Look After Yourself with Ease

One of the phrases in our chant for goodwill is “May I look after myself with ease; may all beings look after themselves with ease.”

How do you do that? Through heedfulness. You realize that your actions really do make a difference, so you have to be very careful about what you do. The concept of heedfulness implies danger but also implies that you can escape from the danger if you’re careful. This is one of the reasons why we train the mind. After all, where do our actions come from? They come from our intentions. If you keep careful watch over your intentions, then you’re more likely to be able to take good care of yourself, because you’re going to be protecting yourself from the results of bad actions—any bad actions you might do in the future and even bad actions you’ve done in the past.

As the Buddha said, if you train your mind properly, it’s like taking a lump of salt. Before, your mind was like a little cup of water; you put the lump of salt in the water and you couldn’t drink the water. But now you can make your mind more like an expansive river that’s clean and clear. You throw that lump of salt in the river, and you hardly taste it at all. In the same way, past bad actions—and if the mind is expansive—have very little impact on the mind. So train your mind to look after itself.

One of the ways it looks after itself is not just by being selfish, of course. You think of goodwill for all beings, compassion for all beings, empathetic joy for all beings, equanimity for things you can’t change—so that you can focus on things you can change. That’s looking after yourself with ease.

I know a monk who, for a long time, specialized in driving spirits out of people. Then he realized: This is a result of their past bad karma. How about teaching them not to make that bad karma to begin with?

I had that same insight when I was down in Brazil one time. There was a faith healer who was healing huge numbers of people. But I kept thinking: He’s solving the problem at the end, rather than at the beginning.

If you get people to stop killing, stealing, having illicit sex, lying, taking intoxicants, then you’re helping them look after themselves with ease. As the Buddha said, if you want to help somebody, encourage them to observe the precepts. Encourage them to have a mind with as little greed, aversion, and delusion as possible. And, of course, for those instructions to have any impact, you’ve got to do that yourself.

The strongest lesson is a good example. So by looking after yourself, you’re also giving other people an idea of how they can look after themselves with ease. You notice that phrase doesn’t say, “I’ll be there for you when you’re suffering.” It says, “May you be there for yourself, when you’re suffering,” be able to treat the suffering with ease so that it doesn’t flow into the heart, doesn’t seep into the heart.

There was a famous teacher in Thailand who said that the essence of Buddhism is not being selfish, which in Thai translates into, “Don’t look out for yourself.” Ajaan Suwat said, “No. You’ve got to look out for yourself.” If you go around trying to look out for other people all the time, your responsibility gets neglected. And whether they’re going to appreciate your help or not, that’s something else.

But if you look after yourself and you set a good example, those who are inspired can at least know that here in the human race there are good people. This can be a good place to be.