A Note from the Teacher

You may be finished with a formal retreat for now but remember that the dhamma is everything, so it is everywhere, all the time. Don’t lose track of that. You can persevere and continue practicing at home. Practicing the Dhamma includes all the practices of right thought (which is a fundamental part of right view), right speech, and right action. Practicing the Dhamma begins with a mindset change that, if we are able to take it on, may eventually lead to a lifestyle change. It is really worth the effort. The right efforts bear fruit when sufficient conditions are fulfilled. The Buddha said, “If you look after the Dhamma, the Dhamma will look after you.” Looking after the Dhamma simply means practicing it. After a certain point, the Dhamma will carry you along on its wave. So keep going!

What is dhamma? It is everything: all of nature, its causes and effects; the mind that is meditating (i.e. the qualities of awareness, perseverance, stability of mind, faith, and wisdom); it is everything that becomes observed in meditation (the sensations, the six sense objects which include the mind as a sense object, the experiences, the events, the thoughts, the pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral feelings) and also that which we may or may not consciously notice yet. These are all a part of our experience. By meditating, we are growing the qualities of awareness, perseverance, stability of mind, faith, and wisdom.

These qualities when strong are called powers (bala) and they protect us, look after us, and bring us good results. So long as we are practicing, we are using the qualities of awareness (remembering what is wholesome), perseverance, wisdom, faith, and stability of mind. Over many years of retreats with my teacher, the late Shwe Oo Min Sayadaw (“Sayadawgyi”), I developed these powers, yet I did not use them in life and did not practice them except on retreat. I had to truly dedicate myself to them before I understood what “Dhammaṃ saraṇaṃ gacchāmi: I go to the Dhamma for refuge” truly meant and what a true refuge the Dhamma truly is.

I was about 13 years old when I started to meditate. I worked with a technique that required energetic, rhythmic breathing and got hooked on the pleasant physical sensation and calm that the experience brought. When I told Sayadawgyi about this and that I liked it, he was curious and asked me about my experiences. He would tell me stories of other people’s special meditation experiences and this would make me want such experiences and motivated me to meditate very diligently. I quickly caught on that when I maintained detailed mindfulness throughout the day, the feelings of calm and pleasantness could be sustained so I was zealous in maintaining mindfulness. He also told me something that really stuck with me: be happy when I noticed anything about myself because it meant that I was aware of myself, that I was mindful. I was so focused on the mindfulness that anything I noticed about myself became a source of joy: it meant I was mindful! It never mattered to me even if I discovered an undesirable quality because the point I saw was that I was mindful.

Sayadawgyi often asked me why certain things happened when I went to him to describe my experiences. One episode in particular was when he asked me to find out why the abdomen rises and falls (that was my main object at that time) and I said it was because of the breath. Then he asked why there was breathing. I did not know this answer, which prompted a six-day search to find out. Every day, at every sit, the question dogged my observation of the breath and I remember on day six when the curious mind thought about why it was breathing and I saw the desire to breathe. This episode and the success I had in finding the answer was so thrilling that I ran out of the dhamma hall immediately to tell my teacher the answer. It has fueled an eternal curiosity in me to observe and investigate, which of course has led to all sorts of discoveries.

Many types of insights can be awakened. Insights into the nature of things include insights into the nature of our own practice, insights into the nature of awareness, insights into the nature of the things we observe and experience, insights into the nature of things as they are and more. Although we may not always realize it, just persevering and noticing is the main skill we need. Whenever awareness is established and strong, and we have an insight, we will begin to see nature in ways that we had never conceived of before and see things in ways we had never seen before. This is the growth of wisdom. Our work and our practice is always changing with this wisdom.

Wisdom is one word but it encompasses so much and operates in many ways. Sometimes we miss the fact that it is there and doing its work because we are not familiar with the nature of wisdom and its various job descriptions. We are more familiar with making an effort, like yogis making a physical effort not to be sleepy. Instead, when we are sleepy we could actually check out the sleepiness, if we are curious, and wisdom would at once be at work: Why is there sleepiness now? What has brought it on? What does it feel like? What we mostly do instead is resist this state because of our belief that sleepiness is not good when we are meditating. We react negatively as a result and try to do something immediately to fix the experience rather than seeing it as it is and checking it out. I recall my teacher’s first lesson to me: when I notice anything about myself, it means there is awareness. That is a good thing.

I also had a first taste of the importance of the mind after an incident with a bed bug. I loved the feeling of calm that came with continuous mindfulness and the attendant samādhi (stability of mind) so much that I would forgo sleep to enjoy this bliss. One night a bed bug bit me while I was meditating in my room in the middle of the night. Even though this disrupted the blissful feelings, I was unperturbed. I knew I could get it back so I continued meditating but it didn’t come back. I tried harder, I walked, I sat, and I still did not sleep. I became obsessed with regaining the blissful feeling, to no avail. I continued to the morning, the whole day, the next night, the next day. By day three I had a headache but I didn’t give up. I put medicated plasters that relieve muscle soreness at my temples and continued my efforts, until finally it got too much and too painful, that I gave up. I surrendered. Never mind if I couldn’t have that bliss back, I thought. I just dropped it and continued to meditate without any more desire to achieve that bliss. It came back, just like that. As I simply paid attention to what I was doing, without a thought of having any more of the bliss, it was back. And I learned this huge lesson about meditation, which has stayed with me ever since, and I ran all the way to my teacher’s kuti (cottage) to tell him and he hammered home the bitter lesson, saying, “Well if you can get it by doing it, then do it.”

I didn’t know the mind directly then, but I just realized very deeply that greed was neither useful nor helpful when practicing meditation. It had no place in getting me results. So I never had greed when I meditated anymore. Ironically that did not prevent me from having greed in many other aspects of my life, so much so that it led to depression.

When I was around 18 to 20 years old on one of my retreats with my teacher, I remember Sayadawgyi mentioning that we can ask what the mind is aware of. Until then, in all my retreats over the years, although I was totally dedicated to being mindful on retreat, I simply watched my body movements and sensations. When thoughts were noticed, I acknowledged them then returned to the task of being aware of all my bodily movements and sensations, over and over again all day long. I recalled my teacher’s words the next morning as I was brushing my teeth and when I posed the question, it felt like a weight was suddenly taken off my mind. As it was, my practice had built up quite a bit of momentum on the retreat so when the attention turned to what the mind was aware of, and what the mind knew, there was suddenly so much to know! It took off! I saw the mind and whatever it knew. From then on, my practice changed. Whenever I went on retreat, I would, in sitting and in all activities, lead with the question: What is the mind knowing? What is the mind aware of? This opened up the practice immensely at the center.

At home, the practice was forgotten and I got busy having fun with my friends. At University to study engineering, I became so involved in having so much fun with my friends that I flunked my second year of Regional College. At about this time, my oldest brother passed away from leukemia at the age of 43, and my father needed help running his menswear shop in a bustling wholesale center in downtown Yangon, a walking distance from our home. My father decided to take me out of University, no doubt a fact that I was a non-doctor in a family filled with brothers and a sister studying medicine. The only other brother not studying medicine had already finished University and was helping my father with the shop.

I wanted so much to continue to be with my friends that I actually, while helping out at the shop, still tried to repeat my second year at University on my own. It was not as much fun anymore by then because all my friends had already moved on to the main Rangoon University for their third year in Engineering studies while I was still at the Regional College. It was discouraging, so I stopped trying to repeat the year. I slowly descended into depression from resentment, fear, dissatisfaction, having to do what I did not want to, and not being able to do what I wanted to do. It was the love, or actually greed for fun that indirectly led to my years of depression.

Initially I forgot about my unhappiness after a while, because it wasn’t very strong then and the depression seemed to go away. When it returned a second time, I got fed up of feeling mopey and angrily railed against the emotion and willed myself to overcome it that way.

While I was working with my father, I got more of an opportunity to go for longer retreats at my teacher’s monastery too, than when I had been in school. My father had no objections to my going and I mostly did the customary days off during the Burmese New Year. At one point I thought I wanted to be a monk for life and told my family and my teacher and they were all happy for me. Ten months in, my mind had changed again, and I just could not stay at the center any longer. My teacher gently tried to persuade me to stay but when my mind was made up there was no changing it. I went home. Ironically it was right on the way home in the taxi from that retreat that I actually descended into the deepest depression of my life. In hindsight, I think the feelings that came up had something to do with some insights into dukkha not being fully understood or realized. Sitting in the taxi on the way home I began to feel irrational fears. I was sure the policeman on the street knew about all my misbehaviors. I went home fearful. This time I could not shake the feelings that overtook me and it was two long years of depression at home before I finally turned in desperation to meditation again, but this time I did not go to the monastery. Circumstances did not permit. My father was getting older and I could not take time off like I had done before. I did try to take short holidays to places I had gone to with my friends before but nothing helped. I could not be happy. I only sought out meditation when it became my very last resort.

