Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 157
  2. The Skill of Patience
     … Now, part of your mind may say, “Well, I’d like to see them suffer a little bit first, so that they could have a taste of what they’ve done to others.” But then you can ask yourself, “Is that a part of the mind that you really want to encourage?” Then you start thinking: “If they’re going to be happy through … 
  3. The Armored Car
     … And the driver is mindfulness. As the Buddha says, it’s a protective driver. You drive in such a way that you keep the vehicle safe. Mindfulness, of course, is the ability to keep things in mind. And what we keep in mind is the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha. We start with the fact that there was a Buddha. He found this … 
  4. Self-Starting
     … Realize that there are people in the world who can read minds. When you’re getting discouraged, what are they going to think if they read yours? You’d be embarrassed for them to see your thoughts. But you also realize that most people who can read minds—and the kind of people you’d want to look good in the eyes of—also … 
  5. Interdependence & Death
     … Then turn around and look at your mind. If it starts wondering about next week’s work or tomorrow’s work, just tell yourself, “Okay, suppose I were already dead. It wouldn’t matter. What would matter at that point?” The qualities you build into the mind—or the qualities that strengthen the mind’s good side and also allow you to abandon the … 
  6. Empathetic Joy
     … Cast your mind out. Think of some examples and ask yourself, “Why would you not be happy for their happiness?” At some point, you’ll come around to the quality of resentment in the mind. If you’re sitting here breathing easily, and the mind is beginning to settle down, you can ask yourself, “Why would you want to engage in resentment? Someone else … 
  7. Appreciating Dispassion
    Our minds are so used to the process of fabrication that to encounter something unfabricated sounds kind of scary, because we don’t know what to do with it. We know how to breathe, we know how to talk to ourselves, we know how to develop perceptions and feelings to adjust the world we live in, to adjust our experience of the world we … 
  8. To Go Where You’ve Never Gone Before
     … There is that passage where the Buddha said the mind is luminous, and it’s darkened by visiting defilements. But he’s not saying that the mind is originally pure. This is a point that Ajaan Maha Boowa made. As he said, if the Buddha had said the mind is originally pure, you could argue with him: If it was originally pure then how … 
  9. Start Out Small
     … And when it’s a chore, the mind will rebel. So ask yourself: What really feels good when you’re breathing right now? If you can’t figure out what really feels good, hold your breath for a while until the mind comes to the point where it’s screaming at you: “Breathe! You’ve got to breathe!” Then, when you breathe, notice what … 
  10. Your Judgments Matter
     … If you put them into practice, will they develop good qualities of the mind or bad ones? And how are your own powers of judgment? Are they up to the task? This is one of the reasons why we meditate: to develop the qualities of mind that make us better judges—better judges of other people, better judges of the things they teach, and … 
  11. Controlling
     … So you hold that perception in mind. That allows the breath to calm down. The mind calms down. Another factor is consciousness. You can choose to be aware of all kinds of things, so what do you want to choose to be aware of? Name and form: How are the elements going in the body? You find that if you think of them—you … 
  12. Helping Yourself by Helping Others
     … You open your mind to the fact that everybody else is suffering. In mindfulness practice, this is called focusing on the topic of mind states both internally and externally. It’s not that you can directly experience other people’s mind states, but you can infer them from your own. You’ve got this body. You’re living as a human being in a … 
  13. The Karma Snake
     … At the same time, when you’re focused on the present, you want to keep in mind lessons from things you’ve done in the past, heard in the past, picked up from the past. That’s what mindfulness is all about. We’re trying to remember what we can that will help us shape the present well, right now. We’re looking at … 
  14. The Safety of Jhana
     … You can breathe, learn to focus the mind, let the mind settle down, become unified around the breath, and you’ve got a source of pleasure that’s totally your own and has no drawbacks, carries no blame. It does have its limitations. After all, it is conditioned. And the Buddha says, if you stay attached to it—in other words, if you’re … 
  15. Right & Wrong Decisions
     … We work on the mind so that it can develop those skills. When we work with the breath, it may seem like a detour but it’s not. When you’re with the breath, you’re in the present moment. As you work with the breath to make it comfortable, to make it energizing, whatever the body needs right now, you’re making it … 
  16. Good Friends Inside
     … It’s only when you open up your mind to the idea that it is possible to put an end to suffering that you can actually do it, that you can actually put forth the effort. Because it takes a lot. If you felt that it was futile, you wouldn’t bother. You’d devote your energies to things that promised more likely results … 
  17. Discipline Is a Choice
    Discipline Is a Choice July 1, 2023 When you practice right mindfulness, you’re making a choice. The basic formula tells you, on the one hand, to follow the body in and of itself, and on the other hand, to subdue thoughts of greed and distress related to the world. You’re choosing to follow one part of your experience and to subdue another … 
  18. Right View from Right Effort
     … What it takes is putting in your own efforts to cut through all the unskillful things in the mind. In the course of that, you learn an awful lot about cause and effect in the mind. And it’s through understanding cause and effect that you really break through to something beyond cause and effect. The Buddha’s short answer, when he was asked … 
  19. Shaping Your Life
     … So you want to be very mindful about where you’re being skillful and where you’re not. When the Buddha gave his first instructions to his son, who at the time was only seven years old, it came down to the issue of being very careful about your intentions: looking at your intentions before you act, looking at the results of your actions … 
  20. In Training
     … When the Buddha teaches his impersonal teachings—where he doesn’t talk about a person doing x in a particular place, but about different events in the mind influencing other events in the mind—it’s basically to help you step back from them and say, “Okay, I thought I was doing this, and as long as I felt that it was me doing … 
  21. So Little Time
     … The mind is an active principle. This is something Ajaan Mun talked about a lot. As he said, the mind flows out. There’s the source of the mind, like the source of a river. Things keep flowing out, flowing out. And that’s the problem. It’s not that things outside are coming in to cause problems. The problem is in the way … 
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