​When I first began doing equanimity practice, an image spontaneously arose. I saw a person standing on the bow of a ship, but it was more like the transparent outline of a person. And then a large wave would rise above the bow – and pass right through as it washed onto the deck.
 
Over time, I have come to understand this image more fully. It is not about not feeling the wave – the transparency of the person does not indicate that they are insensate. Rather, the aim is to experience the wave fully by allowing all of it to penetrate awareness. Any solidity in the person blocks or distorts the complete experience.
 
This is basically the relationship we cultivate to experience. Waves can arise and move as needed without obstruction or distortion. Can you sense the peace in this stance? Even if the ocean is violently stormy, it does no damage because that energy passes right through. We might say it passes through the mind, but more accurately, the storm is also the mind.
 
I hear many questions beginning with the phrase, “What do I do about…” or, more subtly, “How can I work with….” Usually the thing to be “worked with” is some unpleasant emotion or mental state. Often what people mean is, “How can I get this to go away? How can I stop having this mindstate?”
 
Try shifting your viewpoint to the image of the wave passing through a transparent figure. In the end, you will be doing nothing, not trying to “work with” the wave. The very “working with” presents an obstacle in its path – resulting in a partial, manipulated experience of the wave. Mostly, the obstacles are stories, ideas, views, and interpretations that we impose without noticing. We may want to work with anger because we believe its story, because we fear it, or because we think meditation is the place to solve problems in our life. In meditation, anger is just anger – or more precisely, it is a cluster of sensations and mental states that we are invited to experience without resistance.
 
Now, non-resistance is the result. (First check if you are convinced that this is a worthy end; some parts of your mind may not be). But what are practices that help bring it about? There are indeed certain ways of working with difficult mindstates so that they are not overwhelming, such as applying metta/goodwill as an “antidote” to strong feelings of anger or fear. Or, in the case of physical states, diverting attention to a non-painful part of the body if pain becomes too intense. You may not be able to take in the fullness of the experience right now, in which case it is skillful to turn away. There are also methods that concurrently invoke investigation, such as the “RAIN” process devised by Michele McDonald and further developed by Tara Brach. These can be helpful methods.
 
In this article, I am highlighting the fundamental mental cultivation shared by all these methods: Developing enough capacity of attention, or strength of mindfulness, to simply allow the full experience of whatever is arising, whether it is a ripple or a tidal wave. Developing capacity is about stabilizing attention – the basic, unexotic practice of nondistraction. Not allowing the mind to get sucked into discursive thought, entranced by its own commentary, or overwhelmed by physical/mental feelings because of applying meaning or story to them. Don’t worry about perfection in this; that is just another idea.
 
Not that this is easy.
 
From Loreena McKennitt’s song Skellig:
Many a year was I
Perched out upon the sea
The waves would wash my tears,
The wind, my memory
 
I'd hear the ocean breathe
Exhale upon the shore
I knew the tempest's blood
Its wrath I would endure
 
Grounding in the body is the best method I have found to gain strength in attention. Just sit and sense the body – all the pulsing, vibrations, heat, thrumming, solidity, softness, sharpness, all of it. Forget the story or even the emotion. [There are also techniques from other traditions that use devotional energy to increase the capacity of attention].
 
Equanimity is considered a great blessing of practice. A mind that is stable and transparent even amidst the waves is a mind that is poised to know deeply how this life works, and to let go.

​The art of Dharma practice includes engaging skillfully with complementary aspects of practice. Sometimes there can even seem to be "paradoxes" in the instructions. These are invitations to expand our understanding of what practice is; in the end, practice isn't any one thing. 

One domain where we can develop balance has to do with our attitude in approaching and engaging teachings. How do we relate to instructions from teachers, Dharma talks, and suttas we read? These things play the role of guiding and shaping our understanding, our behavior, and our practice. What is our relationship to them? (For more in this topic, here is a talk I gave).

Faith/ Trust/ Surrender

One possibility is that we have the attitude that the teachings are wiser than we are, and it’s best to just let them do their work on us.
 
If the teacher says “bow 108 times before every sit,” this trustful attitude means that you just do it. You don’t add your opinion about it, try to analyze whether it’s working, start playing around with it, or start checking for results. It takes some humility, but you just do it. You let the process do its work on you.

In this practice, we really do have to be able to do things where we don’t know the reason or result. Where it might get a little (or a lot) uncomfortable. And if not from a teacher telling you to bow 108 times, then it will come from the practice itself -– at some point, your heart or mind will demand something that you were not expecting and are not totally convinced about.

