In this exclusive clip, acclaimed teacher Bhante Gunaratana explains how to avoid excessive looseness or tension in your Dharma practice as well as the distinction between mindfulness and mere carefulness. This HD video teaching is an excerpt from lesson 4 of the Wisdom Academy online course Mindfulness in Plain English.
TRANSCRIPT
When we work, we often hear people say that, “Be mindful of what you are doing.” Of course, people do what they do with carefulness. Carefulness and mindfulness are not the same. You can be careful when you walk, talk, wash dishes, wash clothes, and so on, cutting vegetables. If you’re not careful enough, when you cut vegetables, you cut your fingers, and so on. That is not mindfulness. That is carefulness.
Mindfulness is much deeper than that, more profound, more meaningful, and bringing you peace. Mindfulness is whenever you do anything, you train your mind to look at the mind. It is the mind from which everything— every unwholesome or wholesome thing—springs up. “It is the mind; mainly mind is the source; mind is the makeup; mind is the forerunner; mind is the chief; everything is mind-made,” said the Buddha.
Since everything is mind-made, you know, this whole setup is mind-made. Mind tells you to do this, to do that, to do this. And then, according to your order of your mind, you use your hands, legs, mouth, and so forth. So the mind is the one that does everything. Therefore, whenever we do something or say something, look at the mind to see whether greed arises at that time, hatred arises at that time, confusion arises at that time, jealousy arises at that time, or tension arises.
Whatever state arises in the mind, watch that, and immediately, if greed arises, you must say, “This is greed.” “This is greed. This mind is a greedy mind. When the mind is greedy, we become aware that the greedy mind is a greedy mind. When the mind is full of anger or hatred, you say, “The mind is full of hatred. This is anger. This is anger. This is anger.” When confusion arises, you say, “This is confusion. This is confusion.” When you pay attention to it, recognize it, identify it, slowly you learn to let it go. When greed arises, you have to let go of greed. Greed can breed pain, sorrow, lamentation, grief, and despair. And why should we then support, sustain, maintain, nourish, and love greed? We should not. Similarly, when we do this, greed fades away. So you experience then and there the benefit of letting go of greed. And right there, you can see dependent origination.
When greed arises, then and there you have suffering. That is why the Buddha said, “When this arises, this is; that is the dependent origination formula. When greed arises, pain arises. When greed fades away, pain goes away. When hatred arises, pain arises. When hatred goes away, pain goes away. When confusion arises, pain arises. When confusion goes away, pain goes away. So this relationship between the cause and effect has to be watched, noticed all the time, every moment, every day. This is a wonderful meditation—insight meditation, vipassanā meditation. These are good reasons to meditate.
When somebody struggles unnecessarily, that struggling would be counterproductive. You cannot achieve something by mere struggling. You have to understand that you have only a certain amount of energy. Don’t dissipate that energy. Don’t waste it by struggling. Focus your energy on the practice. Say, for instance, you want to meditate; you sit and sitting is sometimes very difficult, painful, and slowly when you move your legs, the pain is excruciating. You cannot practice. Sometimes later you may learn to stay with the pain, but when you have too much pain, struggling to meditate with pain may make you discouraged. And I have heard people who have had pain at the beginning of meditation say, “I’d kill myself rather than meditating,” because it is so difficult for them. You should not go to that kind of extreme. You must relax, be comfortable, and do it slowly and gradually. And that is exactly what the Buddha recommended.
When the energy is too much, we must reduce that with mindfulness and understand how much energy we have to apply to practice. Suppose you have to travel some distance, maybe two miles. If you go with a child, the child is full of energy. And the child at the beginning keeps running, running, running. Very quickly, at less than halfway, the child starts complaining of aches, pains, back pains. And then parents have to carry the child. But the parents move very steadily, slowly knowing that they have to walk two miles. If they struggle at the beginning, they cannot move the entire distance. So you got to do it slowly first and then accelerate. You can reach the goal.
We have seen people carrying a heavy weight when you go to climb mountains. I was in Bhutan. When we went to Bhutan, we see people are not very big, but they carry heavy loads on their backs. They walk steadily up very steep hills, never stopping. And people who are not used to climbing mountains at the beginning, they run, and then have the stop for gasping breath. They cannot continue because they don’t know how to balance their energy. The people living in that area know from their personal experience how much energy they have, how far they have to go, and how much weight they have to carry. So they do it very gently.
People who are in Tibet, Tibetans, also know how to climb because Tibet has lot of mountains. They walk very gently, at a certain steady pace. It goes the same way with meditation. When we meditate, it doesn’t mean that we seem to simply become lazy and slow down. But we must control our energy and do it very gently until we get used to the practice. When we get used to the practice, then sitting longer would be very easy. At the beginning, we should not struggle.
