A Trustworthy Mind
July 11, 2016

Close your eyes and watch your breath. Watch it all the way in, all the way out. Notice where you feel the breathing and let your attention settle right there.

As for anything else that may come into the mind or any sounds from outside, just let them pass, pass. You don’t have to catch them; you don’t have to comment on them. They just come and they go.

Think of your mind being like the screen on a window. As the breeze comes in through the screen, the screen doesn’t catch the breeze and the breeze doesn’t have to make the screen move.

So let the sounds go through. You want to stay focused on this one thing. It’s a good practice to have to learn to stay focused on things in the midst of noise and distraction, because life is full of noises and distractions. You don’t want those things to get in the way. When you’ve made up your mind to do something good, you want to be able to stick with it regardless of the distractions outside.

So get some practice with persistence, because it’s the persistence that makes all the difference in the meditation. If you stay with the breath for one or two times and then forgot about it and then came back for two more times and forgot about it again, nothing would develop, nothing would grow. But if you stick with it consistently, you find that you’re warding off all kinds of old habits and creating good new habits in the mind: a habit of a mind that’s stable, a mind that’s focused, a mind that once it knows something is good, you can stick with it. That way you learn how to trust yourself.

One of the scariest things in life is that we can’t trust our own minds. We make up our mind to do one thing and a few seconds later we’re off someplace else. If you can’t trust your own mind, who are you going to trust? You’ve got to build trustworthiness into the mind.

As the Buddha says, you are your own refuge—but you have to make yourself into a worthy refuge. That’s what we do when we meditate: make the mind a lot more solid and stable, give it a foundation so that it’s not getting pushed around all the time.

This way, the goodness you want to develop in life will have a chance to really develop because you’re sticking with it, feeding it, nurturing it, giving it a chance to grow.