When I finally, in my exhausted and suffering mind, decided maybe I should try meditating at home, something I’d never done before then, I went to speak to my teacher. Sayadawgyi just told me to try. I accompanied my teacher for a four– to five–day retreat to a monastery about 10 miles out of Bago that he was visiting to give myself a boost. It was probably my time because I had three insights while meditating at that monastery that gave me some impetus to persevere when I went home. When I got to the monastery, I spent my time practicing as I already knew well how to. The second day, I sat under a tree because there was not much to do out there, except to watch. It was all trees, with just stillness and as I sat there I guess the silence turned the mind inwards. Suddenly, I saw all the rage, resentment, fear, desires, and frustrations that were racing through my mind. I was shocked. I saw it was all negative thinking in the mind. I realized if I died with the mind in this state, it was not going to a good state/place. That was the first thing that made me afraid to die, not in general, but right then in that state.

The next day as I was taking a shower at a well, pulling up one pail of water after another and pouring it over myself in the heat, a man came running down a hillside. He was large and very dark, his skin almost black, that he must have been in the heat a long time. He was sweating profusely and panting hard and he said to me as he ran towards me, “Water, water” and silently I handed him the pail full of water that I pulled up from the well. He turned the pail up to drink directly from it and drank till all the water was gone! Then he ran off. I just stared at him. Then it dawned on me after he left that I was all alone in that area. The monastery had a lot of land. My watch, which I had taken off, was on the edge of the well. I knew the area had prisons somewhere. And the appearance of the man was not ordinary. I got the chills. I could have been robbed and killed if he had had any ill intentions. Again, the thought came to me that I was not ready to die in my current state of mind.

Then the next night, in my last night with my teacher before I was going to battle it out on my own at home, he asked me to get him medicine from the dining cottage. The monks’ kutis were far from each other and it was pitch dark but I knew the land well and there was moonlight so I walked without lighting the flashlight I had with me. As I walked back to my teacher’s kuti at one point I just felt like using the flashlight so I flashed it and stopped dead. Right in front of me was a viper. One more step and my foot would have been struck. My blood ran cold, the hair on my head (although shaved bald) stood and all I could do was stand. I was so transfixed with fear that I could not move. The snake moved away by itself but I remained there, standing still until my teacher sent his attendant monk to come find me and I followed him back to my teacher’s kuti. I really felt the fear of death then. I was really afraid that I might die.

Of course mindfulness was not continuous when I got home from that “kick-starter” retreat. I knew how to watch the mind, I knew about the watching mind or awareness of awareness and I could use the six sense objects just fine, and although I often speak to yogis about using questions, I myself initially had none. I was only meditating to calm the mind a little, as much as possible. Fear and anxiety overwhelmed me, and when the feelings were really strong, I would sometimes use the feeling as the object and watch them continuously until the feeling subsided. Other times, they wouldn’t hold my attention long enough and I used my breath to anchor my mind. These objects of the feelings and the breath were familiar to me and I knew how to use these objects to anchor the mind. I did not begin using other objects until months afterwards. Without attention on an object, the fear and anxiety could quickly become scary, and, if they became overwhelming, I used the inhaler because the sharp menthol smell and the sensation in my sinuses and forehead would bring my attention to these sensations and off the thoughts that fueled the emotions.

The suffering feeling reminded me to be mindful and that mindfulness made me feel a bit better each time I was mindful. I visited my teacher every week or two and told him about my practice and complained about how hard it was to keep practicing at home. He would tell me it takes time to find our footing and encouraged me to keep trying. My problem was not one of ability to practice. It was more because the peace I got from meditation was not lasting. I already benefited from keeping up the mindfulness—it did give me relief from the suffering—but it did not give a lasting peace, which I craved. I didn’t want to suffer and the temporary peace I got did not satisfy the mind’s craving. It was demotivating yet I had to keep at it; otherwise, the mental suffering came back. This in hindsight was a blessing in disguise!

I worked at my father’s shop, trying to cope with the demands of the business in my state of anxiety, uncertainty, and fear. I often felt unable to make the decisions that had to be made. Very often, the decisions just had to be made, without regard as to whether they were right or wrong, because my state of mind did not allow me this perspective. Sometimes I would make the wrong decisions and had to deal with the fall out of that too. Through it all, I would turn my attention to the suffering, or the breath as much as I could. If the feelings were particularly harsh, I could neither face those feelings nor watch the breath successfully, then I turned to the mentholated inhaler. The Vicks inhaler is a small tube with some mentholated ointment or oil inside that one can inhale through the tube. The sensation in the nose when I inhaled it would help to bring the mind’s attention back, and if I was really desperate I would inhale sharply to get a really strong sharp sensation that would get the mind’s attention, helping to gain control over getting mentally overwhelmed.

