Length: 2:31
Video: Here
Audio: Here
Transcript
When we first begin with the cultivation of willpower, there's often this necessity for most of us to have a blunt, raw intentionality with it. That is that we decide to push through the obstacles that we are facing. We know at some level that we want our state to be drastically different and or just different than where we are currently at. And so often at the beginning, what we have is this pain that pushes us forward. Either we are trying to get away from a state or we are trying to avoid a particular state altogether.
And this is the blunt use of willpower. Over time, the will can be refined and cultivated and you start to learn that there are more nuanced ways to apply willpower in order to pull on certain levers that allow us to leverage our current state and to move a thousand pounds with four ounces, to borrow a terminology from Tai Chi that is beyond the scope of this particular talk.
What I want to discuss, however, is how to get from pain pushes to vision pulls.
And so the saying as it goes, that is an icon of the medicine I'm trying to transmit in this particular talk is that pain pushes until the vision pulls. That is that at first, we have this raw, blunt, reactive nature often to the particular state that we are in.
We feel this, this unease, this restlessness, this necessity, this frustration that often cracks open our current state to move us forward. And it's like a, like a chicken bursting forth from an egg. We need to push through.
But once we develop and mature in our practice, we can begin to develop a vision. And the vision is a higher-order function of where we want our life to go in the long term and what we want our life to offer the world in the long term, both for self and for others.
And so once we have that, what we create is a magnetic north star that allows the daily engagement with practices and with life as a whole to pull us towards the vision. And when we can do that, when we can get magnetic, then there is a lot less effort wasted in the push.
Because now in a sense we have the wind at our back.