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Vitality - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 03, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Good morning everyone, welcome. Happy to be here with you all.

As I prepare to give this talk, certainly what's happening in the Middle East is very much on my heart. When I teach the Dharma, sometimes it's not explicit why I teach, but all my teaching is directed towards trying to address the suffering of the world, hopefully at the deepest level. But there are so many different ways to get at that, that sometimes it seems like I'm maybe not talking about that directly.

So I'd like to dedicate today's talk to the people who are suffering in the Middle East, and certainly the Palestinians in Gaza where so many innocent Palestinians are dying, injured, and homeless. It must be hellish to be there right now, very difficult. I think of all the children who are going through how difficult it must be for them, and how difficult it will probably be for them for a lifetime to go through this. And the hostages that are also being held, Israeli hostages, it must also be hellish to be there and be part of that. So I dedicate it to the welfare, happiness, and peace for all the people who are suffering in the Middle East.

Vitality

Conventionally, the topic for today is effort. The Pali word that's often translated as effort is viriya¹. Viriya has a lot of different translations into English. Sometimes it's translated as effort, sometimes energy, and sometimes endeavoring. Some people like the word persistence. The word in Sanskrit, vīrya², has an association with courage or maybe even heroism. I think in Tibetan Buddhism, vīrya is sometimes translated as "heroic effort" because of the connotations that it has.

The word that I'd like to use today is vitality. Having an embodied sense of vitality is a reference point for wisdom in Buddhist practice. It is not just emphasizing the importance of making effort, but how we make effort is important, and the source of our effort within us is important. By paying attention to this, we can develop a lot of wisdom about how we practice.

This topic of how we make effort is so important that it could be the only thing we ever need to talk about. Everything you need to discover in Buddhism will be discovered by how you make effort. Generally, I like to think that when we do Buddhist practice, 50% of our attention is focused on what we're doing, and 50% of our attention is on how we're doing it. How we're doing it, including the effort we're making as we do something, is as important as what we're doing. What we're doing is important, of course. The Buddha said that if you're trying to make sesame oil by squeezing gravel, that's going to be unproductive effort. You have to know what to do that is to the point of what your intentions are, and not be doing something that's not right. But then also, how you do it is important.

As I said, some people like to translate viriya as persistence, because the continuity of persistent effort is sometimes much more important than the strength of the effort. In fact, the turtle and the hare fable is very apropos to Buddhist practice. Sometimes making heroic effort—really strong effort—is actually counterproductive in Buddhist practice if it stirs us up. And it's so easy to be stirred up. Partly because when we make strong effort, there tends to be a lot of self or ego involved in it. It's like, "I have to do it, I have to be successful, and I have to fix what's going on." We gear up in a way that just agitates the mind more than settles it. But if we can practice with a settled effort and do it persistently—sometimes the effort doesn't look very hot, but the fact that it's being done continuously carries the day. It carries the lifetime for our practice.

I wasn't there at the time, but I've heard now from a few of my friends who were there of a large teaching that the Dalai Lama gave in Arizona many years ago. It was a big convention center and thousands of people were there. He was giving some teaching—I don't know what he was teaching—but then there was a period of questions that he would respond to. A gentleman stood by the mic to ask him a question, and asked him something like, "What's the fastest way to enlightenment?" The Dalai Lama was silent for a long time. As the story was told to me, a tear started to go down his cheek. He finally spoke, and said something to the effect of how sad it was. This idea of going for the fastest way to enlightenment just represented a wrong way of practicing, a selfish way, a caught-up way, or a misunderstanding of what practice is, and it just made him sad.

For him, he dedicated his whole lifetime to Buddhist practice. When you give your whole lifetime to it, I think it tends to be a bit humbling. I think we tend to understand how much there is to work with, how much there is to do, and how much work there is in freeing ourselves from all the little and big ways in which we're selfish, afraid, greedy, hostile, or have ill will or aversion. There are so many layers and layers of ways we get stuck, and it takes a lot of patience sometimes to find our way through this practice. By being persistent—just steadily keeping at it—it's remarkable how slowly things begin to shift and change.

The analogy that I love for this—I don't know why I settled on this one, maybe because I heard it this way or I used to swim a fair amount—is about people who are really athletic, competitive swimmers. Now, I probably don't know what I'm talking about, so maybe just go along with the analogy and not take it too literally! They'll do the same stroke over and over and over again, tens of thousands of times. Slowly, each time they do it in a minuscule little way, their body begins to tune into how to make it more efficient, how to make it just a little bit stronger of a stroke, and a little bit smoother. Slowly, the stroke becomes more and more efficient and more elegant. It's not something that they can figure out for their particular body just by reading a book and saying, "This is how you do it." You have to keep doing it over and over and over again, and something begins shifting. It's the same thing with this practice. We do it over and over and over again, and something begins shifting and changing.

You see it in people's meditation posture. When people are beginners in meditation posture, it's difficult, stiff, and challenging. When I was in a Zen monastery in Japan—like this real tough Zen monastery—some of the new monks had just come from college. They would go to a Buddhist college to get a bachelor's degree or something, and from there they'd go to the training monastery. But some of them had been athletes, and they hadn't done a lot of meditation. I remember they were just in excruciating pain. We all slept together in the meditation hall, and before one of them went to sleep, he put a whole bunch of Menthol cream, like Ben-Gay, on his legs to get them to relax. That whole meditation hall was filled with his Menthol smell. But slowly, the body stretches and changes in all kinds of subtle ways. I've watched people's meditation posture change over a few years until it's almost like a yogic posture. They can sit there in a way that's stable and upright without fidgeting. It's not a process that happens overnight. It's a slow process that comes from the continuity and the persistence of doing it.

One of the things I'm maybe too fond of saying is—I won't do it for you, I'll save you from it, so I'll just tell you what I do. I'll say, "Buddhist practice doesn't work." I'll shake my head and say, "It just doesn't work." And then I'll pause. People think, "Wow, Gil says that?" Then I'll add, "...if you don't do it." With the emphasis on you have to do it to make it work. Some people will have this idea it doesn't work and they won't even try. The Buddha said that this practice, the Dharma that he was teaching, is for the energetic, not for the lazy. That's quite a powerful statement: for the energetic, not for the lazy.

Some people I know who are really busy people are actually lazy. The reason why they're not seen as being lazy—they're putting a lot of work into being busy—is that their busyness is avoiding really facing what's difficult for them. They're being busy to get away, because they don't want to take the time and the effort to really confront and meet what's really going on for them in their lives, whether it's in themselves or in their relationships.

So, vitality is a possible aspect of this word viriya, energy. The reason I find that it's such a wonderful word is that vitality is not necessarily coming from self-consciously applying ourselves or pushing ourselves. There are many ways in which, throughout the day, we gear ourselves up and push ourselves to get something or have something. I suspect a fair number of people who drive cars are putting in a little bit more effort than they need to when they drive. They're pushing, leaning forward, trying to get someplace. A little bit more on the gas pedal, a little bit more clutching the steering wheel, like they have to get there before the light turns red. That's certainly energy, and it may be an embodied energy of gearing up and getting tight and muscles working. But it's not the same thing in my vocabulary as vitality. Vitality is a natural arising of being enlivened without there being any stress associated with that kind of energy. It is non-stressful vitality.

The psychologist and religious writer from the 20th century, Joseph Campbell³, wrote a very interesting statement. He said something like—again, I'm not remembering it quite accurately—"People think what they need is a sense of meaning, but most people are searching for vitality, for a sense of aliveness." A feeling of being alive. There can be this wonderful sense of being alive, that vitality of being alive that's satisfying in and of itself. It feels so good. It's easy to be content, it's easy to be happy to be alive. We sometimes get that from doing certain things. Going for a nice hike, or doing something really fun like sports or playing a musical instrument, something that sets something free. Then, when we're finished, we feel a sense of vitality that is very different than feeling like we've been pushing and trying and working hard to make something happen.

