Right Effort
I was reading something by poet and writer Leora Fridman (You can read the original article by Leora Fridman here) which nudged me to focus my meditation practice on the Buddhist practice of Right Effort or Right Diligence. Right effort is number 6 of 8 practices which form The Eightfold Path. (The Eightfold Path practices are: right view, right resolve or intention, right speech, right conduct (ethical conduct), right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right samadhi or concentration.)
Psychologists tell us that people are biologically designed to feel happier when making an effort at something, when being busy. But most of us experience times when the end of our to-do list is nowhere in sight, we can't finish the laundry, our car needs a wash, and our hair is a mess. The day feels tense, we feel distracted and rushed. That kind of busy doesn't feel great. I read a meme somewhere a while ago, which I thought was very funny and illustrates those days it feels like the wheels are coming off:
The French gardener, botanist, and writer Gilles Clément, known for his design of public parks, writes: “All management generates an abandoned area” Clément suggests that by choosing one area to manage we automatically lose the rest.
He writes from an ecological perspective, referring to wild landscapes vs. urban or developed spaces, but can we extend his ideas to people? It brings up questions. Can we manage everything? How many things can we manage at once? In times when our lives feel unmanageable, what things should we abandon in order to manage? What would it be like not to manage? What would it be like to carefully choose what we can’t manage? How many parts of me can I manage, and what gets left out?
When we can’t manage everything of something, we often close our mind to it completely and turn away. Interestingly, at times when only a limited amount of management or control is possible (which is actually most of the time, if not always) there is a huge potential for insight, as well as potential for acceptance and forgiveness: Working with the belief that we can’t control or manage everything all the time, and that's ok.
Talking to a friend last week, she told me about her experience of being a new mum, and how frightening it was, trying to manage everything. Looking after a new baby, which is so unfamiliar and daunting, exhausting and overwhelming. And at the same time trying to keep the house tidy, juggling her own needs and trying to get some sleep somewhere in between all that. She didn’t know how to manage it all and still be a good mum. She felt like something, somewhere had to give. The advice she got from her mother-in-law was:" “All you have to be is be enough of a mother.” I think that’s so lovely and generous. 'You just have to be enough.'
In Buddhism, we are told that the right effort creates the right response or the right energy. In meditation, right effort means the right ease. Just enough effort, but not too much. It also means the right diligence. Sometimes we think meditation should require no effort at all, or perhaps it takes too much effort altogether.
Sometimes it feels like it's all uphill.
Perhaps we are mistakenly working with the assumption that meditation means to dominate or subdue our mind, and if we think we can’t control or manage our mind within minutes, we turn away from it.
But right effort means we should continue to put in some effort and continue to try, even if we can’t manage it all at once. We need to balance our effort - or lack of effort - so we achieve “rest” in meditation. To “rest in awareness.” It is sometimes called effortless effort.
When that easy awareness is established, mindfulness is happening all by itself—what we could call effortless effort—then we can simply rest in the continuity of it.
When we drop the tension around our efforts, and approach our efforts with a beginners mind, we automatically experience a kind of ease, a softening. By being able to drop tension from our efforts while still remaining diligent and concentrated, we have achieved something that could be described as having the 'right energy'. With the right effort and the right energy which arises from that, you may find that a to-do list is not something we need to wade our way through with gritted teeth in order that we can continue with our life.
This is our life. Right now, we are in it. Possibly we can’t control or manage everything all the time, or we might even choose to abandon something and put no effort into it right now. And I think that's ok.
