Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 105
  2. Trading Up
     … After all, it is your mind. It’s the way your mind relates to your body. That’s one of those issues about which nobody has ever written a book that’s fully exhausted the topic. How is it that we have this physical body, and we have this mind, and they’re related, yet they’re very different things. What is that relationship … 
  3. Your Inner Teacher
     … watching what’s actually going on—one, watching what’s going on with the breath, and then two, watching what’s going on with the mind. Are you staying focused with the breath? If not, come right back. So mindfulness and alertness work together. Ardency is the quality of mind that keeps them all together: the mindfulness and the alertness and the breath. Try … 
  4. The Buddha’s Rules of Order
     … The perceptions you hold in mind are also important. They’re like the subliminal messages they put on TV. They blip very quickly, but your mind can pick them up. Deeper parts of the mind pick them up, and those images can drive you. I think I’ve told you about the time I was visiting someone and he was watching a show on … 
  5. Endurance & Restraint
     … Finally, sacitta-pariyodapanaṁ, the purification of the mind, making the mind bright and pure, bright and clean: We train the mind to be pure in its thoughts and its words and its deeds, particularly through raising the level of the mind. Here, again, think about the fact that the word “mind” here, citta, can also cover the heart. We try to lift our hearts … 
  6. No Resistance
    Sometimes it seems that when you try to focus on the breath, the distracting sounds around you, other distracting things around you, impinge even more on the mind. But that’s simply because when you’re with the breath, there are not a lot of complications. When you’re thinking a complex thought, you have to block things out. The mind is very good … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
  22. Load next page...