We can become restless and adverse to the breath because we always have the desire to get something. We want to find something that easily interests us, something we can focus on without much effort. If we find something interesting, such as exciting rhythmic music, we absorb right into it. But the rhythm of normal breath isn’t interesting or compelling. It’s calming, and most beings aren’t used to tranquility; they are caught in a need to be excited or interested. In other words most of us need something outside of ourselves to stimulate us and to engage our attention.
Ajahn Sumedho, The Mind and the Way
Suffering can be differentiated from pain. There is pain in life, without doubt, but suffering is the extra tension in the mind that is unable to accommodate change and accept the truth of its experience. The first two noble truths are that life is difficult and that suffering is the tension in the mind that insists an experience be different from the way it is. It’s the imperative in the mind that this moment be different that causes our suffering
The essence of the practice life involves cultivating awareness. This process has two basic aspects. The first is clarifying the mental process. The second is experiencing — entering into awareness of the physical reality of the present moment. When we’re standing in the muddy water of everyday life, practice is often not simple and clear. But part of our challenge is to bring a certain precision and impeccability to our efforts. That’s why it’s important to keep returning to these two basic aspects of practice: first, seeing through the mental process, with all its noise; and second, entering the non-conceptual silence of reality as-it-is. As practitioners we learn to honestly and relentlessly observe the mental or conceptual process — thoughts, emotional reactions, strategies and fears — and then bring ourselves back again and again to the physical reality of the present moment.
When we are physically and mentally calm, we have the ability to make choices in our lives. Often when we lose control we become physically or emotionally reactive. Not only does being aware of something as simple as breathing tell us a lot about the emotional state of ourselves and others, it gives us the chace to truly observe how and why we react in a certain way to specific circumstances. By anchoring in the present moment with our breath, the benefits of being in the moment are complimented by the natural relaxation that occurs with conscious breathing. Learning to be aware of our breathing is one of the single best tools we have for keeping a foothold in the present moment.
Solitude is an elusive thing that needs to find us rather than us finding it. We tend to picture solitude in a naïve way as something that we can “soak ourselves in” as we would soak ourselves in a warm bath. We tend to picture solitude this way: We are busy, pressured, and tired. We finally have a chance to slip away for a weekend. We rent a cabin, complete with a fireplace, in a secluded woods. We pack some food, some wine, and some soft music and we resist packing any phones, iPads, or laptops. This is to be a quiet weekend, a time to drink wine by the fireplace and listen to the birds sing, a time of solitude.
