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Thriving with Right Effort

So, what's on my mind, on my heart a bit, is what might seem initially maybe a little bit of an interesting topic. I hope I can make it interesting. And that is the sixth factor of the Eightfold Path^[1], which is right effort.

Maybe one thing that will pique your interest around this topic of right effort is the first time, over 25 years ago, that I gave a series of talks on the Eightfold Path, one of the most important teachings of the Buddha. I was going to do one factor for every evening, so I was going through the factors, and then it was time to do the factor on right effort. And without any comment, or explanation, or recognition that I was doing it, I consciously skipped it.

No one asked me, "Why'd you skip it?" The reason I skipped it was I wasn't really behind it; I couldn't quite get myself inspired by it. Some of it had to do with my background in Zen. In Zen, there was a really clear teaching and admonition to not strive, not have any goal orientation, not try to make anything happen, and not try to attain particular states of meditation. Rather, the instruction was to wholeheartedly, fully be present for what is.

There was a lot of physical effort that went into Zen. You had to show up early in the morning in the monastery, like at four o'clock in the morning. You had to wake up and get up to do no effort at all. Then you had to take a very particular posture, sit very straight and upright. There's a lot of effort that goes into the posture. Then they ring the bell, and you have to do walking meditation. Then they ring the bell, you come back to take this posture, to do nothing. So there's kind of nothing you do, but kind of a lot you do. There's a lot of effort.

In fact, when I was practicing in the monastery in Japan, I was admonished when I didn't make enough effort. They would say in Japan I had to do things with Zen no chikara^[2], which means with "Zen power." It was a little bit peculiar, maybe to myself, how I learned Zen and how I understood it, but it was clearly not striving, not goal-oriented, and not trying to make anything happen. I loved Zen, and in retrospect, I realized I put a lot of effort into it. It was the effort to show up, but the mind wasn't trying to do anything. It was almost like a physical effort to show up for the present. The physical was very important for me because a lot of it was the embodied awareness that came with the embodied showing up. The mind was just trying to be present, but nothing else. So no effort there.

That's how I defend myself a little bit, or explain myself a little bit, for skipping right effort. But at some point, I started appreciating, as I kept studying the Eightfold Path and looking at right effort, that actually I put a lot of effort into it, and I loved the effort I made.

Even when I went to Burma to practice vipassana there, the teacher gave teachings that you should strive. Some people really did themselves in and suffered a lot because, with Western acculturation, striving meant stressing. So people would stress in meditation, which was not healthy, and there were people who were kind of basket cases from that approach.

Because I came from the Zen background, when I heard "strive," I mostly just shrugged it off and did it anyway. In retrospect, I wasn't striving to attain anything, but once again, I was really trying to wholeheartedly show up and be present for what is, which were the instructions. In the background, it was for attaining something, but I wasn't there exactly to attain something; I was there to show up fully.

It was really wonderful for me to have the very detailed, precise instructions that I received in Burma in vipassana for doing this Zen thing: showing up really precisely for the moment. But in doing that, it set in motion an unfolding, a growth, and a development in practice that led to some of the states they're pointing to as what you can attain. Attaining it wasn't the point for me; it was kind of a byproduct. I felt very lucky to have had this background in Zen when I practiced with this fierce teacher, U Pandita^[3], in Burma. I was protected in a way that a lot of other vipassana students were not protected from the striving element that he taught.

It took a while for me to get my handle on this Theravadan^[4] or early Buddhist idea of right effort. To give you an idea so you can appreciate a little bit more the challenge I had to get behind it:

Right effort is made up of four different kinds of practices or efforts. Whether we should call it effort or endeavor—some people translate it as the four endeavors or right endeavor, and maybe that feels a little bit more relaxing, I don't know. But it has to do with recognizing the distinction between wholesome states of mind and unwholesome states of mind. Unwholesome states of mind are reactive qualities of the mind, when we react compulsively or addictively to experience with anger, greed, hostility, delusion, or fear.

Unwholesome states of mind always contain some degree of suffering or pain in them, and that's what qualifies them as unwholesome: they are detrimental to the person who has them. If you had anger which was not detrimental to you, then it wouldn't be considered unwholesome, but that's the definition of it in this tradition. So we have to be able to recognize what's unwholesome, what's stressful, what's detrimental. And then there's what's wholesome, which is healthy and beneficial for the person who has it. These are mental states, activities of the mind that we do.

