Lift Up Your Heart

Joy and gladness are among the bases for concentration. The mind settles down more easily when it comes with a sense of well-being. Sometimes that sense comes naturally. You think about your behavior in the day. It’s been in line with the precepts. You haven’t harmed anybody. You’ve had an opportunity to be generous, to give of your time, give of your energy. You’ve taken advantage of that opportunity, and it feels good. You feel good about yourself. You feel good about the Dhamma. This is a good path to be on, and you’re glad to be on it.

Other times, this sense of well-being doesn’t come so easily. You have to make an effort to produce it. Even though you’re living a virtuous life, you still feel something’s lacking. You need to do something more to convince yourself that you’re really worthy of the meditation, especially if you’ve had days when things are not going well. You’re trying to settle down, but the mind just refuses to settle down. You may have a tendency to get down on yourself at times like that, precisely when you actually need to do the opposite thing, which is to lift up your spirits.

There are some standard recollections that the Buddha recommends for this purpose. Three are meant to give you a sense of conviction in the path: recollection of the Buddha, of the Dhamma, and of the Sangha. Three are meant to give you a sense of your own worth, conviction in your ability to do this: reflection on your generosity, reflection on your virtue, reflection on the devas.

That last one doesn’t mean you just think about the devas. It basically means that you think about the qualities that make human beings into devas; you look and can see that you have them in yourself: conviction, generosity, virtue, learning, discernment. You have these qualities already, at least to some extent. And “some extent” is often enough to become a deva.

After all, there are devas we’ve encountered in the Canon who are not very discerning, not very wise, like the one who sees that her children have been wounded by a monk and she thinks of killing him. Then she realizes, “No, that’s not going to be a good idea.” She has at least that much wisdom.

Then there’s the deva who propositions a monk. That’s not very wise at all. When she goes to see the Buddha and receives teachings from him, she doesn’t understand much of what he has to say, only enough to realize that “Yes, giving is good, virtue is good.”

Which means that you don’t have to be perfect in these qualities to become a deva. To whatever extent you do have them, it’s a sign that you’re a good person. And you should be able to develop them even further as you meditate.

So choose among these different topics when you see that your sense of well-being in the practice is beginning to run dry. To do that, you’ll have to develop a sense of what works for you.

For example, with the Buddha, you could think about his many superhuman qualities, which makes him seem further and further away from you. That gets discouraging. So think about his more human qualities. Think about how, after many years of austerities, he realized he was on the wrong track. He reflected that he didn’t see anybody who had pursued the path of austerities further than he had. That was a type of conceit, and he was willing to give up that conceit when he saw that it led literally to a dead end, and he was able to open his mind to the possibility that there must be another path.

As he started pursuing another path — the path that actually turned out to be the right path — the five monks who were his attendants felt disgust and they left him. Yet he wasn’t discouraged.

That’s a very human story: the person who realizes he’s been on the wrong path with the encouragement of other people, and then realizes that he has to give up that path if he wants to find true happiness. He’s going to have to bear with the disapproval of the people who used to praise him.

Or there are the stories of the Buddha going out of his way to teach an outcast, to teach a leper. Or the story of when he and Ananda found a monk who was sick, soiled in his own excrement and urine, and they washed him off. It shows a very human side to the Buddha, a very kind side. So whichever side of the Buddha you find most uplifting, focus on that.

The same with the Dhamma: You can think about how useful this Dhamma is, how wonderful it is. But sometimes to appreciate the Dhamma you have to think about, well, what would life would be like without the Dhamma?

As the Buddha said, if someone is going to gain awakening while listening to a Dhamma talk, there has to be a sense of joy in the Dhamma. And yet a couple of the talks that he gives start out pretty scary.

When he was talking to the thousand former ascetics who had been worshipping fire, he gave them the Fire Sermon. Their idea about fire before that had been that it was a very useful servant. Even though they worshipped Agni* *as a god, they also were using him. They had a sense that the fire element was dispersed throughout everything. If you knew the right chants and the right rituals, you could get fire to take in whatever you wanted to send to your next life, and it would take it there. It could deliver it because it was extended everywhere. So they had a sense that fire is everywhere, but that it was under their control.

