Energy. It's one of the Ten Paramis, and it's a significant one. Some people have too much energy, which is just off balance, but for a lot of us, there's times when we've got to motivate the energy, which is what this person wants to do. To increase energy, use confidence-inspiring objects for meditation. Rosemary uses that term in the ten-day retreat for the Sympathetic Joy meditation, and we'll be doing some others during this retreat. Reflect upon the Buddha, if you know his life story it helps. If you've never read a biography of the Buddha by all means do it, so you'll know how hard he really did work. When we reflect upon him, what he did and his qualities, it helps to inspire us. We'll remember our own human potential giving us energy to follow that path. Reflect upon the Dhamma, the teachings, what benefit they've already done for you, giving you energy to continue practicing. Reflect upon other people like me and Rosemary who've worked hard to get to where we are and that you can do the same thing if you work hard, this can give you more energy.
Reflect upon your good Kamma. Two other subjects that the Buddha taught in reflection practice was to reflect on your good generosity and to reflect upon your morality. If you've done a lot of generous deeds and developed in morality then you can take happiness from this.
If you haven't done a lot yet, then you won't get that much happiness. So it's going to correlate to how much you've done.
Sometimes I give an example of two people with $50, one person is in Bangkok and the other person is in Los Angeles. They both have $50 for the day. The person in Los Angeles goes to Disneyland, has lots of fun for the day, spending their $50 on all these rides and having fun. The other person in Bangkok, takes the $50 and breaks it up into 5 or 10 baht coins. (Ten baht is around 25 cents.) They walk the streets giving out these coins to beggars. $50. It takes them more than one day probably. They give it all out.
Now they both spend $50 in one day. Years later they're both meditators and they're both trying to purify. The one who spent $50 giving out to beggars remembers that and thinks, "Oh that was nice, I wasn't even a meditator then. But I just thought it was a neat thing to do." And they get a lot of energy from reflecting about their past generosity.
The other meditator may remember spending $50 at Disneyland. Do you think they get joy out of it? No. They may regret being a young selfish person, who wasted $50 at Disneyland.
So who gets the joy? The person who was generous, the person who has better morality receives more joy. What does Joy give you? You've heard me say it before, from joy comes energy, comes confidence, comes contentment, comes happiness,. So if you've done lots of generous actions, if you've developed done lots of good morality, that can actually help give you more energy. So reflect upon it, bring them up in the meditation. When you're doing Sympathetic Joy with yourself, that's the time to do it. What have you actually done that's been good? All those memories can give you lots of energy.
Now in particular, this person talks about in the first retreat bringing up energy, and that's significant. Your first retreat, it was significant for each one of you. I can't believe that anyone would say, no. It's a turning point in our whole life. Learning from books is one thing, but having an organized presentation, no matter how good or bad the teachers were, and having practical application of them for an extended period, is quite different. It was exciting. Buddhism, for most if not all of you, is exciting, because it was kind of like coming home, coming back to something that maybe you've done in past lives, and if Buddhism is true, you have. There's an excitement there, and to remember back to the beginning and have happiness that you're walking the path, this can help give you a lot more energy.