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Sylvia Boorstein tells a story of being at a two-week mindfulness retreat on the coast of Hawaii in 1986. During a meditation period, the teacher Joseph Goldstein, rand the bell only after about 10 minutes to announce that there had been an earthquake near japan that had caused a tidal wave. The wave was headed toward Hawaii and since they were in such an isolated location, there was no time to evacuate. They would have to move to higher ground–the second floor of the facility.

She continues the story, “We were living in two-story bungalows on a beach ringed by thick jungle. The best we could do to “take high ground” was go upstairs. We collected matches, crackers, fruit, and flashlights and brought them to the second-floor room we were using as our communal meditation space. We filled the bathtubs with fresh water lest the water pipes burst. When we had finished preparing, we took our seats around the room. Most of us, facing our teacher, were also facing a wall-to-wall window that looked out across the sea to the flat horizon.

“Joseph Goldstein, told the story of a Zen master of long ago who was asked, “What would you do if the waters of the north and the south and the east and the west all rose around you?” The Zen master, Joseph continued, was reported to have said, “I would just sit.” Joseph said, “Let’s sit.”

“I closed my eyes and then opened them again, checking the horizon. I felt my heart pounding. Imagining what a wall of water moving toward us would look like, I was terrified. I closed my eyes and noticed that the room felt unusually quiet. I took a breath and felt it enough to have it catch my attention.

“Out of habit, I began to name my experience to myself: Breath in, breath out. Breath in, breath out. It’s very quiet. My hands are cold. My heart is pounding. I am trembling. I heard my mind saying, “I don’t want to drown,” and also, “Take a breath, Sylvia. Now another one.” I noticed my mind quieting down as I named breaths. “In. Out. In. Out.” I remember feeling surprised to find that my hands felt warmer and my heart had stopped pounding. “Maybe the tidal wave will happen,” I thought. “Maybe not. I don’t know.”

“Realizing that I didn’t know provided a moment of relief.”

Sogyal Rinpoche wrote in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, “Self-grasping creates self-cherishing, which in turn creates an ingrained aversion to harm and suffering. However, harm and suffering have no objective existence, what gives them their existence and their power is only our aversion to them. When you understand this, you understand then that it is our aversion, in fact, that attracts to us every negativity and obstacle that can possibly happen to us, and fills our lives with nervous anxiety, expectation, and fear. Wear down that aversion by wearing down the self-grasping mind and its attachment to a nonexistent self, and you will wear down any hold on you that any obstacle or negativity can have.”

His Holiness the Dalai Lama said, “The highest perfection of altruism, the ultimate altruism, is Bodhichitta complemented by wisdom.  Bodhichitta – the aspiration to bring about the welfare of all sentient beings and to attain Buddhahood for their sake – is really the distilled essence, the squeezed juice of all the Buddha’s teachings.”  Which is a very direct definition of Absolute and Relative Bodhichitta, the realization of and openness to our connection to all sentient beings, our wish to relieve them of their suffering, and to attain enlightenment in order to be of the greatest benefit to them.

There is the story of the student who asks his teacher, “Master what can I do to help all the suffering beings in the world?” and the Master answers, “Indeed, what can you do?”  Here we are, sentient beings ourselves, with all our suffering and confusion.  How can we possibly help? The only thing we can do is to begin to cultivate some understanding, some insight, and the more we learn the more we can help. Therefore, to be of maximum benefit to others, the answer is to become enlightened ourselves… to become a Buddha.

When we begin meditation, we first start to work with the breath and we see the mind wandering. This is actually our first insight, which is called “seeing the waterfall.” You ask your mind to “please stay on the breath,” but of course it doesn’t!  It seems like such a little thing to say on the breath. But instead, it plans and worries and fantasizes and makes the grocery list. Then you notice you’re not breathing and you bring it back to the breath for a few breaths and then it’s off again on some new or old fantasy … and you notice.  This is when we begin to be aware of our inner dialog.  This is “seeing the water fall”.  Meditation is train the mind in the midst of all this chatter.

Jack Kornfield says that beginning to work with the breath is like training a puppy.  You pick the puppy up and put it on a piece of paper, set it down and say “stay, stay”.  Does it stay?   Like the mind, not much chance of that.  It gets up, it goes around, you pick it up, you put it on the paper again, “stay, stay” over and over and after a while the puppy starts to figure it out.  Well, we’re slower than puppies in that regard.  But it’s possible.  It’s the very returning of the puppy to the paper, it’s actually the coming back when we know that we’re away, gathering our attention and saying over and over again “Thinking”, bringing the body and the mind together in this moment over and over that starts to train us.

Now one other thing that the image is helpful for is for those of us who have trained a puppy before…is it a great idea to beat the puppy?  Similarly for us, we might see judgmental thoughts come, like “I can’t do it”, and “This isn’t working right.”  We find the mind’s habit of judging and beating.  It doesn’t help at all to beat the puppy or ourselves.  You just pick the puppy up gently and bring it back to the next breath; “stay, stay” or rather “thinking, thinking”, and try it again for a couple of breaths.  That’s all.  It’s that simple. And gradually you begin to connect with the breath.