Polishing the Mind

The Buddha teaches that there are two sides to the path of practice: the side of developing and the side of letting go. And it’s important that you see the practice in both perspectives, that your practice contains both sides. If you practice just letting go, everything good will get thrown out. On the other hand, if yours is just a practice of developing and working and doing, you will miss the things that happen on their own, that happen when you do let go.

So an important part of the practice is realizing which is which. This is what discernment is all about, realizing which qualities in the mind are skillful, the ones that are your friends, and which qualities are unskillful, and the ones that are your enemies.

The ones that are your friends are those that help make your knowledge clearer make you see things more clearly—things like mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, together with the qualities they depend on: virtue, morality, persistence. These are the good guys in the mind. These are the ones you have to nurture, the ones you have to work at. If you don't work at them, they won’t come on their own.

It’s like polishing wood. The grain is already there in the wood but, unless you polish it. If you want to see the beauty of the grain, you have to polish it, to work at it. You don’t create the grain, but the polishing is what brings out the grain already there. So practicing the Buddha’s path is like polishing away at the mind to see what’s of real value there within the mind. That’s what the mindfulness, the persistence, and the ardency. This is why there has to be effort. This is why there has to be work.

The concentration practice is the key effort of Buddha teaching, to focus on where you want the mind to be, for example the breath, to be aware of where you don’t want it to be, and also to be ready to fight off anything that’s going to come into disturb your stillness of mind.

So we learn to look at the quality of the breath and then turn around and look at the quality of the mind—this sense of boredom, this wanting to move. What’s actually causing it? Sometimes it comes from the breath, and sometimes it’s just a trait that arises in the mind, a trait that stirs up trouble. Try to be sensitive to what’s going on, to see whether the problem is coming from the mind or the object the mind is focused on.

If it’s coming from a simple sense of boredom that’s moved in, let the boredom move on. You don’t have to latch onto it. You don't have to identify with it. As soon as you identify with the boredom, the mind has left the breath and is on the boredom. Even though the breath may be there in the background, the boredom has come into the forefront. Your inchworm has moved off to the other leaf. So if the mind is getting antsy and saying, "Well, move. Find something new," refuse for a while and see what happens. What is the strength lying behind that need to move? What’s giving it power?

Sometimes you’ll find that it’s actually a physical sensation someplace in the body that you’ve overlooked, so work on that. Other times it’s more an attitude, the attitude that you picked up someplace that said, "Just sitting here not thinking about anything is the most stupid thing you can do. You aren’t learning anything; you aren’t picking up anything new. Your mind isn’t being exercised." Ask yourself, "Where is that voice coming from?" It’s coming from somebody who never meditated, who didn’t understand all the good things that come from being still in the present moment.

Only when the mind is really still right here can it begin to resonate with the body. When there’s a resonance between the breath and the mind, it gives rise to a much greater sense of wholeness and oneness. This is the positive aspect of the practice that you want to focus on, because if the mind is one place and the body someplace else, there’s no resonance. It’s as if they were singing two completely different tunes. But if you get them together, it’s like having one chord with lots of overtones. And then you come to appreciate how, when there’s this sense of resonance between the body and mind, you begin to open up. You begin to see things in the mind and in the body that you didn’t see before. It’s healing for both the body and the mind. It’s also eye-opening in the sense that the more subtle things that were there suddenly appear. You gain a sense of appreciation for this, that this is a very important thing to do with the mind. The mind needs this for its own sanity, for its own health.

As a great respect to Ajann Geoffrey Thanissaro, Metta Forest Monastery