If there is an impulse for generosity that has no conceit, no greed, or no ill will in it, then it's wholesome. But if it's mixed with these unwholesome ones, it kind of makes the generosity unwholesome as well. To be able to be generous, to be loving and kind—these are just part of many wholesome states of mind that we can have.

That's the distinction in right effort. There are two practices that avoid unwholesome states of mind and two for wholesome. The unwholesome has to do with, first, if there's nothing unwholesome—if you're not in a reactive mode, not caught up in unwholesome states—then prevent them from occurring. Do what you can so they don't arise. If they have arisen, then abandon them, let go of them. The same distinction happens for the wholesome. If there are wholesome states that haven't arisen, evoke them. If they have arisen, if they're there, then maintain them. That's the simple explanation for it.

But in each of these four steps, this is what you're supposed to do, and it is repeated for each one: you should make effort, arouse energy, exert your mind, and strive to do each of those. Maybe now you can sympathize a little bit with my skipping right effort in my talk. You're like, "What? I mean, this is a little bit strong right now." Whether the English translation is accurate—you know, you've always questioned words like "strive." Is that really the right thing? But anyway, that's just four words for doing this.

When four words are being used like this, what it does indicate is that for the Buddha, making some kind of effort is super important. The Dharma is not for lazy people. The Dharma is not just to be easygoing: "I'll get around to it eventually, and then I'll do some of it." In particular for meditation, you know, you sit down in meditation: "Well, I'll sit here for a while, but I'll get around to being present maybe near the end. I have some good fantasies I have to get through first. They're mostly reruns, but still, I want to go through them."

But I love the word "wholehearted." [Laughter] For me, the summary of all these powerful expressions is to do your practice wholeheartedly. Do it wholly. Put yourself completely into it, but don't stress. I'll talk about that some more, but do it wholeheartedly. The Buddha really wants you to not be lazy. Be wholehearted. Give yourself to it. If you're going to practice, give yourself over to it when you're practicing.

Like meditation, there's a peaceful way of giving yourself over to it. A peaceful way that doesn't cause more stress or tension, a wholehearted way that supports de-stressing, letting go, and relaxing tension because of the nature of the practice. Sometimes these four right efforts are summarized by the four words: prevent, abandon, evoke, and maintain.

That's a nice thing to remember, maybe. But if you look at the instructions a little bit more carefully, I find this fascinating. I came to realize this in the last few weeks as I've been seeing the teachings of the Buddha from a new slant, things that I overlooked before. Sure enough, it says for unwholesome states that have not yet arisen, prevent them from arising. And for ones that have arisen, abandon them. Each one is just one word. For evoking wholesome states that have not yet arisen, it just says evoke them. Bring them about, bring them up somehow. It's just one word.

But what I find fascinating is the fourth one. There are five words to describe what you do here, not just "maintain." In this translation, it's: "make the effort for the continuance, the non-disappearance, the strengthening, the increase, and the fulfillment by development, by cultivation of those wholesome states that are present."

That's a lot of words. The others have just one word, but this has five. So there's a kind of, "Wow!" Now, if you're chanting this—in the ancient world people chanted this—it has a rhythm to it. It has a heartfelt, embodied feeling to it. My guess is, in the ancient world, it had a very different impact on people. Today, people sit down to read this and start falling asleep because of the repetition.

A lot of these ancient texts are not very engaging to read if you're a novice. But if you're chanting it and you get the rhythm of the language, and you're being carried along by the rhythm, I can imagine that this language almost suggests energy. It suggests an embodied feeling of excitement. If you've chanted it a number of times and heard it a number of times, it's like a refrain. You can get behind it and chant it yourself. There's something that happens in chanting, especially communal chanting, where there's a concentration, an evocation, a deeper resonance inside of us for what's being talked about.

So one awakens effort for the continuance, the non-disappearance, the strengthening, the increase, the fulfillment by cultivation. I don't know if you get a sense of this rhythm and the energy behind it, and how it might be conveyed in the ancient way, the way that this was originally meant to be presented.

But what strikes me is a couple of things. I think it's fair to say that this Buddhism thing that we do is often associated with letting go, isn't it? It's kind of like non-attachment. You go to a block party, and people hear you're doing Buddhist practice, and it's kind of a party pooper. "It's just about letting go and non-attachment."

This non-attachment is overdone. When we had a little baby, my wife went to an organization called Bay Area Attachment Parenting. My wife and my little baby were in this attachment place. But attachment has a very different meaning in psychology these days, where it's a healthy sense of bonding and connection that is very important. But for Buddhists, attachment is all bad in "Buddhist English." Buddhism has that reputation.

