99% Meditators Fail This：The Fatal Error In Right Effort (The Buddha)

99% meditators fail this, the fatal error in right effort, the Buddha. Often, you hear that there are two ways of approaching meditation. One is to put in lots of neurotic, miserable effort. You stress and strain with your heart firmly set on the time someday, in the far distant future, when you'll finally become awakened. The other approach is to realize that the Dharma is all around you in the present moment. You just relax into the present moment and there you are. Now, if those were the two only alternatives, the second would obviously be the only reasonable approach. But there are other alternatives as well. It's possible to relax into the present It's possible to enjoy putting effort into the practice, to thrive on challenges, to realize that there's a mature way to relate to the goal of awakening and actually get there. You realize that yes, the experience of awakening is not here yet, it's someplace in the future. But to get there, you have to focus on here. And focusing on here is not just a matter of relaxing, there's work to be done. Ajaan Lee has a good analogy. He says the practice is like trying to get fresh water out of salt water. The fresh water is already there in the salt water. But just allowing the salt water to sit and relax for a long while is not going to get the salt to separate out. You have to distill it. The fire of your distillery is analogous to the effort that goes into the practice. If you don't put in the effort, you're never going to get fresh water out of the salt water. But the trick is learning how to sustain effort so that you don't give up when the going gets tough. The best way to make it all the way there is to figure out how to enjoy the work here. In other words, the effort in the meditation doesn't always have to be miserable or neurotic, doesn't always have to be a matter of stressing and straining. Sometimes it will require strong effort, sometimes very subtle effort. Right effort doesn't mean middling effort all the time. You know, what makes the effort right is that it's skillful, appropriate for right here, right now. And you're up for the challenge. In the Buddha's description of right effort, you're told to generate desire. And one of the best ways of generating desire is to learn how to enjoy the effort. In other words, to take joy in abandoning unskillful qualities and to take joy in developing skillful ones. This joy is one of the traditions of the noble ones, and it actually gets results. The best way to develop this sort of joy is to regard the practice as a skill that challenges your ingenuity. One of the qualities I've noticed is common among all the forest Dajans, in spite of all their different personalities, is that they all like to use their ingenuity to figure things out. They're not the type of people who simply do as they're told and hope that simply by doing as they're told, awakening is going to come out the other end of the process. Like luncheon meat out of a factory. They each found aspects of the path that were like riddles that captured their imagination. These riddles didn't involve just an intellectual analysis, but more the type of analysis where you figure out a problem. When they found a problem of this sort, they like to find the most effective way of figuring it out. So that's a quality you want to bring to the meditation. Notice what you're doing with the breath and what things seem to be problematic. The problem might be a physical pain or an emotional one. Try to figure out how the breath can help. Notice the mechanics of how you breathe. When you breathe in, where in the body does the in-breath energy, the swelling in the abdomen, the swelling of the chest, start? And when this in-breath impulse ripples through the body, does it spread smoothly or are there places where it's caught up, where it's blocked, where it's tensed? Can you unravel the blockages? That's one thing you might want to work at if you find this an interesting problem. See what you can do. If this problem doesn't capture your imagination, if it doesn't seem to be a problem, notice what is a problem for you right here, right now. In other words, learn how to pose questions about the breath that relate to issues that really concern you. Learn how to go about figuring out the answers and judging when you've found an answer that really works. Another common tendency in the forest tradition is not to explain everything beforehand. The ajans tend to give each meditator the opportunity to figure things out. One reason for this is that the things you've learned by figuring them out stick with you much longer than the things you're simply told. The other reason is that many of our internal problems are extremely internal, the way mental events relate to physical events within you, and only you know how to express them to yourself. Your internal dialogue uses words, images, and language in an idiosyncratic way that only you can know. So, you have to learn how to phrase idiosyncratic questions and then come up with answers appropriate for your case. If you can learn to enjoy this process, you're more than halfway there. If you see the effort simply as a chore, something you've got to get through, you're going to miss an awful lot. You'll end up at the point where you tell yourself that this isn't working at all. You'll want to go back to what people in the 19th century called the gospel of relaxation. The idea that relaxation, simply accepting things as they are, is going to cure all your ills. This has been with us for a long time in America. The idea that if only we could learn how to relax, everything would be okay. We've been at this for more than a hundred years, and even though it still hasn't worked out, the idea hasn't lost its appeal. And it's certainly not the Buddha's take on the problem. In his analogy, if you haven't gotten results from making an effort, you've simply been engaging in wrong effort. The difference between right