Stories about effortlessness
2 Buddhist wisdom stories about effortlessness from Buddhist teachers, each linked to the original talk.
- An hour to killStory · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: On a retreat in Thailand, a Kuala Lumpur woman — later a star meditator — gets nowhere for eight or nine days and is frustrated. After the closing blessings, everyone else packs…
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one of these star meditators who lives in Koala Lumpur. She was on one of the meditation retreats which I was given over in Thailand and she was just like everybody else was getting nowhere trying to meditate maybe getting into the breath maybe getting quiet and then sort of nothing happening and just after eight or nine days just really so frustrated as some people are and then we had the end of the retreat. We finished gave all the blessings the meta meditation finished off and lunch was in about 45 minutes or an hour and after the lunch now the buses were to take you back to the airport. Now people were supposed to go and use that time to clean up their rooms but she had another bus or another flight so you wasn't leaving to leave late afternoon. So she told me she had an hour to kill nothing to do. So she thought I might as well meditate to kill time. And that's when she wasn't expecting anything. She didn't try and control her mind. She didn't do anything. Just them doing nothing. Brilliant. That's when she got a beautiful meditation. And I love it when people have their first really deep meditation because they come up to me and and the nearest thing I can describe it is when like a young girl or young boy falls in love, you know, and they just all got sort of sparkles in their eyes and the whole world is beautiful. Oh, it's so nice. It's so wonderful. Oh, life is so good and so happy. Cuz that's what happens when you get deep meditation. You get enormous happiness. And she did that cuz you never expected it.
- Crocodiles sleep with their mouths openAnalogy · Ajahn Brahm
In brief: NE Thailand folk: lazy crocodiles sleep mouths open; flies walk in by themselves — no hunting needed.
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crocodiles over in northeast of Thailand would actually eat, how they would catch enough fish. They're very, very lazy, those crocodiles. And they didn't need to do very much. able to sleep out in the sunshine of the day with their mouths open. And once they were sleeping with their mouths open, of course, the flies went in all by themselves. They didn't need to hunt for flies. The flies just came