Come back to the breath. And each time you come back, don’t berate yourself. Just reward yourself with a good breath so that it feels good to come back. But be alert. The mind is going to go wander off again.

"This is one of the most common problems everybody encounters. You sit down to meditate and all of a sudden you find yourself someplace else, and you don’t know how you got there. You’re supposed to be focusing on your breath, but suddenly you find yourself mulling over something that happened three or four months ago. Well, you drop that. Come back to the breath. And each time you come back, don’t berate yourself. Just reward yourself with a good breath so that it feels good to come back. But be alert. The mind is going to go wander off again. You can’t be the type of addict who says, “Okay, I’ve given up that bad habit, and it’s never going to happen again. I’m going to be solid and sure and never change.” You’re just setting yourself up for a fall. You’ve got to realize: Okay, there will be a tendency to go back to, if not that distraction, then something else.

So you have to be alert to detect the warning signs that the mind is about to leave the breath: Part of the mind is with the breath, but another part is scouting around, looking for something else. If you detect that happening, then you can make the breath much more gratifying, much more enveloping, so that the part that was looking for someplace else to go comes back and latches on to the breath again."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Suffering is a Feeding Addiction"

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