Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. Work & Play
     … If it’s just in, out, in, out, in, out, the mind is just going to go out wandering away, out of sheer boredom. Then the concentration becomes an exercise in sheer will power: How long can you force the mind to stay here in spite of its impulses to wander away? But if you can see that by staying with the breath, working … 
  3. Cherish Your Friends
    Cherish Your Friends March 12, 2005 Try to make the mind quiet. Try to make the body quiet. There are lots of levels to that quietness. One means sitting quietly — but, of course, the body isn’t the only thing making noise and chattering away. The mind is, too. And just as when you want to hear something very subtle you have to sit … 
  4. Harmlessness
     … Make sure at least that the causes don’t backslide, because, after all, the mind is a complex phenomenon. There’s not just one mind in there. There are many minds with lots of different agendas, lots of different attitudes. Sometimes you can deal with one mind and everything seems to calm down. But tomorrow another comes up. It’s not that you’ve … 
  5. Hold a Mirror to Your Mind
     … When that foundation is strong, then you can start asking the other questions, which are, “How are my feelings and perceptions shaping my mind?” In other words, “How does that feeling of pain make inroads into the mind, and what role does perception play in that?” Ajaan MahaBoowa gives a lot of interesting reflections on this: How do you perceive your pain? Is it … 
  6. The Second Frame of Reference
     … That’s how you bring ardency to the practice of mindfulness. And that’s how mindfulness is part of the path, because mindfulness is not just a matter of bringing bare attention to things. It’s a matter of keeping something in mind. In this case, you’re keeping in mind the fact that there is an intentional element in your feelings, and you … 
  7. Cause & Effect
     … What you’re doing is opening up a dialog inside, but the mind already has its inner dialogue. A lot of times, one part of the mind yells at another part of the mind, gets its way simply through force; other times through subterfuge. But we’re now opening up the mind to a different kind of dialogue, where everything has to be related … 
  8. Feeding While You Work
    The mind has two modes. There’s the active mode when you’re actively working at something, trying to change things, trying to effect a change in yourself or in the world around you. Then there’s the receptive or feeding mode, where you simply want to enjoy without having to do much of anything. As we’re meditating, we’re trying to bring … 
  9. Goodwill for the Breath
     … It’s by adjusting the breath, getting sensitive to how your mind interacts with the breath, and then learning to do it in a more and more friendly way, more sensitive way, so the mind and the breath get along together: That’s how you come to know both the breath and the mind. So, notice how the breathing feels as it comes in … 
  10. The Care & Feeding of the Mind (Reading of Ajaan Lee)
  11. Awaken to Your Potentials
     … Now it’s time to recharge your mind. In the course of recharging your mind, you recharge the body as well. As you get the mind still with the breath and explore the potentials of the breath, you find that it’s good for the mind and for the body. Like right now, you can breathe in long or you can breathe in short … 
  12. Basic Wisdom
     … your actions in terms of what you do with your body, what you do with your speech, what you do with your mind, and the actions that the Buddha recommends you do and not do. He recommends that you be generous, that you observe the precepts, and you develop good qualities in the mind through mindfulness and meditation, partly because these actions give rise … 
  13. Samsara
     … The mental label you keep repeating—“Keep the mind on the breath, mind on the breath, mind on the breath, breath, breath”: Take that faculty of the mind that’s always labeling things and learn to use it skillfully. Label things that allow the mind to settle down. Once the mind has settled down, then you use the perception of inconstancy or impermanence, the … 
  14. Feeding on Feeding
     … The body feeds off the food, but the mind gains pleasure out of these activities because it’s found that this is how you survive, this is how you take in parts of the world and make them part of yourself. That’s what eating is all about: taking what’s not-self and making it self. The mind gets pleasure out of the … 
  15. Rooted in Desire
    When you listen to a Dhamma talk, give only one percent of your attention to the talk, ninety-nine percent to the mind with the breath, right here, right now. Think about the time of the Buddha: People were listening to the talks he gave and they gained awakening. Not simply by listening to the talk—they were looking at their minds. When the … 
  16. Approaching Painful Memories as a Meditator
     … You always want to keep that in mind, because the process of becoming exists on many levels, just as your mind is doing things on many levels. Becoming is the mind’s tendency to create worlds of experience, and then go into them and inhabit them, to take on an identity inside them. You’ve got the outside world right now and your identity … 
  17. Conviction & Confidence
     … So when the mind is talking to itself in those ways, remind yourself, “Okay, that’s the mind off the path. Get back on”—because the path is a good place to be.
  18. A Clean Break at Death
     … The proper use is to get you to the deathless, to the point where the mind doesn’t have to experience death anymore. That next best thing is to be able to approach death in such way that the mind is not affected by the death of the body. If it’s going to be reborn, let it be reborn in a good place … 
  19. A Recipe for Jhana
     … He’d say, “Establish mindfulness.” So Luang Phor Phut would go and ask Ajaan Sao: “Ajaan Singh says to establish mindfulness. Why don’t you say, ‘Establish mindfulness,’ in your meditation instructions?” Ajaan Sao would respond, “If you just start repeating the word buddho and keep it in mind, that’s establishing mindfulness right there. You don’t have to go into long descriptions … 
  20. Your World to Practice In
     … the currents that run out of the mind. It’s not that greed, aversion, and delusion come flowing into your eyes and ears. They **direct your eyes and ears, all too often, flowing out as you look and listen. So you want to take command so that you have wisdom looking, mindfulness looking: qualities of mind you can trust. The Buddha’s image for … 
  21. Pride in Your Craft
     … The mind that’s still is the mind that can see clearly what’s working and what’s not. And it has a clear idea of what it means to “work” because you’re getting more and more sensitive to the movements of the mind and also to the different levels of stress in the mind. You begin to see that there are fluctuations … 
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