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more you begin to feel like your mind is sharpening up. The mind that can come back to the present is clearer and more refreshed, and it can better weather all the ambiguities, pains, and paradoxes of life.
    I began this book with a discussion on suffering as one of the reasons that people come to practice. We meditate in order to remove the root of suffering. Getting at the root of suffering begins with returning to the present moment, with coming back to the breath. This is where expansion can occur. Expansion won’t happen if you try to push through or escape your meditation. It won’t happen by resisting what is present for you in the moment. The present moment, you will find, is limitless. It seems paradoxical that expansion and settledness can happen as we learn to return to the present moment, especially when what comes up in the present moment is anger or sadness or fear. But it is precisely through this act of coming back to the present that we can open to love and joy and the dynamism of life. In other words, meditation brings us the blessing of equanimity, or emotional balance. Meditation and the dharma directly address the tension and stress that are associated with much of our life. We might call this one of the “fringe benefits” of meditation.
    The root of suffering escalates into full-blown suffering when we go on and on with our habitual emotional reactivity, when we let ourselves get carried off by our thoughts and stories. There are many ways to talk about the root of suffering, but I often describe it as ignorance, because that’s very easy to understand. With meditation, we are addressing the quality of ignorance, or not knowing. The quality of not knowing refers to this phenomenon of not being aware, of not understanding what it is that we’re doing in our everyday life. This includes the smallest details of our life, such as not being aware that we’re drinking a glass of water or spacing out when we’re brushing our teeth. These everyday acts that we often do quite mindlessly can exhibit a lack of awareness, or ignorance. When we multitask and split up our mind into a million directions, we are actually creating our own suffering, because these habits strengthen strong emotional reactivity and discursive thought.
    By accepting and living in the present moment, just as it is, we begin to experience more contentment, more spaciousness, and much less fear and anxiety and worry. Meditation works very directly with beginning to see what we’re doing and beginning to realize that we have a choice in any moment to either return to the present or to escalate our suffering by letting our stories and thoughts take over. In any given moment, whether on the meditation cushion or in postmeditation, we begin to perceive more and more clearly—because of our meditation practice—how we are getting hooked, how we’re attaching to a line of discursive thought, which is disastrous in terms of strengthening habitual patterns of suffering. We begin to see this more and more clearly, and we begin to realize that we can do something different.
    A wonderful example of this comes from a student who told me a story about looking in the mirror and noticing that she had some gray hairs. She’d been in a contented mood, yet from that one simple observation she began a downward cycle of self-denigration and a familiar cycle of feeling very bad and low, very lonely and unloved. And this whole thing started from just seeing a grey hair! But because of her meditation, she saw what she was doing, caught it in its tracks, and she didn’t go on the downward cycle. She noticed where her thoughts were taking her, and she came back to her breath. She took this attitude of coming back. Back to the present moment.
    The more we see this kind of pattern and don’t go on the downward cycle, the more our confidence grows in our capacity to awaken. As we expand our confidence in the workability of our situation, we begin to see