There's a really good analogy to mindfulness meditation that comes from traditional Buddhism that invokes the imagery of a wild elephant.
So a wild elephant,
If left to run amok,
Would cause massive destruction in a village.
It would just tear down the buildings,
Eat all the food,
And endanger a bunch of people.
So the analogy goes that the untrained,
Unmeditative mind is like a wild elephant.
In the sense that a untrained,
Unmeditated mind is dangerous.
It can cause overt and external suffering through bad actions,
Bad morals,
That sort of stuff.
And it can cause internal suffering through the continuing of delusions and issues and ruminations and that sort of stuff for the individual.
The analogy goes that to train an elephant,
What you need to do is you tie it to a tree with a good strong rope.
As in,
You capture the elephant,
Put a rope around its neck,
And then tie it up.
And at first,
The elephant will struggle.
It will freak out and try to pull away from the tree,
But the rope holds.
And then eventually you can start feeding him.
And after a while,
The elephant will accept the food.
And once it accepts the food,
It becomes easier to handle.
It becomes so easy to handle that eventually you can discard the rope,
Discard the tree,
And you've got a trained,
Tamed elephant.
And that elephant,
In the traditional sense,
Could be used to transport goods,
To plow the fields,
To work with.
And it becomes a long-lasting,
Positive connection both for the elephant and for the village.
Now,
Animal rights aside,
And the modern era aside for the analogy there,
When you apply this analogy to the mind,
The elephant represents your untamed,
Wild mind.
The rope that you're tying the elephant to the tree with is mindfulness,
And the tree itself is the object of your meditative focus,
Which is traditionally the sensations of the breath at the nose.
So in the same way that the wild elephant initially struggles against the rope and tries to break away from the tree,
The mind will initially struggle to break away from the meditation object.
But with mindfulness,
With that redirection of attention,
Back to the breath,
Back to the breath,
Back to the breath,
You're training the wild elephant of the mind to calm down,
Relax,
And accept its place.
In the sense that with a calm,
Trained mind,
With mindfulness constantly returning the focus back to the breath,
The mind will slowly calm,
And then with that calm mind,
We can look into the true nature of reality.
We can look into our own internal delusions and thought processes,
And start to see ourselves and the world as it is for what it is.