To say the same thing as Joseph Campbell, I think a lot of the effort people make is to try to solve their suffering. They try to get away from it, to find something to do that can assuage it, to bring comfort, to bring safety or avoidance. To somehow deal and cope with our suffering. Sometimes in doing that, we're making the effort in the wrong direction. We're squeezing the gravel rather than turning inward to where the sesame oil is. In ancient India, sesame oil was pretty special. So we turn inward and pay attention to how we make effort, how we're doing anything at all, and what the consequences of it are.

One example for me—and maybe it's for some of you as well—is that my effort can sometimes go into problem-solving. I'm worried about something, concerned about something, trying to figure something out in my head, or I'm involved in fantasy. I leave it to your imagination what a Buddhist teacher fantasizes about! [Laughter] I can feel that the energy of that effort has gone up into the top of my head, and it feels like it's going in spirals that are getting tighter and tighter. Sometimes I feel this mental energy being caught up in the thought streams that I'm in, and it feels really agitated. Or rather than spiraling around faster and tighter, it just feels scattered, like ping pong balls are bouncing around in there. Sometimes I can feel that the effort of thinking involves pressure or tension in my forehead, in my scalp, in my head, in my shoulders, in all kinds of different ways.

The Buddha had this analogy of how the mind works as being a puppeteer. It has all these strings that go down to all the different muscles in our body, and the mind is pulling on those strings of tension, and we get tight in the shoulders and the belly with what goes on. The beautiful thing about the freedom that comes from Buddhist practice is we no longer have a puppeteer. We no longer have this activity in the mind which has these negative tentacles that go out and affect the rest of our body in all kinds of ways. The body starts becoming relaxed.

So the energies that can be up in the head—the effort of trying to make something happen or figure something out—settle down. Vitality is a whole different species of energy. Vitality is not dependent on what we're doing, but how at ease we are in ourselves, how awake we are, how much clarity there is in our being, and how we are now. For me, the word vitality has a feeling of being clean. There is something very clean about it. It just feels good to be alive. "Here I am." Once we have this kind of settled, relaxed, calm sense of vitality—some people might call it ki in Japanese and qi or chi in Chinese—there's an upwelling of a nice sense of aliveness that's here that can buoy us up, that can support us.

When we meditate, it's not a matter of applying effort, but rather it's riding like a boat rides the waves on the surface of the ocean. It's a matter of riding the natural vitality, the natural aliveness that's here within us. It's not so much applying effort to pay attention to the breathing, but relaxing and allowing ourselves to float with the vitality, the energy that's in the body that breathes. It's kind of floating on that sense of movement, energy, and activity that goes on as the body breathes. That's a very different feeling, floating on top of it and allowing the natural vitality, as opposed to being the one who has to have a laser focus, the one who thinks, "Okay, now I got to try hard. Let's try it now. Let's make more effort."

Start having a reference point for this clean vitality, this nice way of being alive. This is where the wisdom part comes in: using that to see how we start applying a different kind of energy or effort in our lives. It is helpful to be able to have that contrast between how to be at ease and relaxed in the body's vitality, and how we lose that when we start making self-conscious effort. "Oh, I'm late for a meeting, I better get there fast!" We certainly can have a lot of energy, and we get there and we've walked really fast, maybe we even ran to the meeting, and we sit down. There's a lot of energy coursing through our body from all that effort. But some of that will not feel like delightful vitality. Some of it might, but if it came from the stress of not wanting to be late and trying so hard, it comes along with energy that goes with being tense.

Then that tension carries momentum. Because stress is uncomfortable, that generates more stress. We're stressed, so we try harder. We don't like the stress that comes from trying harder, so it's uncomfortable, and the unconscious solution is to try even harder. It plays itself out in what we're thinking about, what we're concerned with, and how the mind goes into these habitual loops of thoughts and ideas of what we need to do.

If you can start feeling the energetics of your thinking habits, your thinking loops, and how you're making the effort—all the energy and the tension that's there—then you say, "Is this how I want to live?" This is kind of the central Buddhist question: How do you want to be? Not what do you want to be, but how do you want to be? How do you want to be alive here and now?

