"The Buddha said, 'Faith is the beginning of all good things.’” ~~from Sharon Salzberg’s Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience.
Today I have been thinking about change - what inspires us to change. Perhaps this was prompted by a talk I heard this week by Saki Santorelli. He talks of the human feeling of yearning, a longing that often leads us to try something new - a new course, a retreat, or some other form of exploration and becoming. This yearning is some sense we have of what’s possible. Saki goes on to say, our yearning is pointing to what is deepest in us, what is already there. We can only long, he says, for what we already are.
The first ingredient in this quest is awareness. Our awareness helps us center on what is wholesome in our lives and what is not so wholesome in our lives and can become very fine tuned. We carefully pay attention to the smallest moment because, as Thich Nhat Hanh said, each moment is the mother of the next. Take care of this moment and it will take care of the next. So we start where we are - fully seeing what is true now. We can’t move from our present condition, whatever it is, if we don’t see it clearly. Or as Billie Jean King once famously said, “You can’t hit a ball you don’t see."
We encounter this seeing and not seeing in our negative habit patterns - whether around eating, playing with our phones or social media, watching or reading the news. Perhaps shopping or worrying or misusing substances of one kind or another. Our less wonderful habits fly under our mindfulness radar and obscure our true natures to ourselves.
Although there are several qualities that come to mind as being important to this endeavor to change our less than wholesome habits - setting an intention, courage, resolve, and patience to name a few.
The most important ingredient may be faith.
This quality of faith is not something we make happen although in many religions faith is a verb. It is our belief or confidence or inner heart that tells us that even when we can’t see the path for the brambles, the path will open up.
There are two kinds of faith in the Buddhist tradition - bright faith which is the faith based on hearing the wisdom of others and resolving to try it out for ourselves. In this bright faith, we don’t give over our will blindly. Or at all. This bright faith is the willingness to try for ourselves to see if this way is helpful to us.
The second kind of faith is verified faith. If we have ventured out with bright faith and found the practices helpful, our bright faith becomes verified faith. Yes, this path is wholesome, this path is helpful, this path is leading me toward greater peace - toward deeper union with my own yearning. Or no, this path is not wholesome, not helpful; not leading towards peace. We decide based on our own discernment.
Sharon Salzberg has this to say in her book Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience:
“Faith does not require a belief system, and is not necessarily connected to a diety or God, though it doesn’t deny one. This faith is not a commodity we either have or don’t have - it is an inner quality that unfolds as we learn to trust our own deepest experience.
The Buddha said, “Faith is the beginning of all good things.” No matter what we encounter in life, it is faith that enables us to try again, to trust again, to love again. Even in times of immense suffering, it is faith that enables us to relate to the present moment in such a way that we can go on, we can move forward, instead of becoming lost in resignation or despair. Faith links our present day experience, whether wonderful or terrible, to the underlying pulse of life itself.”