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Tuning into Effort

Thank you for your practice. Hello to people on YouTube. Welcome, everybody.

One thing I like to say is that at IMC, membership is a matter of wanting to belong. So anyone who wants to be part of the sangha, you are part of the sangha, just so you know.

I want to talk about effort today, the practice of effort. Just notice, if you can, what quality of response you have in your being as I bring up the word effort. When I say that word, do you feel a sense of connecting to having to work hard, or a sense of "I don't want to think about effort"? What this word points to is incredibly important, but our relationship to the idea of it may not be as useful as it could be.

Effort is actually the most common quality that is listed by the Buddha for awakening. Effort is woven into everything we do. It's the stuff of energy, and it seems to me that it takes on the resonance or the tone of whatever is guiding, inspiring, or directing it. In particular, the qualities of the heart and the presence or absence of wisdom can really be noted in our efforts. Recognizing the visible experiential results of making effort is something that's always possible. We can really tune into the kind of effort we're making by noticing the results of what we're doing, and I'm going to talk a lot more about that.

I guess I'll say this other thing, which is that we always have a choice, and whether that's conscious or unconscious, habitual choice, there's always some choice happening. With the teachings of the Buddha and the science of neuroscience and neuroplasticity, I think it's particularly useful to use effort to cultivate mind states that are beneficial to ourselves, others, and both.

If we aren't consciously tuning into the kind of effort we're making or what we're doing, the results of what we're doing are going to be determined by our past karmic efforts, our past behaviors, our habits, and patterns. This will shape the mind; this will shape what happens in our next moment.

I'm going to go through a long list of things that I want to cover because I actually don't know how much of this I will cover, so I'm going to kind of give bullet points of all the different things that I've been reflecting on around this quality of our life, our experience.

Our Mind as an Instrument

There's a beautiful sutta called the Sona Sutta^[1]—it's about Sona, who's a monk who's practicing. The Buddha comes to talk to him when Sona is about ready to give up his practice and return to lay life. The Buddha shows up, and essentially the teaching is that our mind is like an instrument, and the way that we play it is like we play an instrument. He was a musician, Sona was. And so when we play music, we can notice the tone, right? We can notice how hard we're strumming or the effort we're putting into playing. So the Buddha essentially is teaching Sona: you can work with your mind the same way you play an instrument. We are our own instruments. Our mind, our body, our hearts are our own instruments.

Everything we do requires some amount of effort or energy, regardless of our conscious choice of these things. We can learn a lot from the effort we're making; it becomes sort of a window into what we're doing internally. It becomes visible in our experience and our actions, the results of our actions. There are different types of effort needed at different times. In general, there's effort that requires activity in a way, and there's effort that requires receptivity, opening up, allowing, receiving. It's a dynamic thing. What is needed is always going to change. It's something that we need to tune into. Like an instrument, when we travel, when we do various things, set it down, the temperature affects the tone and the quality of the music.

Another question for me around effort and noticing is: where aren't we applying effort? Where aren't we putting effort into our lives, into our practice, and where aren't we noticing the effort? In high school, I volunteered in a classroom with people who were neurodiverse or learning diverse. I was profoundly impacted by one of the preparation exercises I did that was given to me by the teacher who ran that classroom. What she said is to go home and sit down and write out instructions for tying your shoe. I was shocked as I started to try and articulate step by step with words what it took to tie a shoe. Try it.

Four Wise Efforts

Another important thing to know in the Buddha's teachings on wise effort is that the function of effort is to increase the wholesome and decrease the unwholesome. The Buddha teaches that there are four types of wise efforts. There are lots and lots of types of effort, but the four types of wise effort can be summarized in this very simple way:

If it's not bad, don't make it worse. If it's bad, stop. These are kind of moving toward acts of renunciation, letting go or stopping. If it's not good, make it good, wholesome, supportive. And if it's already good, sustain or maintain the goodness, the wholesomeness.

So those are the four types of wise effort. To know what kind of effort is needed, we really again need to bring our awareness back to what we're trying to do and what its impact is.

The Stirring of the Heart

One of my final points—not that it will be the last thing I talk about—is that I feel like effort is very much impacted by the stirring of the heart, the resonance of the heart energy. When the heart lifts up, when the heart is bright, inspired—maybe you can just think about a moment of that and what happens. There's a natural following of energy and it has a certain vitality or quality to it that can really support the capacity to receive, to open up, which is a form of efforting. It is to be receptive instead of active. A lot of what we think about when we connect with effort is the energy we need to exert. A very simple analogy might be a scooter. I have a scooter, and when we start to ride the scooter, we need to take the foot and pump, pump, pump, right? But then at some point, it's very skillful to stop putting the foot down and just glide. That's a skill.

Sona and the Vina

Let me talk a little bit more about Sona. The venerable Sona was meditating in seclusion. He was off in the woods doing walking meditation, which he did until the skin of the soles of his feet were split and bleeding. This thought rose in his mind, which is: "Of the Blessed One's disciples who have aroused their persistence (so effort here, right), I am one. But my mind is not released from the effluences through lack of clinging and sustenance."

So then he thinks, "Now my family has enough wealth. It would be possible to enjoy that wealth and make merit. So what if I were to disavow training, return to the lower life, enjoy wealth, and make merit?"

And in the beautiful little story, somehow the Buddha hears. He's nowhere near, but somehow the Buddha hears and magically appears right in front of Sona right after he has this thought. The Buddha says, "Did you just have this thought?" and he repeats the thought. Sona says, "Yes, lord."

So the Buddha says, "Now what do you think, Sona, before, when you were a householder, were you skilled at playing the vina?" "Yes, lord." (It's a string instrument.) "And what do you think? When the strings of your vina were too taut, was your vina in tune and playable?" "No, lord." "And what do you think? When the strings of your vina were too loose, was your vina in tune and playable?" "No, lord." And the Buddha says, "And what do you think? When the strings of your vina were neither too taut nor too loose, but tuned, established to be on the right pitch, was your vina in tune and playable?" "Yes, lord."

And so the Buddha says, "In the same way, Sona, over-aroused persistence (over-efforting) leads to restlessness. Over-slack persistence leads to laziness. Thus you should determine the right pitch for your persistence, attune, and use yourself as an instrument."

Maybe just take a moment to think about how this might be relevant for you in your practice. Where might you notice that it's almost like becoming brittle when we over-effort, when we're striving? There's too much pushing, there's a tightness, a contracting for me in the mind and body. And when there's not enough, we might fall asleep, or we drift, we dream, we don't hold our posture. This is our instrument. The visible results of our effort can be seen in just this simple way.

The Importance of Effort

I mentioned how critical effort is in the Buddhist teachings. I'll just read a couple of sutta quotes. This one's from the Dhammapada^[2] actually, just to give you a sense of how much value the Buddha placed on it: "Better than a hundred years lived lazy and lacking in vigor—there's the effort, vigor—is one day lived with vigor and exertion." And then the other, this is from the Visuddhimagga^[3]: "When initiated properly, it—meaning effort—should be seen as the root of all attainments."

There's a list of the 37 factors of enlightenment, and it's comprised of a bunch of lists, including the four foundations of mindfulness, four supreme efforts, four means to accomplishment, five strengths, the noble eightfold path, seven factors of enlightenment. There are five frequently found qualities in those lists. Those five qualities are faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom. So of these qualities—faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom—what do you think is the most common one? The one that's listed the most is energy, effort—nine times. Faith is listed twice. Mindfulness eight times, so right up there. Concentration four times. Wisdom five times.

I mentioned the value of learning from the effort that we make. The effort we make will have different results in our lives. One of the Buddha's emphatic invitations was to come and see for yourself. Don't just believe what I teach, try it for yourself. The dharma is very incomplete if it's only something we believe or think about. The dharma is to be engaged with, to be practiced, and we need to make an effort to do that.

