Simply This Moment - Buddhist Meditation and Theravada ...

It’s such a release and a relief to know that one can be happy without all of thesedifficult and dangerous things that are so fraught with problems and suffering.Someone told me some years ago that the root meaning of marriage comes from aLatin word meaning to take a gamble? I don’t know if that is true, but marriage istruly a gamble. You never know really who you are marrying until maybe years afterthe ceremony. We can understand that sensuality is fraught with danger and byovercoming it and restraining ourselves we’re freeing ourselves from that. We areactually disciplining thirst. If we don’t drink the thirst disappears. A good exampleof this is sitting in meditation. When we first sit in meditation we try to get ourselvescomfortable, but for people just beginning meditation it’s difficult to get comfortablefor very long. They have to sit this way or sit that way. They keep on fidgeting,always trying to find the most comfortable position. Usually they discover that if theykeep following that thirst of the body for comfort, they will never find peace. Insteadof all this moving whenever there’s discomfort, they find if they say no to thedemands of the body, discipline the demands of the body and just sit still, the achesand itches disappear by themselves. It seems that by not heeding them they fadeaway. Scratching just makes more itches.This is what we mean by disciplining the thirst of the body. By not following thedemands of the body they disappear. It’s just like some person knocking on the doorof your house. If you answer the door you may get into a long conversation, and nowthey know you are in, they will come again. If you don’t answer the door they’ll thinkthere is no one there, and they will go away never to return. This is the way wediscipline the body. When you sit there long enough and say no to all the itches andaches of the body, and simply don’t move, the mind turns away from the feelings ofthe body. For the first time you can sit still and in comfort. It’s a strange thing, but ifwe try and find comfort in the body by scratching, by moving, by putting anothercushion underneath the bottom, we never find that comfort. Just leave the body alone.If we don’t answer the calls of scratching and moving, the body just disappears andthen there is peace. This is what we mean by disciplining the thirsts. By followingand indulging them they just get worse. By saying no to them they disappear, andthen we have comfort.42