Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. Taking Responsibility
     … How can I get the mind to be more still? How can the mind be focused? How can it be settled down? These are useful questions to ask for the purpose of gaining tranquility. For the purpose of insight the questions are: How should fabrications be regarded? How should they be analyzed? You get some answers but then again you have to take those … 
  3. Skillfully Shaping Your Life
     … The mind can be very proactive, and we really do shape the way we experience things. This is why training of the mind is so worthwhile. If the amount of pleasure and pain we felt in the world were entirely out of our hands, then there wouldn’t be much point in training the mind. But we do shape things. You can sit here … 
  4. Looking after Yourself with Ease
     … Our minds are like vacuum cleaners. All too often we go through life sucking up nothing but the dirt. So when a word is fired in your direction, step aside a little bit. Watch it go past. See if you can hold that perception in mind And also hold in mind the Buddha’s comments that the nature of human speech is there’s … 
  5. A Happiness Without Boundaries
     … And although it may take energy on your part to be generous in this way, your mind benefits. It becomes a much more expansive mind. It doesn’t have that narrow, fearful quality that it has if you’re just concerned about what you’re going to gain, being afraid that other people will take away what you’ve got. You realize that you … 
  6. Universal Truths
     … Let the talk be in the background — because the Dhamma is found inside the mind. The Dhamma in words is just pointers. As you listen to the talk, remind yourself that the words are pointing inside your mind. If you’re inside your mind paying attention to what you’re doing, you’re already at the right place. You don’t need the talk … 
  7. Admirable Friendship
     … So we’re here to look, as the Buddha said, at the craving in our minds. The craving and the ignorance: Those are the main causes. We try to develop qualities of mind that can develop a sense of dispassion for the craving, that can cut through the ignorance with knowledge. That’s how suffering can be brought to an end. All of this … 
  8. Sensitive to Fabrication
     … It’s when you can do that that the mind is well trained. And, as the Buddha said, it’s the well trained mind that brings happiness.
  9. Perceptions Around Pain
     … It’s even better when you start noticing what the mind is doing. You can make up your mind that you’ll be equanimous in the face of the pain, that you won’t react. The effort put into being non-reactive* is* a type of proactivity, but there’s a lot more that needs to be done to understand the pain. You want … 
  10. The Sublime Attitudes
    The Sublime Attitudes July, 2003 The Buddha’s teachings on skillful qualities of mind come in clusters: five this, seven that. Even the one quality that’s always appropriate — mindfulness — is always taught in the context of clusters. To begin with, it’s paired with alertness: Mindfulness means keeping something in mind, as when we keep reminding ourselves to stay with the breath as … 
  11. Tools of Perception
     … One of them is jam, which means to remember, but it also means to fix something in your mind. In the dictionary of the Raja Pandit Sathan, which is like the Académie Française of Thailand, the definition of jam is kamnot: You fix something in the mind. You label it. You identify it, saying that this is this and that’s that. That act … 
  12. Calming the Breath
     … You’ve got a full-body framework for your mind to focus on, and it’s easeful. It feels good. The mind is a lot more likely to stay and to develop a sense of rapture, a sense of fullness. As you breathe in and breathe out, nothing’s being forced; nothing’s being pushed. It feels really good. At the same time, you … 
  13. Perception
     … So as you get more sensitive to how the mind labels things—and you can see this more clearly the more still the mind is—try to apply that sensitivity to the way you perceive things around you, the way you perceive the people around you, the way you perceive the situations around you, realizing that you do have choices in how you apply … 
  14. Safety in an Uncertain World
     … As the Buddha describes concentration, it’s basically feeling tones of pleasure, rapture, and the calm of equanimity after the mind has been nourished with pleasure and rapture. We’re feeding the mind so that it’s not so hungry for quick fixes. That way, it can learn to trust itself more. But even then we’re still subject to further dangers: the simple … 
  15. Bless Yourself
     … The mind isn’t putting up walls, so it can search back in its memory to figure out what is skillful and what’s not in line with right view. That’s the kind of mindfulness that gives you a good solid foundation and gets the mind into concentration. So wherever you go, make sure that you maintain these two qualities: virtue, right view … 
  16. An Anthropologist from Mars
     … You’re here primarily to practice, to train your mind. If, having trained your mind, you can help other people, that’s fine. But if you can’t, make sure that at least you get your own mind in shape. As Ajaan Suwat used to say, whether we get other people to come here doesn’t matter, as long as we get ourselves: i … 
  17. Question & Probe
     … So you’ve got to come up with new questions every day—which means that the mind has to be constantly on the offensive. And the fact that you’re on the offensive like this keeps you from being a stationary target for the pain. The same principle applies with the mind. When some emotions are painful, you can ask yourself, “Well, what’s … 
  18. The Kamma of Self & Not-Self
     … The Buddha doesn’t have a term for it, but he does recommend that you develop concentration as a source of well-being in the mind that’s totally harmless. It doesn’t require that you do anything unskillful to develop it and it doesn’t have a bad impact on the mind. As he said, if you have this pleasure, the pleasure of … 
  19. Energy Channels
     … You focus on developing certain qualities of mind. You develop your concentration; you develop mindfulness. As you focus on doing these things more skillfully, it just so happens that you find something valuable. It may not have been precisely where you thought it would be, it may not have been precisely what you thought it would be, but you find it. That’s the … 
  20. Breath Energies
     … Now is the time to give them some protection, because that way you learn a lot of lessons about the body and the mind—and particularly about the mind—that you can’t learn in books and you can’t learn from what other people tell you. You learn from your own sensitivity inside.
  21. Working with Fabrication
     … All the different voices in the mind, all the different committee members, all our different identities are made up of these various forms of fabrication. This is where the teaching gets useful. A thought comes into your mind, an emotion comes into your mind, telling you that you want to do this or that: If you realize that it’s not skillful, you can … 
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