Jill Shepherd: talk: Wise Effort p2

So tonight just to continue our exploration of these last three factors of the Noble Eightfold Path which are the three connected to our meditation practice. So namely wise efforts, wise mindfulness, and wise Samadhi or stability of mind absorption. And last week we started looking at wise effort a bit more broadly, a bit more generally, how it shows up in our everyday lives and in relation to our Dharma practice overall. So as you might remember if you were here I talked about how we all have patterns and habits in relation to efforts, energy, motivation. And as I briefly mentioned last time one common pattern is that suffering is an impetus for us to get motivated to practice. Maybe you notice that, oh we really ramp up, yeah. And then whatever that crisis is, saves away and it's like, oh okay. And we become a bit complacent and we kind of go into cruise mode, coasts along until all of a sudden the next crisis kind of blindsights us and then we get motivated and the cycle continues. So that's one particular pattern. The other is the one I've been talking about a lot recently. I wrote about in the newsletter this week the superhero to slug syndrome, that tendency to flip-flop between over-affetting apathy, over-affetting apathy. So in addition to those patterns coming from our individual personalities and our temperaments we're also affected by the wider society we live in. And as a general rule this tends to value getting, having, achieving, attaining, progress, productivity and so on. And so it's pretty common for those motivations to come into our dharma practice too. And sometimes unconsciously turning the whole thing into a self-improvement project and it becoming yet another way that we can strengthen the endocritic and not doing it enough or not doing it right and so on. So perhaps the first effort, a wise effort is to try to see through those patterns and balance them out. And as an antidote to those kind of attitudes I've been emphasizing more and more. The whole aim of our practice is to cultivate skillful mental qualities and skillful mental qualities and generally experience as pleasant, as nourishing, as conducive to well-being. So qualities like the ones I was pointing to in the meditation just now. Calm, contentment, ease, appreciative joy, gladness, deline, balance, equanimity and so on. And in the context of this exploration of wise effort the Buddha was very explicit about what wise effort is. It's not about just putting in a hundred percent, hundred and ten percent effort all the time. The Buddha had a very specific definition of wise effort in relation to our meditation practice. And this definition has four aspects to it. All of them in relation to mental qualities in our states. So they're about knowing what is happening in the heart and the mind so that we can move to free ourselves from states that are unpleasant, painful, harmful. And instead cultivate states that are pleasant and skillful and beautiful and nourishing. That's really the overall aim of this whole practice. And this emphasis on working with the mind and mind states is another key aspect of these teachings that's often misunderstood especially in relation to the standard mindfulness instructions. So as you all know the beginning instructions we tend to talk about bring mindfulness to the breathing. And it's true I do that every week. And then usually we say if the attention gets caught in thinking bring it back to the breath. And if all we hear of those beginning instructions it's very easy to get a sense of oh I'm just supposed to lock my attention on the experience of breathing that goes into the mind and thinking that's not meditation. And this can be pretty deeply ingrained and was reminded of that. A few months ago I taught a weekend workshop and at the end someone said wow I had no idea that mindfulness was about more than breathing. I thought it was the breath, the breath, nothing but the breath. And now you're telling me it's about looking at our minds and finding ways to experience more happiness. That's unbelievable. So I don't think any of you here have perhaps that misunderstanding. But I do want to emphasize it. This is wise effort in relation to meditation is all about this, you could say, developmental art that shifts from releasing harmful states into developing skillful states. So with this four part division the first effort is really to prevent the mind from falling into unskilled states in the first place. So how do we protect ourselves from getting caught up in painful states, things like aversion, anger, frustration, jealousy, resentment, sadness, anxiety and so on. There are a few ways we can do that. One is to get more aware of how do these states come up, what are the separate circumstances and other ways that we can protect ourselves from maybe simple example, doing school, spending too much time engaged with international news, local news, especially around the politics of this time it's easy to get sucked in and feel bombarded. And so can we set boundaries? Can we put limits? Can we give ourselves conscious breaks, really paying attention? Where am I putting my time and energy? If the difficult mind states tend to be provoked by other people, maybe different difficult people at work or in your family or community, can you put boundaries around how much time you spend with them? And the circumstances