Take Responsibility

When we practice the Dhamma, we’re taking responsibility for our happiness. In other words, we’re going to be the agents to do it, and we’re also going to be very careful about what we do so that the consequences are good. That’s what it means to be responsible.

When I was up in Canada this time, a number of people who came to the retreat were very afraid to say that they wanted to practice to gain results, and they were afraid to say that they were actually doing the practice—that there was “somebody” there doing the practice. Now, where they got these ideas, I have a pretty good idea, but it has nothing to do with the Buddha. As he said, it’s up to you to practice, and you want to gain good results. You want to have long-term welfare and happiness. That’s the beginning of wisdom.

We’re not here just to see things as they are. We’re here to see things as we can make them be: What can we do to bring about true happiness, happiness that lasts? That’s a sign of an adult, that you take responsibility for your actions and that you hope that the results will be good. If they’re not good, you’ll change.

This is how you grow up. You admit your mistakes, when you’ve made mistakes, so that you can learn from them. If you hide your mistakes from yourself or from other people, after a while you can’t learn from them, because you try not to remember them. But it’s by remembering them that you learn.

So make up your mind that when you make a mistake, you don’t want to repeat it, and you try to figure out other ways of acting. Someone up there asked me if they should make a journal of their meditation. And I said, “Write down all the mistakes you make.”

It’s all too often that when we write a journal we try to look good in the journal, and we start creating things in our meditation just for the sake of the journal. So to counteract that tendency, but also to be a good reminder, write down your mistakes.

You focused on the breath this way, and the results were not good. Okay, write that down. You allowed your mind to wander. You lost interest in the breath. You lost interest in your meditation. Okay, write that down. After a while you begin to see patterns and then you can learn from the patterns.

So you want to identify with the sense of who you are in the practice. Be a person who wants to learn from mistakes and is always willing to learn from mistakes. That’s how you grow. That’s how the practice becomes a skill.