to make meditation a part of your life as a whole. The fourth part deals with issues that arise as your meditation progresses to a higher level of skill. The fifth part deals with how to choose and relate to a meditation teacher who can give you the type of personalized training no book can possibly provide.
HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

I’ve tried to cover most of the issues that a committed meditator will encounter in a self-directed practice. For this reason, if you’re brand new to meditation and are not yet ready to commit to a serious practice, you will find more material in this book than you’ll immediately need. Still, you can find plenty of useful guidance here if you read selectively. A good approach would be to read just what’s necessary to get started meditating and then put the book down to give it a try.

To get started:


1) Read the discussion of “Breath” in the following section, down to the heading, “Why the breath.”

2) Skip to the section titled, “Focusing on the Breath” in Part One. Read the six steps listed there until you can hold them in mind. Then find a comfortable place to sit and try following as many of the steps as you feel comfortable attempting. If the steps are too detailed for you, read the article, “A Guided Meditation,” listed at the end of Part One, or sit down and meditate while listening to any of the audio files with the same title available on www.dhammatalks.org.

3) If you encounter problems as you get started, return to Part One and also consult Part Two.

As for the rest of the book, you can save that till later, when you’re ready to raise the level of your commitment.

Even then, it will be wise to read the book selectively—especially Part Three. There the advice is again aimed at a fully committed meditator. Some of it may involve more commitment than you’re ready to make, so take whatever advice seems practical in the context of your current life and values, and leave the rest for other people—or for yourself at a later time.

Remember, nothing in the practice of meditation is ever forced on you. The only compulsion comes from an inner force: your own desire to be free from self-inflicted suffering and stress.
BASIC PREMISES

When you want to master a meditation technique, it’s good to know the premises underlying the technique. That way you have a clear idea of what you’re getting into. Knowing the premises also helps you understand how and why the technique is supposed to work. If you have doubts about the premises, you can try them on as working hypotheses, to see if they really do help in dealing with the problems of stress and suffering. Meditation doesn’t require that you swear allegiance to anything you can’t fully understand. But it does ask you to give its premises a serious try.

As your meditation progresses, you can apply the basic premises to areas that come up in your meditation that aren’t explained in the book. In this way, the meditation becomes less of a foreign technique, and more of your own path in exploring the mind and solving its problems as they arise.

Because breath meditation is a training in which the mind focuses on the breath, its basic premises focus on two topics: the workings of the mind, and the workings of the breath.

Mind. The word “mind” here covers not only the intellectual side of the mind, but also its emotional side together with its will to act. In other words, the word “mind” covers what we normally think of as “heart” as well.

The mind is not passive. Because it’s responsible for a body with many needs, it has to take an active approach to experience. Its actions shape its experience as it looks for food, both mental and physical, to keep itself and the body nourished. It’s driven by hungers both physical and mental. We’re all familiar with the need to feed physically. Mentally, the mind feeds both externally and internally on relationships and emotions. Externally, it hungers for such things as love, recognition, status, power, wealth, and praise. Internally, it feeds off its love for others and its own self-esteem, as well as the pleasures that come from emotions both healthy and not: honor, gratitude, greed, lust, and anger.

At any given moment, the mind is presented with a wide range of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and ideas. From this range, it chooses which things to focus attention on and which to ignore in its search for food. These choices shape the world of its experience. This is why, if you and I walk through a store at the same time, for example, we will experience different stores to the extent that we’re looking for different things.

The mind’s search for nourishment is constant and never-ending, because its food—especially its mental food—is always threatening to run out. Whatever satisfaction it derives from its food is always short-lived. No sooner has the mind found a place to feed than it’s already looking for where to feed next. Should it stay here? Should it go somewhere else? These incessant questions of “What next?” “Where next?” drive its search for well-being. But because these questions are the questions of hunger, they themselves keep eating away at the mind. Driven by hunger to keep answering these questions, the mind often acts compulsively—sometimes willfully—out of ignorance, misunderstanding what causes unnecessary stress and what doesn’t. This causes it to create even more suffering and stress.

The purpose of meditation is to end this ignorance, and to root out the questions of hunger that keep driving it.

An important aspect of this ignorance is the mind’s blindness to its own inner workings in the present moment, for the present moment is where choices are made. Although the mind often acts under the force of habit, it doesn’t have to. It has the option of making new choices with every moment. The more clearly you see what’s happening in the present, the more likely you are to make skillful choices: ones that will lead to genuine happiness—and, with practice, will bring you closer and closer to total freedom from suffering and stress—now and into the future. Meditation focuses your attention on the present moment because the present moment is where you can watch the workings of the mind and direct them in a more skillful direction. The present is the only moment in time where you can act and bring about change.

The committee of the mind. One of the first things you learn about the mind as you get started in meditation is that it has many minds. This is because you have many different ideas about how to satisfy your hungers and find well-being, and many different desires based on those ideas. These ideas boil down to different notions about what constitutes happiness, where it can be found, and what you are as a person: your needs for particular kinds of pleasure, and your abilities to provide those pleasures. Each desire thus acts as a seed for a particular sense of who you are and the world you live in.

The Buddha had a technical term for this sense of self-identity in a particular world of experience: He called it becoming. Take note of this term and the concept behind it, for it’s central to understanding why you cause yourself stress and suffering and what’s involved in learning how to stop.

If the concept seems foreign to you, think of when you’re drifting off to sleep and an image of a place appears in the mind. You enter into the image, lose touch with the world outside, and that’s when you’ve entered the world of a dream. That world of a dream, plus your sense of having entered into it, is a form of becoming.

Once you become sensitive to this process, you’ll see that you engage in it even when you’re awake, and many times in the course of a day. To gain freedom from the stress and suffering it can cause, you’re going to have to examine the many becomings you create in your search for food—the selves spawned by your desires, and the worlds they inhabit—for only when you’ve examined these things thoroughly can you gain release from their limitations.

You’ll find that, in some cases, different desires share common ideas of what happiness is and who you are (such as your desires for establishing a safe and stable family). In others, their ideas conflict (as when your desires for your family conflict with your desires for immediate pleasure regardless of the consequences). Some of your desires relate to the same mental worlds; others to conflicting mental worlds; and still others to mental worlds totally divorced from one another. The same goes for the different senses of “you” inhabiting each of those worlds. Some of your “yous” are in harmony, others are incompatible, and still others are totally unrelated to one another.

So there are many different ideas of “you” in your mind, each with its own agenda. Each of these “yous” is a member of the committee of the mind. This is why the mind is less like a single mind and more like an unruly throng of people: lots of different voices, with lots of different opinions about what you should do.

Some members of the committee are open and honest about the assumptions underlying their central desires. Others are more obscure and devious. This is because each committee member is like a politician, with its own supporters and strategies for satisfying their desires. Some committee members are idealistic and honorable. Others are not. So the mind’s committee is less like a communion of saints planning a charity event, and more like a corrupt city council, with the balance of power constantly shifting between different factions, and many deals being made in back rooms.

One of the purposes of meditation is to bring these dealings out into the open, so that you can bring more order to the committee—so that your desires for happiness work less at cross purposes, and more in harmony as you realize that they don’t always have to be in conflict. Thinking of these desires as a committee also helps you realize that when the practice of meditation goes against some of your desires, it doesn’t go against all of your desires. You’re not being starved. You don’t have to identify with the desires being thwarted through meditation, because you have other, more skillful desires to identify with. The choice is yours. You can also use the more skillful members of the committee to train the less skillful ones so that they stop sabotaging your efforts to find a genuine happiness.

Always remember that genuine happiness is possible, and the mind can train itself to find that happiness. These are probably the most important premises underlying the practice of breath meditation. There are many dimensions to the mind, dimensions often obscured by the squabbling of the committee members and their fixation with fleeting forms of happiness. One of those dimensions is totally unconditioned. In other words, it’s not dependent on conditions at all. It’s not affected by space or time. It’s an experience of total, unalloyed freedom and happiness. This is because it’s free from hunger and from the need to feed.

But even though this dimension is unconditioned, it can be attained by changing the conditions in the mind: developing the skillful members of the committee so that your choices become more and more conducive to genuine happiness.

This is why the path of meditation is called a path: It’s like the path to a mountain. Even though the path doesn’t cause the mountain, and your walking on the path doesn’t cause the mountain, the act of walking along the path can take you to the mountain.

Or you can think of the unconditioned dimension as like the fresh water in salt water. The ordinary mind is like salt water, which makes you sick when you drink it. If you simply let the salt water sit still, the fresh water won’t separate out on its own. You have to make an effort to distill it. The act of distilling doesn’t create fresh water. It simply brings out the fresh water already there, providing you with all the nourishment you need to quench your thirst.

Training the mind. The training that gets you to the mountain and provides you with fresh water has three aspects: virtue, concentration, and discernment. Virtue is the skill with which you interact with other people and living beings at large, based on the intention to cause no harm to yourself or to others. This is a topic that we will consider in Part Three, in the discussion of issues that commonly arise when integrating meditation into daily life, but it’s important to note here why virtue is related to meditation. If you act in harmful ways, then when you sit down to meditate, the knowledge of that harm gets in the way of staying firmly in the present moment. If you react with regret over the harm you’ve done, you find it difficult to stay settled in the present moment with confidence. If you react with denial, you build inner walls in your awareness that create more opportunities for ignorance and make it harder to look directly at what’s really going on in the mind.

The best way to avoid these two reactions is to stick to the intention not to do anything harmful in the first place, and then make up your mind to follow that intention with more and more skill. If you’ve seen that you have acted unskillfully, acknowledge your mistake, recognize that regret won’t erase the mistake, and resolve not to repeat that mistake in the future. This is the most that can be asked of a human being living in time, where our actions aimed at shaping the future can be based only on knowledge of the past and present.

The second aspect of the training is concentration. Concentration is the skill of keeping the mind centered on a single object, such as the breath, with a sense of ease, refreshment, and equanimity—equanimity being the ability to watch things without falling under the sway of likes and dislikes.

Attaining concentration requires developing three qualities of mind:


• Alertness—the ability to know what’s happening in the body and mind while it’s happening.

• Ardency—the desire and effort to abandon any unskillful qualities that may arise in the mind, and to develop skillful qualities in their place.

• Mindfulness—the ability to keep something in mind. In the case of breath meditation, this means remembering to stay with the breath and to maintain the qualities of alertness and ardency with every in-and-out breath.

When these three qualities become strong, they can bring the mind to a state of strong concentration called jhana, or meditative absorption, which we will discuss in Part Four. Because jhana is based on desire—the desire to develop skillful qualities in the mind—it, too, is a form of becoming. But it’s a special form of becoming that allows you to see the processes of becoming in action. At the same time, the ease and refreshment provided by jhana are health food for the mind, enabling you to abandon many of the unskillful eating habits that would pull you off the path. Because the supply of mental food coming from jhana is steady, it takes some of the pressure off of your need to feed. This allows you to step back from the questions of hunger, and to look at them through the questions of discernment: seeing where the stress of feeding is unnecessary, and how you can master the skills to go beyond it. This is why jhana is central to the path of training.

