I’m not here to tell anyone what their answer should be. That’s your work, not mine. What I can offer is the one I’ve landed on after some years of practice, and the thinking behind it. That answer is bodhicitta. The way I frame it, bodhicitta is more or less everything — from the Mahayana perspective, you could say it’s the entire path.

So let me give a loose translation, and then we can look at how it bears on purpose and meaning.

A loose translation

Bodhicitta usually translates as the awakened heart or the awakened mind. Chitta points to consciousness or mind. Bodhi points to being awake, being free of the causes of suffering. So bodhi is pointing at liberation, enlightenment, or Buddhahood.

For practitioners this will be familiar, but it’s worth stating plainly: Buddhahood is not so much something we attain. It’s something we uncover. There are different ways to frame this — some pathways describe it as an attainment, others as an uncovering — and I find the second more accurate.

That framing has helped me a great deal, and it isn’t my invention. It comes straight from the teachings on Buddha nature, which describe a seed of awakened mind that cannot be removed from the heart or mind. It’s already there. Unfortunately, for most of us, it’s covered. Even sitting with that idea for a moment changes something. It’s not that we lack something we have to go out and acquire. It’s that something already present is obscured. So we use the path — dharma, meditation, study, contemplation — to uncover it. There are many pathways and many methods, but the essential point holds: it’s there.

Bodhicitta is part of that Buddha nature. It’s already present to some degree, just covered. And on the pathways of Buddhadharma we use various practices to help bring it out. One of those methods is simply talking about it, the way we’re doing here — explaining it, and offering practices that help foster it.

Two sides of one coin

On the relative level, we usually connect with this awakened mind in two ways: aspirational bodhicitta and engaging bodhicitta. There is also what’s called absolute bodhicitta, which is the wisdom side — the teachings on non-duality, or emptiness. These aren’t two separate things. They’re a coin with two faces: the ultimate and the relative.

In most traditional paths we practice both, because both are useful, and both lead to the awakening of the same thing. Depending on our proclivities we may lean into one more heavily at first, and that’s fine. I try to practice both. What I’ve found is that the wisdom teachings make the compassion side — relative bodhicitta — far more workable for me. They let me hold it in an open, dynamic way with myself, rather than a fixed one.

But that’s getting ahead of things. Let me step back to relative bodhicitta.

Aspiration, and getting to know dukkha

Most of what we’re working with is aspiration bodhicitta: aspiring toward awakening for the benefit of all beings. Through the four noble truths as the basis or view, we study and practice, and we come to recognize our own dukkha — our own pain and dissatisfaction, gross and subtle. We begin to see that this is embedded in life. Not in a doomsday, cynical, nihilistic way, but in a way that’s workable. In a way that says: this is simply the predicament we’re in. And from there we start to seek freedom from it. The whole path begins at that recognition.

I won’t say much more about dukkha here — there’s a great deal to say, and I say it elsewhere. But the point bears repeating: we have to come to know dukkha intimately, because that intimacy is what makes us seek freedom from its confusion.

When we add bodhicitta to that, something shifts. We start to see that others are caught in a very similar predicament, and we want to help. Our path becomes connected to theirs. We’re no longer only freeing ourselves; we’re doing this because eventually we’ll be able to serve others in a much larger capacity.

What Lama Zopa Rinpoche showed me

I was fortunate to meet Lama Zopa Rinpoche early in my Buddhist life, when I was around twenty or twenty-one. He’s no longer with us, but he was a widely known teacher, and his teachings are easy to find. I don’t want to put a hard number on it, but well upwards of sixty or seventy percent of what he taught revolved around relative bodhicitta. It came up so consistently that at a certain point I thought: why does he keep returning to this? It must be important. And it is. It mattered then, and it still shapes my life now.

His argument, put simply, was that without aspirational bodhicitta — without practicing and pursuing your own awakening from that perspective — you’re missing something essential, because everything else ends up serving a closed loop of ego. He spoke often about how bodhicitta brings purpose and meaning to a life. I couldn’t see it at the time. I see it now. That’s much of why I wanted to write this.

But the real gift of encountering him wasn’t the emphasis. It was that he lived it. You could see it in the way he moved, in the actions he took. There was very little thought of himself, if any, most of the time. It was always about benefiting others in immediate, relatable ways — an animal that needed healing or medicine or food, or a person who needed the dharma and help uncovering their own Buddha nature. He did both. That was his life. From the time I met him, I never saw him focused on anything else.

He was an example, not just information. Not just words. He walked the walk fully until he died — and he died practicing bodhicitta. He was high in the Himalayas, giving teachings and transmissions to Buddhist communities in the Himalayan regions of Nepal, places where few lamas of his stature go. He was in a helicopter, and on the way down he developed altitude sickness. Other medical conditions complicated it once he landed, and he passed away there. Even his last act was serving others through dharma, through skillful means.

He remains a hero and an example in my life. Between his example and my own practice and study, he convinced me thoroughly: there’s no greater purpose in living than to wake up for the benefit of others.

This doesn’t mean we ignore the world

None of this means we ignore the world, or let it burn. This is where some black-and-white thinking tends to creep in, and it isn’t necessary. Relative bodhicitta includes helping when help is needed. If someone is thirsty, get them a glass of water. And when they’re open to it, we can share dharma with them and support them in their own path.

There’s another dimension to this. As someone becomes skilled in practice and begins to realize bodhicitta and emptiness, they move closer to being a bodhisattva — or they are one. They can certainly teach dharma and guide people directly. But they also become someone who lives it, and that influences others far more profoundly than words and information ever could.

This matters when we’re pledging to live through altruism. We’re not claiming we have to accomplish it immediately. We’re training in what we need now, so that we can live with it and embody it more authentically over time. We can’t force ourselves into it. We have to work from wherever we actually are.

That’s what makes bodhicitta so workable. We can aspire to it and train with practices like the four immeasurables and tonglen. There are many methods for developing compassion and openness, for strengthening that altruistic wish to wake up for the benefit of others. And as we do, our actions in the present moment start carrying more meaning.

Not kicking the can down the road

On its face, this can sound like postponement — we’ll help others later, once we’re ready. But that isn’t what happens. It affects us now. It changes our relationship to our immediate surroundings. It transforms us, and we become better able to serve others in the present. So I’d argue it isn’t kicking the can down the road at all, even though it can sound that way while we’re practicing. It’s the beginning of embodiment.

And how else would it work? Anything we want, we have to get used to. We can’t simply decide to become something else overnight. We have to transform. We have to practice. We have to work with our own dukkha and the mud of our own lives, and grow out of that.

The point is that bodhicitta strikes me as the best way to live and the best thing to pursue. We do what we can. We set the intention before we meditate. We dedicate the merit at the end. We motivate with bodhicitta at our daily work, with our families, in whatever we’re doing. It’s one of those universal things we can apply anywhere, and it brings a great deal of purpose and meaning with it.

Purpose in a material world

Which brings me back to where I started. When material values are placed at the forefront as the most meaningful thing available, and few other value systems are being shown or discussed, it gets depressing. The exhaustion isn’t really the problem — the sense that there’s nothing else on offer is.

But there is. There are many other things. Some of them are quite basic: living with more love, living with more kindness, caring for our families, our friends, our communities. And if we want to care for them in a much larger way — not separate from the care we already offer day to day — we can practice bodhicitta.

Buddhists generally understand bodhicitta as a training that unfolds over many lifetimes rather than a single one. But we have to start somewhere. So my view is: why not do both? Why not help family, friends, and communities in whatever material way we can, and also develop bodhicitta, making the aspiration to benefit them on a much grander scale by going inward and uncovering our own Buddha nature. Because in uncovering it, we become a path by which others can uncover theirs.

Closing

There’s far more to say here, because bodhicitta really is the whole thing. It’s a large enough topic that you’ll find beautiful teachings on it from many great masters, and I’ve covered it elsewhere in more depth.

It took me some years to arrive at real confidence that this is the best way I could use my time in this body and this life. I don’t expect anyone to take that on faith, and I’m not expecting instant enthusiasm. But I’d encourage giving it room. Especially when we’re on the cushion, motivating with bodhicitta genuinely changes the process of what we’re doing — and over time, it changes more than the practice.

The original of this piece lives on my site: Bodhicitta and the Question of Purpose

Most of my writing goes out by email, every other Saturday — reflections from my own practice, and whatever I’m currently teaching. If you’d like it, you can sign up here. New subscribers get a few of my most loved guided meditations to start.

I want to offer a different reading of the same situation. Maybe the body just needs to be attended to — the speediness in particular, the overactivation that’s fueling all that thinking. For me that shift was the whole thing. It moved the problem from something is wrong with me to there’s an imbalance here, and those are very different places to sit down from.

What follows is one approach among many. There are a lot of ways to work with distraction in meditation, and if this one doesn’t resonate, others are easy to find. This is the one I tend to reach for when someone describes not just a busy mind but a lot of anxiety and overwhelm living in the body.

Where this comes from

I didn’t invent this. You can find it across most Indic traditions, where there’s an understanding of an underlying energy body sitting between the physical body and the mind. I won’t go far into that here, because I know it turns some people off. In the West we tend to translate it into the language of the nervous system, and that’s fine if you’d rather take that route. Either way, the basic observation holds: there are stirred-up energies in the body fueling a stirred-up, distracted mind.

We can certainly work with thoughts directly. We can work with awareness of them — that’s mainly what I teach. But we can also work at settling the speedy energy of the body.

A lot of the modern remedies for stress are aimed at exactly this. Some are more wholesome than others, but through my own experimenting they all seem more or less pointed at reducing speediness, at finding a body that’s more settled. Some people call it a calm body. I tend to think of it as a settled one.

Working with the breath

So: if the sitting is full of distraction and rumination and you’re at your wits’ end with it, one option is to stop pushing harder inside the meditation and instead work with the breath before you get to your main mindfulness or calm abiding practice.

There are many breath techniques, and any of them that work below the chest — anything involving abdominal breathing — will help. Even the simplest version does something. Breathe in and out through the nose, down into the abdomen, expanding it like a balloon on the inhalation and letting it settle on the exhalation. Five to ten minutes of that before practice makes a real difference.

There’s an additional one called vase breathing, where the breath is retained — held for a few seconds on the inhalation, once the lower abdomen is full. That one really helped me.

These days, though, what I mostly work with is attention to the body. It can be as simple as connecting with the feet, with the sensation of the feet on the ground, or the hands resting on the knees if you’re in a chair. Anywhere below the chest tends to be neutral ground for most of us, and more grounding. Give it enough attention and things start to settle, depending on how much speediness there is to begin with.

For me personally, I needed the breath practice — vase breathing especially — and I needed other remedies alongside it. Better sleep belongs on that list. So does less caffeine. These things matter more than they sound like they should.

Movement, and where yoga came from

Movement helps a great deal too, sometimes vigorous exercise. This is the reason people do asana yoga in the first place. Asana, or hatha yoga, came from yogis who were trying to work out how to tame the mind for meditation and liberation. What they found was that moving the body in certain ways and holding certain postures changes how energy moves through it, and the body settles as a result. It’s why even a modern yoga class puts the movement first and the sitting at the end — by then the prana is moving more smoothly, the channels have been stretched open a little, and the speediness has somewhere to go.

Beyond the specific technique, a lot of this comes down to intention when we show up to the cushion. Going straight into mindfulness of breath or open awareness — whatever form of shamatha or calm abiding we practice — may need augmenting. There may be a case for spending five or ten minutes first on some preliminary body work: breath, movement, a few asana or hatha postures.

Support, not self-blame

The comparison I keep coming back to is going to the doctor. If we come down with a bad flu and need medicine for it, we don’t blame ourselves. It’s a flu. Everybody gets one. The doctor names it and offers something to support the body in healing, and that’s the end of the moral dimension of it.

It works much the same way here. Sometimes the mind needs support in order to see itself — to have more clarity, more openness, to cultivate awareness and insight, and in Buddhist terms insight into the nature of existence and how things actually are, so that more freedom can be uncovered. And sometimes that support has to come through the body, through working with its energies.

Something to try

So I’ll leave this with you to experiment with. If the mind is speedy, see what happens when you give five or ten minutes to the body first, before ever arriving at the practice itself.

Then notice whether the story changes — from I can’t do this to there’s just something here that needs attending to. That’s a very different place to sit down from.

The original of this piece lives on my site: Settle the Body to Settle the Mind.

Most of my writing goes out by email, every other Saturday — reflections from my own practice, and whatever I’m currently teaching. If you’d like it, you can sign up here. New subscribers get a few of my most loved guided meditations to start.

The text moves through the entire path by way of the six paramitas, and a great deal more besides. It’s complete in itself — you can study the whole sutrayana path of Mahayana Buddhism through it. I came to it early on, in my first couple of years in Tibetan Buddhism, and between the fervor of my teachers and the popularity of the text, I thought, this is incredible, I have to study this. So I bought the book and read it through — and honestly, it was kind of a nothing burger for me at the time.

That’s a little embarrassing to admit. This is a powerful, beloved text in the Himalayan lineages, and there I was wondering, am I missing something? And I was. I was missing a lot. To be fair, there were probably parts that landed for me early on and parts that didn’t. But over the years — as I studied it more, treasured it more, and of course practiced the dharma more — the qualities of the text began to come out. In this course especially, there are just so many gems. Even reciting it can be a profound meditation on yourself and your motivations: how to develop loving-kindness, how to hold honest regret even for the things you want to change or transform in yourself.

Why I couldn’t hear it

Part of what made the text so hard to receive early on was that I grew up with a lot of what we’d call shame — not the healthy kind, but the kind turned against oneself. It used to be called low self-esteem; we have all sorts of names for it now. My own favorite term for that particular wound — one so many people carry in the modern world — is the wound of unlovability: the feeling that we’re unlovable, or simply not good enough. When I was caught in it as a young person, I assumed there was something wrong with me. But as I searched out paths of healing, both Buddhist and not, I came to find that there’s nothing wrong with me. It’s just a confusion about oneself.

A large part of the early text is what I’d call taking honest stock of one’s faults and where one needs to improve. There are a lot of admonishments throughout. And at that point in my life, I couldn’t take it. It was too much — shame piled on shame — and I couldn’t read it for what it was actually saying. Going through it again in this course has brought a lot of those memories back, along with some reflections I thought might be worth sharing.

I run into this often — with the mentees I work with, and sometimes in classes, when the material is more traditional, framed in the language of Mahayana Buddhism, or traditional Buddhism in general. Here’s what I mean. Until there’s a settled sense that we are lovable — that, as I used to put it, “I’m not a screwed-up person; I make mistakes, I have things to improve, there are things I do that I like and things I don’t, but none of that makes me a screwed-up person” — many of us go on struggling. Our faults, or what we take to be faults, or what others point out as faults, trigger an almost primal sense: I’m not good enough, I’m not worthy, I’m not a good person.

I’ve come to see it less as a psychological wound and more as an energetic one — something lodged in the body. My teacher Tsoknyi Rinpoche describes the feeling of it as hollowness, and he teaches practices for working with it: the Handshake practice, Dropping, and others.

Either way, I want to name that there is a way through. For many years I almost couldn’t hear what Shantideva was actually saying, because it was so colored by my own low self-worth. So it’s been a gift to feel how powerful the text is — how powerful any traditional Buddhist text is — when you meet it with a mind that isn’t clouded by your wounds. And it’s not that we’re bad for having the wounds. The wounds are wounds; we can work with them. The point is that they can be remedied — and these texts become that much more valuable to us when they are.

Who Shantideva was

For those who don’t know the story behind the text, here it is briefly. Shantideva was a monk at Nalanda, probably one of the largest universities in the world at the time. We’re talking roughly the 8th century — medieval India. And it was enormous. You can still visit the ruins; I’ve been to them. They’re near Bodhgaya, in Bihar, and they run for miles. This was a vast place of learning, not only for Buddhism but for all kinds of sciences and Vedic studies — so not strictly a Buddhist institution, though it seems to have been primarily focused on that.

Within the monastic college, Shantideva had a reputation for being lazy. People didn’t see him studying. He didn’t seem especially active or interested; maybe he sat around more than the others. He was made fun of a little — easy fodder for the ones who thought they were hot stuff. The monks took turns giving dharma discourses, each offering a commentary, essentially a dharma talk, to the assembly. So, partly to mess with him, some of his peers said, “Why don’t you give the talk this time?” And Shantideva said, “Sure.” They laughed, expecting to watch him bomb.

That’s how this text came to be. He sat down in front of them and recited the whole thing from memory — a work he had written himself. And it isn’t only, as I said, more or less the entire path, at least of the sutrayana vehicles. It’s also eloquent. It reaches your heart as you read it; it opens the mind and the heart. It’s deeply poetic. And once you arrive at the chapter on non-duality, it becomes profound and deep — every bit as impactful, I’d say, as Nagarjuna, Chandrakirti, and the other great practitioner-scholars of the time. I find the story moving precisely because he wasn’t a famous, erudite teacher. He taught from such humility that no one knew who he really was — a realized bodhisattva.

A verse from the chapter on patience

There are so many gems that it’s genuinely hard to choose one verse, and some are quoted often — by the Dalai Lama and others. But since we were working with the chapter on patience last week, this one is fresh. It’s verse 126:

“The greatly compassionate lords consider all beings as themselves. There is no doubt of this. Those whom I perceive as beings are Buddhas in themselves. How can I not treat them with respect?”

Within the context of patience, Shantideva is offering another reason to cultivate it — though we can take it further still. What struck me is how often I catch myself limiting other people: reading someone in a single moment by their body language, their words, the way they look. You know the old line, “Don’t judge a book by its cover”? I find myself doing exactly that. Part of my practice is to notice it, and to challenge or transform it on the spot, if I can.

No one higher, no one lower

This verse gave me another way to do that. First, there’s the reminder that the Buddhas — those who are truly enlightened and free — don’t hold themselves as higher. They don’t carry the thought of higher or lower at all; if they did, they wouldn’t be enlightened. So for those of us who practice traditional Buddhism and aspire to awakening, it raises a real question: what are we actually aspiring to? Among other things, we’re aspiring to be no one — not non-existent, but no one special, no one higher or lower than anyone else, just here. So when I notice myself feeling higher or lower than someone, however it arises, two things are true: it isn’t accurate, and it isn’t even what the Buddhas experience. And since I aspire toward Buddhahood — well, let’s work with that. Not that I’m bad, or wrong, or screwed up. Just that this way of thinking, this belief, is what’s at fault. So how do I begin, slowly, to correct it?

Seeing others as Buddhas in training

But it’s the second half of the verse that really got me: “Those whom I perceive as beings are Buddhas in themselves. How can I not treat them with respect?” This is something else entirely. What if we saw other beings — including the ones we don’t like — as Buddhas in training, potential Buddhas? Maybe that’s the more accurate way to put it. It comes from the Mahayana teaching on Buddha nature: the principle that all beings, at their root, carry the seed of awakening. We don’t discard one thing and become another. The seed, the potential, is already within every being, and we simply uncover it through the path, through the dharma.

To me that makes sense. Even when I see someone as truly awful, or undesirable, I try to remember — I like to try to remember — that they hold that potential. They have the seed, even if I can’t see it in the moment. And whether or not that’s ultimately true, what I’ve noticed is that it really does help my mind drop its judgment. It loosens the way I limit a person to whatever my mind happens to be labeling in that instant. The more we practice it, the more a kind of companionship can arise — a sense of closeness, as if the person isn’t so far away after all. They’re not a stranger. They’re not just someone I dislike. They’re someone who, at their core, wants what I want: I want to be happy, I want to be free from suffering, and I know they want that too. Even when it’s never spoken, it shows in how we behave.

So this isn’t only something lovely to think about. It’s a practice — something we can cultivate, something we can put real energy into. When we catch ourselves limiting someone, through mindfulness, we can simply think: this is a Buddha, a Buddha in potential. They hold the full capacity, as I do, as anyone does, to awaken. And a kind of reverence can rise up — even, I’d say, a sense of sacredness. There’s a sacredness in our existence together, in being alive on this earth at the same time.

The work goes both ways

When I’m limiting myself — caught in some belief or delusion about whether I’m good or bad — it’s that much easier to fall into delusion about someone else. So the question becomes: how do we open the mind? How do we stop reifying and constricting around the belief? I find the work runs both directions. Self-honesty and open-mindedness toward ourselves make it easier to be open-minded toward others, and the reverse is true as well. It’s all connected here.

If you haven’t read The Way of the Bodhisattva yet, I’d encourage you to pick it up. It’s wonderful, and you’ll find it in print and online in many forms. And the next time you catch yourself sizing someone up, deciding who they are from the cover, you might try holding the question Shantideva leaves us with: what if this, too, is a Buddha?

The original of this piece lives on my site: The Teaching I Wasn’t Ready For.

Most of my writing goes out by email, every other Saturday — reflections from my own practice, and whatever I’m currently teaching. If you’d like it, you can sign up here. New subscribers get a few of my most loved guided meditations to start.

I want to be honest right from the start: I’m a pretty lazy person by my own admission. And whenever we’re looking at our own habit patterns around something like this, we have to be gentle. We have to be compassionate. The teaching isn’t here to criticize me, and it’s not here to criticize you. It’s here to point something out so we can become more skillful in our practice — so we can grow, so we can transform, and so we can move closer to peace and freedom. I want to say that right off the bat, because whenever we’re studying something that involves looking at our own behaviors, it can easily tip into too much self-critique. And as it happens, that’s actually the third type of laziness. So we’ll get there.

Setting the Context

The Tibetan word for laziness is le lo. It comes from a Sanskrit root that, honestly, I don’t know how to pronounce — so I’ll stick with the Tibetan. Le lo refers specifically to a kind of spiritual laziness, a lethargic relationship to virtue and practice.

That’s already an interesting distinction. We’re not just talking about general laziness in life, though of course you can apply these teachings broadly. What le lo is really pointing to is a lethargic relationship to the practice of virtue — to dharma, in the sense of that which removes suffering and brings more wakefulness.

This matters because we might judge ourselves or others for laziness in ways that miss the point entirely. To flip it around: some people might think meditators are incredibly lazy because they just sit there all day. But from the perspective of this teaching, they may be among the least lazy people around. What we’re really talking about here is the paramita of joyful effort — virya — and sometimes we have to rethink what we consider lazy versus what we consider diligent.

So with that context established, we’re talking about a spiritual laziness, a lack of interest in virtue and practice — the kind of practice that liberates ourselves and others and leads to a more lasting happiness and peace.

The Three Types

Let me name all three, and then we’ll go into each one.

The first is what we’d normally think of as laziness in the modern Western world: procrastination, lethargy. I’ll meditate tomorrow. I’m too tired right now. I’d rather sit on the couch and watch Netflix and eat chips. We all know this one.

The second is the surprise for most people. This is the laziness of busyness — which is something of a modern epidemic. We’re often taught that our worth is tied to how busy we are, how much we’re doing, how much we’re accomplishing.

The third is discouragement — self-deprecation, too much self-critique, low self-worth. I can’t do this. I’m not good enough. This is also considered laziness here, and for the same reason as the others: it blocks our effort toward the practice of virtue, toward the practices that lead us to more peace and freedom.

That’s the brief introduction. Now let’s unpack each one.

Type One: Procrastination

I don’t think we need to linger here — we all recognize this one. In traditional Buddhist teachings, it’s often described as attachment to sleep, comfort, and pleasure.

But the antidote is important, and the main one is contemplating impermanence. When we really sit with impermanence, we start to see that things are changing all the time, that once a moment has passed, it’s gone. And of course, our lives are finite. There’s a timer ticking, and none of us know when it will stop. A lot of us assume we’ll age gracefully, retire, have grandchildren — and yet many people save for retirement and never actually get to enjoy it. That’s just reality. In Buddhism, this isn’t a dark truth; it’s just a truth. It’s not light or dark — it just is.

In the context of laziness, when we forget this, it’s easy to sit around and say, “I’ll do it tomorrow. I’ll work with that challenging emotion later.” But when we meditate on impermanence and death, it creates a sobriety — not morbidness, but sobriety. We start to realize: I don’t actually know if I’ll have that chance later, so why not do it now? What’s actually worthwhile?

A small sidebar here: we also need to take breaks. That’s worth saying in the same breath, especially given what we’re about to discuss with type two. Consciously resting — deciding, “I need a break, I’m going to eat chips on the couch, and then I’m going back to practice” — that is actually part of virya. That’s part of joyful effort.

I’ll also add an antidote from my own journey that may or may not apply to you: an obsession with encountering truth. In Buddhism, truth isn’t something you arrive at through accumulating nice ideas — it’s something you uncover in meditation, through continually investigating how things exist. Are they permanent or impermanent? Solid and unchanging, or interdependent? That pursuit brings me energy and joy. Sometimes I need a break from it, or life and emotions get overwhelming. But that pursuit inspires me. So beyond impermanence and death, I’d encourage you to find some piece of dharma — a teaching, a practice, a question — that lights something up for you and brings you back to the cushion.

Type Two: Busyness

This type is usually described as excessive engagement in worldly activity — spending too much of our time, energy, and worry on very temporary things.

I should be careful here, because this can be taken to an extreme. The Buddha didn’t advise lay practitioners to quit everything. For those who choose monastic or yogi life, fine — that’s a different path. But for his non-monastic followers, the Buddha actually taught extensively on how to be ethical in business, how to think about money and sufficiency, how to consider supporting others. So we have to be discerning: when does ordinary engagement become the laziness of busyness?

For me, it really comes down to avoidance. I can find myself endlessly creating tasks to do because I want to avoid boredom, or avoid a difficult conversation, or avoid meditating. That’s what this is pointing to — the busyness that is really about avoidance. We can see this in workaholic tendencies, or in the drive for endless accomplishment. There’s nothing inherently wrong with accomplishing things; it’s when it becomes excessive, when it’s mainly functioning to keep us away from virtue or dharma practice, that it becomes this kind of laziness.

I want to point something out that’s a little harder to see: this can also happen to dharma practitioners. The easiest place to hide is often behind virtue. It can look like we’re being a genuinely dharmic person, a dedicated meditator — but in actuality, we’re running away from our own mind. That’s happened to me. I can’t speak to anyone else’s internal experience, but I’m pretty sure it happens to others too. We can look very much like a spiritual person while actually just being busy all the time.

So what’s the antidote? A few things from the traditional teachings: contemplating the nature of samsara — recognizing that worldly activity is literally endless, and that busyness never actually delivers what we’re after. When we step back and ask, What do I actually want to accomplish? What will be most worthwhile? — that can loosen things up. And ultimately, the point is to cultivate the kind of joyful effort that’s willing to look at the nature of mind, to see where we’re bound, and to genuinely want to wake up from that — for our own sake and for the benefit of others.

Type Three: Discouragement

I’ve really struggled with this one. It’s the sense of I can’t do this. Other people are good at this — I’m not. I’m too angry, too attached, too distracted. Sometimes this can feel like honesty or humility, and I think genuine honesty matters. But there’s a tone where it curdles into avoidance, where we’re really just using it as an excuse rather than working step by step.

Nobody says we have to be good at meditation or dharma practice or working with our minds. This work is intense when we’re actually doing it, because we’re looking at all the problems internally. So we need to pace ourselves. We need to go step by step. Not from zero to a hundred — just from zero to one or two or three. If we feel down on ourselves, if we feel unworthy, if we’re constantly comparing ourselves to others, it can solidify into this third type of laziness.

The main antidote I’d recommend here is studying and reflecting on Buddha nature. This isn’t really something you arrive at through a single technique — you encounter it through meditating on nondual wisdom, on emptiness, on bodhicitta. But the core perspective is this: fundamentally, the nature of our mind is neither good nor bad, and underneath everything, it’s free in a way we don’t normally experience. And that freedom has compassion embedded in it. When we meditate on this — or even just study and reflect on it — we start to sense that there is a fundamental openness available to us, and that openness isn’t something we have to achieve. It’s not a medal or a title granted by someone else. It’s completely related to our own experience, to what the nature of mind actually is.

Some teachers call this basic goodness. But by “goodness” here, they don’t mean good as opposed to bad — the word “basic” is there precisely because it’s beyond that distinction. It can be a bit of a deep dive at first, but I really encourage you to explore what Buddha nature means. There are a lot of teachings and texts on it, and I talk about it quite a bit elsewhere on the site. Just search and you’ll find plenty.

The other thing that helps with discouragement — and this is more practical — is simply taking small steps and letting those steps build a sense of capacity. When people I work with fall off their regular practice, the thing I always recommend is this: just practice for a short amount of time, but do it every day. That consistency keeps the energy alive. It keeps us from spiraling into self-critique or losing our sense of connection to the practice. Sometimes the most important thing is just to keep taking small steps toward growing our capacity and our confidence.

Wrapping Up

These three types of laziness — procrastination, busyness, and discouragement — really do pervade a lot of our experience. As with any dharma teaching, the point isn’t that you shouldn’t have these. It’s: look at them. Notice where they might be present in your life. And generally, the antidote is virya — joyful effort, which is the direct antithesis of all three.

Instead of self-deprecation, little by little we grow our confidence, reflecting on Buddha nature and studying it. When it comes to busyness, we take some stock — there are obvious responsibilities we need to tend to, but we can ask, when is enough enough? And with procrastination, we learn to recognize the difference between genuine rest and when it tips into avoidance, and we try to be a little more diligent there.

There’s so much more to say on each of these. This piece is really just a way in. If something here resonates — or if you notice one of the three showing up more than the others in your own life — I’d love to hear about it.

The original of this piece lives on my site: Three Types of Laziness That Block Your Practice.

Most of my writing goes out by email, every other Saturday — reflections from my own practice, and whatever I’m currently teaching. If you’d like it, you can sign up here. New subscribers get a few of my most loved guided meditations to start.

You’re Not Having More Thoughts. You’re Just Looking.

One of the most common complaints from newer meditators goes something like: “I can’t meditate. I have too many thoughts.” Here’s what’s actually happening.

Think about murky water. From the surface, you can’t see much. But drop a camera down there and suddenly you’re seeing pieces of wood, old fishing poles, maybe a fish — maybe even an alligator. The stuff was always there. You just weren’t looking.

That’s meditation. We’re pointing a camera into the murky water of our mind. The thoughts were always happening. We’re just now conscious of them. And here’s the good news: the more you look, the less murky it gets. That’s one of the real benefits of practice — clarity comes from looking, not from avoiding.

So if you’re sitting down to meditate and noticing a lot of mental noise, that’s not a sign you’re doing it wrong. It’s actually a sign you’re doing it right. You’ve pointed the mirror in the right direction.

Thoughts, Emotions, and Deeper Waters

As we go further into practice, it’s not just thoughts we encounter — we start touching emotional content. Difficult feelings, old habit patterns, sometimes even trauma. Emotions tend to feel more intense than thoughts because there’s a physical, energetic component to them. They live in the body, not just the head.

But the same principle applies. This material isn’t showing up because meditation is making things worse. It’s showing up because you’re finally in a position to see it clearly.

And importantly — this is not fundamentally who you are. These patterns, emotions, and mental habits are more like a film being projected on a screen. They’re shaped by our conditioning, our beliefs, our habitual ways of viewing ourselves and the world. That’s actually good news, because what gets projected can change. The movie isn’t fixed.

What To Do When It Feels Overwhelming

So what do we do when difficult material comes up and it starts to feel like too much?

The first thing I’d suggest is setting an intention before you sit. This matters more than most people realize. Without a conscious intention, an unconscious one takes over — and for a lot of meditators, that unconscious intention is some version of: I want peace. I want these uncomfortable thoughts and feelings gone.

But that’s not how peace works. Peace doesn’t come from getting rid of thoughts and emotions. It comes from knowing their nature.

That’s where love and compassion come in — not as abstract spiritual concepts, but as a practical orientation. Love here doesn’t mean “I love myself, so I shouldn’t have to experience difficult things.” It means bringing warmth and care toward whatever is actually happening, including the uncomfortable stuff. And compassion, in this sense, is a willingness to be with discomfort — combined with a genuine wish to be free from unnecessary suffering.

Being free doesn’t require your thoughts and emotions to disappear. Real freedom starts with creating a little space between you and your reaction. From that space, you can begin to see into the nature of what’s arising.

Seeing Clearly: The Three Things to Look For

When we look at thoughts or emotions with some stability and openness, we’re generally looking to see three things.

The first is impermanence — thoughts and emotions are constantly changing. They’re not fixed, permanent things, even when they feel that way.

The second is what the Buddhist tradition calls dukkha — in this context, a kind of confusion or misperception. We’re often reacting to a distorted version of what’s actually happening.

The third is the non-dual nature of experience — meaning these difficult states aren’t being imposed on us purely by outside forces. They depend heavily on our own beliefs, interpretations, and habit patterns. This isn’t about blaming ourselves. It’s about recognizing that we have more agency in our experience than we might think.

Take something simple: a brutally hot, muggy day. The heat is real. Your body is experiencing it. You can’t change that in the moment. But how your mind relates to it — whether you spiral into complaints and let it ruin your day, or whether you bring some awareness to your reaction — that’s within your reach. Meditation doesn’t change the weather. But it can change your relationship to your experience of it.

Turning Rejection Into Exploration

Here’s a good diagnostic question: Am I rejecting what I’m seeing in meditation, or am I exploring it?

If you find yourself pushing away thoughts and emotions in your practice, that’s a signal worth paying attention to. It often means the intention behind your practice needs an upgrade. Not a criticism — just useful information.

When we sit down with an intention rooted in curiosity and compassion — something like “I want to see how my mind actually works, I want to know my own patterns more clearly” — the whole dynamic shifts. We’re not at war with our experience anymore. We’re getting to know it.

