Making the Mind Stay

For some, [the] task of coming back a thousand or ten thousand times in meditation may seem boring or even of questionable importance. But how many times have we gone away from the reality of our life?perhaps a million or ten million times! If we wish to awaken, we have to find our way back here with our full being, our full attention.In this way, meditation is very much like training a puppy. You put the puppy down and say, Stay. Does the puppy listen? It gets up and runs away. You sit the puppy back down again. Stay. And the puppy runs away over and over again. Sometimes the puppy jumps up, runs over ad pees in the corner or makes some other mess. Our minds are much the same as the puppy, only they create even bigger messes. In training the mind, or the puppy, we have to start over and over again

- Jack Kornfield, "A Path with Heart" from Everyday Mind, a Tricycle book edited by Jean Smith