Eight Steps to an Authentic Life

STEP 6:  EFFORT - Loving the Journey

Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served. But all other pleasures and possessions pale into nothingness before service which is rendered in a spirit of joy.  - Mahatma Gandhi

Things won are done, joy's soul lies in the doing.  - William Shakespeare

Living with awareness of our thoughts, speech, and actions, which are informed by our overall view and intention, requires energy, or effort.  ‘Right Effort’ is the next quality of our 8-step path.

‘Effort’ is the fuel in our lives, the underlying energy that gives us the strength we need to move constantly forward into all of the challenges we face every day.  Effort is like the legs we need in order to walk along the path of our life in an intentional and meaningful way.

Unfortunately, we often feel oppressed by what we are required to do from day to day and from moment to moment.  Our ‘daily grind’ can have a sense of imposed duty, and it can sometimes be hard to get out of bed to start another day of stress and general overwhelm.  We may put out enough effort to accomplish what we need to do to get by, but there isn’t always a feeling of full engagement.  We try to do the things we feel we should do, but ‘our heart isn’t in it.’  We can even feel resentment, as if someone else is making us do something we don’t want to do.  It’s like when our parents made us do chores when we wanted to be outside playing—except now we’re grownups, and there really isn’t anyone to blame any more.

We can even feel this way about our meditation practice.  Letting go of our urge for constant entertainment isn’t easy, and there are various tricks we may use to avoid the unfamiliar boredom of simply sitting with ourselves.  One version is to make more of the practice that it actually is, subtly congratulating ourselves on our ‘spiritual’ realizations and trying to recreate self-confirming experiences in meditation, rather than simply letting them go and returning to our breath.  Another reaction to boredom is to be very dutiful and serious, which ultimately results in many judgmental thoughts about how we’re doing.  And, of course, we can avoid this unfamiliar open space altogether by just convincing ourselves that meditation is a waste of time and continuing to hang out in our reactive, familiar nest.

‘Right Effort’ is the opposite of this feeling of disconnect and drudgery.  It is the natural energy we have when we are fully present and engaged in a situation.  It arises from the natural tendency of our mind to open suddenly in any situation, as if awakening from a trance.  When we are fully engaged, heart and mind, with someone or something, this openness is prolonged and exhilarating. 

An analogy that is sometimes used for this natural attention is the feeling of falling in love, where no artificial effort is required to manufacture the feeling, or atmosphere, of the ‘other.’  Our heart and mind are completely full of the experience of that person, and it naturally comes to us again and again, with wordless wonder, presence, and appreciation.  Everything feels more alive and vivid, like being in the technicolor Land of Oz after our usual black and white world.

We can also feel this full, effortless-effort when we are engaged in challenging activities like sports, music, or other arts.  Interestingly, this tends to occur more often when we have studied and trained in something, again and again, until there are moments when it seems to happen ‘effortlessly.’ A high-level hockey player, or a singer performing Handel’s Messiah, has to be familiar to a level where they can perform their part perfectly with a simultaneous awareness of everything else going on around them, and thereby ‘lose themselves’ in the energy of the overall experience.  Skilled surfers feel a complete oneness with the wave that they catch and ride.  Time becomes irrelevant in the pure joy and fullness of these experiences, and there is no separation between the experience and the experiencer. 

These are all analogies for how we can live our lives fully, with genuine presence and engagement.  The way we train for this is with mindfulness meditation.

The psychologist and author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described this kind of effort famously as “Flow”: 

                The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best                    moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary                     effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

Csikszentmihalyi describes this as a feeling of effortlessness, where one’s actions and awareness are merged so fully that any sense of self-consciousness disappears and there is a complete absorption in the activity.   He distinguishes between Intrinsic and Extrinsic motivation for our conscious actions, the highest being Intrinsic motivation, where we do something because we love it.  ‘Extrinsic motivation’ is what I described above, ranging from ‘fear motivation’ (like working just to make more money, or studying only to get through a course but without inspiration to learn), to a more useful purpose of wanting to get better at something, learn more skills, etc.

‘Intrinsic motivation,’ on the other hand, comes from the inside and moves us forward with no second-guessing—just natural and complete confidence and a feeling of egoless power.  A traditional Buddhist image for this kind of effort is the walk of an elephant, who, through its knowledge and mastery of the environment and its confidence in its own strength and ability, easily and precisely places each foot and moves powerfully along at its own pace. 

Csikszentmihalyi’s distinction between ‘extrinsic’ and ‘intrinsic’ motivations is applicable to our mindfulness practice, where we are training ourselves to have the ability to be fully engaged in our life.  We can say that our ‘intrinsic’ motivation is our own wisdom, the intuition about how we go in and out of being present with what is happening in our life.   The ‘flow’ we experience during those moments when we are suddenly present feels like the sun bursting through the clouds, with warmth, clarity, and the joy of being alive. 

We identify this feeling in retrospect, after the moment passes and we begin to evaluate it.  When we are in this flow, we are not really thinking about it at all.  So this is why our mindfulness training is so vital:  we are directly, deliberately letting our thoughts go and coming back to the simple, present situation of our body breathing.  By doing this over and over, we strengthen our familiarity with the contrast between being caught up in the clutter of our discursive mind and being simply present and engaged.