Instructions in meditation technique tend to fall into two main types. The first type tells you what to do-how to think, to visualize, to breathe-to create a certain state in body and mind: a sense of spaciousness, compassion, or solid concentration. The second type tells you not to do anything at all. Simply be, accept, or watch what’s already there.

The reason for these two types of approach is that the mind has two sorts of problems: those that go away only when you actively work them out, and those that go away when you simply watch them patiently. Anger, for instance, sometimes seems so clearly justified that it goes away only when you sit down and reason with yourself, probing for its underlying assumptions and analyzing them until you’re willing to admit that they aren’t worth all the fuss. Other times it just withers away under your steady gaze.

What this means in practice is that you can’t expect a single meditation technique to do all your work for you. You need to master both approaches. Not only that, you need to gain a sense of which approach to apply to which problem, and how best to combine them. Gaining this knowledge, though, isn’t drudgery. It’s actually an adventure. You get to explore on your own, to experiment, to read the results, and learn from your mistakes. You learn how to read your own mind.

This is why the Buddha didn’t simply teach meditation techniques. He also taught the skills you need to be a reliable mind-reader: how to understand the workings of the mind so that you’ll know what to look for, and how to develop the personal qualities of truthfulness and patient equanimity you’ll need so that you can trust yourself as an observer.

Only within that context did he teach meditation techniques, and even then he didn‘t spell everything out. He raised questions and suggested areas for experimentation. Instead of trying to spoon-feed you the answers, or forcing you into a straitjacket where you aren’t allowed to think, he wanted the meditation to capture your imagination so that you’d develop your own discernment and gain your own insights. Only when you experiment to figure out what’s working and what’s not do you understand cause and effect. And only through understanding cause and effect can you eliminate the causes of suffering and stress, and foster the path to true Awakening.

It’s like learning the guitar. Simply learning to play other people’s songs is only part of what it takes to know the guitar. You also want to understand some music theory and get some practice in developing your ear as a listener. Then you can use the standard songs as a jumping-off point for your own experiments and improvisations. That’s when you can really begin to know the guitar, and take full advantage of what it has to offer.

So if you want to explore what your mind has to offer, the best preparation is to review the Buddha’s meditation instructions in three areas: understanding, attitude, and technique.

Understanding. To understand the workings of the mind, you have to understand karma, or action, for karma is what the mind is doing all the time. It’s through reading the mind’s actions that you can read the mind in the first place. The causes of suffering are a form of karma, and so is the path to suffering’s end.

The two most important points in the Buddha’s teaching on karma-the two that set it apart from every other version of karma taught in his time-are that karma is intention, and that present experience is shaped by two kinds of intentions: past and present. Past intentions that are ready to ripen establish the range of possibilities that you could experience right now. Your present intentions pick and choose from those possibilities to shape what you actually experience. Even the intention simply to be or to observe is still an intention, and so it’s a form of karma shaping what you see.

As you meditate, these points alert you to the fact that some things you experience in the present come from past intentions, and some from present intentions; you have to be able to tell the difference between the two if you want to read the results of your present actions. Suppose, for instance, that when you’re meditating a lustful thought resulting from past intentions arises in the mind. If you’re not alert, you might think that the meditation is causing the lustful thought. In this way, you’re going to misread the results of your present actions. A good rule of thumb is that a thought that simply pops into your head comes from past intentions. What you do with it constitutes your present intention. You have no control over past intentions-and there are bound to be some bad ones-but you can make a difference with your present intentions. You can treat the thought skillfully-in a way leading to harmless forms of happiness-or unskillfully. And regardless of what your past karma might be, it’s always possible to choose a skillful intention in any given moment.

These points are so important that the Buddha identified the distinction between skillful and unskillful as one of his most basic teachings. Meditation is basically the effort to develop skillful intentions and abandon unskillful ones at all times.

This means that meditation isn’t simply a matter of letting go. It involves both abandoning and developing, plus a third activity: comprehending what’s skillful or unskillful at so that you can know what to do when. And it’s through experimentation that you figure out which of these activities is appropriate at any given time.

