Practice note · 7 October 2026
The monkey mind, and who is the “I” that watches it
By the fourth day of sitting, most people have found out that watching the breath is harder than it looked. The mind jumps from branch to branch like a monkey and will not stay put. That is not a fault in you; it is the first thing the practice was designed to show you.
The mind does not like the present. It wanders into the past, or into the future, and rarely stays here. So it keeps pulling you off in one direction and then another, and you keep noticing this only after the fact.
Notice what has already happened, though. You have begun to work on yourself. You have started building the habit of sitting with a straight back and coming back to the breath. Both of those are new, and neither is small.
Have you ever asked who you really are? What is this “I” you say all day long? What is it made of? Names — Peter, John, Mary — what is behind them? How many attachments are tied to that one important word?
Is it a person? Or a collection of limbs and organs? You know you have eyes, a nose, ears, hands, fingers. Perhaps you know about your internal organs too — but only intellectually, without ever having experienced their nature from inside. Something is always going on in there. The mind is simply too coarse and too unsteady to notice it.
This practice explores those connections from within, through the breath, which links mind and body like a bridge. Note how unusual the breath is. You can control it for a while: speed it up, slow it down, hold it for a moment. You cannot stop it for long.
That is why it is the chosen object. By observing the breath in its natural, uninterfered state, you come close to what runs without you — accepting what happens and learning from it. But first the agitated mind has to be calmed and cleared of what has piled up in it over a lifetime.
I find the smartphone comparison useful. The outer shell is the body: design, colour, material. The inside is the mind: memory, speed, graphics. A phone overheats and slows down when too much is stored on it and too many things are running at once.
When the screen is a mess of apps, you clean up: delete what you do not use, clear the old photos, clear the cache. A concentrated mind is doing something similar. Concentration works like the tool that frees the device of what is clogging it.
It is only an analogy, and it should not be pushed. Nothing here is automatic. How the practice goes depends on the qualities a person has developed, on their understanding, on their discipline, and on what is already stored in them.
The question of the “I” is not answered by thinking about it harder. It is answered slowly, by observation, and the observation has a method. Three things to hold to while you sit:
- Do not tense up. Stay relaxed, and stay still.
- Do not react to sensations in the body. Accept them and let things happen naturally. Keep your attention on the small area below the nostrils and recognise what kind of breath it is — short or long, coarse or fine.
- Watch yourself the way you would watch the main character in a film: study, observe, and keep the attention where the instruction puts it.
That is the whole of it on Day 4. No conclusion is required from you.
People expect an insight about the self on a schedule, and then decide the practice failed when it does not arrive. States and understandings do come, but they are not ordered in advance and they cannot be forced. What you can do is sit twice a day and keep bringing the attention back.
If the sitting itself starts turning up strong emotion or old memory, read the safety page before you push further.
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- Part 1 · Ānāpānasati Essentials
- The pond and the stick: why not reacting settles the mind
- Ānāpānasati: the breath practice everything starts from
More practice notes
- Marks in water, sand and stone: what saṅkhāras areThe harder you react, the deeper the mark: a line in water, a groove in sand, a carving in stone. That mark is a saṅkhāra, and not reacting cuts no new one.
- The five precepts as hygiene of attentionAn unwholesome act stirs up the mind, and an hour later that agitation is what you sit with. So the course opens with five precepts, written by hand and signed.
- Fifteen days at the Pa-Auk Forest MonasteryAt Pa-Auk the monks rise around three and sit like statues. What Ocean DYNN carried home from fifteen days there in 2019 was smaller: a fixed hour, twice a day.