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How to Deal with Procrastination

Teaching with Venerable Robina on How to Deal with Procrastination. You’ve got to know the reasons for something. If you can’t identify the problem, then you can’t identify the cause of it, how can you ever find the solution? Once you understand the cause of it, it’s clear. The quality called enthusiasm or enthusiastic perseverance, or joyful effort, is the fourth of the six perfections on the bodhisattva path of the Lamrim. They all say that it's the most important. Each of the perfections is more difficult than the last. The first four of the six perfections are generosity, morality, patience, and enthusiastic perseverance. They seem these fairly disconnected concepts but there’s a lot of logic to them. The fourth one is the most important on the entire path, because if we don’t have enthusiasm, if you don’t make effort, if you’re effort isn’t joyful, if you don’t have perseverance - they all come to the same thing, you won’t be successful. You could have wisdom coming out your ears, you could even have incredible compassion, but if you don’t have enthusiasm, if you don’t have this perseverance, this not giving up attitude, then you will not be successful. When you hear about enthusiasm, it sounds lovely, but we have no idea how to get it, it doesn’t tell us anything. We’ve got to analyse it, and it’s really so clear when you do. The opposite of enthusiasm is called laziness, and there are three levels. The second one is what we call procrastination, where we put things off. Let’s analyse them, then there’s no confusion any longer, and we know the solution. The first one is I can’t be bothered. We know that, we are so intimately familiar with that. They are talking very specifically in relation to dharma practice, not in terms of going to the gym every day or washing the dishes. In fact doing samsaric activities with enthusiasm is a type of laziness, but we’re not discussing that here. I’m going to use analogies and examples in ordinary examples because we really understand them, but it’s specifically referring to enthusiasm for practice. The very first point, and it’s really helpful to hear this, the lamas all say, and it’s so logical, the only way you will ever have enthusiasm to do something, therefore not be lazy, is when you know the benefits of something. So if we look at samsara, nobody has to convince us of the benefits of sleep, nobody convinces us of the benefits of our best coffee, or getting what attachment wants, or all the things we know that preoccupy our lives. We know when we know the benefits of whatever it is, we will do it, because we can see the result. Even just getting that ice cream you like, you don’t care if you go to six different shops, you’re prepared to persevere to do it. That’s what’s difficult, it’s easy to see the benefit of going to the gym, it’s easy to see the benefit of nice food, comfort, people smiling at you, and all those kinds of things, in other words attachment getting what it wants. But it’s very hard to be enthusiastic about the long term result, which means to become a Buddha. In fact it’s so abstract, so long distance, even if we see His Holiness, see Lama Zopa, as crystal clear examples of the benefit of this goal, it’s still very hard because it’s so distant for us. But we have to think about it. So what laziness is, the first one is I can’t be bothered. Ask yourself the question - What can’t you be bothered doing? Well it’s really obvious, the thing you can’t be bothered doing, is the thing that you can’t do, that you’re not capable of, and that’s why it’s difficult, because you’re not good at it. So you go to the gym, you are initially enthusiastic, you think about it, you get ready, you go to the gym, you’ve got the goal in mind, and this is the point - you know necessarily it takes effort, but look what happens the moment it becomes difficult, that’s the second that attachment isn’t getting what it wants. It’s attachment to comfort, not to sex, not to drugs, maybe to being seen as a nice person, but the primordial attachment here is the grossest one of all, it’s attachment to our comfort zone, feeling comfortable. If you understand this, it’s a revelation. So of course anything you can’t do properly demands effort, so there’s got to be that point at which you go beyond that bit of pain, you stretch yourself to that next little step, and if you don’t do that you will never change. If you go to the gym and the moment it starts to hurt, meaning the moment your attachment is not happy, and you stop and say I just did the gym - no you didn’t! Because we know you’ve got to go beyond that point, and it’s got to hurt. In other words, you’ve got to go beyond attachment, and that we do not want to do, it is primordially painful to do what attachment doesn’t want. Vajrayana Institute, Sydney, 22nd June 2025.