Look After Yourself with Ease

There’s a phrase included in the chant on goodwill. When you have goodwill for yourself, one of the things you say is, “May I look after myself with ease.” When you have goodwill for others, “May they look after themselves with ease.” This is not a recommendation that you pamper yourself. It’s not the kind of wisdom you find in pieces of chocolate that say, “Have another piece of chocolate, you deserve it.” It’s more in line with the principle of being unburdensome.

You want to be able to provide for your happiness and not burden other people. This requires developing skills. This is one of the reasons why we meditate. Sitting here, putting up with pain sometimes, gets you used to putting up with pain. Because pain will come, and if your way of dealing with pain was to ask for help from other people, without developing your own skills for how to deal with pain internally, you’re placing a burden on them.

All the skills of the path—generosity, virtue, meditation—are there for you to learn how to become more independent in looking after yourself, more capable of looking after yourself even in difficulties, so that you don’t have to be a burden on others. And your happiness doesn’t have to depend on conditions being just so.

There’s a passage in the Canon where the Buddha is in discussion with the Jains. The Jains are saying that happiness has to be found through suffering. Otherwise, people like King Bimbisāra would be happier than the Jains, or even the Buddha himself.

The Buddha says that was a rash statement. “Who do you think is happier, King Bimbisāra or myself?” At first they say, “Well, the Buddha lives in a very frugal lifestyle, King Bimbisāra has more wealth, of course he’s happier, he has more pleasure.” The Buddha says, “Can King Bimbisāra sit for an entire week without moving and experience pleasure?” “Well, no.”

Yet the Buddha was able to do that. And his ability to do that was based on skills he developed.

So that’s the first attitude you should have in thinking about looking after yourself with ease: You have to develop the necessary skills. Try to make them all-around, because dangers can come from any place, any direction.

To begin with, you’ve got dangers in your body. As Ajaan Funn said, “The eye is a disease, the ear is a disease, the nose is a disease.” The passage he’s quoting is usually translated as, “There are diseases of the eye, diseases of the ear, of the nose.” But as he points out, the fact that you’ve got an ear and an eye means the potential for disease is already there. Are you prepared? The potential for pain in the body is already there—are you prepared?

You can meditate.

Of course this principle applies outside as well: There are all kinds of skills you need to look after yourself. Ajaan Lee pointed out in his autobiography that as a young boy, he decided to learn not only the skills of men’s work, but also the skills of women’s work: how to sew, how to weave, how to cook, so that if he ever had to depend on himself, he’d have the skills.

He was planning at that point to get married, but you never know with marriage: Divorce can happen, the other person can die. We don’t plan for disaster. But if you have skills, you can be ready for disaster. You have to think about the potential for disaster, and how would you handle it, and master whatever skills you need.

I’ve been reading about a bushman in Alaska who saved up, saved up, saved up a lot of money doing all kinds of odd jobs here and there, entering dog sled races, winning them. Finally had a nest egg. He was tired of trapping, trapping, trapping every year. He wanted to have a more solid lifestyle where he could have a trading post. So he was eventually able to build his trading post. And then in the course of a few hours, it burned to the ground.

That devastated him. He went off for a while just to be alone, left his children with someone else. His wife had abandoned him at that point. Then he realized that the qualities he had developed in his mind, the skills he had developed in his mind in his daily life, could see him through, and he could do it again. So he did.

Looking after yourself is a combination of skills, but also attitudes. The Buddha talks about the principles of finding happiness in the present life. The first is being industrious, having the attitude that if you’re going to get anywhere in life, you have to put forth an effort. We hear so much about being content, content. But the Buddha says, find a right livelihood and try to provide yourself with the relative safety that comes from having wealth, that comes from having developed your ability to provide for yourself, provide for others, because otherwise, you’re going to be a burden.

