The Buddhist teacher Choygam Trungpa coined the term “sick effort.” In our spiritual practice, and our lives, we are driven by conscious or unconscious desperation. We are desperate to save ourselves from encountering life’s fundamental openness or groundlessness.

One way of reminding ourselves of this groundlessness is to remember the brevity of our lives. We live and die in a flash, and we are quickly forgotten. The tiny electro-shock that we feel upon contemplating this fact is a wink from the pervasive fear that is driving us to manufacture a sense of urgency and importance in every moment.

We create drama to antidote our suspicion that there is no absolute significance to our lives. This drama shows up in our spiritual practice as brow-beating earnestness, exaggeration of sensations and emotions, and even over-enthusiasm.

Ultimately, though, through consistent sadhana, we come to relax and live in harmony with the unimpeded flow of the natural state. We slowly, slowly unwind our fear and rediscover life as an infinitely nuanced, moving palette of expressions. We drop the effort of manufacturing experiences and participate with equanimity in the groundless state of experiencing.

But first, we must allow ourselves to become aware of and taste the fear. Awareness of our real situation is always the first step.

Sick effort, fueled by fear, comes in different flavors and can be usefully related to unbalanced expressions of the elements: earth, water, fire, and air. (Space, the fifth element, works a little differently and is not included in this discussion.) Here are some ideas about how unbalanced elements manifest in our approach to our sadhana.

EARTH. We are rigid in our practice, turning it into something mechanical, plodding, and mundane. We are very strict about format and structure. We are constantly measuring ourselves and others. We think if we follow follow the rules, we will get what we want. We become upset if the rules are changed. We are moralistic and critical when other people don’t seem to be doing things the ‘right’ way, e.g. our way. We feel cheated when we discover that, despite being good and following instructions to the letter, our fundamental unhappiness, feelings of separation, and insecurity do not seem to be giving way.

WATER. We are needy and ’sticky’ in our approach to sadhana. We seek and are dependent on big emotions: outpourings of yearning, prayer, begging, wheedling, bargaining, weeping, ecstacy, and so on. When we think we’ve received an answer to our prayers, we exaggerate, fantasize, and expend enormous amounts of energy convincing ourselves and others that we are one with the divine. In contrast to real Bhakti, or surrender through love, this kind of sick effort expresses a fundamental feeling of lack of nourishment and loneliness. All of our efforts to suppress these feelings actually cut us off from receiving the nourishment we crave in our practice and in contact with others.

FIRE. We feel dissatisfaction, frustration, self-doubt, and distrust of our capacity to meet and digest what life brings us. We approach spiritual practice with the intention of overpowering, driving through, and burning up these obstacles. We work with the attitude that we will overcome in spite of everything and everyone. We practice long hours with intense focus. We may actually cause our health to deteriorate as we seek to be saved from self-doubt by racking up spiritual ‘accomplishments.’ Like addicts, we are always seeking more accomplishment, more practices, more initiations. We may appear to some to be consummate yogis, but inside we desperately want approval, recognition, and acceptance.

AIR. We are blown around by anxiety, mental overcrowding, and a general feeling of fragmentation: of being “out of touch.” We expend a lot of energy moving among a variety of practices, or feeling overwhelmed by variety and detail. We complain that we have too much to do. At the same time, sitting quietly without activity terrifies us. Fear keeps us moving, but we never really get down to a regular pattern of sadhana. We are exhausting ourselves by engaging in constant interrupted, irregular, nonproductive activity.

Recognizing these imbalances is a crucial part of allowing View to guide us. Natural adjustments in our approach to practice can emerge out of simple recognition of our real situation and a sincere desire to relax our tensions and grow. But if we are experiencing the effects of imbalance, it is important to consult our teachers. Certain kinds of practices can make our imbalances worse, as can the wrong kind of physical activity. Students who attempt to go it alone, learning from hearsay, or out of books, are at risk of creating more impediments to relaxation, even when intentions are sincere.

As all of these imbalances in approach relate to the expressions of the elements, we should address them through changes in our eating, sleeping, and daily conduct. Ayurveda, and especially the practice of dinacharya, helps to recalibrate the expressions of the elements in our bodies and lives. Healthy expressions of the elements can then begin to emerge such as groundedness, adaptability, the ability to give and receive proper nourishment, mental, emotional, and physical steadiness, clarity, discrimination, both physical and psychic digestive energy, feelings of connectedness, and the ability to integrate activities of body, speech, and mind.

Cultivating a sense of humor about oneself and a lighter approach to life in general is also important. We tend to swing between self-congratulation and despair, or hang out in one of these states. Both over-earnestness and precarious states of false confidence are impediments to relaxing sick effort. Learn to poke loving fun at yourself, and be willing to place all the confidence you can muster in the process.

Most of us do need to work hard to relax our self-limiting concepts and behaviors. But as I was recently told: It is best to work hard like water.

Water is the foundation of all growth and new life. Water is the fundamental source of nourishment. The balanced water element flows, adapts, shines, dances, plays, and meets everything in its path with grace, constancy, sweetness, softness, and strength. So, laugh, adapt, dance, be sweet to yourself and all others.

And work hard. . . like water.

OM Shanti,
Shamhavi

Posted by Shambhavi on April 25th, 2006 | Explore More! Tags: Suffering