Make the Dhamma Your Own

Focus on your breath. Notice when it’s coming in, when it’s going out. And notice how it feels. You can experiment with different kinds of breathing: long breathing, short breathing. Fast or slow. Heavy or light. Ask yourself what kind of breathing feels good right now.

This is an important part of the meditation: asking questions—and asking the right questions. You may have all the concepts down. You may have read a lot. But the question is, how do you talk to yourself? Because one of the things we learn as we meditate is that it makes a big difference how you talk to yourself.

Like right now: You can be talking about the breath. Or you can be talking about something else to yourself. But why talk about something else? The mind needs to be here; you have an opportunity to train it. So as you’re training the mind, focus on how the breathing feels.

Because there are other things you can be talking about around the breath. If the mind slips off, just tell yourself to come back. Tell yourself gently, but firmly. If you tell yourself, “I’m a miserable meditator; I can’t get anywhere,” that doesn’t help anything at all. Remember the way the Buddha would teach people. He would instruct them, urge, rouse, and encourage them. He would never discourage people from practicing, never discourage people by telling them they couldn’t practice. It was always: “This is something you can do.”

So you’ve got to learn how to adopt that way of talking to yourself as well. Then focus your attention on how the breathing feels. This is something you can judge for yourself. Nobody else can judge it for you: what kind of breathing feels comfortable for you right now, where you notice the breathing, where it’s best to focus on the breathing. That’s up to you. You have that choice.

So make different choices and see which ones are best. This is how we learn. If everything we did were determined by old karma, we wouldn’t be able to learn anything. But it’s because we have new karma as an important part of our experience—and we have the choice of what to do—that we’re able to learn. We experiment and look at the results and decide whether we like them or not. If you don’t like them, you can change. If you do like them, you try to keep them up. This way your knowledge of the Dhamma becomes your knowledge. It’s not just book knowledge. It’s knowledge you’ve gained from your own experiments.

Think of yourself as being like a scientist. Scientists play around with the causes and see what results they get—which causes give good results, which causes don’t give good results. That way they learn. And if things are not clear, they experiment again and again and again.

The same with the meditation. When things are not clear, you just keep at it, asking yourself, “Where could I focus that I haven’t been focusing yet? What kind of breathing could I try that I haven’t tried yet? What way of thinking about the breath I haven’t tried yet?” Experiment with these things. It’s only when you experiment and ask questions that you can learn.

And that’s what we’re here for, to learn—which means that when the meditation goes well, you can learn. When the meditation doesn’t go well, you can still learn and see it not as a waste of time, but as time when you’ve gained some knowledge. That’s when you can say that you had a good meditation, when you’ve learned something new about the mind, learned something new about the breath, learned something about the way you can talk to yourself in the most effective and encouraging way.