Hey everybody,
It's Judy Cohen and this is Wake Up Call 506.
Hope everybody's doing okay.
Just thinking about this weekend,
If you're engaging in No King's Day this Saturday or election protection work or whatever work you're involved in supporting democracy,
Thank you.
Be safe.
So let's talk about the fourth noble truth or start talking about the fourth noble truth,
Which is the truth of the path to the end of suffering.
And just quick review,
The first noble truth is the truth that this being human is a bumpy ride.
Second noble truth,
The truth that there's a reason why we feel so much stress and strain and suffering in relation to that bumpy ride,
Which is that our natural inclination is to push back against the hard stuff and cling to the good stuff and engaging magical thinking about how we cannot be subject to that bumpiness.
And the third noble truth is the truth that when we let go of clinging and pushing and magical thinking,
We're good.
There's still plenty of difficulty,
But instead of relating to it with stress and strain,
There's peace even in the stormiest moments,
Which not only doesn't detract from whatever commitments we have towards justice or democracy or healing,
But instead it increases our capacity to do that work and to enjoy our successes and to accept our failures with equanimity.
And the fourth noble truth is the noble eightfold path.
It's this whole path,
Which to me is essentially the truth about how to walk the talk.
So the eightfold path has eight steps,
Hence the name,
And they organize into three buckets I mentioned in the last wake up call the Samadhi steps of training the mind in stillness,
Attention and love,
The Sila steps of leading an ethical life in the law and in general,
And the steps of Panya or wisdom.
And they're not sequential,
But we do want to be practicing all eight all the time.
And right now,
Samadhi,
Sila,
Panya feels like the right order.
So let's jump into Samadhi.
There are three steps in its bucket,
Effort,
Mindfulness and concentration.
And all three,
Actually all eight steps begin with the word either wise or right.
And I'm shy of the word right,
Because the eight steps are aspirational.
They're the work of a lifetime.
But the legal mind or this one anyway,
Can so easily swing into a kind of binary perspective where there's only a kind of perfectionistic right and a devastated wrong.
You know what I mean?
And in our work,
That perspective,
It can feel necessary,
It can feel justified.
And I don't want that to be our frame of reference here,
Because in mindfulness practice,
As opposed to the practice of law and maybe other professions,
We simply want to be pointing in the right direction as often as possible.
And knowing that we're imperfect and being okay with that,
Even joyful about that.
So right doesn't work.
Wise works if we agree on a definition.
And wise can be problematic if it has religious or spiritual connotations,
Because I mean,
It's lovely if mindfulness intersects in a positive way with your beliefs.
But mindfulness itself is an evidence-based system like the law,
Right?
We practice mindfulness,
We cultivate stillness,
Attention and love,
For example.
And we see for ourselves if we feel better,
If we're better connected to other people,
If we can take care of ourselves and others in a more loving way,
If we feel more competent or less stressed or healthier or just plain happier.
If we do,
We keep practicing.
If we don't,
We find another path,
Right?
The Dalai Lama was once asked by a group of neuroscientists what he would do if it turned out that the science didn't back up the promises mindfulness makes,
And he famously said,
We'll change the practices.
So I'll use wise in that way as evidence-based rather than belief-based wisdom,
Okay?
So in the Samadhi bucket,
There are wise effort,
Wise mindfulness,
And wise concentration,
Which are the training the mind or the training the mind-heart steps.
And,
You know,
The other steps are training too,
But these three are specifically about training in what I like to say,
Again,
Stillness,
Attention and love.
And they're about how much effort we need to do that,
Right?
So I want to jump into effort,
But I want to say one more thing,
Which is that there's an overarching theme in these three steps that I see,
And it's this theme of calmness,
Right?
So as we explore wise effort,
Mindfulness,
And concentration,
And cultivate stillness and attention and love,
What we're doing is we're calming the mind,
We're calming the nervous system.
I love what Pamela Weiss always says,
You have to calm down before you can wake up.
