The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

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Okay.

It's good to practice with you. So yesterday was confidence and humility, these kind of pairs, the pairs around kind of pairs, pairs around kind of more assertive qualities of mind,

more receptive qualities of mind,

how they work together.

So yesterday, confidence, humility, and today effort and

effortlessness.

So I was alluding to kind of effort, effort we make in the sit, to actually, to feel our feelings, to feel life, and in a sense renounce the need to understand everything moment by moment, to narrate it,

to know its origins, its trajectory, all of this.

Let's take some effort.

And evolutionary pressures have exerted very potent effects. We're animals. It's so easy to forget because I wear VNX, but it's like I'm an animal, I'm an animal, you know. And we're not far from, you know, from chimps and we love predictable things and pleasure and security and

Nibana was not at the top of evolution's to-do list, right? Peace, happiness, that's just one lever that evolution pulls.

And effort is a major theme in the sutas because for animals such as ourselves, you know, great hate and delusion is often the path of least resistance, right?

Like I joke that my habits, my bad habits require precisely zero effort.

Zero. Zero.

Deep growth, in other words, is not always comfortable, it takes energy and we're renouncing less satisfying forms of pleasure for deeper forms of well-being. And that gesture of renunciation takes effort, especially in the kind of training period, you know,

which maybe is our entire life, but it, there may be a trend towards more effortlessness, but especially as we're establishing a practice, it's like a lot of effort. The Buddha described anger, for example, like that this

beautiful phrase with its honey tip and poisoned root. And to, we know the honey, we know the poison, to forgo the

honey takes effort, our problematic habits.

Always have some honey, even the most painful mind states,

there's some honey, there's some solace,

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