What do I do when my mind keeps wandering in meditation?

A wandering mind in meditation is not a sign that something is wrong with you. Mahaguru's teaching treats this as the ordinary starting condition for everyone, even those who have meditated for a long time, so the first thing to do is simply accept where you actually are rather than expecting yourself to be somewhere else. You can only take the next step from where you really stand, not from an imagined ideal state.

Think of it like training a new bull

Mahaguru uses the image of a newly bought bull pulling a cart. Until now, that bull (your mind) has gone wherever it liked, chasing grass or wandering into a field whenever something caught its interest. Now that you want to direct it somewhere specific, it resists. The way a new bull is trained is by driving the cart at the same time, for a fixed duration, every single day. Over weeks, the bull gradually realises that wandering off doesn't work, and it settles.

So practically:

• Keep to the same meditation topic (kammatthana) given to you, at the same time each day, for a fixed length of time, whether that's half an hour or forty minutes.
• Don't expect results in a week. Some people's minds settle quickly, others take longer, depending on how deep and habitual their mental patterns are.
• Even after progress, the mind can still suddenly jump away, like the trained bull leaping at a cow or a patch of grass it notices on the road. That's expected; it doesn't mean the training failed.

Separate what you feel from what you think

Mahaguru points out that ordinarily we don't distinguish between what we feel (through the five senses, or within the meditation object) and what we think (the stories the mind builds on top of that). We just drift along with whichever one, feeling or thought, pulls us. The practice is to become attentive to what is felt, and at the same time notice how the mind tends to spin off into its habitual stories. Catching a thought at its very beginning, before it grows into a full mental narrative, is easier than trying to stop it once it has already taken you away.

This is really about stepping outside the mind's usual momentum rather than continuing to go along with whatever it happens to drift toward, since the practice is not meant to follow the mind's own whims.

The deeper reframe: awareness as a third-party observer

Mahaguru also describes awareness itself as a capacity to observe yourself as a third party, as if a camera were watching you think, speak, and act, without judging or trying to change anything in that moment. This capacity exists in everyone but usually remains unawakened because we are busy identifying with the mind completely. Building this observing capacity is described as the real first step; from there, one gradually comes to rely less on the mind's impulses and more on what the teaching calls refuge in Buddhi (the inner, clear faculty), rather than being swept along by the mind's wandering habits. The wandering itself is described as happening precisely because, until now, we've taken the mind as our only refuge.

So the approach is twofold: steady, consistent daily practice to retrain the mind like a bull on a cart, and patient, non-judgmental observation that gradually separates you from automatically identifying with every thought that arises. Neither is a quick fix. It's effort sustained over time, matched to the thickness of your own mental habits.