The more observant you are in the way you relate to the breath, the more your muddle will turn into a process of discovery.

"At the very least, when you're sitting here meditating and things don't seem to be going right, don't blame it on the weather. Don't blame it on the time of day. Just look at what you're doing. Look at the raw material you have to work with and your skill in fashioning that raw material into a state of calm. From the Buddhist point of view, that raw material comes from past actions. You can't change the fact that this is the raw material you have at hand, but you can fashion that raw material in different ways. That freedom of choice is always present. So if things aren't going well in your meditation, look at your intentions to see what you might change. Look at your perceptions, at the questions you're posing in the mind. Experiment. Improvise. See what makes a difference.

When things are going well, try to maintain them well. See how you can develop that sense of wellness even further. This is Right Effort. This is where we encounter the element of intention, the element of action directly in our own minds. If you sit here complaining about how things aren't going well in your meditation, that's your choice: You chose to complain. Is that the most skillful thing to do? If it's not, try something else. You've always got that freedom.

When things are going well, you can always choose to get complacent. If you get complacent, where does that take you? You can choose to manipulate things too much, too little, or just right. The choices are here. It's important that we keep that in mind. Otherwise we find ourselves trapped in a particular situation and can't think our way out, because we don't realize the range of available possibilities.

Try to keep your sense of those possibilities as alive as possible, so that the doing of the meditation becomes a skillful doing and not just a thrashing around. You observe, you watch, you look into this question: "What does it mean to have an intention? How can I see the results of my intentions? Where do they show their results?" They show their results both in your state of mind and in your breathing, so look right here, make your adjustments right here.

And even if you're not consciously thinking about the nature of human action, you're learning a lot about your own actions as you work with the breath, trying to keep the mind with the breath, trying to make the breath a good place for the mind to stay. You're muddling around here in the basic elements of human action, like a young kid fooling around with a guitar: After a while, if the kid is observant, the fooling around turns into music. The more observant you are in the way you relate to the breath, the more your muddle will turn into a process of discovery."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Watch What You're Doing" (Meditations1)

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