Skillful Distress

What we’re doing as we’re sitting here meditating is learning how to develop the skills for maximizing skillful kinds of pleasure, skillful ways of approaching the pleasure.

There are even skillful forms of distress. The Buddha talks about household distress and renunciation distress. Household distress is when you’re not getting the physical feelings you want: You don’t see the sights you’d like to see or hear the sounds you’d like to hear, smell the smells, taste the tastes, get the physical contacts you’d like to feel. Then you get upset. And for most of us, the way of dealing with this kind of distress is to try to find the things we want, i.e., replace household grief with household joy. That’s when you get the sights and sounds and smells and tastes and tactile sensations and ideas you’d like.

But the Buddha says that the better course is to abandon household grief by relying on renunciate grief. Renunciate grief is when you think about the fact that you haven’t gained awakening yet. You’d really like to gain the peace; you’d really like to gain the happiness and the freedom that come with awakening, and the fact disturbs you. Now this kind of grief actually goes someplace. It’s like the tension when you pull back on a bow to shoot an arrow. It’s what allows the arrow to fly. This kind of grief focuses you on what you really would like to do, and it focuses you on the fact that there is a path to that awakening.

So instead of just mucking around in the grief and joy that come from losing and then gaining, and losing and then gaining, and losing again the pleasures of the senses, you focus on developing the elements of the path. And notice: The Buddha says to abandon household grief by relying on renunciate grief.

And then he goes on to say, abandon renunciate grief by relying on renunciate joy, i.e., when you finally do attain some of that freedom, some of that happiness, some of that peace, through the practice.

This reflection by Ajaan Geoff is from the book, The Noble Eightfold Path: 13 Meditation Talks, (pdf) p. 46.