The third aspect of the training is discernment. Discernment is the ability:


• to distinguish the skillful processes in the mind from the unskillful ones,

• to understand how to abandon what’s unskillful and to develop what’s skillful, and

• to know how to motivate yourself so that you can abandon unskillful processes and to develop skillful processes even when you’re not in the mood.

You learn these three abilities by listening to others—as when you read a book like this one—and by observing your own actions and asking the right questions about them. In the beginning, you step back from the questions of hunger—which demand an answer right now as to where and what to feed on next—and take stock of how you’ve been feeding:


In what ways do your feeding habits lead to stress?

In what ways is that stress unnecessary?

To what extent is it worth it—in other words, to what extent does the pleasure gained from feeding compensate for the stress?

In the beginning stages, as you develop virtue and try to master concentration, the questions of discernment are simply looking for better ways to feed. In other words, they’re refined versions of the questions of hunger. You come to realize that the pleasure you gained from carelessly acting in harmful ways or letting the mind wander where it will isn’t worth the stress it entails. You begin to see where the stress you thought was unavoidable isn’t really necessary. You have other, better ways of finding inner nourishment, feeding on the higher pleasures that virtue and concentration provide.

As your concentration develops, your discernment into the levels of stress in the mind gets more and more refined, so that your sense of what is and isn’t skillful gets more refined as well. As you keep applying the questions of discernment even to your practice of jhana, you begin to wonder if it might be possible to escape the stress that comes even with the most refined sort of feeding. What sort of skill would that involve?

This is where the questions of discernment are no longer just a refined version of the questions of hunger. They become noble questions in that they take you beyond the need to feed. They bring dignity to your search for happiness. They help you uncover the dimension where even feeding on jhana is no longer necessary. And when that dimension is finally uncovered, all stress comes to an end.

The questions of noble discernment—concerning unnecessary stress, the actions that cause it, and the actions that can help put an end to it—are related to one of the Buddha’s most famous teachings: the four noble truths. The fact of unnecessary stress is the first truth; the unskillful mental actions that cause it are the second; the fact that it can come to an end is the third; and the skillful actions that bring it to an end are the fourth.

These truths are noble for three reasons. One, they’re absolute. They’re true for everyone everywhere, so they’re not just a matter of personal opinion or your cultural background.

Two, they provide guidance for a noble path of practice. They teach you not to deny or run away from the stress you’re causing, but to acknowledge it and face it until you comprehend it. When you comprehend it, you can see the causes of that stress in your actions and abandon them. You develop the skillful actions that put an end to stress so that you can realize freedom from stress for yourself.

The third reason these truths are noble is that, when you use the questions underlying them to examine and question your actions, they lead ultimately to a noble attainment: a genuine happiness that puts an end to the need to feed, and so causes no harm to anyone at all.

Because discernment is aimed at bringing your actions to the highest level of skill, it grows directly out of the quality of ardency in your concentration. However, it also builds on alertness in seeing which actions lead to which results. And it informs mindfulness, so that you can remember the lessons you’ve learned from what you’ve observed and can apply them in the future.

In fact, all three aspects of the training—virtue, concentration, and discernment—help one another along. Virtue makes it easier to settle down in concentration and to be honest with yourself in discerning which members of the mind’s committee are skillful and which ones are not. Concentration provides the mind with a sense of refreshment that allows it to resist unskillful urges that would create lapses in virtue, and the stability it needs to discern clearly what’s actually going on inside. Discernment provides strategies for developing virtue, along with an understanding of the mind’s workings that allow it to settle down in ever-stronger states of concentration.

Virtue, concentration, and discernment, in turn, are all based on the most fundamental part of the training: the practice of generosity. In being generous with your belongings, your time, your energy, your knowledge, and your forgiveness, you create a space of freedom in the mind. Instead of being driven by your various appetites, you can step back and realize the joy that comes when you’re not a slave to hunger all the time. This realization provides your basic impetus to look for a happiness where you don’t need to feed at all. Seeing the good that comes from giving, you can learn to approach the practice of virtue and meditation not just with an eye to what you can get out of it, but also with an eye to what you can give to the practice. The training of the mind becomes a gift both for yourself and for the people around you.

So, all in all, the premises of breath meditation are based on four observations about the mind that the Buddha called noble truths:

1) The mind experiences stress and suffering.

2) The stress and suffering come from the way the mind shapes its experience through its actions driven by ignorance.

3) That ignorance can be ended, opening your awareness to an unconditioned dimension free of stress and suffering.

4) That dimension, even though it’s unconditioned, can be reached by training the mind in the skillful qualities of virtue, concentration, and discernment.

The purpose of breath meditation is to help with that training.

Breath. The word “breath” covers a wide range of energies in the body. Most prominently, there’s the energy of the in-and-out breath. We tend to think of this breath as the air coming in and out of the lungs, but this air wouldn’t move if it weren’t for an energy in the body activating the muscles that draw it in and allow it to go out. When you meditate on the in-and-out breath, you may start by paying attention to the movement of the air, but as your sensitivity develops, you become more focused on the energy.

In addition to the energy of the in-and-out breath, there are subtler flows of energy that spread through all parts of the body. These can be experienced as the mind grows more still. There are two types: moving energies; and still, steady energies. The moving energies are directly related to the energy of the in-and-out breath. For instance, there is the flow of energy in the nerves, as all the muscles involved in breathing, however subtly, are activated with each breath. This energy flow also allows you to have sensation in the different parts of the body and to move them at will. There is also the flow of energy that nourishes the heart with each breath, and then spreads from the heart as it pumps the blood. This can be felt with the movement of blood through the blood vessels and out to every pore of the skin.

As for the still, steady energies, these are centered in different spots in the body, such as the tip of the breastbone, the middle of the brain, the palms of the hands, or the soles of the feet. Once the in-and-out breath grows calm, these energies can be spread to fill the whole body with a sense of stillness and fullness that feels solid and secure.

To some people, these energies in the different parts of the body might seem mysterious—or even imaginary. But even if the concept of these energies seems foreign to you, the energies themselves are not. They form the way you directly experience the body from within. If they weren’t already there, you wouldn’t have any sense of where your own body is.

So when you try to acquaint yourself with these energies, there are three points to keep in mind:


1) You’re not concerned with your breath as it might be observed by a doctor or a machine outside you. You’re concerned with your breath as only you can know it: as part of your direct experience of having a body. If you have trouble thinking of these energies as “breath,” see if thinking of them as “breathing sensations” or “body sensations” helps—whatever enables you to get in touch with what’s actually there.

2) This is NOT a matter of trying to create sensations that don’t already exist. You’re simply making yourself more sensitive to sensations that are already there. When you’re told to let the breath energies flow into one another, ask yourself if the sensations you feel seem unconnected to one another. If they do, simply hold in mind the possibility that they can connect on their own. This is what it means to allow them to flow.

3) These energies are not air. They’re energy. If, while you’re allowing the breath energies to spread through the various parts of the body, you sense that you’re trying to force energy into those parts, stop and remind yourself: Energy doesn’t need to be forced. There’s plenty of space even in the most solid parts of the body for this energy to flow, so you don’t have to push it against any resistance. If there’s a sense of resistance to the energy, it’s coming from the way you visualize it. Try to visualize the energy in a way that can slip around and through everything with ease.

The best way to get in touch with these energies is to close your eyes, notice the sensations that tell you where the different parts of your body are, and then allow yourself to view those sensations as a type of energy. As you get more sensitive to those sensations and see how they interact with the energy of the in-and-out breath, it will seem more and more natural to regard them as types of breath energy. That allows you to get the most use out of them.

Why the breath. There are two reasons why the breath is chosen as a topic of meditation: It’s a good theme for developing the qualities needed for (1) concentration and (2) discernment.

1) All three qualities needed for concentration are easily developed by focusing on the breath:

Alertness: The only breath you can observe is the breath in the present. When you’re with the breath, your attention has to be in the present. Only in the present can you observe what’s going on in the body and mind as it’s actually happening.

The breath is also a meditation theme that goes along with you wherever you go. As long as you’re alive, you’ve got the breath right here to focus on. This means that you can meditate on the breath and develop alertness at any time and in any situation.

Mindfulness: Because the breath is so close to your present awareness, it’s easy to remember. If you forget to stay with the breath, the simple sensation of an in-breath can remind you to come back to it.

Ardency: The breath is one of the few processes in the body over which you can exert conscious control. An important part of breath meditation is learning how to make skillful use of this fact. You can learn which ways of breathing foster pleasant sensations in the body, and which ones foster unpleasant ones. You learn a sense of time and place: when and how to change the breath to make it more comfortable, and when to leave it alone. As you develop this knowledge, you can use it as an aid in developing skillful qualities of mind.

This sort of knowledge comes from experimenting with the breath and learning to observe the effects of different kinds of breathing on the body and mind. You can call this sort of experimentation working with the breath, for you’ve got an ardent purpose: the training of the mind. But you can also call it playing with the breath, for it requires that you use your imagination and ingenuity in thinking of different ways to breathe and to picture the breath energy to yourself. At the same time, it can be a lot of fun as you learn to explore and discover things about your body on your own.

There are many ways in which working and playing with the breath can help foster the quality of ardency in your meditation. For instance, when you learn how to breathe in ways that feel comfortable—to energize the body when you feel tired, or to relax the body when you feel tense—you make it easier to settle into the present moment and to stay there with a sense of well-being. You learn to view the meditation not as a chore, but as an opportunity to develop an immediate sense of well-being. This gives energy to your desire to stick with the meditation over the long term.

Playing with the breath also helps you stay in the present—and stick with the meditation over time—because it gives you something interesting and engaging to do that can show immediate benefits. This keeps you from getting bored with the meditation. As you see the good results arising from adjusting the breath, you become more motivated to explore the potentials of the breath in a wide variety of different situations: how to adjust the breath when you’re sick, how to adjust it when you feel physically or emotionally threatened, how to adjust it when you need to tap into reserves of energy to overcome feelings of exhaustion.

The pleasure and refreshment that can come from working and playing with the breath provide your ardency with a source of inner food. This inner food helps you deal with the obstreperous members of the committee of the mind who won’t back down unless they get immediate gratification. You learn that simply breathing in a particular way gives rise to an immediate sense of pleasure. You can relax patterns of tension in different parts of the body—the back of the hands, the feet, in your stomach or chest—that would otherwise trigger and feed unskillful urges. This alleviates the sense of inner hunger that can drive you to do things that you know aren’t skillful. So in addition to helping with your ardency, this way of working with the breath can help with your practice of virtue.

2) Because of the direct connection between ardency and discernment, the act of working and playing with the breath also helps develop discernment.

• The breath is the perfect place from which to watch the mind, for it’s the physical process most responsive to the mind’s own workings. As you grow more sensitive to the breath, you’ll come to see that subtle changes in the breath are often a sign of subtle changes in the mind. This can alert you to developments in the mind just as they’re starting to happen. And that can help you to see more quickly through the ignorance that can lead to stress and suffering.

