Don’t Make It Worse
My Dharma mentor, Diana Gould, has been gone to a month-long retreat in Washington state. I’m honored to fill in her regular Thursday night sitting group to lead the beloved Sangha in meditation and give a talk. Because I know most of the people who attend this group, I feel quite at ease to do this feeling loved and supported.
In this group, we’re travelers on the journey of life sharing this particular path. Many attendants are just as practiced in meditation as I am. So rather than “give a talk,” I like to present a topic of discussion and “engage in a conversation.” And the topic I brought for last week and this week was one I sat with in my last retreat in December, “Wise Effort” beautifully taught by teachers I admire so much, Gil Fronsdal and Andrea Fella.
In Buddhist text, the wise effort is described with rather esoteric terms such as “wholesome and unwholesome mind states” in four layers. But Gil put it quite simply in secular terms by telling us the whole Buddhist teaching can be summarized in this one sentence, “Don’t make it worse.”
Do you notice our mind tends to get us to a place that causes stress? My mind does for sure. I keep coming up with things to worry, get mad, or depressed about, often seemingly out of nowhere. The idea of wise effort is to learn how to rein our mind from going wild with our negative thoughts, and allow it to find a way to be kinder to ourselves. When I’m triggered by something, someone’s words or actions, and experience some sort of a reactive feelings and thoughts, I can easily go down the rabbit hole into fear, anger, frustration, etc., etc., and God forbid can take some actions including speech that I may later regret.
“Don’t make it worse” sounds so simple, yet it requires some mindfulness. And as mindfulness means to cultivate our understanding of why we, human beings, experience suffering because ultimately all of us don’t want to suffer. Ultimately, we all want to love and care about ourselves and others. By being able to choose a thought or action that would not make the current situation worse, we get closer to the freedom of our suffering.
We’ll be talking about the second half of the wise effort: “Make it better” part Thursday evening. You can join me there, or join me on Friday at our lunch time sitting group.
#YouCanSitWithUs