The Buddha, in at least one sutta, was very clear that his followers need to have this kind of faith. (MN 70, At Kitāgiri. This teaching is for ordained monastics, and doesn’t apply to people who are not declared followers). He states: “For a faithful disciple intent on fathoming the Teacher’s Dispensation, it is natural that he conduct himself thus: ‘The Blessed One is the Teacher, I am a disciple; The Blessed One knows, I do not know.’” And someone who thinks this way, it is said, the teachings are “nourishing and refreshing," and the disciple will go on to achieve the fruits of the path. The Buddha also criticized an overly rational, thought-based mindset (see, for example, MN 63, The Shorter Discourse to Malunkyāputta). 

So there is this idea of “just take the medicine.” You are not wise – that’s the problem – and you just have to trust if you are really going to transform.

Inquiry (including thought!)

But the Buddha didn’t consistently demand some kind of total capitulation. He wanted to foster people who are self-reliant. Overall, the Buddha didn’t really like obsequiousness, and valued people trying to figure it out for themselves, even if they made some wrong turns along the way.
 
One clue is to notice that people often came with questions, as shown throughout the suttas. Obviously this mode of learning was important and valued.

More directly, there is the teaching of the Kalama Sutta (AN 3.65): “…don't go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, 'This contemplative is our teacher.' When you know for yourselves that, 'These qualities are unskillful; these qualities are blameworthy; these qualities are criticized by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to harm & to suffering' — then you should abandon them.”
 
We are encouraged not to just blindly restrain behavior, but to go ahead and act, but to act with awareness, so that we can discern if something is leading toward harm or benefit. We are to investigate.

Finding Balance

Bhikkhu Bodhi says (in his essay: Two Faces of the Dhamma):  "When we try to determine our own relationship with the Dhamma, eventually we find ourselves challenged to make sense out of its two seemingly irreconcilable faces: the empiricist face turned to the world, telling us to investigate and verify things for ourselves, and the religious face turned to the Beyond, advising us to dispel our doubts and place trust in the Teacher and his Teaching."

The Buddha himself used both Faith and Inquiry. He had to have faith in something he couldn’t see yet, because there were no teachers for him once he struck out on his own. And his path included consideration, like assessing that the ascetic practice wasn’t working and remembering a deep jhana experience as a child -– so there was “analysis” (wisdom) also.
 
We don’t necessary understand how to navigate this easily. Even as dedicated practice develops, we will continually be called to let go and have faith in the next step unfolding. Experience gets different as meditation deepens, and our life may start to flow in unexpected ways. Can we ride this? And can we continue to inquire and bring order to our life, changing/honing/clarifying our intentions so that the engagement remains strong?

It may be interesting to consider the following in your own practice and life:
In your own practice and life:
​

• When has it been good to just accept?
  • Have there been times when something amazing opened up that you could never have imagined, and which your judgmental mind might have rejected?
• When did you need to dig in, make assessments, and ask questions?
  • Were you ever too gullible? Or did you ever just hover around on the surface believing something magic would happen, and you realize now that you could have engaged more fully and gotten a deeper experience?

Image: Great Rift Valley.jpg – By Xiaojun Deng (Flickr: Great Rift Valley) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

We’ve been looking at body, speech, and mind as domains of practice that the Buddha articulated. Of course, the mind is central – we are engaged in “mind training.” The body is only going in one direction – toward decay and death. But the mind/heart can continue to develop to the very end of life.
 
The first two stanzas of the Dhammapada say a lot (Fronsdal translation):
 
All experience is preceded by mind, led by mind, made by mind.
Speak or act with a corrupted mind, and suffering follows, as the wagon wheel follows the hoof of the ox.
 
All experience is preceded by mind, led by mind, made by mind.
Speak or act with a pure mind, and happiness follows, like a never-departing shadow.
 
A natural question is thus: How to work with the mind? The rest of this post is a summary of realms we may work with in the territory of “mind.” It’s a big topic, and it differs by Buddhist tradition. But even this much is the work of a lifetime.
 
As we’ve noted in the case of the body and speech, there are two broad realms of training: through intentional practices, and through observation. These apply in the mind too. I go into more detail in this talk.
 
Creation of Beneficial Mindstates

• Examining our intention and motivation to practice: This includes remembering the dangers of death, impermanence, illness, and chasing after delusions. It also includes remembering the preciousness of human birth and our beautiful aspirations to realize deep peace, compassion, love, or liberation.
• The Brahma-Viharas. Deliberate practices of the heart: goodwill, compassion, joy, and equanimity.
• Concentration: Learning to gather the mind into a nondistracted state. These states are very pleasant and free up an enormous amount of energy. Discovering this potential in the mind is valuable and it must be well-directed toward the aim of liberation.
• Investigation/Inquiry: Generating the interest to examine the mind. It can be done using specific questions, or in a more wordless way. It provides a segueway into the practice of observing the mind.

