Search results for: "Suffering"
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- Humility & Confidence… We want happiness and yet so many of our actions, so many of our thoughts, our words and deeds create suffering. Stress. Dis-ease. Why is that? What is it about our minds that we don’t know? That should be the most interesting question you can ask yourself. And here you’ve got the opportunity to learn, to explore, to figure out the …
- When You Hit a Plateau… He’s asking you to see what you’re doing that’s causing suffering.” To see that, you have to reflect carefully on what you’re doing. It’s happening all the time. But we’re sloughing over the details, and so we don’t see.
- Tranquility & Insight… how your mind creates suffering for itself, even though it doesn’t want to, but it does. Why on earth would that be? Well, because you’re not paying attention, so you don’t know what you’re doing. You’ve paid much more attention to things outside, and not enough attention to your own mind. This is dangerous, because things outside can do …
- Breath Energies… Which is why, when you see that your sense of self is actually causing suffering—you see it in the act and you see that it’s not necessary—the whole thing short-circuits. After all, what is it there for if not to create happiness? When you see that it’s not doing its expected job, then you drop that particular strategy. This …
- Taking a Stance… The basic indicator is, “Does the breath feel good or not?” For the Buddha, the big issue in life is suffering, so we start with a minor version of it — a minor sense of discomfort coming from the breath. Why breathe in a way that’s uncomfortable? Nobody’s forcing you. It’s your own lack of attention that allows the breath to get …
- True to the Breath… Truths that are really useful in pulling you out of your old habits of creating a lot of unnecessary stress and strain and suffering. It’s a simple strategy. It may not be easy, but if you work at it, you find that it’s one of best the strategies there is.
- Looking for Essence in the Wilderness… So, if you’re working on getting the mind more concentrated or trying to work on gaining some insight into how the mind creates suffering out of all kinds of things good and bad, remember, that’s the purpose of being here. This opens all kinds of opportunities for the mind. Our time here is fleeting, so make the best use of it, because …
- A Master of Your Thoughts… It’s only when we see that we’re complicit in our own suffering that we begin to step back from it, let it go, and develop the disenchantment and dispassion that the Buddha was talking about. So when disturbing thoughts come up and move in, you’ve got your raw material for developing your concentration. In the beginning, it’s just a matter …
- Allies… The duty with regard to suffering and stress, he says, is to comprehend it. Most of the time, we feel threatened by it, we feel engulfed by it, surrounded by it, squeezed in by it, so the only thing we can think of it is how to get away, how to get ourselves out of that situation. That’s not comprehending. That’s just …
- Maintenance Work… It’s always finding new ways to make itself suffer. So look for the voices in the mind that lead you in that direction and learn how not to identify with them. Learn to stick with the Capricorn voices, the ones that say, “Just stick with the work here. Keep going. It’s because you stick with it that things will make a difference …
- A Sense of Adventure… Remind yourself that your assumptions are the assumptions of a person with defilement, the assumptions of a person still suffering. Perhaps it would be in your best interest to put them aside for the time being instead of demanding that everything fit into your preconceived notions of how things should be. And you should be willing to embark on this without a 100% guarantee …
- True Values… Compunction is the realization that if you do something unskillful, it’s going to cause suffering, so why bother? Why do it? You have the choice not to do it. Then there’s the wealth of virtue, where you abstain from harming anyone at all. You hold to the precepts. That’s your expression of giving safety to everyone. And when you give safety …
- The Problem Is Birth… People afraid of death, afraid of illness, afraid of aging, suffering from these things—and they need him to solve the problem at that stage. But where do these things come from? They come from birth. Once there’s birth, there’s got to be aging, there’s got to be illness, there’s got to be death. The Buddha saw that the solution …
- Protection Through Mindfulness… You want to look into your suffering, look into the dangers you’re facing, see what you’re doing to create them, and then try to protect yourself by not creating them anymore. The different analogies and similes the Buddha gives for mindfulness give some ideas of the different ways in which mindfulness can provide protection. For example, the simile of the man whose …
- Learn from Your Mistakes… He characterized his quest as the search for what is skillful, in other words, a path of action, a course of action that would lead to the deathless, that would lead to what he called “the rest from the yoke,” the ability to take off the burden of suffering. That’s a pretty tall order, but notice that the focus was on looking for …
- The Energy in the Body… We’re meditating to overcome our addiction to creating suffering. That’s purely an internal matter. And it can be overcome only by developing your own internal ability to see what you’re doing and to evaluate the results. So use the meditation as an opportunity to explore, to see what works. If things don’t work, be more creative and more imaginative in …
- Noble Contentment, Noble Discontent… You realize that there is suffering, but you also realize there’s something you can do about it. You gather together all the strengths you have and you work on those. You find that, as you develop those strengths, others come along. There will, of course, be obstacles in the path, but you don’t want them to discourage you. There was a story …
- Protection from Fools… So many people carry around their pain and suffering as if they were their most precious possessions. It’s their identity, and they’re afraid that they’d be nothing without it. This was the Buddha’s great insight: that you’re not nothing without it. Whatever you lose by letting it go is nothing to be regretted. First reduce it to these very …
- Questioning Impermanence… That’s the essence of the meditation, learning how to relate to what’s right here right now in such a way that you’re causing yourself the least suffering and actually working toward a stable happiness. Even though a good part of the practice is aimed at the future—there is a goal at the end of the path, don’t let anyone …
- Turtle Meditation… When the body is in pain but the mind is strong, you can be with the pain and not suffer from it. When people are being harsh with you, you can develop an energy field around the body by staying with the breath, letting the breath fill the whole body so that their energy can’t penetrate your energy field. When you fully occupy …
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