What you want to be is certainly relevant and important sometimes, but I think that we have a culture that is a little bit too tied up in "what I need to be." The whole idea of identity, asserting yourself, being someone, and self-promotion is really big in our society. Yesterday I saw a website for someone who was a Buddhist teacher. It just seemed like 100% self-promotion, in the way that I've seen for other people who are trying to promote their services and themselves as being the leading person in their field. I asked myself, "What is a Buddhist teacher doing making claims about himself that no self-respecting Buddhist for 2,500 years would ever say?" At least in the way I was trained in Buddhism. Where does this come from? This comes out of a culture of being self-centered, being someone, proving yourself, and self-promotion.

For those of us who are following in the wake of that, it's so easy when it's in a culture to start feeling like it's normal: "I'm supposed to do this." And then we go along with it. I'll tell you a story. Many years ago, when I first moved here to the Peninsula, I lived up on Skyline. That's irrelevant to the story, but I had been given a 15-year-old Toyota Celica. It was red, which was cool, but it was just an old car. I lived in San Francisco first, and there I just drove this old car around and there was no thought about it. I was happy and content having it. Then when I came here to live on the Peninsula, and I'd come down to Palo Alto to teach, after a while I noticed I had one of the oldest cars on the streets. It wasn't that old, but it was one of the oldest cars in Palo Alto even back then. Being there long enough, at some point I had these thoughts: "Maybe I should get a new car." As long as I was living in San Francisco, there wasn't that kind of reference point of everyone having new cars. But here in Palo Alto, there was that reference point, and it slowly crept in innocently.

So this self-promotional culture that we have comes along and unconsciously seeps in. We start to feel like, "I'm not good enough, I'm not doing great and wonderful things, I don't have a website yet." A lot of this unhealthy vitality comes from pushing and trying to be something, proving ourselves, or apologizing for ourselves. We can feel how that doesn't feel good.

The shift in Buddhism for many people is to pay attention to, "How am I right now?" Not "What am I?" That's where Joseph Goldstein's⁴ quote I think is quite significant. He suggested that maybe what we're looking for is a sense of aliveness that's been misplaced. In Buddhism, we would say we're looking for a sense of freedom that has been misplaced, and maybe those two things are not so separate. To really feel a healthy sense of aliveness, there can no longer be the pushing, straining, stressing, and self-assertion. That involves a very different kind of energy than the energy of vitality, which can come from really enjoying what you're doing for its own sake.

That's one of the signposts of meditation beginning to really benefit us and provide a lot of wisdom. When we sit down to meditate, the body has settled into the posture, and we're at home in the posture. The mind has learned to calm down. We've learned to recognize how we strain and push, and how we tend to beat ourselves up and be critical. We learn to recognize these things and we learn to settle them enough that we begin paying attention to the quality of our inner life: "How am I?" One of the things we become sensitive to regarding the quality of the inner life is, "What's the quality of being alive right now?" It's a vitality that feels good.

This can be an equally valid or important way of checking in with oneself when one is sick or injured as well. Sometimes it's actually more important in those situations where, conventionally, you don't have much energy and you're exhausted because of being chronically sick. I've been sick, and it was wonderful to be sick or injured when I was in the monastery doing a lot of Buddhist practice. I learned so much about myself in that environment where the practice was right in my face. It was like always having to be close to the practice.

There were times when I was so sick that in order to manage, I still had to go do the monk work. In order to manage with it, I had to be very careful with how I was doing what I was doing. Not only that, I had to pay very careful attention to what I was thinking. I could see that if I thought certain thoughts, I would feel sicker, and my vitality would diminish. If I thought other thoughts, it would come back. Not dramatically, but the difference between those two was enough to be the difference between managing and not managing.

