learn · 2026-10-21 · 3 min read
What does it mean to make friends with your mind?
When I was living on fruit I had a small obsession: I'd look at monks and gurus, plenty of them far from slim, and ask them silently where their light was, eating like that. The answer came in Burma and it had nothing to do with food. It was the power of the mind, in someone who knows how to make friends with their own, and that's probably the main thing I've wanted to pass on ever since. When people ask what making friends with it means, I answer as I would about any friend: you look after it, you respect it, and first of all you hear out whatever has been boiling up in there.
I say this because of how people talk about their meditation. It won't settle, it keeps wandering off, I can't get it to be quiet. There's always an it, and the it is always misbehaving. That makes you the handler of an unruly animal and every sitting a contest you're either winning or losing. Plenty of people practise inside that relationship for years and can't understand why the whole thing takes such effort.
The instruction I give instead sounds too soft to be technical: make friends with your mind, be the best friend it has. I mean it literally, as a method, and on vipassana.life I came at it from another side, in a practice note on befriending the mind before you train it.
It starts further back than most instructions do, because first you have to notice there's a mind at all, that thoughts are happening somewhere rather than lying like clear glass between you and the world. You sit, you put your attention on the breath, a moment later you're somewhere else, and at some point you catch yourself there. In that second there are suddenly two where you thought there was one: the wandering, and whoever noticed it. For many people that's the most surprising thing in the first month, because until then you were the wandering, and now you can begin speaking to it, not out loud and not as a ritual, just by no longer treating it as scenery.
Then you can see what the handler was costing you. He catches himself somewhere else and answers with a reprimand, again, why can't I hold anything, and a reprimand delivered hundreds of times in one sitting is training too. You're teaching yourself that the cushion is where you go to be told off, and then wondering why some part of you finds reasons not to sit. When you notice you've wandered, that's only a signal: gone off; come back. Don't scold yourself for it, just redirect the attention, again and again, however tired you get. It's the same event and the same action in a different relationship, and only one of the two can be kept up for years.
For a long time I compared the mind myself to a small animal, or a child to bring up, and I like the child because you don't win an argument with a child by being right, and force gets you more of what you were trying to stop. But I insist on friend because a friend is your equal, and what I've noticed, though I wouldn't have believed it at the start, is that the cleaning doesn't happen to the mind but with it: only when you're really on its side can the two of you clear anything out, and only in that shared effort does the mind start helping you.
You can't force that; you can only stop shouting at it on the cushion, and wait. At some point the mind isn't what you're meditating against but what's meditating, sittings you used to get through become, without any announcement, somewhere you want to be, and what you couldn't look at directly comes up on its own, because the part of you holding it is no longer being interrogated and can finally put it down.
Tomorrow there's nothing new, technically: you'll sit and watch the breath, the way the free fifteen-minute taster teaches it, and the attention will leave as it always has. Change only the tone you bring it back in, for a month, long enough to see the difference. Not there you go again, just: there you are, come on.
Questions people ask
Why does meditation feel like a fight?
Because most people treat the mind as an opponent that won't settle. That makes you the handler of an unruly animal and every sitting a contest you're winning or losing.
What should you do when you notice you've wandered?
Treat it as a signal, gone off, come back, and redirect the attention without scolding yourself. A reprimand delivered hundreds of times in one sitting is training too.
Why call the mind a friend rather than a child?
A friend is your equal. The cleaning doesn't happen to the mind but with it, and only when you're really on its side can the two of you clear anything out.
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