Taking Responsibility For Ourselves by Ajahn Pasanno

Taking Responsibility For Ourselves by Ajahn Pasanno

The tendency for most people is to create more problems and difficulties for themselves. 

That habit is one of the reasons the Buddha was reluctant to teach. he could see that most people are “obstructed by ignorance and ensnared by craving; hurrying and hastening through this round of rebirths.” But the Buddha also recognized that there were those beings with “little dust in their eyes,” those who are willing to train and who would be lost without the opportunity to manifest the teachings.

So what category do we want to fall into? Do we want to cultivate sīla, samādhi, and paññā, the qualities and practices that lead to freedom, or do we want to neglect inner development and just muddle along, entangled and bound in ignorance? It’s our responsibility to make that choice.

Ajahn Chah used to tell the sangha that he was giving us a suitable environment to develop our own practice: “It’s like providing a pasture for your cows. If there’s a pasture that’s fenced in and has plenty of grass, then the cows can eat the grass and also be safe. 

If they are cows, they will eat the grass. If they don’t eat the grass, then they aren’t cows. In the same way, it’s the nature of practitioners to practice

and train. If they don’t, maybe they’re not practitioners.” It’s up to us to train and make some effort.

We need to make clear in our own minds what we want to be doing. This cannot be emphasized enough. Training the mind requires a great deal of discipline and effort; it’s not always easy to keep that up. 

The mind gets clouded with frustration, boredom, laziness, and all sorts of defilements. 

It’s so easy to slip into wanting to ignore the training or feeling forced to carry it out because the ajahns keep pestering us. Training the mind is not about trying to fulfill some duty perfunctorily. It’s not an obligation to the precepts or training rules, to some standard within a monastery or a particular place. Such inclinations and approaches don’t get us anywhere; they miss the point.

So what is the point? The point is to take responsibility for ourselves. We need to recognize when the mind feels oppressed and resistant to training; we need to notice when the commitment to training feels overbearing or not worth the effort required. 

That awareness helps raise the energy in the mind and helps create a sense of spaciousness and ease. We can remind ourselves that training the mind is a rare and precious opportunity; we can reflect on our own good fortune to meet the dhamma in this lifetime. We can then recommit to making good use of this opportunity.

DON’T HOLD BACK

PASANNO BHIKKHU.