Meditation means catching your mind, or keeping it still in one place you choose ahead of time. Before you start, set a rule for yourself about what your mind will stay focused on. You might use the word “Buddho,” your breathing in and out, or “Buddho” combined with your breath. You could also use “rising, falling,” “Samma Araham,” or any of the 40 meditation objects we discussed earlier.
The Key to Meditation
First, you need to understand what the mind is like. Once you know its nature, it becomes much easier to focus. To catch your mind, you have to know what it looks like so you grab the right thing. It’s like catching a chicken: you need to know what a chicken looks like first. If you send someone who’s never seen a chicken to catch one, they might come back with a duck, a goose, a dog, or even a cat, because they don’t know what a chicken is.
That’s why the Buddha described the nature of the mind like this:
Phandanaṃ capalaṃ cittaṃ, durakkhaṃ dunnivārayaṃ, sududdasaṃ sunipuṇaṃ, yatthakāmanipātinaṃ.
This means: The mind is restless and fickle. It’s hard to guard and hard to hold back. It’s extremely hard to see, very subtle, and it tends to wander off toward whatever it wants.
That’s just how the mind is. It’s restless, fickle, hard to guard, hard to hold back, and hard to pin down. It’s subtle, and it keeps drifting toward things it likes. So how do we catch a restless mind, steady a fickle one, guard one that’s hard to guard, and hold back one that’s hard to hold back? This mind loves to think about the future and dwell on the past. It’s so subtle and delicate that it’s hard even to see.
Think about it: just telling a hyper kid to sit still is hard enough, and you can actually see the kid. Now we’re trying to stop the mind, something with no body or form you can’t see at all, from being restless and scattered. How on earth do we do that?