There were also times in the monastery where my back went out, and it was horrendous for me; I was in so much pain. What was so wonderful about it was that ordinarily, I have a lot of slack in my body. I can get away with a fair amount of things without it affecting me; I have a range where I can do things. But when my back went out, there was almost no range at all. So much so that I couldn't even think certain thoughts without it affecting my back. So I learned this reference point of energy, vitality, and stress that I carry. My body became an essential reference point when I was really sick and injured. I was just watching it very carefully.

Without thinking I had to be super vital, like the embodiment of vitality for anybody—I was just trying to cope—it was such a valuable way to understand myself. I learned so much about how my mind works when I was sick, and the difference it made in how to be present.

Hopefully, you don't have to wait until you're sick for that. This is part of what we do in mindfulness practice. We start becoming more and more mindful of how we are, not just what we're doing, and one of the areas of how we are is our sense of vitality and the kind of effort we make.

When I was a new Buddhist practitioner, the big exploration was how to make not too much effort and not too little effort. For a long time, I learned that I was never going to get it perfectly right, but I could get the swings to be smaller and smaller. It is just like driving down the freeway. I don't know, maybe some of you now have cars that are self-driving and go straight, but I'm constantly—almost unselfconsciously, without any thought—making ever so slight adjustments as I'm going down the straight lane on the freeway, just finding my way.

It is the same thing with meditation effort. There were long years where finding my way was part of the reference point: "Oh, that's too much, let's try to back off." Or, "Oh, I backed off too much now and I'm not making enough effort, let's come back." Over time, I learned that there are different kinds of energy in the system. There's the self-conscious energy, there's the pushing energy, there's the "me" that's making the effort, and then there's the vitality, which is the natural vitality, the chi of the system that also varies over different circumstances. To begin having that as a reference point is really helpful.

I'll end with this, because it's possible as you go through your day today to pay attention to what is happening to your native vitality. In the posture with which you sit in a chair, what is your vitality? By how you sit in your car seat while driving, what is your vitality? How about how you listen to someone else talking? What's the vitality in your body posture, and how are you when you're doing something you don't want to do? What is the sense of energy or aliveness inside of you when you're in conflict with someone? What happens there within you? What is taking precedence and what can you learn from that?

When you're in conflict with someone and the sense of energy feels stressful and tight, you're the one who's responsible for that, not the person you're in conflict with. You're the source of the energy. You can ask, "Is this really how I want to be? Is this how I need to be? Is there another way? Is there another way of being alive here where I'm actually more productive, more effective, and wiser in being in the conflict?" I've certainly learned that when I'm stressed in conflict, I can make a lot of mistakes, speak out of turn, say things I wish I didn't say afterwards, and be more unconscious about what's really driving me. But if I'm relaxed and at ease in the conflict, I'm actually able to stay involved in a much more useful way.

So what's your vitality? What's your sense of aliveness? Is it one that brings you satisfaction and feels good? Does it feel like, "Oh yeah, it's good to be alive now," even if that aliveness is very teeny in you? "Oh, there it is, that feels good." Or is your inner sense of aliveness one that feels difficult? And if it is difficult, what is needed from you? What is the need for how you are with it? Not what you do to it, but how you are with it. Maybe you could meet it with some of the vitality, the aliveness of your own heart. To meet it with your kindness, with your love.

Those are my thoughts for today. We have a few minutes here if anyone wants to ask any questions, or share comments or testimonials about vitality.

Q&A

Questioner 1: Thank you, Gil. This is really lovely. I feel conflicted, because the question in my mind is one of when there are urgent situations where action is needed. I often feel that the practice of Buddhism is about taking more time, stepping back like you said, and I feel in conflict with that when there are urgent matters and how to take action in a way that keeps balance.

Gil Fronsdal: I'm sorry that you feel in conflict with that; that's a strong word. But I'd like to say that that's a very wise concern that you should have, because that's often the association people have with Buddhism. You're supposed to do things slowly and calmly. In some situations, that's not what's called for. What's called for is to do things fast, efficiently, and quickly.