effort and wrong effort is not so much the amount of effort as much as where you focus your effort and what you actually do. If you want to get milk out of a cow, for example, you learn how to pull at the udder. That's right effort. Wrong effort is trying to get milk out of a cow by twisting her horn. Now, if you've been putting a lot of effort into twisting her horn, but not getting any milk, it might be a good idea to relax. But relaxing is not the whole solution. It's just the first step. After all, you still haven't gotten any milk. The next step in actually getting the milk is to ask, what other parts of the cow can I squeeze? And you look around. You try squeezing her leg. That doesn't work. You try pulling her tail. She kicks you. And finally, you pull her udder. That's when you get milk. In other words, relaxation is the first part of the solution. If you've been putting effort into the wrong area, if you've been engaging in wrong effort, but if you're engaged in right effort in the right area, just keep at it. As your effort gets more consistent, you start getting results. The more you get results, the more you find joy in the effort. And the more you find joy, the more you're energized to try to figure things out at even subtler levels. So, to do well at the meditation, it's a matter 1. Of being willing to put in the effort. And 2. Of learning how to enjoy the effort. Learning how to enjoy puzzling things out. The Buddha's path is not the sort where you simply do as you're told. Noting. Noting. Noting. Or scanning. Scanning. Scanning. Without thinking. Those approaches are simply mindfulness exercises, but people tend to do them mindlessly, i.e. without asking any questions. Actual insight comes not by pummeling the mind with a technique, but from posing the right questions in the mind. What are these assumptions I'm carrying around here? How could I do this more efficiently? What am I doing that I'm not noticing? How can I learn how to notice it? How can I catch the mind as it's about to let go of its mindfulness? This last point may sound impossible, but it's not. When you learn how to pose questions in the mind like this, and you enjoy trying to find the answers, it's going to bring progress along the path. And it's perfectly alright to want to make progress along the path. After all, that's how the Buddha taught. A lot of people like to second guess the Buddha, saying he couldn't really mean what he said using conditioned things to reach the unconditioned. There must be some trick to all this. They try to figure it all out beforehand, to clone an awakened view without having to go through the work of the path. That's the wrong way of trying to figure things out. The right way is to take the Buddha at his word and then, when you're doing as he tells you to, to try to figure out why he has you do things this particular way. That's one of the features of the forest tradition. They took the Buddha at his word, but in an inquisitive way. He said to follow the Vinaya, they follow the Vinaya. He said to develop right concentration, which means jhana. Okay, they do that. Then they look at what they're doing to see how it helps in bringing suffering to an end. What this means in practice is that you learn how to question your efforts in terms of the four noble truths, until you arrive at something that lies beyond effort, beyond the path. But you can't get to the beyond unless you go through the effort of the path. In fact, it's in focusing on the doing of the path that you actually come across the beyond. So take the Buddha at his word. There is right effort. When the Buddha singled out three of the most important factors of the path in helping right concentration, they were right view, right effort, and right mindfulness. These are the most important helpmates or requisites for right concentration. These are the factors you want to focus on while you're meditating. Right view, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. They all involve doing things, developing things, watching the results, and then when you see something unskillful happening, letting it go. If you learn how to take joy in the developing and joy in the letting go, you're on the noble path. And it's not a bad place to be. It's better than being stuck in a place where you're trying to clone awakening and end up with nothing but wrong view, wrong mindfulness, and wrong all the way down the line. No milk in your pail and an irritated cow besides. So take the Buddha at his word and be up for the challenge because it can be a lot of fun. The joy of effort. When explaining meditation, the Buddha often drew analogies with the skills of artists, carpenters, musicians, archers, and cooks. Finding the right level of effort, he said, is like a musician's tuning of a lute. Reading the mind's needs in the moment, to be gladdened, steadied, or inspired, is like a palace cook's ability to read and please the tastes of a prince. Collectively, these analogies make an important point. Meditation is a skill and mastering it should be enjoyable in the same way that mastering any other rewarding skill can be. The Buddha said as much to his son, Rahula, When you see that you've acted, spoken, or thought in a skillful way, conducive to happiness while causing no harm to yourself or others, take joy in that fact and keep on training. Of course, saying that meditation should be enjoyable doesn't mean that it will always be easy or pleasant. Every meditator knows it requires serious discipline to sit with long, unpleasant stretches and to untangle all the mind's difficult issues. But if you can approach difficulties with the enthusiasm that an artist approaches challenges in her work, the discipline becomes enjoyable. Problems are solved through your own ingenuity, and the mind is energized for even greater challenges. This joyful attitude is a useful antidote to the more pessimistic attitudes that people often bring to meditation, which tend to fall into two extremes. On the one