Search results for: "Thought"

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  2. The Dhamma Wheel
     … There’s a tendency sometimes to say, “Well, let me finish this thought and then I’ll get back to the breath.” But then that thought has ramifications that lead to other thoughts, and more thoughts, and then you find yourself hopping from train of thought to another train of thought and end up in the Northwest Territories. So if you realize that you … 
  3. Dethinking Thinking
     … Once you can start taking apart your thoughts and perceptions about the body, you can do that with thoughts and perceptions about other things as well. A thought comes up and you can recognize it as a voice from someone in your family, someone in school, or somebody in the media. Or it’s one of your old defilements: in other words, your identity … 
  4. Brahmaviharas & the Breath
    Ajaan Lee, in all of his guides to meditation, would talk about how you have to start out with thoughts of goodwill—in fact, all the brahmaviharas: goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity—as preparation for settling down with the breath. But he would also comment occasionally on how, when you’re developing thoughts, especially of goodwill, if there’s no sense of well … 
  5. The Joy of Growing
    As the Buddha says, one of the skills that you develop as a meditator is learning how to think the thoughts you want to think and not think the thoughts you don’t want to think. In other words, you have to be able to step back from your thinking and pass judgment on it as to what’s worth thinking and what’s … 
  6. Inner Poise
     … It provides a range or room in which the thoughts can happen. You’re still there in the room. You don’t have to follow the thoughts out, no matter how much they point outside and say, “Look, look, look out there.” You stay looking right at the thought. That way, you can entertain thoughts, you can be aware of other things, but your … 
  7. The Buddha’s Cost-Benefit Analysis
     … He began to divide his thoughts into two kinds: those that were imbued with sensuality, ill-will, harmfulness on one side; and those imbued with renunciation, non-ill-will, and harmlessness on the other hand. He was looking at his thoughts not in terms of what he liked, or at least in the content of the thoughts themselves, but where they came from and … 
  8. A Refuge in Mindfulness
     … Learn to get some order in your thoughts, remembering—again—to look at your thoughts as processes. Usually, when we see a little thought arising, it’s like a little present that’s come in a box. You open the box to look into it, and you fall into the box. In other words, the thought comes and you just jump right in; you … 
  9. The Origination of Suffering
     … Any thoughts about the world outside right now, you just put them aside. Remind yourself: What are those thoughts? The world itself, as the Buddha said, is simply sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and thoughts. And your thoughts about the world: Either they’re memories about things that happened in the past or speculation about what’s happening now and on into the … 
  10. Lessons of Distraction
     … Another strategy is when you notice that the creation of a thought world requires a little bit of tension someplace in the body, as a marker that keeps your place in the thought, that keeps the thought going. But if you can find that pattern of tension, breathe through it, relax it, the thought should disappear. Finally, if none of these methods work, just … 
  11. Staying in Position
     … When a thought comes passing in, just let it go passing on. You don’t have to chase it down. You don’t have to complete it. All too often, a half-finished thought arises in the mind, and for some reason we feel compelled to finish the thought—as if we’re somehow responsible for accounting for all our thoughts. But to keep … 
  12. Friends with the Breath
     … Thoughts of goodwill, thoughts of compassion, thoughts of sympathetic joy or appreciation: Extend those to everybody. And then develop thoughts of equanimity, realizing that ultimately each of us has his or her own kamma, his or her own actions, that we’re each responsible for our happiness and for our suffering. What this means is that you’ve got to work on your own … 
  13. In Accordance with the Dhamma
     … This means that you’ve got to scrutinize every thought that comes into the mind: Where’s this going to lead? If you get casual about some of your thoughts, then that attitude of casualness begins to spread, takes up more of your thoughts, and starts eating into your meditation time. You’ve got to regard all day as meditation time. Ajaan Fuang made … 
  14. Battling Negativity
     … When negative thoughts come into the mind, you’ve got an ally in dealing with them, too. In other words, you can take your stance here in the body. And even though angry thoughts may be roiling through the mind, they don’t have to go roiling through your body. You can consciously keep that awareness of the breath, whole-body breathing, calm breathing … 
  15. Work with It
     … The thoughts that don’t go away easily come under the other two of those five approaches. There’s the one where you have to think about the drawbacks of that kind of thinking: “If I were to think about this thought for 24 hours, where would it take me?” It usually takes you nowhere. Or if it did take you someplace, it’d … 
  16. Maintaining Goodwill
    Maintaining Goodwill July 24, 2004 Start out with thoughts of goodwill. Tell yourself: “May I be happy. May my happiness be true.” Those two words have to go together: “true” and “happiness.” True happiness is the whole purpose of why we’re meditating. We realize there’s a lot of suffering in life, and a lot of that suffering comes from our own minds … 
  17. Protection Through Mindfulness
     … In other words, you’ve got to keep your thoughts within bounds, keep your interests within bounds. This lesson applies all throughout the day. All too often we forget that the things we think about in the course of the day will have an impact on the mind that lasts well beyond the time the thought has passed. You can think about thoughts in … 
  18. Painful Thinking
     … So this is good practice, staying with the breath, staying with a physical sensation that gives you a good vantage point outside that big swimming vat of all your thoughts. If you’re inside all the thinking processes, jumping from one thought to another, it’s hard to get any sense of perspective of where a particular thought is going, where it came from … 
  19. Self-Reliance
     … Once you develop this ability with your breathing, you can start turning around to look at your own mind, watching the thoughts as they come and go, and getting a sense of the quality of the motivation behind the thought. Sometimes you can see immediately that a certain thought is not one you want to follow. If there’s any greed, anger, or delusion … 
  20. Housecleaning
     … As soon as you see any perceptions coming up saying that this is a thought about that, this is a thought about this, breathe right through them. Breathe through whatever stirring there is right there, and you can nip the thought in the bud. This way, as you clean things out, you find that this house here in the present moment really becomes a … 
  21. Looking at Your Life
     … We know that at some point you’re going to want to start examining your thoughts, but to do that well, you first have to be in a position where you can pull yourself out of any thought world at any time when you see that the examination is not getting anywhere. So right now, as soon as you notice a thought coming up … 
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