• The sense of well-being fostered by working and playing with the breath gives you a solid foundation for observing stress and suffering. If you feel threatened by your suffering, you won’t have the patience and endurance needed to watch and comprehend it. As soon as you encounter it, you want to run away. But if you’re dwelling in a sense of well-being in the body and mind, you don’t feel so threatened by pain or suffering. That enables you to watch pain and suffering more steadily. You know that you have a safe place in your body where the breath feels comfortable, where you can focus your attention when the stress or suffering becomes too overwhelming. (For more on this topic, see the discussion of “Pain” in Part Three.) This gives you confidence to probe more deeply into the pain.

• The sense of pleasure that comes from concentration, as it gets more refined, allows you to see more subtle levels of stress in the mind. It’s like making yourself very quiet so that you can hear subtle sounds very far away.

• Being able to attain this inner level of pleasure puts the mind in a much better mood, so that it’s much more willing to accept the fact that it has been causing itself suffering. Training the mind to look honestly at its unskillful qualities is like talking to a person about his faults and shortcomings. If he’s hungry, tired, and grumpy, he won’t want to hear anything of what you have to say. You need to wait until he’s well-fed and well-rested. That’s when he’ll be more willing to admit his faults.

This is the main issue with the mind: It’s causing itself suffering through its own stupidity, its own lack of skill, and usually it doesn’t want to admit this fact to itself. So we use the sense of well-being that comes with playing and working with the breath to put the mind in a mood where it’s much more willing to admit its shortcomings and to do something about them.

• As you work and play with the breath, you also find that you have strategies for dealing with pain. Sometimes allowing breath energy to flow right through the pain can help lessen it. At the very least, the pain becomes less of a burden on the mind. This, too, allows you to face the pain with confidence. You’re less and less likely to feel overwhelmed by it.

• Finally, working with the breath in this way shows you the extent to which you shape your present experience—and how you can learn to shape it more skillfully. As I said above, the mind is primarily active in its approach to experience. Discernment, too, has to be active in understanding where the processes of the mind are skillful and unskillful in the shape they give to things. Discernment doesn’t come just from watching passively as things arise and pass away in your experience. It also has to see why they arise and why they pass away. To do this, it has to experiment—trying to make skillful qualities arise and unskillful qualities pass away—to see which causes are connected to which effects.

In particular, discernment comes from engaging with your present intentions, to see the extent to which those intentions play a role in shaping the way experiences arise and pass away.

The Buddhist term for this act of shaping is fabrication—in the sense of fabricating a strategy—and fabrication comes in three forms.


— First is bodily fabrication: the fabrication of your sense of the body through the in-and-out breath. The way you breathe influences your heart rate, the release of hormones into the blood stream, and the way you experience the body in general.

— Second, there’s verbal fabrication. This is the way you direct your thoughts to something and evaluate it. These two processes of directed thought and evaluation are the basis of your internal conversation. You bring up topics in the mind to think about, and then make comments on them.

— Third, there’s mental fabrication. This consists of perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the labels you put on things: the words by which you name them, or the images the mind associates with them, sending itself subliminal messages about them. Feelings are the feeling-tones of pleasure, pain, or neither-pleasure-nor-pain, which can be either physical or mental.

These three forms of fabrication shape your every experience. Take an example: Your boss has called you into her office for a meeting. As you go to the meeting, you call to mind some of the difficult exchanges you’ve had with her in the past. This is perception, a form of mental fabrication. You think about the possible issues that might be discussed, and you’re concerned that she’s going to reprimand you. This is verbal fabrication. As a result of your concerns, your breathing becomes constricted, causing your heart to speed up. This is bodily fabrication. All these forms of fabrication lead to feelings of mental and physical dis-ease, which are another form of mental fabrication. As you open the door to her office, these forms of fabrication already have you primed to overreact to even the slightest expressions of dislike or contempt in her words and bodily language—or to see such expressions even when they’re not there.

This is an example in which these three forms of fabrication have you primed to enter into the meeting in a way that will affect not only your experience of the meeting, but also your boss’s experience of you. Even before the meeting has started, you’re increasing the chances that it won’t go well.

But you could also use the power of fabrication to shift the meeting in another direction. Before opening the door, you stop to take a few deep, relaxing breaths (bodily fabrication plus feeling as a mental fabrication), and then call to mind the fact that your boss has been suffering from a lot of stress lately (perception as a mental fabrication). Putting yourself in her shoes, you think of ways in which to approach the meeting in a spirit of cooperation (verbal fabrication). You open the door to a different meeting.

These three forms of fabrication shape not only your external experiences. They’re also—and primarily—the processes shaping the different members of the mind’s committee, as well as the means by which the different committee members interact. Verbal fabrications are the most obvious way in which these members shout or whisper in one another’s ears—your many inner ears—but verbal fabrications are not the only way. For instance, if one of the members is advocating anger, it will also hijack your breathing, making it labored and uncomfortable. This leads you to believe that you’ve got to get the uncomfortable feeling associated with the anger out of your system by saying or doing something under its influence. Anger will also flash perceptions and images of danger and injustice through your mind, in the same way that devious television producers might flash subliminal messages on your television screen to make you hate and fear the people they don’t like.

It’s because we’re ignorant of the many levels on which these fabrications shape our actions that we suffer from stress. To end that suffering, we have to bring these fabrications into the light of our alertness and discernment.

Working and playing with the breath is an ideal way to do this, because when you work with the breath, you bring all three kinds of fabrication together. You’re adjusting and observing the breath; you’re thinking about the breath and evaluating the breath; you use the perceptions of the breath to stay with the breath, and you evaluate the feelings that arise when you work with the breath.

This allows you to be more sensitive to the fabrication of what’s going on in the present. You begin to see how the mind’s committee creates pleasure and pain not only while engaged in meditation, but all of the time. By consciously engaging in this fabrication with knowledge and discernment, you can change the balance of power in the mind. You reclaim your breath, your thoughts, your perceptions and feelings so that they can strengthen the skillful members of the committee, and aren’t under the power of the unskillful ones. You can actually create new, even more skillful members of the committee, who help you progress on the path.

In this way, you take one of the problems of the mind—its fragmentation into many different voices, many different selves—and turn it to your advantage. As you develop new skills in meditation, you train new members of the committee who can reason with and convert the more impatient members, showing them how to cooperate in finding a true happiness. As for the members that can’t be converted, they gradually lose their power because their promises of happiness are no match for the promises of the new members who actually deliver. So the blatantly unskillful members gradually disappear.

As your practice of concentration and discernment develops, you become more sensitive to the stresses and sufferings caused by fabrication even in activities that you used to regard as pleasant. This makes you become more ardent in looking for a way out. And when discernment sees that the way you fabricate stress and suffering in the present moment is unnecessary, you lose your taste for those fabrications and can let them stop. That’s how the mind becomes free.

In the beginning, you gain this freedom step by step, starting from the most blatant levels of fabrication. As the meditation develops, discernment frees you from progressively subtler levels until it can drop the subtlest levels that stand in the way of the unfabricated dimension: the unconditioned dimension that constitutes the ultimate happiness.

Your first taste of this dimension shows you that the most important premise underlying breath meditation is right: An unconditioned happiness is possible. Even though, at this stage, your taste of this dimension doesn’t totally put an end to suffering and stress, it does confirm that you’re on the right path. You’ll be able to reach it for sure. And at that point, you’ll have no more need for books of this sort.

Because the breath is so helpful in developing all three aspects of the path to unconditioned happiness—virtue, concentration, and discernment—it’s an ideal theme for training the mind to experience that happiness for itself.

ADDITIONAL READINGS:

(In every case where no author is listed, the writings are mine.)

On the values underlying the practice: “Affirming the Truths of the Heart” and “Karma” in Noble Strategy; “Generosity First” in Meditations; “Purity of Heart” in Purity of Heart

On the committee of the mind: Selves & Not-self; “The Wisdom of the Ego” in Head & Heart Together

On the suffering that the mind creates for itself: “Life Isn’t Just Suffering” in The Karma of Questions; “Ignorance” in Head & Heart Together

On the questions of discernment: “Questions of Skill” in The Karma of Questions

On the four noble truths: “Untangling the Present” in Purity of Heart. For a more detailed discussion, see the sections, “The Four Noble Truths” and “The First Truth” in The Wings to Awakening.

On the role of moderation and discernment in the practice: “The Middles of the Middle Way” in Beyond All Directions

On the meaning of mindfulness: “Mindfulness Defined” in Head & Heart Together; “The Agendas of Mindfulness” in The Karma of Questions

On the element of play in the practice: “The Joy of Effort” in Head & Heart Together; “Joy in Effort” in Meditations5

It’s often nice to have a few books of short Dhamma passages that you can open at random to get a Buddhist perspective on things. Some good examples: 
Ajaan Fuang Jotiko – Awareness Itself; 
Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo – The Skill of Release; 
Ajaan Dune Atulo – Gifts He Left Behind; 
Ajahn Chah Subhaddo – In Simple Terms; and the section, 
“Pure & Simple” in Upasika Kee Nanayon – An Unentangled Knowing

PART ONE Basic Instructions
NAVIGATIONBooks/With Each And Every Breath/Basic Instructions

I : GETTING READY TO MEDITATE

Meditation is something you can do in any situation and in any posture. However, some situations are more conducive than others to helping the mind settle down. Especially when you’re just getting started, it’s wise to look for situations where there’s a minimum of disturbance, both physical and mental.

Also, some postures are more conducive than others to helping the mind settle down. The standard posture for meditation is sitting, and it’s wise to learn how to sit in a way that allows you to meditate for long periods of time without moving and without at the same time causing undue pain or harm for the body. Other standard postures for meditating are walking, standing, and lying down. We’ll focus here on sitting, and save the other postures for section IV of Part One, below.

Before you sit to meditate on the breath, it’s wise to look at three things in this order: your physical situation, your posture, and your mental situation—in other words, the state of your mind.
Your Physical Situation

Where to meditate. Choose a quiet spot, in your home or outside. For a daily meditation routine, it’s good to choose a spot that you don’t normally use for other purposes. Tell yourself that the only thing you’re going to do when you sit in that spot is to meditate. You’ll begin to develop quiet associations with that spot each time you sit there. It becomes your special place to settle down and be still. To make it even more calming, try to keep the area around it neat and clean.

When to meditate. Choose a good time to meditate. Early in the morning, right after you’ve woken up and washed your face, is often best, for your body is rested and your mind hasn’t yet become cluttered with issues from the day. Another good time is in the evening, after you’ve rested a bit from your daily work. Right before you go to sleep is not the best time to meditate, for the mind will keep telling itself, “As soon as this is over, I’m going to bed.” You’ll start associating meditation with sleep, and, as the Thais say, your head will start looking for the pillow as soon as you close your eyes.

If you have trouble sleeping, then by all means meditate when you’re lying in bed, for meditation is a useful substitute for sleep. Often it can be more refreshing than sleep, for it can dissolve bodily and mental tensions better than sleeping can. It can also calm you down enough so that worries don’t sap your energy or keep you awake. But make sure that you also set aside another time of the day to meditate too, so that you don’t always associate meditation with sleep. You want to develop it as an exercise in staying alert.

Also, it’s generally not wise to schedule your regular meditation for right after a large meal. Your body will be directing the blood down to your digestive system, and that will tend to make you drowsy.