 
Observation of the Mind

• The Satipatthana Sutta (MN 10) offers realms and modes of observation in the mind: Feeling tone; the presence and absence of various beneficial and unbeneficial qualities; the arising and passing away of various mindstates.
• We are especially directed toward observing the conditionality of experience.
• This leads to seeing particular qualities of experience more precisely: Impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and emptiness (of inherent existence)

• In my experience, this tends toward a broad awareness in which everything can arise and pass

 
At some point, we start to get a feel for what mental activity itself feels like. Then the mind can move toward relaxing this. Even these “observations” still employ the mental activity of Investigation (which is good – it’s a factor of Awakening – but at some point starts to feel too “active”). And this leads to letting go. In the end, the mind is let go; development is necessary, but is not the final goal.
 
Development of the Mind
 
We tend to go through cycles of intentional development and observation. This can occur in a single sit, when we spend some time getting concentrated or gladdening the mind, and then change to a more open awareness. It also occurs over the months and years of practice. You may feel drawn to developmental practice for a while: concentration, metta, compassion practice, challenging your internal assumptions, strengthening intention, etc. And then at some point, this may seem too active and even agitating, and you begin to settle back and just watch the flow. This may lead to insight – the result of which might very well be the understanding that more needs to be developed.
 
It’s good to trust what you are drawn to in practice. The path of development and the path of letting go are two sides of the same coin. They both lead toward the deep insights of the path that free the heart from the vicissitudes of the outer and inner worlds. Fully freeing the heart will probably take both a lot of development and a lot of observation and letting go.
 
All of this is not to diminish the role of the body and speech in practice. Those who try to ignore these two realms (or simply "transcend" them) are in for a rough ride: We must ultimately have an integrated development of all aspects of our being. Getting into alignment is much of the path. May your practice be multidimensional.

The three domains of practice offered by the Buddha are body, speech, and mind. Although not fully separate, they are worth examining distinctly.

There is a possibly apocryphal story from IMS (a retreat center in Barre MA) about a yogi on an extended retreat. Early one morning, when the breakfast cook arrived to start the oatmeal, she found a yogi with his hand in one of the food bins in the kitchen. Surprised to see the cook, the yogi said, "I was looking for a spoon."

We can laugh, but how often do we notice that our own speech is not perfectly aligned with our actions (or thoughts) in the moment? We may not be so skilled at speaking straightforwardly, finding instead that we hedge the truth, omit details that would make us look bad, or otherwise shade the language in our favor.

Looking at the suttas, we find this interesting reference from Iti 4.112 ("The World"): “As the Tathagata says, so he does; as the Tathagata does, so he says: therefore he is called the Tathagata." (Tathagata is a word for the Buddha). This quote says that perfect alignment between speech and action is a quality that characterizes Buddhas. Thus, we can realize that we may have a ways to go, and we may need some guidance on how to get our speech aligned.

For more detail on this topic, here is a talk I gave about it at Insight Meditation Center. 

Two practices that provide excellent background and preparation for working with speech are mindfulness of the body and listening practice. It is amazing how much information is contained in the body, and how grounding it can be to rest the attention in the feet or belly while speaking. It is also worthwhile to attune to tensions in the body with the aim of relaxing them if possible. If you are not able to sense your body while speaking, begin by consciously practicing feeling your feet on the ground. As for listening practice, there are many resources out there for learning mindful or heartful listening; these are worth pursuing if it's of interest.

Moving on to speech practice, Right or Wise Speech is said to have four key qualities: It is true, beneficial, timely, and spoken with a heart of kindness. Note that "true" means both factually true and "true to the moment": It should express something appropriate to the situation, which often means it must be spontaneous. Although there are times when planned speech is necessary, often things that we have thought of ahead of time become conceptual and not quite "true" to the situation.

The Buddha was once asked (MN 58§9): “…when [people] go to the Blessed One and pose a question, has there already been in the Blessed One’s mind the thought, ‘If they come to me and ask me thus, I shall answer thus’? Or does that answer occur to the Tathagata on the spot?”

The Buddha replied, “It occurs to me on the spot.”

As with the domain of the body, there are two ways of practicing: Taking deliberate action to create wholesome or mindful speech, and observing our "natural" speech to feel how well it aligns with our intentions, the truth of the moment, etc. Both are useful modes of practice. In the second case, as with the body, it may take some practice to be able to speak and observe the speech carefully at the same time. It is well worth learning this skill. In the end, we want to speak spontaneously, like the Buddha, not relying on a mental filter that checks for the qualities of "right speech."

