Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 159
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. Always Willing to Learn
     … You look to see how your mind does that. You have to see what sensual fantasies you’re attached to, what views about the world you’re attached to, what ideas of habits and practices you should follow that you’re attached to, what ideas of self you’re attached to. Those are the things your mind feeds on. We often see these forms … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. Clinging
     … When something moves in the mind and there’s a tightening up in the body, the mind is holding on to something. When we meditate and breathe through patterns of tension in the body, we’re doing symptom management, because what often makes it seem so oppressive is the fact that it tightens up the body, and we’re carrying it around. So it … 
  19. The Energy You Broadcast
    Our minds are both like radio transmitters and radio receivers. We send out energy and we pick up energy from outside. A lot of what we pick up from outside is just the reflected energy that we sent out. Send out a lot of greed, and that’s what gets reflected back at you. Send out a lot of anger, a lot of delusion … 
  20. Determined to be Happy
     … You seem to notice them even more when you start to meditate, because when you don’t have a particular desire in mind, or you allow the mind to wander among its desires, it’s like a boat floating in a river with different currents coming in from different directions. You’re not really sure which current is pushing the boat which way because … 
  21. To Suffer Is an Active Verb
     … We look to see the level of suffering in the mind, and then try to see how it’s connected with what we’re doing. The Buddha says to watch it to see it go up and down so that you can detect the causes. When are you going to watch it best? When you’re getting the mind into concentration. That’s when … 
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