hand, there's the belief that meditation is a series of dull and dreary exercises allowing no room for imagination and inquiry. Simply grit your teeth, and at the end of the long haul, your mind will be processed into an awakened state. On the other hand, there's the belief that effort is counterproductive to happiness, so meditation should involve no exertion at all. Simply accept things as they are. It's foolish to demand that they get any better and relax into the moment, while it's true that both repetition and relaxation can bring results in meditation. When either is pursued to the exclusion of the other, it leads to a dead end. If, however, you can integrate them both into the larger skill of learning how to apply whatever level of effort the practice requires at any given moment, they can take you far. This larger skill requires strong powers of mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. But if you stick with it, it can lead you all the way to the Buddha's ultimate aim in teaching meditation, Nibbana, a happiness totally unconditioned, free from the constraints of space and time. That's an inspiring aim, but it requires work, and the key to maintaining your inspiration in the day-to-day work of meditation practice is to approach it as play. A happy opportunity to master practical skills, to raise questions, experiment, and explore. This is precisely how the Buddha himself taught meditation. Instead of formulating a cut-and-dried method, he first trained his students in the personal qualities, such as honesty and patience, needed to make trustworthy observations. Only then did he teach meditation techniques, and even then he didn't spell everything out. He raised questions and suggested areas for exploration in hopes that his questions would capture his students' imagination so they'd develop discernment and gain insights on their own. We can see this in the way the Buddha taught Rahula how to meditate. He started with the issue of patience. Meditate, he said, so that your mind is like the earth. Disgusting things get thrown on the earth, but the earth isn't horrified by them. When you make your mind like the earth, neither agreeable nor disagreeable sensory impressions will take charge of it. Now, the Buddha wasn't telling Rahula to become a passive clod of dirt. He was teaching Rahula to be grounded, to develop his powers of endurance, so that he'd be able to observe both pleasant and painful events in his body and mind without becoming engrossed in the pleasure or blown away by the pain. This is what patience is for. It helps you sit with things until you understand them well enough to respond to them skillfully. To develop honesty in meditation, the Buddha taught Rahula a further exercise. Look at the inconstancy of events in body and mind, he said, so that you don't develop a sense of I am around them. Here the Buddha was building on a lesson that he had taught Rahula when the latter was seven years old. Learn to look at your actions, he had said, before you do them, while you're doing them, and after they're done. If you see that you've acted unskillfully and caused harm, resolve not to repeat the mistake. Then talk it over with someone you respect. In these lessons, the Buddha was training Rahula to be honest with himself and with others. And the key to this honesty is to treat your actions as experiments. Then, if you see the results aren't good, you're free to change your ways. This attitude is essential for developing honesty in your meditation as well. If you regard everything, good or bad, that arises in the meditation as a sign of the sort of person you are, it will be hard to observe anything honestly at all. If an unskillful intention arises, you're likely either to come down on yourself as a miserable meditator or to smother the intention under a cloak of denial. If a skillful intention arises, you're likely to become proud and complacent, treating it as a sign of your innate good nature. As a result, you never get to see if these intentions are actually as skillful as they seemed at first glance. To avoid these pitfalls, you can learn to see events simply as events and not as signs of the innate buddhaness or badness of who you are. Then you can observe these events honestly to see where they come from and where they lead. Honesty, together with patience, puts you in a better position to use the techniques of meditation to explore your own mind. The primary technique the Buddha taught Rahula was breath meditation. The Buddha recommended 16 steps in dealing with the breath. The first two involve straightforward instructions. The rest raise questions to be explored. In this way, the breath becomes a vehicle for exercising your ingenuity in solving the problems of the mind and exercising your sensitivity in gauging the results. To begin, simply notice when the breath is long and when it's short. In the remaining steps, though, you train yourself. In other words, you have to figure out for yourself how to do what the Buddha recommends. The first two trainings are to breathe in and out, sensitive to the entire body, then to calm the effect that the breath has on the body. How do you do that? You experiment. What rhythm of breathing, what way of conceiving the breath, calms its effect on the body? Try thinking of the breath not as the air coming in and out of the lungs, but as the energy flow throughout the body that draws the air in and out. Where do you feel that energy flow? Think of it as flowing in and out the back of your neck, in your feet and hands, along the nerves and blood vessels, in your bones. Think of it coming in and out every pore of your skin. Where is it blocked? How do you dissolve the blockages? By breathing through them, around them, straight into them. See what works. As you play around with the breath in this way, you'll make some mistakes. I've sometimes given myself headaches by forcing the breath too much. But with the right attitude, the mistakes become lessons in learning how the impact of your