Luang Por Liem: The Ways of the Peaceful - Wat Pah Nanachat

follow the principle of being happy with whatever we receive or
have. An attitude like this will make us feel normal about things.
As lay people we always did what we were used to. We
usually call anything “good” if it was what we liked. Anything we
disliked was “bad”. We’ve been supporting such an attitude over a
long, long time. Now we need to go against it. We have to train
ourselves in going against what we are used to and what we like.
An example of this is sitting in the meditation posture. If we have
never sat in this position before, the first time we do it, there are a
lot of painful feelings. What one experiences are feelings of
agitation and irritation, to put it simply: dukkha. This is the same
whenever we don’t get what we like or what we were used to.
Sometimes we struggle so much that we become worried and start
to doubt everything. This is where we need to learn how to let
things go, how to put things down. We need to realize that, as
monks, we are not part of those people that can arrange things
according to our wishes or ask for things. Which kind of food we
get, for example, is up to the donor. So we need to be able to
adapt and step back from our own ideas. Not getting what one
wishes, one needs the quality of equanimity (upekkha) or at least
patient endurance.
This entails what is called “going against the stream” – to
resist one’s moods, or going against what one was used to in lay
life. So we train to go against the grain, even though it can be
incredibly difficult. But it isn’t beyond anyone’s capabilities. To
go against the grain is something that anybody can do. If we go
against our preferences, we get the chance to understand that they
are merely sankharas, conditioned phenomena, proliferations that
we have been supporting all the time. Giving the sankharas
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