Awakening the Buddha Within _ Eight Steps to Enlightenment - Lama Surya Das [124]
All of these people have made right-on efforts at self-understanding and inner development. Doug, Maggie, and Jane have different lives, different interests, different paths. What they share is some understanding of what it means to make heroic efforts to stay on the spiritual path, even when it’s inconvenient or uncomfortable. Certainly there are days when Doug might like to call up his old drinking buddy Charlie to hang out and have a couple of beers; he doesn’t do it because he has learned enough about himself to not want to backslide. There are rainy mornings when Maggie would rather skip her meditation practice and sleep late or watch the news, but meditation and yoga are helping Maggie make sense of her life, and she doesn’t want to lose touch with that. Many evenings Jane would rather drive to the shopping mall than head for the shelter to help a woman deal with her rebellious teenage daughter, but Jane wants to keep reaching out rather than shutting down. These people continue to make the effort needed to walk away from the old patterns of the past and toward new possibilities in the future. This requires commitment, consistency, patience, courage, determination, and enthusiasm. This is Right Effort.
EFFORT AND MEDITATION
We can develop an awareness of ourselves and the world in an infinite variety of ways. All of them take effort. Who can deny that it takes courage to examine our thoughts and behavior? It’s not easy to admit when we act from pride, jealousy, or ill will instead of honoring our Buddha-nature. Who has the courage and the spiritual zeal to face all the facts about ourselves?
There are numerous ways of making spiritual effort and developing a more soulful life. What Buddhism offers seekers are the tried and true techniques of meditation, passed down by centuries of experienced practitioners and illumined masters who understood how our inner lives determine our life experiences. Meditation has been used by millions of people over thousands of years to transcend human limitations, gain self-realization, and experience the divine. In practical terms, this means developing intellectually and emotionally to the point where we are balanced and in harmony with ourselves, capable of grappling with life’s deepest issues.
In Buddhist practice, the effort to transform and awaken is connected to meditation, which often begins with watching the breath. This frequently confuses people. What, they want to know, does inner growth and change have to do with breathing? What does the mind have to do with breath? What does watching the breath have to do with spiritual transformation?
We start with breathing because it is a basic physical process that we all share. Etymologically, the roots of the word breath and spirit are the same. Breathing is our common connection to life itself. This is fundamental and tangible. We can all experience this. Watching the breath is the most basic centering and grounding exercise, one that we can practice no matter where we are. Inhale. Exhale. It’s calming. It’s quieting. It helps us to concentrate and to focus. Putting effort into observing the breath causes us to slow down, to become more reflective, more contemplative. Take a deep breath. Exhale. Relax. Release. Let go. Smile to yourself. At ease.
Meditation is essentially a way of life. That’s why it is so intrinsically connected to spiritual effort. It requires effort to cultivate awareness through attention training. The meditative way doesn