Again, it’s like learning how to play the guitar. You strum and listen; if you don’t like what you hear, you strum something different, dropping some notes and adding others, until you hear what you like. You won’t learn about the guitar from just strumming without listening, or listening without strumming. The same is true with the mind. You learn what causes suffering and what leads to its end by encouraging certain states in body and mind, and then reading what you’ve got. This is why doing and watching are both necessary in meditation, and have to work together to get results.

Attitude. Just as you need to train your ear to become a better judge of your playing, you need to develop trustworthy qualities of mind so that you can trust what you see as you read your mind. Otherwise, if you’re not careful, meditation simply becomes one more of the mind’s many means of avoidance. You may have a complicated family issue you’ve got to work through, but you convince yourself that if you simply sit with it, it’ll go away on its own. Or you may have an embarrassing addiction that festers simply because you won’t look at it, but you busy yourself with something else: visualizations, full-body breathing-anything but the problem at hand.

To avoid this problem, you need to develop two basic qualities: patient equanimity and honesty.

Before teaching breath meditation to his son, Rahula, the Buddha taught him a preliminary exercise in developing equanimity. Meditate, he said, so that your mind is like earth. Disgusting things get thrown on the earth, but the earth isn’t horrified by them. When you make your mind like earth, neither agreeable nor disagreeable sensory impressions will take charge of it.

Now, the Buddha wasn’t telling Rahula to become a passive clod of dirt. He was simply teaching him to be grounded, to develop his powers of endurance, so that when unpleasant things came up in his meditation-as they inevitably would-he wouldn’t get blown away. When pleasant things came up, he wouldn’t get engrossed in the pleasure. He’d be able to observe both pleasant and unpleasant events in his body and mind without jumping to hasty conclusions.

To develop honesty in meditation, the Buddha taught Rahula a further exercise. Look at the inconstancy of events in body and mind, he said, so that you don’t develop a sense of “I am” around them. Here the Buddha was building on a lesson that he had taught Rahula when the latter was seven years old. Learn to look at your actions, he had said, before you do them, while you’re doing them, and after they’re done. If you see that you’ve acted unskillfully and caused harm, resolve not to repeat the mistake, then talk it over with someone you respect.

In these lessons, the Buddha was training Rahula to be honest with himself and with others. And the key to this honesty is to treat your actions as experiments. That way, if you see the results aren’t good, you’re free to change your ways.

This attitude is essential for developing honesty in your meditation as well. If you regard everything-good or bad-that arises in the meditation as a sign of the sort of person you are, it will be hard to observe anything honestly at all. If an unskillful intention arises, you’re likely either to come down on yourself as a miserable meditator or to smother the intention under a cloak of denial. If a skillful intention arises, you’re likely to become proud and complacent, reading it as a sign of your innate good nature. As a result, you never get to see if these intentions are actually as skillful as they seemed at first glance.

To avoid these pitfalls, you can learn to see events simply as events, and not as signs of the innate Buddha-ness or badness of who you are. Then you can observe these events honestly, to see where they come from and where they lead. When you combine this honesty with patient equanimity, you’re in a good position to read your own mind.

Technique. The Buddha taught dozens of topics for meditation to deal with a wide variety of problems, but one topic, he said, was home base for his mind: the breath. This may have been because the breath is something you can simply watch or actively fashion. It’s a topic that belongs to both types of meditation. You may sometimes need other topics to deal with specific problems-like anger, complacency, or lust-but the breath is so close to the mind that it’s a good place to take your stance when you want to read what the mind needs. Often the breath itself can be used to get the mind back in shape.

The Buddha recommended sixteen steps in dealing with the breath. The first two involve straightforward instructions. The rest raise questions to be explored. In this way, the breath becomes a vehicle for exercising your ingenuity in solving the problems of the mind, and exercising your sensitivity in gauging the results.

To begin, simply notice when the breath is long and when it’s short. In the remaining steps, though, you train yourself. In other words, you have to figure out for yourself how to do what the Buddha recommends. The first two trainings are to breathe in and out sensitive to the entire body, then to calm the effect that the breath has on the body. How do you do that? You experiment. What rhythm of breathing, what way of conceiving the breath calms its effect on the body? Try thinking of the breath not as the air coming in and out of the lungs but as the energy flow throughout the body that draws the air in and out. Where do you feel that energy flow? Think of it as flowing in and out the back of your neck, in your feet and hands, along the nerves and blood vessels, in your bones. Think of it coming in and out every pore of your skin. Where is it blocked? How do you dissolve the blockages? By breathing through them? Around them? Straight into them? See what works.