If we aren't attuning to the quality of our effort, we might sit down, close our eyes, sit up straight, try and stop the thoughts, get really serious about meditating, and have a horrible experience meditating, and decide at the end, "I suck. I can't do this. I tried really hard, and I'm not going to do it again. Forget it, I can't do it." This is a gross exaggeration for a purpose, just to really step back and say, when we have a practice session, or an experience or interaction in our lives, something we're working on—when it doesn't go well, there's a lot to tune into. There's so much subtlety in this area, and there's that heart quality I mentioned.

Where is the heart in relationship to what we're doing? Based on what I was describing about sitting down and making all this effort to meditate properly, where was the heart in that? In the way I was describing it, there wasn't really heart in that. It was more of a striving to do something perfect, to become a meditator, to be a good meditator, to have a certain kind of experience. A heart quality when we sit down to meditate would be much more like, "Well, I care about what I see in my mind. I care about how I'm staying in my body and my heart. May I have a sense of kindness to myself and to what arises." This is a kind of setting the tone of a practice.

So just in summary with that section of what I'm talking about, we can learn from the effort we make by noticing the results of what we're doing and not assuming that we can't change the results if we don't change our approach. We can change the quality of the heart, what's guiding us, and what kind of effort we're putting in.

Effort in Daily Life

Different types of effort are needed at different times. I definitely hear this from people; they're trying to figure out what the right amount of effort is to put into a practice. One of the things I love to teach is loving-kindness practice. I was talking about the effort we bring to that practice, and one of the yogis was really trying to think about, "How do I find that perfect amount of effort?" He was feeling a little frustrated because he couldn't get the same results in his practice every time. Like everything, our mind is never the same twice. What's happening in our life, in our hearts, and our bodies changes all the time—the presence or absence of pain, the presence or absence of conflict, the presence or absence of a concentrated mind or a distracted mind. Our minds are constantly changing. So the effort needed for a distracted mind is going to be very different than the effort needed for a mind that's grounded, settled, and whole.

It's our habit, because of how we are designed biologically speaking, to kind of have these shortcuts for everything we do, like tying our shoes. If we aren't tuning into that, we might end up bringing effort that is not wise effort to whatever interaction or meditation we're doing.

I've been a swimmer on and off throughout my life. At various times, I have a membership to a pool and I swim a lot, and then there are periods of time in my life where that wasn't happening so much. In my most recent return to swimming, I was just so happy to be back in the pool. I am someone who doesn't like to swim inside; I like to swim outside. That's because my mind is very much impacted by the open sky, the sense of openness. And of course, when it's sunny, that feeling of the warmth. Also, in an enclosed pool, the smell of the chlorine is quite strong. So there are all these things about swimming outside that I particularly love.

When I first got back in the pool, I was all about just enjoying being outside, the sky, and the sun. I was very much working on my form, getting the body back into it, and looking at YouTube videos about current swim techniques. It was in this very joyful, relaxed way, and I started to call my swimming a source of sukha^[4], joy. I would just have so much joy. For the first couple of years, I'd be swimming a lot in the summer, and then when it would get cold in the winter, my whole body would tense up. It was just like, "I can't do it." I couldn't deal with the vedana^[5], the unpleasantness and the coldness.

I sort of realized over time that I had to start over again every spring or summer. I was missing out on the benefits of continuing my practice of swimming—which I consider a mindfulness practice—despite the cold. So I started to tune into what effort I needed to make to bring to my swimming to keep me going. I remember one day, it was intensely raining, and I was walking out in my suit from the locker room. I wasn't covered up. As I'm walking, I can feel my body wanting to duck—trying to avoid the drops of rain. It was so absurd to see it, and very freeing actually. It was like, "Okay, look at this. Just turn toward the vedana, the unpleasantness. Stop reacting, stop trying to get away from it."

So that was bringing some effort, noticing my response. My effort maybe would have been to just get out to the pool as fast as I could. That was putting a lot of energy into it, but noticing that when I'm doing that, it just fuels the sense of reactivity or negativity. The effort needed to shift to receiving, to being okay, to staying with and not trying to get away from the coldness or the raindrops (which is impossible anyway), and then over time, learning to swim through the winter.

Another really significant thing I noticed about making effort with swimming was when I decided it was time to pick up my pace. I needed to start to swim a little bit faster. I was conditioned enough, so it was just time to try and pick it up. What I started to notice was that when I got out of the pool after making this extra physical effort, I wasn't feeling that sense of joy. I wasn't feeling that sense of uplift from my swimming. I started to watch what was happening in the mind as I was swimming. When I was pushing, efforting to go faster—and this might be just fine because it might be the kind of effort I needed at that time to increase my conditioning—what I noticed was that it was almost like pulling a hood up and over my body, my head. My senses kind of honed into this smaller point. I stopped seeing the light in the water. I sort of had these blinders on, and it was like this contracting. So then I started to work on trying to have effort with the swimming while opening up, while working with the mind to be open and receptive, and trying to find this balance, this right attunement to how tight the strings were.

Attuning on Retreat

When we're on retreat, everything becomes sort of under a microscope because you start to get more simplified, and everything's more clear. For me, I could clearly see how much effort needed to change all the time. Sometimes if I had a really concentrated sit, I needed to go out and do fast-paced walking; I needed to balance out what was happening. Sometimes we need to walk slow, sometimes we need to walk fast, sometimes moderately, attuning to the body. Sometimes during the course of a retreat, you'll see it's better to sit longer sits, and sometimes we have to consider what's happening in our bodies and maybe we don't go to the hall for the sits because we need to sit less time.

Other things that really helped, that were examples of taking effort, would be to reflect on the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, the Three Jewels. That would be a way of brightening the heart, and that would affect the energy I brought to my practice. One of my favorite things is to go out and look up at the sky. It's like something about it for my mind is just like, "Oh yeah, I remember how to be open. I remember taking in the light and that sense of broadness."

Sometimes I think about effort as having the quality of a temperature or consistency to it. I'm offering this because all of our minds and hearts are tuned differently; we might notice different things. There's effort that can feel cold, hard, and brittle, often thought of as striving. And there's effort that can feel like it's hot and saggy. And then there's the not too hot, not too cold middle way. Sometimes I can feel in my body, and I have this image of an ostrich. Is my effort right now like an ostrich with its head in the sand? Like I'm not really looking, I'm not really doing anything, I'm just kind of shutting down? Or is it like an ostrich running? When I think about an ostrich running, it's like they're running that way and thinking about what they're running away from or something. It's just not taking in. And then there's being more upright.

Here's another dharma quote: "The Dharma is for those who are industrious, not those who are lazy." That's from the Anguttara Nikaya^[6]. I guess I'm inviting by sharing all of this, this is kind of industrious, creative ways of thinking about and seeing effort. I think we do need to be really receptive and sensitive and tuned in and creative in how we work with our own effort, and bring the heart and the wisdom to it.

Paying Attention in Our Lives

So where aren't we putting in effort, or where aren't we paying attention to our effort in our lives? This is a question for me, too. The practice can be everywhere in our lives, not just on the cushion. There is effort needed to even orient toward the wholesome because of the negativity bias in the mind. Rick Hanson calls it: the negative sticks like Velcro, and the positive slips like an egg in a Teflon pan. This is sort of the hardwiring of the brain, to orient us toward that which is more of a threat than that which is a gift. But we can counterbalance that tendency by consciously resting our awareness and being receptive to the good by savoring or appreciating, being grateful. This is an effort, too.

Another area where there might be a not noticing, a sense of delusion maybe even, or taking things for granted in our lives, is around identity, like who we think we are. We just sort of get going in a groove and assume we're a certain way. We're constantly changing; our minds are changing, our hearts are changing. But if we think, "Oh, I'm a patient person," because we have this idea about ourselves, we're maybe not going to notice when we're being impatient, at least not in the beginning.

