Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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.
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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.
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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