Search results for: "Persistence"
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- Good Friends Inside… This is a lot of what’s required for persistence, for discipline. It’s not just gritting your teeth and bearing with it. It’s learning how to make it entertaining, how to make it enjoyable, how to get your spirits up as you stick with the work. You find that once you can do this, you’ve learned some very important skills. These …
- Strength Training… The Buddha talks of the path as a path of strength, and the strengths of the mind are conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. The Buddha has one way of formulating the path in these five terms. He himself often compares the path of practice to various skills, and some of them have to do with strength. The skillful meditator is one who can …
- Don’t Worry, Be Focused… conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. You’ve got to find your energy here, and the energy starts with your understanding, understanding that your actions matter. That’s what conviction is all about, and that can make a difference. But there are some areas where your actions can’t make a difference. That’s where you have to drop any worries you might have …
- How to Think about Death… There’s generosity, there’s virtue, there’s renunciation—the ability to step back from sensual pleasures and find a higher level of pleasure in a concentrated mind—discernment, persistence—your powers of endurance—truth, determination, goodwill, equanimity. These are things of lasting value. They might not be as hard as the hardwood of release, but at least they’re not just twigs and …
- Driving Lessons… your *persistence. *You just keep at it. Whatever is skillful, you try to nourish and encourage; whatever is unskillful coming up in the mind, you try to let it go. The third quality is intentness: You give full attention to what you’re doing. That’s why the Buddha says to put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. Whatever is happening …
- In Cahoots with Your Defilements… Because even though it takes time, it takes energy, it takes persistence, commitment, it gets us out of suffering. It’s the kind of friend who doesn’t simply go along with our moods but actually points out what’s useful to us. As the Buddha said, that’s a sign of a true friend. He doesn’t simply flatter you but points out …
- The Fourth Frame of Reference… mindfulness, analysis of qualities, and persistence. Mindfulness is what helps you remember to look for what’s skillful and unskillful; analysis of qualities—which is nurtured by appropriate attention—is what enables you to recognize skillful and unskillful qualities as they arise; and persistence is what carries through with the desire to develop the skillful and abandon the unskillful ones. Analysis of qualities actually …
- Heedfulness & Confidence… generosity, virtue, renunciation, discernment, persistence, endurance, truth, determination, goodwill, equanimity. These qualities are all skills that we can develop. And then these skills enable us to deal with whatever comes up in a way that doesn’t cause suffering for ourselves or other people. So we should have some confidence in them as we develop them. Now the question is, how do we make …
- The Path to the Top… Conviction is like one of the rafters, as are persistence, mindfulness, and concentration. Only when you have discernment, which is the ridge pole, is the frame for the roof secure. So the only way you can know the truth of the teaching is to put it to the test until discernment arises—and it has to be a rigorous test. As Ajaan Lee once …
- The Brightness of Life… Or if something good is there, what you can do to maintain it? That leads immediately to the next quality, which is persistence, i.e., right effort. As we chanted just now, you try to generate the desire to make sure that unskillful qualities don’t arise. And you do that by developing skillful qualities. Once unskillful qualities have arisen, what can you do …
- Meaning Through Perfections… As you’re meeting up with challenges, you have to develop the perfection of determination, the perfections of persistence and endurance, the perfection of truthfulness. Every way in which you develop good qualities like this, you’re taking one more step toward awakening. The important thing, though, is that you’re guided by discernment. After all, when you look at the perfections, you can …
- Simple & Basic… That’s persistence. Then there’s intentness, looking very, very carefully at what you’re doing, not sloughing over the details. And then finally, powers of analysis: checking up on how things are going with a very clear sense of what counts as skillful and what doesn’t. Work on these things—keep it basic—these four bases of success, and you find the …
- Being Right… You had to be sincere and persistent—the feeling being that if you’d showed that sincerity and that persistence, you’d be a good candidate to learn the Dhamma. This is a lesson that gets taught from an early age. In Japan they have a little doll. When you knock it over, it rights itself. You knock it over again, and it turns …
- But Not Sick in Mind… Another one of the bases of success is persistence: You really stick with the practice. This often means learning how to pace yourself: “How much effort can I put in consistently?” There are times when you need to put in extra effort because a particularly strong problem comes up in the mind. Other times, the effort has to be a little bit more refined …
- Worth… things like generosity and virtue, persistence, patience, discernment, goodwill, and equanimity. Renunciation, truthfulness, determination. These are all qualities that the heart needs. And they’re things that stick with you, in this life on into the next life. This is where you look for value: your value as a person. Of course, it’s not something anyone else can measure, and it has only …
- Kindfulness… conviction, persistence, mindfulness, alertness, concentration, discernment, goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity. These are all good qualities to develop. As for the word qualities here, it’s best to think of them as habits you develop in the mind. That’s because it’s more useful to think of the mind in terms of what it’s doing than in terms of what it is …
- Borrowed Wealth… At the very least, you’re developing qualities of endurance, persistence, stick-to-it-tividness. And it gets even better when you begin to get a sense of well-being with the breath. Even if in the beginning it’s just for short periods of time, the fact that you’re able to settle down is enough to show yourself that there is a …
- Making the Dhamma Your Own… the mindfulness, alertness, persistence, endurance, ardency. Push yourself so that you can see that these things really do provide a good foundation for the mind. And when you’ve seen it for yourself, when you’ve seen it in your own mind, then that Dhamma becomes yours. It’s not just the Buddha’s Dhamma, or somebody else’s Dhamma. It’s your Dhamma …
- Dimensions of Right Effort… The real issues are how you’re able to generate persistence so that you can stay with the stress long enough to watch it and see how it’s connected with its cause. That requires concentration, because concentration is what gives you a sense of well-being inside, so that you don’t feel oppressed or threatened by the stress. When you feel oppressed …
- Balanced Breathing… One of the basic skills you need to learn in the meditation is how to work persistently and just keep at it, keep at it, but not get tense about it. When you can find that proper balance, you can stay with the path. You don’t keep straying off into the woods. You have a sense of feeling at home as you work …
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