Sometimes people think that spiritually correct speech must always be pleasing to the listener -- in other words, it should be "nice." There are actually some suttas that say this. But other suttas place "pleasant speech" in the realm of timeliness. From MN 58§8: “In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be factual, true, beneficial, but unendearing & disagreeable to others, he has a sense of the proper time for saying them.”

Teachers may say "unendearing" things in order to shock a student out of a complacent or deluded way of thinking. One teacher talks of a time when he was a beginning Dharma student, on his first retreat. He told his teacher in an interview that he thought he was the only person on the retreat who was not being mindful. She looked at him coolly and said, "What makes you so special?"

In the end, we are asked to speak with wisdom and compassion. That is all that "right speech" really points toward. 

The Buddha offered three broad domains of practice: Body, speech, and mind. Of course these are not entirely separate, but it is useful to distinguish them in order to talk about specific practices. Ultimately we are training the mind, but body and speech are excellent tools for doing so, in addition to working on the mind explicitly. (For a deeper exploration of this topic, here is a talk I gave at IMC).



From Hafiz:
What is the key
To untie the knot of the mind’s suffering?
Benevolent thought, sound
And movement.
​
In each domain, we can imagine two modes of practice: Intentional actions that help us train the mind, and observation of how experience unfolds in order to learn and have insight. Both modes are valuable and necessary.

Using the Body
In the case of the body, the first mode of practice involves undertaking deliberate actions with the body. What we do with our body is consequential – how we hold it, how we use it, how we take care of it. The body is the key vehicle in ethical conduct: Not killing, stealing, or committing sexual misconduct. 

The body is also used to take the meditation posture. The sitting posture itself is designed to be a stable, relaxed posture, which helps the mind to calm down and relax too. If it's difficult for you to establish the practice of sitting every day, it helps to just take the posture daily for any amount of time, even 1 minute. As Munindra-ji said, "Just put your body there." (again and again).

This area of “using the body” includes both restraint and positive actions: Stopping yourself from having the third piece of cake, and also deliberately offering that person at work (whom you dislike) the use of your stapler when you see them looking for one. You will notice that you need to use your mind to do this – it’s an example of the body-mind link: Training your body has an effect on your mind. Positive actions like volunteering or otherwise being generous also assist in mental development.

Another example is sitting with pain, as all of us do at some point (even the Buddha). One option is to “breathe through” the pain – taking deliberate action with the breath to help ease the mind’s tendency to fixate on the pain and make it worse. 

Observing the Body
The second mode of practice is to observe the body. Many body awareness practices are recommended in the suttas: breath, postures, activities, elements, body parts. Some are external and some are internal. One function of these is to develop mindfulness. It is to make sure that we can have a continuity of mindfulness in all activities, which is very important for insight. 

But another function of observing is to learn about the body, and also the mind. We actually carry a lot of false ideas and assumptions about both body and mind that have never been checked, and only very careful, unbiased observation is going to expose their falseness. 

Joseph Goldstein said: “See what you do.” This means just letting the body act while observing carefully. We don’t always want to control our body so tightly – we can start to get caught up in how we look, or how we think we “should” be, missing what is actually there. We may have taken on a spiritual identity about how good Buddhists look and act, and be subtly controlling our experience to match this.

Try just acting, and observe what is going on. It takes some practice to find this balance - being able to act naturally while also be keenly aware.

When we combine the quiet sitting posture with the internal observation of the body – letting it express itself as it is – things get very powerful. Recall the idea of working with pain by “breathing through” the pain. If we combine that action with observing the result of this, we’ll notice that the pain no longer feels so solid. What used to be a solid wall of “pain” (an abstract concept) is seen to be a series of flashes, often in a very small region. Maybe heat, stabbing, tingling, burning, aching, all coming and going very fast. Once you see this, the mind stops believing the pain in quite the same way – the relationship changes, and there will tend to be less suffering. (But you have to see it directly – reading it right now is not enough).
 
This kind of open observation of the body is great in general. We may experience energy, tightness, openness, areas of heaviness or lightness, a sense of no boundaries, even different shapes or sizes of the body.
 
These are not necessarily significant in and of themselves, although they seem dramatic at the beginning. After a while, they get more commonplace. What is important is that the mind’s perception of the body is becoming more variable. You are getting less subject to fixed, habitual ways of seeing and feeling your body.

Observing the body carefully enough leads naturally to seeing into the mind, and then things really get interesting. But don't think of the body as "beginner's stuff" that you'll move past at some point. The body is an incredibly important realm of practice that will serve along the whole path.