The Buddhist Path of Making Mistakes

Years ago I was leading a meditation session on the topic of forgiveness at Reciprocity Foundation, a homeless aide organization in New York City. Afterward a young man, perhaps 22 years old, approached me. His grandmother often talked about forgiveness and he wanted to share a piece of her wisdom with me, something that he had found invaluable while living on the streets. “One hundred of the same mistake is regressive,” he said, “But one hundred different mistakes is progressive.”

The words of this young man captured my heart, as I have found this to be true in my spiritual journey. If you ever crack open one of my books you will see that half of the credit for the meditation teachings goes to the brilliant teachers I have studied under and the other half is directly as a result of a simple fact: If there is a mistake to be made on the spiritual path, I have made it and, I’d like to think, learned from it.

We all make mistakes. Even the Buddha made mistakes along his road to enlightenment. After he liberated himself from a cloistered upbringing he spent years literally torturing himself through various practices in the name of religious awakening. That was a big mistake. Ultimately he found a practice that made sense to him, but first he tried out a number of ways of pursuing spirituality that caused himself harm.

I would argue that the Buddha wouldn’t have been able to discern that the simple breathing practice he engaged in was so effective if he hadn’t tried so many other things first and…