perceptions shapes the way you breathe. You'll also catch yourself getting impatient or frustrated. But then you'll see that when you breathe through these emotions, they go away. You're beginning to see the impact of the breath on the mind. The next step is to breathe in and out with a sense of refreshing fullness and a sense of ease. Here too, you'll need to experiment both with the way you breathe and with the way you conceive of the breath. Notice how these feelings and conceptions have an impact on the mind, and how you can calm that impact so that the mind feels most at ease. Then, when the breath is calm and you've been refreshed by feelings of ease and stillness, you're ready to look at the mind itself. You don't leave the breath though. You adjust your attention slightly so that you're watching the mind as it stays with the breath. Here the Buddha recommends three areas for experimentation. Notice how to gladden the mind when it needs gladdening, how to steady it when it needs steadying, and how to release it from its attachments and burdens when it's ready for release. Sometimes the gladdening and steadying will require bringing in other topics for contemplation. For instance, to gladden the mind, you can develop an attitude of infinite goodwill or recollect the times in the past when you've been virtuous or generous. To steady the mind when it's been knocked over by lust, you can contemplate the unattractive side of the human body. To re-establish your focus when you're drowsy or complacent. Contemplation of death, realizing that death could come at any time and you need to prepare your mind if you're going to face it with any finesse, can transfix you. At other times, you can gladden or steady the mind simply by the way you focus on the breath itself. For instance, breathing down into your hands and feet can really anchor the mind when its concentration has become shaky. When one spot in the body isn't enough to hold your interest, try focusing on the breath in two spots at once. The important point is that you've now put yourself in a position where you can experiment with the mind and read the results of your experiments with greater and greater accuracy. You can try exploring these skills off the cushion as well. How do you gladden the mind when you're sick? How do you steady the mind when dealing with a difficult person? As for releasing the mind from its burdens, you prepare for the ultimate freedom of Nibbana first by releasing the mind from any awkwardness in its concentration. Once the mind has settled down, check to see if there are any ways you can refine the stillness. For instance, in the beginning stages of concentration, you need to keep directing your thoughts to the breath, evaluating and adjusting it to make it more agreeable. But eventually, the mind grows so still that evaluating the breath is no longer necessary. So, you figure out how to make the mind one with the breath and in that way, you release the mind into a more intense and refreshing state of ease. As you expand your skills in this way, the intentions that you've been using to shape your experience of body and mind become more and more transparent. At this point, the Buddha suggests revisiting the theme of inconstancy, learning to look for it in the effects of every intention. You see that even the best states produced by skillful intentions, the most solid and refined states of concentration, waver and change. Realizing this induces a sense of disenchantment with and dispassion for all intentions. You see that the only way to get beyond this changeability is to allow all intentions to cease. You watch as everything is relinquished including the path. What's left is unconditioned, the deathless. Your desire to explore the breath has taken you beyond desiring, beyond the breath, all the way to Nibbana. But the path doesn't save all its pleasures for the end. It takes the daunting prospect of reaching full awakening and breaks it down into manageable interim goals. A series of intriguing challenges that as you meet them, allow you to see progress in your practice. This in and of itself makes the practice interesting and a source of joy. At the same time, you're not engaged in busy work. You're developing a sensitivity to cause and effect that helps make body and mind transparent. Only when they're fully transparent can you let them go. In experiencing the full body of the breath in meditation, you're sensitizing yourself to the area of your awareness where the deathless, when you're acute enough to see it, will appear. So even though the path requires effort, it's an effort that keeps opening up new possibilities for happiness and well-being in the present moment. And even though the steps of breath meditation eventually lead to a sense of disenchantment and dispassion, they don't do so in a joyless way. The Buddha never asked anyone to adopt a world-negating or world-affirming, for that matter, frame of mind. Instead, he asks for a world-exploring attitude in which you use the inner world of full body breathing as a laboratory for exploring the harmless and clear-minded pleasures the world as a whole can provide. You learn skills to calm the body, to develop feelings of refreshment, fullness, and ease. You learn how to calm the mind, to steady it, gladden it, and release it from its burdens. Only when you run up against the limits of these skills are you ready to drop them, to explore what greater potential for happiness there may be. In this way, disenchantment develops not from a narrow or pessimistic attitude, but from an attitude of hope that there must be something better. This is like the disenchantment a child senses when he has mastered a simple game and feels ready for something more challenging. It's the attitude of a person who has matured, and as we all know, you don't mature by shrinking from the world, watching it passively, or demanding that it entertain you. You mature by exploring it, by expanding your range of usable skills through play.