Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 168
  2. Serial Clinging Is Still Clinging
     … And look at the mind: It runs all over the place. It’s not so much attached to the objects as it is to the planning, the fantasizing. And even there, the plans and the fantasies may change. Clinging to sensuality doesn’t mean that you hold permanently to one fantasy or one plan. It means you hold on to this or that activity … 
  3. The World of Conviction
    The World of Conviction March 27, 2017 One of the mind’s habits is to create states of becoming, involving both the world outside and your own inner world, the world of the mind. You start with a desire and then, based on that desire, you take on an identity in a specific world of experience. If you have a desire for pizza, the … 
  4. Befriending the Breath
     … Try to make your mind cool and still as well. Bring it to the breath. Tell yourself you’re going to become friends with the breath. All too often, what happens when you’re meditating and you have trouble staying with your meditation object, is that it starts to become your enemy, your opponent. You try to squeeze it and force it down, to … 
  5. Antidotes for Clinging
     … But if you don’t grab on to these things, your mind doesn’t suffer. It’s when you grab on, it’s when you cling, that stress comes into the mind. You create a clinging-aggregate. You create a connection. This is stress in terms of the four noble truths. Wherever there’s craving, there can be clinging, and the clinging to the … 
  6. The Search for Happiness
     … And because our actions come from the mind, this is why we’re here meditating. You have to meditate with a goal in mind. Here again, you get people who say that meditation is better when you have no goals. They pride themselves on the fact that they’re doing it without any purpose in mind, without trying to accomplish anything. But that’s … 
  7. When Nothing’s Happening
     … Something in the mind says, “Even though these are the best states of mind I can create, I don’t want to stay here, but I don’t want to go there to another state I create. Isn’t there something that doesn’t have to be maintained?” And in the prospect of neither staying here nor going there, something may open up. That … 
  8. Giving to the Meditation
     … You’ve got a mind. You’ve got these qualities of mindfulness, alertness, concentration, discernment. They’re all there in an inchoate form. You’ve got the seeds for these things. The meditation is simply an opportunity to allow them to grow and to flourish, so that the seeds of well being that you already have will have the opportunity to show exactly how … 
  9. Habits of Perception
     … This is what the four establishings of mindfulness or four frames of reference are all about: giving yourself a framework so that you’re not blown away by the events of the world. See things within the frame of body, feelings, mind states, or mental qualities, in and of themselves. Make those your frames of reference — as when you’re dealing with the breath … 
  10. A Game of Chess
     … We get impatient with the beginning steps, especially when we see our minds muddling around with concentration and mindfulness is hard. Actually, the simple act of mindfulness isn’t that hard, but sticking with it is. Maintaining mindfulness, maintaining alertness, all these other qualities: The maintaining is hard to do. So we hope for the quick insight or the quick tactic that can take … 
  11. The Culture of the Practice
     … It’s more a question of the qualities of mind you develop, the strengths of mind you develop. But making a big deal about the right zafu and the place you claimed for yourself: That’s what happens when you take the technique out of the culture. Things can get distorted. So, think about what it means to engage in admirable friendship. Conviction means … 
  12. To Know the Buddha
     … We can read about mindfulness. We can think about how mindfulness works together with ardency and alertness. We can come to certain conclusions. But the actual fact of being mindful and being mindful again, and then learning how to extend your mindfulness—to give it a good foundation; being alert at the same time, being ardent at the same time, how these factors work … 
  13. Rebirth is Relevant
     … This is why the Buddha has us employ desire to get the mind to settle down. That’s a skillful desire. The desire to abandon unskillful mind states is a skillful desire. The desire to find awakening is a skillful desire. The Buddha encourages these things because the desire for awakening is the only thing that’s going to pull us out of unskillful … 
  14. Contentment in the Practice
     … But you find, if you allow yourself to settle into it, that it solves a basic problem in the mind: the underlying tension where it’s ready to jump at a moment’s notice, like a cat settled in one spot but coiled up ready to spring. If you could take a picture of the mind, that’s what it would look like: a … 
  15. Intelligent Design
     … Third, there’s mindfulness: You remember to keep that conviction in mind all the time and to apply it to all of your actions. Fourth and fifth are concentration and discernment. The discernment there is to help find ways over the obstacles that we all inevitably find on the path, and the concentration is to give your mind the food it needs to keep … 
  16. Radical Questioning
     … The attitudes you have, the thoughts that burn in your mind, burn in your body: What are they based on? Why do they burn? Is there some way that you can learn not to be burned by them? A lot of the answer requires changing your attitudes, changing your assumptions. Back in my days as a student studying intellectual history, one of the main … 
  17. Alternative Conceptions
     … And then the concentration then becomes a good basis for insight, not simply because it makes the mind still enough so that you can see, but also because, in the process of creating the concentration, you’ve learned a lot about how the mind puts things together. This is why the Buddha, when teaching meditation, simply said, “Go do jhāna.” He didn’t say … 
  18. Evident Inequality
     … that by working on our minds, we can improve our minds, and that improving our minds is worthwhile. The mind is not just a passive recipient, an epiphenomenon of physical properties or physical laws. It’s actually an important agent. When the mind has been trained, it can make a big difference in our lives. So it’s worthwhile training, worthwhile sitting here with … 
  19. Meditators at Work
     … We’re not here just to treat diseases, but that’s one of the ways of getting the mind to really want to focus on the breath, to pay attention to it, and to take an interest in it. Then you can get into the issue of when you have a vagrant thought, what happened to the breath? How does the breath relate to … 
  20. The Challenge of Right View
     … What right now is the suffering or stress that you’re feeling, and what’s the cause? Part of the reason for why the mind is suffering right now is something in the present moment. There are causes coming in from the past that may make you feel pain either in the body or in the mind, but how you react to them is … 
  21. Everything You Need
     … Ajaan Lee, when he discusses the practice of mindfulness, stresses the three qualities you bring to the practice of mindfulness: mindfulness, ardency, and alertness. And among those three, ardency is the factor that, he says, has to do with wisdom. Ardency is your desire to abandon what’s unskillful and develop what’s skillful in its place. That’s where the discernment lies—in … 
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