Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 107
  2. Faith in the Practice
     … that the issue is not the body; it’s the mind. You can say that ahead of time, but what makes a difference is when your actually see the movement of the mind: What is the movement of the mind that wants to go to lust, say, or to pride around the body? That first little thought that sets you off say in a … 
  3. Breathing Easy
     … The first thing you’ve got to understand is that every desire in the mind aims at happiness. That’s what they all have in common, and that can become their basis for discussion, their basis for negotiation. The differences center around what’s the best way to go about happiness, and what kind of happiness you want. Some desires go for the immediate … 
  4. Not What You Are, What You Do
     … So instead of being a process of lobotomizing the mind so that you don’t think, meditation is actually training in learning how to think in more skillful ways, how to act in more skillful ways — with knowledge, with an understanding of actions and their results. In particular, it’s training in learning how to distinguish the types of activities in the mind that … 
  5. Mindfulness as a Goad
    To get the mind into concentration, we have to develop our mindfulness. Sometimes you hear mindfulness being defined as simply being aware of whatever is happening, but that’s not the Buddha’s definition. His definition was that it’s a faculty of the memory, your ability to call things to mind and keep them in mind. For instance, when you’re working with … 
  6. Clinging & Feeding
     … It’s because we cling to them that the mind suffers. The aggregates may have stress simply in the fact they arise and pass away, but that doesn’t really afflict the mind unless the mind clings to them. So we have to understand what this clinging is and how we can get past it. First off, it’s good to notice that the … 
  7. Alertness: What Are You Doing?
     … Then the mindfulness and ardency come in. Ardency tells you, if you made a mistake, “I don’t want to make that mistake again.” Mindfulness helps you remember what you did. And then you go talk it over with someone else who’s more advanced on the path so that you can get some ideas of what some other alternatives might be. Then you … 
  8. The Pain of Conviction
     … You’d think that the mind would immediately want to incline to a state like this and do everything it could to protect it and maintain it. But the mind has lots of other agendas as well. So expect that there are going to be some fallow times. You sit down to meditate and the breath just doesn’t seem to get comfortable, doesn … 
  9. In Line with the Dhamma
     … They’ve learned all the tricks that the mind plays on itself and they use them to make us happy to be lied to. If we really looked at our lives, we’d find it really discouraging. We’ve spent so much effort, so much time, with so little to show for it. So we like hanging around people who have the same delusions … 
  10. When Things Seem Dark
     … Things come into the mind and they seem to possess the mind. But you learn how to just be aware of them. If you can’t get rid of them yet, just know that “They’re there but they don’t have to be there forever, and I don’t have to give in to them.” Even though they make big, scary faces at … 
  11. To Make Suffering Crumble
     … For instance, when you’re driving yourself crazy talking about certain things in your mind, focus less on the content of what the mind is saying, and more on the process of how the mind talks to itself, and how it uses perceptions to stab itself, and how it doesn’t really have to—or, how it focuses on certain feelings in the body … 
  12. Your One Responsibility
     … This is where the mind and the body meet. Every intention has to go through the breath in order for the body to move. The things that you sense coming in through the bodily senses have to go through the breath as well before they reach the mind. The breath is like a checkpoint. When things come in, what kind of impact are they … 
  13. Occupy Your Body
     … It’s “concentration work.” We come to concentration to rest, but for the mind really to rest, to have a sense of belonging here in the present moment, fully inhabiting the present moment, often takes some work. The factors that do the work are directed thought and evaluation: keeping your mind directed to the breath, and then evaluating how things are going as you … 
  14. Skillful Attachments
     … And because you can’t teach the mind just to drop everything all at once, the basic strategy of the path is to give you better things to latch on to, and basic to this strategy is the realization that you have more choice in the matter than you might have thought. For most of us, whatever comes up in our minds, whatever comes … 
  15. All-around Eye
     … You’re training the mind on all sides of the mind. If it were just a matter of training the mind to note, note, note, note, note or to scan, scan, scan, scan, scan – or whatever the one practice is – it would be like going down to the gym and just developing your biceps. Everything else would be left undeveloped; you’d be all … 
  16. Love for the Dhamma
     … The real problems lie in the mind, which is why we sit here focusing the mind on the breath as a way of bringing the mind into the present moment, where we can watch it. We turn our gaze inward, instead of outward. What do you see when you look outward? You see aging, illness, and death. You see other people’s issues: their … 
  17. For Your Future’s Sake
     … At that point, the mind is going to grab at anything. So, as it’s forced out of the body, if it hasn’t been trained, it’s going to grab hold of whatever. Again, there’s a need to train the mind so that it can control its urges, so that it’s not pushed around by pleasure or pain. This is why … 
  18. Judging the Dhamma
    One of the first things you notice as you try to get the mind quiet is how unquiet it is. Or as Ajaan Lee once said, a lot of the practice is getting to know your defilements. All these thoughts that come into the mind and pull you away from the practice: There are lots of them. And getting to know them doesn’t … 
  19. Own Your Actions
     … What are you doing right now as opposed to what’s coming in at you? Because the suffering you’re feeling right now, whatever stress or strain or sense of burden or disturbance in the mind: It comes from what you’re doing. The things that are coming in may be the raw material for creating that suffering, but you don’t have to … 
  20. Unraveling the Present
     … So once the mind is still and you feel it’s time to look at the rest of your life from that perspective, look for that issue of inconstancy and stress, to give you the proper perspective on things: proper in the sense of leading the mind to release. Always keep this in mind. The Buddha is teaching us skills to bring the mind … 
  21. Complexities of Karma
     … You’ve got to train the mind, because if the mind changes on you—and as the Buddha said, there’s nothing in the world so quick to change direction as the mind—then all that goodness can be blocked at the moment you die. You don’t want that. This is why we develop mindfulness, so that we can remember what’s good … 
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