Just look after your mind

“...If you encounter some hindrances such as sleepiness, you might have to use a more austere or severe tool to overcome it. One way is to fast because when you are hungry, you don’t feel sleepy. But you must be able, at a certain level, to control your mental hunger.

Most hunger doesn’t come from your body, but from your mind thinking about food, and when you do, you start to become hungry right away, even though you may have just had something to eat. So you have to have a certain level of mindfulness to be able to stop your mind from thinking about food, like maintaining your mantra, repeating Buddho, Buddho.

If you can maintain that, then you don’t feel hungry. When you sit in meditation, you don’t feel sleepy. And you can meditate for a long time. If you sit and you feel tired, get up and do walking meditation. Your meditation process is still the same. Just switch your position from sitting to walking.

If you use the mantra as a meditation object, you can use it while you are walking also by repeating the mantra. You can also use your breathing as your meditation object. But if you find it difficult to focus on your breath, you can use your feet as a meditation object. Just be aware of your feet when you walk: left, right, left, right. The important thing is not to let your mind think about this and that.

And after you have walked until you feel tired, then you can come back and sit again. If you can keep on doing this, I guarantee you that eventually your mind will become calm and peaceful. And you will have succeeded in your first level of meditation practice. Practice for calm.

Once you have achieved calm, when you come out of meditation, you want to direct your mind to think in the way of truth. Think of the things that you possess, the things that you love, and look at the true nature of what they really are.

If you look, the Buddha said, they are all impermanent. If you look harder, you will see that they are all not your possessions. They don’t belong to you. They are temporary possessions. And they are not always under your control—just like your body. You see with great clarity that you cannot stop your body from aging, from getting sick, or from dying.

Once you understand this truth, you will adjust your mind, your attitude towards these things. Instead of trying to force them to be what you want them to be, you will let them be. You will live with them. If the body is going to get old, let it be. If it is going to get sick, let it get sick. If you can cure it, you cure it. If you can have medicine to fix it, fix it. If you cannot cure or if you cannot fix it, you just have to let it be. Just look after your mind.

Don’t let your mind have any desire. Because once your mind starts to have desire, your mind will become stressful and all sorts of bad feelings will arise. The mind will create the desire for the body to get well when it is sick or the desire not to die when you know that the time for you to die is coming soon. If you accept the truth, your mind will return to peace and calm. And
you will not be affected by the dissolution, sickness, or aging of the body.

This is what we call vipassanā (insight), to see the truth of things, not the way we used to see them: as permanent, belonging to us, giving us happiness. They don’t. They are the opposite, because they are impermanent.

Because they are impermanent, we cannot control them. They will only bring bad feelings. So if you can develop to this level, you will start to be able to eliminate your bad feelings. And eventually all your bad feelings will disappear because your bad feelings arise from your desire for things to be this or that.

But when you know that you cannot have what you want all the time, sometimes things will go their own way. And if you don’t have any desire for them to be otherwise, you won’t have any bad feeling…"

By Ajaan Suchart Abhijāto