Samadhi Steadies the Mind
- Mel Pine
- Aug 21
- 2 min read
Develop concentration, monks. A concentrated mind understands things as they really are. —The Buddha in the Anguttara Nikaya
In that quotation, the Buddha is talking about samadhi—training your mind to be stable and clear enough to see reality as it actually is. It doesn’t mean blanking out and being unaware of anything. In samadhi as taught in Buddhism, you're super-aware and focused. You’re not turning off all the lights. You’re focusing like a laser.
Learning to focus intently may bring with it a pleasing sense of calm, but that’s not the point. It's one tool to help develop insight into the nature of reality.
The word comes from Sanskrit and literally means "to bring together" or "to collect." As used in Buddhism, it involves bringing your scattered thoughts together into a single point of concentration. It doesn’t matter what you use as that point. It could be a pebble, a coin, a spot on the wall. Samadhi steadies the mind.
The contrarian in me finds breaking the Eightfold Path into distinct, named segments with a beginning and an end gets people stuck in semantics and logic. I think of it as more like a traffic circle than a path. You can join the flow from different directions, but your destination is to:
Live ethically with a compassionate and clear worldview.
Remain aware and mindful moment by moment.
Use contemplative practices such as samadhi to gain clarity and wisdom.
The Vietnamese Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh put the role of samadhi simply:
The practice of samadhi is to cultivate a mind that is one-pointed. This brings clarity and the ability to look deeply.
My regular practice seems on the surface to be the opposite of one-pointedness. I practice awareness meditation—being aware of and open to whatever's happening. But the two practices—samadhi and awareness—share a common basis.
Imagine holding a flashlight with an adjustable beam. In concentration practice leading to samadhi, you're narrowing the beam to a laser point. In awareness practices, you're widening the beam to illuminate everything.
Either way, if your hand is shaky, the result won’t be very useful. Samadhi and awareness are two ways of training the mind to be steady.
Mel's book, The New Middle Way, is available in Kindle, paperback, hardback, and Audible versions.
Other online outlets now offer the paperback and will release the ebook on September 4. In the meantime, you can buy the ebook at less than half price during its pre-release sales on those outlets. The audiobook will be available beyond Audible starting in November 1.
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