Lessons In Practical Buddhism - Sirimangalo.Org

“Rising” and “falling” are concise explanations of what’s
occurring at each moment. It doesn’t really matter what
word you use, as long as it is an as-concise-as-possible
understanding of what’s happening. When you feel pain in
the body, you just focus on the pain and remind yourself that
it’s pain. Normally pain is an object of aversion that we’d
rather not focus on and would much rather escape from.
When we say to ourselves again and again, “pain, pain,
pain,” we change that. We change from reacting, our
reactionary behaviour, to simply interacting – accepting,
understanding, and being able to live with the reality in front
of us. When we think of something, we remind ourselves,
“thinking”, just knowing that we’re thinking.
It might seem a pointless exercise on the surface, but think
about how often our thoughts destroy us; thoughts about
what we’ve done in the past, bad things we’ve done or bad
things others have done to us, worries about the future, fear
of what may come, and so on. We are quite capable of
destroying ourselves with our minds, creating great amounts
of suffering for ourselves and others due simply to thoughts
of past and future. When you say to yourself “thinking,
thinking”, you see that it is just a thought, and that it
disappears in an instant with no remainder. It doesn’t really
hang over you like a curse or doom that you must carry
around forever. It’s just a thought.
The Buddha’s teaching is sandiṭṭhiko – you see it for yourself,
and can verify the truth of reality for yourself. One of the
great reasons for wanting to teach mindfulness meditation to
other people is because it is so simple and easy to practice,
perfectly free from dogma or belief of any sort. When you
see people suffering from things that could be completely
cured with a simple explanation of how to be mindful, it feels
too good to keep to yourself. The truth is that most of the
problems in the world could be solved with just a few
minutes of explanation on how to listen to and learn from
oneself, if only people would care to try.
These days, many people contact me with what seem to be
life-threatening problems of anxiety, depression, addiction,
and so on. Often just one e-mail explaining these basic
concepts in a way that relates to the problem they are
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