Enlarge Your Mind
September 09, 2015

Close your eyes. Think thoughts of goodwill.

Whether it’s hot outside or cold outside or whatever the physical problems, the mind can always have thoughts of goodwill. It’s a good way to start your meditation: To remind you that you have no ill will for anybody in the world. That lightens the mind, makes it a lot easier to deal with trouble as it comes up.

When you see that you do have goodwill in your mind, it strengthens you as well. It gives you a sense of self esteem: that you’re not here just grabbing what you can, that you want to take other people’s happiness into consideration. That thought expands the mind.

This is one of the best ways to deal with unpleasant situations in life: to expand the mind as much as you can, to make it larger than the situation. The Buddha says it’s like making your mind like the Earth: The Earth is really large. Anyone can try to come along and take all the earth away, but they can’t succeed. Make it like space: Space is even bigger than the earth. Nobody can draw pictures in space.

In other words, make you mind larger than the problem. Don’t let the problem be larger than the mind.

The Buddha once made a comparison. He said that even if bandits pin you down and start sawing off your arms and legs with a saw, you should still have goodwill for them. When you think about that, then you think about the things people say to you in the course of the day, the things other people do in the course of the day, and they seem small in comparison. They’re not too much to bear.

Or little things like the weather. They’re saying that today is going to be probably the hottest September day in the country ever. But we can stand it. It’s not more than we can stand. We know how to deal with heat. The body can take it, and the mind can take it. too.

The mind is shot with one arrow: the heat. Don’t shoot yourself with extra arrows, the arrows of being upset. Make your mind larger than the heat.

That way. the little things of life really do get into proportion. You see that they are little, while the state of your mind, the quality of your mind, can be large. That’s important. You want to look after that as best you can. The smaller you make the mind, the easier it is for other things to overcome it. The larger you make your mind, the harder and harder it is for things to come and have a large influence on it. That way, you can rise above these things.

So as you focus on the body today, try to find which part of the body is the coolest and let your attention settle there. As for the hot parts, just let them do their own hot thing: That’s what they’re designed to do. Your nerve endings are designed to pick up what’s going on outside. But you don’t have to make a big deal out of it.

You make your mind bigger than that. That’s how we can stay in this world and not be overcome by it.