When You’re Discouraged

When I was at Ajaan Fuang’s attendant, there were times when he was sick and he made it very clear that I was not doing a very good job of looking after him. I got very frustrated, very discouraged. Sometimes I thought I’d just give up. But then I realized: If I gave up, who would there be to look after him? And why would I do a duty only when I thought that I was doing it very well? If I had some duties that had to be done, I’d have to do them as best I could, knowing that it might not be the best that somebody else could do. There might be people better, more capable. But I was the one there. So I lowered my pride and just stuck with it and did my best to learn.

That’s the attitude you’ve got to have when you’re trying to master a skill that you’re not automatically good at. There are two kinds of skills in the world: There are skills that, if you don’t master them, you can find someone else to do them for you. But then there are the skills that nobody else can do for you. You’ve got to do them as best you can. And whatever effort you put into doing them is effort well spent.

So when you’re feeling discouraged in the practice, remind yourself: This is something you’ve got to do. You’ve got to learn how to get your mind under control, otherwise you’re going to suffer a lot when aging comes, when illness comes, when death comes. People may give you advice, but how you manage your mind in the face of those things is something no one else can do for you.

So take a cheerful attitude toward a skill like this. You’re working on something you need to master. Every step in the right direction is a good step, is worthwhile.

You can read the texts about people easily getting into jhāna, or listening to one Dhamma talk and gaining awakening. And here you are, you’ve listened to many Dhamma talks, you’ve meditated many hours, but you don’t seem any nearer now than you were at the beginning. That’s partly a false perception, but also it’s a perception driven by pride. Meditation sometimes requires the humility that “There’s a lot here to learn and I’m not there yet.” So you nurture the desire to do what you can as best you can and find satisfaction in the little steps of progress you make. Not the kind of rock star, gold star, “You’re great whatever you do” attitude: It’s more like what Ajaan Maha Bua said about taking satisfaction in seeing just a little chip of the bark on the tree of defilement fall off. Give yourself pep talks, give yourself encouragement, but keep reminding yourself that this is something you’ve got to do. And you can’t let your pride get in the way. You can’t let your impatience get in the way.

Now, we do talk about having a sense of urgency in the practice, because you don’t know how much longer you have to do it in this lifetime. But remember all the many, many eons in which you’ve been developing your defilements, nurturing your defilements. It may take a while to turn that ship around. But it’s got to be turned around. You can’t wait until you’re good at it before you start doing it. You’ve got to do it when you’re not good at it.

Like the old principle of going down to the gym: You don’t wait until you’re big and strong and then go down to show everyone in the gym how strong you are. You’re going to take your weak little body amid all these other people who seem to have really big bodies, and you do what you can with it. And gradually, by using what you’ve got — what discernment you have, what concentration you have, what mindfulness you have — you get stronger.

This is another incident from my life as a meditator. Before my ordination, I was sitting meditating with Ajaan Fuang’s lay students in Bangkok. They all seemed to be having really great progress in their meditation, very fast progress in their meditation. Many of them had visions. I got the idea somehow that having visions was a necessary part of the meditation, yet I was nowhere near there. But then I began to realize, how does meditation grow? What do you start with? You don’t throw away the concentration you’ve got and look for something else. In other words, whatever mindfulness you have, whatever concentration you have, you don’t throw it away. You don’t treat it with disrespect. You protect what you’ve got. And protecting what little concentration you have, what little mindfulness you have, it grows.

After all, where does concentration happen? It happens right here, right where you’re aware of your nose, aware of your face, aware of your eyes, aware of your body. It doesn’t happen anywhere else. It’s just a matter of learning how to stay here and connect those moments of staying.

You’ll have your moments where you stay, and then you wander off, and then you come back and stay for a while, and then you wander off and come back. Well, see if you can connect two of those moments so that the staying power stays through for a while, through any temptation to move off. You don’t go with it. Learn how to be here. Right here. When the next thought heads off, see it as something heading out of right here, but you stay right here. If you can do that once, then you can learn to do it twice, and then more and more frequently, more and more continually.

So again, you take what you’ve got and you develop it. You don’t look down on it. You don’t say, “There must be something else that’s better,” and throw away what you’ve got. Work with what you’ve got, and don’t let your pride get in the way—the pride that wants to be good at something before you’ve even started, that doesn’t have to spend a lot of time mastering something.

Our education system is good at channeling us into areas where we’re talented. It’s not very good in teaching us how to get good at something we’re not naturally good at. But that’s a skill you can learn. In fact, that’s probably one of the most important things you can learn. After all, what do the four noble truths tell us? What you’re doing is wrong. Something in what you’re doing is wrong. You’ve got to learn how to stop that and do things more skillfully. What you’re doing is the craving and the clinging. Because you’re used to craving and clinging, the Buddha says, “Here’s something better to crave for, something else to cling to. Cling to the path.” You learn how to attack the old craving and clinging by developing qualities of virtue, concentration, discernment.

So we all come here in that category of “you’re doing something wrong,” but that can be fixed. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about, nothing to be ashamed about, the fact that you’re doing it wrong. Don’t let your pride get in the way, and bit by bit by bit, the progress will come. There will be regress, but then you learn how to learn from your regress. What knocked you off?

In the beginning, you don’t worry about what knocked you off. Just say, “I’ll just go back and start over from square one.” Don’t be embarrassed about square one. Some people read about “buddho, buddho, buddho” as an elementary meditation topic that you go beyond as you settle in with the breath. But sometimes you find that’s the only thing that can keep you with the breath, the only thing that keeps you anchored in the present moment.

So it’s nothing to be embarrassed about. Use what’s necessary. Use what you’ve got. Then you’ll find that you develop a whole range of skills here in how to train the mind, how to get it more under your control, so that it thinks the thoughts you want it to think and doesn’t think the thoughts you don’t want it to think. That’ll be a skill that’ll really hold you in good stead when aging comes and it’s very easy to think about how much you miss your youth; when illness comes and you miss your health; when death is coming, and all you can think about is, “I wish I could have used my life in a better way.” Those thoughts have got to be banished.

You think about, “Well, what can I do right now? At the very least, I can stay with my breath. I can stay with my awareness in the present moment.” There’s something to be developed there.

So this is a skill you’ve got to master. No one else can master it for you. No one else can do the work for you. And always keep in mind the fact that even if you can’t fully master it, whatever progress you make in the right direction is worth it. Something to feel good about.

As the Buddha said, when you see that you’ve done something right in the practice, take joy in that fact. You don’t rest satisfied with where you are, but take joy in the fact that you’re making progress. If you learn how to talk to yourself in an intelligent way like this, then you can get beyond your discouragement.