Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. Space for Sustained Contemplation
     … Just keeping the mind quiet is a major task, to say nothing about digging down and understanding the causes for why we’re making ourselves suffer. Just getting the mind to settle down is a major project. The mind has lots of different traplines. In other words, you feed on all kinds of things. Just like hunters have traplines. In other words, they walk … 
  3. A Sense of Yourself
     … seeing where you’re causing yourself suffering. This, of course, requires that you work on your concentration so that you can see things more clearly. Discernment is not just a matter of having learned things or having thought them through. It means actually seeing, when you’re about to do something that’s going to be unskillful: How can you talk yourself out of … 
  4. For the Sake of the Deathless
     … You develop the path, and in developing the path you realize awakening, you realize cessation of suffering. It’s not someplace else. Some people have read this teaching as to mean that the path and the goal are the same, but that’s not the case. It’s in the doing of the path that you’re also doing the doing the duty of … 
  5. Moods Are Not-Self
     … The Buddha teaches the truth of a path that can take you to the end of suffering. It’s a truth of the second type. Even if it takes a lot out of you, it’s really worth it because it pays back many times over.
  6. The Gift of Speech
     … i.e., there are things you know will lead to suffering down the line, but you like to say them—and so you learn how not to say them. There are things that will lead to good things down the line, happiness down the line, but they may be things that you don’t feel like saying—but still you talk yourself into wanting … 
  7. Above the World
     … Above all, you can see the really subtle things the mind is doing that are causing stress, suffering, a sense of burdensomeness to itself. You see these things and you can clear them away. That brings the mind to an even higher state of awareness, a more heightened state, in the sense that nothing can touch it. And again, it’s not a question … 
  8. Licking Yourself Clean
     … that you can put an end to suffering. Now, scientists like to see their hypothesis proved, but good scientists are willing to admit when it isn’t, when the experiment actually proves something else. You chalk it up to experience and you try again. The instructions for breath meditation involve discernment, and they also involve training yourself. To train in any skill you need … 
  9. The Hedgefox
     … looking at his mind to see if there was still any suffering or stress in there. He focused on learning how to observe the mind really well through mindfulness and concentration. And focusing on that one thing, he began to see that it divided out into lots of little things. So we can keep those Dhamma concepts in the background, for the time when … 
  10. Make Yourself Reliable
     … Does your knowledge really help put an end to suffering? Does it help you look at your habits that are unskillful and help pull you out of them? When you’ve put things to that test, again and again and again, then you become a more reliable judge, and the knowledge you gain can become more reliable as well.
  11. Maintained by Fabrication
     … And it’s a good thing to keep in mind as we practice, because as the Buddha warns us, a lot of the other “for the sakes of” that we could follow—the ones we take as a guide as we keep fabricating ourselves, fabricating our experience, and then using those fabrications to fabricate more—entail a lot of suffering. We need a guide … 
  12. Faith as a Virtue
     … Remember the questions that lie at the beginning of discernment: “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term harm and suffering? What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” In asking those questions, you’re taking responsibility. They go together with two other questions: “What is blameworthy? What is blameless?” You want to make sure … 
  13. The Language of the Breath
     … That’s what it means to master the language of the mind, learning how to use the mind so that it doesn’t cause suffering. It’s one of the most difficult skills of all, but also the most worthwhile.
  14. The Larger Picture
     … The end of suffering is a huge goal. We have to accept where we are at the present moment, and realize that we’re not going to get there unless we look very carefully at the present moment. So you’ve got to put aside memories of the past, anticipations of the future, and just look at what you’ve got right now: this … 
  15. There Is This
     … This is a teaching on suffering, stress. And both of those teaching are also teachings on not-self. In other words, this body that you thought would do what you wanted it to do is suddenly not doing what you want it to anymore. Pain comes, and you can’t share it out among others. There’s a lot you can’t do around … 
  16. No-Tech Meditation
     … The important thing is to see all these levels of concentration as types of fabrication because you’re looking for the origination of suffering. Now, the word origination means cause. Usually when the Buddha uses that word, he’s talking about causes coming out of the mind. Craving comes out of the mind. Clinging comes out of the mind. That’s what we’ve … 
  17. Not Pained by Pain
     … Ajaan Fuang told me that when he was a young monk he suffered from headaches, and he found that by focusing on the base of his spine, and thinking of the breath going out of the base of his spine down into the ground, reduced a lot of the pressure up in his head. So, this step can have that effect sometimes. Other times … 
  18. A Full Heart
    One of the teachings that the forest ajaans hold in common is that dukkha, suffering or stress, comes from a sense of lack—and that the lack is something we create. We don’t normally think in those terms. A lack is often something given. In other words, it’s what we start out with. We want to find something to fill the lack … 
  19. The Desire for Truth
     … It, too, has some stress—although the Buddha doesn’t call it suffering or stress in this context. He calls it a disturbance. You look for the disturbances in your concentration. You see where you’re causing them in the way you perceive things. Then you refine your perceptions. In this way, you take that principle he taught to Rahula and you bring it … 
  20. The Skills of Stillness
     … i.e., “What am I doing? In what way is it causing suffering or stress? How can I learn to stop?” When you’re at the right place, you’re asking the right questions, and you’re really observant, then you’re bound to come up with good answers.
  21. Not-self in Context
     … When you feel tempted to stop, ask yourself, “Okay, you came here for this purpose, which is to put an end to suffering. Do you not want to do that? Don’t you really care for your genuine happiness?" It’s in cases like that where the activity of identifying yourself is actually useful. So, taking action as the context, you begin to see … 
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