Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. Isolating the Aggregates
     … When the mind is really still, you can see this as it’s happening. You can see it more clearly because you’re intent on not allowing it to take over your concentration. So it’s through your mastery of these different processes of the aggregates that you can actually get the mind to settle down—which is why when the mind has settled … 
  3. Analysis of Qualities
     … What patterns in the mind need to be examined? Which ones need to be fostered? Which ones need to be put aside? We use our breath as our guideline in the beginning. You make up your mind to stay with the breath, and as for anything else that comes in to pull you away, you can say: not now. No matter how good it … 
  4. Cutting New Paths in the Mind
    Cutting New Paths in the Mind October 10, 2011 When we’re taught to meditate, there’s so much emphasis placed on being in the present moment, not wandering off to the past and not wandering off to the future, that we tend to neglect a very important part of right effort, which is to prevent unskillful qualities from arising. To prevent these things … 
  5. Equanimity as a Factor of Awakening
     … The mind knows when it’s in a state like this: It knows what’s coming in, knows what’s going out, what’s rising and falling, but it doesn’t follow along with them. That’s the mind state we’re trying to develop. Solid and aware. One of its main aids is a little bit of skepticism. Basically, the Buddha’s saying … 
  6. How to Use the Three Perceptions
     … You have to work on the concentration, and only when you’ve got it really solid and it has done its work on the mind—calmed the mind, soothed the mind, nourished the mind, given it a good place to stand so that it can watch things clearly—then you start applying the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not self to the aggregates that … 
  7. Medicine – Timely & Timeless
     … If you start out with three perceptions and try to use them as your medicine to treat everything that comes along, it’s very hard to get the mind into concentration. So realize that there are stages in this treatment. Your mind is sick. What’s it sick with? Greed, anger, and delusion. And this is the treatment. It has its different stages. You … 
  8. Dhamma Books & the Actuality
     … The first two simply get you oriented properly so that you realize that you really do have to train the mind. If you’re going to look for happiness, especially a happiness that’s solid and secure, the mind needs to be trained so that its thoughts don’t go and destroy its happiness. So that’s the orientation part – the directing part. But … 
  9. Passion for Dispassion
     … Why is that? We’re here to figure out our own minds, and that should be interesting. After all, seeing how the mind lies to itself is like a detective novel: Who committed the crime? And how did they cover it up? The irony here is that the mind is lying to itself, right to its face. It does things here in the present … 
  10. The Dhamma Is in the Method
     … So try to get your mind still as well; try to bring things into balance inside. Look at your mind. Look at your body. Look at your posture. Make sure your spine is straight, balanced, not leaning to the right, left, forward, or back. Then make sure your mind isn’t leaning, either. The Thai ajaans use this image a lot. Leaning forward, of … 
  11. Unattractive
     … They have to do something else to get the mind to settle down. You can think thoughts of goodwill to put the mind in a good nice warm state, and then the breath flows more easily. Sometimes you have to deal with thoughts of lust, which is why we have the contemplation of the body, or as the Buddha says, the contemplation of the … 
  12. Building on Certainty
     … Look at the mind in the present moment, look what it’s doing. In other words, look for its intentions. Look to see how much stress or pain or suffering those intentions are causing and learn how to cause less. Those are the basic instructions. The test is something very immediate: your own immediate experience. And yet for most of us, immediate experience is … 
  13. Determination
     … And once those things are dropped, it’s easier for the mind to settle in and to be willing to stay right here. And as you stay right here, you realize you’re not depriving yourself. You’re finding a new source of well-being inside. And it goes deep inside. Here it is, right close to the mind. The breath is the closest … 
  14. Occupy Your Body
     … It’s “concentration work.” We come to concentration to rest, but for the mind really to rest, to have a sense of belonging here in the present moment, fully inhabiting the present moment, often takes some work. The factors that do the work are directed thought and evaluation: keeping your mind directed to the breath, and then evaluating how things are going as you … 
  15. Virtue & Right View
     … You want to give the mind a place where it can settle down and find a source of well-being inside. We live in a world that doesn’t go the way we want it to often, but we can learn how to control our minds. That’s an important distinction. Sometimes you hear it said that just wanting anything to be different from … 
  16. Frustrated Desires
     … You sit down and you try to concentrate the mind and you find it immediately goes off someplace else. One lesson you could learn from that is that you’ve got a goal to have a quiet mind, and if you try to focus on the goal, you are going to get frustrated. So don’t have a goal about a quiet mind, just … 
  17. A Load Off the Mind
    We come to this quiet corner here at the end of the road, with the chaparral all around us, to find a quiet corner in our own minds, because that’s something you can take with you wherever you go. Whether you’re in this spot at the end of the road or at an intersection some place, it’s good to have that … 
  18. Nostalgia for Suffering
     … Think of all the different variations of what the mind can do—and as the Buddha said, the mind is more variegated than the animal kingdom. Think of all the different species out there and all the different types of animals: They all came from mind. A mind thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool to be a lizard… wouldn’t it be cool to … 
  19. Pleasure & Pain
     … our “quiet corner.” You have to make a quiet corner in the mind as well. If you wait for the world to settle down and be a good place to live in, where everybody’s fair and just, you’ll never have your chance to straighten out your own mind. You’ll die first. This is why you have to start here, creating this … 
  20. No Happiness without Restraint
     … Ajaan Maha Bua’s term for the normal state of the mind is “unruliness.” Virtue is a fence, he said, for the unruliness in your behavior in body and speech. Concentration is a fence for the unruliness of your mind, because without restraint you can’t focus on what is the big problem in life: the fact that we do everything we can for … 
  21. Protect Your Energy
     … This is why the forest ajaans stressed so much those three qualities of mindfulness, alertness, and ardency. In other words, you try to develop right view about what’s really important in terms of what’s going to cause suffering and what’s not. You want to keep that in mind. That’s a duty of mindfulness. Alertness is being aware of what you … 
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