Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 136
  2. Acceptance
     … And the mind moves from one to another. When you sit down to meditate, part of the mind is with the program and part of the mind is not, which can be the cause for a lot of frustration. But you can learn how to use these many selves to your advantage. Remember, each of your selves is the result of an activity aimed … 
  3. Clearing Your Space
     … And the same with the mind: Sometimes really persistent thoughts keep coming back again and again and again. You try to think about the drawbacks of those kinds of thoughts, and they still come back again. This is where you have to think about the committee of the mind: There will be some members who just keep talking, and they’re not going to … 
  4. Your Desire to Practice
     … There are large parts of your mind that you’ve been blocking out for various reasons, and there are other parts of the mind that don’t want to open them up. But when you can be all-around aware of the body, you become all-around aware of the mind. Areas that used to be subconscious or buried under many layers of denial … 
  5. Chew Your Food Well
    The mind has a habit of feeding on things. And for the most part its feeding habits are pretty bad. It feeds on all the wrong things and it suffers as a result. Like a person who just takes anything at all and stuffs it in his mouth: He’s sure to damage his digestive system and his body as a whole. But the … 
  6. Fabricated Path, Unfabricated Goal
     … You’re here to focus on the breath, creating a mind state that allows you to see what’s going on in the mind. And whether it reaches jhana at this particular time or not, that’s not the issue. The issue is: Can you get the mind still enough to start seeing what’s going on? And comprehending what’s going on? And … 
  7. The Raft of Concepts
     … He did say that if you thought skillful thoughts for 24 hours, the drawback would be that the body and mind would get tired, so you want the mind to learn how to rest from the thinking. But he never said that the conceptual mind is bad. It’s simply a matter of learning how to use your concepts properly. That’s the path … 
  8. Solo Practice
     … When the mind is sluggish, he says you want to start questioning things. There’s first what he calls analysis of qualities: basically analyzing the qualities of the mind, seeing what’s skillful right now, what’s not skillful right now. And when you get a sense of what’s skillful, then you work at augmenting it, bringing it into being and strengthening it … 
  9. Investing Your Intention
     … because the mind works this way. The mind’s really good at hyping things. And we wouldn’t fall for external hype unless it were already a habit in the mind. It may sound like we’re bad-mouthing the pleasures of the world, but you have to make a choice: Do you really want peace of mind or do you want to keep … 
  10. Things that Arise & Pass Away
     … If you want a solid happiness, you’ve got to keep other people’s well-being in mind. They love their happiness as much as you love yours. So if you want happiness that lasts, you can’t build it on their suffering. That’s the basis for compassion. Notice, compassion is not an innate quality in the mind, but it is one that … 
  11. Mistakes
     … If you punish yourself, the mind won’t want to stay. It’ll find even more reasons to get away. But if you reward yourself with some very pleasant breathing, then the mind will be more and more inclined to want to come back. This is an important principle in the meditation: learning how to deal with your mistakes, how to correct them without … 
  12. The Kamma of Meditation
    The reason why we’re focusing on training the mind in the present moment is because of the way the Buddha taught kamma. That may seem ironic, as most of us think of kamma as having to do with past and future—and it does. But it actually has to do with all three time frames—past, future, and present, and it hinges on … 
  13. Beyond Imagination
     … There’s a passage in the Canon where the Buddha said that the mind is more variegated than the animal world. Think of all the different species of animals, different kinds of lives they live, different kinds of bodies they have, the things they find attractive. And the Buddha said it all comes from the mind. Your mind is capable of all that kind … 
  14. Safe at Home
     … So it has come from within the mind, from training what resources you have in the mind. The good thing about true happiness is that it doesn’t take anything away from anyone else. It’s not like the happiness and pleasures of the world, where if you gain something, somebody else has to lose it. Your true happiness doesn’t conflict with anybody … 
  15. Body Contemplation Is Compassionate
     … As the Buddha says, when you do other meditation topics and unskillful mind states start developing, you go back to the breath. As you sweep the breath through the body, sweep the breath through your mind, those unskillful states get swept away. He makes a comparison with the end of the dry season and the beginning of the rainy season. During the dry season … 
  16. The Buddha Didn’t Play Gotcha
     … After all, it’s a pleasure that can arise simply by focusing your mind on the breath. You’re not harming anyone at all. And in following this pleasure, you’re not getting intoxicated with youth or health or life or the other things that intoxicate the mind. So it’s a good pleasure to pursue. In this way, jhana was the first factor … 
  17. Friends with the Breath
    When we come out to a place like this, sit down, close our eyes, we find that the physical luggage we’ve brought along with us is nothing compared to the baggage we’re carrying around in our minds. And one of the first tasks in meditation is to let go of that baggage, for otherwise it keeps interfering, keeps getting in the way … 
  18. A Passion for the Path
     … There’s a sense of well-being that comes when you can look at your actions and see that you haven’t harmed anybody; a sense of well-being that comes from getting the mind to settle down and be still; the well-being that comes when you begin to discern things in the mind that are really unnecessary, you can drop them, and … 
  19. Instructions for a New Monk
     … These are qualities that come bubbling up in the mind and lead you to flow along with them and create more suffering and stress as you keep coming back and back and back. He was able to end all of those things in the mind. Then he went on to teach for 45 years. He set out the Dhamma, set out the Vinaya, the … 
  20. To Excel
     … And you have to practice to the level where you know that even if aging comes, illness comes, death comes, social unrest comes, or a split in the Sangha comes, your mind is solid enough so it won’t have to suffer. A verse in the Mangala Sutta says that you want to get the mind so that even when it’s touched by … 
  21. The Skill of Letting Go
     … Phenomena are led by the mind, created by the mind, dominated by the mind. So you want to look inside. The next three steps have to do with not just the fact of fabrication but also the value of fabrication. First you want to see, “What is the allure of this thing that I’m attached to? What do I find attractive?” Say, with … 
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