But it does not have the reputation for what we're supposed to do with these wholesome states: to increase them, strengthen them, expand them, and develop them. Once they've arisen, make them grow. We find elsewhere in these ancient texts where it actually uses the word to grow the wholesome states to the point that they're abundant. That we thrive with them, that we're filled with them, that they fully flow through us. The word for "fulfill" actually means to be filled out by them fully. That's kind of dramatic.

The Zen person in me, the way I was taught Zen, kind of reacts: "Wait a minute, we're supposed to be prioritizing certain states of mind? We should just be with the way things are and accept it for what it is." The idea that you prioritize certain states of mind—if I went to my Zen teacher and said, "Wow, I just got really concentrated," or "I really felt peaceful," or "I'm filled with joy in my meditation," I'd be lucky if the teacher said something like, "Well, just one more thing to let go of." [Laughter]

Sometimes it was worse. In Zen, they have something called makyo^[5], which means delusion or illusion. It's like, "Don't bother with it." This dismissing of these beautiful, wholesome states makes sense in the approach of Zen. I want to be respectful of it; it really makes sense in the grand totality of what Zen practice is about. It's very effective if you really understand the purpose and the background for it.

But it also led someone like me to read these kinds of texts and be dismissive of them or not be interested. At the same time, when I did vipassana practice, these beautiful states arise. They're allowed to arise; they're supposed to arise. Sitting in meditation and allowing yourself to feel deeply calm, deeply content, deeply at home being here right now. It's an embodied feeling of being at home. This feeling comes sometimes with delight, joy, happiness, and a settledness of the mind. The mind gets really stilled, unified, and peaceful. I was really surprised to discover the upwelling in meditation, for the first time, of very powerful states of loving-kindness, compassion, and equanimity that arose.

These things are supposed to be allowed to grow and develop. One of the faults in not recognizing this early on is that a lot of the early English translators flattened the Pali language into English. I think maybe they were distrustful of a lot of emotionality and flowery or evocative language. So some of the more beautiful and inspiring words like thriving became "increase," and abundance became "frequent" or "lots." The words you choose have a very different emotional tone or feeling, and I think we flattened it in these English translations.

When you start getting this language of abundance and thriving, you get a very different feeling for what fills us, what can happen, and what's possible. It's also possible to hear these words and compare oneself and say, "Well, these aren't happening to me, so I'm bad or wrong, or it's supposed to be different." It's also possible to think, "Well, I have to strive now to attain these and huff and puff and try to hold on to it." So there's a lot of detrimental reactivity that can come into play when we hear about these things.

That's why these four right efforts are needed together, and we need to understand them together. If we mix wrong effort with right effort, we end up with wrong effort. If you hear that you're supposed to develop qualities of joy and happiness in practice, that they're supposed to come up, but you do it with clinging and attachment, then it doesn't help. It doesn't work.

One of the examples I like to give for the kind of proper striving—if you were into that kind of thing—is: strive to be relaxed. [Laughter] If you strive to be relaxed, that's a protection, because you can't strive with tension and relax at the same time. If the purpose is to relax, the striving has to be wholehearted, diligent, and continuous. You really stay on top of it. But in staying on top of it, you're getting more and more relaxed. You're discovering the places within where there's tension, just to relax.

In fact, elsewhere, the Buddha talks about how the first stages of meditation have a lot to do with relaxing and calming our reactivity. In the stages of meditation that he gives, it's not until there's been a fair amount of relaxation of reactivity that we begin getting into the realm of cultivating, maintaining, and growing these wonderful positive states of mind that can arise.

We learn to relax the body. The Buddha said that for the reactivity stored in our body, for someone who's new to meditation, this is one of the first things that's really useful to do. Really find a way to sit and meditate so the shoulders can relax, the belly can relax, and the muscles of the face can relax. Really work on sitting upright, or the equivalent for you, and let things really unwind. Don't be in a hurry to jump over that stage of practice.

The second instruction is to do that for the mind, for the mental world. Whatever is reactive and intense in your mental world, it's important to try and make it tranquil, to settle, to relax. So this is a very important protective measure in this practice: to remember how important it is to relax. Then we take this instruction here which says: you should make effort, arouse energy, exert your mind, and strive... to relax. Do it wholeheartedly. Really give yourself to it. If you give yourself to it wholeheartedly, remember to do it as a way of relaxing.

