Search results for: "The Mind"

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  2. Practicing Your Scales
     … You find that you have to learn how to streamline your understanding of what it means to keep the mind focused. You start out by basically doing too much: You tense up the body, you engage all kinds of other parts of the mind to try to keep the mind here, and yet you can’t maintain that amount of tension. The mind is … 
  3. Right Exertion at Play
     … If anything comes up to disturb it, all you have to do is let it go, and then the natural purity of the mind will appear. But the Buddha never taught like that. As he said, the mind is capable of anything. It’s capable of good things; it’s capable of bad things. And it’s not the case that the good things … 
  4. Wisdom & Compassion
    Meditation is medicine for the mind, medicine for the heart. It’s an opportunity to put down all your thoughts and concerns, and let the mind be treated in a healing way. One good way of getting out of mind’s concerns is to focus on how the body feels right now. Before you focus on the breath, you might want to go through … 
  5. The Importance of Being Focused
    As you focus on the breath, it often helps to keep reminding yourself of how important the breath is, and why it’s important to be able to train the mind to stay with one thing. The breath is important, because after all it is the force of life. It’s what keeps the mind and the body together. And the quality of the … 
  6. Life Well Lived
     … One of the hardest ones is concentration, because it’s so easy for the mind to wander off. Catching the mind is like trying to catch a bead of mercury: You put a little pressure on it, it scoots off; put a little pressure on this side, it scoots someplace else, scatters all over the place. But unlike mercury, the mind can be tamed … 
  7. Death Is Normal
     … If the mind is untrained, it can cause a lot of harm to itself and to people around you. So you try to do this well. You’re developing good qualities in the mind regardless of what your background is. These are things we all need in all activities in life. At the same time, you’re giving the mind the ability to step … 
  8. Adjust the Flame
     … And why is that? Because when you hang on to one object like this, you get to see not only the object but also the mind in relationship to the object. You see how the mind state creates a state of becoming around the object, a sense of you focused on that object, and the world in which you and the object exist. As … 
  9. A Haven for Inner Wealth
     … That’s nourishing for the mind. It creates good habits. So whatever qualities help us focus on creating more of this good food for the mind, those are our treasures, and those are the things we want to protect as well. The Buddha has a list of seven treasures, and they all focus on what’s necessary to protect the intentions of the mind … 
  10. Catch It in the Act
     … Once you get the basic principle going, even on very basic levels of concentration, once you see that connection between a still spot in the mind and your ability to catch the mind in the act, so that you actually do change your habits: That’s when you understand the third level of discernment, which is discernment that comes from developing the mind, developing … 
  11. Genuine Goodness
     … What are the best ways to bring the mind to stillness? What are best ways to gain a sense of well-being in the mind? Focus on the breath, see how it feels. What kind of breathing feels best? In focusing on the breath, you’re also learning about the mind. As Ajaan Lee says, the breath is like a mirror for the mind … 
  12. Always Looking Inside
     … always looking inside, looking at the movements of the mind—the comments, the fabrications of the mind—because they cause trouble, they cause suffering. But as part of the path, we have to use fabrications. After all, the noble eightfold path is a path that’s fabricated. It’s put together out of our intentions. Right views, right resolves, right mindfulness, and right concentration … 
  13. Elephant Training
     … Then when issues come up in the mind, we can talk about the mind without having to talk about what religion we’re coming from,” he said. “That way, we can understand each other. We talk about what we have in common.” So focus on the breath. Why focus on the breath? It’s a way of training the mind, because a mind, like … 
  14. The Truth of Desires
    One of the reasons we try to get the mind in concentration is because it allows us to see the intentions that don’t want to be in concentration. If we don’t set up this intention that we’re going to stay here with a breath, one intention, one thought, one perception flows into another, and another, and another. The boundaries get very … 
  15. Exercising the Mind
     … It gives you both the mindfulness and the strength, exercises both the mindfulness and increases your strength, so that when you learn a good lesson, you can remember it and carry it out, time after time. That’s because you keep giving the mind its own place to be, its own place to rest and gain strength, again and again, continuously.
  16. Judging Your Meditation
     … He wanted you to put the mind in a place where it can look at itself. And the breath is a good place to do that, because the breath is very intimate with the mind. Of the different processes in your body, the one that’s closest to the functioning of the mind is the breath. Greed arises in the mind, anger, or fear … 
  17. Distractive Thoughts
     … But know that you probably will wander off again, because that’s the way the mind is used to operating. When they talk about samsara, it’s not a place, it’s an activity of the mind that wanders around. This is what the mind’s been doing for who knows how long. So take it for granted that the mind will wander off … 
  18. Looking for Essence in the Wilderness
     … Concentration, here, covers both insight and tranquility, because the practice of getting the mind to settle down requires that you understand the mind. You don’t just force it to be still. You try to understand the conditions in the mind so that you can create something that’s relatively lasting. But even this is not an ultimate refuge. As the Buddha said, the … 
  19. Anchored by Skillful Roots
     … They did survive, but at a huge cost, the cost of the skillful roots in the mind. It’s by nourishing the skillful roots that the health of the mind survives. Even if we have to leave this particular body, at least the mind has the potential for sending out skillful roots wherever it finds itself the next time around. It’s nourished with … 
  20. The Form of the Body
     … And the mind seems to pick up that habit very quickly. The least little thing goes wrong with the body, and the mind gets upset. Just try sitting for two, three, four hours. If you think you’re not attached to the body, you suddenly discover a lot of very intimate and demanding attachments. Even in just one hour, it’s easy for the … 
  21. Forging a Path
     … If you force the mind to stay with an uncomfortable breath, it’s going to rebel. So give it a sense of ease in the breathing. Allow the breathing to become refreshing. This gives the mind something good to do, and you begin to see the other activities of the mind, because of course as you make up your mind to stay with one … 
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