Search results for: "Persistence"
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- Working Ourselves Free… mindfulness, alertness, persistence, right effort. One of the Thai terms for meditation is tham khwaam phien. It means to make an effort. This doesn’t mean that you have to do walking meditation for five hours or sitting meditation for ten hours or to wear down the body. The effort is an effort in the mind: taking care, being mindful, being aware, and doing …
- Test Everything… Be persistent. Develop mindfulness, concentration, discernment, goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity, gratitude. All of these are good things to be developing. So we approach the path with a certain humility. On the one hand, the Buddha is encouraging us to have faith in our own abilities to test the path—it’s something we can do—but at the same time we have to …
- The Food of Feelings… Conviction can be food for the mind, as can persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. It may seem artificial to create these things, but the Buddha’s analysis of feeling shows that it’s pretty artificial, too—the belief that our feelings are the raw data of experience, the raw data of who we are. In the final analysis, the Buddha said there are potentials …
- Seclusion… The work here is being persistent, not getting careless. You’ll notice, as soon as you start getting careless, that all the issues of the world start flooding in again, and you’re no longer secluded. You may be sitting here alone, but it’s as if you’ve got a room full of people inside you, all jabbering away. So do what you …
- Desert Island Meditation… In other words, he was able to keep his energy going, so that when opportunities presented themselves, he was able to apply his persistence, his energy, all of his efforts, all of his skills to make the most of those opportunities. That’s an important quality we want to build into our minds. In Pali, the term for that confidence is pasada. It goes …
- What Should I Do?… Putting it in the fire stands for right effort—persistence. You have to make an effort. As the Buddha would say, “Exert a fabrication.” Change the way you breathe, change the way you talk to yourself, change the perceptions you’re holding in mind, and the feelings you’re focused on—to get rid of unskillful qualities and bring skillful qualities more to the …
- A Well-stocked Memory… Then comes persistence: You do what’s required to develop the skillful qualities and abandon the unskillful ones. Then, following that, come the factors deal with concentration directly: rapture, calm, concentration, equanimity. But there’s another description in which mindfulness is defined as being mindful of the Dhamma teachings you’ve memorized, that you’ve learned: what you’ve read, what you’ve listened …
- Making an Effort… There’s a phrase in the Pali, viriyena dukkhamacceti, which means suffering and stress are overcome through effort, through persistence. Sometimes the idea scares us off, but you have to remember that life itself requires effort. Think of the effort involved in simply keeping the body going, making a living, scrounging around trying to find some happiness. It all takes effort. It’s simply …
- Mind the Gap… Your heedfulness then becomes the basis for developing the five strengths, and the five strengths—conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, discernment—lead to the deathless. They take you beyond having to amass things and build things up, having to be worried about sudden gaps that open up wide in front of you. They take you to a place of genuine safety. So be clear about …
- The Power to Transcend Suffering… Once you find that you’re beginning to enjoy this, then the next base for success comes in, which is persistence. You just stick with it. Start applying your skill to all different kinds of things, different kinds of situations. The more you stick with it, the more you begin to appreciate it and the greater sense of confidence you have that you can …
- Equanimity when You Care… the equanimity of a doctor, which is the equanimity of the brahmaviharas; the equanimity of a soldier, which is equanimity that has to go together with persistence; the equanimity of a fisherman, which goes together with patience; and the equanimity of someone who’s eaten, which is equanimity in the factors for awakening. In all these cases, you care. In the last two, you …
- Learn from the Ants… So even when he was studying with the teachers who taught very high levels of concentration—the dimension of nothingness, the dimension of neither perception and non-perception—he saw that they’d developed conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. They devoted good qualities of the mind to this, but they rested content with something that wasn’t ultimate. He, however, wasn’t satisfied …
- Giving & Taking Time… These are some of the ways in which you can learn how to stick with something, develop your powers of endurance and persistence—your stick-to-it-ived-ness. Unfortunately in our society these character traits are not encouraged that much. “Click here, click here,” and automatically you’ll get instant gratification. And we start taking that for granted. A couple of years back …
- The Dhamma Is in the Method … contentment, persistence, and what the Buddha calls shedding. Shedding refers to shedding pride, shedding thoughts of wanting to get revenge. There’s another great story in the Canon of a young prince whose parents had been executed by a king. The prince decides to get revenge, so he applies for a job in the elephant stables of the king’s palace. In the evening …
- Goodwill as a Guardian… than a happiness that’s absolutely safe: safe from heedlessness, safe from making you behave in unskillful ways. You develop the qualities that the Buddha said were key to his awakening: persistence and an unwillingness to settle for second best. So thoughts of goodwill protect you not only from ill will, but also from laziness and complacency—if you think those thoughts in the …
- A Slave to the Dhamma… truthfulness, in the sense of making up your mind you’re going to do something good and you stick with it all the way through, no matter how hard it gets. Persistence, determination: all the Capricorn virtues. It’s important to realize that this is a part of training the mind. If training the mind were simply a matter of closing your eyes and …
- Chewed Up by Your Food… conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. This way, the mind, more and more, can stand on its own two feet. And unlike the body, the mind—when it feeds off mental food, off the food of the path—eventually reaches the point where it doesn’t need to feed anymore. With the body, you always need to keep it well fed. The mind, though …
- How to Be Self-Centered… And although it requires determination, persistence, and endurance, it should also be done with joy. Here again, Ajaan Suwat: “Have a sense of how fortunate you are to do this practice. Take joy in the fact that you can.” When you can develop that attitude, then you’re self-centered in the right way. As long as you need a self—and you will …
- Like an Athlete in Training… You’re trying to strengthen the mind, so you strengthen the qualities that give rise to more conviction, more persistence, more mindfulness, more concentration, more discernment. Watch out for the food that would eat away at these things. In this way, you protect the Dhamma inside yourself, which is where it’s best protected. You look outside, and sometimes it’s hard to see …
- A Position of Strength… conviction in the importance of maintaining a skillful state of mind, persistence in keeping it going, mindfulness, concentration, discernment. When these things are strong, when they’re in charge of your mind, then you can trust it. It becomes your refuge. You realize that your happiness doesn’t have to depend on things outside. It can depend on these qualities inside, and nothing outside …
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