Minimizing disturbance. If you’re living with other people, tell them you don’t want to be disturbed while you’re meditating unless there’s a serious emergency. You’re taking some time out to be an easier person to live with. If you’re the only adult at home, and you’re living with children for whom everything is a serious emergency, choose a time when the children are asleep. If you’re living with older children, explain to them that you’ll be meditating for x amount of time and you need privacy during that time. If they interrupt you with a non-emergency, quietly tell them that you’re still meditating and that you’ll talk with them when you’re done. If they want to meditate with you, welcome them, but establish a few rules for their behavior so that they don’t disturb your time to be quiet.

Turn off your cell phone and any other devices that might interrupt your meditation.

Use a watch or a clock with a timer to time your meditation. In the beginning, twenty minutes is usually about right, for it gives you enough time to settle down a bit, but not so much time that you start getting bored or frustrated if things aren’t going well. As you gain some skill in the meditation, you can gradually increase your meditation time by five- or ten-minute increments.

Once you’ve set your timer, put it behind you or off to your side so that you can’t see it while you’re in your meditation position. That will help you to avoid the temptation to peek at the time and to turn your meditation into an exercise in clock-watching.

If you have a dog in your home, put it in another room and close the door. If it starts to whine and scratch at the door, let it into the room where you’re sitting, but be strict with yourself in being unresponsive if it comes to you for attention. Most dogs, after a few days, will get the message that when you’re sitting there with your eyes closed, you’re not going to respond. The dog may well lie down and rest along with you. But if it doesn’t get the message, put it back in the other room.

Cats are usually less of a problem in this regard, but if you do have an attention-starved cat, treat it as you would a dog.
Your Posture

An important part of training the mind lies in training the body to stay still so that you can focus on the movements of the mind without being disturbed by the movement of the body. If you’re not used to sitting still for long periods of time, the act of training the body will have to go along with training the mind.

If you’re new to meditation, it’s wise not to focus too much on your posture for the first several sessions. That way you can give your full attention to training the mind, saving the process of training the body for when you’ve had some success in focusing on the breath.

So for beginners, simply sit in a comfortable way, spread thoughts of goodwill—a wish for true happiness—to yourself and others, and then follow the steps in the section, “Focusing on the Breath,” below. If your posture gets uncomfortable, you may shift slightly to relieve the discomfort, but try to keep your attention focused on the breath while you shift position.

If, after a while, you feel ready to focus on your posture, here are some things you can try:

Sitting on the floor. An ideal posture is to sit cross-legged on the floor, with at most a folded blanket under you—placed just under your sitting bones or under your folded legs as well.

This is a classic meditation posture for at least two good reasons:

One, it’s stable. You’re not likely to fall over even when, in the more advanced levels of meditation, your sense of the body gets replaced by a sense of space or pure knowing.

Two, when you’re accustomed to this posture, you can sit and meditate anywhere. You can go out into the woods, place a small mat on the ground, sit down, and there you are. You don’t have to carry a lot of cushions or other paraphernalia around with you.

A standard version of the posture is this:


• Sit on the floor or your folded blanket with your left leg folded in front of you, and your right leg folded on top of your left leg. Place your hands on your lap, palms up, with your right hand on top of the left. (To prevent this posture from causing an imbalance in your spine, you can alternate sides by sometimes placing your left leg on top of your right leg, and your left hand on top of your right hand.)

• Bring your hands close to your stomach. This will help keep your back straight and minimize the tendency to hunch over.

• Sit straight, look straight in front of you, and close your eyes. If closing your eyes makes you feel uncomfortable or induces feelings of sleepiness, you can leave them half open—although if you do, don’t look straight ahead. Lower your gaze to a spot on the floor about three feet in front of you. Keep your focus soft. Be careful not to let it harden into a stare.

• Notice if your body feels like it’s leaning to the left or the right. If it is, relax the muscles that are pulling it in that direction, so that you bring your spine into a reasonably straight alignment.

• Pull your shoulders back slightly and then down, to create a slight arch in your middle and lower back. Pull your stomach in a bit, so that the back muscles aren’t doing all the work in keeping you erect.

• Relax into this posture. In other words, see how many muscles you can relax in your torso, hips, etc., and still stay erect. This step is important, for it helps you to stay with the posture with a minimum of strain.

This is called the half-lotus position, because only one leg is on top of the other. In the full-lotus, once your right leg is on top of your left, you bring your left leg on top of your right. This is an extremely stable position if you can manage it, but don’t try it until you’re adept at the half-lotus.

If you’re not accustomed to the half-lotus, you may find in the beginning that your legs will quickly fall asleep. That’s because blood that normally flows in the main arteries is being pushed into the small capillaries. This can be uncomfortable at first, but don’t worry. You’re not harming the body, for the body can adapt. If the small capillaries carry an increased load of blood frequently enough, they will enlarge, and your circulatory system will be rerouted to accommodate your new posture.

The trick with all postures is to break yourself in gradually. Pushing yourself to sit long hours right from the start is not wise, for you can damage your knees. If you know any good yoga teachers, ask them to recommend some yoga poses that will help limber up your legs and hips. Do those poses before you meditate to speed up the body’s adaptation to the sitting posture.

A somewhat gentler way of sitting cross-legged than the half-lotus is the tailor position: Fold your legs, but don’t put the right leg on top of the left. Place it on the floor in front of the left, so that your right knee makes a gentler angle, and the left leg isn’t pressed down by the right. This helps relieve some of the pressure on both legs.

Benches & chairs. If you have a knee or hip injury that makes it difficult to sit cross-legged, you can try sitting on a meditation bench, to see if that’s easier. Kneel with your shins on the ground, place the bench over your calves, and then sit back on the bench. Some benches are designed to force you to sit at a certain angle. Others can rock back and forth, allowing you to choose your own angle or to change it at will. Some people like this; others find it unstable. It’s a personal choice.

If none of these three alternatives—sitting right on the floor, sitting on the floor on top of a folded blanket, or sitting on a meditation bench—works for you, there are many styles of meditation cushions available for purchase. They’re usually a waste of money, though, because an extra folded blanket or firm pillow can usually serve the same purpose. Pillows and blankets may not look as serious as a dedicated meditation cushion, but there’s no need to pay a lot of extra money just for looks. A good lesson in becoming a meditator is learning how to improvise with what you’ve got.

Alternatively, you can try sitting on a chair.

Choose a chair with a seat just high enough off the ground so that your feet can rest flat on the ground and your knees can bend at a ninety-degree angle. A wooden or other firm chair, with or without a folded blanket or thin cushion on the seat, is ideal. Too thick a cushion is unwise, for it leads you to hunch over.

When you’ve got a good chair, sit slightly away from the back, so that your back supports itself. Then follow the same steps as with the half-lotus: Place your hands on your lap, palms up, one on top of the other. Bring your hands close to your stomach. Sit straight, look straight in front of you, and close your eyes. Pull your shoulders back slightly and then down, to create a nice arch in your middle and lower back. Pull your stomach in a bit. Relax into this posture. In other words, see how many muscles you can relax and still maintain it.

If you’re too ill or disabled to sit in any of these postures, choose a posture that feels comfortable for your particular condition.

With any posture, if you discover that you have a tendency over time to slump your back, it may be because of the way you breathe out. Pay a little extra attention to your out-breaths, reminding yourself to keep your back straight each time you breathe out. Keep this up until you’ve established it as a habit.

And whatever your posture, remember that you don’t have to make a vow at the beginning not to move. If you find yourself in extreme pain, wait a minute so that you don’t become a slave to every passing pain, and then very consciously—without thinking of anything else—shift your posture to something more comfortable. Then resume your meditation.
The State of Your Mind

Once your body is in position, take a couple of deep in-and-out breaths, and then look at the state of your mind. Is it staying with the breath, or is a persistent mood getting in the way? If you’re staying with the breath, keep going. If some of the members of your mind’s committee are less cooperative, bring in some other members to counteract them.

The important point is that you don’t let a mood dictate whether you’re going to meditate or not. Remember, a bad meditation session is better than no meditation session at all. At the very least, you learn to resist the unskillful members of your mind to at least some extent. And only through resisting them can you come to understand them—in the same way that building a dam across a river is a good way to learn how strong the river’s currents are.

If some of your committee members are getting in the way, there are some standard contemplations to counteract them. The purpose of these contemplations is to cut through the mind’s usual narratives and to create some new committee members with new narratives that will help put things into perspective so that you’re more willing to stay with the breath.

The sublime attitudes. The most popular contemplation is to develop attitudes of goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity for all beings, without limit. These attitudes—called brahmaviharas, or sublime attitudes—are so useful that many people make a standard practice of developing them for a few minutes at the beginning of every meditation session regardless of whether there’s a conscious need for them. This helps to clear up any buried resentments from your daily interactions with other people, and reminds you of why you’re meditating: You want to find a happiness that’s secure—which means that it has to be harmless. Meditation is one of the few ways of finding happiness that harms no one at all. At the same time, you’re creating a new narrative for your life: Instead of being a person weighed down by resentments, you show yourself that you can rise above difficult situations and develop a magnanimous heart.

The four sublime attitudes are actually contained in two: goodwill and equanimity. Goodwill is a wish for true happiness, both for yourself and for all others. Compassion is the attitude that goodwill develops when it sees people suffering or acting in ways that will lead to suffering. You want them to stop suffering. Empathetic joy is the attitude that goodwill develops when it sees people happy or acting in ways that will lead to happiness. You want them to continue being happy. Equanimity is the attitude you have to develop when you realize that certain things are beyond your control. If you let yourself get worked up over them, you waste the energy you could have applied to areas where you can have an effect. So you try to put your mind on an even keel toward the things you can’t control, beyond the sway of your likes and dislikes.

Here’s an exercise for developing goodwill and equanimity:

Remind yourself of what goodwill is—a wish for true happiness—and that, in spreading thoughts of goodwill, you’re wishing that you and all others will develop the causes for true happiness. You’re also establishing the intention to further true happiness in any way you can, within your own mind and in your dealings with others. Of course, not everyone will act in line with your wish, which is why it’s important also to develop thoughts of equanimity to cover the cases where people refuse to act in the interests of true happiness. That way you won’t suffer so much when people act unskillfully, and you can stay focused on the cases where you can be of help.

For goodwill, begin by stating in your mind a traditional expression of goodwill for yourself: “May I be happy. May I be free from stress and pain. May I be free from animosity, free from trouble, free from oppression. May I look after myself with ease.”

Then spread similar thoughts to others, in ever-widening circles: people close to your heart, people you like, people you’re neutral about, people you don’t like, people you don’t even know—and not just people: all living beings in all directions. In each case, say to yourself, “May you be happy. May you be free from stress and pain. May you be free from animosity, free from trouble, free from oppression. May you look after yourself with ease.” Think of this wish as spreading out in all directions, out to infinity. It helps to enlarge the mind.

