Search results for: "Becoming"

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  2. Strategies for Generosity
     … You become more and more sensitive. It’s like listening to a piece of music. If you’re humming to yourself inside, you don’t hear a lot of the subtleties in the music. But if you make yourself very, very quiet inside, some of the subtler things begin to impinge on your awareness. You notice them. It’s the same with the mind … 
  3. The Gift of Meditation
     … This way, your skill becomes more balanced, and you develop a range of skills for dealing with different situations. Sometimes the situations are determined by events of the day, sometimes by the physical condition of the body right now. As a skilled meditator, you want to be able to have an approach for whatever the situation. It’s like being a good cook. You … 
  4. Maintenance Work
     … But if you’re observant, you become sensitive to the signs that tell you when the mind is about to slip off. It hasn’t gone yet but it’s getting ready to go. It’s tensed up and ready to jump. When you can sense that tension, you simply relax it. Meticulously. And that way you can keep the mind more and more … 
  5. No Foolproofing
     … The clear seeing, which is what genuine vipassana is all about, comes from trying to be very, very skilled in keeping the mind still and developing more sensitivity to how it may become even more still. What little things are you still doing that are knocking it off balance? The answers to these questions again fall under the duties of the four noble truths … 
  6. Bad Friends Inside
     … The question of trusting other people becomes less and less important because you’ve found something really reliable inside.
  7. Dethinking Thinking
     … This becomes a useful way of dealing with pain. Pain tends to get glommed together with the earth element, your sense of solidity in the body. Of course, that makes the pain seem solid. So to get past that, you learn how to question the solidity of the pain. You experience the breath before you experience the pain: Think of it in that way … 
  8. Suppressed Emotions
     … As for the pain, that also becomes something you can approach with the tools you’ve learned from your technique. Try breathing through the tension around the pain. If the pain is in your knee, you can think of the breath coming in and out right at the knee. Or you can think of it going down the leg and through the pain in … 
  9. The Brahmaviharas Are Not Enough
     … Dhanañjanin dies and becomes a Brahma – achieves union with Brahma. Sariputta then returns to see the Buddha, and the Buddha says, “You left him in an inferior attainment,” and chides him for not taking him further. There’s another passage where the Buddha’s going to be leaving the monastery at the end of the rains retreat. Mahanama comes to him and says, “Suppose … 
  10. Limitless Thoughts
     … The mind becomes more fully here so that you can observe it, so that you begin to watch it in action. The Buddha’s approach to dealing with the problems in the mind is not so much tracing things back to what you did as a child, as they do in psychotherapy. He has you focus more on looking at your habits right now … 
  11. The Four Frames of Reference
     … the floods of sensuality, the floods of views, the floods of states of becoming, of ignorance. These things come flowing out of the mind, and if you don’t have an island, you drown. It’s by staying with these four frames of reference that you create an island for yourself that the flood waters will not overcome. Keep this in mind as you … 
  12. Timeless Dhamma
     … You become sensitive to how your perceptions of the breath affects rapture and pleasure. In other words, what ways of thinking about the breath can give rise to feelings of intense rapture? Thinking of the breath as a quality of the whole body, not just the air coming in and out of the lungs, changes the way you relate to the breathing process and … 
  13. Understanding Contentment
     … They were concerned that Thailand might become communist, and they tried to understand how to prevent that. So they figured they had to study Buddhism—what the Buddha taught—to see what kind of attitudes Thai people were learning from their religion. And one of the things they came across was this emphasis on contentment. They thought, “This is bad; this is not going … 
  14. Endurance
     … Then whatever else is added on just becomes too much. But if we don’t weigh ourselves down, these other things can’t weigh us down. So when you find yourself facing a situation that’s hard to endure, remember those steps in the breath meditation. Be sensitive to the potentials for pleasure, even in the midst of the hardship. And regardless of whether … 
  15. Nibbana Is Better than You Think
     … Questions of meaning become meaningless. Listening to that from our side of things, it doesn’t sound all that attractive. But as the Buddha said, if you think that there’s anything negative about the experience of nibbana, that would be wrong view. So, reserve judgment. Take it for granted that the ability to put an end to suffering would be a good thing … 
  16. The Five Precepts for the Mind
     … Don’t become a traitor to your own well-being. If you plan to meditate, make sure you meditate. If you plan to be generous, make sure you’re generous. If you plan to hold by the precepts, make sure that you hold by that promise to yourself. At the same time, if unskillful things come up in the mind, admit to yourself that … 
  17. The Wisdom of Wising Up
     … That way your intentions become more skillful. Sometimes it’s good to do preventive strikes on wrong resolves before you settle down. If you know that the mind has been obsessing about a particular thought during the day, you’ve got to do some antidote thinking to pry the mind loose. Other times, you may realize the problems only after you’ve started settling … 
  18. All for the Sake of Freedom
     … And if you can develop a sense of well-being by the way you breathe, by the way you allow the breath energy to flow through the body—so that body, a feeling of pleasure, and awareness all seem to become one—that puts you in a better position to make better judgments as to what’s worth holding onto and what’s not … 
  19. Generating Good Energy
     … We’re here to become friends with the breath. You want to be an admirable friend to your breath, not one of those false friends described in the passage we chant every now and then. You want to look after the breath well. The breath needs care. If you don’t pay attention to it, it’ll simply come in and go out, sometimes … 
  20. Holding on Strategically
     … You might ask yourself if your awareness is above the pain or is it below the pain? One way to catch yourself, to understand what perceptions you’re using, is to start asking questions like this because all too often, we’re so used to particular ways of perceiving things that they become unquestioned. We think that’s just the way they are. But … 
  21. Accepting Yourself
     … It’s obvious that we shouldn’t have unrealistic expectations, but the question is, “At what point do they become unrealistic?” And that’s something we’ve got to learn through trial and error in the practice. But it helps to focus not so much on your sense of who you are, whether you’re a person who should accept yourself or a person … 
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