Then at some point, with enough relaxation and enough being fully present here—and this is not an easy thing to come to. Many people find meditation phenomenally beneficial just because it helps them relax ten percent of their tension, and they're ten percent more here and wiser because of it.

But at some point, when there's enough relaxation of our reactivity, the reactive world that we're caught in and living in, these beneficial states, the wholesome states, begin appearing on their own. They're not something we have to manufacture or acquire. Rather, it's almost like the nature of who we are is waiting inside of us. Our states of calm, peace, generosity, care, love, equanimity, wisdom, joy, and happiness are just off-stage. They're just waiting for a chance to come on stage when those reactive actors can just get off.

But you know, the reactive actors are there all the time, and they think they have an endless encore. Finally, when they settle away and there's room on the stage of our mind and our heart, there's all this stuff that can arise. What this teaching means for me—supporting the continuance, the maintaining of it, the strengthening of it, the development of it, the abundance of it—has a lot to do with allowing it to do so. Getting out of the way.

This is one of the things I learned from the way I was practicing: how useful it was to get out of my own way and make room for these things. Making space for them comes from appreciating them. It took a long time for me to appreciate these positive states of mind that can arise out of meditation, out of Buddhist practice. They arose for me, but I kind of shrugged them off or didn't pay any attention to them because of this Zen background where we weren't supposed to.

Eventually, I learned, "Oh, it is okay to appreciate these. It's okay to make room for them and value them." Doing that is the very thing that supports them to grow more and more. If you don't appreciate them, they don't grow. If you get attached to them, they don't grow. If you connect them to your self-worth, they don't grow. Just let them be. Let them be there, and support, grow, and develop them. Don't make them complicated. Get out of the way for them, don't interfere with them, but do the things that support them.

Part of what supports these is wholeheartedly showing up and being present for what is. When the wholesome states of mind begin showing themselves, maybe as small hints at first, being wholeheartedly present for those and making room for them gives room for them to grow and develop.

Then we come to a point in practice—at some point, not an easy thing, but it is kind of the North Star that we know is possible—where the thriving, the sense of abundance that is possible, an embodied thriving, embodied abundance, embodied sense of wholeness and nourishment, seems to begin having a life of its own. It wells up, is present, and supports us in being present. It creates a context, a background, a foundation for being present for all kinds of things, including our reactivity and what's really difficult in this world. It is such a powerful support. To be supported by deep relaxation, by joy, by happiness, by a sense of calm so we can address the difficulties of this life of ours, is very different than meeting the difficulties of this life from that place of reactivity and unwholesomeness that many people are caught up in.

With all that, I want to read an ancient poem. I think it's written by a disciple of the Buddha from the ancient world, rather than by the Buddha. In a sense, what we're talking about today is the distinction between wise and unwise attention. Unwise attention doesn't know what to pay attention to properly, and also pays attention in ways that involve attachment, clinging, resistance, or aversion.

This poem begins with a sentence:

From unwise attention, your thoughts eat you.

What do you think of that? None of you, of course! Apparently, the Pali word might literally mean "chew you up," which is a little more dramatic than eating. So this ancient text is very poetic and powerful. The words have been flattened in English, so sometimes even the negative ones are muted. But you see:

From unwise attention, your thoughts eat you. Giving up what is unwise, think wisely, basing your thoughts on the Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, and your own virtue. You will no doubt obtain gladness, joy, and happiness. Then with abundant gladness, you will make an end to suffering.

Here you see a shift in language. From something unwholesome, unhelpful, and unwise attention, we learn how to pay attention wisely and to think wisely, so that our thoughts don't eat us up, don't pull us into their whirlpool of preoccupation. Then, basing ourselves on the values and the orientation in life that the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha represent, and virtue—your own ethics—you will no doubt obtain gladness, joy, and happiness. Here's the emphasis on these wholesome, healthy qualities of mind and heart.

And then here it talks about abundance: "with abundant gladness." Imagine this language of abundance. Sometimes another way they talk about it is as "inner wealth." Faith is inner wealth. Vigilance and careful attention are an inner wealth. Loving-kindness is an inner wealth. The idea of becoming wealthy, abundant, spilling over—you have more than enough, you feel completely content and happy. And then you will make an end to suffering.

Maybe your suffering won't come to an end until you've figured out a way to relax deeply, to allow some really beautiful qualities of heart to arise, so you can really then, from that point of view, address the root of the suffering that you have in your life.

