Balanced Effort: Getting to Know Yourself Through Meditation

By Andrew Chapman

In Balanced Effort, an audio course from Scribd Coach, LCSW and guiding teacher at Wild Heart Meditation Center Andrew Chapman explores the pragmatic, psychological, and behavioral teachings of Theravada Buddhism, and how you can apply those teachings to live a life with less suffering. Beginning with the assumption that this is an engaged practice motivated by effort and engaged nonattachment, Chapman breaks these teachings down into purpose, practice, and patience. He also shares exercises along the way to help you put what you’ve learned into practice immediately.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribd Coach
• Release date: Oct 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781094446448

Book preview

Balanced Effort

BALANCED EFFORT

Getting to Know Yourself Through Meditation

ANDREW CHAPMAN

Contents

About Scribd Coach

Introduction

Effort as Purpose

Effort as Practice

Effort as Patience

Conclusion

About the Author

Copyright © 2022 by Andrew Chapman

All rights reserved

ISBN: 9781094446448

First e-book edition: October 2022

Scribd, Inc.

San Francisco, California

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This ebook is brought to you by Scribd Coach, a new imprint from Scribd dedicated to short-form, inclusive, and insightful personal and professional growth courses written by recognized experts.

Each Scribd Coach course is available in audiobook format or as an ebook transcribed from the audio course — like the book you’re about to read. If you’re interested in the audio edition of this course, or if you’d like to read more personal growth content from Scribd Coach, check out the Scribd Coach imprint page. 

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Introduction

Hello, my name is Andrew Chapman, and this is Balanced Effort: Getting to Know Yourself Through Meditation, a Scribd course.

What I'm going to share in this course are some of the teachings of Theravada or Early Buddhism, the Buddhism of the elders. The Buddha taught pragmatic, psychological, and behavioral ethical practices. In some of the discourse, the Buddha said that his teachings were only concerned with one thing: suffering and the end of suffering.

Often, we intentionally and unintentionally self-generate stress. We do this in our minds with our thoughts, speech, actions, and how we live in the world. The format the Buddha laid out for us to follow is called the Noble Eightfold Path. When you look at Buddhist symbolism, you'll see the wheel used regularly, and the first teaching the Buddha offered was turning the wheel of the Dharma.

The wheel has eight spokes that represent the areas we intend to focus our attention on and ask ourselves how these areas of our lives and parts of our experience are practiced daily. To get an idea, we have to look at our views, intentions, speech, actions, and even our livelihood. What do we choose to do for money?

We include these thoughts in our meditation practices with effort, mindfulness, and concentration. Some believe the Buddha spoke about Balanced Effort more than any other factor of the Noble Eightfold Path.

In Poly Sanskrit, the written language the Buddha's discourses were transcribed into, virya (veeria) is the word for effort. It has many meanings: strength, courage, vigor, vitality, and perseverance.

During this course, we're going to talk about effort in three forms, and they all interconnect as a lot of things in the Buddhist Dharma tend to do; they overlap. As we know, how we think, speak, and act all have an influence over one another.

To put it plainly, effort is the part of our human experience that provides the capacity for all other things. It's the foundation that helps us