Endurance

§ On the beginning level of the practice you have to learn how to control yourself in the area of your words and deeds–in other words, on the level of virtue–so that you can keep your words and deeds at normalcy, calm and restrained. In this way, the mind won’t follow the power of the crude defilements.

When violent urges arise, you stop them first with your powers of endurance. After you’ve been able to endure for a while, your insight will gain the strength it needs to develop a sense of right and wrong, and in this way you’ll see the worth of endurance, that it really is a good thing.

§ When you first start meditating, it’s like catching a monkey and tying it to a leash. When it’s first tied down, it’ll struggle with all its might to get away. In the same way, when the mind is first tied down to its meditation object, it doesn’t like it. It’ll struggle more than it normally would, which makes us feel weak and discouraged.

So in this first stage we simply have to use our endurance to resist the mind’s tendency to stray off in search of other objects. Over time it will gradually grow tame.

These reflections by Upāsikā Kee Nanayon are from the Thai Forest Ajaans book, An Unentangled Knowing: The Teachings of a Thai Buddhist Lay Woman, chapter “Pure & Simple,” translated from the Thai by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu.