Jill Shepherd: talk: Wise Effort

So welcome again. Really good to see the reinforcements who came piling through the door. So a really big thank you for showing up because in the spirit of tonight's talk, the path factor of why is effort. I just want to acknowledge again and appreciate again that it takes effort to get out of the complexity and the busyness of our everyday lives and deal with all of the competing demands and then get ourselves here. It's not easy. And the Buddha himself acknowledged that following this path to freedom is quote, swimming upstream. So you might have a sense of that just in the process of getting yourself here. Yep, like salmon leaping up. This can be lots of different obstacles that get in the way of that. So this idea that it's swimming upstream, it's acknowledging that it does take effort. And so tonight I wanted to look a bit more closely about this sixth factor of the Noble Eightfold Path. It's the first of the last three factors and the last three groupings are all about meditation. So why is effort, why is mindfulness, why is samadhi? And why is effort comes right after why is livelihood. And I don't think that's any coincidence because as I just alluded to, how we live all the rest of our lives has a big effect on how much time and energy we have to practice. So if we're living at 150K an hour when we sit to meditate, it can feel like we're slamming into a brick wall. And so being able to find a more balanced approach to anything and paying attention to what motivates us to put energy into our practice, what motivates us and what gets in the way, these are important aspects of why is effort. And I wanted to start just by naming a pattern that I recognized in myself early on and I've seen it in quite a few students. And it's a, this pattern is so common that I've given it a name. You may have heard me talk about the superhero to slug syndrome. Sounds like some of you might recognize that. So unfortunately, this syndrome can be activated just by hearing the term wise effort, let alone when it's translated as right effort. So when we're new to this path, it's quite common when we hear this phrase to almost fixate on the word effort and unconsciously ignore the right or the wise part. And we have that mainstream conditioning that often brings with it a belief that unless we're putting in 110% effort every waking minute, we're not doing it right. We're not going to get anywhere. And that same mainstream conditioning often has as over focused on getting results. So sometimes I meet people who are caught up in trying to get esoteric experiences on retreat or wanting to become someone special, maybe a deeply spiritual person or a highly realized meditator or a famous Dharma teacher or whatever the fantasy might be were motivated a little bit off. And the problem with having too many expectations is when we don't get the results that we think we're supposed to, what comes in disappointment, doubt, maybe self judgment, and those tend to undermine our effort. And sometimes we give up completely. So it's pretty common to swing between over efforting and under efforting. Anybody noticed that? That balance point is surprisingly elusive. So when we're in the superhero phase, we launch ourselves. This is really common, particularly on retreat, the first few days of the retreat, right, I'm here, let's do it. And we launch ourselves or we first hear about the practice. We get all inspired and motivated and we push ourselves, aiming at what turned out to be unrealistic goals. And because that energy is driven by force, by greed, by aversion, by judgment, it's not sustainable. And at some point it burns out, we burn out, we collapse into apathy, and we're in the slug phase of the syndrome. And we retreat into a sense of defeat. It's just, it's too hard. I can't do it. I'm a failure. Well, maybe millions of other people have benefited from this path over thousands of years, but I'm uniquely defective. This isn't working for me. I'm the exception that proves the rule. So we can get caught in that pattern, and then at some point, maybe driven by guilt, we launch into another superhero phase. And then again, we collapse back into apathy, slug mode, the pendulum keeps swinging. And no judgment here. It seems to be, this is a pattern that we have to go through. It's almost part of the developmental arc of the practice before we are able to come back to more balance. And if it's any consolation, even the Buddha himself went through something similar, those extremes. I think as most of you know, before his awakening, he was supposedly a prince. He was living a life of luxury. He was able to indulge every sense pleasure he could. And for a while, he had no interest in anything deeper. So we can think of that as a slug phase, very cozy, comfortable kind of slug. And he stayed there for quite a few years. And then eventually he started to wonder if there might be more to life than this endless self-indulgence. That launched him into the other extreme where he left the palace and he spent years practicing extreme austerities, which included almost starving himself to death. I think that's pretty much over-efforting. Unfortunately, he realized that wasn't working either. And that's when he came to this need for balance, the famous middle way, the middle way between extremes of any kind. And after that realization, shortly afterwards he attained full awakening. So in this story, we can see that what makes wise effort is that it is responsive. It's not just hard-out, flat-tack, 110% effort all the time. It needs to be attuned to the moment that we're in, to our physical energy, our mental energy, our health, to the specific conditions of where we are in our practice, whether we're in daily life or on retreat, and to the overall phase of our meditative development and our broader life circumstances. Okay, so that's wise effort in the broadest sense. And just to name, in the context of the Noble Eightfold Path, the Buddha had a more specific definition of what he meant by wise effort, remembering that it's in relation to our meditation practice. So in the context of the Noble Eightfold Path, wise effort is very much about working with our mind states in the context of meditation. There are four aspects to this. The first is the effort to prevent, the effort to prevent unskillful states from coming up. So unskillful states, things like aversion, anger, jealousy, rage, despair, fear, anxiety, those kind of things. If they do come up, the second effort is to make the effort to help them release, to move on. And then when we've done that, there's a bit more room in the heart and mind for the opposites to come in, skillful states. So that's the third effort, help beneficial states to come up. So you can think of the Brahma Viharas, the heart practices, kindness, compassion, gladness, equanimity, there's all the awakening factors, this thing like generosity and steadiness and calm and patience and courage and so on. Then when those states have got some foothold, the fourth effort is to help them deepen and ripen and grow. So in the context of effort, there's a shift from the unskillful to the skillful and we can see that in the broader development of our practice too. However long you've been meditating, there's a shift where in the beginning we're much more likely to get caught in the painful, the unpleasant, the afflictive states and over time those loosen their grip on us, they don't last as long, the intervals between them coming up gets longer and we have more capacity to spend more time in the skillful beneficial states. So all of this takes effort and we need to pay attention to the wise aspect of wise effort as much as the effort itself. And that first stage of wisdom, it involves getting clear about what are our own default tendencies. To all of us tend to have habits in relation to effort. Some of us are temperamentally just more on one side, maybe for some of us trying too hard as a default, but others it might be more, yeah. Not trying hard enough. So I'll say a little bit about how to work with each of these. If you tend to be more of an over-effort, it's important to bring more awareness, what's that attitude that you're practicing with and to recognize when we are coming from that striving, it creates tension in the body, the heart, the mind and that's unpleasant. We can recognize that sense of tightening both physically and mentally. So in the body, we might be sitting really stiff and rigid and our jaws are clenched and our fists are clenched and we're like, right. And that same stiffness in the body brings a rigidity in the mind too. We might notice there's a contracted narrow determination and we're going to micromanage every aspect of our experience. We get caught in trying to control this. We're getting rid of what we think shouldn't be happening and we're trying to hold on to those fleeting moments when there is more pleasure. And those fleeting moments generally don't last very long because of the underlying aversion and pushing and stress. So unwise effort. And one significant way that it's unwise is that it's centered around a strong sense of me and my practice and whether I'm doing it right or wrong whether I'm succeeding or failing. So this is something really worth looking out for. Is there a lot of identification and self referencing in how you're practicing? And it can be a challenge to release this kind of over efforting because it's so counterintuitive that actually genuine deepening of the practice comes from letting go from learning to relax and to release all of that micromanaging. So if you've done retreats with me you might have heard me talk about this shift from what I call will driven practice to Dharma centered practice. So will driven practice is that over efforting that's all about me trying to achieve something whereas Dharma centered practice comes from that quality of trust, confidence, even faith. Faith that the intuitive embodied wisdom of the Dharma is more and more established in me and it's growing in me almost in spite of my efforts. So yes, it takes time, it takes energy, it takes effort to get that trust but we can help it along by noticing when we have got caught in taking things personally and then consciously relax that tightening. So I've shared with some of you before how one of my teachers Joseph Goldstein he talks about how there's a significant shift in the practice when we move our motivation moves from what can I get from this practice to what can I give to it. And in my own experience one powerful way of softening that getting mode is to bring in more of the Brahma Maharas to bring in the kindness, the compassion, self compassion helps to soften the self judgment and also Mudita gladness appreciate what's going well. Okay, so let's look at the other side of unwise effort, how the pendulum swings the other way, we can find ourselves in phases of complacency, apathy, half-heartedness. And for me this can show up as a kind of disconnectedness. I sit down and I'm just kind of zoning out and daydreaming and kind of just filling the time not really fully present or at times I don't sit at all. This is a few years ago because I'm just too busy, I'm too tired, I'll get to it later. Anybody had that thought? And does later come? In my experience often it doesn't, eventually, but it can be quite a while. I'll say I'll do it later, maybe tomorrow, oh well maybe the weekend or maybe next week. So that procrastination. And then sometimes it shows up as that rationalizing voice that says come on, relax. You've been working really hard, why not just skip meditation tonight and give yourself a break? Now to be clear sometimes that might be true, that might really be a genuinely skillful thing to do, but in my own practice what I've noticed is that voice comes in and then another voice says, yeah, but and then there starts to be an argument in my head and that very argument now is a warning bell. You're getting caught in delusion. And don't go there, ignore the louder voice, listen to the quiet one and as best I can come to the meditation cushion, come to the sangha, get to the retreat, whatever it might be. So if you happen to notice that kind of tendency again, it's worth looking at the deeper roots. And sometimes that sort of half-heartedness or holding back is driven by an unconscious fear of failure. And maybe by doubt that what we're doing is really going to get us anywhere. And with that unseen attitude we hold back and then often what we're afraid of becomes a reality. Because we're not putting much effort in, we don't get the benefits we hoped for and then that seems to justify our lack of effort. We can tell ourselves, see, nothing's really happening. I was right not to waste my time and energy with this. So if that at all seems familiar, a wise effort involves making the effort to challenge that pattern. And especially if you're relatively early in your practice, it can be helpful to sort of consciously suspend disbelief. Give yourself a timeframe. So maybe make an intention to really apply yourself to meditating more regularly, to listening to talks, to meeting with a sangha as often as you can for a set period of time, maybe three months, maybe