To make this a heart-changing practice, ask yourself—when you’re secure in your goodwill for yourself—if there’s anyone for whom you can’t sincerely spread thoughts of goodwill. If a particular person comes to mind, ask yourself: “What would be gained by this person’s suffering?” Most of the cruelty in the world comes from people who are suffering and fearful. Only rarely do people who’ve been acting unskillfully react skillfully to their suffering and change their ways. All too often they do just the opposite: They hunger to make others suffer even more. So the world would be a better place if we could all simply follow the path to true happiness by being generous and virtuous, and by training the mind.

With these thoughts in mind, see if you can express goodwill for this sort of person: “May you learn the error of your ways, learn the way to true happiness, and look after yourself with ease.” In expressing this thought, you’re not necessarily wishing to love or have continued relations with this person. You’re simply making the determination not to seek revenge against those who have acted harmfully, or those whom you have harmed. This is a gift both to yourself and to those around you.

Conclude the session by developing an attitude of equanimity. Remind yourself that all beings will experience happiness or sorrow in line with their actions. In many cases, their actions lie beyond your control, and your own past actions can’t be erased. In cases where these actions place obstacles in the way of the happiness you wish for all beings, you simply have to accept the fact with equanimity. That way you can focus on areas where you can make a difference through your present actions. This is why the traditional formula for equanimity focuses on the issue of action:

“All living beings are the owners of their actions, heir to their actions, born of their actions, are related through their actions, and live dependent on their actions. Whatever they do, for good or for evil, to that will they fall heir.”

Thinking in this way helps you not to get worked up about what you can’t change, so that you can devote the energy of your goodwill to what you can.

If there are people for whom goodwill is simply too difficult for you to manage right now, you might try developing thoughts of compassion instead. Think of the ways that they may be suffering, to see if that softens your attitude toward them, or helps you understand why they act the way they do. If this is too difficult, you can go straight to thoughts of equanimity about them. In other words, you can remind yourself that you don’t have to settle accounts. You’re better off freeing yourself from the circle of revenge. The principle of action and its results will take care of the situation.

Just that thought can give the mind some space to settle down and develop some concentration.

By spreading thoughts of goodwill and equanimity to all beings, you take your mind out of its everyday narratives and create a broader perspective for your meditation. It’s easiest to settle the mind into the present moment, right here and now, when you’ve let it think for a few moments about the universe as a whole. When you remember that all beings are looking for happiness—sometimes skillfully, more often not—it puts your own quest for happiness in perspective. You want to do it right.

There are other contemplations to counteract specific unskillful moods that might get in the way of your meditation, such as contemplation of your own acts of generosity and virtue for when you’re feeling low self-esteem, contemplation of death for when you’re lazy, or contemplation of the unattractive parts of the body for when you’re overcome with lust. A few of these contemplations are described in more detail in the Appendix.
II : FOCUSING ON THE BREATH

Now you’re ready to focus on the breath. There are six steps:

1. Find a comfortable way of breathing.

Start by taking a couple of deep, long in-and-out breaths. This helps to energize the body for meditation and makes the breath easier to observe. Deep breathing at the beginning of meditation is also a good habit to maintain even as you become more skilled in the practice, for it helps to counteract any tendency to suppress the breath as you try to make the mind still.

Notice where you feel the sensations of breathing in the body: the sensations that tell you, “Now you’re taking an in-breath. Now you’re taking an out-breath.” Notice if they’re comfortable. If they are, keep breathing in that way. If they’re not, adjust the breath so that it’s more comfortable. You can do this in any of three ways:

a. As you continue breathing deep and long, notice where a sense of strain develops in the body toward the end of the in-breath, or where there’s a sense of squeezing the breath out toward the end of the out-breath. Ask yourself if you can relax those sensations with the next breath as you maintain the same breathing rhythm. In other words, can you maintain a sense of relaxation in the areas that have been feeling strained toward the end of the in-breath? Can you breathe out at the same rate without squeezing it out? If you can, keep up that rhythm of breathing.

b. Try changing the rhythm and texture of the breath. Experiment with different ways of breathing to see how they feel. You can make the breath shorter or longer. You can try short in and long out, or long in and short out. You can try faster breathing or slower breathing. Deeper or more shallow. Heavier or lighter. Broader or more narrow. When you find a rhythm that feels good, stick with it as long as it feels good. If, after a while, it doesn’t feel good, you can adjust the breath again.

c. Simply pose the question in the mind each time you breathe in: “What kind of breath would feel especially gratifying right now?” See how your body responds.

2. Stay with each in-and-out breath.

If your attention slips off to something else, bring it right back to the breath. If it wanders off again, bring it back again. If it wanders off 100 times, bring it back 100 times. Don’t get discouraged. Don’t get upset with yourself. Each time you come back, reward yourself with an especially gratifying breath. That way the mind will develop positive associations with the breath. You’ll find it easier to stay with the breath, and to return to it quickly the next time you slip off.

If you get discouraged thinking about how many breaths you’re going to have to stay focused on, tell yourself with each breath: “Just this one in-breath; just this one out-breath.” The task of staying with the breath will then seem less overwhelming, and your thoughts will be more precisely focused on the present.

If you want, you can use a meditation word to help fasten your attention to the breath. Buddho (“awake”) is a popular one. Think bud with the in-breath, and dho with the out. Or you can simply think in and out. Keep the meditation word as long as the breath. When you find that you can stay easily with the breath, drop the meditation word so that you can observe the breath more clearly.

3. When the blatant sensations of breathing are comfortable, expand your awareness to different parts of the body to observe more subtle breathing sensations.

You can do this section-by-section, in any order you like, but in the beginning try to be systematic so that you cover the entire body. Later, when your sensitivity to the body becomes more automatic, you will quickly sense which parts of the body need most attention, and you can direct your attention immediately there. But when you’re starting out, it’s good to have a clear and comprehensive roadmap in mind.

One roadmap is this:


• Start with the area around the navel. Locate that part of the body in your awareness and watch it for a while as you breathe in and breathe out. See what rhythm and texture of breathing feels best right there. If you notice any sense of tension or tightness in that part of the body, allow it to relax, so that no tension builds up as you breathe in, and you don’t hold on to any tension as you breathe out. If you want, you can think of breath energy entering the body right there at the navel, so that you don’t create a sense of strain by trying to pull it there from somewhere else. Have a sense that the breath energy is coming in and out freely and easily. There’s nothing obstructing it.

• When that part of the body feels refreshed, move your attention to different parts of the front of your torso and repeat the same steps. Survey the parts in this order: the lower right-hand corner of the abdomen, the lower left-hand corner of the abdomen; the solar plexus (the spot right in front of your stomach), the right flank (the side of the rib cage), the left flank; the middle of the chest, the spot to the right of that where the chest and the shoulder meet, the same spot on the left. In other words, you move up the front of the torso, focusing first on the center, then on the right, then on the left. Then you move further up the torso and repeat the same pattern.

• You may find, as you focus on the different parts of the body, that the rhythm and texture of the breathing will change to suit that part of the body. This is perfectly fine.

• Then move your attention to the base of the throat and follow the same steps as for the navel.

• Then bring your attention to the middle of the head. As you breathe in and out, think of the breath energy coming in and out not only through the nose, but also through the eyes, the ears, the back of the neck, the top of the head. Think of the energy gently working through any patterns of tension you may feel in the head—in the jaws, around the eyes, in the forehead—and very gently dissolving those patterns of tension away. When the patterns of tension feel relaxed, you can think of the breath energy going deep into the area around the pineal gland, right behind the eyes, and allowing that part of the body to absorb all the incoming breath energy it needs. But be careful not to put too much pressure on the head, because the nerves of the head tend to be overworked. Apply just enough pressure to maintain your focus comfortably.

• Now move your attention to the back of the neck, right at the base of the skull. As you breathe in, think of the breath energy entering the body at that spot and then going down the shoulders, down the arms, out to the tips of the fingers. As you breathe out, think of the energy radiating out from those parts of the body into the air. As you become more sensitive to these parts of the body, notice which side is carrying more tension: the left shoulder or the right shoulder, the left upper arm or the right upper arm, and so on. Whichever side is holding more tension, consciously try to relax that side and keep it relaxed all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out-breath.

If you tend to hold a lot of tension in your hands, spend a fair amount of time releasing the tension along the back of each hand and in each finger.

• Now, keeping your focus at the back of the neck, breathe in with the thought that the energy is going down both sides of the spine down to the tailbone. Repeat the same steps as for the shoulders and arms. In other words, when you breathe out, think of the breath energy radiating out from the back into the air. As you become more sensitive to the back, notice which side is carrying more tension and consciously try to keep that side relaxed all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out-breath.

• Now move your attention down to the tailbone. As you breathe in, think of the breath energy entering the body there, going down past the hips, down the legs, and out to the tips of the toes. Repeat the same steps as for the shoulders and arms. If necessary, you can spend a fair amount of time releasing the tension in your feet and toes.

• That completes one cycle in the survey of the body. If you like, you can go through the body again, beginning at the navel, to see if you can clear up any patterns of tension you may have missed the first time around. You can keep this up as many times as you like until you feel ready to settle down.

The amount of time you spend with each section of the body is up to you. In the beginning, as a general rule of thumb, you might want to spend just a few minutes with each point or section, giving more time to the points on the central meridian of the body than to the points on the side, and even more time to the shoulders, back, and legs. As you become more familiar with the energy patterns in your own body, you can adjust the time spent on each point as you see fit. If one point or section seems to respond especially well to your attention, releasing tension in a refreshing way, stick with that point as long as it responds. If a point or section doesn’t respond after several minutes of attention—or if you find that tension increases when you focus on it—drop it for the time being and move on to the next point.

If your time for meditation is limited, you might want to limit your survey to the center points on the front of the torso—navel, solar plexus, middle of the chest—and then to the base of the throat and the middle of the head.

If focusing in the head gives you a headache, avoid focusing there until you learn how to maintain focus with a minimum of pressure.

4. Choose a spot to settle down.

You can choose any spot you like where the breath energy is clear and you find it easy to stay focused. A few of the traditional spots are:


a. the tip of the nose,

b. the point between the eyebrows,

c. the middle of the forehead,

d. the top of the head,

e. the middle of the head,

f. the palate,

g. the back of the neck at the base of the skull,

h. the base of the throat,

i. the breastbone (the tip of the sternum),

j. the navel (or a point just above it),

k. the base of the spine.

Over the course of several meditations, you can experiment with different spots to see which ones give the best results. You may also find that other spots not mentioned on this list are also congenial. Or you may find that keeping track of two spots at once—say, the middle of the head and the base of the spine—helps to keep your attention fixed more firmly than focusing just on one spot. Ultimately, you want to be able to keep your attention focused on any spot in the body. This ability will be useful when you’re suffering from a disease or injury, as you can sometimes speed healing by focusing on the breath energy at particular spots in the body.

5. Spread your awareness from that spot so that it fills the body through every in-and-out breath.

Think of a lit candle in the middle of an otherwise dark room. The flame of the candle is in one spot, but its light fills the entire room. You want your awareness to be centered but broad in just the same way. Your sense of awareness may have a tendency to shrink—especially as you breathe out—so remind yourself with every breath: “whole body breathing in, whole body breathing out.” This full-body awareness helps to keep you from getting drowsy when the breath gets comfortable, and from losing focus as the breath gets more subtle.

