Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 115
  2. Adult Dhamma
     … When he taught Rahula meditation, he started off with the images of making the mind like earth, making the mind like water, like fire, like wind. In other words, earth doesn’t react to what it dislikes. If you throw something disgusting on the earth, the earth doesn’t shrink away. The same with fire: It can burn disgusting things and doesn’t recoil … 
  3. Cutting Roads
    A focused mind can do a lot of good and it can do a lot of damage. It’s like the rays of the sun. If you focus them on the right spot, they can start a fire for you when you’re cold. If you focus them on the wrong spot, they can start a fire during the dry season that can sweep … 
  4. Jhana: Responsible Happiness
     … Mindfulness and alertness are the actual medicines; the quality of your attention right now is what’s healing both for the body and for the mind. The breath acts as a solvent, helping the medicine to spread throughout the body. When you apply well-balanced alertness and mindfulness to any sense of blockage in the body, it helps to untangle it. The reason these … 
  5. Focus on the Precepts
     … That’s developing three important qualities in the mind right there: mindfulness, keeping things in mind; alertness, watching your actions while you’re doing them; and ardency, fighting off unskillful qualities. These are the qualities you need to develop mindfulness and concentration. Of course, when you get the mind into concentration—the Thai translation of samadhi is “firm intent”—you’re firmly focusing your … 
  6. Think Your Way to Stillness
     … The skill here is getting the mind to be with the breath in a way that the breath energy is nourishing for the whole body, and can become nourishing for the whole mind. Because we’re trying to develop a concentration that is centered but all-around. All the Buddha’s images for right concentration talk about full body, full body, full body. There … 
  7. Monologue on the Breath
    The mind seems to be carrying on a conversation all the time. Sometimes it’s a monologue, sometimes a dialogue, and sometimes it’s a whole committee. When you’re meditating, you’re trying to bring it down to a monologue, one voice talking about one thing—in this case, the breath. The conversation in the monologue in Pali is called vaci-sankhara, which … 
  8. Sophisticated Dhamma
     … This is a very important principle in learning about the mind and seeing exactly where your defilements are. If you don’t say No to the mind, everything seems to flow, and there’s no problem at all. “Who says there’s such a thing as defilement?” The part of the mind that even resists having any of its thoughts called defilement: That’s … 
  9. False Friends
     … Remind yourself that if it’s something important to think through, it’s best to think it through when the mind is clear. So wait until you’ve had a good long hour just to be very still, to get the mind in good shape. Then, if you have to use it to think through some difficult problem, you’ll be in proper shape … 
  10. An Environment for Practice
     … Because in meditation, we’re trying to control the mind. And if you can’t control your mouth, there’s no way you are going to control your mind.” So even when things that are true, you have to really be careful about how much to say. Try keep your words to a minimum. Speak what achieves your purpose and stop right there. A … 
  11. A Handful of Leaves
     … After all, the mind has its purposes. It creates views for certain purposes; it doesn’t sit there and gaze in rapt admiration of views. It creates them, it uses them, and it acts on them. So the Buddha realized that views had to be viewed in terms of where they came from in the mind—what mind states inspired them—and where they … 
  12. Using What You’ve Got
     … The mind has to have a feeling of well-being, a feeling of confidence, so that it can deal with the pain. No better way of getting confidence than to learn how to control your mind, to have it focus on what you want it to focus on and learn to have it stay focused there. When you can do that, you feel up … 
  13. A Healthy Attitude Toward Happiness
     … The three qualities the Buddha recommends for this are mindfulness, alertness, and ardency. Mindfulness means keeping things in mind—in this case, remembering what you’re here for. You’re here to stay with the breath. And if you’ve learned any particular techniques that work, have those ready at hand so that if any issues come up, you have some idea of what … 
  14. The Fetter of Perceptions
     … Pain does happen in the body, but it doesn’t have to make inroads into the mind. And by “mind” here, we don’t mean just the part of the mind that’s talking about it. It’s also our awareness. There’s a filter of perceptions between the actual sensation of pain and how it registers in the mind. That filter is going … 
  15. Dealing with Pain
     … It’s the way the mind communicates with itself through very brief and simple signals. And then there’s fabrication. This is where the emotions are along with your more complex thoughts. Then finally there’s consciousness—awareness of these things. The Buddha says we feed on these activities. And in fact, these activities are the activities that the mind usually uses in feeding … 
  16. Lessons from Jhana
     … Again, you cling because you haven’t really learned how to take your mind apart, or taken fabrications apart. You’ve just badgered it into that state. So it’s good, when you’re getting the mind into concentration, that you realize that there is right concentration that can help you understand the mind. And there are other kinds of concentration that don’t … 
  17. Tenacity
     … This state of mind is your food in the meditation, food in the practice. When the mind is well fed like this, then it’s willing to start understanding itself and stop hiding things from itself. It’s a mind well rested and ready for work.
  18. Going Out of Your Way
     … What makes it special is when you decide you’re going to focus in on one thing and get the mind to stay there. Now, in some forms of concentration there’s not much ingenuity involved. Simply repeat a word over and over again, and force the mind down, beat it down. But the way the Buddha teaches breath meditation requires that you think … 
  19. Meditate to Win
     … You watch the mind thinking, you watch the mind as it focuses, you watch the mind as it’s doing the meditation. That requires a certain distance. You’re not totally immersed in these activities. There are times in concentration practice when you do get totally immersed. That’s basically to give the mind a chance to rest and get still. But then once … 
  20. Pleasant Practice, Painful Practice
     … to get to the point where the mind is neither taken with attractiveness or unattractiveness, to realize these are perceptions you apply that are not all that useful. When you can get past them, the mind is freed from a lot of worries and a lot of concerns. This is a method of practice that’s really important. Now, it’s not pleasant. As … 
  21. Honest & Observant
     … And then you make up your mind you’re not going to repeat it again. There’s another place where the Buddha advises, when you realize you’ve done something wrong, that you make up your mind not to repeat the mistake, and then you spread goodwill: goodwill for yourself so that you don’t beat yourself up too much, goodwill for the person … 
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