Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 147
  2. Patterns to Happiness
     … As you get absorbed in these issues, the mind gets more and more focused on them to the exclusion of everything else. Your mind has one object, and that one object—the breath—fills your awareness. That’s called singleness of preoccupation—the third of the three causal factors. And the results will be pleasure and rapture. When you get the causes right, the … 
  3. Renunciation
     … Then, on the transcendent level, right resolve is, essentially, the thinking and evaluating that bring the mind to jhāna: good, strong states of concentration. That’s your food inside. Some of the passages talk about feeding on rapture as food for the mind. There’s another sutta that compares the different factors of the path to different parts of a fortress, and the jhanas … 
  4. Right Livelihood
     … The only way the mind can stand up to that kind of contemplation is if you’ve got the strong sense of wellbeing that comes from nourishing the mind with right concentration. Otherwise, the insights that can come from meditation, if you don’t have a good solid foundation like this, can be disorienting, destabilizing. So as the foundation for your practice, you want … 
  5. Abandoning Effluents (1)
     … Effluents, *asava, *are things that flow out of the mind. They could also be translated as fermentations, things that bubble up in the mind and keep flowing back in a flood into samsara, engaging the mind in the process of wandering on, wandering on. It was the ending of those effluents that freed the Buddha. He identified three: the effluent of sensuality, the effluent … 
  6. Fear of Death
     … training in heightened virtue, heightened concentration—trying to heighten mind, which is the phrase in the Pali, and basically means getting the mind to a good strong concentration—and then heightened discernment. For instance, to counteract the fear of leaving the body, we practice concentration. One of the topics of concentration is contemplation of the body, as we chanted just now. What is there … 
  7. Peace Requires Character
     … This may go against the grain, but when you begin to realize that there’s a happiness there, it raises the mind above its ordinary level. Similarly with virtue: You realize that there are ways of finding happiness that would cause harm to others, but you come to see them as beneath you. You’re beginning to raise the mind up above its feeding … 
  8. Test Everything
     … But you have to remember that the mind is a complex thing. You go back to square one because there’s some unfinished business back there. And there’s another kind of patience, the patience that, when the mind does get into concentration, and you say, “Okay, what’s next, what’s the next step?” the patience requires that you stay with that state … 
  9. The Challenge of Faith
     … To what extent do they place a burden on the mind? You can watch this, seeing the ups and downs of your concentration, the ups and downs of the level of stress in your concentration. That way you begin to detect very subtle movements of the mind that otherwise you wouldn’t have seen, and peel away any of the motions of the mind … 
  10. Skillful Effort
     … And it’s a very useful tool to use against a lot of unskillful mind states. Say, for instance, that lust has arisen in the mind. A standard way of dealing with it is to focus on the 32 parts of the body, and we’ll talk about that little bit later. But you can also say, “Hey, wait a minute, what do you … 
  11. Goodwill Starts with Gratitude
    When the Buddha taught breath meditation to his son Rahula, he started out with some preliminary meditations to get the mind in the right shape to be focusing on the breath. I’ve talked a lot in the past about the meditation on making your mind like earth so that you’re not shaken by events coming up outside or coming up inside your … 
  12. In Tune
     … But the way we work together, the way we meditate, the way we try to bring the body and mind in tune: It’s all the same principle. There is a joy that comes from harmony. That joy brings the mind peace: brings peace to your mind and peace to the minds of others. So try to develop this quality of being in tune … 
  13. Your Highest Aspiration
     … So we develop concentration to be able to look at the mind in this way because the duty with regard to stress is to comprehend it. It takes a lot of mental strength to look at the stress and suffering that are oppressing the mind. And concentration provides that strength. We bring the mind to a state of oneness, a state of unification, with … 
  14. A Boxing Lesson
     … It talks about how there are different ways that people can criticize you, sometimes with a mind of goodwill, sometimes with a mind of ill will, with what’s true or what’s false, what’s helpful and what’s not helpful. That’s the way of human speech. So on the one hand, you have to have some equanimity toward what they’re … 
  15. Appropriate Attention
    The nature of the mind is that it doesn’t sit around just doing nothing. It’s not simply a passive receiver of outside stimuli. It’s out there looking for things. It’s constantly active because it knows there are dangers all around. And so the question always in the back of the mind is, “What next? What next? What do I do … 
  16. The Kamma of Concentration
     … The important thing is that you learn how to keep that questioning attitude in mind: Where is there still disturbance? And look for it not so much in things outside but in the actions of the mind. You see this especially clearly when you’re working with pain. The real disturbance there is not the pain. It’s the mind’s commentary, or the … 
  17. The Raft
     … all the different fabrications in the body and mind. You’ve got the breath. That’s a part of the body, part of “form.” Then there are feelings: the feelings of pleasure you try to create by the way that you look at the breath. There are perceptions—saññā—the images you have in the mind about how the breath comes into the body … 
  18. What You’re Choosing to Do Right Now
     … But as we get the mind more calm, get the mind to settle down, we can begin to sense these movements in the mind. We use the Buddha’s vocabulary to sort out what’s what. What’s going on in there? The fact that we’re making choices right now is what allows us to practice. It’s what allows us to find … 
  19. A Wealthy Memory
     … What would Ajaan Suwat say? What would Ajaan Fuang say? What would the Buddha say? Try to keep them in mind. If you forget them, it’s as if you’re cutting yourself off at the root. You’re drifting, and you’ll go back to the old voices in your mind, the people you knew when you were younger, the things that came … 
  20. The Brightness of Life
     … Life has suffering in it, but the problem isn’t life, the problem is the activities of the mind. Knowing that fact gives you focus. This is why we focus on the breath as we meditate, because the breath is very close to the mind. As you get to know your breath better, you get to know your mind better, in a way that … 
  21. Trading Up
     … Then you’re ready to work on the mind. In other words, you’ve got to clear away a lot of the underbrush, clear away a lot of the junk in your life if you want to have some space for the mind to develop. The path factors dealing with concentration start with right effort. Here again there’s a trade. You work on … 
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