Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 110
  2. Papañca
    We sit here just with the body and the mind, focused on bringing them both together in the breath. Sometimes it can get frustrating. The body doesn’t do what you want. It’s not always doing what you want. It gets sick without asking permission. Your voice gives out without asking permission. Your mind starts wandering around without asking permission. It can be … 
  3. Right View: Feeding Instructions
     … You find you’re also dropping a lot of your old ways of suffering – until the mind gets strong enough through the path and you get enough insight into what’s going on in the mind, that you reach something in the mind that doesn’t need to feed. It’s an awareness totally free of conditions. That’s when you realize that the … 
  4. Intelligent Effort
     … It’s so easy to pick them up, look at a headline, look at a website—and then the mind can go running for days. So you have to be careful about what you take in, because it can destroy good states of concentration. Remember, concentration is something put together. It’s fabricated. Its nature is to slip away. So we have to be … 
  5. Put Your Books Back on the Shelf
     … Get to know the mind with the breath right here, right now, with as little interference as possible from what you may have read. When something comes up in the meditation and you wonder what it is, after the meditation you can go and find some reference to it. But don’t let the books run your practice. You want the breath and the … 
  6. Equanimity & More
     … So as protection for the mind, we have to develop equanimity. What’s interesting is that the statement for developing equanimity, reflecting on the principle of karma, has more than one use in the Canon. There’s another place where the Buddha says, when you reflect on that statement, it gives rise to the path. It’s in a sutta where he starts out … 
  7. Infinite Good Humor
     … looking around and seeing that all the things that you might want to think about are not really worth thinking about, looking at the mind’s own tendency to go after those things, and realizing that you don’t want to go there. You don’t want to follow it along. That’s when the mind can begin to settle down and be still … 
  8. Introduction: Meditation as a Skill
    The purpose of the meditation is to develop the skillful qualities in the mind. It takes the same principles that we would apply to any skill—being mindful, being alert, evaluating the results of your actions and being ingenious about figuring out new ways to solve mistakes: It takes those mental qualities and applies them directly to the mind. Think about any skill that … 
  9. Dangers Outside & In
     … Then you get the mind into concentration because the mind needs food, and if it doesn’t have the food of the pleasure of concentration, it’s going to go feeding off other things. This is when you learn that you can’t really trust yourself. Often, when the food that you can get through virtuous behavior isn’t readily available, a lot of … 
  10. Question Your Perceptions
     … It has an impact on the mind. What ways of perceiving the breath have a good impact on the breath and a good impact on the mind? You want to test them. Ajaan Lee’s explorations of the breath energies in the body are very helpful. He approaches them in many different ways. First there’s the description in Method Two, which talks about … 
  11. You’re Already Dead
     … That sense of spaciousness in the mind, when you’re not always worried about losing this or being deprived of that: That sense of space can’t be bought. Then there’s discernment, the ability to see things arising and passing away in the mind, so that you can understand what’s skillful and what’s not, what needs to be developed, what needs … 
  12. Be Heedful & Think
     … It’s to get the mind to thrive. Some people complain all this attention to minutiae seems to put a straightjacket around their minds. But actually it’s liberating. It frees you from the mind’s abstractions. It frees you from the mind’s ignorance. You focus on things that are right before your eyes, you look at them carefully, and you’re careful … 
  13. The Buddha’s Cost-Benefit Analysis
    It’s not the case that we give in to every desire that comes into the mind. After all, so many different desires are clamoring for our attention. We have to decide which ones are worth following, which ones are not. So subconsciously we do a kind of cost-benefit analysis: Is this desire worth the effort? The problem is that some of the … 
  14. Kindness in the Light of Karma
     … Make the mind like wind. Wind blows dirty things around, and yet it’s not disgusted by them. Make the mind like fire. Fire burns disgusting things, but it’s not disgusted by them. Make your mind like space. No one can write on it. In other words, the words of other people or the actions of other people don’t have to stay … 
  15. Just This Breath
     … You may have experience from the past of how long it takes for the mind to settle down. But by now you should have a sense of where the mind goes when it settles down. Why can’t you go there right now? Once you’re there with the breath, and you can get your balance, try to maintain balance. Again, it’s just … 
  16. The Raft of Concepts
     … training the mind, learning how to watch the mind so you can see where its misunderstandings lead it to suffer, where its misunderstandings lead it to crave things that are going to cause problems on down the line. And as for the teaching on nibbana, it reminds you that freedom from suffering isn’t just a total blackout. It’s the highest happiness there … 
  17. Enlarge Your Mind
     … It’s the same with the mind. You can enlarge your mind, expand your perspective, and a lot of the pains and discomforts that you ordinarily complain about will start to seem smaller and smaller. There are different ways to expand the mind. One is to expand it throughout the body. Once you find that the breath is comfortable, with breath sensations that feel … 
  18. Disenchantment
    Try to find a sense of nourishment in the breath, because the mind needs nourishment. If it doesn’t find its food here, it’s going to go looking someplace else. As long as we’re beings, we need to feed. The Buddha pointed out that that’s the thing we all have in common: All beings depend on nutriment. As long as we … 
  19. Possessiveness
     … Now, the wise response to that analysis is not just to hold to the view that that’s how the mind works. You also have to develop right resolve to train the mind so that it can make use of that knowledge: resolve on renunciation, i.e., renouncing your fascination with thinking thoughts of sensuality; resolve on non-ill-will or non-affliction—in … 
  20. Tap, Tap, Tap
     … This breath comes in, that breath goes out, but the mind has run down to the end of the hour, come back again, back to the end of the hour, come back again, many times. No wonder it gets tired. It hasn’t seen what it’s doing. Remember: The focus here is, “What are you doing right now?” After all, the defilements are … 
  21. Determined to Make a Difference
     … To get the mind concentrated, you have to talk to yourself. You keep reminding yourself: “This object that you’re focused on is really worth staying with.” Then you evaluate it to make sure that the mind stays with it—with a sense of satisfaction, wanting to be here. Other thoughts will come up, and you have to remind yourself, they’re not worth … 
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