you spend them with. And this can be a skillful way of just protecting ourselves from a whole pile of irritation, frustration and so on. And so all of this takes mindfulness. Mindfulness being second of these three meditative factors. And in the beginning we might not have enough mindfulness to recognize what our triggers are until after they've been activated. But that cliche about better late than never implies the mindfulness too. So even though technically mindfulness is about being present, sometimes it can be skillful when we recognize something has gone awry just to look back and see what happened there. How did those painful states get activated so that we can then protect ourselves better if a similar situation comes up in the future? So ideally we're aiming for continuity of mindfulness in the presence and to the extent that we can be present. That's a powerful protection from the painful states getting a hold on us. Because as I think you all know, the earlier we can catch that chain reaction closer to the source, the easier it is to help it release before it's really got its hooks into us. So that's the first aspect of wise effort, the effort to, you could say, protect ourselves, prevent unskillful states from coming up. And one thing I appreciate about this is the Buddha recognizes in spite of that effort there will be times when we do get caught. And so the second aspect of this effort is when there are unskillful states coming into the mind, the effort is to abandon them, to help them to release, to help them to move through. And I think it's worth noting that the instruction is to abandon the unskillful states. It doesn't say judge them, hate them, fight them, try to get rid of them as quickly as possible, blame ourselves on coming up, which is often how we do relate to those states. As you probably know, when we do get caught on that, it tends to just fuel the states and make them stick around even longer. So this effort is more about trying to withdraw the energy that's fueling them and to not take them quite so personally so that they're able to release their grip on us eventually. And I want to emphasize this because even highly experienced meditators, they often have an unconscious assumption that any kind of unpleasant, painful mind state is wrong, it's bad, shouldn't be happening, and if we were meditating properly then we'd somehow become immune from experiencing any unpleasant states of mind ever again. And if we don't see the underlying assumption, we might inadvertently end up avoiding painful emotions, maybe suppressing, resisting, denying them, maybe even getting caught in spiritual bypassing. So spiritual bypassing is an unconscious tendency to misuse the practice, to try and transcend whatever is unpleasant, unwanted, unwelcome, instead of learning how to metabolize what's unpleasant and heal. So it might be deeply counterintuitive or counter-instinctive, as they say the only way out is through, or as they also say, we need to feel all the feels. Because the true freedom that this practice offers, true freedom is freedom in any circumstance, any setting, any condition, pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. I'm bringing this directly into our insight practice. The wisdom helps us to understand that when painful states come up, they are impermanent, they're unsatisfactory, they're impersonal, they're coming up due to conditions. Yep, they're here, yep, they'll stay for a while, but at some point they will disappear. And the best thing we can do to help them move on is to not take them personally. Yes, Scotland? I'm playing, because I want to acknowledge I'm giving a very condensed outline of this path. And in actuality what I'm describing is something that takes definite training, training, practice, patience, perseverance. So if you have to be feeling like, you're not there yet, don't worry. This path is not a quick fix. But because of that, the results are longer lasting. So as we persevere we start to see little by little situations that used to really upset us. They just don't have the same impact these days. And we were talking about that last week, and at the end I invited you to reflect on the overall arc of the practice and many of you share just how many benefits you experienced. So just to say, as we get more skilled at helping these unskilled states to move along, there's a natural arc of development where we find ourselves in the third and the fourth aspects of white effort. And these are very much about working with skillful states. So the third aspect is to support wholesome, beautiful qualities to come into being. So as we clear out the unskilled stuff, at least for me at times it feels almost like there's literally more room in here for the good stuff to come in, in that place. Now one challenge in doing this, as we've often talked about, the mind's inherent negativity bias. We tend to pay more attention to the unpleasant, the painful stuff, and not even necessary to recognize the skillful states because they're not threatening. So we often have an unconscious habit of barely recognizing skillful states when they are there. And that's why I often at the end of meditation will invite you to notice what's here now to develop that skill of tuning into all refined, pleasant, nourishing states. However, for some people it can even be a sense of mistrust of anything that's in the terrain of the