Beginner’s Mind
November, 2002
Try to bring a fresh mind to the breath each time you meditate. Imagine that you’re someone who hasn’t been living in a body for a couple of lifetimes and you’re suddenly back in this body with this unusual experience: There’s an energy flowing around the body, flowing in the body, flowing in and out. And so you’re curious, you’re inquisitive, you want to find out what it’s like. If you can bring that kind of fresh, inquisitive mind to the meditation, you can learn things. If you have everything all figured out beforehand, it gets in the way of your learning. If you have a lot of negative attitudes about yourself in the meditation, that gets in the way, too. This doesn’t mean that we don’t bring lessons that we’ve learned from one session of meditation into the next one, simply that we need the fresh eyes to see whether that particular lesson from the past actually applies right now.