Search results for: "Mindfulness"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Truths Noble in the Heart… What is suffering, after all? What is stress – or however you want to translate dukkha? And what is the mind doing that’s giving rise to more stress and more suffering over and over again? Many people will want to look into this problem at some point in their lives. But again, it’s when you take this issue as the primary issue in …
- True Protection for the World… So this practice of sitting here with your eyes closed training your mind is not a selfish thing. It’s protection for yourself so that you eventually become a refuge for others. We can’t wait until the world gets straightened out before we straighten out our own minds, because the cause is in the mind. The world out there is the realm of …
- Sweat the Small Stuff… This is why the Buddha—when he was about to teach his son, Rahula, how to meditate, even before he taught him the steps to breath meditation—told him to focus on the inconstancy of things so as to undercut the conceit, “I am.” In other words, as you look at your own mind, you begin to realize that there are good intentions mixed …
- The End of the World… Lokuttara, the word we translate as “transcendent,” actually means, “above the world.” You’ve got to make your mind above the world. Otherwise, you get crushed—think of all those mountains moving in, in the simile the Buddha taught to King Pasenadi. If we were just physical bodies, with the mind just an epiphenomenon of physical processes, it’d be pretty miserable. The mountains …
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