positive. Particularly qualities like delight or joy or gladness. There's a certain vulnerability or heart opening that's required and that can make us feel vulnerable. And I know for myself we can tend to see that those skillful states, well, why open to them? They're only going to go away and then I'll be disappointed. So that can be almost a preempt of holding them at bay. And I had an experience that this one about my second retreat in Australia started the same way. A lot of them do in two or three days of physical pain and lots of afflictive states. And then suddenly out of the blue there was a phase of really intense happiness. Unlike anything I've experienced before. The mind was settled, it was calm, it was openness, it was actually bliss. I was like, wow. And you can guess what happened next, probably. I think it was the next sitting slipped back into what were more familiar states. But I heard my mind at that point say I knew it back to reality. But I had enough awareness to notice, why am I calling the unpleasant stuff reality? Because the assumption was the pleasant stuff is somehow not reality. So unreal, so trustworthy, it's unreliable. So I use that example just to point to we have these biases often unconsciously against pleasant experiences. So we can encourage opening towards pleasant. Not only on retreat but even in the context of our everyday lives. Some of you have heard me talk about this before. We can use pleasant sense based experiences to help support pleasant inner experiences. So one example I often use is the experience of watching a beautiful sunset. Imagine you've all had that experience. And if you stand and fully, fully let yourself take in that beauty, instead of thinking oh where's my phone, I should take a photo, this is going to look great. Put all that aside and just be present for that actual experience. Fully take it in and then after a few minutes just take a moment with all your attention from the external. Tune into what's happening inwardly. And you might notice oh wow this calm, this settleness. So feeling of expansion and appreciation. Oh there's some gladness and delight here. There's a really refined quality of presence. So you can do that with a sunset. You can do something similar with anything in your everyday life that brings joy. Maybe swimming in the ocean or surfing or playing with your grandkids or creating a piece of artwork or playing music. At some point take your attention out away from out there and just notice what's the effect on the heart and the mind. And is it helping to strengthen skillful states. And if it is, then you can move into the fourth aspect of wise effort which is why the skillful states have come up to make the effort to not let them fade away, to bring them to greater growth, to maintain prolong and deepen them in other words. So you may also have experienced that when we are in skillful states whether that's on the trip or in everyday life there's a particular challenge and that's the one thing that will last. It could be a cleaning and again like that experience I had on retreat when it went away or what did I do wrong? How do I get it back? Here we go again. So one of the efforts here is to accept the truth of impermanence, to accept the truth of unsatisfactoriness, to accept the truth of not some, that all of us is impersonal. So there's a reciprocal relationship between insight into these characteristics and our capacity to deepen into the skillful states. There's a kind of circularity or reciprocity between effort and wisdom. The more clearly we see the truth of change and impermanence of instability we recognize that much as we might like to we can't make these states last forever. When we understand the truth of impermanence it connects us also to unsatisfactoriness more deeply. Even these sublime states don't last and can't give us ultimate satisfaction because they'll disappear. When we more deeply recognize the understanding of amata of not self we understand this is unfolding into impersonal causes and conditions and the best thing I can do is get out of the way instead of trying to force the whole process. So the more we understand these three characteristics the more supported we are to experience the mental nourishment that comes from the wise effort. So if you have an experience for yourself I hope what I'm saying here is a relief. You don't have to push and force and strain and strive to make anything happen. You can actually let go of monitoring and micromanaging and settle back into knowing this dharma is working in you at times in spite of you. And there are many sutras, discourses that describe this kind of natural momentum. It's natural, it's organic. So close, perfect timing with the rain out there. This is called, the Vasasutra is called rain. And it says practitioners, suppose it rains heavily on a mountaintop and the water flows down hill to fill the hollows and the cretises and the creeks and that fills up the pools which fill up the lakes. The lakes fill up the streams, the streams fill up the rivers and as the rivers become full they fill up the ocean. These things flow onwards and after crossing to the far shore they lead to the ending of all afflictive states which ultimately is nirvana, full of awakening. So may all of our skillful efforts here generate that natural realization of ever deepening freedom of heart and mind. And thank you for listening.