Heal Me from the Sickness of Effort

Dear Friends,

Norbu Rinpoche, a high Tibetan lama, once wrote as his prayer, "Heal me from the sickness of effort."  

Now this is an interesting puzzle or question or challenge.  Don't we need effort, a sense of hard work, in spiritual things?  Don't we achieve in every field by working at it, putting in the time, renouncing other pleasures for the sake of a goal?

But notice how you can work hard at remembering a name you have forgotten, and then, shortly after you stop trying to remember, the name just comes to you.   Or you can make great efforts to forgive someone, and then, once you do so, it feels as if it wasn't that big a deal all along.  Or you can go back and forth with different kinds of meditation and spiritual practices, but then the moments of grace or insight or delight come as pure gifts, and always contain aspects we didn't strive for at all.  

On the other hand, we don't want to devalue all the suffering, the sweat and tears and confusion, that perhaps were essential forerunners of these apparently effortless turnings.

A friend once told me that it is impossible to be tired of reading.  If you notice you are tired, then you are not reading.  If you are reading, immersed, you are effortlessly turning the pages without even noticing.  Of course, in lived experience, we bounce back and forth between these levels.  Certainly there is a kind of torture in unintentionally divided attention, and a kind of heaven in self-forgetful immersion.

Keats wrote, "If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree, then it had better not come at all."  We want to find that ease.  

A foundational example of effortlessness is the way small children learn language.  They absorb and produce the first few hundred words, at least, along with the grammar that binds them, without any evidence that they are trying.  It all just gets imprinted.  Images, processes, meanings and beings of all kinds can imprint themselves on us right into adulthood, and change our structure.  This possibility raises the question: by what do you wish to be imprinted?  Your own soul?  A quality, like love? The soul of the earth?  A divinity? 

Today we'll dive right in and take as our model the photo above, an image of the effortless imprinting of language and relationship.  So we will engage in a kind of meta-imprinting, in which we allow this image of imprinting to imprint itself on us.   Our wish is to be engaged in this kind of effortlessness.

with love,

Michael