Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. Who Are You Trying to Please?
     … To get past the disturbances of the perception of wilderness, you bring the mind to concentration. The mind is totally with, say, the breath, or any of the formless states. You can drop the concerns of being in the wilderness. When you’ve settled down, it’s just you and the breath. Or as the Buddha recommends in that particular sutta, you hold on … 
  3. Shaping Your Breath, Shaping Your Life
     … If it were, the mind would just be on the receiving end of everything. But here the mind can make choices, and it can use those choices to impress changes on its experience. That’s why the Buddha said, in the first verse in the Dhammapada, “The mind is the forerunner of all phenomena.” The way you approach experience is going to determine whether … 
  4. Common Ground
     … As the Buddha said, you keep track of the body in and of itself, or feelings, or mind, mental qualities in and of themselves, ardent, alert and mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. The “in and of itself” there is important. Say you’re going to focus on the breath. It’s just the breath right here. That’s … 
  5. To Comprehend Craving
     … In the same way, the mind clings to craving as it goes from this body to another one. And we know what wind is like. It can blow anywhere. So you want to train the mind so that it’s not fooled by any kind of craving. We do work with the desire to get the mind to settle down. We work with the … 
  6. Take Care of Your Tools
     … Images coming into the mind? Just because there’s an image in the mind and it’s coming in a way that’s very uncanny doesn’t mean it’s true. If you find it unsettling or disturbing, breath deep down into the heart a couple of times and it’ll go away. If you suddenly find yourself outside of the body, just think … 
  7. Body as Path
     … The really important part is that it’s good for the mind. So this is how you take the body, this aggregate of form, and turn it into part of the path. When you get the mind in a good state of concentration like this, all the aggregates are here. There’s the form of the body, there’s a feeling of pleasure, there … 
  8. Purity of Heart
    Purity of Heart March 9, 2005 When I first went to stay with Ajaan Fuang, it gradually dawned on me that he could read my mind. And I begin to notice that he had other unusual powers as well. He knew when things were going to happen in the future. I must admit that it had me really fascinated. It opened whole new worlds … 
  9. Laying the Infrastructure
     … Any of the obstacles—some of the seemingly positive things that are signs that the mind is beginning to settle down or things that happen in the body or the mind as the mind begins to settle down: You don’t want them to distract you, either. You‘re working on your ability to stick with one thing no matter what else happens. And … 
  10. The Noble Truth of Suffering
     … There’s the physical food for the body, and then there are three kinds of food for the mind: the food of consciousness, the food of contact, and then the food of what he calls intellectual intentions, which can be translated basically as all your intentions. These are the things the mind feeds on. If you don’t have these things, the mind goes … 
  11. Initiative
     … that we should simply accept everything; that all we need is a paradigm shift in our minds; how realizing that there’s nobody here doing anything somehow should solve the problem; that we should be content with whatever mind states come up, and not think that we have to do anything about them. They would have no time for that kind of thinking. Ajaan … 
  12. Dignity in the Face of Hardship
     … When we find ourselves in difficult situations, it’s not that we were simply minding our own business and something came along and hit us. We were out looking for it. We have to keep that in mind at all times. The question is, what are we looking for now? As things fall apart, where is your craving going to go? Is it going … 
  13. Old Movies & New
    One of the best ways to get the mind to stay with the breath is to realize that there’s a lot going on here when you breathe. It’s not just in and out. The energy flow of the whole body is involved. For most of us, it’s terra incognita, a place we don’t know, unexplored jungle. But then as you … 
  14. Inner Critics
     … One of the reasons we meditate to get the mind still is to start seeing our own unskillful habits and to put the mind in a mood where it’s willing to admit them. This is why concentration is an important part of the path. But it’s not the whole path. Sometimes you hear the mistaken notion that when you reach a certain … 
  15. Living Forward, Understanding Backward
     … They’re created in the mind. They’re not necessarily a given. What are they made out of? Physically, they’re affected by the breath. Inside the mind, they are affected by the kind of conversations the mind has with itself, and also by feelings of pleasure and pain, neither pleasure nor pain, and perceptions—the labels we put on things. As we meditate … 
  16. Bases of Success
     … The complicated part is the mind. You have to bring the right attitudes to this, because you’ll find as you meditate that the mind has many minds, many attitudes, and a lot of those attitudes can get in the way. So you’ve got to bring as many skillful attitudes to this as you can. Otherwise, the meditation is not going to work … 
  17. Unlearning Helplessness
     … that it does make a difference when the mind is wandering off that you bring it right back. And even though it wanders off again, that doesn’t mean that you’ve failed—just bring it back again. Learn to develop this as a new habit. You’re developing good qualities in the mind: Mindfulness—the ability to keep your breath in mind. Alertness … 
  18. Friends with The Breath
     … It’s interesting that in Pali they talk about the object of the mind not being a focal point but being a support. So allow the breath in any spot in the body to be a support for your mind, a place where you can settle in. Then think of your awareness spreading from that spot to the whole body, so that you’re … 
  19. A Home of Your Own
     … But as the mind settles down, the more obvious areas calm down, and then the other areas become more apparent. And you want to think of everything in the body flowing smoothly together. You can hold an image in the mind of the breath flowing down the spine, down the legs, the energy flowing through the blood vessels, around through the body; whatever helps … 
  20. Appreciating Merit
     … That makes the mind even more generous, even more inclined to think of others. In fact, this practice of dedicating merit lies at the basis of goodwill—the idea that you’d like to spread your happiness around. But first it has to start simply with appreciating the happiness that comes from a harmless action. You want to hold that in mind. Often when … 
  21. When You Care
    We come to meditate because we realize the mind has power. It’s the agent that shapes our lives. It’s not just on the receiving end of outside influences. It has influences coming from within. We want to make sure those are good. There are a lot of qualities that we bring to this. We bring the discernment that realizes that our actions … 
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