Search results for: "The Mind"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. Abandoning & Developing
     … What does it do to the mind, to keep focusing on these particular pleasures? Some of them are perfectly okay. The Buddha says going out into nature is good for the mind. Living in a harmonious community is good for the practice pretty much across the board. But then there are some things that are going to be an individual matter. You notice, in … 
  4. Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
     … What would you like to accomplish in this lifetime? Specifically, what would you like to accomplish in the training of the mind, understanding the mind? One of the reasons we meditate is because we don’t really understand our minds. We need to look at them to see how they process things coming in through the senses. If they process them in a way … 
  5. Looking Inward
     … You find that certain ways of breathing that are tight, constricted, and uncomfortable put the mind in a bad mood. When the mind is in a bad mood, it’s going to go out and look for trouble. Basically, that’s what it’s doing: looking for trouble. But if you breathe in other ways, you find that the mind gets soothed, feels better … 
  6. Wisdom, Compassion, Purity
     … getting the mind to be still; having it centered with a sense of well-being. And then discernment: being able to use that concentration to see what’s going on in the mind—where you’re causing yourself unnecessary suffering; what you’re doing that’s getting in the way of finding the happiness whose potential lies within. The Buddha wasn’t operating from … 
  7. The Power to Transcend Suffering
     … These things strengthens the mind in the face of suffering. And then there’s the practice of meditation. This strengthens the mind as well, but it also makes the mind a lot more sensitive, so that we can see exactly where the suffering is and then ferret out all of its tentacles, all the little roots that it’ss put down in the heart … 
  8. The Burning House
    The Burning House May 4, 2016 We focus on the present moment so that we give the mind a sense of feeling at home here. This is the place where you belong. Now, for most of us, we don’t live here. We live in the past, we live in the future, and come running through the present moment just for a moment, like … 
  9. The Four-in-One Establishing of Mindfulness
     … This refers to the quality of the mind. Here we’re trying to develop a mind free from greed, free from aversion, free from delusion, one that’s centered and not scattered, but enlarged. In other words, you’re aware of the breath throughout the whole body. That’s right here. Your range of awareness is enlarged. Then finally, there are dhammas. These can … 
  10. Karma in the Present
     … Every time there’s an intention in the mind, that’s karma. Sitting here with your eyes closed, you’re creating karma: mental karma. So make it good. The mental karma is the attitude you bring to something, and that shapes everything you do. You need to practice making sure that whatever the situation, you’re bringing something good to it. That’s your … 
  11. You Can’t Relax Your Way to Awakening
     … You’ve seen that otherwise the mind is going to create a lot of suffering for itself. And the sufferings that come from people outside or situations outside are nothing compared to the suffering that the mind can create for itself—and that’s what you’ve got to work on. That’s the real difficulty and that’s where the real effort is … 
  12. A Memorial to Your Life
     … But feelings of rapture are things you have to get beyond if you want the mind to be really still. So even though they’re one of the rewards of getting the mind to settle down, you can’t focus on them. You have to give your full attention to your breath. That’s what the intentness is all about: You want to do … 
  13. Skillfully Shaping Your Life
     … This is why training of the mind is so worthwhile. If the amount of pleasure and pain we felt in the world were entirely out of our hands, then there wouldn’t be much point in training the mind. But we do shape things. You can sit here for an hour and make yourself miserable. You can sit here for an hour and be … 
  14. The Five Faculties Confirmed
     … And where do our actions come from? From the mind. So we realize we’ve got to train the mind. Training the mind will require seeing things in terms of the four noble truths. Now, the four noble truths are not intuitive. As the Buddha says, we suffer because of our clinging. Our knee-jerk reaction is usually that we’re suffering because of … 
  15. Head, Heart, & Gut
     … A sense of well-being that you can develop, as you get the mind into concentration, can give you a place to stay where you have a sense of strength, where you can withstand the parts of the mind that get upset by having to give up this or give up that, and withstand parts of the mind that are lazy when you say … 
  16. Three Levels of Refuge
     … That means you have to train the mind, because the mind is what gives the orders for what you do and say and think. So the dangers come from within, but the potential for going beyond the dangers also comes from within. There’s a passage where the Buddha says the mind is bright, but it’s defiled by incoming or visiting defilements. The … 
  17. No One Size Fits All
     … Concentration is a matter of finding something the mind feels comfortable with, a place where it feels it can settle down and be at ease. So you have to explore which of the topics can be your home base. Again Ajaan Lee recommends the breath as a general home base or at the very least a good place to go, but it’s not … 
  18. The Desire for Things to Be Different
     … You find that you can’t stay here in this body, and something will appear to the mind and appeal to the mind, and all of a sudden you find yourself there—often without having investigated the surroundings too carefully or taken a good look at what you have to become in order to find that thing. Then there’s craving for non-becoming … 
  19. A Refuge from the Winds of the World
    The Thai translation for concentration is “to have the mind firmly established.” Right concentration, of course, means have it established firmly in the right way. When you think of concentration in that way, then it’s obvious that it’s a quality you want to have all the time. As Ajaan Suwat once noted, when you define concentration that way, it covers all aspects … 
  20. A Heart Bigger Than the World
     … He didn’t look at the world through rose-colored glasses, but he did see that the mind can be trained so that it doesn’t have to be affected by the difficulties and outright cruelties in the world. That’s why we’re here—to train the mind so that it’s larger than the world, to train the heart so that it … 
  21. Rooted in Desire
    When you listen to a Dhamma talk, give only one percent of your attention to the talk, ninety-nine percent to the mind with the breath, right here, right now. Think about the time of the Buddha: People were listening to the talks he gave and they gained awakening. Not simply by listening to the talk—they were looking at their minds. When the … 
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