Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 112
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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