These are my top five lessons on training the mind.
1. Equanimity is a muscle
Equanimity is a muscle, and you can strengthen it. It isn't a fixed temperament you're either born with or without — it grows with use, the way any muscle does. The boredom or the restlessness still arises; the strength is simply that you no longer have to act on it.
Why train it? Imagine you've planned a holiday for months — booked the tickets, paid for a room right by the sea — and the night before you leave, an email lands from your boss: he wants a serious conversation when you're back, nothing more said. Now the whole trip, an untrained mind runs its scenarios. Am I being scolded? Laid off? Did I make some mistake? Almost certainly none of it. But a mind that hasn't been trained cannot put the thought down — it keeps circling, and the sea, the sand, the days you paid for are all spent somewhere else. The waves are right in front of you and you never arrive. Equanimity is what lets you set the worry down until there is actually something to do about it, and be where your feet are until then.
And it isn't only the big trips. Sit down to a good meal, or go to the gym, with a mind that won't stop reacting — rolling from one thought to the next — and you can't taste the food or feel the body working either. The experience is happening, but you are not in it; a mind that cannot settle turns even its pleasures into something to merely get through, and the whole of life starts to feel like a miserable thing. That is what the muscle is for — not to stop the thoughts, but to stop being dragged behind them, so you can actually be present for your own life.
2. Awareness at every possible moment is the first step
Before anything else, be aware. Notice what you are doing, and notice the thoughts moving inside you. This builds mindfulness — the habit of bringing the mind to see what is actually happening right now, rather than letting it drift into daydreams, or into the past with its guilt, or into the future with its worries and fantasies. That habit is the first step, the ground you prepare before any deeper meditation can take root.
3. The mind comes to love what you repeat
Take something boring — naam chanting, exercise. Do it regularly, and the mind, on its own, begins to like it. That is the mind's nature: it grows fond of what it keeps returning to. So the discipline doesn't stay a discipline forever. Given time, the thing you had to push yourself toward becomes the thing that pulls you.
This is the thing we miss. We want the interesting things first, and wait to feel drawn before we begin. But even boring things become interesting with enough patience. The key is to choose what is essential in life, put your attention there, and let the mind catch up — it will get interested in whatever you keep feeding it.
The same is true of observing the mind itself. If you want to understand it, watch it objectively, like a scientist watching an experiment. But you have to do it consistently, every day, before the mind grows interested. Once it does, the mind itself begins to push you toward the practice rather than away from it.
This is also why sitting for meditation at the same time and place, or exercising at the same time and place, matters so much. The mind starts to associate the place and the hour with the doing, and the doing becomes easier. That is the power of habit.
4. Guard your focus, and spend it on the essential
Life is short, and more of it slips away than we ever realize. So many things fill a life, and time is far more limited than it feels while you still have it. So the real work is to figure out what is essential — to ask honestly what you would regret not having done when you come to die — and to keep that short list in front of you. The things that truly matter are, mercifully, few. Once you know them, the discipline is to guard your focus and drive it toward those few things, again and again, rather than letting it leak into everything that merely asks for it. Attention is the one resource you are always spending; choosing where it goes, and protecting that choice, is most of the work.
5. Keep the momentum
Momentum has to be kept up. When it goes, you start again from scratch — and starting from cold is far harder than continuing from warm. So the key is to hold the momentum and add to it a little each day.
Build it, and practice becomes like riding with the current of a river: the flow carries you, and less effort is needed. Lose it, and every day is like rowing against the current. The activities don't change. Only whether the river is with you or against you. That is why momentum matters.