But then when the Buddha told them that everything was aflame, that meant that whole fire element was burning everywhere. The image must have been overwhelming, everywhere they could think. They had been thinking very much about fire being everywhere, but now it was all ignited. Latent fire was okay. Burning fire, that’s something else. It consumes everything.

On top of that, there’s the image of developing disenchantment with the fire. The word for disenchantment, nibbidā, is related to having eaten something and having a sense of enough. Basically, the Buddha was implying that they’d been eating fire, consuming fire.

So the fire was not just outside, it was in them. That would be a scary image.

And then the Buddha offered the Dhamma as a way out. In that case, the joy they found in the Dhamma came from having a strong sense that they needed the Dhamma. It rescued them.

The same with the thirty wilderness monks, when the Buddha asked them which was greater, the water in the oceans or the blood they had shed from having their heads cut off—their cow heads when they were cows, their sheep heads when they were sheep, their water buffalo heads when they were water buffaloes, their human heads when they were highway robbers, village robbers, adulterers. The answer was that the blood in each case was greater. That was pretty scary, and it induced a very strong, intense sense of saṃvega. Then the Buddha offered them the Dhamma, and they took it with a strong sense of its value.

So sometimes it’s good to think about what life would be like without the Dhamma, how full of danger it would be, and how precious it is that we have it.

There are people who say they don’t like the Dhamma about, say, rebirth or karma, because it erases the mystery from life. But do you really want a mysterious life? Isn’t it better to have a reliable and proven path laid out through all these other mysteries? A path that says that your choices make a difference, that what you do makes a difference, so you should focus on your actions. You have this power. The Dhamma reassures you that you do have that power and it shows you how to use it well.

So focus on whatever aspect of the Dhamma you like. I know some people who don’t like the sense of being forced into the Dhamma because of the fact of suffering. They’d rather be in a position where they could freely choose with no sense that they were being forced to choose. Well, you are free to choose, and you’re free to focus on whichever aspect of the Dhamma you find encouraging, you find inspiring, you find gladdening.

The same with the Sangha, the noble Sangha: It includes people of all kinds—men, women, and children, rich and poor; educated, uneducated; high class, low class. People who were true. People who saw the dangers in life and appreciated the Dhamma, used the Dhamma, so that we can use the Dhamma too.

So choose whichever way of reflecting on the Buddha, the Dhamma, or the Sangha that inspires you with a sense that this is a really good path that you’re on, and that you’re worthy of the path. Reflection on the Sangha is especially good in that way, and you can augment it with thinking about your generosity in the past, your virtue in the past, the fact that you have the qualities of a deva. You can be glad in the Triple Gem, glad in yourself, glad that you’ve got them together. This lifts the mind.

So if you find yourself coming down on yourself, remind yourself, that’s precisely when you need to turn around and lift yourself up. And there are many ways you can do it.

As the Buddha says, when you see something that’s difficult, something you don’t like to do but you know it’s going to be good for you, and yet you know how to encourage yourself to want to do it, it’s a sign of wisdom in your effort. These reflections are among the ways in which you exercise that wisdom.

You may say, “What wisdom do I have?” As I told Ajaan Fuang one time when he said, “Use your wisdom,” I replied, “I don’t have any wisdom.” He said, “Everybody has some.” Of course, what he meant was, “Everybody has some discernment.” Just learn how to apply it. Understand what kind of thinking motivates you, gets you out of bed early in the morning. What kind of thinking makes you willing to sit longer than you might otherwise. Use that thinking, and learn how to use many varieties of it as well. That’s because an argument that works today may not work tomorrow. This is an area where you can use your ingenuity, use your creativity, so that instead of destroying yourself, discouraging yourself, learn how to encourage yourself and lift up your spirits.

There may be a part of the mind that says, “Well, that’s Pollyannaish. It’s false.” All your thinking is artificial. It’s just that some types of thinking are more habitual than others, more familiar than others. But the unfamiliar ones are not necessarily untrue. Learn how to use your thinking in a way that’s really helpful to you. There’s nothing false about that. All your thinking is fabricated, so fabricate it for the sake of your own well-being, your true well-being, a well-being that causes harm to no one. That makes the world a lighter place for everyone.