There are also things that we can bring more awareness and more effort to in our lives that can make a big difference. Those might be things like, where do we have areas of assumptions in general about others? Some people are really good at learning people's names, and some people aren't. Some of that might be just the way our minds are, but some of it is, how much effort are we bringing to learning people's names or how they pronounce their names? Is that important to us? Does our heart see the value of that?

Here's a little quote from Winton Higgins: "We can't live ethically without caring about ourselves as well as others, and we can't be mindful without caring about what is happening here and now. Care underpins the radical attention the dharma practice accentuates." Caring can help us bring more awareness and effort to the areas where we maybe aren't tuning in and could tune in more.

Cultivating the Wholesome

Actually, in the description of effort in the Visuddhimagga, it says vigor is the state of viriya^[7], energy. Its characteristic is exertion. Its function is to support or consolidate related mental qualities. It manifests as non-collapse. And, "stirred, one strives wisely." So stirring of the heart, right? It's that stirring of the heart that helps bring wisdom to our efforts.

I just think it's a super poignant space for practice. I think there is so much immediate feedback right here and now if we notice and play with the kind of effort and the kind of heart quality we bring. It's very tied to wise intention and wise view. Last night, I was thinking about this talk and I had this dream. In my dream, I had this image of granite, and how all the different minerals and colors weave together. I think this is the Dharma. Any place you enter, you can pretty much find everything else in the Dharma. So for me, I'm offering effort as one of those ways in, a window for learning and seeing in our practice, getting more intimate with this.

To review the four right efforts: If it's not yet arisen, if it's not making it worse, don't make it worse. If whatever is happening is making it worse, stop. If what we're doing isn't making it better, start. If what we're doing is making it better, keep it up. Abandoning what is unskillful is letting go; developing what is skillful is cultivation. There is this important balance even here between the cultivation and the letting go. We need to be ardently tuned into the results, because life is dynamic, it's always changing.

I've seen with people—maybe even myself—where they're trying to abandon something that's unskillful, something that's making things worse, they're trying to stop it, and what actually happens is the reverse: things get worse. Anybody ever experience that?

If we're having a thought we don't want to have because it's hurtful or we think it's harmful, what happens when you try and stop that thought? Has anybody ever noticed that it gets a little louder or sticks around a little longer? Sometimes, instead of trying to make something stop, actually what we need to do is not be trying to make anything happen to it. Just let it be, and maybe turn our heart, our energy, toward something that feels supportive, like being kind to ourselves with this thought.

And sometimes when we're trying to cultivate a sense of wholesomeness in ourselves—so this was an example of trying to get rid of something that's not wholesome, not helpful, and we get the opposite—sometimes when we're trying to cultivate something that feels wholesome, like loving-kindness, we actually start to find our mind becoming more prickly, more irritated, more critical. So even though we're doing loving-kindness practice, and that's supposed to make us happy and warm and kind, we need to maybe stop doing the loving-kindness practice, and just recognize that that in itself, at this moment, is resulting in unwholesome states. So sometimes we're doing all four at the same time; essentially, they're not always so independent from each other.

Summary

Okay, so I think I got through all the points. I'll just go through them to summarize:

• We're our own instrument (the Sona Sutta).
• Effort is extremely important in the role of awakening and freedom. Everything we do requires effort or energy to some extent or not, whether it's exertion or receptivity.
• We can learn so much by watching the effort we're making and then the results of that effort. It's always going to change. Staying attuned, reflecting before, during, and after, is always important.
• Where aren't we applying effort, or where aren't we noticing the effort we're putting into things?
• The function of wise effort is to increase the wholesome and decrease the unwholesome.
• The stirring of the heart is extremely supportive for the effort we make. Finding some quality that has some warmth or tenderness to it to varying degrees can help us play our own selves with care.

All right, I think that's it. Thank you for your kind attention.