Search results for: "The Mind"

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  2. Delight in Striving
     … The other was not resting satisfied even with his skillful qualities, to say nothing of unskillful qualities in the mind. He didn’t practice “radical acceptance.” If something in his mind was unskillful, he would try to get rid of it. If he had done something skillful, he would take joy in that fact but he wouldn’t rest satisfied. He would try even … 
  3. Rooted in Heedful Desire
     … You’ve always got to keep watch on what the mind is doing. Upasika Kee brings up this principle in her teaching. She says, “As soon as you gain an insight, you have to watch immediately: What does the mind do or say right after the insight?” It’s not enough to be right, you have to learn how to take that right insight … 
  4. Grounded in the Elements
     … It’s most responsive to the mind. It’s through the breath that the mind can exert control over the body, make it move. And it’s through the breath that the mind experiences the body. Without the breath, you’d be going separate ways. So think of the breath as primary. And it’s everywhere. It’s all around your body. Wherever you … 
  5. Virtue & Right View
     … You want to give the mind a place where it can settle down and find a source of well-being inside. We live in a world that doesn’t go the way we want it to often, but we can learn how to control our minds. That’s an important distinction. Sometimes you hear it said that just wanting anything to be different from … 
  6. In the Context of the Deathless
     … What does the Buddha say? You try to get the mind in a state of concentration with a sense of ease and rapture or refreshment. In fact, the ease, pleasure, and refreshment are one of the main points of getting the mind into concentration. So the path may have its difficulties, but it has its rewards. And it doesn’t save its rewards for … 
  7. Sensitive to Fabrication
     … Then we can ask ourselves, “Okay, when the stress level in the mind goes up, what were the perceptions that brought it on? What were the feelings? What were the thought constructs?” The perceptions usually are the big troublemakers because they’re quick and they have an immediate impact. They deal with the mind on its lizard-brain level. So again, as you’re … 
  8. Skills for Dying Well
     … The skills that you gain in learning to keep the mind in one spot, to peel it away from distractions, will be extremely useful at that point; but the word ‘skill’ here means not only techniques but also attitudes, qualities of your character. These get developed in the meditation and they’ll be useful at that time, too. In terms of techniques: As the … 
  9. Look After Yourself with Ease
     … One of the common questions you hear in the forest tradition is that, when the mind gets really still, you should ask it, “Who are you?” When you look at it in those terms, what do you see? There’s nothing male or female about it, nothing white, nothing black, nothing Asian. It’s just the mind; it’s just awareness. You want to … 
  10. Stay
     … It doesn’t require a lot of intelligence, at least not of the book-learning type, but it does require the kind of intelligence that can deal with your defilements—the parts of the mind that want to go exploring other fields. You have to keep reminding yourself of why you want to be here and of the drawbacks of going any place else … 
  11. Renunciate Grief
     … So you’ve really got to train the mind, because otherwise it’s just going to keep trying to find the pleasure it thought it might have had, could have had, or just missed. It’s going to come back and try for it again. You’ve got to look deep into the mind because that’s where all of this points. After all … 
  12. Visakha Puja
     … That’s how he did it, by looking at his actions—not only his external actions but also the actions in the mind—seeing what was skillful, what was unskillful, seeing where his actions were causing harm, even subtle harm in the mind, even a subtle sense of stress, disturbance, a weight in the mind. He saw that as a problem and resolved to … 
  13. Ekaggata
     … This makes you more sensitive to the speech inside the mind. After all, the Buddha said that when we talk it comes from two mental activities: directed thought and evaluation. These are precisely the things we’re working on as we meditate. You focus your thoughts on something, and then you observe it, you evaluate it. This is how alertness moves inside the mind … 
  14. To Have a Purpose
     … We want to develop good qualities of the mind. So we’ve come to meditate. And as we begin to see the results appearing, we can see the happiness that comes from having a purpose. Everything we do has a purpose of one kind or another. Every movement of the mind has its purpose. Even when we try to get the mind really, really … 
  15. Energy
     … You’ve got the mind focused on the breath, you’ve been able to let go of all your normal worries and concerns. And realize: This is much more pleasant now than it was before, but there’s still work to be done. You want to learn how to make that pleasure more reliable. Again, you realize the pleasure comes from the mind’s … 
  16. The Ennobling Path
     … Contemplate these things until the mind feels inspired. Once it gets lubricated, you can settle down with the breath again. And you find that the mind is willing to settle down and be still. So the practice of concentration is designed specifically to give you that sense of pleasure whenever you need it, because the work of insight is sometimes very difficult. The mind … 
  17. Self-Correct
    The Buddha’s instructions for getting the mind into concentration are found in his description of right mindfulness. You start by keeping the body in and of itself in focus. The “body in and of itself” means just taking the body in its own terms—your direct experience of the body right here, right now, without reference to how it looks to other people … 
  18. What Focus? What Breath?
     … In the course of figuring these things out, you learn an awful lot of important lessons both about the body and about the mind. In terms of the breath, you have look at what your preconceived notions are, what’s happening here as you breathe. When we say to breathe in with the whole body, often you find that there’s a subconscious idea … 
  19. An Interest in the Breath
     … To get past that, you have to give the mind work to do. This is where you have to really take an interest in the breath. Give the mind a task. As long as you’re paying attention inside the body to what the body feels like, to how you visualize the body to yourself, that kind of work is fine. It doesn’t … 
  20. Stepping Out of Truth Games
     … to get the mind stay here. The problem is that the mind has lots of other worlds at its disposal, because it has lots of other desires. This is the process the Buddha calls becoming, where, based on a particular desire, you take on a particular identity around that desire. And there’s a relevant world around that desire as well. They all go … 
  21. Squeezing Goodness Out of the Aggregates
     … This is how you get the mind into concentration. We try to get the breath so that it’s easeful. We try to get the mind so that it can stay constantly with the breath. And that requires a certain amount of control. Then Ajaan Lee goes on to say then the Buddha let go of both sides: both what was constant and inconstant … 
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