So that was a little plug for right effort, maybe trying to make up for 25 years ago when I skipped it. Thank you. We have a few minutes if some of you would like to ask questions or make comments. Let's head north over there. Yes.

Q&A

Speaker 1: Thank you very much. That was very provocative for me; many things are swirling around inside me. I want to add that in that place, as I've acknowledged over time the wholesome thoughts, if you will—the positive states, the joy, the higher vibration—I feel very much that I work with that idea of what nurtures it, how do I resource it? Because we're also in our human bodies. My profession is a therapist, so as I was listening to you, it was unavoidable to not think about how we live out here externally, practically. What do we do? What choices do we make to feed those states of mind? The one thing I wanted to share that got me very excited was when you spoke about how we grow those wholesome states, and what came to me was: express it, create service, love more here and here. Thank you. You fed me deeply today.

Gil Fronsdal: Great, thank you. That's very nice. I think if there are these wholesome tendencies or qualities that are in us, they grow by expressing them, especially if we express them wisely. Not just inflicting people with them, but the wise expression of them. The relational aspects are so important. If someone asked me how to make these wholesome states grow, the most common answer the tradition gives has to do with how we live interrelationally with other people. They say you should be ethical, you practice your ethics and generosity. Ethics is all about how we live in relationship to other people and other things. Generosity is the same thing. It's an interrelational world that is so important for all this. Sometimes, because it's a meditation tradition and we close our eyes, it just seems like it's so self-focused, internally focused. But a lot of this work also happens interrelationally, and ethics and generosity are the beginning of it. Someone else?

Speaker 2: Thank you for your comments and the session today. I wondered if you have tried to teach, or have taught, meditation to four- or five-year-old students? Or to older ages, maybe 9 to 14? I've been trying to teach a five-minute meditation when I have been teaching the last few weeks, just to see how they absorb being able to close their eyes and feel the generosity and the wholesomeness of relationships.

Gil Fronsdal: I haven't had a lot of experience with four- to five-year-olds. I think that for that age, and for even older kids, adults want to have kids positively influenced by meditation so they can be different in some kind of way. But some of the ways we want them to be different, changed, supported, or guided, there might be better ways than trying to get them to meditate. How parents conduct themselves regularly becomes a model for how they learn to be present and be relaxed. If the parents are anxious, they learn that the world is a scary place. If the parents are happy, they learn the world's a happy place to be. How the parents are at that age is probably more important.

When my kids were that age—I have two sons—I did a lot of meditation with one of them. But the main reason for doing it was that he was kind of a hyperactive kid. The more tired he got, the more activated he would get, which wasn't healthy for him because he couldn't sleep. Getting him to sleep was a big issue. Like when he was a little baby, we could only get him to sleep if we carried him or drove him in the car for naps. So I started doing guided meditations for him going to bed at night, and that would help him go to sleep.

I did a lot of creative visualizations or imaginations for him. Like imagining that he was a sea otter on its back in the ocean, floating on top of the kelp, and the gentle waves are coming and lifting you up and down, and so your breath goes up and down with the waves. He would lay there and imagine he was a sea otter, or a bird. I did all these animals; every evening was a different animal for a long time. So he had that, and how deeply that went into him, I don't know.

The other thing that we did with the kids when they were young is we had cookie parties. Sometimes we did it because with two kids at home, things were... you know, I didn't know that people literally bounced off the walls. I thought it was just an expression! [Laughter] There were times when not only were they bouncing off the walls, they were going to bounce through the window soon! We needed something here, so, "Let's have a cookie party."

They knew what that meant. They would get involved in setting it up, and we'd set up a special rug on the floor. They would get a flower or a centerpiece, maybe a Buddha, and then we'd put zafus^[6]—like we have here—around. Four of them, you know, in each corner of a kind of circle. Then we'd get cookies out and put them on a plate, and maybe some milk for the kids. Then we would sit there, my wife and I would sit in meditation posture, and they would sit on those zafus in the way that they do. Everything calmed down. Everything settled and got peaceful. There was no meditation, but there was an ambiance, a tone. After they had this cookie party, they were so calm, contented, and cozy. Whatever a parent wants a four-year-old to get from meditation, we got from cookie parties. I could say more, but that's enough for now. I think adults do well—maybe not cookie parties, but now we call them tea ceremonies. Just looking at our tea master!

Okay, so thank you. If some of you would like to meet outside now in the parking lot, we can take some folding chairs out, take our masks off there, and have more discussion for a little while. It will be nice to hang out. Otherwise, thank you.