6. Think of the breath energy coursing through the whole body with every in-and-out breath.

Let the breath find whatever rhythm or texture feels best. Think of all the breath energies connecting with one another and flowing in harmony. The more fully they’re connected, the more effortless your breathing will be. If you have a sense that the breath-channels are open during the in-breath but close during the out-breath, adjust your perception to keep them open throughout the breathing cycle.

Then simply maintain that sense of whole-body breathing throughout the remainder of your meditation. If the breath grows still, don’t worry. The body will breathe if it needs to. When the mind is still, the brain uses less oxygen, so the oxygen that the body receives passively—through the lungs and perhaps through the relaxed pores (anatomists have differing opinions on this)—will be enough to serve its needs. At the same time, however, don’t force the breath to stop. Let it follow its own rhythm. Your duty is simply to maintain a broad, centered awareness and to allow the breath to flow freely throughout the body.

If you find that you lose focus when you spread your awareness through the body, you can return to the survey of the different parts, try a meditation word, or simply stay focused on one point until you feel ready to try full-body awareness again.

Variations. As you get more familiar with the meditation and with the problems you encounter while doing it, you can adjust these steps as you see fit. In fact, gaining a sense of how to adjust things—to learn from your own experimentation—is an important principle in using breath meditation to develop discernment.

For example, you may want to change the order of the steps. You might find that you can more easily find a comfortable way of breathing (step one) if you first develop a full-body awareness (step five). Or you might find that you need to force the mind to settle down firmly in a single spot for a while (step four) before you can explore the breath sensations in the rest of the body (step three). You might find that after you’ve chosen one spot to stay settled in (step four), you want to focus on two spots at once for a while before you move on to spreading your awareness to the whole body (step five).

Another way of adjusting the steps is to vary what you do within a particular step. Step three—exploring the subtle breath sensations in the body—allows for an especially wide range of variation. You might want to start your survey at the back of the neck, thinking of the breath energy entering the body there from the back and then going down through the spine, and ultimately out the legs to the tips of the toes and the spaces between the toes. Then think of the breath coming in the back of the neck going down through the shoulders and out through the arms to the fingers and the spaces between the fingers. Then move your attention to the breath sensations in the front of the torso.

Or you might want to go through the body very quickly at first, and then repeat the survey more methodically.

Or you might visualize changing the direction of how the breath sensations flow through the body. For instance, instead of thinking of the breath flowing down the spine and out the feet, you might think of it coming up from the feet, going up the spine, and then either going out the top of the head or over the top of the head and down through your throat and out the area in front of the heart.

Or you might sense that there are breath energies surrounding the body like a cocoon. When this happens, try to get a sense of how to tell when these energies are in harmony, when they’re in conflict, and how to bring them from conflict to harmony in a way that nourishes the energies inside the body. One way of doing this is to visualize these energies as all flowing in one direction—say, from the head to the toes—and then, after a while, visualizing them all flowing in the other direction. Notice which direction feels more comfortable, and then stick with that. If the cocoon of breath energies feels comfortable, you can experiment with ways of using that comfortable energy to heal parts of the body that feel tight or in pain.

Another way of adjusting the steps, on certain occasions, is to focus on only a few of the steps. There are two main situations in which you might want to try this:


• When you’re first getting started and you find that the more broadly focused steps—3, 5, and 6—are hard to follow without getting distracted, you can skip them for the time being and focus first on the more narrowly focused steps—1, 2, and 4—until you can stay with them consistently. Only then should you expand your practice to include the other three. However many sessions of meditation this may take doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re able to maintain a comfortable center. That will help you add the remaining steps with a greater sense of stability.

• When you’re skilled at combining all six steps and you want to gain practice in bringing the mind to stillness as quickly as possible, you can focus on steps 4, 5, and 6. In other words, once you’ve learned from experience where your mind feels most comfortably centered, try settling down quickly in that spot, allow it to get comfortable, and then see how quickly you can spread your awareness along with the comfortable breath to fill the entire body and then keep it filled. This is a useful skill to develop, not only in the context of formal meditation, but also in daily life. This point will be discussed further in Part Three.

These are just a few of the ways you might want to experiment. In general, though, it’s usually best to begin with the six steps, in order, so as to have a clear roadmap in mind each time you sit down to meditate. That way, when you’ve wandered off, you’ll find it easier to pick up where you left off. And if a particular stage in the practice goes especially well, you’ll be better able to remember it because you know where it is on the map.
III : LEAVING MEDITATION

There are three steps to leaving meditation skillfully.

1. Reflect on how your meditation went.

The purpose here is to pick up useful points for the next time you meditate. Was there any time during the past session that the mind felt especially calm and centered? If there was, ask yourself, “Where were you focused? What was the quality of your focus? What was the quality of your breath? What did you do leading up to that point in your meditation?” Try to remember these things for the next session. You may find that you can re-create that sensation of calm just by repeating the same steps. If you can’t, put that memory aside and focus totally on what you’re doing in the present. Try to be more observant of these things the next time. It’s through being observant that the meditation develops as a skill and gives more reliable results. It’s like being a good cook: If you notice which foods please the people you’re cooking for, you give them more of the same, and eventually you’ll get a bonus or a raise in pay.

2. Spread thoughts of goodwill again.

Think of whatever peace and calm you felt for the past session, and dedicate it to other beings: either specific people you know who are suffering right now, or all living beings in all directions—all our companions in birth, aging, illness, and death. May we all find peace and well-being in our hearts.

3. Try to stay sensitive to the breath energy in the body as you open your eyes and leave the meditation posture.

Don’t let your awareness of the visual field crowd out your awareness of the body-field. And don’t let your concern for your next activity cause you to drop your awareness of the breath energy in the body. Try to maintain that sense of full-body awareness as consistently as you can. You may not be able to keep track of the in-and-out breath as you engage in other activities, but you can maintain an overall sense of the quality of breath energy throughout the body. Keep it relaxed and flowing. Notice when you lose your awareness of it; notice how you can regain it. Try to keep the sense of awareness of the breath energy in the body as constant as you can until the next time you sit down to meditate. This way you maintain a solid, nourishing foundation for the mind as you go through the day. This gives you a sense of groundedness. That groundedness provides not only a sense of security and inner ease, but also a basis for observing the movements of the mind. This is one of the ways in which steady mindfulness and alertness form a foundation for insight.

In other words, the most skillful way to leave meditation is not to leave it entirely. Keep it going as much and as long as you can.
IV : MEDITATING IN OTHER POSTURES
Walking Meditation

Walking meditation is a good transition between maintaining a still mind when the body is still, and maintaining a still mind in the midst of all your activities. As you walk in a meditative way, you gain practice in protecting the stillness of the mind in the midst of the motion of the body, while at the same time dealing with the fewest possible outside distractions.

An ideal time to practice walking meditation is right after you’ve been doing sitting meditation, so that you can bring a mind already stilled, to at least some extent, to the practice.

Some people, though, find that the mind settles down more quickly while sitting if they’ve done a session of walking meditation first. This is a matter of personal temperament.

If you’re meditating right after a meal, it’s wise to do walking meditation rather than sitting meditation, for the motion of the body helps both to digest your food and to ward off drowsiness.

There are two ways of practicing walking meditation: walking back and forth on a set path, and going for a stroll. The first way is more conducive for helping the mind to settle down; the second is more convenient when you don’t have access to an undisturbed path where you can walk back and forth without rousing curiosity or concerns from other people.

1. Walking on a path. Choose a level path anywhere from 20 to 70 paces long. Ideally, it should be a straight path, but if you can’t find a straight path that long, try an L-shaped or a U-shaped path. If you’re going to time your meditation, set the timer and put it someplace near the path but facing away so that you won’t be able to see how much time is left while you’re walking.

Stand at one end of the path for a moment. Gently clasp one hand with the other, either in front of you or behind you, and let your arms hang down comfortably. If you have your hands in front of you, have both palms facing your body. If behind you, have both palms facing away from your body. Close your eyes and check to see if your body feels properly aligned, leaning neither to the left nor to the right. If it feels out of alignment, relax the muscles that are pulling it out of alignment, so that your body is as balanced as possible.

Bring your attention to the breath. Take a couple of long, deep in-and-out breaths, and focus your attention on the breath sensations in one part of the body. It’s usually wise, in the beginning, to choose a point anywhere on a line drawn down the middle of the front of your torso. If you focus in your head, you tend to stay in your head: You don’t get a clear sense of the body walking, and it’s easy to slip off into thoughts of the past and future. If you focus on a point on one side of the body, it can pull you out of balance.

However, if in the beginning you find it hard to keep track of a still point in the torso, you can simply stay aware of the movement of your legs or feet, or of the sensations in your hands. As your mind settles down, you can then try finding a comfortable place in the torso.

Breathe in a way that allows the spot you’ve chosen to feel comfortable, open, and refreshed.

Open your eyes and gaze either straight ahead of you, or down at the path several paces in front of you, but don’t let your head tilt forward. Keep it straight.

Make sure that you’re still clearly aware of the point of your internal focus on the breath, and then start walking. Walk at a normal pace, or slightly slower than normal. Don’t gaze around while you walk. Maintain your inner attention at your chosen point in the body all along the path. Allow the breath to find a comfortable rhythm. There’s no need to breathe in sync with your steps.

When you reach the other end of the path, stop for a moment to make sure that your attention is still with your chosen point. If it’s wandered off, bring it back. Then turn to face in the opposite direction and walk back to where you started, maintaining focus on your chosen point. Stop at that end of the path for a moment again, to make sure that your attention is still with your chosen point. Then turn to face in the opposite direction and walk back again. If you find it helpful in calming the mind, you can decide beforehand to turn either clockwise or counter-clockwise each time you turn.

Repeat these steps until your predetermined time is over.

In the beginning it’s best to focus on maintaining your attention at your one chosen point in the body as much as you can, as you would in step 4 of the sitting meditation. This is because you’re balancing attention to several things at once: your chosen point, the fact that you’re walking, and the fact that you have to be aware enough of your surroundings so that you don’t stray off the path, walk past the designated end, or bump into anything. That’s enough to keep you fully occupied at first.

As you get more proficient at this, you can start paying more attention to how the breath energies flow in the different parts of your body as you walk—while at the same time maintaining the primary focus at your chosen point—in much the same way that you maintain a centered but broad awareness in step 5 of the sitting meditation. You can make a game of seeing how quickly you can move from being focused comfortably on one spot to spreading your awareness and the sense of comfort throughout the body. Once it’s spread, see how long you can keep it that way as you continue walking. As we’ll see in Part Three, this is an important skill to develop to maintain a sense of secure well-being throughout daily life.

Some people find that their minds can gather into strong concentration while walking. But generally, you’ll find that you can get into deeper concentration while sitting than while walking, because you have more things to keep track of while you’re walking. However, the fact that your attention has to move between three things when you’re walking—your still point, the motion of your walking, and an awareness of your surroundings—means that you get to see clearly the movements of the mind in a restricted field. This provides a good opportunity for observing them carefully and for gaining insight into their various ways of deceiving you.

