Boredom

So if you've sat often enough, if you get some headspace on a regular basis, perhaps even a daily basis, and you've been doing it for quite some time, there's a pretty good chance, at some stage, even if it was just for a short while, that you experienced a little bit of boredom. Doesn't happen to everyone, and it can take longer for some than others to arise. But it will arise at some stage. And don't worry if it does. The important thing is to understand boredom and to know how to relate to it in a useful, in a skillful way. So our lives are so busy. We are so into doing things the whole time. In fact, some people, they never even stop the entire day, from the beginning to the end. And because of that, being habituated, conditioned to doing, when we stop and look at something as mundane as the rise and the fall of the breath, very easy, you can see how we might easily kind of feel bored compared to all the usual sort of stimulation. And it might be tempting to think, "What's the point? "I could be more productive doing something else. "I could find something more interesting to do." But, again, as long as we do that, then we're always just being caught up in stuff. We're never giving the mind, the body a break. And we're not training the mind to find those moments of stillness, of calm, of clarity throughout everyday life. So really important that even if we experience boredom, that we still stay with that and we use it in a very particular way. So it's tempting to look at boredom and to think, and think being the important word there, to think that, well, as I said, it's not very interesting. But that's thinking about boredom. That's not looking at the nature of boredom. That's simply feeding into the idea of boredom. And if you start to look at boredom more carefully, what is boredom? Is it a physical sensation? Is it an emotion? Is it a series of thoughts in the mind? The only way we can examine and understand boredom is to experience it. So the last thing we want to do is run away from it when we experience it. We actually, that is the opportunity to sit and examine it. It's not to think about it. It's to be aware of it, to be curious, to be interested, to start to notice, as I say, do you feel it in the body? if you do, what is that feeling in the body? And can we really say that the feeling, the physical sensation is boredom? Or is it heaviness, or is it tiredness? If it's a series of thoughts in the mind, well, that's just thinking. We notice thinking and come back to the object of the technique. So once we start to examine boredom and we start to look...