Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. Respect for Happiness
     … If you suffer from stress diseases, working with the breath can work through that stress and dissolve it away so that physically you’re healthier, and mentally you have a home. Wherever you are, you’re at home. So take some time to make this house into a home. Make the body comfortable right now. Think of the breath not just as air going … 
  3. Working at Home
     … The four noble truths are a problem-solving approach, focused on the problem of stress and suffering as a whole, and offering a solution to the problem. As you first start applying this approach to the obvious issues in your life, you learn to develop maturity around the application of this teaching. The work then gets more and more subtle, to the point where … 
  4. Ingenuity
     … The fourth quality that makes you a good friend to yourself is to be discerning, seeing which actions lead to suffering, which actions lead away. The Buddha calls this “penetrative discernment of arising and passing away.” It doesn’t mean you just simply watch things coming and going. For the discernment to be penetrative, you have to see that when some things come, they … 
  5. Conviction & Confidence
     … That right there really merits conviction because it reminds us that it is possible through human effort to put an end to suffering. It is possible through human effort to cleanse the mind. Sometimes you hear the idea that the ego is so corrupt that anything it tries to do is going to be corrupted as well. That idea closes off all the doors … 
  6. Making Yourself Worthy of Trust
     … If your happiness depends on their suffering, they’re not going to stand for it. They’ll do what they can to destroy your happiness. There’s a scene in the Canon where King Pasenadi is in his private apartments with his favorite queen, Mallika. In a tender moment he turns to her and asks her, “Mallika, is there anyone you love more than … 
  7. Enlightenment is Not a Hot Dog
     … And as you begin to see an instance of how you create unnecessary suffering, either in the way you breathe, or the way you think about issues, or the perceptions or feelings you hold about those issues, your sensitivity grows. So you have to use your imagination in addition to the technique. Imagination is composed of four elements. First you get something in mind … 
  8. Breathing Easy
     … The Buddha goes through a long list of the miseries that come from our attachment to sensual desires, starting with the fact we have to work to make a living and we suffer in the work, and we either find that the work doesn’t succeed, or we’re put to trouble when it does succeed. When we get rich, we’ve got to … 
  9. Mindful of Death
     … You go down and you check the street corner to see how you can avoid the mugger and, at the very least, minimize the amount of suffering. The Buddha says to think about the fact that death could come at any time. Then you ask yourself, “Okay, what unfinished business do I have? Are there still unskillful thoughts in my mind?” If you notice … 
  10. Potentials for Awakening
     … to find where they are and then to apply what’s called “appropriate attention” to them—in other words, seeing them in terms of what you can do with them that’s skillful, what you can do with them that would not be skillful, and particularly, how you can use them to help put an end to suffering. The Buddha talks about the potentials … 
  11. A Refuge from Death
     … That makes it easier to stand apart from the body and all the suffering it inflicts on you. You still have that sense of awareness. That’s your valuable possession. You hold on to that. The same with sensual pleasures: You learn to look at them, especially if you’ve got a state of concentration going in the mind, and you can compare the … 
  12. Looking at Your Life
     … As the Buddha once said, we often suffer from aberrant perceptions, seeing constancy in things that are not constant, pleasure in things that are painful, we identify with things that really can’t really identify with, and we see beauty in things that are really not beautiful. It’s all very strange what we hold dear. He says this doesn’t apply just to … 
  13. The Steps of Breath Meditation
     … You realize that months, sometimes years of labor went into it, and the question becomes, “Was it worth it?” A few brief hours of empty enjoyment and then you forget about it — despite all the work, all the suffering that went into making it. So when you look at all your experiences in the same way, seeing all the effort that goes into their … 
  14. The World Is Swept Away
     … If you think anything good would be accomplished by seeing somebody else suffer, you’ve got the wrong attitude. Then there’s the determination on truth, which includes the perfection of truth, the perfection of virtue, and the perfection of persistence. There’s the determination on relinquishment, which includes renunciation and generosity. And there’s the determination on calm, which includes endurance and equanimity … 
  15. The Karma that Ends Karma
     … It’ll see you all the way through every possible type of suffering, because its rewards are more than you can intend. You can think about the goal, you can have a picture of what it’s like, but the picture in your preconceived notion has an intentional element. It’s part of the path because it helps you along, gives you encouragement, but … 
  16. Broad, Tall, & Deep
     … These are some of the key concepts in the practice, the key concepts in the skills you need to get the mind past suffering.
  17. Always in Training
     … your duties with regard to the four noble truths—to comprehend suffering, abandon its cause, realize its cessation by developing the path. So this is what reflection of death is for. When the Buddha talks about being in the present moment, it’s always focused in the context of recollection of death. We’re here because there’s work to be done and right … 
  18. In Training
     … How do you use your ingenuity to get the Dhamma to work for you in giving rise to dispassion for the causes of suffering? These are the areas the Buddha would have you be sensitive to as you take stock of your inner teacher and your inner student to get some idea of how they’re doing—and also to give them some ideas … 
  19. The Inner Monitor
     … Yet when that person has to suffer the consequences of the greed, aversion, and delusion, they’re gone. They’re like unreliable friends. They get you to do something against the law, but then as soon as the police come, they run off, leaving you holding the bag. So you’ve got to realize that these things are not your friends. We tend to … 
  20. Furnishing Your Home for the Mind
    The Buddha recognizes that there’s an element of pain and suffering in being on the path. Some parts of the path are difficult, and when you look down the path and then you look at where you are, it seems like it’s a long, long way away to the end. But he adds that the pain of being on the path is … 
  21. Toward Release
     … And the dialogue is about appropriate attention: “Where is the suffering right now? What am I doing to cause it? What qualities of mind can I develop to help abandon the cause so that I can calm the mind and realize what the noble people of the past have realized: that the news of awakening, the news of release, doesn’t have to be … 
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