Search results for: "Attachment"

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  2. Treating the Diseases of the Mind
     … The question always is, are you ready? And the answer almost always is, “Not yet.” Ask yourself, “Why? What’s standing in the way? What attachments do you have?” Maybe you can work on those a little bit—learn how to think them through. See the attachment as something strange. Why would awareness want to hold on to that? Especially when it’s going … 
  3. All About Change
     … If you see that your attachments are unskillful, try to see their drawbacks so that you really feel that the attachment is not worth it. At the same time, you provide yourself with something good to hold on to. Otherwise, no matter how much you may let go, you just grab hold again. It’s like climbing a ladder. If you have only one … 
  4. The Not-Self Discourse
     … First you’ve got to learn how to let go of everything except the path, and then when that’s done, you can focus on your attachment to the path. When you can let that go, then your letting-go is all around. You’re released everywhere. So look at your attachments right now, to see which ones are really worth holding on to … 
  5. What Are You Doing Right Now?
     … This is one way that meditation helps you overcome your addictive patterns, your old attachments, your old unskillful habits. You’ve simply got something better to feed on, something more nourishing, something that really goes deep down inside, something you experience with your whole body. You work on concentration so as to have a wider range of habits, a wider range of opportunities and … 
  6. Because the Mind Is Purposeful
     … We’re attached to certain things and we’re afraid that something will come along and destroy what we have—or what we want to have. So if you want to understand your fears, look for your attachments. To understand your aversion, look for your desires, realizing that sometimes it’s not simply a case of thwarted desire leading to aversion. There’s also … 
  7. A Genius about Your own Mind
     … There was a writer a while back who said, “Desire is okay as long as you’re not attached to the object.” But as the Buddha noticed, we’re really not attached as much to the object as we are to the act of desiring itself. We can sit and fantasize for hours about a sensual pleasure of one kind or another, even though … 
  8. Look after Yourself with Ease
     … So as long as the mind is going to have its attachments, get attached to this: a sense of the body as it’s felt from within, with the breath energies flowing smoothly through the body. As the Buddha said, this is part of the wind element, the breath that flows throughout the entire body. It’s a very subtle set of sensations, but … 
  9. Use Your Defilements
     … And if part of the mind says, “Oh, that’s giving in to my likings for comfort, my attachment to comfort,” you’re using your attachments, remember. You’re using defilements. “Hey, you like pleasure, well here it is. Here’s the potential.” You learn a lot about making use of that potential. You begin to realize that things don’t just arise and … 
  10. A Victory that Matters
     … We think we can get some pleasure out of them, but we have to look very carefully at that pleasure, to see why we’re so attached to it. Here again, the problem isn’t metaphysical. Our attachment doesn’t come because we have some metaphysical belief about whether things have an essence or don’t have an essence. That’s pretty irrelevant. We … 
  11. Respect
     … both the things we’re attached to and the mind that attaches. Those things that we latch onto, as we get to know them more and more intimately: We begin to realize that our experience of those things has an element of will, an element of intention in it. It’s not like we’re presented with ready-made experiences and we have the … 
  12. Sensuality
     … It’s ironic, how often we read about the dangers of getting attached to concentration. There’s a book on concentration that came out recently which—I think it was around page 5 of the book—talks about the dangers of concentration, as if we have to be warned off from the very beginning. But that’s not how the Buddha taught it. There … 
  13. Focus on One Thing
     … If you spend all your time settled in one place, you get attached to the place. Sometimes you get too comfortable. But if you don’t settle down at all, all you see is yourself wandering around, reacting to this place, reacting to that place, and you don’t have that much time to really see the mind on its own terms. When the … 
  14. Part I : Basic Instructions
     … In the meantime, you cultivate the qualities that will help when the time comes to go into battle, to really look into the pain, really look into your attachment to the pain, and all of the issues around it. We mentioned earlier today that the big issue is the way the mind fabricates things, and you get to know how the mind fabricates things … 
  15. Eight Principles
     … Actually, we want you to get stuck on concentration first so that you can let go of your other attachments. As the Buddha once said, if you don’t have the pleasure that comes from jhana or something better, you’re not going to be able to let go of your attachment to sensuality. No matter how much you understand the drawbacks of sensuality … 
  16. Practicing on Your Own
     … You want to hold to these things, because not only does the culture at large tend to dismiss the whole idea of actions with consequences, but you even go to Buddhist retreat centers, you read Buddhist websites and Buddhist magazines, and everybody says, “Don’t be attached to views, don’t hold too tightly to your views. Have the view of no view,” as … 
  17. Preparing to Meditate
     … And don’t be worried about getting attached to concentration. That kind of attachment is a healthy one. After all, you’re going to need something to hold on to as you begin to let go of other things. The nature of the mind is that it can’t just let go of everything all at once. The image Ajaan Maha Boowa uses is … 
  18. Mindfulness of Death
     … You’d simply start getting sentimental, very attached, very clingy. But then the Buddha goes on to have you reflect about kamma: that you’re the owner of your actions; the other person is the owner of his or her actions. How you die, and where you’re going to go after you die, is going to depend a great deal on your actions … 
  19. Bare vs. Appropriate Attention
     … And when you have a sense of comfort that comes from within, it’s a lot easier to let go of your outside attachments. Instead of being hungry and looking for places to feed outside, you’ve got a good source of food for the mind inside. But it goes deeper than that. You’re also gaining practice in what’s called appropriate attention … 
  20. The Middle Way
     … This put you in the right frame of mind to look in to see exactly where the clinging comes from, how it starts, and how you can let it go, how you’re attached to your craving, how you’re attached all the other things that lead to suffering. As they begin to lose their appeal, there’s a strong sense of dispassion that … 
  21. To Discern Suffering
     … You have to be attached to the meditation, attached to being quiet, in order to be able to stick with it, to feel motivated that you want to stay here longer and longer and really figure out what the problem is if you can’t stay here long. Ajaan Chah has a nice image here. Going down to the market, you buy a banana … 
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