Ajaan Suwat like to talk about this, the fact that contentment doesn’t mean just being okay with whatever you have. If you’re a layperson, you try to develop what wealth you can in the right way, because you need to prepare for the future. If you’re a monk, you learn to develop the skills that can take what you have and make it more comfortable. Like that bushwoman in Alaska who John McPhee talks about, who told him that “We’re not here to rough it, we’re here to smooth it.” Given the circumstances, whatever makes things smoother or easier, you develop those skills.

So being industrious is the first quality of looking after yourself with ease.

The second quality is learning how to maintain what you’ve got, look after what you’ve got. One time I was washing something that could have broken and it almost slipped from my grasp. I was able to catch it in time. And Ajaan Fuang asked me, “What would you have done if it had broken?”

I said, “Well, we’d get a new one.” He gave me a real scolding for that. He said, “If something can break, you hold on to it tight. Take care of what you’ve got.” This is one of the reasons why, in the Forest tradition, there’s such an emphasis on being clean, sweeping up around the monastery, keeping things clean and neat—because when things are in their place, they don’t bang against each other, they don’t get dropped.

Now, the day may come when they have to be broken, but don’t let it be because of your carelessness. Look after your things. That way, you can get the most out of them without being a burden to anybody. xx

The third quality is living in line with your means. Not being a spendthrift, but at the same time, not being too miserly.

That principle is sometimes surprising to people. But the Buddha said, if you have some wealth, learn how to enjoy it, because if you can’t enjoy your wealth, within reason, you get resentful of other people enjoying their wealth. It’s hard to develop an attitude of empathetic joy. And finally, the fourth quality is having good friends, admirable friends, people who will advise you that there’s more than just happiness in this lifetime, there’s happiness in future lifetimes. And again, how are you going to look after yourself with ease when you’re dying?

It’s through developing good qualities of mind: conviction, virtue, generosity, discernment. These are the inner qualities that make you more independent, more self-reliant. So that’s what it means to look after yourself with ease: learn the skills you need to prepare for dangers in this lifetime, and the dangers that come at death. So even though you’re suffering hardships, your mind doesn’t have to suffer. You’re able to use your ingenuity to make the best out of a bad situation.

So you’re not being self-indulgent, you’re learning how to be unburdensome, more self-reliant. So think about the skills you need to develop to align yourself and not be a burden to others, knowing that the biggest burden you can have, or biggest burden you can place on other people, is as you’re sick and mentally you can’t take it.

All those years with Ajaan Fuang when he was sick, his mind never wavered, his mind was always very strong. So that was something I never had to worry about. I had to come home at one point, though, after Ajaan Fuang had died, my father was sick. He was a much bigger man, much stronger physically, but this was his first time in his life he’d ever been seriously ill. His mind state was really bad, very apologetic for being a burden on others. But I had to tell him, “Look, this is natural, it’s part of being a human being, the body is a burden.” “But the mind doesn’t have to be a burden.” In that case, I was able to talk to him, which made the whole experience a lot less burdensome for me.

But you see cases where people are so sick, so much in pain, that they’re delirious, you can’t talk to them, nothing gets through, and you can see how much they’re suffering. And it’s a big weight on the people around them, all that suffering, and they can’t do anything about it. So one way of being unburdensome to others, of course, is training your mind so it can deal with pain, so it can deal with the facts of aging, illness, and death, and not be knocked around by them.

So looking after yourself with ease is not a matter of being self-indulgent. It’s a matter of being unburdensome, looking ahead, seeing potential dangers, and preparing for them as much as you can, and realizing that your best source of strength, whatever happens in the world, is a trained mind. So that’s what that phrase means, “May I look after myself with ease.” may I train my mind, so that I’m not a burden on others.

When you wish the same for others, you’re wishing for their happiness, too. May they find an independent source of goodness inside, train their minds, so that they’re not burdensome either. And remember, there’s a joy in not being a burden to others. This is why this phrase is part of goodwill: goodwill for yourself, goodwill for other people.

May you find joy in being unburdensome, and may they find joy in being unburdensome as well.