Search results for: "The Mind"

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  2. What Are You Bringing?
     … If you’re here to squeeze or force as much concentration out of the mind as you can, that attitude starts affecting the way you breathe. Then the way you breathe gets uncomfortable, and it’s difficult to settle down. So ask yourself, “What are you bringing to the meditation?” It’s always good to stop and take stock, and try to bring the … 
  3. Expanding Your Awareness
     … When your awareness is all-around, you start seeing things in the mind you didn’t see before. You catch sight of the motions in the mind out of the corner of your eye that you’d miss if your awareness were too narrowly focused. So this practice of expanding your awareness and keeping it expanded is a really important part of the meditation … 
  4. The Challenge of Faith
     … To what extent do they place a burden on the mind? You can watch this, seeing the ups and downs of your concentration, the ups and downs of the level of stress in your concentration. That way you begin to detect very subtle movements of the mind that otherwise you wouldn’t have seen, and peel away any of the motions of the mind … 
  5. Skillful Selfing
    The Buddha’s instructions on right mindfulness are basically his directions for getting the mind into right concentration. You stay focused on the body in and of itself—and here, to do that, we’re going to take the breath as our object. You put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. In other words, anything that’s not related to the … 
  6. Emotion
     … And particularly awareness of what kind of breathing is easeful and what kind of breathing is stressful; what kind of breathing is good for the mind, good for the body; what kind of breathing is bad for the mind, bad for the body. Learn to get a sense of cause and effect as it surrounds the breath. This is one of the most important … 
  7. To Go Where You’ve Never Gone Before
     … There is that passage where the Buddha said the mind is luminous, and it’s darkened by visiting defilements. But he’s not saying that the mind is originally pure. This is a point that Ajaan Maha Boowa made. As he said, if the Buddha had said the mind is originally pure, you could argue with him: If it was originally pure then how … 
  8. Noble Wealth
     … You’re doing it because it develops good qualities in the mind. You develop the mindfulness that’s going to help you remember the lessons you’ve learned, and you develop the discernment to see things clearly—in particular, to see what you’re doing right now that’s shaping your experience. Because those instructions for breath meditation involve bodily fabrication, verbal fabrication, mental … 
  9. Mindfulness: The Whole Formula
     … When you’re ardent, if anything unskillful comes up in the mind, you try to get rid of it. As for skillful things that are not there yet, you try to give rise to them. And when they are there, you try to maintain them in such a way that you don’t allow new unskillful things to arise. So, there’s a lot … 
  10. Don’t Hang Around Your Corpse
     … This is where the contemplation turns into a focus on the mind. Why does the mind play these tricks on itself? Something that looks really attractive in one context becomes unattractive in another context, and then back to attractive again in still another. What’s going on? The mind wants this to be attractive. For what purpose? Keep digging into those questions and you … 
  11. Consistently on the Path
     … There may be people who say we can’t eat self-esteem, but even though it’s not sustenance for the body, it is sustenance for the mind. You’ve got to learn how to appreciate that sustenance. Otherwise, the mind is left hungry as the body gets to feed. You keep feeding the body, and feeding it, and feeding it, and finally it … 
  12. Samvega for Samsara
     … As for the other topics, though, he says that the ones you do before the breath are designed to give rise to a strong sense of saṃvega—for the body, for things of the world — so that the mind will be willing to settle down: not just because you tell it to settle down, but because it looks around and doesn’t see anywhere … 
  13. Fear of Concentration
    Some of the problems we have in getting the mind into concentration come simply from an inability or unwillingness to let our thoughts subside. We find our thoughts interesting. We find our inner mental chatter interesting. We’d be hard put to know what it would be like to have a mind where this chatter wasn’t going on all the time. So we … 
  14. A Warrior’s Strengths
     … You’re creating new ruts in the mind. Your old ruts are obviously unskillful, so let’s create some new ones. That’s going to take some time. Remember that the old ruts are also the product of conditions. They aren’t innate in the mind. You have the choice of creating new habits or falling with your old habits. If you don’t … 
  15. Meaningful Freedom
     … They’re defenseless, unprotected.” Urges come up in the mind, and they have no reason to think that they can say No to them. Yet so much of the practice is just that: Something comes into the mind, and you have the choice to say Yes or No. The point he’s making in all these instances is that the things you’re experiencing … 
  16. The Buddha’s Lists
     … They’re there to name the monsters in the mind but also to name your friends and allies in the mind. You can put all those different lists within the right frameworks, in terms of the duties of the four noble truths, to comprehend suffering, abandon its cause, realize its cessation, and develop the path to its cessation. Then you know what to do … 
  17. Fear of Missing Out
     … You see them directly as you meditate, not that they simply appear, but you’re actually using them to get the mind to settle down. You’re using directed thought and evaluation. You’re using perceptions. You’re using your intentions. The things you use, the things you make, are the things you know best. So when the mind does settle down, ask yourself … 
  18. Fix Your Views
     … That’s where the real problem lies.” The inconstancy of the mind is the problem. The stress caused by the mind is the problem: the mind holding on to things it shouldn’t hold on to. How do you watch the mind? You get it to do something that you think is right and you watch it in action. You get it to commit … 
  19. Sweat the Small Stuff
     … I can change my habits, the habits of the mind here by attending to the details”: That’s the attitude that will see you through. That’s the kind of humility you want. It’s not the humility of saying that you’re bad—because that’s not really humility at all. Genuine humility is the humility that’s willing to learn from the … 
  20. The Power of Present Kamma
     … If the mind isn’t steady, it’s like trying to write as you’re riding along in a bouncy car. The writing is going to be all over the place. If you’re going to write something neatly, you want a still place where you can sit down and write. It’s the same with the mind. If you’re going to create … 
  21. Up for the Challenge
     … As things start winding down and we realize that we’re going to have to leave a lot of things in this life, the mind reacts. There can be very strong greed, very strong aversion, a very strong sense of helplessness and weakness. And that’s something we can’t give into. This is one of the reasons why we meditate, to develop strengths … 
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