Cultivating Spiritual Effort — Gently

The spiritual effort, or virya, is a key spiritual quality. Yet it's best not to be effortful, and it helps if we keep the mind on track and in balance very gently, first having connected with our experience in a restful way.

Transcript

So just allowing the body to find its way into an effective posture,

Upright,

Relaxed,

Dignified,

And with the eyes soft and the eyes kind,

Beginning to tune in to sensations arising all over the body as you breathe in and out,

And with soft eyes we can often open ourselves up to experiencing the breathing in terms of soft waves of movement and sensation,

Sweeping all the way through the body,

On the in-breath and on the out-breath,

And with the eyes soft and the eyes kind you might notice that there's less inner chatter going on than there usually is,

There might be periods of time where there's no discernible inner chatter going on,

There may be times when thinking is going on but it's just in the background and it's not capturing your attention,

And there might still be some times when the mind is,

As it were,

Hijacked by a train of thought,

Which you get lost in,

In an unmindful way.

So just keep noticing as you're paying attention to the soft waves of movement and sensation that are the breathing,

What the mind is doing,

And if you notice the mind is getting caught up,

Unmindfully,

In a train of thought,

Simply make the decision to drop that thinking,

To soften the eyes and to let your attention once again become absorbed in the sensations of the breathing.

So this is spiritual effort,

Virya.

We're making a gentle effort to prevent unmindfulness from arising.

When it does arise,

We choose to let go of it.

We're bringing into being states of mindfulness and ease and kindness and we're making a gentle ongoing effort to maintain those.

So you can just continue to meditate in this way.

Reviews

Nice explanation of spiritual effort which is a bit of unusual in western culture.