Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 148
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. An Interest in the Breath
     … To get past that, you have to give the mind work to do. This is where you have to really take an interest in the breath. Give the mind a task. As long as you’re paying attention inside the body to what the body feels like, to how you visualize the body to yourself, that kind of work is fine. It doesn’t … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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.
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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