Not for Feeling Good

When we do a practice and it makes us feel good, we think, ‘This is it! This is the one,’ and work at that. But if it doesn’t make us feel good we think, ‘This isn’t benefiting me. I’m not so keen on this.’Basically, our only thought is of feeling good, which is a massive mistake. If you are gauging the benefit of something by whether it makes you feel good in your mind, your approach is fundamentally flawed.

To give an example, I’m pretty sure that all of you here think the sublime dharma is something excellent and wonderful. But, what brought you to the dharma? It probably wasn’t through being really happy, was it? If previously in your life, everything was going smoothly and happily, without any problems, you probably wouldn’t be practising the dharma now. So the difficulties you experienced have been the condition or trigger for you meeting the dharma, and in that way, they’ve been extremely helpful. Generally, it’s the stuff we’d rather be without that is the most helpful and beneficial to us.
If we look at how we progress through the stages of the path, it’s always a matter of abandoning that which we see to be bad at that stage. ‘That’s no good – I’ll get rid of that. This is no good – I’ll get rid of it…,‘ and so on. And it’s in this way we make progress. Especially until we attain the state of a noble being, a bodhisattva, we’re constantly engaged in the process of getting rid of what we feel to be no good. So actually, we are constantly being helped by the bad stuff, not by the stuff which we like.
So for example, if we are meditating on impermanence, and we decide, ‘This practice isn’t making me feel so good. I don’t want to do it. I’d rather do calm abiding meditation, I’m just going to relax and take it easy, and work at that. That makes me feel much better.’ It’s a massive mistake. Because in truth, if we come to see the truth of impermanence, it brings wonderful results! It makes us diligent in our practice, it reduces our attachment, and it directly remedies our suffering. But more than that, it is that which leads us to understand emptiness and the nature of things, or the view. So it’s extremely precious and profound dharma.
But, if we don’t understand the dharma properly, we might see these practices as terribly depressing, even though in truth it’s not like that. When we are practising the dharma, whether we feel happy or sad is irrelevant. We are not practising for the sake of either of these things. We are practising to realise the actual state of reality.