Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. Shifting Your Paradigm
    This afternoon we were talking about perception, the way our minds label things, as a way of stocking the labels away in our memory so that we can recognize things the next time they come. The mind has a kind of filing system, a whole set of perceptions for how it perceives things, how it fits things in into different molds before they can … 
  3. The Purpose of Empathetic Joy
     … That’s a somewhat more impersonal principal, but it lifts the mind to a higher state, because it’s getting “you” out of the way. Think about it: What are the attitudes in your mind that would interfere with empathetic joy? They’re all very childish. One is if you see someone who has something that you want but you don’t have, and … 
  4. Proactive with Pain
     … Worries may arise, but try to look at them from the point of view of someone outside the mind. It’s just a worry about something you’re going to have to let go. We practice letting go now, while we’re still strong, so that the attachments won’t weigh on the mind as the mind and body get weaker. We want to … 
  5. No One Size Fits All
     … Although it is true that the Buddha recommended breath meditation as generally the best meditation topic, he recognized that not everyone could get his or her mind to settle down with the breath. There were some people who needed to focus on the unattractiveness of the body; others, on recollecting the Buddha or the brahmaviharas. Concentration is a matter of finding something the mind … 
  6. Skillful Selfing
    The Buddha’s instructions on right mindfulness are basically his directions for getting the mind into right concentration. You stay focused on the body in and of itself—and here, to do that, we’re going to take the breath as our object. You put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. In other words, anything that’s not related to the … 
  7. Deconstructing Suffering
    The mind is always active, always creating things. You see this clearly when you start to meditate. You’re supposed to stay with the breath, and all of a sudden you find yourself thinking about other things, getting absorbed in other thought worlds. It doesn’t take you too long to realize that you’ve created those thought worlds and then fallen for them … 
  8. Skills to Make You Free
     … These attitudes enlarge the mind. The next two skills are that you train yourself in virtue and train yourself in discernment: your ability to see what’s going on in the mind, what choices you’re making, which ones are skillful, which ones are not. The final two skills are the ability not to let the mind be overcome by pain and not to … 
  9. Balancing the Bases for Concentration
     … It’s the part of the path that heals the mind. Many times you come to meditation with a sense of being worn out, at your wit’s end, frazzled, exhausted. So breathe in a refreshing way, breathe in a comfortable way, in a nourishing way. After a while, the mind will settle in, and both body and mind will begin to feel refreshed … 
  10. Right Action
    Right Action November 28, 2007 Today I was talking to someone who said in passing that sitting and meditating when your mind is a mess all over the place is a waste of time. And of course that’s not true. At the very least, meditating when the mind is messy gives you an opportunity to look at what a messy mind is like … 
  11. Thinking About Rebirth
     … If you simply indulge, you’re developing a lot of unskillful qualities in the mind, a lot of weaknesses in the mind. It becomes a mind that depends on things being a certain way in order for it to be happy. The same pattern of thinking applies to other areas of life as well. You think about your relatives. They’re your relatives now … 
  12. Bewildered
     … In particular, we try to figure out how they invade the mind and remain there. When we know that, we can figure out what to do so that they don’t remain in the mind. To give some explanation as to why pain can be so bewildering, the Buddha points out that there are many places in dependent co-arising where pain can appear … 
  13. To Comprehend Suffering
     … Every time you suffer, every time there’s a weight on the mind, a fire burning in the mind, darkness in the mind—it’s in the clinging. That’s what’s burning; that’s what’s dark. So, you try to put out the fire, try to bring some light to the darkness, by looking at the kinds of clinging and also understanding … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. Intelligent Effort
     … So use your imagination to give rise to skillful qualities, to create the mind state that wants to practice and finds it easy to settle down. The formula for right mindfulness is: focused on the body in and of itself—or feelings or mind states in and of themselves—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. It’s good to know … 
  16. Cooking with Kamma
     … But that, he says, isn’t the suffering that weighs the mind down. The suffering that weighs the mind down comes from craving and clinging. Craving and clinging he defines in different ways. There’s delight and there’s passion, which can take all kinds of forms. So what form are they taking in your mind right now, telling you that a certain unpleasant … 
  17. A Slave to Craving
     … The mind, when fostered with discernment, is released from all its effluents, in other words, all the things that come bubbling up out of the mind that make us go flowing out looking for happiness outside. When discernment is fully developed, it frees the mind. It’s no longer a slave to craving. There is a dimension that can be touched at the mind … 
  18. A Skillful Heart
     … That requires a lot of mindfulness. This is why the Buddha said that universal goodwill is a kind of determination and a kind of mindfulness. Determination in the sense that you have to make up your mind that you’re always going to act on goodwill. It doesn’t come spontaneously. In some cases it may come naturally, but in other cases it doesn … 
  19. A Sense of Yourself
     … The Buddha talks about the disturbances in your mind. How good are you at seeing through them and seeing that you can drop them? The important point of discernment is seeing that the suffering that’s weighing the mind down is not coming from people outside or things outside, conditions outside. It’s coming from within. So you look into your mind, try to … 
  20. Settling In
     … You try to notice the movements of the mind as it settles in and as it leaves and as it comes back, because that’s where the process of desire, passion, and clinging will play itself out. That’s where you’ll see it. So when the mind leaves, gets distractible, don’t get flustered when you realize that it’s happened. Just notice … 
  21. All Eye
     … There’ll be thoughts in the back of the mind, saying, “This is stupid. Nothing’s happening.” Well, nothing has to happen for the time being. It’s good to get the mind used to being in this state, so that when it leaves this state, it can see things clearly as the mind begins to start thinking about things again. You can see … 
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