Enduring Strength

Close your eyes and take a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths. And notice where you feel the breathing in the body. Focus your attention there. Then watch it all the way through the in-breath, all the way through out-. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can change. Try to find a rhythm of breathing that feels good for the body right now. It might be shorter—or in short, out long. In long, out short. Fast, slow. Heavy, light. See what kind of breathing feels good now.

You need to strengthen the mind. And a good way to strengthen the mind is to find a good place for it to stay inside. One of our needs in life is endurance. We have to put up with a lot of things in life. like physical pain or the harsh words of other people. Then there’s laziness, weakness. We need mental strength to compensate for these things. And this is a good place to do it, right here, right now.

Get the mind with a sense of well-being right here, when it gathers its forces right here—when it’s not scattered around. Then it can be strong and it can see where its strong points are, so that when something comes along that requires a lot of endurance, you’re not focusing on how difficult that particular problem is. You focus, instead, on where your strong points are. You draw on your strengths. That makes endurance a lot easier.

What are some good strengths to have? Conviction—that what you do will serve you well now and on into the future. All too often, people say, “It doesn’t make any difference what I do, so why put forth an effort?” That’s weakness right there. You need to strengthen yourself.

Then there’s persistence. If you notice that your mind is saying things to itself that make it hard to endure, learn to speak in other ways. Let go of those unskillful habits and develop some skillful habits in their place. When the mind says, “I can’t stand this any longer,” ask it, “Okay, is it going to kill you?” Usually, no.

The part that’s really hard to stand is the mind’s complaints to itself, more than anything else. So just drop those complaints and you’ll find that life is a lot easier and endurance is a lot more possible. You develop mindfulness. You develop concentration. You develop discernment to see exactly what it is that’s hard to bear.

After all, as you go through life, things are going to get more difficult than they are right now. There’s going to be aging, illness, and ultimately death. If you have trouble keeping your mind under control under relatively comfortable circumstances like this, what are you going to do when things get hard? You need to develop strength right now, the ability to see where the suffering is coming from and what you can do to stop it.

That all comes from developing these inner strengths: conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, discernment. When you have those strengths, then everything’s easy to endure. Easy things don’t make an impression at all. They don’t weigh you down at all. That way, instead of complaining about where the things are difficult, you focus on where things are good—where things inside have strengths that can help bear with things coming at you that otherwise would be hard to bear.

Like with harsh words from other people: Just tell yourself, this is the nature of human speech. You go all over the world and people will be saying harsh things; people will be saying nasty things to one another. What this person is saying to you right now is not all that much out of the ordinary. So there’s no reason to get upset.

Just remind yourself: You were the one who wanted to be born in the human realm to begin with, and this is what the human realm contains. If you want better than this, you’ve got to improve the quality of your mind. So instead of blaming the other person, you look for where you can strengthen yourself inside. That solves a lot of problems right there.