Become a Student of Your Mind
I'd like to discuss something that I talk about quite often with those I mentor and in the classes I teach regularly: the attitude or approach to our spiritual practice and meditation of becoming a student of mind.
This is something I've developed from my own practice, moving away from relying on techniques and toward relying on a process, a journey, or what we call in traditional Buddhism, a path. More and more, as I've reflected on it in my own practice, it becomes more enjoyable when I take this approach of becoming a student of my mind. Not that my mind knows exactly what to do all the time or even has good answers, but another way to think of this is becoming an explorer or observer of mind, which we're doing in meditation.
The more we meditate, the more we can carry this observation throughout the day - it doesn't have to be limited to the meditation cushion. This is one huge incentive for maintaining a regular formal practice. Just like going to the gym and becoming healthier by growing our muscles, we can actually grow the muscle of awareness, which is a natural quality of mind that I talk about quite often in my content. This awareness is discussed extensively in Buddhism because it's primarily what we're connecting to and cultivating in meditation, based on a motivation of compassion, altruism, and love.
There's much to unpack here, but I want to start with the main point: I really encourage those I work with, as well as in my own practice, to become an explorer of mind, an observer, a student of mind. So what is mind? Those of you who study Buddhism regularly understand mind from that perspective, but normally in the Western world, we don't think of mind as its own thing - we think of brain. I'm not going to delve into a whole discussion of whether mind is brain; that's not my expertise. However, in Buddhism, we do think of them as distinct, meaning that while mind in a human body relies on the human brain, mind itself is not brain. The brain is more like a muscle that the mind relies on.
Generally in Buddhism, we would say the mind is something immaterial. Let's call it consciousness - the fact that we're conscious, that we can be aware, that we can think, that we can know. This is all based on something natural, the natural vitality of the mind, something we're born with just like our biology. To make it more digestible for our discussion of what we're actually becoming an explorer of, it's all of our experience that's not necessarily physical. This includes our sense perceptions: smell, taste, touch, sight, hearing, and so forth. All these senses get interpreted by mind.
Mind serves as a filter for our experience - it helps us think, know, and in meditation, be aware. In Tibetan Buddhism, we usually define the relative mind as "clear and knowing." The knowing capacity is straightforward - it means we can know things: we can know there's a sound, we can know there's a sight, we can know there's a thought. The clear part is particularly interesting, as mind itself is very similar to clear, limpid water that can reflect anything. Mind can reflect just as we see and interpret colors through our eyes and other mechanisms, including the brain. This consciousness element is integral to that process.
Because mind is clear, anything can be reflected in it - whether it's the color brown, green, white, or any other color. While we can explain this in words, and Buddhism has a remarkably rich tradition of describing mind in great detail - perhaps one of the most advanced systems to date - it's ultimately very subjective. This understanding was all discovered through meditators subjectively exploring their own minds and reporting back what they saw, with other meditators repeating the same process to identify similarities.
When we become students of mind, explorers and observers, we need tools to bear witness to mind. The greatest tool for this is meditation, specifically awareness. Awareness, as I mentioned, is also a quality of mind, and you can think of it as a double knowing - you have the natural knowing, and then you can know that you're knowing. For instance, a car horn sounds, and you know it's a car horn because you've heard it before - you don't have to think about it. But then you can also know that you're knowing it, and that's what we call awareness. Perhaps an easier way to think of it is as a sense of observation, a sense of watchfulness.
We're all born with this awareness because it's part of mind, yet we don't all cultivate it. Buddhist meditative awareness, or shamatha practice, specifically arose from a need to connect more deeply with this type of awareness, to become more familiar with it, and essentially cultivate it. When I mentioned earlier about growing it like a muscle, I don't mean that awareness itself grows - don't take that literally. Rather, our connection to it, our knowing of it, our familiarity with it grows.
Awareness is incredibly useful because all our actions come from either awareness or unawareness. When we're unaware, we're not conscious of our actions, and we can do many harmful things - we can make choices that aren't skillful for ourselves and others. When we're cultivating awareness, we're cultivating skillfulness, we're cultivating a way to see and know the mind. With the motivation of wanting to become a student of mind, we're also staying really curious, which is why I particularly appreciate this approach.
Our mindfulness or shamatha practice isn't just a technique to calm us down. While we realize calm is useful because it grounds us in the body and creates more space to familiarize ourselves with awareness and mind, it's not useful in itself for what I'm discussing. We could use calm as a way to check out, and then we're not really becoming an explorer or student of mind - we're becoming somewhat like a zombie. I'm not trying to insult anyone who enjoys that state; I'm simply discussing a larger purpose for how we could use our meditation practice.
For me, although this approach is challenging, it's quite joyful because we start to see that we finally have some efficacy and agency in our lives. I don't know about some of you - whether you're new to meditation or have been doing it for a long time - but when I first started, that was one of the biggest things that sold me on this practice. I realized I could have more agency in my life - in how to work with my emotions, how to work with my mind, how to work with my thoughts, and even how to change my behaviors to more skillful ones.
Of course, all of this is really challenging. Some of our habit patterns and behaviors are really stubborn, and we like them too, sometimes even if they're causing some harm. It's like junk food - we all love it because it tastes great, so it's a difficult habit to break, just as an example.
Another benefit to this attitude of engaging in meditation and the study of Dharma to become a student or explorer of mind is, as I mentioned, this sense of curiosity and wonder. It's the sense that we don't need to have it all figured out, we don't even really need to change necessarily. Of course, we all want that, and it's a good measure of practice, but it's not the starting place. The starting place is becoming a curious, open person.
In the beginning, our mind is like a wild monkey - it's jumping everywhere, creating a mess, and being unruly. Initially, we're just working with taming that a little bit, giving the monkey something to do: watch the breath, stay here, come back when it wanders. Then, as we start to tame it, we develop the ability to look at the mind throughout the day. I recommend doing this in really short moments - just looking back at your mind, observing what it's doing, becoming watchful of your thinking process for a moment. Let's tread in small doses.
I remember when I first started practicing, I would catch things much later - perhaps ten minutes after the fact - and I'd realize, "Oh, I just had all those weird thoughts," or "That's what influenced me to do this." It was very unconscious, and I would notice later. Slowly, that gap gets shorter and shorter. This is really one kind of measure of our practice - the time between awareness of something and something happening becomes shorter until it becomes more simultaneous. This is a good incentive to practice.
Again, this isn't about becoming a dictator over our thoughts - it's so we can see more and start to understand their nature. We can start to open up and develop more compassion towards our human experience and others, and then, of course, we can start to liberate ourselves, which is the point. Liberation comes through seeing; liberation comes through knowing; liberation comes through understanding the nature of something and how it's functioning.
We can see this in other elements of life that are less abstract. An engineer gets really good at designing something because they know it inside and out - they've worked with it so much that they know its parts, its mechanisms, and what's possible. We can do this with mind. This is where meditation and the various techniques of meditative awareness become so helpful. It's not about getting good at the technique; it's about using the technique to become an explorer and student of mind.
I think that's all I want to say on this topic, but I encourage you to reflect more on this if you find it helpful. I hope it's insightful for your practice. For me, at some point - I don't remember exactly when - thinking of practice this way changed everything. If I think of it another way, I notice I get stuck in mechanisms of trying to control what I like and don't like, or very goal-oriented thinking and a lot of perfectionism. This approach is one way I've found to interrupt those behaviors and make it more about curiosity and openness - you could say wonder and awe even. It's about saying "wow" to how vast and strange the mind can be at times, and also how beautiful.
