Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. Staying Normal
     … Even more so when you practice concentration, learning to keep the mind steady no matter what happens. Sounds come and go. Thoughts of the past, thoughts of the future, come and go. All these things come and go, but the mind stay steady in the midst of them. This requires practice, because the nature of the mind, the ordinary mind, is to get knocked … 
  3. Seclusion Through Mindfulness
     … And this is what mindfulness does. In the lists of qualities that lead to concentration—say, in the noble eightfold path—discernment does come first, and mindfulness comes before concentration, but you need some concentration to get the mind willing to do the practices that mindfulness requires. So, they help one another along. So learn to delight in this aspect of mindfulness. It’s … 
  4. In the Present
     … If the mind slips off, you bring it right back. That involves the three qualities that the Buddha said need to be brought to the establishing of mindfulness. There is a popular belief that mindfulness simply means being in the present moment, but the Buddha never said that. Mindfulness is a quality of memory. You remember certain things—in this case, you remember your … 
  5. Varieties of Mindfulness
    Varieties of Mindfulness May, 2003 The word sati in Pali has lots of meanings. The basic one is to keep something in mind. We’re often told it means alertness or awareness, but that’s not the case. Alertness and awareness come under the Pali word, sampajañña. Sati means keeping something in mind, like remembering to stay with the breath, remembering the various things … 
  6. Everything Comes Together Right Here
     … In other words, the three qualities that accompany the practice of right mindfulness get turned into factors of jhana. So it’s one smooth, seamless practice. It’s not as if you do mindfulness practice and then you stop doing mindfulness practice and start doing concentration. As you’re doing mindfulness right, the mind gets into right concentration. So you stay right here. It … 
  7. Secluded from Sensuality
     … Unskillful qualities are defined as anything beginning with wrong view up through wrong mindfulness. So, if you’re mindful of things that are not relevant to staying focused on the body in and out itself, if you’re not mindful to put aside greed and distress with reference to the world, try to put these memories aside. Be mindful only of things that are … 
  8. Using Right Resolve Rightly
     … The issue is solved by creating a sense of well-being inside from which you can then look at the present moment and gain some insight into how the mind creates unnecessary suffering and how that unnecessary suffering is the only thing that really weighs the mind down. Right resolve points in here, right here at the breath and right here at the mind … 
  9. Enlarge Your Mind
    One of the terms for a mind in concentration is mahaggatam cittaṁ, the expanded mind or the enlarged mind. You want to expand your mind so that your ordinary pleasures and pains start to seem a lot smaller in comparison. Pleasure and pain are big issues when your mind is a little tiny mind—narrow in its concerns, narrow in its perspective—and it … 
  10. Adjusting the Flame
    There are three factors in the path that deal with the topic of right concentration—right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration itself—and all three are necessary to get the mind to settle down. Right effort is generating the desire to get rid of unskillful qualities and to develop skillful ones, and that gets parsed out: If unskillful qualities have not yet arisen … 
  11. The Mind When Trained Brings Happiness
     … We’re using the breath here to train the mind, to develop some useful qualities. The first one is mindfulness, the ability to keep something in mind. In this case, you’re reminding yourself each time you breathe in, each time you breathe out, that this is where you want to be. Then there’s alertness, which, if the mind wanders off, means you … 
  12. Balanced Concentration
     … You need insight, too, to get the mind to settle down. You have to understand what’s going on. You have to use your ingenuity. You have to have strategies to get the mind to settle down and stay down. After all, even people who find it easy to get the mind to settle down can have trouble staying there. And when the mind … 
  13. The Fourth Noble Truth
     … As for right mindfulness, the word “mindfulness” means keeping something in mind. In this case, you’re keeping your breath in mind. You’re also keeping in mind the need to protect your concentration on the breath. It’s in this way that everything converges into right concentration, so that right concentration gathers up all the other factors of the path and makes them … 
  14. Giving Weight
    One of the terms for concentration is adhicitta, which means a heightened mind—not heightened in the sense that you’re physically above something else, heightened in the sense of heightened importance. You try to be very clear about where your awareness is focused. You make that focal point the really important issue. Normally, you focus on one thing but then something pulls you … 
  15. The Buddha’s Protection
     … He’s more interested, though, in having you defend your mind. So he says you take yourself as a refuge for the sake of your mind, and you do that, he says, by taking the Dhamma as a refuge. What does it mean to take the Dhamma as a refuge? You learn how to establish mindfulness. The Buddha’s instructions on establishing mindfulness are … 
  16. Mastering Pleasure & Pain
     … As for being developed in mind, that means that pain can’t invade and remain in your mind. The materialist challenges the Buddha. First he says, “I assume then that pain and pleasure haven’t invaded your mind and remained?” And the Buddha replies, “Ever since I left home to go forth into the wilderness, neither pain nor pleasure have invaded the mind and … 
  17. To Certify Yourself
     … mindfulness—the ability to keep something in mind; alertness—your ability to watch what you’re doing as you’re doing it and seeing the results; and then, ardency—trying to be really good at this. It’s in the ardency that your discernment develops, because ordinarily you could be mindful of anything and it would count as mindfulness. You could watch yourself doing … 
  18. Saying No to Distraction
    When you meditate, it’s good to keep in mind the Buddha’s teachings on kamma—that what you’re experiencing right now is a mixture of several things: the results of intentions from the past, your present intentions, and the results of your present intentions. This helps you to sort out what’s going on in the mind. Your present kamma should be … 
  19. The Mirror Inside
     … Like right now as we’re meditating, we’re engaged in actions of the mind, and you want to observe these, too: What are you doing right now? When the Buddha talks about developing mindfulness, he says that you want to be ardent, alert, and mindful. Mindful is remembering what to do, and alert is watching what you’re actually doing. Here again, the … 
  20. Straightening Out the World
     … They all come out of your mind and they can be really harmful if you’re not careful. This is why you have to exercise mindfulness and make it stronger. And this is what we’re doing right here: We’re exercising the mind. All the good qualities in the mind—mindfulness, alertness, concentration, discernment: Without these qualities you get careless; you don’t … 
  21. Curious About the Process
     … That’s when you realize you’ve learned something about the mind, its processes. And what could be more interesting? How the mind lies to itself, how it has many layers of conversation inside, and yet it thinks it’s a unified mind: How does that happen? And how does it happen that there are different voices in the mind that don’t really … 
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