What If I Stopped Trying to Be Good?

I’m tired of always doing the work—of being kind, thoughtful, and forgiving—especially when others don’t seem to care. In this episode, we explore the resentment that can build when you’re the one always trying, and what Buddhist teachings like the Simile of the Saw, the Eight Worldly Winds, and the Dhammapada say about staying true to yourself when the world feels unfair.

Transcript

 Hello and welcome to episode six of What Would Buddha Do. I'm Lena DiGenti and on this podcast, I take real questions often from my coaching clients and explore Buddhist teachings that relate to those questions. I was raised in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and have been a lifelong meditation practitioner.

I'm also a coach, a meditation instructor, and a yoga teacher. I'm currently training to be a chaplain in the Master's of Divinity Program at Naropa University. Today's question asks, why do I try so hard to be a good person and accept others when they don't seem to try at all? Why can't I just stop trying and let other people accept me the way I'm supposed to accept them?

This is a really honest and powerful question. Why do we have to accept others as they are and still do the work ourselves of being kind, forgiving, and grounded? So let's dig in and see if the Buddha had anything to say about this one relevant teaching I came across. It's a bit intense, but it's the simile of the saw.

In this teaching, the Buddha was speaking to a group of monks, and it started off with a very practical concern. Somebody asked, How do we respond to harsh speech? And the Buddha responds by saying, even if bandits were to carve you up savagely limb by limb with a two-handled saw, he who lets his anger, he who lets his heart get angered.

At that moment would not be following my teaching. So, as you're being cut limb by limb, if you're getting angry, you're not following the teachings of the Buddha. So he's not, it's important to note here, he's not suggesting that we become pacifists or martyrs. This is talking about something deeper than passivity.

This is about the fact that anger harms us. First, it's like if you're holding a hot coal that you wanna throw at somebody, you're the one who's gonna get burned first. And the place to go for refuge is your heart. That's where your refuge is. And if we start to let other people's behavior dictate our internal state, then we've handed over our freedom.

Others' actions don't justify our unskillfulness. Our path is about our own integrity, not waiting for others to change. Okay, so that all sounds very noble. But how do we actually do that, right? Like somebody's cutting off my limb. How am I supposed to not respond in anger in real life, not just as the Buddha said.

So, he does offer some step-by-step teachings, and he says that we start off by cultivating. Goodwill towards someone who speaks harshly to you. Then you learn to maintain that goodwill even when that harsh language turns into insults, eventually you extend that goodwill even to those who physically harm you.

Finally, we can practice the ultimate test, which is maintaining loving kindness even in the most extreme conditions.

After giving the simile, he instructs, you should train. Thus, our minds will remain unaffected. We will utter no evil words. We will be compassionate for their welfare. With a mind of loving kindness, we will pervade them with a mind imbued with loving kindness, and beginning with them, we will pervade the all-encompassing world.

With a mind imbued with love and kindness. This isn't about repression, it's about freeing the heart, not for their sake, but for yours. It's a call to protect your own clarity and peace, not as a performance of virtue, as a reminder that your effort to not be pulled into anger is not weakness. It's actually power.

Your effort to not be pulled into anger is your power, not a weakness. It's not about being nice to harmful people. It's about not becoming the thing that you resent. I have some personal experience with this. There's this pattern in my life. In work and social spaces. There's this unwritten rule that I'm the steady one, the calm one.

I'm the one who doesn't take things personally. Who sees all sides and rises above, I am proud of the work I put in to be thoughtful and emotionally grounded. I'm not always able to, but I am proud of the effort I put in. Sometimes it can feel more like a trap and less like a path.

Because when other people flake, lash out, or act selfishly, it's brushed off. But for me, it can feel like if I so much as roll my eyes or set a boundary, I violated some unspoken agreement. And that has left me wondering, similar to this person who asked this question, why is the burden always on me to be good?

Why do I always have to do the work to forgive people that aren't doing theirs? This brought up another teaching from the Dharma Patta. In this teaching, the Buddha says He abused me. He struck me. He overpowered me. He robbed me. Those who harbor such thoughts do not steal their hatred. Those who do not harbor such thoughts still their hatred.

Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By nonhatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal, so when you feel resentful that you're always the one trying, you're not being asked to approve of the other's behavior, just not to let it become a seed of your own suffering.

There's a third teaching that I've also found very helpful. It's called the eight Worldly Wins, and it says, gain and loss status and disgrace, blame and praise, pleasure and pain. These conditions among humans are inconstant, impermanent, and subject to change. So the four pairs of. Conditions of worldly life are gain versus loss, praise versus blame, fame versus dispute, dispute, and pleasure versus pain.

And what the Buddha says is that the world spins after these conditions, and when we spin after them, we suffer. So when you ask, why do I have to be good in accepting while others don't even try? You're touching on the pain of praise and blame of fairness and recognition. What the Buddha teaches about that is that life isn't morally fair.

Being good doesn't always lead to good outcomes, and suffering doesn't always mean someone did something wrong. Spinning with these wins creates suffering. If your goodness depends on reward or validation, then you're caught. Freedom comes from seeing praise and blame for what they are, which is passing wins.

You get to choose integrity, not because it earns you something, but because it frees you. The real practice is even when others don't show up, I can stay true to myself. For myself. At some point, I realized I was carrying this kind of bitterness. It wasn't overly dramatic or loud. It was just this steady, underlying thing that would come up.

Why do I always have to be the one to rise above? And really, studying these eight worldly wins helped me recognize that I wanted praise for being good, I wanted fairness. And when I didn't get it, I would get this resentful feeling. It doesn't say it's bad to want those, just to recognize that they're impermanent, that they're wins, they're gonna come and go.

And if I start to let those wants. Steer me, then I'm gonna lose my ground, I'm gonna lose my footing. So then I start to ask myself, what if I choose to act for my own values? Not because it's gonna earn me any approval or any peace, but just because it's who I want to be and separate what the results of that might be.

And that really changed a couple of things for me. This is not to say that I'm there or that I've got it and I'm perfect by any means. I still feel resentment. But when I feel it, I can recognize it and I can pause and see that what's happening is that I'm trying to earn being treated well by being good, and then I can start to shift I'm not shifting into passivity, I'm shifting into freedom.

I'm shifting into saying that I can be kind and clear and boundaried, and I don't need to fix the other person who's behaving the way that they behave. I can just stay true to me. So I think what the Buddha is getting at is that goodness is not a transaction. Accepting others doesn't mean that I'm abandoning my discernment.

I don't have to earn love or peace or rest. And that I can care deeply and still have boundaries. Thanks for joining me today. See you next time.