Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 111
  2. To Be Debt Free
     … Many people say, “The real work is with insight, so let’s go straight to insight.” But insight doesn’t happen in a really deep way until the mind has been stilled through mindfulness, concentration, and right effort, which are the three concentration factors of the path. There are times when getting the mind into concentration seems kind of dumb. Nothing new is happening … 
  3. Even Shame Can Be Skillful
     … People sometimes ask, how are you going to gain any insight focusing on the breath? It’s right here in the maintaining that you begin to see the mind, see the movements of the mind, because you’re giving yourself a good standard against which to measure things. Otherwise, the mind moves around, and because everything is moving, it’s like being in the … 
  4. The Karma of Meditation
     … As he says, you hardly feel it at all when the results of old karma come, because the mind is in a different state. The other way of preparing the mind to deal with anything bad coming in from the past is to try to train the mind so that it’s not overcome by pleasure or by pain. In other words, you can … 
  5. Learning How to Talk to Yourself
     … You can talk yourself out of certain moods; or if the mind seems to be like a crowd, bent on making you miserable, at the very least you don’t have to give in to the crowd. If you’re feeling lonely, you can ask yourself, “Why do I not like being alone?” See what the mind says. Tell yourself you don’t have … 
  6. A Healthy Ego
     … In fact, the Buddha said heedfulness is the source of all good qualities in the mind. You realize that if you don’t train your mind, the mind can create a lot of problems. It’s like having a Rottweiler in your house. If the Rottweiler isn’t trained, it’s going to create a lot of problems. The second quality is altruism, which … 
  7. Harmony Inside & Outside
     … Get the mind to settle down so that you can see where the craving is, because that’s the problem. As long as there’s going to be craving, focus your craving on the path, on what you can do to observe your precepts, what you can do to get the mind concentrated, what you can do to start analyzing what’s going on … 
  8. At Play
     … You can ask yourself, “Where are you in the body?” That was one of Dogen’s questions when he was teaching how to de-think thinking: “Is the body sitting in the mind or is the mind sitting in the body?” Where is your mind in the body? We tend to think of our awareness as being focused in the head, but there’s … 
  9. The Evening News
     … You get sensitive to when there’s rapture and pleasure coming from getting the mind concentrated. Then you see how those things together with the perceptions that go with them—the perception of the breath, the perception of the feelings, the perception of the body—have an impact on the mind. They fabricate the mind. Then you allow that impact to calm down. With … 
  10. What You’re Choosing to Do Right Now
     … But as we get the mind more calm, get the mind to settle down, we can begin to sense these movements in the mind. We use the Buddha’s vocabulary to sort out what’s what. What’s going on in there? The fact that we’re making choices right now is what allows us to practice. It’s what allows us to find … 
  11. Precept Meditation
     … This requires mindfulness and alertness, which are important factors in training the mind. You have to keep your precepts in mind and be alert in watching over your actions to make sure they don’t go against your original intent. At the same time, you have to develop strategies for fending off any intentions that would go against your intent to be harmless. This … 
  12. An Exercise in Freedom
     … You develop them through exercising the powers of the mind, which is what we’re doing as we meditate. The mind is capable of developing mindfulness, alertness, conviction, persistence, concentration, discernment, goodwill—all kinds of good qualities. The more you exercise these qualities, the greater your range of freedom, the greater your range of choice. But the Buddha starts with basics. He starts with … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
  22. Load next page...