While sitting, the effort to come back to the abdomen eventually ruins my vigilance and concentration, whereas following experiences mindfully as they naturally unfold helps me remain mindful.
Isn't it contrary to the teachings?
What should I do?
No, it's not contrary to the teachings, necessarily.
Now again, you have to be honest with yourself, which we often aren't, I'm sorry to say, when
you're actually, when the problem is actually bringing the mind back or when the problem is simply the suffering that you have in the mind and the disinclination to deal with it.
So sometimes when we come back to the present moment, when we come back to the here and now, it's unpleasant because our mind is inclined to
go with it, to enjoy things and to be fluid and to just let the mind go as it, let the mind go after, chase after objects, which is disrupted by the practice of mindfulness.
So there's two aspects.
When you force your mind back to the stomach, that's wrong because it's not being honest with yourself about the nature of reality.
you're deluding yourself about the idea that you have some kind of control and can benefit from trying to force things.
But by letting your mind go and just following after whatever comes up,
then you incline instead towards laziness and indulgence.
There's the potential to indulge and to enjoy experiences and give rise to liking and attachment.
So, one experience that comes up is not a
It's not ruining your vigilance, but it's going to ruin your sense of enjoyment, which we call concentration.
So it's quite common for people to say, this practice is ruining my concentration.
It's designed to do that, because your concentration is not...
Not necessarily wholesome, you see.
You can be concentrated on a bad thing.
Angry people can be, maybe not from an Abhidhamma point of view, but can be in some way very, very much focused.
You can be very much focused on sensual desire.
You get caught up in watching a movie or listening to a song and you can become very much entranced by it.
in a bad way, you see, because there's a whole bunch of sensual defilement in there.
And so by breaking that up, it's unpleasant.
It's like crying like a child.
When the child gets what it wants, it's totally at peace and it's totally focused.
When you take its toy away from it, it starts to whine and complain.
And so that's essentially what the mind does when you bring it back to the present moment.
It whines and complains.
So, I would say oftentimes you're not actually forcing the mind back, you're just choosing something neutral, which the mind doesn't like.
The mind doesn't want to come back to the stomach, that's boring, that's useless, that's uninteresting.
And that's the point.
The point is to keep you on something that's not going to intoxicate you, which the mind doesn't like.
So the mind is like, I'd much more prefer to go after these interesting things and enjoyable things.
And that's mostly what you're feeling.
Now, if and when you're actually forcing them, not you, but that's mostly what people feel, and I'd imagine much of what you're feeling is that.
That's my guess.
But there are people who force themselves.
So when something comes up, they ignore it and instead go back, force themselves to stay with one object.
So that's not good.
When something does come up, you're to acknowledge it.
Now, once you've acknowledged it, best advice is to go back to the rising and falling without paying attention to what's going to come next.
it will be uncomfortable to do that in many cases because the mind isn't interested in the rising and falling.
The mind wants to chase after more enjoyable things, which is not beneficial, which is a problem because it encourages defilement and delusion and the idea of permanence, of stability and so on, which we're all trying to, all of which we're trying to overcome.