For instance, you’ll come to notice how unbidden thoughts try to take advantage of the fact that the mind is moving quickly among three things. These thoughts slip into that movement and hijack it, directing it away from your meditation. As soon as you notice this happening, stop walking for a moment, return your attention to your chosen spot, and then resume walking. Ultimately you’ll see the movement of those unbidden thoughts but won’t move along with them. When you don’t move with them, they go for just a little way and then disappear. This is an important skill in gaining insight into the workings of the mind.

2. Going for a stroll. If you’re going to practice walking meditation by going for a stroll, you have to lay down a few rules for yourself so that it doesn’t turn into just an ordinary stroll.

Choose an area that’s relatively quiet and where you won’t run into people who will want you to stop and chat with them. A park is good, as is a quiet, backcountry lane. If you’re walking around your neighborhood, go in a direction you don’t normally go and where the neighbors won’t try to engage you in conversations. If someone does call out to you, make it a rule that you’ll nod and smile in response, but won’t say any more words than are necessary.

Before you start your walk, stand for a moment to put your body in alignment, and bring your attention to your chosen spot for observing the breath. Breathe in a way that keeps that spot comfortable and refreshed. Think of it as a bowl filled to the brim with water, and you don’t want to spill a drop.

Walk at a normal pace in a manner that’s composed but doesn’t look unnatural. You want to keep your secret: that you’re doing walking meditation and you don’t want anyone else to know. Gaze around only as much as is necessary and appropriate to keep yourself safe.

If your thoughts start wandering off, stop for a moment and reestablish your primary focus at your chosen point. Take a couple of especially refreshing breaths, and then resume walking. If people are around, and you don’t want to call attention to yourself, pretend that you’re looking at something to the side of your path while reestablishing your focus.

Whether you practice walking meditation on a set path or as a stroll, conclude the session by standing still for a moment and following the three steps for leaving meditation, as discussed under section III, above.
Standing Meditation

Standing meditation is rarely done on its own. It’s more often done as a part of walking meditation. It’s especially good for five situations while you’re walking:

1. When your thoughts slip away from the breath, stop and stand for a moment until you can reestablish your focus at your chosen point. Then resume walking. If your mind is especially restless, you may want to stand for a while. In this case, take advantage of the fact that you’re standing still, close your eyes, and see if the body feels aligned. If you’re slouching, straighten up, pull in your stomach a bit, pull your shoulders back and then down a bit, to create a slight arch in your back. If you’re leaning to one side or the other, relax whichever muscles are pulling you out of alignment. Then relax into this straightened posture so that you can maintain it with a minimum of strain.

2. When the walking has you fatigued but you aren’t yet ready to stop walking meditation, stand for a few minutes to rest, paying attention to your posture as in step 1.

3. When you’re trying to master the skill of spreading your awareness, along with the comfortable breath, from one spot to fill the entire body, you might find it easier to do this while you’re standing still. Once it’s spread, resume walking. If you lose that sense of the entire body, stop and stand still so that you can recover it more easily.

4. When the mind, in spite of the movement of the body, gathers into a strong sense of concentration, stop and stand still to allow it to gather fully. Some meditators arrange a place next to their meditation path where they can sit down if the mind gathers so strongly that even standing still is a distraction.

5. When an interesting insight into the mind comes to you while you’re walking, stop and stand so that you can observe it more carefully. In cases like this, you may not want to devote too much attention to your posture, as that might distract you from what you’re observing in the mind.

As a general rule, while standing, keep your hands clasped in front of you or behind you as you would when walking.
Meditation Lying Down

To meditate while lying down is very conducive for attaining strong concentration. Some people find that it’s actually more conducive for concentration than the sitting posture.

However, it’s also conducive for falling asleep. This is why your main concern when meditating while lying down is to stay awake.

It’s generally better to meditate while lying on your right side, rather than on your left side, on your back, or on your stomach. If you have to lie down for long periods of time—as when you’re ill—there’s nothing wrong with shifting your posture among these four lying postures and meditating all the while.

However, lying on the right side has three advantages. First is that the heart is above the head, which improves the blood flow to the brain. (This means that if your physiology is reversed, with the heart on your right side, you’d do better to meditate while lying on your left side.) Second, it’s better for digestion. Third—and here lying on the right side shares this point with lying on the left—you can make a point of placing one foot on top of the other and keeping it there, not allowing it to slip off. The amount of attention this requires you to devote to your feet can help keep you awake.

Have your head supported with a pillow at the proper height for keeping your spine relatively straight. If you’re lying on your right side, place your right arm slightly in front of you so that the body doesn’t weigh on it. Fold your arm so that your right hand is lying palm-up in front of your face. Allow your left arm to lie straight along the body, with your left palm facing down.

The steps for surveying your mind, focusing on the breath, and leaving meditation are the same as for sitting meditation.
V : BECOMING A MEDITATOR

Meditating is one thing. Becoming a meditator is something else. It means developing a set of inner identities around the activities of meditation. Ideally, as you meditate, these identities should take on growing influence within your inner committee.

The activities around which these identities grow are the three needed for concentration: mindfulness, alertness, and ardency. When you focus on the breath in line with the above instructions, mindfulness is what keeps the instructions in mind, alertness is what watches what you’re doing and the results that come from what you’re doing, while ardency is what tries to do it well. When you slip off the breath, ardency tries to come right back to the breath as quickly as possible. While you’re with the breath, ardency tries to be as sensitive as possible to what’s going well and what isn’t. When things aren’t going well, it tries to figure out why, so that it can improve them. When they are going well, it tries to maintain them so that they can grow.

As these qualities get stronger with practice, they begin to coalesce into two distinct identities, two new members of your mind’s committee. The more passive of the two is the observer, which develops around alertness. This is the part of the mind that steps back a bit and simply watches what’s going on with a minimum of interference. As it develops, it gives you practice in exercising your patient endurance—your ability to stick with things even when they’re unpleasant—and in exercising your equanimity, your ability not to react to things, so that you can see them clearly for what they are.

The more active of the two identities is the doer, which develops around mindfulness and ardency. This is the part that tries to make things go well; that, when they aren’t going well, asks questions and investigates to understand why, tries to remember what worked in the past, and then decides how to respond—when it’s best to interfere and when it’s not. When things are going well, this identity tries to keep them going well. Over the course of time, you’ll find that the doer can assume many roles, such as the investigator and the director. This part exercises your ingenuity and imagination, as you try to shape things in the best possible direction.

These two identities help each other along. The observer provides the doer with accurate information on which to base its decisions so that it doesn’t simply try to force its will on things and deny when it’s done harm. The doer does its best to make sure that the observer doesn’t lose balance and start providing biased information—as when it’s tempted to stay focused on one side of an issue and to ignore another side. Sometimes the back-and-forth between these two identities is fairly quick. At other times—especially when you can’t figure something out and simply have to watch what’s going on—you’ll find yourself identifying with the observer for a fairly long time before gaining enough information to pass on to the doer.

A large part of the skill in meditating is learning when to assume these identities while you practice. They’re especially helpful in dealing with problems in the mind, as we’ll see in Part Two. When you’re faced with pain, for instance, they provide you with alternative identities that you can assume in relation to the pain. Instead of having to be the victim of the pain, you can be the observer of the pain. Or you can take on the role of the investigator, trying to figure out what the pain is and why the mind is turning it into a burden.

Similarly, when an unskillful emotion comes into the mind, you don’t have to identify yourself as the person who feels the emotion or agrees with it. You can be the observer, stepping back from the emotion. Or, as the doer, you can be the investigator, taking the emotion apart; or the director, assembling a new emotion to replace it.

As your concentration strengthens, the observer and doer will continue to be helpful. On the level of strong concentration called jhana (see Part Four), they turn into a factor called evaluation: the discernment factor that helps to settle the mind down through understanding its needs and providing for them. The observer acts as the passive side of evaluation, the doer acts as the active side. Working together, they can take you far in the practice.

So even though these members of your committee are forms of becoming, they’re useful forms. Don’t throw them away until you reach the point where they have no more help to offer. In the meantime, get to know them by exercising them. Because your mind’s committee has a lot of unskillful members, you’ll need all the inner help you can get.

ADDITIONAL READINGS:

On meditation as a skill: “The Joy of Effort” and “Strength Training for the Mind” in Head & Heart Together; “Joy in Effort” in Meditations5; “Adolescent Practice” in Meditations2

A talk by Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo—“Observe & Evaluate” in Inner Strength—also gives a good perspective on meditation as a skill.

On the role of desire and imagination in the practice: “Pushing the Limits” in Purity of Heart

On the relationship between mindfulness and concentration: “The Path of Concentration & Mindfulness” in Noble Strategy

For more advanced discussions of mindfulness and concentration: Right Mindfulness; Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo – Frames of Reference

On breath meditation: Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo, Keeping the Breath in Mind, in particular “Method 2.” Ajaan Lee’s talks in Lessons in Samadhi are very useful for getting a fuller perspective on his approach to breath meditation, as are the talks in the section of Inner Strength entitled, “Inner Skill.” The short fragments in the sections of The Skill of Release entitled “Beginning Concentration,” “The Basics of Breathing,” and “All-around Discernment” offer useful tips.

For more useful tips, see the sections of Ajaan Fuang Jotiko – Awareness Itself entitled, “Meditation,” “Breathing,” “Visions & Signs,” and “Right at Awareness”

On the brahmaviharas: “Head & Heart Together” in Head & Heart Together; “Metta Means Good Will” and “The Limits of the Unlimited Attitudes” in Beyond All Directions; “The Sublime Attitudes” in Meditations2

On walking meditation: “Walking Meditation: Stillness in Motion” in Meditations4

For short talks to read before you meditate: any of the books in the Meditations series
RECORDINGS OF RELEVANT TALKS AND (TRANSCRIPTS):

2012/2/4: In Shape to Meditate (read)

2004/7/24: Maintaining Goodwill (read)

2005/9/2: Metta Meditation (read)

2011/12/21: Goodwill and Heedfulness (read)

The collection of talks entitled Basics contains many talks dealing with issues that arise as you start learning how to focus on the breath.

2011/8/10: Gather ’Round the Breath (read)

2006/11/3: Allowing the Breath to Spread (read)

2010/2/7: Brahmaviharas at the Breath (read)

2011/12/5: Turn Off the Automatic Pilot (read)

2012/7/21: Choiceful Awareness (read)

2011/8/16: Artillery All Around (read)

2011/12/6: Views, Virtue, & Mindfulness (read)

2005/4/22: Ekaggata (read)

2011/4/10: Training Your Minds (read)

2011/9/27: Equanimity (read)

2012/1/21: A Mirror for the Mind (read)

2007/5/8: Centered in the Body (read)

2010/3/28: Mindful Judgment (read)

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PART FIVE Finding a Teacher
NAVIGATIONBooks/With Each And Every Breath/Finding a Teacher

Every earnest meditator needs a teacher. Because meditation is training in new ways to act, you learn best when you can watch an experienced meditator in action and at the same time can let an experienced meditator watch you in action. That way you tap into the accumulated wisdom of the lineage of teachers stretching back to the Buddha, and don’t have to work through every problem completely on your own. You don’t have to keep reinventing the Dhamma wheel from scratch.

