"Relax, take it easy, let's not do anything today!" Right, so what happens to your fear and your anger and your aversion, they stay the same or they get stronger, because often relaxing too much is just Mara taking over. After all, we've done enough work, we can relax now. Yes, we can sometimes. And the breath is one of the techniques. So as much as we would not build a complicated house with only a hammer, we also don't build a complicated house without a hammer. The breath is one of the techniques which can help us relax. But if the mind is always bending that way in order to just relax, then we've got a problem, we're going too much into a complacent type of life, complacent in our practice. We're getting too content on a lower level. It means that the Ten Paramis reflection has not been done enough, that we're not pushing ourselves to expand our limits. If you find that you want to do the breath too much in your normal life, you want to just sit down and kind of escape what's happened during the day, then usually you're not pushing your limits, you're not working the wisdom side enough.
Now all of you on the extra old student's form have been told to do the Five Reflections briefly at the beginning of the sit or at least do full sits of some of them. We want to encourage you to do them in the short form at the beginning of every sit. You can do it at the beginning of every walk too if you want. A short form, one or two sentences of each of the five reflections. Always put it in, always putting the wisdom in. But even if you're going to choose to do the rest of the period with the breath, perhaps because you could think it's been too stressful and it's time to relax a little, even then you're still going to put in some wisdom at the beginning of every sit. As well, be very careful as to how many times you want to escape and relax compared to wanting more wisdom to develop, and whether you want to push those limits.
A busy hectic day brings up stress, can we work with the stress that night? Can we actually try to look into it, can we see where we contributed to the stress. Many of you know I was just back in America, with a stressful time. In these situations the formal practice is not so easy for me to do on a regular basis. I still try, but in addition to the formal practice, throughout the day the wisdom has to come up, wisdom coming up in order to guard against creating more stress from the stress that was already present with all the other people. So unless you train your mind to think wisely, then not only will you have stress in your normal life, but you will have the extra stress in your reactions to what's going on in your normal life. So keep in mind that the reflection meditations are very important for getting to the root of why we create stress.