As you play around with the breath in this way, you’ll make some mistakes-I’ve sometimes given myself headaches by forcing the breath too much-but with the right attitude the mistakes become lessons in learning how the impact of your perceptions shapes the way you breathe. You’ll also catch yourself getting impatient or frustrated, but then you’ll see that when you breathe through these emotions, they go away. You’re beginning to see the impact of the breath on the mind.

The next step is to breathe in and out with a sense of refreshing fullness and a sense of ease. Here, too, you’ll need to experiment both with the way you breathe and with the way you conceive of the breath. Notice how these feelings and conceptions have an impact on the mind, and how you can calm that impact so that the mind feels most at ease.

Then-when the breath is calm, and you’ve been refreshed by feelings of ease and stillness-you’re ready to look at the mind itself. You don’t leave the breath, though. You adjust your attention slightly so that you’re watching the mind as it stays with the breath. Here the Buddha recommends three areas for experimentation: Notice how to gladden the mind when it needs gladdening, how to steady it when it needs steadying, and how to release it from its attachments and burdens when it’s ready for release.

Sometimes the gladdening and steadying will require bringing in other topics for contemplation. For instance, to gladden the mind you can develop an attitude of infinite good will, or recollect the times in the past when you’ve been virtuous or generous. To steady the mind when it’s been knocked over by lust, you can contemplate the unattractive side of the human body. To reestablish your focus when you’re drowsy or complacent, you can contemplate death-realizing that death could come at any time, and you need to prepare your mind if you’re going to face it with any finesse-can transfix your. At other times, you can gladden or steady the mind simply by the way you focus on the breath itself. For instance, breathing down into your hands and feet can really anchor the mind when its concentration has become shaky. When one spot in the body isn’t enough to hold your interest, try focusing on the breath in two spots at once.

The important point is that you’ve now put yourself in a position where you can experiment with the mind and read the results of your experiments with greater and greater accuracy. You can try exploring these skills off the cushion as well: How do you gladden the mind when you’re sick? How do you steady the mind when dealing with a difficult person?

As for releasing the mind from its burdens, you prepare for the ultimate freedom of nirvana first by releasing the mind from any awkwardness in its concentration. Once the mind has settled down, check to see if there are any ways you can refine the stillness. For instance, in the beginning stages of concentration you need to keep directing your thoughts to the breath, evaluating and adjusting it to make it more agreeable. But eventually the mind grows so still that evaluating the breath is no longer necessary. So you figure out how to make the mind one with the breath, and in that way you release the mind into a more intense and refreshing state of ease.

As you expand your skills in this way, the intentions that you’ve been using to shape your experience of body and mind become more and more transparent. At this point the Buddha suggests revisiting the theme of inconstancy, learning to look for it in the effects of every intention. You see that even the best states produced by skillful intentions-the most solid and refined states of concentration-waver and change. Realizing this induces a sense of disenchantment with and dispassion for all intentions. You see that the only way to get beyond this changeability is to allow all intentions to cease. You watch as everything is relinquished, including the path. What’s left is unconditioned: the deathless. Your desire to explore the breath has taken you beyond desiring, beyond the breath, all the way to nirvana. When that happens, you know that you’ve read the mind rightly.

In the meantime, though, it’s important to understand the general pattern of the practice. You watch to see where there’s stress in the breath or the mind; you try a few experiments-playing with this, exploring that-to see what alleviates that stress; and then you watch again, to see what’s worked and what hasn’t. Then you experiment some more. You keep on playing, keep on exploring. But you’re not just playing around. You’re trying to find what’s skillful and harmless; you’re bringing qualities of honesty and patient equanimity to the task, so you learn as you play. You gain both the pleasure of making beguiling sounds with your guitar and-even when someday you put the guitar down-the satisfaction of having mastered a skill.