Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 131
  2. A Good Path to Be On
     … You try to be alert and mindful so that you can watch the mind, see how the mind moves around, see how it clings to things, and ask it why. What’s the allure? And to get to the allure, you have to ask some pretty strange questions, because the reasons we go for certain things are not always aboveboard. We have lots of … 
  3. The Thinking Heart
    The Thinking Heart December 28, 2018 In Western languages, we have separate words for heart and mind. But in most of the countries where Buddhism has spread, they don’t have separate words. They use one word for both. Even in the ones where they do have two words, like Thai—they have cit for mind and cai for heart—the words are pretty … 
  4. The Wisdom of Restraint
     … But even though the thoughts wouldn’t lead him into trouble, still, thinking even skillful thoughts all the time gets the mind tired. When the mind is tired, it can’t control itself very well. So he realized he would have to exert some more control. Even skillful thoughts, he said, he would have to keep in check as he got the mind to … 
  5. Cultivate a Limitless Heart
     … He realized that the other people puttering around were actually doing something useful for their own minds. They were developing good qualities. They weren’t going dry. These are perfections: patience, endurance, goodwill, compassion. They all go together and they all help with the meditation. When you focus on doing the little good things, that strengthens your mind and develops the attitude of a … 
  6. Active Truth
     … And the only way you can do that is to put the mind in a position where it doesn’t feel threatened by the stress. That’s what the path is for — and particularly the heart of the path: Right Concentration, putting the mind in a state of ease, even rapture, focused on one thing. This gives the mind a sense of power, a … 
  7. The Thinking Cure
     … For example, as we’re doing breath meditation, try to get the mind to settle down with the breath, get concentrated on the breath. As the Buddha said, every state of concentration depends on a perception, a mental label you create, a little message you can carry from one moment to the next, one that you can remember, that you can be mindful of … 
  8. The Wisdom of Ardency
     … Ardency, of course, is very closely related to the factor that comes before right mindfulness, which is right effort. Right effort builds on right view in the sense that it makes the distinctions between skillful actions and unskillful actions, skillful qualities of mind and unskillful qualities of mind, and then it tries to do something about them. You have the duties of the four … 
  9. Analyzing the Breath
    Analyzing the Breath April 18, 2005 When the Buddha teaches mindfulness immersed in the body, the first thing he discusses is being mindful of the breath. It’s good to stop and think for a few moments about why he starts there. One of the reasons is that the breath is your most immediate experience of the body. We have a tendency to identify … 
  10. Social Anxiety
     … If the zeros get put after, you’ve got lots of issues, but if the zeros get put first, no matter how many zeros you have, they don’t add anything, don’t burden the mind at all. It’s the same way with the mind: You make it zero and then you put the zeros first. Then when you deal with other people … 
  11. The Six Properties
     … And again, hold that perception in mind. Don’t pay any attention to anything that would tell you that the perception is not right. You’re seeing the power of your present actions. There will be different possible sensations in your range of awareness. What you’re doing here is being very selective. You’ve got this one perception in mind and you look … 
  12. Shame & Acceptance
     … You’ve got a human mind. You’ve got breath. You’ve got your awareness. You’ve got some mindfulness, some alertness. These are all the things you need.” And so a lot of his Dhamma talks focused on, one, the fact that people were suffering; and, two, they had the resources that, if they worked at them, could take them out of suffering … 
  13. Train Hopping
     … Or if you still find yourself really obsessed with a particular kind of thinking, then, as the Buddha says, grit your teeth, press your tongue against the roof of your mouth, and make up your mind to crush your mind with your mind. In other words, you make up your mind that you will not go there. You won’t think those thoughts. Just … 
  14. Getting into the Body
    One of the Buddha’s terms for concentration is adhicitta, which can be translated as “heightened awareness” or “the heightened mind.” It can also be translated as “heightened intentness.” In other words, you really do pay careful attention to what you’ve got here, the object you’re focused on—in this case, the body, the breath. Give all your attention to how the … 
  15. Mindfulness Immersed in the Body
     … Set your mind there.” Then when the person set his mind there, tell him that there are even better sensual pleasures among the Devas of the Thirty-three. He works up through the heavens, finally gets him to the level of the Brahma heavens. Then he says, “Even there, there’s self-identity. It would be good if you could set your mind apart … 
  16. Between Either & Or
     … Use the pleasure of concentration to put the mind in the proper mood and the proper frame of mind, making it stable enough so it can really see things in a balanced way. And often this requires a lot of concentration-pleasure to get the mind tamed, not just little middling doses. At the same time, the Buddha has you use pain. Pain is … 
  17. Stupid about Pleasure
     … The side of the human mind that wants to maintain its old attachments: It doesn’t give them up easily. It does everything it can to hold on. You give things up only when you really see that there’s a direct connection between suffering and the pleasures you’ve been enjoying — and that there’s a better alternative. Only then will the mind … 
  18. The Particulars of Your Suffering
     … And you find that as you try to bring the mind into oneness with its object, you have to learn how to isolate these particular functions of the mind, these aspects of your experience, so that you can adjust them skillfully. How do you adjust the form, i.e., the breath? Well, that requires fabrication and it also requires perception because some perceptions get … 
  19. Universal Truths
     … You can check the impact on the body and the impact on the mind of those different ways of breathing. And you begin to see the more mindful you are—in other words, keeping these tasks in mind—and the more alert you are to what’s actually happening in response to what you’re doing, the more sensitive you then become to when … 
  20. An Exercise in Sensitivity
     … Otherwise, you just go back to the mind’s old ways of wandering around. Although it’s true that you can learn some things by watching the mind wandering around, you can learn a lot more by watching it as you try to get it to settle down and under control. That’s because there are parts of the mind that resist getting under … 
  21. Happiness Without Conflict
     … That’s where the real blame lies.” In other words, our mind changes very quickly. And our mind is very unreliable: so unreliable, so quick to change that the Buddha said he couldn’t find a good simile for how quick it is. This is where the real problem lies. It’s not that things outside are inconstant. It’s that the mind is … 
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