Strength Training for the Mind by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Strength Training for the Mind
by
Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Source: Transcribed from a file provided by the author.
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Copyright (c) 2007 Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Access to Insight edition (c) 2007
For free distribution. This work may be republished, reformatted, reprinted,
and redistributed in any medium. It is the author's wish, however, that any
such republication and redistribution be made available to the public on a
free and unrestricted basis and that translations and other derivative works
be clearly marked as such.
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*Strength Training for the Mind*
*by*
*Thanissaro Bhikkhu*

Meditation is the most useful skill you can master. It can bring the mind to
the end of suffering, something no other skill can do. But it's also the
most subtle and demanding skill there is. It requires all the mental
qualities ordinarily involved in mastering a physical skill — mindfulness
and alertness, persistence and patience, discipline and ingenuity — but to
an extraordinary degree. This is why, when you come to meditation, it's good
to reflect on any skills, crafts, or disciplines you've already mastered so
that you can apply the lessons they've taught you to the training of the
mind.

As a meditation teacher, I've often found it helpful to illustrate my points
with analogies drawn from physical skills. And, given the particular range
of skills and disciplines currently popular in America, I've found that one
useful source of analogies is strength training. Meditation is more like a
good workout than you might have thought.

The Buddha himself noticed the parallels here. He defined the practice as a
path of five strengths: conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration,
and discernment. He likened the mind's ability to beat down its most
stubborn thoughts to that of a strong man beating down a weaker man. The
agility of a well-trained mind, he said, is like that of a strong man who
can easily flex his arm when it's extended, or extend it when it's flexed.
And he often compared the higher skills of concentration and discernment to
the skills of archery, which — given the massive bows of ancient India — was
strength training for the noble warriors of his day. These skills included
the ability to shoot great distances, to fire arrows in rapid succession,
and to pierce great masses — the great mass, here, standing for the mass of
ignorance that envelops the untrained mind.

So even if you've been pumping great masses instead of piercing them, you've
been learning some important lessons that will stand you in good stead as a
meditator. A few of the more important lessons are these:

*Read up on anatomy.* If you want to strengthen a muscle, you need to know
where it is and what it moves if you're going to understand the exercises
that target it. Only then can you perform them efficiently. In the same way,
you have to understand the anatomy of the mind's suffering if you want to
understand how meditation is supposed to work. Read up on what the Buddha
had to say on the topic, and don't settle for books that put you at the far
end of a game of telephone. Go straight to the source. You'll find, for
instance, that the Buddha explained how ignorance shapes the way you
breathe, and how that in turn can add to your suffering. This is why most
meditation regimens start with the breath, and why the Buddha's own regimen
takes the breath all the way to nirvana. So read up to understand how and
why.

*Start where you are.* Too many meditators get discouraged at the outset
because their minds won't settle down. But just as you can't wait until
you're big and strong before you start strength training, you can't wait
until your concentration is strong before you start sitting. Only by
exercising what little concentration you have will you make it solid and
steady. So even though you feel scrawny when everyone around you seems big,
or fat when everyone else seems fit, remember that you're not here to
compete with them or with the perfect meditators you see in magazines.
You're here to work on yourself. So establish that as your focus, and keep
it strong.

*Establish a regular routine.* You're in this for the long haul. We all like
the stories of sudden enlightenment, but even the most lightning-like
insights have to be primed by a long, steady discipline of day-to-day
practice. That's because the consistency of your discipline is what allows
you to observe subtle changes, and being observant is what enables insight
to see. So don't get taken in by promises of quick and easy shortcuts. Set
aside a time to meditate every day and then stick to your schedule whether
you feel like meditating or not. The mind grows by overcoming resistance to
repetition, just like a muscle. Sometimes the best insights come on the days
you least feel like meditating. Even when they don't, you're establishing a
strength of discipline, patience, and resilience that will see you through
the even greater difficulties of aging, illness, and death. That's why it's
called practice.

*Aim for balance.* The "muscle groups" of the path are three: virtue,
concentration, and discernment. If any one of these gets overdeveloped at
the expense of the others, it throws you out of alignment, and your extra
strength turns into a liability.

*Set interim goals.* You can't fix a deadline for your enlightenment, but
you can keep aiming for a little more sitting or walking time, a little more
consistency in your mindfulness, a little more speed in recovering from
distraction, a little more understanding of what you're doing. The type of
meditation taught on retreats where they tell you not to have goals is aimed
at (1) people who get neurotic around goals in general and (2) the weekend
warriors who need to be cautioned so that they don't push themselves past
the breaking point. If you're approaching meditation as a lifetime activity,
you've got to have goals. You've got to want results. Otherwise the whole
thing loses focus, and you start wondering why you're sitting here when you
could be sitting out on the beach.

*Focus on proper form.* Get your desire for results to work *for* you and
not against you. Once you've set your goals, focus directly not on the
results but on the means that will get you there. It's like building muscle
mass. You don't blow air or stuff protein into the muscle to make it larger.
You focus on performing your reps properly, and the muscle grows on its own.
If, as you meditate, you want the mind to develop more concentration, don't
focus on the idea of concentration. Focus on allowing this breath to be more
comfortable, and then this breath, this breath, one breath at a time.
Concentration will then grow without your having to think about it.

*Pace yourself.* Learn how to read your pain. When you meditate, some pains
in the body are simply a sign that it's adapting to the meditation posture;
others, that you're pushing yourself too hard. Some pains are telling the
truth, some are lying. Learn how to tell the difference. The same principle
applies to the mind. When the mind can't seem to settle down, sometimes it
needs to be pushed even harder, sometimes you need to pull back. Your
ability to read the difference is what exercises your powers of wisdom and
discernment.

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 center 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.