Teaching: Training the Mind

The ability to pay attention, direct our focus and develop concentration in our practice as mindfulness practitioners are fundamental elements to building a strong foundation for our spiritual practice. Attention, focus, and concentration are also incredibly useful to support nearly every aspect of our daily life, from our interactions with friends, family & co-workers to the tasks we do at work and from household upkeep to making plans for what we need to do today, tomorrow and next week. The ability to captain our own mental ship is a valuable and powerful - and drastically underrated - skill.

When we invest in growing our capacity for being able to better focus and direct our attention and mental activity, versus letting it run and jump all over the place like a child allowed to do whatever it wants, our ability to get clear about our life-path increases in tandem. In the absence of providing good structure and healthy discipline to our mental landscape, we’re likely to live on autopilot where our old habits, conditioned beliefs, fears, worries, anxieties, and distraction & suppression techniques are steering the ship and running the show.

As mental dispersion lessens and we’re able to pay closer & kinder attention, we become more equipped to discern what and who we want to spend our time & energy on. We get clear on what we want to do and how we truly want to live during this short ride of life. We dip under the surface waters of autopilot & conditioned living to connect with a deeper understanding about the preciousness and wonders of being alive.

This journey is entirely up to us. No one else can do it for us. We need the support of good friends to stay close to and good teachers to learn from, absolutely. But it will and can never be someone else who can take responsibility for our quality of wellness and well-being, or for cultivating the spiritual dimension of our life.

Many among of us in the world of mindfulness practitioners are struggling greatly to practice. It’s highly worth mentioning that if we live with depression, ADHD, PTSD, chronic anxiety, complex trauma, addiction, or ongoing & perpetual stress, the ability to guide and direct our attention in beneficial ways can either be entirely offline or severely compromised. Many of us have one or more of the above afflictions on board in our mind/body/heart system. If this is the case, we may find it incredibly challenging, if not impossible, to practice sitting meditation. But while sitting meditation is perhaps the most direct route for us to practice building the skill of taking captain status of our mental ship, we might need to take a different approach.

Just as we can’t magically transport ourselves physically from NYC to the Amazon instantly, some of us will need to slow roll our way into the practice of sitting meditation. Or maybe even consider sidelining meditation all together, at least for now. In other words, meditation is not for everyone and doesn’t need to be. There are other avenues we can take to help tame and train the mind.

A few possibilities.

-Slow movements with structure (ex. tai chi, gentle yoga, qi gong)
-Walking meditation
-Guided meditation & guided deep relaxation (use apps or online audio)
-Engage with music (listen to it and allow it to help you process emotions, feel what’s real, or simply invite it to hold space for you in the background as you clean or cook dinner or wind down after work)
-Stay close to good teachers & wise guides (read, listen, watch)

In the event you have a strong calling to practice sitting meditation, or you feel ready to give it a go after easing into the idea of it, I’d like to offer a couple of things that I think are important to hear and know. For one, meditation is hard. It is not an easy thing to do. Especially with the frantic pace of mainstream living and the ever-present tidal wave of technology, entertainment, quick-fix mentality and screens, to sit still and quiet on a chair or cushion to engage in meditation with the intention to come home to oneself is a radical undertaking. You may even need to do some active unlearning before you can sit and have it be an activity that feels beneficial or nourishing. Consumer culture heavily grooms us to constantly search for big hits of flash & bang. Sitting meditation is not that. Not even a little bit. So it’s tempting to think meditation is boring, a waste of time, negatively selfish, or just simply not enough of a high-flying good time. So we may need to rearrange the furniture of our thinking before we can start sitting, in order to have a real chance of being able to stick with it.

And for two, when you start sitting, it’s likely you’ll think your mind is actually speeding up vs. slowing down. And it may be like this for a little while. Many people have this experience when they first start sitting. It’s really common and totally normal. Then what often happens is they take it as a sign to incorrectly believe one or more of the following things: they aren’t good at it; they should stop doing it; or they literally can’t do it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard from people who think their mind is busier than everyone else’s. People often think meditation is literally impossible for them to do. Other people, sure. But for them? Impossible! With great love and care: you are not the exception, dear friend. You can cultivate the practice of sitting meditation.

It’s probably not actually that our mind speeds up when we start involving ourselves with sitting meditation. It has more to do with the fact that we’ve slowed down physically enough to take notice of how much is really going on upstairs. During the day when we’re in go-mode, our attention is pinging around between a number of different things. But once we still and quiet the body and come home to ourselves with the practice of meditation, we have the opportunity to really see the content and quality of our mental activity. We may come face to face with the reality that our mind is like a big city that never sleeps. Which, based on mainstream and collective consumer driven culture, is by design. It makes sense our mind is jam packed and constantly on. We just need to be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking we don’t have any say or sway over practicing how to transform it. 

Training the mind is really what Buddhism is all about. It’s a lot of work. It takes a lot of intentional effort. And it’s absolutely worth it. As far as self-cultivation goes, I’m not sure there’s anything more beneficial to our growth and learning than increasing our capacity of paying attention, skillfully directing our focus, and slowly developing our concentration.