Search results for: "Thought"
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- The Best News in the World… Keep your thoughts connected to the breath. Then evaluate the breath. How does it feel? You might try some long breathing for a while to see if long breathing feels good and energizing. If it does feel good, keep it up. If not, you can change. Try shorter breathing. Or in short, out long; in long, out short. Heavy, light; fast, slow; deep, shallow …
- Strength of Persistence… Just drop those thoughts. They’re not your friends. They get in the way of taking the hand that you’ve been dealt and playing it well. After all, all of us have good potentials from our past. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be here meditating. So focus on those. Focus on the opportunities you do have and be happy that you …
- Goodwill for Safety… The kind of conversation that goes on in the mind has a huge effect on feelings, which is why we repeat the brahmaviharas every day, twice a day as a group—to get those thoughts embedded in your mind. And it’s why we don’t just chant them in Pali, we also put them in English. As an exercise, if your native language …
- Steal the Dhamma… Where were things placed? Where did they go? I started putting them in places where I thought they should go, and if I was wrong, he would just throw them someplace else. He wouldn’t tell me what the right spot would be. But I learned, well, that’s obviously not the right spot. I’d run into other issues as well. As he …
- Murderers, Vipers, & Floods, Oh My!… Then he’s told that five murderers are following him right on his heels with the thought that whenever they can catch up with him, they’ll kill him. So he runs away even more. Then he’s told there’s a sixth murderer, someone who used to be an intimate companion but now has his sword raised and is ready to slice off …
- Doing Your Duty… All they thought about was the virus—and some people ended up getting dengue. So there will be this danger and then there will be other dangers. The important thing is to keep a calm attitude. Remember that aging, illness, and death are normal, so you have to make your mind normal toward them. Barry Lopez talks about being with the Inuit, and how …
- Dignity in the Face of Hardship… That’s a sobering thought. In a society where the emphasis is placed so much on material things, dignity gets swallowed up and disappears. But we can create a space for it by the way we act, by the choices we make. And the good causes—the causes that lead to good things—are things that we all have within our power to do …
- An Environment for Practice… It takes quite a while to learn how to drop those issues and to focus on how you’re creating suffering for yourself, as opposed to what you thought was important. You really need some major shift in where you stand, how you look at things. Right view is defined in terms of four noble truths. It’s basically framed by the question: What …
- Emulating the Truth… And the Buddha called him on this, saying, “I thought you were going to stand on the truth”—which means that being consistent is one way of standing on the truth. But also notice that passage where he says, “If there’s something you don’t understand, ask. Cross-question me about it, right then and there.” In other words, don’t simply jump …
- Friends with The Breath… If your thoughts wander off, just drop them, and you’ll find yourself back at the breath. You don’t have to pull yourself back. This is home base. If your thoughts wander off again, just drop them again. And as you return to the breath, try to breathe in a way that feels especially good. Think of what other parts of the body …
- In Training… If other thoughts do come into the range of your awareness, you get so that you’re just not interested in them. You train yourself to release yourself from them. Those are the basic steps. There’s more, but these are the ones that you work on to begin with. The fact that this is a training means that you play two roles. You …
- Giving to the Meditation… What are you bringing to the meditation? You may be bringing a day full of scattered thoughts, worries about this, that, the other thing, and as you focus on the negative things you’re bringing to the meditation it makes it difficult. Focus on the positive things: You’ve got a body; you’ve got the breath; you’ve got a certain amount of …
- A Sense of Yourself… Be careful with your speech, because that translates into directed thought and evaluation. Even before you’re going to speak, you have to direct your thoughts to things and evaluate them. That’s when you come up with something to say out loud. All too often, though, we don’t put too much energy into evaluating things properly. Whatever pops into our minds, whatever …
- The Kathina… It doesn’t say why the Buddha thought up the kathin, how it came about. It’s in a very unusual section of the Vinaya. It seems to assume that the people reading the section already know what the kathin is all about, so very little is explained. So you have to read between the lines. Just look at the event. The monks have …
- Mindful of the Buddha’s Shoulds… Which is very ironic because the Buddha thought that was the most important thing he left behind: a basis for deciding what you should and shouldn’t do. That, he said, was one of the main duties of a teacher. Of course, he didn’t impose the shoulds on you, but as he pointed out, if you wanted to put an end to suffering …
- The Equanimity of a Winner… It’s effort in the mind, the effort to go against certain thought patterns, certain desires, certain old ways of doing things. Even though they may be subtle, dealing with them requires a consistency and a persistency, a stick-to-it-tividness that you can manage only when you have equanimity to help you see clearly. So we’re trying to develop here the …
- Urgency & Contentment… You don’t have to second-guess the different thoughts that come floating into your mind, wondering if maybe this is something valuable or that’s going to be a great insight or whatever. Just content yourself with staying right here. You don’t have a hankering to go off someplace else. So these are two ways of thinking to keep you focused on …
- Watching Over Time… If you see that what you thought originally was going to be harmless actually ended up causing harm—and this can be from very gross levels to very subtle ones—then resolve that you’re not going to make that mistake again. Talk it over with other people who are practicing, people you trust, to get their perspective on it, too. This one basic …
- The Power of Choice… Even the slightest little bit of thought is going to destroy that kind of concentration. But if an element of exploring and evaluation is part of the concentration itself, you can be in the concentration and pull out a little bit, without destroying your focus. It’s like having your hand in a glove: You can have it in all the way, or you …
- Fear & Conviction… This helps to get your priorities straight and strengthens your conviction that what really needs to be done is to focus on your actions in thought, word, and deed—to develop your mind more than it is now, until you get to that point that the Buddha called attaining the as-yet-unattained, knowing the as-yet-unknown, reaching the as-yet-unreached—that …
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