Search results for: "The Mind"

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  2. Allowing the Breath to Spread
     … This is an important training for the mind right there. Our tendency is to fixate immediately on either pleasure or pain: pleasure, because we like it; pain, because we feel threatened by it. We have to do something about it. There are times when you have to tell yourself: Just don’t go there yet. You’re not ready for it. No matter how … 
  3. Sending Happiness
     … How do you direct your thoughts to the breath? How do you evaluate the breath? Or if you find that the mind isn’t willing to settle down with the breath, what other things could you be thinking about right now that would be in line with the Dhamma? One of the monks who stayed with Ajaan Lee toward the end of his life … 
  4. Between You and Your Eyes
    The Buddha’s teachings are primarily about things that are immediately present to our awareness—the feeling of the breath, the movements of the body, thoughts moving in the mind: things immediately present, but things that we tend to miss, things we’re pretty ignorant about. When we suffer, we think we know suffering, but we don’t really. When we have a desire … 
  5. Bodies & Minds Outside
     … the mind when it’s depressed, the mind when it’s scattered. All the great meditators of the past and the present have had just exactly the same kinds of problem. Yet they were able to get past them. In the same way, when you’re sitting with pain, realize that other people have sat with pain, too, and yet they were able to … 
  6. Hold onto the Breath
     … So if you can’t get the mind to settle down in the present moment, what are you doing that’s putting all those peas under the mattress? Sometimes they’re not just peas under the mattress, they’re burrs on top of the mattress. One of the difficulties of the path is that we have to admit that we’re the ones who … 
  7. Shoulds & Ideals
     … If you put these imperatives into practice, you’ll find that the mind does get lighter, its burdens get lighter. You’re not carrying around so much stuff. You don’t have all those suitcases weighing you down. In terms of Western psychology, these imperatives are the Buddha’s superego. They’re the part of the mind that tells us what we should do … 
  8. Break Things Down
     … Then the Buddha asks him, “Have you seen that ‘this has come to be’?” That’s when Sariputta launches into quite a long discourse on seeing things as they’ve come to be—as individual events in the mind, individual habits, individual qualities in the mind. You see that they have their nutriment—there’s something that feeds them; there’s some allure to … 
  9. In Accordance with the Dhamma
     … You see that all the stress that’s weighing down the mind comes from your passion for fabrication. You’re making all kinds of worlds out of your experiences, and in the course of that you’re making yourself suffer. But a lot of those worlds are hard to give up. The different hopes and ideals we have: Some of them are in line … 
  10. Concentration as Wilderness
     … You find that if you settle down with the breath, large parts of the committee of the mind are not really here yet. They’re still carrying on their conversations about home or work or whatever, assuming that you will give in after a while and forget about the breath. And you will – to begin with. But then you remember that you’re not … 
  11. A Path for a Noble Desire
     … Based on that, all the other factors of the path follow, all the way up to right concentration, because for this message to really sink into the mind, you’ve got to get the mind focused. You’ve got to give it a sense of well-being that doesn’t depend on things outside. This concentration is not the goal of the path. After … 
  12. A Rite of Passage
     … If you’re going to get the mind still, you can’t get involved with any thought, no matter how wonderful or inspiring or whatever it is. You’ve got to just drop it, drop it, drop it, because you want a place where the mind can step back and see thoughts and other things as processes. You want to see where they’re … 
  13. The Brahmaviharas Are Not Enough
     … It involves both the observer, the more passive side, and also what you might call the director, who looks over the situation in the mind, tries to notice where something’s wrong, and then figures out what to do about it. The director asks questions, tries to think up solutions, puts them to the test, and then judges the results. This is not just … 
  14. Overconfidence & Underconfidence
     … As the Buddha said, if you find that, by living at your ease, the mind does develop, okay, live at your ease. But if you find that, by living at your ease, laziness creeps in, other unskillful states creep in, that’s a sign that you’re going to have to push yourself with a certain amount of pain. And how do you deal … 
  15. Is It Worth It?
     … Where is the effort worth it? And the Buddha said, “Right here, in right effort.” With right effort, you’re not only doing good things for yourself and other people, you’re also developing good qualities in the mind—and those good qualities can take you beyond cause and effect. That’s what’s really amazing about the Buddha’s analysis of cause and … 
  16. Patience & Sensitivity
     … what state is the body in; what state is the mind in. The ajaans talk metaphorically. They say, “Is your mind leading forward or leading back? To the left or the right?” Forward or back, of course, would be leading to the future or the past. Left or right would be focusing on things you like or things you don’t like. And how … 
  17. Slogging Through Difficulties
     … After all, the Buddha said that his awakening came not because he was a special person but because he developed qualities of the mind that everybody can potentially develop. And even in his case, he had to go through six years of torment before he found the right path. That means you have to be prepared for difficulties in your path, too. Otherwise, you … 
  18. Strength of Persistence
     … The part of the mind that says, “Why put in an effort? Just put in a minimum, what you can get by with”: That falls away, too. That’s probably the biggest obstacle in the path—the attitude of “well, just enough to get by.” We may not come to the meditation consciously with that attitude, but if that’s the way we live … 
  19. Goodwill for Safety
     … The kind of conversation that goes on in the mind has a huge effect on feelings, which is why we repeat the brahmaviharas every day, twice a day as a group—to get those thoughts embedded in your mind. And it’s why we don’t just chant them in Pali, we also put them in English. As an exercise, if your native language … 
  20. Shoot Your Pains with Wisdom
     … You’re getting the mind in a position of inner strength where it doesn’t feel the need to go out and straighten out the world before it’s going to practice. If you had to straighten out the world before you could practice, nobody could practice on the human plane. You need to get some perspective on this issue. There are crazy people … 
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