Search results for: "Mindfulness"
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- Cornered… If you’re mindful, alert, and ardent, you can resist the temptation to go places that won’t be conducive to the practice. You can either direct yourself to places that will be conducive to the practice, or you can deal with what’s coming up in the mind right then and there, and gain release. That’s possible, too. But it all depends …
- Guiding Truths… From there you develop all the other factors of the path, particularly right concentration, which gives the mind the strength it needs in order to pull away from the craving, to pull out of its old habits. Because the mind needs pleasure, you give it the pleasure of concentration. Once it has the pleasure of concentration, it has a point of comparison from which …
- What Made the Buddha Exclaim… a state of mind where the happiness is totally unshakable. There’s a whole series of verses where the Buddha talks about how the mind of an awakened one doesn’t quiver at all in response to either pleasure or pain. Totally solid, a happiness that can’t be touched by anything else: That’s what we’re practicing for. In the case of …
- Delight in Conviction… You’re focusing on your mind in the present moment because your mind in the present moment has a lot of potential power, and you want to learn how to use it well. There are a lot of potentials you have here for understanding yourself, understanding your breath, understanding the way you talk to yourself, understanding the perceptions you hold in mind—even the …
- The Best of a Bad Situation… When you realize that this is not useful at this very moment, as a good meditator you should learn how to put it aside even when it’s screaming in your mind again and again and again. Your attitude has to be, okay, maybe I can’t get you out of the mind but at least I’m not going to let you have …
- Daily-Life Dhamma… Maybe your mind is racing with all sorts of great sarcastic replies to something someone says, but you realize, “Nope, it’s not going to be worth it.” You learn how to keep a lid on things. Now, this requires that you learn how to not turn the mind into a pressure cooker. Again, you remind yourself that you’re better off by not …
- Other People… As you get more and more interested in this, you get a sense of well-being not only in the body but also in the mind—because it’s not running around all over the place. It can rest. Now, be careful when you rest not to drift off. You have to be very, very mindful of what you’re doing. This is why …
- Dhamma Opportunism… But with goodness, you take it with you by leaving some goodness behind—in your relationship with other people and the way you deal with your mind. The inner and the outer goodness are connected. Any goodness you leave behind by being unburdensome, by being content, also goes with you as a strength in the mind. So it’s not a matter of just …
- How to Change… It can help you develop qualities of mind that would be useful, at the very least so that you can fabricate with knowledge and can see all the various layers in the mind where it sides with the defilements that are out to destroy your true happiness. He’s also teaching new ways to talk to yourself. This is why we have all those …
- Respect, Confidence, & Patience… There are lots of techniques for dealing with all different kinds of problems in the mind. When teachers give you just one technique, it’s sort of one-size-fits-all, or Henry Ford’s old maxim: People can have whatever color car they want as long as it’s black. Given the complexity of the mind, there’s no way that one single …
- Rapture… If you can nourish and protect this sense of fullness, then you begin to notice any movements of the mind that might disturb it. You see where the mind is hungry and how it often goes out looking for what’s basically junk food to assuage its hunger. Now, however, you realize you don’t have to do that, for you’ve got something …
- People of Integrity… If they give you new insights into your own mind, it shows that that person knows something you don’t know. So that’s ideally what you look for as you go through life. And the Buddha says he’s providing that kind of person for you. He himself trained himself to be knowledgeable, truthful, and compassionate. And he trained others to be knowledgeable …
- Goodwill Is Respect… generosity, virtue, and meditation, learning how to turn within and finding the resources within our body and minds—our many minds—to see what we can develop that would lead to that happiness. Ajaan Lee talks about how human beings have so many good potentials within them that go undeveloped. So let’s see what we can develop out of the breath. You can …
- Body Contemplation… It’s good for you while you’re alive, and it’s good to keep in mind when you die. It’s a good practice to have done when the mind is trying to figure out where to go. While you’re alive, it’s good for dealing with lust or with any sense of pride around your body. In the Forest tradition, they …
- Self-Knowledge… We don’t like the idea that the mind has defilements. We’d like to hear that the mind is naturally pure, the mind is naturally awakened, and that it’s simply all that horrible social conditioning that makes us unhappy. If we could get away from our social conditioning, everything would be fine. That’s partly true, partly not. One of the important …
- Ajaan Suwat’s Gift… We want to stop somebody else from doing this, or encourage them to do that, without turning around to look, well, are we doing what’s right? This is why we train our minds, because our actions come from here. This is the area for which we are responsible. We develop qualities like mindfulness, ardency, and alertness so that we can see what we …
- What It All Comes From… He said it had a lot to do with your state of mind at the moment of death. That could delay a lot of good karma for a long time. A bad state of mind can delay some good karma. A good state of mind can delay some bad karma. Which got him to reflect that some things have an immediate impact that have …
- Ups & Downs… It’s good to keep that point in mind, that your mind is very complex; causality is very complex. What you’re experiencing at any one point has to do, to some extent, with what you’re doing right now but also something to do with what you did in the past. Of course, what you did in the past is often buried to …
- Delight in the Dhamma… The fourth one is to delight in seclusion—finding a space for the mind where you can put down your burdens, where you don’t have to deal with all the issues of other people, and you can focus on your own issues. Even if there are a lot of issues in the mind, the fact that you can focus on them and you …
- Gratitude to Things… As I’ve said, the purer your mind, the more merit goes to the people who provided the things that made it possible for you to practice. When your mind reaches ultimate purity, then you don’t have to come back and be a burden for anyone anymore. So try to keep this distinction between appreciation and gratitude in mind. Both of them help …
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