Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 163
  2. As Days & Nights Fly Past, Fly Past
     … That way, what you’ve learned in one skill you can apply to the skill of the mind. This is why the ajaans—Ajaan Lee in particular—were so good at analogies: analogies for the skilled mind, analogies for the foolish mind. They’d seen those patterns in themselves and were able to use those patterns to teach themselves. This is where you make … 
  3. Attachment to Views
     … You can’t trust that everything that comes up in a quiet mind is going to be useful or correct or reliable or trustworthy. Ajaan Fuang used to say not to make a diary of your meditation. If an insight arises, try to see how it’s relevant to what’s actually going on in your mind right here, right now. If it’s … 
  4. Talking to Yourself
     … The issues are your own ability or lack of ability, the way you place suffering and stress on your own mind, and your ability to relieve some of that even if it’s just, as one of the forest ajaans once said, a little fleck of bark off a tree. If you get that much of a defilement off your mind, your mind is … 
  5. A Touchstone at the Breath
     … Where? Right here, where the mind and the body meet at the breath. So try to make this the point from which you come—this awareness of the body, awareness of the breath, awareness of the mind, right here at the breath. When other issues come up, you may want to look at the texts, but always take the answers and try to relate … 
  6. The Courage to Set Yourself Free
     … If you want to learn how to depend on your own mind, if you want to turn your mind into its own refuge, you can’t let yourself be afraid of pain, because if you’re afraid of pain, your fears can order you around. You won’t be depend on yourself anymore. That way you’re confined by your fears. Your own mind … 
  7. Good Fundamentals
     … The mind can change direction that fast. So what we’ve got to do is to learn how to change the mind in a good direction and keep it a good direction. That requires mindfulness, it requires alertness, it requires ardency: all the qualities we’re working on as we meditate. And what’s our motivation? Heedfulness: the realization that our actions really do … 
  8. Flexibility
     … We’re here trying to explore what’s going on in our own mind, which presuppositions we bring into the practice are going to be helpful and which ones get in the way. Sometimes issues come up in the meditation that are not the ones you anticipated, not the ones you planned, but they may be the issues that the mind needs to deal … 
  9. Treating the Diseases of the Mind
     … We all have diseases in our minds—not necessarily the really heavy kinds of diseases that they put you in an institution for, but we do suffer from greed, aversion, and delusion. We suffer from the hindrances, the fetters. There are long, long lists of the problems of the mind. So we want to make sure we take the right medicine. When we think … 
  10. Sending Happiness
     … Is your mind ready and prepared so that it can hold things under control? That much of a thought should be in the background—because when you engage in mindfulness of death, it’s not as if you’re thinking about death, death, death, death, death, all the time. You remind yourself, “What do I need to develop in order to prepare?” Then you … 
  11. Thoughts with Fangs
     … Nobody else can look into your mind and measure how much you’re suffering. And you can’t look into other people’s minds to see how much they’re suffering. So whatever basis you might have for comparing yourself in the practice with other people is totally nonexistent. Or to put it in another way, it can’t be measured in any way … 
  12. Cooking the Present Moment
     … It’s just that your old level of how you held your body, how you held your mind, was familiar, so you felt safe. You felt you were on familiar territory. But that’s not a real sign that you’re really safe there. The mind can create a lot of problems if it doesn’t know how to create a sense of well … 
  13. The Body Doesn’t Care
     … But the fact is that, as you’re getting the mind to stay with the breath, the breath is like a mirror for the mind. You begin to see things in the mind you wouldn’t have seen otherwise. In particular, when you follow the Buddha’s instructions on breath meditation as they relate to the processes of fabrication, you see how the way … 
  14. Skills of the Dhamma Wheel
     … Then as you work with the breath, as you get more and more skilled at it, you can take the skills and turn around and start applying them to the mind, to the different events in the mind. You find that this framework will take you far. That’s why the Buddha said that the most important internal quality for awakening is appropriate attention … 
  15. The Right Touch
     … When he started out, though, it was all very simple. “Meditate to get your mind down”: That was the first meditation instruction he received. So, he struggled with that for a while: What does it mean to get your mind down? So, he got it down, down, down, and it got very heavy. So, he realized on his own: “This can’t be right … 
  16. In Heedfulness We Trust
     … The mind is capable of all kinds of things. The problem is that it’s very quick to change. So you want to develop your powers of mindfulness and alertness, you want to develop your discernment so you can see what’s a good course of action and you can remember to stick with it. You might say Buddhism is a religion of heedfulness … 
  17. Deconstructing Anger
     … You get more and more experience in looking at your mind states as just these things: breath, directed thought and evaluation, feelings, and perceptions. When you begin to recognize these things as you’re dealing with them to get the mind in concentration, you begin to realize that your other mental states, outside of concentration practice, are made up of the same sort of … 
  18. The Not-Self Discourse
     … So when there’s no place for the mind to focus its desires, this realization undercuts all possible craving, because as the Buddha said in the definition of craving, it delights here, delights there, focuses here, focuses there. It always has a place, always has a location, whether physical or mental. The purpose of the questionnaire is to deprive the mind of any possible … 
  19. Levels of the Breath
     … As you learn to fabricate in more subtle ways, more solid ways, more unchanging and unified ways, the mind can settle down more and more solidly, securely. Some people, when they get to this stage, think that the mind isn’t doing anything at all: no self, no actor, nothing. But actually it’s doing just one consistent thing. When there’s that one … 
  20. When You Don’t Like Your Selves
     … That requires a lot of mindfulness and alertness and ardency: the qualities we’re trying to develop as we meditate to be on top of things so that the unskillful selves don’t come back and push the skillful ones out of the way. Your old zombie selves: You don’t need them. But it requires mindfulness to protect yourself. So work on your … 
  21. Right but Wrong
     … So the student asked the famous monk about it, and he said, “Well, really the essence of the Vinaya is to be mindful, so we just practice mindfulness here.” The student went back and reported this to Ajaan Chah, who replied, “He’s right, but he’s wrong.” The Vinaya is about being mindful, but it’s about a lot more as well. The … 
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