Search results for: "Thought"

1. Page 121
2. Play AudioThe Goldsmith
    … In other words, you breathe right through wherever in the body you feel there’s tension related to the thought. And you keep at it. But the effort here is much milder than the effort of trying to get the mind to settle down. Then finally there’s watching. This can apply to two different things. One is when the mind really settles down … 
3. Play AudioYou Are Not Redundant
    … When I first read that, I thought he was referring to someone with a high ecclesiastical rank, but then I found out later it was one of the ajaans in the forest tradition who was not famous at all, but who was reputed to have had a very high level of attainment. In fact, it was as a result of that talk that he … 
4. Play AudioBody Contemplation
    … the embroidery, the fabrication around the actual feeling of pleasure—our thoughts of the kind of sensual pleasures we’d like and the sensual pleasures we’ve had. The free play of our imagination is what keeps pulling us back—because, in that free play, you’re free to lie to yourself, and the mind likes to lie to itself. After all, what are … 
5. Play AudioTherapeutic Seclusion
    … are making you suffer. The first noble truth is that you’re doing things that make you suffer. After all, the aggregates are activities. Form keeps changing. Feelings feel. Perceptions perceive. Thought fabrications fabricate. Consciousness cognizes. These are activities we’re doing all the time. We’re addicted to doing them in ways that make us suffer, and we don’t realize it, probably … 
6. Play AudioSkillful Distress
    … He thought things through. And he’s teaching us to think and use all of our capacities to figure out this problem we have inside: Why it is that we want happiness but we’re causing ourselves suffering? We feed on things, and we think the feeding is going to give us happiness. Then we find that we’re suffering because we feed. How … 
7. Play AudioAt Home in Your Own Skin
    … Now, you’ll find that your thoughts may still tend to wander off because you’ve got all those other issues outside. But for the time being, tell yourself that the best way you’re going to handle those issues is to develop the mental qualities that are strengthened by focusing right here. Concerns about other people, your worries about situations that happened: Regardless … 
8. Play AudioThree Types of Equanimity
    … He thought a lot and about a lot of things, and especially about when and where it’s possible to get things under your control so that you can make a positive difference. When you’re meditating, you really are trying to get the mind under your control. You are trying to make a difference. Mindfulness is a governing principle that underlies concentration practice … 
9. Play AudioUps & Downs
    … Try to be quicker in letting go of unskillful thoughts. Then maintain the attitude you’re going to stick with this and see it through. Be true to your original determination, because it’s only when you stick with those qualities that the practice is going to go anywhere. And it will go. It does develop. It’s not going from point x to … 
10. Play AudioBuilding Character
     … The thought that saved the monk in the forest was, “At least I’m developing something good out of this, developing some character.” There was something to show for this, and he could actually come to enjoy it. We had that phrase in the chant just now about right effort—learning how to generate desire to abandon unskillful qualities and to develop the skillful … 
11. Play AudioAll-around Alertness
     … They might have some potentials you haven’t thought of before. Then, from the sense of well-being in the body, it begins to spread into the mind. Partly because the mind likes being with comfortable sensations, and partly because you realize you’re developing a skill. That’s part of the sense of well-being, part of the pleasure that comes with the … 
12. Play AudioStop Weaving
     … Simply the fact of having a body, having feelings, perceptions, thought-constructs, consciousness, clinging to these things, we suffer. Carrying these things around as a burden, we suffer. It’s because we weigh ourselves down that we feel overburdened. When you’re overburdened, the least little thing can set you off, and you end up spreading that suffering around. One of the things we … 
13. Play AudioFire
     … So think of cutting the breath energy channels through areas you may not have thought of before. Then stay with that. You protect it with your mindfulness, your alertness, and your ardency. And the ardency here starts turning into the discernment that notices what’s just right, what’s not just right – where there’s any unnecessary stress in here, and what to do … 
14. Play AudioPerfect Breathing Isn’t the Goal
     … If it feels good enough to stay, you can put down your directed thought and evaluation and just be with the breath as best you can. Allow the breath to get more and more still as your mind gets more and more still. Then whatever subtle movements come up, you can see them. Those are the things we’re after. When something arises in … 
15. Play AudioTake Responsibility for Yourself
     … What you thought was good was not. If they give good results, you can remember that, too. Take that as a lesson as well, and adjust your actions accordingly. Take joy when you are doing things right, and come down a little hard on yourself when you’re making mistakes. But don’t just come down hard. Learn from the mistakes and do your … 
16. Play AudioA Graduated Discourse
     … In other words, you put aside your thoughts about sensual pleasures, your plans for what you’d like to eat or touch or taste or see, and you can just be with the sense of the body, felt from within, in the present moment. To do that, you have to see that there are drawbacks to sensuality, or at the very least that there … 
17. Play AudioHow to Really Depend on Yourself
     … The fact that you’ve thought a solution up on your own doesn’t mean it’s not Dhamma. Not all Dhamma has to be in the texts. If something works, gives good results, gives rise to more insight, gives rise to an ability to let go of things that are burdening the mind, then it counts as Dhamma. Or if you’re not … 
18. Play AudioBuilding on Certainty
     … Something you thought you may have known, well, look at it again until you’ve tested it from every angle. And then look at it again. See if there’s an angle that you didn’t explore before. As the mind begins to settle down in its more refined knowledge of the present, it has a greater and greater sense of stability. Here’s … 
19. Play AudioGreat Expectations
     … As the Buddha once said, if you don’t have this higher level of pleasure—the pleasure that comes from concentration, getting the mind secluded from sensuality and unskillful thoughts—then no matter how much you may know about the drawbacks of sensuality, you’re going to go back to it. That’s precisely the problem of modern psychology: They don’t know this … 
20. Play AudioLarge-hearted Equanimity
     … And that thought, “Whatever is subject to origination,” occurs to the mind only when it’s come across something that is not subject to origination, an experience that is uncaused. ** In other words, as Sariputta told Moggallana—this was back when he had first gained the Dhamma eye, and Moggallana asked him, “Have you seen the deathless?”—Sariputta said, “Yes, I’ve seen the … 
21. Play AudioProtect Your Energy
     … In fact, we can even be surrounded by all kinds of pleasant things outside and have nice pleasant thoughts, but still someplace deep inside, we’re suffering. So we have to look for the causes inside: what we’re bringing to the situation. This is why we meditate: to train the mind—first to be sensitive to what we’re bringing and then learning … 
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