Training Your Inner Teacher
September 02, 2022

We’re trying to find a special kind of truth inside ourselves, the truth of the end of suffering, a deathless dimension that can be accessed by the mind. The Buddha describes the steps in awakening to that truth. You start by finding a teacher who’s reliable, and you listen to the Dhamma; you pay careful attention; you try to remember the Dhamma. All of that comes under discernment that comes from listening.

The next steps are the discernment that comes from thinking. You take the Dhamma you’ve heard and you compare it with other lessons you’ve learned, and you think about it, till what you have learned recently makes sense in terms of what you’ve learned before. That’s the discernment that comes from thinking.

Then there’s the discernment that comes from developing. It starts with a desire to put the Dhamma into practice. All too often, we’re told that desire is a bad thing in the path, but actually it’s an important part of right effort. Without that desire, you wouldn’t embark on this path.

Based on the desire, the Buddha says, you become willing. In other words, you take the teachings of the Buddha and you use them to judge the thoughts in your mind. That’s a big step right there, because all too often we just think the things we want to think and we don’t think the things we don’t want to think. Except when the things that we want to think turn on us and start driving us crazy. But by and large, our likes and dislikes play a huge role in what we choose to think about. Yet the Buddha says the things that we crave cause us to suffer, and the things we cling to actually are the suffering in the mind. To follow this teaching is going to require that we change our priorities and allegiances inside.

When the Buddha sets out the four noble truths, he says that the thoughts that give rise to suffering come from craving for sensuality, craving for becoming, craving for non-becoming. Then there are the thoughts that lead away from suffering, starting with thoughts of right view, right resolve—your intention to follow the duties of the path—then right speech, right action, right livelihood. Then you train the mind to get into concentration so that it stays comfortably with one object. Those kinds of thoughts you want to develop.

This is a reordering of our priorities. A lot of times it goes against the grain. But we have to realize that it’s for our own good. But you can tell yourself only so long that it’s for your own good. If there’s nothing to show for it, then the mind starts to wander away.

This is one of the reasons why we practice right concentration, to give rise to a sense of well-being inside. You sit here, just you and the breath, and you ask yourself: What potential for happiness is there? The Buddha says that when we seclude our thoughts from sensuality—in other words, we stop fantasizing about sensual pleasures—and we’re just present for the sensation of breathing as it’s coming in, going out, we can experience pleasure and rapture. But what’s the potential there for pleasure? What’s the potential for rapture, fullness? It’s there. Other people have found it. Ask yourself: What kind of breathing would help give rise to a sense of fullness in the body? What way of perceiving the breath would give rise to a sense of fullness? What would you like right now?

You’re doing this to keep that original desire alive. As the Buddha said, you have the desire to attain the goal, then there’s the willingness to practice. Then you compare. You compare what the Buddha taught to what you’re doing in the mind right now, and seeing what’s working, what’s not.

This ability to reflect is important. In fact, it’s so important that the Buddha one time said that the two things you need in order to nourish the Dhamma inside are commitment and reflection. You commit yourself to doing it, and then you reflect on what you’re doing. You learn how to pass skillful judgment on what you’re doing. If things aren’t working, you try to figure out what’s wrong.

There are lots of things you can be doing with the mind. Sometimes it needs simply to rest. Other times you need to push it, to be extra strict with it. In other words, when the breath is comfortable and the mind starts wandering around, you have to remind yourself you’re not here to wander around, you’re here to stay with the breath. So you have to ride hard on it for a while.

Then there are times when you have to step back and evaluate and think about it. One of the first things you have to evaluate, of course, is when is a good time to evaluate, and when you just leave the mind alone and let it stay still. That’s something you have to learn with practice. You have to learn how to read your own mind to know what it needs.

The Buddha gives the image of a cook working for a king. Sometimes the king will explicitly say that he likes this dish or that dish. Other times, the king doesn’t say anything, but there are signs: the dish he reaches for, the dish he empties out. Without the king’s having to say anything, the wise cook can pick up: This is something the king likes. So he makes more of that. As for things the king doesn’t like, he makes less of that. And you know how kings are, they’re pretty fickle. Sometimes they like something today, but tomorrow they don’t like it anymore. The same thing. So you have to watch out for that, too. You have to provide for that as well.

Your mind is that way, too. It can be very fickle. Today it likes long breathing, tomorrow it doesn’t like long breathing. Today it likes to explore the breath sensations in the different parts of the body, other days it wants to focus in really strongly just on one spot. You’ve got to learn how to read it, and in that way, the mind gets to rest as it likes. You can maintain that sense of desire to practice.

There are other times when you have to talk to the mind, to get it in the right mood. It’s not willing to settle down with the breath, no matter what kind of breath you cook for it, in which case you have to ask yourself, “What else could you settle down with?” Or when it’s getting discouraged—sitting here and there’s pain, sitting here, nothing seems to work—well you remind yourself you’re doing something good. At the very least, you’re developing endurance and determination.

Remember the Buddha’s way of giving a Dhamma talk: He would instruct, in other words give people information, but then he would also urge, rouse, and encourage people. One part instruction, three parts encouragement. This would be called gladdening the mind—in other words, thinking in ways to remind you that you’re glad to be here. You learn how to read the mind, you learn how to provide for it.

Ajaan Lee gives the example of someone who knows their child. The child cries this way, you know that it’s hungry; it cries that way, you know that it wants to be picked up; cries this way, you have to change the diaper; cries that way, it’s just being ornery, so you leave it alone. When you learn how to read its cries, then the child will be happy.

And the same with the mind: You have to learn how to read what it’s doing, because as you’re meditating, you’re taking on two roles. One, you’ve got the mind that has to be trained, but also there’s a part of the mind that is the trainer. Or make a comparison, like Ajaan Fuang did, with a teacher and a student. Part of your mind is a student trying to learn the meditation, another part is the teacher, picking up lessons from outside, watching over the student, making sure the student does the work he has to do. If the teacher knows when to be strict, when to be lenient, when to give the student work, when to give the student something more enjoyable, the student will be happy to learn, and the teacher gets wiser as well.

When you think about teachers in real life, student teachers have a lot to learn. But over time, as they begin to learn how to read the students, they become more reliable as teachers. So you start out looking for a reliable teacher outside, so that you can learn how to become a reliable teacher inside. This is how the path progresses.

As the Buddha says, you hover around your practice with right view, right mindfulness, right effort. Right view is basically the Buddha’s standards. Right mindfulness is how you remind yourself of those standards. Part of right mindfulness, of course, is alertness. You watch yourself to see what you’re doing and the results you’re getting. Then there’s right effort. If things aren’t going well, you make an effort to make them go well, and then you read that. That’s why these qualities, as the Buddha said, circle around every factor of the path.

So the ability to reflect on yourself is an important part of the practice. This is why, when the Buddha introduced his son to the practice, one of the first things he gave him as an image to think about was the image of a mirror. You look at your actions in the same way that you would look in a mirror to see your face. You look at your actions, you learn how to judge them properly, and you get more and more skillful. You look at your actions, not just to look at them, but to purify them, just as you look at your face, not to just look at your face, but to see: Is there anything that needs to be cleaned, anything that needs to be straightened out?

When you can read yourself in this way, you realize that’s a really important part of the meditation. The meditation is not just a matter of technique, it’s also learning how to master a skill with the kind of reflection that that requires. That’s how you’re going to progress.