During these initial two months I also began reading the books of Mogok Sayadaw. I happened to see my friend with one of a series of 36 books on Mogok Sayadaw’s teachings and eventually borrowed about six books over some months. Reading a few pages of these books every night, I eventually realized that Mogok Sayadaw was pointing to check to see how the mind is reacting to whatever it is knowing, over and over, constantly.

About two months after I began trying to practice at home and at work, the mind did begin to gain some balance. Where I could not previously think without the cloud and background of anxious fears and doubts, I now began to be able to consider things more rationally and logically. And one day I had a moment of clarity. In a moment of balance in mindfulness I saw clearly that when there is mindfulness the mind is totally free of its suffering. Then the suffering returned, but the insight had been strong. Although it was just a glimpse, the mind saw this truth unquestionably. There is a place of utter peace. And the conviction that it gave the mind provided me with the motivation to continue practicing with increased vigor. I knew now that this was the way out, for sure, so there was a real desire to practice. I began to think about practice daily, about how to practice.

After about six months practicing at home, the depression had gradually disappeared and I began to notice that I would notice my reactions whenever I looked at people or when I heard something. The thoughts and feelings had calmed down enough and the practice had gained enough momentum that I finally had the mental space and interest to use objects outside of the breath or feelings. The practice became interesting in and of itself, and I began initially just one at a time to explore the mind’s ability to stay anchored, for example on one pair of fingertips touching while sitting in the shop, on myself when drinking coffee or tea during a break, or being aware of seeing while waiting for customers, and so on.

And these accumulated practices of collecting the mind enabled me to then be more aware of the interactions within my own mind when I was making decisions, counting money or attending to customers. I could notice when I lost my composure and devise a plan for maintaining it in my next interaction, always using the practice of collecting the mind as the basis for strengthening the mind’s composure. As these interactions happened daily and routinely, this is how I learned what helped me to maintain the composure of my mind, what helped me to remain aware and maintain continuity—when I needed to pick up attention on one object, mainly when I was no longer interacting with someone else or doing a task and when I needed to be aware in a more fluid way as in when customers approached and I had to attend to them and interact with them. The awareness became closer to continuous and insights naturally arose more and more over time.

A year in, I read an article about the ājīvaṭṭhamaka sīla, eight precepts with right livelihood as the eighth precept. I was particularly interested in the expansion of the precept on not telling untruths, into four precepts for right speech: refraining from telling lies, slander, harsh speech, and idle chatter. I was inspired to try this. The depression had already made me quite subdued at the marketplace I worked at, compared to the joker I had been previously, and then practicing continuously made me quieter.

However, taking on the four right speech precepts left me with hardly anything to say because I now avoided idle chatter. If someone came over to gossip about some other stallholder, they no longer found in me someone that sympathized. I merely listened and did not contribute as I saw neither wisdom nor meaning in adding fuel to their fire. The mindfulness became so much keener, aware of everything I said or planned to say and naturally the strength and composure of the mind also improved.

After two years of practicing dedicatedly I began to notice that I had been avoiding unnecessary interactions and I began to challenge myself to go to social functions as a representative of my family and maintain mindfulness, or to go out for dinner with old friends and maintain my mindfulness, composure, or my stand without frustration or rudeness when they tried to get me to join them in drinking alcohol. I even went for a boxing match and learned a lasting lesson that this was not the place for me any longer.

I tell you this story to say this is possible for you as well. You just have to persevere, experiment, and use your wisdom to figure out what works until this also becomes a natural part of your life. I want to persuade you that this is possible. I really want you to know that you can do it at home when you have become skillful in this practice. This is my motivation to continue teaching. The only reason we aren’t able to bring it into our lives is because we don’t know enough yet or aren’t practicing enough yet.

You may go on formal retreats to develop wholesome minds. But it is very important that you continue meditating outside of retreats because unwholesome minds arise in the absence of wholesome minds. Right now, as soon as yogis leave a retreat, they have no idea where all the wholesome minds have disappeared! It seems as if wholesome minds just arise on retreat, only to be replaced by unwholesome mind states as soon as a person returns home. You have to cultivate your own energy and your own wisdom. If you are suffering, you will need to sit down and work out what to do about it. If the parents always work things out for the child, the child will never learn for himself.

Finally, we all have to live, but we must ask ourselves: Are we truly alive? If we don’t change and grow, it is akin to being dead. I encourage all of you to please continue practicing. I make an aspiration for all of you to practice at home and to enjoy the fruits of your practice.