Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 171
  2. Against Your Type
     … So it comes down to learning how to watch your mind and see what needs to be done, realizing that sometimes the amount of energy you need to apply to a problem is not the sort of level you normally apply. There are some people who really like to take a macho approach that whatever defilement comes up in the mind they’re going … 
  3. Adult Dhamma
     … It’s a very focused skill, focusing in on your mind and seeing what in the mind causes you to create suffering. It’s also a battle. There’s winning and losing. There’s doing the skill well and there’s doing it poorly. