Wise Effort - Goldilocks Was Right

How much effort is enough? In the law, often the answer is, it’s never enough.
That’s a burnout-answer.But it doesn’t mean we don’t have to work our tails off to do a good job.
 
Mindfulness invites us to work hard, too, but there is an “enough.”
Sometimes “enough” is a few minutes of practice. Sometimes, it’s a ten-day silent retreat. Always, it’s practicing a least a little, every day. 

In the immortal words of Justice Stewart, we know it when we see it.
Louis Armstrong famously said,

“If I don't practice for a day, I know it. If I don't practice for two days, the critics know it. If I don't practice for three days, the public knows it.”  I’m thinking Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Stewartboth knew what they were talking about.

Transcript

Hi everyone, it’s Judi Cohen, and this is Wake Up Call 457. I missed you last week! And, we had an amazing time with the 2024 class of the Mindfulness in Law Teacher Training…in person! It was really something to get to practice together, learn together, eat and play together…all in one place and not on our Hollywood Squares. So sweet.

So today is World Mindfulness Day – happy that! Maybe the whole world is practicing today. We can only hope. ☺ 

For the last many weeks I’ve been talking about the Eightfold Path to liberation. We’re at step six on the path now, after looking at the wisdom elements of wise view and intention, and the ethical elements of wise communication, action, and livelihood. The next three steps are what are called the samadhi elements, or the elements of the path that calm the mind: wise effort, wise mindfulness, and wise concentration. 

Wise effort is a great one for us lawyers, because we are so darned accustomed to being required to make what amounts to a herculean effort, 24/7/365. In law school, in our clerkships, at the jobs we take – whether they’re corporate or public interested or whatever in between – the ethos is to put in not 100% and not 200% but 1,000%. 

I did it. Probably we all did it. For so many years I burned the midnight oil. I worked all day, came home and hung out with my family, then worked another three, four, five hours into the night. Into the wee hours of the morning. Subsisted on five hours of sleep for weeks on end, maybe years. Said yes to everything. Lived on black tea and honey. Crazy times. 

And I was far from alone. In fact – again I’ll bet lots of you have a story like this. Plus the competition! Who came in earliest? Who stayed latest? Of course who billed the most hours? And this is still the case in many offices even if it’s supposedly not that way.

So: I practiced law at a pace that got me where I needed to get and was also a perfect recipe for burnout. And then, before bumping into mindfulness, I bumped into yoga…and yoga in the West: it’s also possible to fall into the perfect recipe for burnout: loud music, pushing the body far past its limits of endurance and even safety. I started out by practicing yoga also at 1,000%.

At the MLTT in-person teacher training this past week, our yoga director and one of my very closest friends, Alisa Gray, called out, “I want to see you practicing at 30%!” I loved that so much. When I practice yoga at 30%, my body feels like a million. There’s suppleness and ease going in, and coming out. It feels self-respectful. I’m treasuring that instruction.

With mindfulness, the instruction is a little different, but certainly closer to Alisa’s 30% than to my first firm’s 1,000% instruction. Here’s one of the legends of wise effort:

Venerable Sona had practiced sitting and walking day and night until his bare feet were bleeding and raw, and still he felt like he wasn’t getting anywhere. He was about to abandon the practice. But the Buddha, who knew Sona was a musician, said, “When you string the lute too tightly, does it make a beautiful sound?” And Sona replied, “No, sir, the sound is shrill.” 

“Ah,” the Buddha responded. “And when you string the lute too loosely, does it make a pleasing sound?” “Not at all, sir,” replied Sona. “When the strings are too loose, the lute makes an unpleasant sound.” 

“So how does the lute sound when it is tuned just right?” the Buddha asked, to which Sona replied, “It makes a beautiful sound.” To which the Buddha said, “Sona, your practice must be just like this. If you practice with too much zeal, your practice will be like the strings of the lute tuned too tightly; if you practice with not enough zeal, you will sink into sluggishness and lose all mindfulness. If your practice is evenly tuned, it will be like a lute that makes beautiful music.” 

What is “just right” for our practice? In other words, what is wise effort – the Goldilocks effort that will enable us to cultivate mindfulness and make beautiful music, or law, or a life? It’s different for each of us.

For someone who becomes a monk or nun, “just right” might mean meditating for 15 hours a day. For a practicing lawyer whose also part of a family and has friends and a professional life and maybe also a volunteer community, “just right” might mean practicing for 30 minutes each day. For that same person who wants to purify their heart and mind a little bit more, “just right” might include going on retreat periodically: sitting in silence and exploring the mind for extended periods of time. And for some of us, “just right” might be taking point-one, or six minutes, once a day or a few times a day, and checking in: settling the mind, the body, the heart; attending to the breath; seeing what’s happening internally and externally; and cultivating mindfulness in that way.

There are texts and stories that remind us to “practice as if our hair were on fire.” I love that image because for me, it speaks to the urgency of practice more than the frequency or duration: we should practice as much as is possible for us, but always remembering that if we don’t practice, our anger and greed and delusion will burn us up. 

I also love the Tibetan saying, “hasten slowly,” which reminds me to get going and keep going, keep practicing, even though it’s a long path: one that will take a whole lifetime to walk, so my progress feels very slow. And that’s ok.

The Dalai Lama apparently practices for four hours a day - that’s “just right” for the spiritual leader of Tibet. Suzuki Roshi, who founded San Francisco Zen Center, said, “If you don’t have time to practice for an hour each day, practice for two.” And finally, here’s something from our shared tradition, from Learned Hand, who was on the 2nd Circuit court for the Southern District of New York at the time. He said, about wise effort and also, about the mind: We may not stop until we have done our part to fashion a world in which there shall be some share of fellowship; which shall be better than a den of thieves. Let us not disguise the difficulties; and, above all, let us not content ourselves with noble aspirations, counsels of perfection, and self-righteous advice to others. We shall need the wisdom of the serpent; we shall have to be content with short steps; we shall be obliged to give and take; we shall face the strongest passions of (hu)mankind — our own not the least; and in the end we shall have fabricated an imperfect instrument. But we shall not wholly have failed; we shall have gone forward, if we bring to our task a pure and chastened spirit, patience, understanding, sympathy, forbearance, generosity, fortitude, and, above all, an inflexible determination.