six months. And don't assess the results until that period is up. I don't think I've met anyone yet who made that kind of commitment and didn't notice some improvement in their well-being, in their relationships, in their work and home life. Also important to say when or if you're in the slug phase, self-compassion is very important because the usual trap here is to feel inadequate, to feel guilty, and that can propel us into another superhero phase. We push ourselves, I'm going to meditate every morning, every evening for an hour each time, I'm going to do that every day for the rest of my life. Maybe some of you've tried that. Again, it's that same pendulum swing. So what's really needed here is not another push of the pendulum, but a much more gentle approach. For example, you might set an intention to sit every morning for 10 minutes for the next week. That's all. Try it for one week, see how it goes, and then at the end of the week, was it doable? It's a little bit of a stretch, maybe six days out of seven is more realistic. Maybe I can let myself have Sunday off. Or if it felt okay, yeah, great. Let me try another week, but just one week, because that's usually not as daunting as thinking, this is something I've got to do forever. So once you've established that as a bit more of a habit, then you might start expanding a little, maybe you do 15 minutes. So as always, it's not that we're trying to make up for lost time. In the Dharma, there's a very important principle, simply begin again. Whether that's beginning again with the next breath after you've got distracted in meditation, whether it's beginning again with another day of sitting, if you'd ended up skipping a day, simply beginning again. It's a powerful expression of wise effort. Whereas I say in the Zen tradition, fall down seven times, get up eight. So there's another very common pattern in relation to effort that, again, I've seen this in myself, I've seen it in many of the other people and the communities I'm involved with. Slightly ironic, but it's the tendency to slacken off when our lives are going well. There's something pretty motivating about suffering. And conversely, when we're not suffering, easy to slide into cruise mode and coast on our good fortune, not recognizing it is temporary. So this is another place where we need the wisdom, the wise aspect of wise effort. The Buddha often spoke about delusion or ignorance as one of the key drivers of suffering. And he acknowledged that one of the most seductive delusions we get caught in is the delusion of permanence, the delusion of stability. So when things are going well, we like to think, oh, it's always going to be like this. We forget the truth of impermanence. And we're shocked when the next unexpected challenge shows up and we find ourselves emotionally unprepared to weather that storm. So to stretch that metaphor a bit, meditating regularly before the next storm arrives, it's like making sure we've got the life raft, we've got the life jacket, we've got the flares, we've got the radio, we've got the food, the water, we've got everything we need to give us the best chance of getting through that storm. But if we wait until we're in the storm, we're in some kind of crisis, and then we start desperately trying to meditate, much harder to do that. So just in case you have been coasting a little bit, it's helpful to take advantage of ways to re-inspire your practice. And doing a retreat's always a good place to start. But if that's not available for whatever reason, you can try making a mini-retreat at home. So put aside your devices, spend the morning or an afternoon meditating and listening to talks and walking outside in nature if you can, and even better, do it with a friend, because it's really helpful to have moral support. So this leads to something I touched into last week in response to a question from Ruby, one of the other rubies, a question about peer group pressure, and just how it takes effort, in fact, real courage at times to stay true to our own values and to protect our inner life, to protect that inner life from all of the societal pressures that are kind of working to pull us off balance. So last week I spoke about going on retreat as a process of what I called re-saining, and it's a made-up word, but re-saining, restoring sanity, making ourselves sane again. And I found out that the English word sane, which nowadays usually only refers to our mental health, from the Latin root, sanus, that originally meant healthy sound whole, healthy physically as well as mentally. And I like that connection with wholeness or integrity, because wise effort, in fact, all the eight factors of the path, their whole purpose is to help us to live lives that are less fragmented, scattered, agitated. And at the retreat with Gil that I did last month, he spoke a lot about the importance of valuing our inner life. And he used that phrase inner life a few times, and it sounded, even just that phrase sounds sort of counter-cultural, because mainstream society pretty much ignores inner life, and we're encouraged about all of our energy and chasing happiness out there in the material world. So from this perspective, prioritizing our inner life is an act of resistance, even rebellion against those dominant values of busyness and productivity and acquisition and status and so on. And so I've been talking a lot about the challenges of taking care of our inner life, and we also want to keep in mind the huge benefits of doing that. Keep those benefits in mind so that you don't think, oh, it's just too hard, and trigger apathy again. So as I mentioned last week to Ruby, we need each other for moral support through this whole process. And particularly at first, when the seedling of the Dharma is small, just being able to connect regularly with like-minded people, people who share some aspiration to live with more awareness, kindness, compassion, regularly connecting with those people, it helps us to feel less alone, less weird. And again, based on my own experience, I know it can be easy to take these meetings for granted, to take the workshops and the retreats for granted, and to not recognize how much we contribute simply by showing up, by our presence, your presence matters. So in saying that, I don't want to create another kind of pressure where people feel like, oh, I have to show up on Thursdays. What makes wise effort wise is that it comes from clear seeing. It comes from recognizing for ourselves the value of our inner life. So then our motivation to practice comes from a natural, healthy desire to live more sanely rather than being