At the same time, a teacher is often needed to help you see areas of your practice that you may not recognize as problems. This is because, when you’re deluded, you don’t know you’re deluded. So one of the basic principles of the practice is to open your behavior not only to your own scrutiny but also to the scrutiny of a teacher whose knowledge and goodwill you trust. That way you learn how to be open with others—and yourself—about your mistakes, in an environment where you’re most likely to be willing to learn.

This is especially important when you’re learning a skill—which is what meditation is. You can learn from books and talks, but when the time comes to practice you’ll encounter the main issue that no book or talk can cover: knowing how to judge which lesson to apply to which situation. If you’re not getting results, is it because you’re not putting in enough effort? Or are you making the wrong sort of effort? In the words of the Pali Canon, are you squeezing a cow’s horn in the effort to get milk when you should be squeezing the udder? Only someone who has faced the same problem, and who knows what you’ve been doing, is in a position to help you answer questions like these.

Also, if you’ve suffered emotional trauma or are dealing with an addiction, you need guidance specifically tailored to your strengths and weaknesses—something no book can provide. Even if you don’t suffer from these issues, a teaching tailored to your needs can save you a lot of wasted time and effort, and can help prevent you from going down some wrong, dead-end roads. This is why the Buddha didn’t write meditation guides like this, and instead set up the monastic training as a form of apprenticeship. Meditation skills are best passed down person-to-person.

For these reasons, if you really want to become skillful in your thoughts, words, and deeds, you need to find a trustworthy teacher to point out your blind spots. And because those spots are blindest around your unskillful habits, the primary duty of the teacher is to point out your faults—for only when you see your faults can you correct them; only when you correct them are you benefiting from your teacher’s compassion in pointing them out.

This means that the first prerequisite in benefiting from a teacher is being willing to take criticism, both gentle and harsh. This is why genuine teachers don’t teach for money. If the teacher must be paid, the person paying is the one determining what’s taught, and people rarely pay for the criticism they need to hear.

But even if the teacher is teaching for free, you run into an uncomfortable truth: You can’t open your heart to just anyone. Not everyone who is certified as a teacher is really qualified to be a teacher. When you listen to a teacher, you’re adding that teacher’s voice to the committee of your mind, passing judgments on your actions, so you want to make sure that that voice will be a positive addition. As the Buddha pointed out, if you can’t find a trustworthy teacher, you’re better off practicing on your own. An unqualified teacher can do more harm than good. You have to take care in choosing a teacher whose judgments will influence the way you shape your mind.

To take care means not falling into the easy trap of being judgmental or non-judgmental—judgmental in trusting your knee-jerk likes or dislikes, non-judgmental in trusting that every meditation teacher would be equally beneficial as a guide. Instead, be judicious in choosing the person whose judgments you’re going to take on as your own.

This, of course, sounds like a Catch-22: You need a good teacher to help develop your powers of judgment, but well-developed powers of judgment to recognize who a good teacher might be. And even though there’s no foolproof way out of the catch—after all, you can master a foolproof way and still be a fool—there is a way if you’re willing to learn from experience.

The first step in learning to be judicious is to remember what it means to judge in a helpful way. Think, not of a Supreme Court Justice sitting on her bench, passing a final verdict of guilt or innocence, but of a piano teacher listening to you play. She’s not passing a final verdict on your potential as a pianist. Instead, she’s judging a work in progress: listening to your intention for the performance, listening to your execution of that intention, and then deciding whether it works. If it doesn’t, she has to figure out if the problem is with the intention or the execution, make helpful suggestions, and then let you try again. She keeps this up until she’s satisfied with your performance. The important principle is that she never direct her judgments at you as a person. Instead she has to stay focused on your actions, to keep looking for better ways to raise them to higher and higher standards.

At the same time, you’re learning from her how to judge your own playing: thinking more carefully about your intention, listening more carefully to your execution, developing higher standards for what works, and learning to think outside of the box for ways to improve. Most important of all, you’re learning to focus your judgment on your performance—your actions—and not on yourself. This way, when there’s less you invested in your habits, you’re more willing to recognize unskillful habits and to drop them in favor of more skillful ones.

Of course, when you and your teacher are judging your improvement on a particular piece, it’s part of a longer process of judging how well the relationship is working. She has to judge, over time, if you’re benefiting from her guidance, and so do you. But again, neither of you is judging the worth of the other person.

In the same way, when you’re evaluating a potential meditation teacher, look for someone who will evaluate your actions as a work in progress. And apply the same standard to him or her. Even teachers who can read minds need to get to know you over time to sense what might and might not work in your particular case. The best teachers are those who say, “Try this. If it doesn’t work out, come back and let me know what happened, so we can figure out what might work for you.” Beware of teachers who tell you not to think about what you’re doing, or who try to force you into a one-size-fits-all technique. The relationship should be one of trying things out together.

So when judging a teacher, you’re not trying to take on the superhuman role of evaluating another person’s essential worth. After all, the only way we know anything about other people is through their actions, so that’s as far as our judgments can fairly extend.

At the same time, though, because you’re judging whether you want to internalize another person’s standards, it’s not unfair to pass judgment on what that person is doing. It’s for your own protection. This is why you should look for two qualities in a teacher: wisdom and integrity. To gauge these qualities, though, takes time and sensitivity. You have to be willing to spend time with the person and try to be really observant of how that person acts, because you can’t judge people just by first impressions. Integrity is easy to talk about, and the appearance of wisdom is easy to fake—especially if the teacher has psychic powers. It’s important to remember that powers of that sort simply come from a concentrated mind. They’re no guarantee of wisdom and integrity. And if they’re exercised without wisdom and integrity, you’re better off staying away.

So your search has to ignore flashy qualities and focus on qualities that are more plain and down-to-earth. To save time and needless pain in the search, there are four early warning signs indicating that potential teachers don’t have the wisdom or integrity to merit your trust.

The warning signs for untrustworthy wisdom are two. The first is when people show no gratitude for the help they’ve received—and this applies especially to help from their parents and teachers. If they deprecate their teachers, you have to wonder if they have anything of value to pass on to you. People with no gratitude don’t appreciate goodness, don’t value the effort that goes into being helpful, and so will probably not put out that effort themselves.

The second warning sign is that they don’t hold to the principle of karma. They either deny that we have freedom of choice, or else teach that one person can clear away another person’s bad karma from the past. People of this sort are unlikely to put forth the effort to be genuinely skillful, and so are untrustworthy guides.

Lack of integrity also has two warning signs. The first is when people feel no shame in telling a deliberate lie. The second is when they don’t conduct arguments in a fair and aboveboard manner: misrepresenting their opponents, pouncing on the other side’s minor lapses, not acknowledging the valid points the other side has made. People of this sort aren’t even worth talking to, much less taking on as teachers.

As for people who don’t display these early warning signs, there are some questions you can ask yourself about their behavior to gauge the level of wisdom and integrity in their actions over time.

One question is whether a teacher’s actions betray any of the greed, anger, or delusion that would inspire him to claim knowledge of something he didn’t know, or to tell another person to do something that was not in that person’s best interests. To test for a teacher’s wisdom, notice how he or she responds to questions about what’s skillful and what’s not, and how well he or she handles adversity. To test for integrity, look for virtue in day-to-day activities, and purity in the teacher’s dealings with others. Does this person make excuses for breaking the precepts, bringing the precepts down to his level of behavior rather than lifting his behavior to theirs? Does he take unfair advantage of other people? If so, you’d better find another teacher.

This, however, is where another uncomfortable truth comes in: You can’t be a fair judge of another person’s integrity until you’ve developed some of your own. This is probably the most uncomfortable truth of all, for it requires that you accept responsibility for your judgments. If you want to test other people’s potential for good guidance, you have to pass a few tests yourself. Again, it’s like listening to a pianist. The better you are as a pianist, the better your ability to judge the other person’s playing.

Fortunately, there are guidelines for developing integrity, and they don’t require that you start out innately good. All they require is a measure of truthfulness and maturity: the realization that your actions make all the difference in your life, so you have to take care in how you act, looking carefully at your motivation for acting and at the actual results that come when you act. Before you act in thought, word, or deed, look at the results you expect from your action. If it’s going to harm you or anyone else, don’t do it. If you don’t foresee any harm, go ahead and act. While you’re acting, check to see if you’re causing any unforeseen harm. If you are, stop. If not, continue until you’re done. After you’re done, look at the long-term results of your action. If it caused any harm, talk it over with someone else on the path, develop a healthy sense of shame around the mistake, and resolve not to repeat it. If it caused no harm, take joy in the fact and keep on training.

As you train yourself in this way, you get more sensitive to what is and isn’t skillful, because you’re more sensitive to the connections between actions and their results. This helps you become a better judge of a potential teacher in two ways, both in judging the teacher’s actions and in evaluating the advice the teacher gives you.

For the only way really to evaluate that advice is to see what results it gives when put into action: your own actions. If acting in that way fosters within you such admirable qualities as being dispassionate, modest, content, energetic, and unburdensome, the advice to act that way is the genuine thing. The person who gives you that advice has passed at least that test for being a genuine friend. And you’re learning still more about how to judge for yourself.

Some people might object that it’s selfish and inhumane to keep testing people to see if they fit the bill, but remember: In testing a teacher you’re also testing yourself. As you assimilate the qualities of an admirable teacher, you become the sort of person who can offer admirable help to others. Again, it’s like practicing under a good piano teacher. As you improve as a pianist, you’re not the only one who can enjoy your playing. The better you get, the more joy you bring to others. The better you understand the process of playing, the more effectively you can teach anyone who sincerely wants to learn from you. This is how teaching lineages of high caliber get established for the benefit of the world.

So when you find an admirable meditation teacher, you’re tapping into a long lineage of admirable teachers, stretching back to the Buddha, and helping it to extend into the future. Joining this lineage may require accepting some uncomfortable truths, such as the need to learn from criticism and to take responsibility for your actions. But if you’re up for the challenge, you learn to take this human power of judgment—which, when untrained, can so easily cause harm—and train it for the greater good.

ADDITIONAL READINGS:

On the need for advice in the practice: “Lost in Quotation” in Beyond All Directions

On the most important external factor in reaching awakening: “Admirable Friendship” in Meditations

On wise vs. unwise ways of using your powers of judgment, see “Judicious vs. Judgmental” in Meditations

On the teacher-student relationship: “Think like a Thief” in Head & Heart Together

Passages from the Pali Canon discussing what to look for in a teacher are included in the study guide, Into the Stream.

On the values of the practice: “The Customs of the Noble Ones”

On non-Buddhist values that have shaped the way Dhamma is often taught in the West: “The Roots of Buddhist Romanticism” in Purity of Heart
RECORDINGS OF RELEVANT TALKS AND (TRANSCRIPTS):

2009/7/30: Admirable Friendship (read)

2011/5/14: To Purify the Heart (read)

2011/4/5: Remembering Ajaan Suwat (read)

2011/1/25: Multi-dimensional Dhamma (read)

2007/7/21: Factors for Stream Entry (read)

2008/10/21: The Brightness of the World (read)

2007/3/20: A Refuge from Modern Values (read)
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