Right Effort - The Mindful Family Business
THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS
The First Noble Truth: be aware that life brings with it many forms of dissatisfaction, frustration, irritation, and many levels of suffering.
The Second Noble Truth: recognise that these different types of suffering are produced by your mind, even if the apparent cause is external. The mind reacts negatively to life experiences that we didn’t want, and does the same when we don’t get things we were hoping for. The Buddha called these wants and dislikes “thirsts”. It is thirsts that cause unhappy states of mind.
The Third Noble Truth: we can learn to cultivate skills that stop our thirsts and thus end our various forms of suffering.
The Fourth Noble Truth: to cultivate these skills we have to follow a path that contains eight components, as follows.
THE EIGHTFOLD PATH
As with the word Noble above, the Eightfold Path uses a word that needs a little clarification. Each of the eight paths starts with the word Right. In this case it does not mean right as opposed to immoral, so it is not judgemental. Nor does it mean correct as opposed to wrong. It is best thought of as skilful or wise.
The four previous “paths”, covered in previous episodes, relate directly to how we live our lives - our thoughts and feelings, our communication with others, our decisions, and our working life. The next three are the methods or disciplines to use to ensure we do in fact learn to manage our wayward minds.
Right Effort: changing our volatile, conditioned mind doesn’t happen overnight. It took us our entire lifetime to date to become who we are today, so reversing and changing our mindset takes time. Therefore we need to work at it with effort. Again, the word right means skilful. Skilful effort means we don;’t slacken off or lapse, but nor do we exhaust ourselves in too zealous an effort.
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Alternatively, you can email us Russ@familybusinesspartnership.com
Copyright 2023 Russ Haworth and Martin Stepek