Quiet Breathing

Now I'd like to explain a little about how to meditate. Sitting in meditation is a worthwhile activity. The outer part of the activity is to sit in a half-lotus position with your right leg on top of your left leg; your hands palm-up in your lap, your right hand on top of your left. Keep your body erect. Close your eyes, but don't close them off like a person asleep. Your optic nerves have to keep working to some extent or else you'll get drowsy.

These activities are the outer aspects of good meditation, but they aren't what makes the meditation good. You also need to have the right object for the mind to dwell on, and the right intention: the intention to keep the in-and-out breath in mind, to adjust it so that it's comfortable, and to keep the breath and mind together so that they don't slip away from each other. When you can do this properly, you'll gain beneficial results in terms of both body and mind — i.e., the right quality you're looking for, termed "inner worth," which means a soothing sense of ease, comfort, fullness, and well-being.

When you sit and meditate, keep noticing whether or not your mind is staying with the in-and-out breath. You have to keep mindfulness in charge of the mind. For example, when you breathe in, think bud; when you breathe out, think dho. Bud-dho. Be mindful. Don't let yourself forget or slip away. Put aside all your outside responsibilities and let go of all outside thoughts and perceptions. Keep your mind with nothing but the breath. You don't have to turn your attention to anything else.

Usually when you sit and meditate, though, thoughts of past and future tend to appear and get in the way of the quality of your meditation. Thoughts of this sort — whether they're about things past or yet to come, about the world or the Dhamma — have no good to them at all. They'll simply cause you trouble and suffering. They make the mind restless and disturbed so that it can't gain any peace and calm — because things that are past have already passed. There's no way you can bring them back or change them. Things in the future haven't reached us yet, so we can't know whether or not they'll be in line with our expectations. They're far away and uncertain, so there's no way they'll be any help to our thinking at all.

For this reason, we have to keep hold on the mind to keep it in the present by fixing it on nothing but the breath. To think about the breath is called directed thought, as when we think buddho together with the breath — bud in, dho out, like we're doing right now. When we start evaluating the breath, we let go of buddho and start observing how far the effects of each in-and-out breath can be felt in the body. When the breath comes in, does it feel comfortable or not? When it goes out, does it feel relaxed or not? If it doesn't feel comfortable and relaxed, change it. When you keep the mind preoccupied with investigating the breath, let go of buddho. You don't have any need for it. Mindful awareness will fill the body, and the in-breath will start to feel as if it's permeating the body throughout. When we let go of buddho, our evaluation of the breath becomes more refined; the movement of the mind will calm down and become concentration; outside perceptions will fall silent. "Falling silent" doesn't mean that our ears go blank or become deaf. It means that our attention doesn't go running to outside perceptions or to thoughts of past or future. Instead, it stays exclusively in the present.

When we fix our attention on the breath in this way, constantly keeping watch and being observant of how the breath is flowing, we'll come to know what the in-breath and out-breath are like, whether or not they're comfortable, what way of breathing in makes us feel good, what way of breathing out makes us feel good, what way of breathing makes us feel tense and uncomfortable. If the breath feels uncomfortable, try to adjust it so that it gives rise to a sense of comfort and ease.

When we keep surveying and evaluating the breath in this way, mindfulness and alertness will take charge within us. Stillness will develop, discernment will develop, knowledge will develop within us.