Building Character
October 19, 2016
I had a student in Thailand who was always itching to get out into the forest, complaining that life in the monastery was placing too many restrictions on his meditation. And so finally he got out into the forest, he had his own little hut, his own mountain—nothing to do but meditate all day long. Yet for the first couple of months, his meditation was miserable, and there was nobody he could blame it on. He couldn’t blame it on the schedule; he couldn’t blame it on other people; he couldn’t blame it on the location. All the convenient scapegoats were gone. So finally he took himself in hand and reminded himself, “Well, at the very least, I’m learning the perfection of endurance.”