Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 104
  2. Cutting Through the Hype
     … This sensitivity to cause and effect is going to go deeper and deeper in the practice as you get more sensitive even to vagrant thoughts coming through the mind. When your sensitivity gets really focused, really subtle, you can see a little bit of craving coming and then going away. Or you can see a particular perception coming into the mind and going away … 
  3. Happy to Be Here
     … But there’s so much build-up, the advertising you do in your own mind as to how great it’s going to be, and then the advertising you do afterwards, how great it was, to encourage you to keep on doing it again. That can overwhelm the mind. In a lot of ways, the mind lies to itself. The pleasure wasn’t all … 
  4. Gifts of Noble Wealth
     … For the Buddha, the precepts are a means for the higher stages of training the mind. They help you develop more alertness, more mindfulness, getting you to reflect on your actions and their consequences. And learning some restraint, because if you don’t have restraint, mindfulness, and alertness, then you’re never going to be able to get anywhere in your meditation. So using … 
  5. Where the Mind & Body Meet
    When you’re focused on the breath, you’re focused where the mind and the body meet. It’s through the breath that the mind is aware of the body, aware of having a body, and it’s through the breath that the mind exerts influence in the body; it can get the body to move around. And right here is where the Buddha … 
  6. Head, Heart, & Gut
     … How do you not neglect discernment? Discernment has two sides, just as our mind has two sides. In English, we tend to make a sharp distinction between the mind and the heart. But in Pali, they’re one word, citta, which covers both sides. Discernment on the head side, on the mind side, is an understanding of cause and effect, realizing that certain actions … 
  7. Don’t Leak Out Your Ears & Eyes
     … Now, restraint of the senses works when you have a good sense of being mindful of the body. This can either be mindful of the breath as a source of nourishment or mindful of the 32 parts of the body, especially when you’re looking at beautiful bodies outside. You remind yourself: What’s beneath the skin? What’s beneath all the coverings? The … 
  8. The Pleasure of the Middle Way
     … With certain pleasures, if some people enjoy them they don’t have any bad effect on their minds, but if other people indulge them, they do develop bad effects in their minds. This is an area where you have to look at how your mind responds to a particular pleasure to decide whether it’s something that you can continue enjoying or something that … 
  9. Metta Metacognition
     … We’re not training only the mind to be smart and intelligent, we’re training the heart to be intelligent as well—in other words, to will things in a way that really is for your true happiness. If it’s just the mind, it’s pretty weak. But if you’ve got the mind working together with the heart, and you’ve got … 
  10. Blowing Bubbles
     … That’s when you begin to understand, “This is what made that thought so interesting or attractive.” You don’t have to stay with the thought to understand the process of why the mind is getting involved with these things. You actually learn a lot by cutting things away as quickly as possible. When the mind is churning out thoughts, it’s like a … 
  11. Determination
     … It’s looking at your mind, figuring it out: What are the obstacles? What’s the allure of the things that are unskillful? What image have you built in your mind about things that are skillful that’s getting in the way? Can you get past those images? Can you replace them with new ones? Can you see that the allure of the unskillful … 
  12. Refuge
     … In the same way with the breath and the mind, you keep rewarding the mind with a really gratifying breath each time it comes back. After a while, the mind will be happy to come back on its own. Then when you’re here, you try to figure out a way to make it like staying here. After all, one rewarding breath: If you … 
  13. A Small, Steady Flame
    A Small, Steady Flame July, 2002 The breath is where the mind and the body meet. We often have a sense that the solid part of our bodies is the part we know best, the part we inhabit, and the breath is something that just comes in and goes out through the solid part we’re inhabiting. But when you close your eyes, what … 
  14. Self-doubts
     … My mind seems to be all over the place.” And Ajaan Mun encouraged him, saying, “Well, knowing that a scattered mind is a scattered mind counts as mindfulness practice.” And Ajaan Suwat took it well. As he said, he realized that Ajaan Mun was not saying what he was doing was good or that he should be satisfied there, but it was a good … 
  15. Delight in Stillness
     … Right there, where the mind is disturbing itself, that’s suffering. You want to figure out why: What’s the craving that’s getting in the way? What are you clinging to? So do your best to get the mind to settle down. Find the greatest point of stillness in the body and stay there. Connect with it and keep your gaze as steady … 
  16. Putting Aside the World
     … That’s how you develop your mindfulness and concentration together. As the formula says, you remain focused on the body in and of itself—that’s the breath—ardent, alert, and mindful. Mindful means you keep remembering to stay here. Alert means you watch what’s going on. And ardent means that you want to handle this well, you want to handle this with … 
  17. You Contain Multitudes
     … Well, the mind is not much different from that. We tend to think of ourselves as having one mind, one self, but there are lots of minds in there, lots of states of becoming. It’s not always clear who’s in charge. What we’re doing as we meditate is trying to put the mind concerned about your true well-being, your long … 
  18. A Dhamma Bucket List
     … So what good qualities would you like to develop in the mind? Those are the things that will help you. Think about wind going from one house to another, carrying a fire with it. The wind is pretty blind. That wind is craving. We know how blind craving can be. You want to have some control over the cravings that come into the mind … 
  19. Meaningful Freedom
     … You’ve made up your mind you’re going to stay with the breath. And whether you stay with the breath depends on your continuing with that intention. It also depends on being mindful to remember the intention so that you don’t forget and just start wandering off thoughtlessly. And you have to be alert to what you’re doing. If the mind … 
  20. Doing
    One of the purposes of the meditation is to get to see what the mind is doing, because what the mind is doing can either create happiness or create suffering. In fact, as the Buddha pointed out, that’s the big problem in life: the fact that the mind usually acts for the purpose of creating happiness, but it ends up creating just the … 
  21. Taking a Stance
     … Because when we meditate, we’re going against a lot of the currents of the mind. You make up your mind you’re going to stay right here. When you begin to notice things in the mind that are pushing you to go away—your old habits, your old desires—you can make up your mind whether you’re going to go with them … 
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