Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. Basic Intro
     … So we train the mind to bring it more under control so that it doesn’t create unnecessary suffering for itself. And as we train the mind with the breath like this, we’re developing good qualities to help with that sense of control: Mindfulness, keeping something in mind—in this case, you keep the breath in mind. Alertness, watching what’s actually going … 
  3. Exercising the Mind
     … You start with mindfulness, alertness, and ardency, and you start developing concentration and discernment. If you really are ardent at being mindful and alert, the mind is going to start staying more and more consistently with the breath. It can begin to relax with the breath. All too often, the mind is like a cat that jumps here and jumps there. If it knows … 
  4. A Mirror for the Mind
     … We’re not training the mind for the sake of the world. We’re training the mind for the sake of the mind. So as you sit here right now, put all your other concerns aside—because the big issue is not the world outside. The big issue is your mind, and you now have the time to focus total attention on the mind … 
  5. The Analytical Mind
    The analytical mind, all too often, gets a bad rap in Buddhist circles, especially Western Buddhist circles. But many times that’s simply an excuse for laziness and mediocrity, not wanting to think, saying that thinking is bad. Actually, thinking has its place in the meditation, and your powers of analysis have their place, as well. It’s just learning how to use them … 
  6. Choices
     … And two, they don’t have confidence in themselves.” This may be one of the reasons why when meditation, especially mindfulness, is introduced to the West, there’s a huge emphasis on just being okay with whatever comes up in your mind. When you’re trying to get the mind still, there will be voices in the mind, or sides of the mind, that … 
  7. The Best Work Around
    Bring the mind to the breath in a friendly way. If you treat the meditation as a war, the mind is going to fight, but if you treat it as a process of creating friendship—developing a friendly relation with the present moment—the mind will soften into the present moment and be a lot more willing to settle in to make itself comfortable … 
  8. Remember This
    Remember This January 16, 2014 One of the really useful qualities we’re developing as we stay with the breath is mindfulness. If you’re going to stay with the breath, you have to keep the breath in mind. As soon as you forget the breath, you’re off someplace else. This training in remembering plays a huge part in the practice—and it … 
  9. Heedful of Small Dangers
     … And look for ways to strengthen the mind, which is what we’re doing right here, right now: giving the mind strength, trying to get the mind to be still and provide it with at least a square inch of stillness inside. There may be a lot of chatter going on in the mind, but you have to learn how to treat that chatter … 
  10. Homage Through the Practice
     … You can also catch a lot of the movements of the mind. When the mind leaves the breath, why is it leaving? Don’t just let it leave. Bring it back. That way, you begin to see how your mind acts. Oftentimes the first lesson you learn in meditation is how untrained your mind is. It’s like a puppy dog. You bring it … 
  11. Solidly Established
     … If you wander off, bring the mind back to the breath. If you wander off again, bring it back again. Go off 10 times, bring it back 10 times. Go off hundred times, bring it back a hundred times. Don’t get discouraged. You’re developing three qualities of mind. The first is mindfulness, the ability keep something in mind—in this case, keeping … 
  12. How Right Mindfulness Leads to Right Concentration
     … ardency, alertness, and mindfulness. Mindfulness means keeping the breath in mind, not forgetting. Alertness is watching what you’re doing. In Ajaan Lee’s explanation, it watches both the mind and the breath to make sure they’re together. And then ardency is the desire to do this well, which means, one, if you notice that the mind has wandered off the breath, you … 
  13. A Refuge in Mindfulness
     … When you can be mindful in this way—in other words, mindfulness as an all-around practice and not just as noting or accepting or being non-reactive, but as a practice in which you keep in mind what you need to know in order to develop skillful qualities in the mind, abandon unskillful ones, so that you can be ardent, alert, and mindful … 
  14. On Denying Defilement
     … So it’s important that you learn to keep this concept in mind and realize that what we are doing as we practice is a type of cleansing. There is this darkness in the mind. Fortunately, it’s not innate to the mind. It can be cleansed away. And we can cleanse it away ourselves. That’s what the luminosity is all about. There … 
  15. Rewriting the Mind’s Song
    What we would call this stream of consciousness—all the words and sentences, the bits and snatches of songs or whatever that go through the mind—Ajaan Mun called the mind’s song. The mind is singing to itself all the time. In technical terms, this is verbal fabrication. It’s one of the things that you notice as you try to get the … 
  16. Admirable Intentions
    We’ve come here with a good intention—which is to train our minds—to help one another in training our minds, so try to maintain that good intention. All of the Buddha’s teachings are a training of intentions. Intentions are food for the mind. Just as the body has good food and bad food, the mind has good food and bad food … 
  17. Above the World
    In one of the talks where the Buddha summarizes his basic teachings, he concludes with the phrase, *“Adhicitte ca āyogo”: *being committed to the heightened mind. “The heightened mind” means raising the state of your mind to something higher than the ordinary state. It specifically refers to concentration practice but then beyond concentration to discernment and then ultimately to release. That’s the mind … 
  18. The Forerunner of All Things
    When the Buddha says that the mind is the forerunner of all things, it’s both empowering and scary. Empowering in the sense that if we want to change our lives, we can start from within. We don’t have to wait for other people outside to change; we don’t have to wait for our circumstances outside to be good. We can start … 
  19. Respect for Concentration
     … When the Buddha talk about the concentrated mind, he called it “ mahaggattam cittam ,” which means an expanded mind. Not a narrowed mind. It’s an expanded mind. That’s the kind of concentration that allows discernment to arise, that allows the factors of the path to develop. Now, your mind can expand that way, your concentration can expand that way, but you have to … 
  20. Questioning Your Unconscious Actions
     … Make up your mind that you’re going to stay right here with the breath. That gives you a point of comparison. When the mind goes drifting off, you realize that it has drifted. Some people complain that when they meditate they begin to see what a mess their minds are. Well, the mind has always been a mess; it’s not suddenly a … 
  21. The Lotus in the Mud
    One of the traditional images of the mind in concentration or of the awakened mind is of a lotus growing out of the mud. In the tropics the mud is pretty rank. And yet out of the mud you get this lovely flower with a very gentle smell and leaves that repel the water, flowers that repel the water, so that they can grow … 
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