Going back to the murky water: the goal isn’t for the wood and the alligators to disappear. It’s for the water to become clearer. And as it does, your relationship to all of it naturally transforms. More space. More warmth. More freedom — not because the difficult stuff is gone, but because you’ve stopped being at war with it.

A Few Parting Thoughts

Three things worth keeping in mind when difficult material shows up in meditation:

It’s not a problem — it means you’re looking. The harder material is part of the practice, not an obstacle to it. You also need tools for when it gets genuinely overwhelming — practices that help you connect with the felt, somatic quality of what’s arising rather than just spinning in thought. And finally, keep revisiting why you’re meditating in the first place. The intention you bring to your cushion matters, and it’s worth refining over time.

Wherever you are in your practice, this kind of seeing — even when it’s uncomfortable — is how real transformation happens. You’re not failing when things get hard. You’re finally looking clearly.

The original of this piece lives on my site: When Meditation Reveals What You’d Rather Not See.

Most of my writing goes out by email, every other Saturday — reflections from my own practice, and whatever I’m currently teaching. If you’d like it, you can sign up here. New subscribers get a few of my most loved guided meditations to start.

I came across a post from someone I knew, not quite a friend, more of a former acquaintance. Something about it rubbed me the wrong way. It felt a little like bragging — maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, I honestly don’t know. But within seconds, I noticed my mind had quietly slipped into criticism mode. Not heavy criticism. Just that low-grade, dismissive commentary that runs under the surface.

And then I caught something: my mood had shifted. A decent afternoon had turned a little dark — not because of anything real, not because anyone had been harmed. Just me, my phone, and a judgment I didn’t need.

That small moment is what I want to explore here.

Turning the question inward

When I catch myself in a strong judgment that’s leaning critical, I’ve learned to ask a simple question: Is that really how this is?

I want to be clear about why I ask it that way — because there’s a version of self-reflection that just turns the arrow of judgment back on yourself. “Why am I such a critical person? What’s wrong with me?” I’ve done that my whole life, and it doesn’t help. It just replaces one kind of judgment with another.

Asking “is that really how this is?” does something different. It opens the question without landing on a verdict. For me, in that moment on the couch, something shifted: Actually, this person is sharing something genuine. They seem genuinely involved in something meaningful and altruistic. If that’s what’s happening, that’s worth appreciating — not dismissing.

Something loosened. I was able to move toward a kind of rejoicing — taking quiet pleasure in someone else’s goodness — rather than sitting in the low-grade irritation of judgment.

Seeing the whole person

There’s something else I’ve noticed I often do when I manage to get out of that critical loop: I look for a more complete picture of the person.

This has grown out of years of working with an equanimity practice from the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, where you meditate on three different figures: someone you like, someone you have difficulty with, and someone you feel indifferent toward. The practice asks you to look at each one and question your biases — why do I respond to this person this way? What am I actually seeing?

Over time, that kind of reflection builds something. It creates a natural habit of trying to see more of someone than what’s presenting itself in the moment. And what I notice is that this directly affects the critical mind — because criticism, almost by definition, narrows someone down. It reduces them to one thing: this post, this habit, this flaw.

But people aren’t one thing. They’re evolving, changing, complicated. We’re seeing a tiny fraction of who they are. When I try to hold that — even just gesture toward it — the critique tends to dissolve on its own. And something like compassion opens up. Not pity. Not even warmth toward some particular quality of theirs. Just a kind of openness to the wholeness of who they are.

Every time that happens, it’s easier to just let things be. Easier to settle into some basic contentment.

Why this matters

I don’t think I’m alone in this. Criticism is kind of the lifeblood of our online culture — critiques get clicks, contempt travels fast, and there’s something genuinely primal about it. Some social scientists call it “negativity bias,” the idea that we’re hardwired to notice and amplify what’s wrong.

I only half-agree with that framing. I think what we cultivate is what becomes our bias. If we keep putting energy into criticism, that groove gets deeper. But if we keep practicing something like equanimity — a compassion that isn’t aimed at one version of a person, but stays open to who they actually are — that can become the groove instead.

This doesn’t mean losing discernment. Valid criticism is real. If something is causing harm, it’s worth naming and addressing. What I’m talking about is the reflexive, ambient critique that doesn’t serve anyone — including us.

A place to start

If this resonates and you want to work with it, you don’t have to start with an elaborate meditation. Just try to see more of the person. It may need to be effortful at first — actively calling to mind other things you know about them, their history, their complexity, the fact that they’re navigating their own life with everything that entails.

Over time it gets easier. Because as human beings, we actually have a lot in common. And once you start to feel that — really feel it, not just think it — it becomes possible to rest in the wholeness of people rather than narrowing them down to what irritated you on a Tuesday afternoon.

The original of this piece lives on my site: Why Criticism Feels So Good (And What to Do Instead).

Most of my writing goes out by email, every other Saturday — reflections from my own practice, and whatever I’m currently teaching. If you’d like it, you can sign up here. New subscribers get a few of my most loved guided meditations to start.