It just feels so right to me,
Especially in the world right now,
Right?
I have to calm down to meet the moments in the law,
The moments of my life,
A moment of conflict.
I have to calm down before I can open the paper,
Right?
It's only once I'm calm that I can get a sense of the right thing to say,
Or the wise thing not using right,
Wise thing to say,
Or do,
Or even think.
So we have this overarching theme of calm,
And then the first of the three steps in the Samadhi bucket is wise effort.
And I like to think of wise effort as having two components,
Quantity and quality.
So first,
There has to be enough effort.
If I don't sit,
If I don't study,
If I don't reflect on my practice and how it's impacting my life,
Then there's nothing abstract about the situation.
I see exactly how it goes.
I don't feel very calm.
I am not still,
I am not attentive,
I am not as loving or at all,
And everybody else sees it too,
Right?
So it's what Louis Armstrong said,
If I don't practice for a day,
I know it.
If I don't practice for two days,
The critics know it.
And if I don't practice for three days,
The public knows it,
Right?
And yet it can feel like there's no time.
And especially in the law,
Right,
For mindfulness practice.
For years,
I lived in so much panic that I wouldn't get everything done at work.
How could I also contemplate making time to meditate,
Right?
And Suzuki Roshi once said,
If you don't have time to sit for an hour,
Sit for two.
Ooh,
And that's an intense instruction,
But it's so good too,
Right?
Because it's such a good reminder that like,
This is not optional if we're really walking this path.
So we do have to put in that effort.
But then there's the story,
The ancient story of Sona and the lute,
And a student who happens to play the lute asks the teacher,
How much effort is wise effort?
This is what it's essentially about.
And the teacher says,
If you tune your lute strings too tightly,
The lute sounds terrible,
Right?
And the student agrees.
The teacher says,
If you tune the lute strings too loosely,
Sounds terrible too,
Right?
Student agrees.
So there's a wise quantity of effort,
A wise amount of effort for each of us.
It's to put it in legal terms,
It's like the Goldilocks amount,
Right?
That we know is wise by tuning into how we feel,
Right?
And how our practice feels to us and how our words and our actions and our choices,
Right?
In the law,
In our lives,
How they land,
Right?
It's a feedback loop,
Internal and external.
All right,
So quantity,
And then also quality,
Quality.
One of the paramitas or perfections of heart and mind is virya or joyful effort,
Right?
Joyful effort is the quality of effort we're looking for,
I think.
It might be getting darker earlier if you're up here in the Northern Hemisphere,
So it's harder to get out of bed early to practice.
But there's no point in doing it unless it's with joy,
Right?
There's no point in practicing with resignation or resentment or any other unskillful quality because that quality gets infused into the practice and then infused into the day.
So best,
Very much best,
To be infusing joy.
So wise effort,
Effort that's in tune with the life we're living,
Quantity of effort that's in tune with the life we're living,
Possibly a very busy,
Multifaceted,
Full life,
And is also infused with joy,
Okay?
So let's sit,
Finding whatever stillness is available to you right now,
And just settling in,
Just feeling the body sitting or standing or walking or lying down,
Whatever posture you're in,
Just dropping into this present moment by feeling the body right now.
And then just beginning to notice the breath in the body,
The breath as it's flowing in and out of the body,
Or if breath is not your refuge,
Then sound as it arises and passes away.
And then just check in with yourself right now,
In case you have your screen off and maybe you decided that you'd catch up on emails while listening to this part of the talk,
And just ask yourself,
What would be wise right now?
What is wise effort right now?
Could I give myself just six and a half,
Six minutes more of just sitting and practicing?
That's point one,
Folks.
Or that to-do list keeps coming up,
Coming up,
Coming up,
And can I just set it down?
And can I do it with a smile,
With joy,
With just gladness,
And taking in the great good fortune that we have to be able to hang out together in stillness just for a few minutes?
Thanks,
Everybody,
For being on the Wake Up Call.
Great to see you.
Great to sit with you.
