Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. Defilements as Not-self
     … You have to make up your mind that you really want to develop this attitude. Then when you feel secure in yourself, you can deal with the voices inside the mind that exemplify greed, aversion, delusion, or ill-will—whatever the defilement—realizing that in some twisted way they want happiness. Then you can offer them an alternative, pointing out to them: “The way … 
  3. Talking Among Your Selves
    It’s strange that the mind has to talk to itself. But then when you think about the different roles of self that function in becoming, you can understand. There’s the consumer self that wants to enjoy pleasure, the provider self that feels that it can provide for that consumer self by doing whatever’s needed to gain that pleasure. And then there … 
  4. Indecision
     … The other way of harming yourself is engaging in something that’s going to give rise to greed, aversion, or delusion, or passion, aversion, or delusion in your own mind. If you have those qualities in the mind, they’ll lead you to act in ways that are unskillful. Delusion, particularly, will make it difficult to see what’s skillful or not. You harm … 
  5. When You’re Discouraged
     … You’ve got to learn how to get your mind under control, otherwise you’re going to suffer a lot when aging comes, when illness comes, when death comes. People may give you advice, but how you manage your mind in the face of those things is something no one else can do for you. So take a cheerful attitude toward a skill like … 
  6. Meaning & Importance
     … This is what right mindfulness is all about: the things we should keep in mind. How we keep them in mind forms part of the path, an important part of the path. As the Buddha said, right mindfulness hovers around every other path factor. Once we have right view, we need right mindfulness to remember right view so that we can exert right effort … 
  7. A Fool for Sensuality
     … Which is why the Buddha said that when unskillful mind states arise in the course of this analysis, go back to the breath. Breathe in a way that’s refreshing. Breathe in a way that gives pleasure. Breathe in a way that gladdens the mind. What you want is to be able to take an objective view of your fantasies, an objective view of … 
  8. A Healthy Body Image
     … When the Buddha asked the monks how often they practice mindfulness of death, some were saying, “I think about death once a day.” He said, “Heedless.” “Twice a day.” “Heedless.” They worked down till finally one monk said, “Each time I breathe in, ‘May I live for the rest of this breath so I can practice.’” And that’s when the Buddha said, “Ah … 
  9. Your Gyroscope
     … When you find the mind suffering from pain, you ask yourself, “Where is the cause of that suffering?” It’s not so much in the physical pain. It’s in the clinging and craving within the mind. That’s where you want to look. When you adjust your understanding in this way, then when these waves of the world go up and down, you … 
  10. Overconfidence & Underconfidence
     … Once you’ve made up your mind to follow this path, you really want to stick with it through thick and thin. Now again, this requires learning how to raise your spirits when they need to be raised, and learning how to take criticism, not just from outside but learning how to take your own criticism, when the comment comes into the mind that … 
  11. Desire for Happiness
     … We’re developing qualities of the mind here. We’re not looking for little insights that we can wrap up and take home. We’re looking for skills. And this is the beginning skill: getting more and more sensitive to how the breath feels. It requires alertness, it requires mindfulness, and as these qualities get developed, those are the qualities you take home. Those … 
  12. Samvega vs. Dispassion
     … to get the mind quiet so that you can really observe what’s going on, so that you can see, when the mind moves to something: Why is it moving there? We practice concentration together with restraint of the senses, all based on that principle that the Buddha taught to Rahula right from the very beginning, the principle of truthfulness. Why are you going … 
  13. Creating a New Self
    As I’ve said many times before, the mind is like a committee. It’s got lots of different members. Each member lives in its own world, has its own ideas about what’s going to lead to happiness. Sometimes they actually have meetings, and other times they just move in and move out. But their worlds are pretty impervious to each other. Because … 
  14. Disenchantment
     … Whereas the pleasure that comes simply from learning how to focus on your breath is not placing a burden on anyone, so it’s a type of food for the mind that’s really worth developing. As you develop a sense of oneness with the food of concentration, you look at the other ways the mind has been feeding on things for its emotional … 
  15. The Questions of Suffering
     … Think, not in terms of the physical heart, but of your mental heart, the mind—in Buddhism, they treat the heart and the mind as basically the same thing: For the problems of the mind, people offer even more conflicting solutions. It’s very rare that they actually point back to that first issue: What is the suffering? How do you put an end … 
  16. A Producer Mentality
     … There should be some nourishment from being generous, some nourishment from being virtuous, some nourishment from the simple fact that you’re here meditating, training your mind. The mind may be resistant, but it’s got to be trained. So develop the talents you need to do what needs to be done. Because if you don’t do it, no one else can do … 
  17. Circumspection
     … When he described mindfulness practice, he said alertness is like a pulley that you pull in one direction and then pull in another direction. You look at the breath. Then you look at the mind. Make sure that both of them are snug together. This is how you turn your practice into a skill. You keep looking at what you’re doing. You look … 
  18. Judging Just Right
     … In other words, we have to approach this as a skill, because it is possible for the mind to get into really heavy states of concentration where everything blanks out. You have no sense of the body. Nothing is going on at all, and no discernment can arise in that kind of concentration. And of course it’s very easy to get the mind … 
  19. The Web of Pain
     … the factors that fashion the mind, that can create almost any kind of mind state out of almost any kind of raw materials. If you see that you’ve developed habits of creating suffering out of almost any raw material, it’s good to learn some new habits. So you start with the breath. How you focus your attention on the breath and how … 
  20. The Pursuit of Excellence
     … Think of Ajaan Maha Boowa comparing the state of the luminous mind that at first he thought was awakening against the actual experience of awakening that he later came to. He said—excuse me—that the luminous mind, as compared to awakening, was a pile of shit. When you get that point in your practice, your sensitivity toward happiness, your sensitivity to what’s … 
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