Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 154
  2. Goodwill for Snakes
     … So it’s mindfulness, one, and then goodwill. That was the second part of his instruction: “Extend goodwill as much as you can to that being.” This way you protect yourself all around. The attitude that you’re radiating out is a good attitude. At the same time, you have your shield: the shield of heedfulness, the shield of mindfulness. This is useful for … 
  3. A Refuge from Modern Values
     … The mind— through its greed, anger, and delusion—so quickly picks up the ideas out there that foster more greed, anger, and delusion. If our minds were truly pure, if you really did have that wonderful Buddha nature that deep down inside is so true and good, this wouldn’t happen. It would be incorruptible. But the mind is corrupted. It’s defiled. What … 
  4. Give of Yourself
     … He would ask you, “How is your breath right now? How is your mind right now?” After all, that’s where the real problems are: not with the words, but with what your breath is doing, what your mind is doing. The Buddha himself would leave a lot of things blank. He mentions that there are two types of causes for suffering: those that … 
  5. Keeping Your Head
     … They’re happy to move into your space and into your time and into your mind, to tell you what to think and what to do. You have to say, “No. I’ve got to set my own priorities. I can’t let my time be invaded like this. I can’t let my mind be invaded like this.” So you try to extend … 
  6. Verified Confidence
     … But as the Buddha himself said in many places in the Canon, the practice of the brahmaviharas, even though it leads to high levels of rebirth, doesn’t lead to dispassion unless you really look at the state of the mind that results from those brahmaviharas. After all, you can use the brahmaviharas to get the mind into good, strong concentration. There’s one … 
  7. Responsibilities
     … At the beginning, it may seem like a lot, but then look at the way your mind actually functions as you go through the day: You’re taking on a responsibility, and yet your mind sometimes wanders here, wanders there in the course of your work. Well, tell yourself, “Those times when you’d ordinarily wander, why don’t you stay with your breath … 
  8. Right Inner Speech
     … One of the advantages of getting the mind still like this is that it helps you to see, it helps you to pull yourself out of those mental conversations that go on in the mind all the time, between all the different factions in there. If you’re in the thick of it, it’s hard to gain perspective. But when you step out … 
  9. The Need for a Purpose
     … We have a purpose in mind. This is the nature of our mind. It’s purposeful. When it has no purpose, it’s miserable. This is why depression comes when people feel that no matter what efforts they make, they’re accomplishing nothing. All the avenues for happiness are closed off; there’s nothing they can do. That’s when they get depressed. The … 
  10. A Friend to the World, A Friend to Yourself
     … And you always keep that in mind. That’s mindfulness. The more consistently mindful you are, the stronger your concentration. The more nourishment you get, the more strength you get from the concentration. That’s what enables you to develop your good potentials as much as you can. So we have within us the ability to create as much goodness as possible, goodness enough … 
  11. A Rite of Passage
     … giving the mind a place where it can set itself apart, not only from people outside—that’s called physical seclusion—but also from the people inside our minds. That’s called mental seclusion. We have all these different voices in our mind that we’ve picked up from other people—our parents, our teachers, our friends, our enemies, the media—and it’s … 
  12. Protection, Inside & Out
     … Watch the mind to see how the mind is going. And then you’re ardent, trying to get rid of unskillful qualities and develop skillful ones. That ardency is based on a quality called appropriate attention. That, too, is one of your inner refuges. It’s what lies at the beginning of right view. That’s something you have to remember as well. Appropriate … 
  13. A Good Independent Self
     … When you do that, it lifts the level of your mind. Remember the image of the salt crystal. If your mind is expansive, then whatever painful results you’re experiencing from past kamma will be greatly reduced. Just as when you throw a salt crystal into a large river of water: Even though you’ve put some salt in the water, there’s so … 
  14. In Line with the Dhamma
     … What would your life be like if you did nothing but right speech, right action, and held to right livelihood? What would your mind be like if you really did engage in right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration? It’s a good path. It would make a good you and create a good world around you. Maybe not the world you see in your … 
  15. Nimble with Your Questions
     … Is the mind sitting in the body? Is the body sitting in the mind? These are some of the questions he would bring. The purpose was to dig up a lot of unspoken assumptions and at least see how they were skewing his perception of things. And those were just a few example questions that he would offer. He encouraged people to ask their … 
  16. Life in the Context of the Practice
     … You want to find ways to bring the peace and calm of a centered mind into your work and into your family life. But the problem with that question is that sometimes the peace and calm are made to serve the purposes of your work and your family life, and the context then gets very small and confined: trying to keep the mind still … 
  17. A Sense of Yourself
     … How are you in the way you act and speak? What are the aspects of speech that you need to work on? This is directly related to the meditation, because the way you talk to others is the way you talk to your mind, the way you talk to your own mind is the way you talk to others. The influence goes back and … 
  18. All Dhamma, All the Time
     … Listen with your eyes, listen with your ears, and your nose, and your tongue, and your body, and your mind, to what’s happening in terms of cause and effect. And remember to develop mindfulness. Mindfulness is not just being aware of what’s happening and saying, “Oh, that’s interesting,” and letting it pass, pass, pass. It means remembering: remembering what’s skillful … 
  19. A Meritorious Heart
     … And as you develop that larger sense of goodwill, the Buddha says you develop an unlimited mind. That unlimited mind, he said, is like a large river. If you threw a huge lump of salt into the large river, you could still drink the water because the river is so much larger. Very different from putting that same lump of salt into a little … 
  20. Alone Together
     … After all, when we meditate, we’re trying to make the mind consistent. As Ajaan Lee points out, we’re taking something that’s stressful—the way we breathe, the way we experience the body—and making it easeful; we’re taking something inconstant—the way the mind moves around—and we learn how to give it some constancy; we’re taking something that … 
  21. Bare vs. Appropriate Attention
     … For example, as we’re staying here with the breath, we’re trying to develop as much concentration, as much mindfulness as possible. In other words, we’re developing the path. If you’re going to look at stress and pain with any equanimity, with any steadiness, the mind has to have a strong sense of a good solid foundation, a strong sense of … 
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