Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 164
  2. The Practice is Wherever There’s Mindfulness
     … You can also remember what ways have worked in the past to get the mind to settle down, so that if you come up against an obstacle, you can work your way around it. This involves three qualities: mindfulness, alertness, and ardency. Each of them has to be right. Mindfulness, if it’s right, is remembering, basically, what’s skillful and what’s not … 
  3. Conviction & Focus
     … These are precisely the skills you’re going to need as aging comes in, and the mind starts wandering around thinking about the past, because you don’t like to think about the future. The future doesn’t seem to hold much, but you think about things in the past: the pleasant things that get you nostalgic, or the unpleasant things that fill you … 
  4. Motivation
     … Because part of the mind will try to dress up little bits of insight and little bits of concentration into something more than they really are. Another part of the mind will know that this is self-deceit, and there will be a war going on inside as you get pulled back and forth between unrealistic estimations of what you can do and a … 
  5. Equanimity & Action
     … Sometimes the mind doesn’t want to stay with the breath. Or it starts getting sleepy when it stays with the breath. Well, you might want to change. Start contemplating the different parts of the body. Visualize them; go through the whole catalogue. Give the mind work to do so that it doesn’t just drift off, come back, and wonder where it was … 
  6. The Equanimity of a Winner
     … In other words, when your efforts at being mindful get successful, the mind can finally settle down. When it settles down fully, it reaches a state called purity of mindfulness and equanimity. That’s useful for seeing that even in good things, like the concentration, there’s still more to be done. There are still subtle levels of stress in the state of concentration … 
  7. Fear & Conviction
     … Why put yourself out? Why make an extra effort? But deep down in the mind, everybody has this sense that things could go wrong. Either we try to cover it up with platitudes or we start getting unrealistic and give rise to very unskillful kinds of fears. Neither approach is helpful. The best way to deal with our fear is to learn how to … 
  8. An Anthropologist from Mars
     … to see which activities you’re engaged in that get the mind stirred up, and learn how to abandon them. And “activities” here means everything from the way you look at things, the way you listen to things, to the actual responsibilities you take on. The bottom line for a meditator, when doing any of these things, is to ask yourself: How does this … 
  9. Unparadoxical Happiness
     … It’s the happiness, the pleasure and ease, that comes when the mind is concentrated, when it’s focused on one thing and can stay there. As the Buddha said, there is no happiness other than peace. Whatever happiness we get from things outside comes because the mind is able to rest with them for a moment. But what always happens is it gets … 
  10. Possessed by Emotions
     … In that way, even though the emotion may still be going through the mind, it doesn’t have to have an effect on the body. That’ll weaken it considerably. Then you look at the way you talk to yourself. Here again Ajaan Lee says that it’s very similar to being possessed, with the emotion saying all kinds of things. He says just … 
  11. Trust Your Desire for Happiness
     … After all, the mind does have a tendency to wander off to the past, wander off to the future, without being conscious of what it’s doing. The wandering itself is not bad. You have to think about the past and about the future at times. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to make sense of anything. But it’s important … 
  12. Flexibility
     … But if you understand that you keep the mind focused on the breath in a particular way, the continuity with which you do it, the right amount of pressure, and the breath is not too heavy, not too light: You focus on doing that properly, and the rapture just keeps coming and coming and coming until you have enough. Then you can focus in … 
  13. The Path of Giving
     … Learn to use whatever pleasure you can muster to developing concentration, as nourishment for the mind. Use feelings of pain as things to analyze, to understand, because you begin to see the mind in action right around the pain. You see the perceptions that you place on pain, saying, “This is the pain. It’s located right here. It has these characteristics.” If you … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. Don’t Underestimate Merit
     … As you work up the levels of motivation, you finally get to the ones where generosity is simply a natural expression of the mind. You say to yourself, “I give simply because it’s good to do this. The mind feels refreshed.” That, too, is a benefit you get from it. So don’t look down on the idea that you’re going to … 
  16. The Real World
     … They train the mind in the right direction. And there’s happiness at the same time. When you dedicate merit, you’re hoping to share that happiness with others. Of course, happiness isn’t something you can take out of your heart and put into someone else’s heart. But often just the thought that you’re thinking of them makes them happy when … 
  17. Strategies for Happiness
     … The body, events in the mind: They all come from our desire for happiness. And we act on that desire, sometimes in skillful and sometimes in unskillful ways. That’s why the situation we’re living in is such a mixed bag, in terms of being satisfactory or not. You have to look carefully at your actions to see which ones really are conducive … 
  18. Know the Dhamma by Its Results
     … You begin to realize that you were weighing the mind down to no purpose. Even though you held onto these things tightly and cherished them, they really didn’t help you. That’s the first set. These are qualities that have to do with your own practice and its impact on your mind, what kind of person you become as you practice: someone who … 
  19. The Same for Everyone
     … the spot where the mind is still, the breath is still, your awareness fills the body. Getting there may have required all kinds of ups and downs, not just east, west, north, and south. Some people had problems with visions; some people felt stymied because they didn’t have any visions; other people had problems with the different elements in their body getting out … 
  20. Cutting Roads
     … You tend to associate that level of energy, that type of energy, with the focus the mind on the breath. It’s like all the other good qualities that you try to develop in the meditation: If you infuse them in the breath, then each time you focus back on the breath, you’ll be reminded of them. So try to get more in … 
  21. The Power of Choice
     … But if you really want to understand the choices of the mind, you’ve got to focus on the present moment. So we focus on the breath, because that’s one thing that you really do have a lot of leeway in. It may not seem like much, but you can choose to breathe short breaths, long breaths, deep breaths, shallow breaths. You can … 
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