I remember a friend of mine, many years ago, was involved with a business that mailed products out to people who ordered them. They hired someone from the Zen monastery to work there, and the person was putting the things into the box slowly. They stood there a little while and observed how that was, maybe moved the product around the box a little bit, and then closed the lid. You can't run a business that way, so the person lost the job! [Laughter]

When I left the monastery, the San Francisco Zen Center still had—and still has—Greens Restaurant⁵ in San Francisco, which is a little bit of a fast-paced place to work. I was assigned there when we monks had to go work there. Now they pay people, but back then I worked five and a half days a week and got paid $60 a month. I loved working there. I came from the monastery and worked there, and it was obvious being on the lunch crew making lunch that you couldn't do things slowly. What I learned was how to do things fast and mindfully. Fast and calmly with inner calm, and I loved it. There was a dance. I was spinning around and multitasking. I had all these different dishes I had to prepare at the same time, and the pizzas were in the oven. You had to do something else while they're in there; you don't stand in front of the pizza oven waiting for the pizza to be done. The idea was how to be fully present and engaged without being stressed, and so that's the art.

So yes, definitely, we can learn to be calm. Sometimes it takes a while to have a foundation of being calm and slow in order to learn the basics, and then once you know it well, we need to respond appropriately to the situation, but hopefully without any stress. If it's urgent, and it's so important, the last thing you want to do is to be stressed. Let's do it vigorously.

I grew up in Palo Alto, and so that message of "try harder" definitely seeped in in many different ways. So one of the mantras that I like now is "try softer." And then maybe we could add, "try softer but persistently." Just keep steady. At least in terms of Buddhist practice, it carries the day. And also, if you get enlightened slower, it might be a better enlightenment! [Laughter]

Questioner 2: It was a follow-up question to the question that the lady shared. During the time when you were working at the restaurant, what were some of the things that helped you to stay mindful and calm in a fast-paced environment? Thank you.

Gil Fronsdal: The practice that I had then, what I learned to do in the Zen monastery which then I applied to working at that restaurant, was not, "How should I be mindful of this situation?" Sometimes asking how to be mindful is a little bit removed from what you're doing. Rather, I asked myself, "How do I participate more fully with what I'm doing?"

I learned in the monastery how much I only participated half-heartedly or quarter-heartedly. Especially if I didn't want to do something, it was like, "Oh, I'm not really going to give myself to it." But in the monastery, I learned the joy of giving myself fully to what I was doing. Full engagement, full participation. So when I was there at Greens Restaurant, that was my task: "How do I participate in this fully?" The consequence of that was that I had to be mindful. I had to be very aware of everything that was going on. But the awareness followed in the wake of participating, as opposed to the awareness leading what I was doing.

So I became very present. In fact, by the time I left work at the end of the work day, I was more concentrated than when I came, because I was so fully present there for what was going on. I wasn't lost in any particular detail; it was like I was participating in the whole thing and tracking many different things. Whatever came. One of the things I loved doing was—fully in the present moment doing all this different stuff, preparing dishes and putting them up for the waiters to come and serve to the people eating there—at some point I tried to have a relationship with each of the waiters. I tried to remember what we had talked about between dishes when they came in, and tried to have a meaningful connection with them on top of it all. It was a fun time for me.

I was much younger, so I had a lot of energy then. Probably what it would look like now if I worked at Greens, I'd probably have to have a little bit of allowance to do things slower and take breaks. Wholehearted full participation now would be with the energy and the stamina that I have now at my age. Does that answer your question? Good enough, because there's a lot I could have said, but it was a good question.

Okay, well, thank you for being here, I appreciate it very much. One thing I could add as you're leaving is, every year we do a year-end letter, kind of a fundraising letter for IMC. We never really ask for funds here—I don't know if you've noticed, we never ask for things. In fact, if you look at it, it looks like a fundraising letter, it smells like it, if you shake it it shakes like one, and there is a remit envelope, but they actually don't ask! [Laughter]

This year I thought I wanted to write a less boring letter, and I wanted to do something that is memorable in terms of the Dharma. So anyway, if you want to pick it up and read it, it's on the counter as you leave. But I could well imagine people don't want that, and that's okay. Thank you.