Strength Training for the Mind -- by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

A guide for training the mind based on the basic principles of muscular training.

(continued from issue 246 pg 41)

Pace yourself.

Learn, too, how to read your progress. The meditation won't really be a skill, won't really be your own, until you learn to judge what works for you and what doesn't. You may have heard that meditation is non-judgmental, but that's simply meant to counteract the tendency to prejudge things before they've had a chance to show their results. Once the results are in, you need to learn how to gauge them, to see how they connect with their causes, so that you can adjust the causes in the direction of the outcome you really want.

Vary your routine.

Just as a muscle can stop responding to a particular exercise, your mind can hit a plateau if it's strapped to only one meditation technique. So don't let your regular routine get into a rut. Sometimes the only change you need is a different way of breathing, a different way of visualizing the breath energy in the body. But then there are days when the mind won't stay with the breath no matter how many different ways of breathing you try. This is why the Buddha taught supplemental meditations to deal with specific problems as they arise. For starters, there's goodwill for when you're feeling down on yourself or the human race - the people you dislike would be much more tolerable if they could find genuine happiness inside, so wish them that happiness. There's contemplation of the parts of the body for when you're overcome with lust - it's hard to maintain a sexual fantasy when you keep thinking about what lies just underneath the skin. And there's contemplation of death for when you're feeling lazy - you don't know how much time you've got left, so you'd better meditate now if you want to be ready when the time comes to go.

When these supplemental contemplations have done their work, you can get back to the breath, refreshed and revived. So keep expanding your repertoire. That way your skill becomes all-around.

Take your ups and downs in stride.

The rhythms of the mind are even more complex than those of the body, so a few radical ups and downs are par for the course. Just make sure that they don't knock you off balance. When things are going so well that the mind grows still without any effort on your part, don't get careless or overly confident. When your mood is so bad that even the supplemental meditations don't work, view it as an opportunity to learn how to be patient and observant of bad moods. Either way, you learn a valuable lesson: how to keep your inner observer separate from whatever else is going on. So do your best to maintain proper form regardless, and you'll come out the other side.

Watch your eating habits.

As the Buddha once said, we survive both on mental food and physical food. Mental food consists of the external stimuli you focus on, as well as the intentions that motivate the mind. If you feed your mind junk food, it's going to stay weak and sickly no matter how much you meditate. So show some restraint in your eating. If you know that looking at things in certain ways, with certain intentions, gives rise to greed, anger, or delusion, look at them in the opposite way. As Ajaan Lee, my teacher's teacher, once said, look for the bad side of the things you're infatuated with, and the good side of the things you hate. The same principle applies to all your senses. That way you become a discriminating eater, and the mind gets the healthy, nourishing food it needs to grow strong.

As for your physical eating habits, this is one of the areas where inner strength training and outer strength training part ways. As a meditator, you have to be concerned less with what physical food you eat than with why you eat. If you're bulking up for no real purpose, it's actually harmful for the mind. You have to realize that in eating - even if it's vegetarian food - you're placing a burden on the world around you, so you want to give some thought to the purposes served by the strength you gain from your food. Don't take more from the world than you're willing to give back. Don't eat just for the fun of it, because the beings that provided the food didn't provide it in fun. Make sure the energy gets put to good use.

Don't leave your strength in the gym.

If you don't use your strength in other activities, strength training becomes largely an exercise in vanity - aimed at impressing yourself or others, but the impression is rarely deep or lasting. The same principle applies to your meditative skills. If you leave them on the cushion and don't apply them in everyday life, they never make a deep impression on the mind, and you don't get as much out of them as you really should. The ability to maintain your centre and to breathe comfortably in any situation can be a genuine lifesaver, keeping the mind in a position where you can more easily think of the right thing to do, say, or think when your surroundings get tough. As a result, the people around you are no longer subjected to your greed, anger, and delusion. And as you maintain your inner balance in this way, it helps them maintain theirs. So make the whole world your meditation seat, and you'll find that meditation both on the big seat and the little seat will get a lot stronger. At the same time, it'll become a gift both to yourself and to the world around you.

Never lose sight of your ultimate goal.

Mental strength has at least one major advantage over physical strength in that it doesn't inevitably decline with age. It can always keep growing to and through the experience of death. The Buddha promises that it leads to the Deathless, and he wasn't a man to make vain, empty promises. So when you establish your priorities, make sure that you give more time and energy to strengthening your meditation than you do to strengthening your body. After all, someday you'll be forced to lay down this body, no matter how fit or strong you've made it, but you'll never be forced to lay down the strengths you've built into the mind.

Excerpted from "Strength Training for the Mind", by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight, June 7, 2009, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/strengthtraining.html

Thanissaro Bhikkhu is an American Buddhist monk of the Thai forest kammatthana tradition. He studied meditation under Ajaan Fuang Jotiko, himself a student of the late Ajaan Lee. Presently, he is the abbot of Metta Forest Monastery in San Diego County, U.S.