Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 148
  2. Think Like a Thief
     … The thing is the truth is there, to be seen at all times, if only you have the mind to observe it. So as I stayed with Ajaan Fuang, it wasn’t just a matter listening Dhamma talks. In fact, he gave very few Dhamma talks. You could probably count all the Dharma talks I heard from him during those ten years on the … 
  3. The Treasure of Equanimity
     … However true that might be, it is noticeable that as you get older, your mind tends to scatter in lots of different directions. But you can learn how to gain some control over it before you get old. The mind has this tendency, exacerbated now by the Internet, where you can surf all day – follow one topic as it leads into another into another … 
  4. Not What You Are, What You Do
     … So instead of being a process of lobotomizing the mind so that you don’t think, meditation is actually training in learning how to think in more skillful ways, how to act in more skillful ways — with knowledge, with an understanding of actions and their results. In particular, it’s training in learning how to distinguish the types of activities in the mind that … 
  5. Heedfulness
     … So it’s better to be open with yourself that there are skillful and unskillful urges in the mind, and you want to know how to sort them out. A large part of discernment is just this: sorting out what’s skillful in the mind, what’s unskillful, and then doing what you can to give rise to the skillful and to abandon the … 
  6. Family Ties
     … And it’s why he extolled seclusion, because the real problem, of course, is within each human mind. The reason we can’t get along is because we can’t get along well with our own minds. We’re all sloshing around in our greed, aversion, and delusion. And there’s nothing you can really do about other people’s greed, aversion, and delusion … 
  7. The Pain of Conviction
     … You’d think that the mind would immediately want to incline to a state like this and do everything it could to protect it and maintain it. But the mind has lots of other agendas as well. So expect that there are going to be some fallow times. You sit down to meditate and the breath just doesn’t seem to get comfortable, doesn … 
  8. In Line with the Dhamma
     … The mind is used to lying to itself. This is why it’s so easy for advertisers to lie to us. They’ve learned all the tricks that the mind plays on itself and they use them to make us happy to be lied to. If we really looked at our lives, we’d find it really discouraging. We’ve spent so much effort … 
  9. Modest in Manner, but Not in Goals
     … Focus on your breath and keep watch over the mind to make sure that it stays with the breath. It’s almost as if you have two minds here: the one focused on the breath, and the other focused on the relationship between the two. You want to keep them together. Adjust the breath so that it feels good. If any thoughts come up … 
  10. Skilled in Leaving Concentration
     … You begin to gain a sense of your stillness of mind. And you may also begin to sense that the way your mind settles down will really vary from time to time; that you don’t have just one spot where you tend to go, but you have a couple of spots that are your home bases. The next step, of course, is to … 
  11. Happy for People You Don’t Like
     … So if you combine the practice of the brahmaviharas with the factor for awakening called the “analysis of qualities”—it’s the discernment faculty in the factors for awakening—you go beyond simply trying to create a happy state of mind. You start reflecting on the nature of happiness. That’s when the practice begins to lead beyond something ordinary. It inclines the mind … 
  12. Heedfulness for the Holidays
     … Then there’s mindfulness, which the Buddha compares to a gatekeeper who knows whom to let in and whom to not. In your case, you’re mindful to do what’s skillful and to avoid what’s not skillful. You keep that in mind. Hold that value, hold that standard in mind, so that when people do things that are threatening, you know that … 
  13. Willing to Question Yourself
     … Where is your state of mind right now? How do you measure up against the Buddha’s descriptions, say, of right concentration, right mindfulness, right effort? That’s what the word “comparing” means there. As you compare your mind with the Dhamma, you see that you’re lacking here and you’re lacking there. You don’t take that as a reason to get … 
  14. Many Desires, Many Selves
    As we practice, we try to focus our desires on one thing—the ending of suffering—but the nature of the mind is that it desires tend to head off in lots of different directions, like the man who jumped on a horse and rode off in four directions all at once. Our desires to pull us here, pull us there, and we try … 
  15. A Gift of Well-Being
     … If you have a sense of well-being right here, the part of the mind that feels dissatisfied and is down on you then wants to spread a little of that dissatisfaction around to other people, too. “As long as we’re feeling miserable, let’s let other people feel miserable, too”: That kind of mind state gets undercut when you’re feeling refreshed … 
  16. Fighting Spirit
     … If you hold that perception in mind, what does it do to the breathing? Hakuin, the old Zen master, talked about getting Zen sickness, which was basically a strong headache when he was meditating. To cure it, he would hold in mind a perception to counteract it, which was to think of a big ball of butter on top of his head melting and … 
  17. The Gift of Speech
    As Ajaan Fuang once said, an important part of training your mind lies in training your mouth. What you say has a very strong connection with what’s going on in your mind. And the training of the mind is very close to the training of the mouth. Look at the factors in the noble eightfold path: Right after right resolve, which is the … 
  18. Dispassion
     … See renunciation as a true way of finding peace in the mind. And in renouncing, we don’t give up our feeding just by starving. We give up feeding because we find something in the mind that doesn’t need to feed. This is one of the reasons why awakening happens in stages. You gain your first taste of the deathless with your first … 
  19. Ask the Right Questions
     … So you want to focus on the actions of the mind—this is why we get the mind really quiet: not to find out who we are, but to see exactly what actions are happening in the mind, which ones are causing stress, and which ones are helping put an end to it. When we focus on the actions, we’re not saying there … 
  20. Believing & Knowing
     … In the same way, the good results that we get from the practice developing the precepts, developing mindfulness and alertness, overcoming the hindrances, getting the mind in states of concentration, are like the footprints. They don’t prove that the Buddha was awakened, but they give us encouragement. We see the good results that come when we train the mind, and that strengthens our … 
  21. The Skills of a Hunter
     … And stick with it, because it’s the only way you’re going to get to know your mind. Don’t think that when the hunters are sitting there they’re not thinking about anything at all, or that they have no desires. We all have a desire here as we practice to get to know the mind so that we can learn how … 
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