Effort

The Source of All Achievement

What will you do with this precious and all-too fragile gift we call life? Whatever it is, you will need effort to do it. Effort is the source of all achievement. It fulfills our aspirations, breathes life into our values, and turns our intentions into lived expressions of our being.

In this article, then, we’ll put a magnifying glass over this mental faculty. We’ll explore what it is, the causes and conditions that allow it to arise, and how to formally cultivate it through practice.

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What is Virya?

“Effort” is the most common translation of the Pali word “virya.” (Pali is the language of the Buddha.) Virya, however, is actually a much bigger word than effort alone. It has many nuances and flavors to it, which include energy, strength, courage, vigor, vitality, resolve, and perseverance of body, heart, and mind. In its most basic meaning, though, we can think of virya as the capacity for activity, the power to get shit done.

This too, however, can be a bit misleading because, when we really examine this quality or capacity the Buddha encouraged us to explore and develop in ourselves, we realize that what we are actually trying to achieve is more of an effort-less flow rather than a forced effort. So, training in virya is more of a balancing act, like riding a bike or walking a tightrope. We need to stay aware of our current state of mind and adjust the effort to what’s needed in the moment.

The Buddha compared it to tuning a lute—the strings can’t be too tight or too loose. We need to continually find the sweet spot between effort and sur­render. This may seem like a contradiction, but understanding this paradox is pivotal to our meditation practice and a vital piece of knowledge to carry with us on our spiritual journey, or really any endeavor we pursue.

So, how can we work towards our endeavors while, at the same time, avoiding the trap, frustration, and energy drain of over-efforting? How do we apply effort and, at the same time, surrender to the reality of the present moment (the dhamma)? This brings up one of the biggest misunderstandings of Buddhism I hear from people—that Buddhism leads to total withdrawal and surrender from the world or from personal interests and endeavors, that it leads you to sink into the blissful meditative oblivion of oneness. This is far from the truth.

Thich Nhat Hanh was a major activist not just in Vietnam, where he was born and eventually exiled, but he also marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., and continued marching for peace for the rest of his life. Surrender doesn’t mean passive resignation. It means we surrender to the dhamma—the truth of the present moment’s experience—rather than pretend things are otherwise. It means that we take a stand in reality, that we take a stand in truth. It is the attitude or posture expressed so eloquently by James Baldwin:

“It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair.”

—James Baldwin

This kind of acceptance still allows us to make effort, to work toward our goals and aims, but it does so without the grasping or aversive mind. It does so without causing unnecessary agitation to the system. It is an easeful effort that knows its aim but is not strained by expectation, strained by wanting things to go or be a certain way. We can be mindful of the bigger perspective, our goal, but also stay present, open, relaxed, and responsive in each moment.

Joseph Goldstein uses the analogy of climbing a mountain, which needs a similar balance of perspectives. When you climb a mountain, you need to know your aim—to hike to the peak of Mount Raymond, say, a local favorite of mine. But you also need to be aware of each step. You need to be aware of the terrain beneath your feet so that you can adjust as you go. Similarly, with our spiritual journey, we can keep our larger goal in mind while also paying precise attention to where we are in the moment, allowing us to balance our effort as needed. When there is rocky terrain or we’re close to the cliff, we need to tighten up our attention. But when we’re in an open meadow filled with flowers, we can loosen up a bit.

How to Adjust the Dials of Virya

So, how do we know if we’re applying too much or too little effort? Well, to begin, try to pay attention to those moments when you feel overstrained, desperate, disappointed, frustrated, restless, or agitated. Are you expecting things to go a certain way? Are you waiting for something to happen? Do you want something about your experience to be different than it is right now? Do you feel like you are leaning into the next moment or leaning into the next task? We even see this on the meditation cushion—it’s as if we are trying to anticipate the next breath, trying to catch it. We might even be thinking about how mindful we will be for our next sit. We get too far out in front of ourselves.

These are all signs that our effort is too tight. Rather than being open and receptive to experience, laid back, seeing experience with wisdom, we are trying to catch and hold onto something, anticipating or expecting something to happen. There’s an element of control, often from the little doer in our heads. At bottom, it is this feeling of wanting that can signal to us that we are over-efforting.

Effort becomes unhelpful when there is a forcing of the mind. Again, watch out for expectations or for any idea of gain you might be hold­ing onto—the “in-order-to-mind” or the “if-then” mind. Does the mind feel tight and contracted or does it feel open and receptive to what is here? Are you trying to push the river along?

If so, remember, it doesn’t need your help. It’s time to loosen the strings. It’s time to sink down and back, to soft­en our heart and open the mind. We need to give up some control and settle into the dhamma, the truth of the ever-flowing moment. We need to work with and be with what’s here, with equanimity, interest, and compassion. Remember, you’re not producing anything in your experience and you’re not producing your awareness of it either. So, sit back and simply receive it. Even if we need to act or respond to a situation, we can do it while we remain on top of our feet, settled into the moment. Don’t get ahead of yourself and fall flat on your face.

Now, if on the other hand you find that the mind feels lazy, lethar­gic, apathetic, dull, bored, cloudy, or stagnant, this may be a sign that more effort is needed. When energy is low, when we are drifting or falling into a daze, falling into mindless reveries or daydreams, we leave ourselves vul­nerable to delusion. Our effort is too loose. We need to tighten it. We need to straighten up our postures, check our attitude, and bring forward some strength, courage, investigation, and/or perseverance.

One way to do this is by taking a walk, going to the gym, or doing some Tai Chi or some other physical exercise that gets the energy in the sys­tem moving. Another thing to consider is eating lighter meals. It is quite the energy drain to metabolize food, especially in large quantities. Clean, moder­ate eating can take you a long way. You can also try being a little more active in your mental noting. And I don’t mean becoming analytical of your expe­rience. I mean to simply note it in a way that helps you bring a bare attention to the objects of awareness. So, the note should just be a soft mental note: tingling, pleasant; sleepiness, neutral; dullness, neutral; doubt, unpleasant. See if, instead of five notes a minute, you can make ten notes about experience. Again, we just want to put a small frame around the experience to allow us to see it more clearly. We don’t want to lean into the object. Just receive it. Finally, if you are still feeling sleepy, your body might be telling you it’s time to take some rest. Listen to it. Just be careful that it’s not sloth and torpor trying to deceive you, trying to prevent you from facing a challenge, trying to prevent you from confronting some difficulty in your life.

Remember, like all skills, it will take time to familiarize and tune-up your capacity for virya. It will take time to learn the appropriate balance. But to support you, let’s explore virya in some of its different forms so you can start to play around with the dials and see what works best for you at various times along your way.

Virya as Strength

One function of virya is to provide strength or support. Virya, in this form, serves to support wholesome factors of mind—mindfulness, concentration, investigation, joy, tranquility, memory, and equanimity. The second-century monk Nagasena, in his famous dialogues with the Indo-Greek King Milinda, said that virya has the quality of shoring up our skillful practices and insights—when they are shored up by virya, none of our skillful dhammas are lost.

The Buddha emphasized something similar in the Dhammapada, saying that when we put in the effort and practice, wisdom grows, and when we don’t, wisdom wanes. So, like I said earlier, it is this quality of virya that keeps us on the path of fulfillment and awakening. It supports wisdom from waning. “Here,” the Buddha says, “the noble disciple dwells as one who has produced strength; for the sake of abandoning unskillful dhammas and arousing skillful dhammas one is firm, of steady valor, un-relinquishing in purpose with regard to skillful dhammas.”

Virya as Courage

Another aspect of virya is courage, an unrelenting expression of heart. This quality of virya is profoundly energizing and is critical when, at times along our path, we run into difficult landscapes of mind that make us want to retreat to a place of comfort. While the hindrances sloth and torpor cause us to retreat from challenges, courage does the opposite. It is energized by challenges, inspired by them. When we cultivate virya in this form, we rise to the occasion and move onward to our aim. It doesn’t mean we aren’t scared or that we don’t have doubts. It means we are willing to act in the face of those fears, in the face of those doubts. It welcomes fear and doubt and understands them as necessary elements of our growth.

“The only time a man can be brave is when he is afraid.”

— Ned Stark, Game of Thrones

Jesus demonstrated this quality of courage in an extraordinarily beautiful way. In Jesus’s unwavering commitment to love, while his hands and feet were nailed to the cross, crowned in thorns, bruised and torn, he cried out, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Jesus had many opportunities, as well as every reason, to retreat from Jerusalem to escape persecution. But courage kept him on his path to become a living symbol of love, not only for his people but for all humankind.

Now, you may be thinking, “Well sure, Jesus can do that. But he’s the Christ, the Son of God and Man. I’m just a plain Jane.” This quality of courage, though, isn’t reserved for saints, heroes, and legends. Nor is it a fixed quality, something you have or you don’t. It’s a quality of mind that can be cultivated and strengthened with practice. And we see it everywhere in the hearts and minds of ordinary folk like you and me. We see it in so many mothers, who sacrifice their bodies, their time, and their careers for their children. We see it in extreme athletes, like the Wim Hofs of the world, who continually test the limits of their bodies. We see it in our schoolteachers, who keep showing up for their students, despite their low pay. We see it in our police officers, firefighters, and other first-responders, who continually face trauma without the proper resources, support, and pay. We see it in the women who spoke up against offenders in the #Me-Too movement. We see it right now in the people protesting in Iran for basic human rights.

We too can cultivate this quality of courage. We can skillfully build up this muscle by teasing the boundaries of our comfort levels, by briefly peaking over the edge. It takes courage to challenge ourselves, to extend our limits, to really see what is possible. As the Burmese meditation master Sayadaw U Tejaniya said:

“Avoiding difficult situations or running away from them does not usually take much skill or effort. But doing so prevents you from testing your own limits and from growing. The ability to face difficulties can be crucial for your growth. However, if you are faced with a situation in which the difficulties are simply overwhelming, you should step back for the time being and wait until you have built up enough [virya or courage] to deal with it skillfully.”

This is wise advice. We don’t want to simply jump into a situation without giving it any thought. We want to discern with wisdom whether doing so is a skillful means to our end. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes we simply aren’t ready, and facing the challenge will just lead to more suffering. So, we need to step back and seek out some smaller wins before we come back to the bigger challenge.

There are some small practical ways you can start cultivating this element of virya, depending on your own personal conditioning. Maybe you can put yourself out there socially, pushing that comfort level. You can face your fear of rejection as you try to make some friends. You can put your art or writing out into the world, even though you fear people won’t like or appreciate it. Or maybe you can apply for that job you’ve always wanted but haven’t because you fear you’ll get turned down. With your meditation practice, maybe you can sit for just a few minutes longer than you are comfortable with. You can commit to not move a muscle during one of your sits, no matter how uncomfortable it may be. You can also try running a 5- or 10k, or even a marathon. You can start going to the gym regularly. You can read a certain number of pages a day. There are many options here. When you push any of these boundaries, though, just make sure to pay attention to the energy that comes from teasing the boundary.

I really came to explore virya up in the mountains with my Snow Leopard. Every summer solstice, we would hike a bit further than we ever had before. Near the beginning, for one of our first summer solstice adventures, we hiked a trail in the Wasatch called Desolation Trail, an 18-mile hike with about 5,500 feet of elevation gain to Desolation Lake, where we camped for the night before making the 18-mile trek home. The next year, we went there and back in the time the sun was up, clocking in 36 miles in one day. And the next year, we did 48 miles in two days, bagging six peaks over ten thousand feet. Before each of these hikes, and especially during them, there was a big part of me that thought there was no way I could do it. Several times, I had the thought that this was it—I must simply lay down and die. But each time I thought my body would give out on me, this courageous dimension of virya came to the rescue and gave me the energy I needed. It showed me that my mind can propel my body much further than I ever could have imagined.

If you need some energy in your life, seek out some challenges. Play at the boundaries of your comfort levels. Know what you want and go get it, despite your doubts and fears. Let the bodhisattva’s roar of courage motivate you:

“Let only my skin and sinews and bones remain, let my blood dry up. I will not give up until I have accomplished what can be done by human effort and endeavor.”

Virya as Perseverance

The final dimension of virya I want to explore is perseverance. Where courage gives us strength to face challenges, perseverance is all about the long game. It is the power of the long-enduring mind. This dimension of virya is not one to be underestimated. It is vital to our goal of liberation, which, as I said, is a life-long commitment and journey. Suzuki Roshi, in Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, says:

“After you have practiced for a while, you will realize it is not possible to make rapid extraordinary progress. Even though you try very hard, the progress is always little by little. It is not like going out in a shower, in which you know when you get wet. In a fog, you do not know you’re getting wet. But as you keep walking, you get wet little by little. If your mind has ideas of progress, you may say, ‘oh, this pace is terrible,’ but actually it is not. When you get wet in a fog, it is very difficult to dry yourself, so there is no need to worry about progress. Just be sincere and make full effort in each moment. This is enough.”

This is how practice works. It takes time. You can’t just learn to rhyme like Eminem overnight. He’s been at it consistently for decades. The other rappers who collaborate with him are astonished at the effort he puts in, saying he treats it like a 9–5 job. Despite what some Buddhist suttas say about people becoming fully Enlightened beings at the snap of a finger, it takes time to master the hindrances, to free ourselves of greed, hatred, and delusion, to free ourselves from suffering, especially in our complex, modern world. Our practice unfolds steadily over years and decades when we apply this persevering dimension of virya.

There’s a great story about the famous Tibetan master Milarepa, who, as legend has it, at a young age went on a revengeful killing spree at his mother’s request. Later in his life, though, after he had encountered the Buddha’s teachings, he realized he needed to get enlightened or else his karma would catch up to him. So, he went to live and practice in many caves until he perfected his heart and mind and then spent the rest of his life teaching and singing joyously.

Over the years, Milarepa grew very close to his chief disciple and shared many of his teachings with him. But the chief disciple thought Milarepa was saving the highest teaching, the real esoteric teaching, the secret transmission, for the end. So, not long before Milarepa died, the two of them trekked off to some remote place in the mountains. And when they got there, Milarepa had the chief disciple set everything up perfectly, really setting the stage for something special. The disciple was stoked, super eager to receive the secret transmission. Finally, when everything was ready, Milarepa came very close to his disciple, turned around, bent over, lifted his robe, and showed his disciple the calluses on his ass—the secret transmission: virya in the form of perseverance.

What’s the secret to success? Put in the work and don’t give up. The long game is tough, no doubt. Whether it’s raising kids, going to school, maintaining a relationship, putting in the years to get your dream job, working through grief or chronic depression, or just sticking with your spiritual practice, there will inevitably be times when we run low on hope and fuel. So, here are a few tools to keep in your bag for when you find yourself in those situations and need a little virya in the form of perseverance.

First, see if you can connect again to what first sparked your interest in your journey. Was it some personal experience, maybe of tremendous joy or interest, or maybe of suffering? Was there a deep thirst for meaning or purpose in your life? Were you desperate for freedom or understanding? Was it compassion for another? Whatever it was, see if you can reconnect with this motivation, interest, or inspiration. Let it rekindle some fire in you.

Second, you can try contemplating the inevitability of death and the preciousness of this human life. We too often take advantage of the unbelievable conditions we’ve been given—this miracle of life, this precious human birth, this awe-inspiring experience. Somewhat unconsciously, we think we’ll never run out of time or that we’ll be able to pursue our interests or deepest passions later. But thinking the conditions will always be favorable is simply a delusion. Eventually, we will get sick. We will grow old. And we will die.

Just a couple weeks ago, we had a friend over to our home. And that night she was working through a headache, which she expressed had been there for a couple weeks. A few days later, the headaches got bad enough to make her go to the hospital. Turns out, her entire life changed in an instance. She was diagnosed with a diffuse midline glioma, an aggressive and rare type of brain tumor.

Our life, this human body, this experience, this very moment, is precious. The Buddha said that we have arrived at a great treasure island, the treasure island of this precious human birth. Here, now, with this body, with this life, with this opportunity, with this day, with this hour, with this moment, we can come to understand and cultivate the causes of peace, happiness, and freedom. And this moment will never come again.

“Cherish your body. It is yours this one time only. The human form is one with great difficulty. It is easy to lose. All worldly things are brief, like lightning in the sky. This life, you must know, is a tiny splash of a raindrop, a thing of beauty that disappears even as it comes into being. Therefore, set your aspiration and make use of every day and night to achieve it.”

—The 14th Century Monk Tsongkhapa