Search results for: "Suffering"
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- Realities Right Here… If you experience them with ignorance, it’s going to lead to suffering. If you begin to bring knowledge and awareness to them, it becomes part of the path. So try to look at your sense of the body in these terms. Look at you mind in these terms as well. What have you got in the mind on this level? You’ve got …
- Pleasure & Pain… That’s why we suffer so much. And one of the reasons we don’t look into them is because it’s hard. Pain especially is hard to look at. We’ve been dealing with pleasure and pain ever since we were born, and a lot of our habits for dealing with pleasure and pain are things we learned before we could even talk …
- Strength of Conviction: 1… You ask yourself: “How does this teaching apply to me, to my suffering, to my unskillful actions? Where do I measure up? Where do I not measure up? If I don’t measure up, what can I do to make improvements?” Because appropriate attention means looking at things in terms of what’s skillful and what’s not skillful, but also realizing that there …
- Jhāna & Discernment… Then you can see how you do it as you go through the day in lots of different ways that can actually cause a lot of stress and suffering. Wherever there’s a desire, that’s how things get started. As the Buddha said, things don’t come out of your self, they come out of desire. Everything, he says, that you’re going …
- Happiness – Yours & Others’… In other words, you take seriously the principle that each of us is suffering because of our own actions, and each of us will find happiness because of our own actions. But that doesn’t mean we just leave others to fend for themselves. We’re happy to help. We’re going to do our best, one, not to get in the way of …
- A Room of Your Own… This is why you can pour everything into your diary—be really open with yourself about your feelings, about your thoughts—not just for the sake of self-expression but because you really want to see what’s going on and to straighten it out so that you cause less suffering to yourself. So learn to take advantage of what feels good inside. Learn …
- A Cure for the Sluggish Mind… And this is how we take advantage of the Buddha’s teachings, and especially his statement that we suffer because of our own actions. He’s saying that not to place blame on us, but to show us where the solution lies: We can change our actions. We can change the way we think, we can change the way we direct our thoughts and …
- May You Forever Be Well… There’s another passage where the Buddha talks about the different kinds of loss that we can suffer in life. There may be loss of relatives, loss of wealth, loss of our health. And the Buddha says that those kinds of loss are not serious. They’re simply the results of past actions; they’re one of the affairs of the world. Wherever we …
- Don’t Be a Traitor to Yourself… And other people can decide, “Oh, I want that.” In that particular analogy, the Buddha says that if the first hawk doesn’t let go of the little piece of meat, it’s going to be suffering for a long time. So it’s good to learn how to let go of those kinds of things. Focus instead on the good food you can …
- To Excel… And you have to practice to the level where you know that even if aging comes, illness comes, death comes, social unrest comes, or a split in the Sangha comes, your mind is solid enough so it won’t have to suffer. A verse in the Mangala Sutta says that you want to get the mind so that even when it’s touched by …
- The Food of Feelings… That’s when there’s an end for suffering. So feed your breath well. And in turn, it’ll give you something genuinely good to feed on.
- No Happiness Other than Peace… Compassion in realizing that if you want your happiness to last, it can’t cause suffering to anybody else. And purity in that you really do look at your actions and their results, making sure that they stay in line with your principles. So we’re here not just for a pleasure hit. We’re here learning how to use happiness for really good …
- The Forerunner of All Things… We want happiness but we create suffering. That’s because of the ignorance inside. And our hearts and minds are capable of all kinds of things. As he said, the mind is more variegated than the animal kingdom. Think of all the different kinds of animals there are—on land, in the ocean, in the air—and the different mindsets that each of those …
- Normalcy… If we want to learn how not to suffer from them, we have to keep our minds normal in their presence. This is what virtue and concentration and discernment are for. They work together to keep the mind at normalcy. It’s bad enough that aging, illness, and death can come, but we often make them worse. We’ve got to practice so at …
- The Desire to Do Well… After all, desire is the cause of suffering. Well, there’s going to be some stress in the path, and the Buddha never said that all desire is bad. After all, there’s desire in the description of right effort. It’s just a question of learning how to express it and fine-tune it in the right way. Sometimes you hear that the …
- The Best of a Bad Situation… But even when situations don’t get that dire, you have to realize that you’re addicted to your clingings, and your clingings are making you suffer. And as with any addiction, a lot of the problem is a lack of imagination. You can’t imagine relating to your thoughts, your feelings, your perceptions, even your acts of consciousness in any other way aside …
- Defilements with Their Bambi Eyes… But then what kind of friends are they? Are they the friends who get you to commit a crime and then, when the police come, they run away, leave you holding the bag? They don’t suffer the results of karma. We do, the mind does. And then the defilements come back with new ideas, and we fall for them again, because of our …
- Self-Knowledge… seeing where you are and getting a sense of the possibilities of where you can go in causing less suffering, less harm, through your thoughts, your words, and your deeds. That’s a task you can tackle and actually get results.
- You Contain Multitudes… If we were innately good, then why are we suffering? We’ve got a mixture in there. So have a sense of the range of possibilities that this opens up. The Buddha talks about perception as a mental fabrication, and that includes visualization: visualizing yourself as capable of following this path. Just think of the great ajaans in Thailand. They were born out in …
- Being Somebody, Going Somewhere… realizing that his thoughts led either to happiness or to suffering and affliction. He saw that if a thought was imbued with sensuality, or ill will, or harmfulness, it would be afflictive, so he made up his mind to “beat it back,” just as a cowherd would beat back the cows he’s responsible for if they start getting into the rice fields. As …
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