Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 119
  2. Put Your Books Back on the Shelf
     … But, as the ajaans like to say, it all comes down to one mind. The mind has lots of different defilements, lots of different tricks. There’s one of the passages in the Canon where an elephant trainer says that, when dealing with an elephant, within a week you know all of the elephant’s tricks it would try to play to avoid being … 
  3. Respect for Concentration
     … That’s what mindfulness and alertness are about. Mindfulness is to keep reminding you to stay here. Alertness is watching to see what’s going on. And you make little adjustments as you go. If you find any ways of breathing that are uncomfortable or make the mind either too sleepy or too edgy, just drop those. Look after the kinds of breathing that … 
  4. The Uses of Equanimity
     … When the Buddha taught Rahula, he said, “Start out by making your mind like earth. When disgusting things are thrown on the earth, the earth doesn’t shrink away.” We can also add that when wonderful things are thrown on the earth, the earth doesn’t get excited. The Buddha then said, “Make your mind like water. When water has to wash away disgusting … 
  5. The Fangs of Conceit
     … There’s stress in the mind. There’s suffering in the mind, and we’re causing it to ourselves. That’s the big irony. There’s enough stress and suffering in the world without our additional piling it on. And everything we do should be for the sake of happiness. You’d think that’s why we would act to begin with, or to … 
  6. Wilderness Mind
  7. Mindfulness & Alertness
  8. Strengthening Mindfulness
  9. Wandering Mind
  10. Heightened Mind
  11. Heedful & Mindful
  12. Mindfulness & Discernment
  13. Basic Mindfulness
  14. Seclusion
    When the mind begins to settle down, it gives rise to a sense of ease. And the ease, the texts say, comes from seclusion. So what kind of seclusion are they talking about? To begin with, there’s physical seclusion. You’re not talking to anybody else right now. You’re not interacting with other people. All the burdens of interacting with other people … 
  15. Patience & Hope
     … And where do your actions come from? From the mind. So skill in your words and deeds has to come from skill in the mind—which is what meditation is all about. We’re developing the skills of mindfulness, alertness, and ardency; the skills of concentration and discernment, that will allow us not to be overcome by the results of past actions, and to … 
  16. The Dhamma Mirror
     … You try to do the two of them together, because where are you going to learn insight? From getting the mind still. After all, “insight,” as far as the Buddha was concerned, was not a technique, it was a quality of mind that you’re trying to develop. You don’t wait until your concentration gets really strong, and you don’t wait until … 
  17. Four Determinations
     … This test will make demands in terms of how much mindfulness you develop, how much alertness you develop, and how much ardency. When Ajaan Lee discusses those three qualities that you bring to mindfulness practice, when the question comes as to which of them embodies discernment, he says it’s the ardency. Again, this would be another meaning for not neglecting discernment—that you … 
  18. Large-hearted Equanimity
     … As I said, even the Buddha couldn’t control the minds of the people who listened to him. But he could learn how to gain control over his own mind. That’s where our efforts are best focused, because when our minds are under control, we’re not inflicting our greed, aversion, and delusion on anyone else. If we see that we can be … 
  19. Determination
     … We’re developing all kinds of good qualities of the mind. So you can look at your whole life as an opportunity to practice. This doesn’t mean that you just try to be mindful all the time or alert or aware all the time. There are many other qualities you’ve got to develop, too. One of the lists that’s useful to … 
  20. Cooking the Present Moment
     … When you get the mind strong enough so that it actually doesn’t have to feed, that’s when you’re in a good position. Now, you get the mind strong through your conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. These are the five strengths that take the good food of the meditation to nourish the mind and get the mind in a position where … 
  21. Stay Principled
    When we practice concentration or mindfulness, we tend spend a lot of time focusing on the technique: where to focus the mind, how to stay with the point of your focus or the theme of the meditation; how to work with it so that the mind can begin to settle down and stay settled down. There are even skills techniques how to leave meditation … 
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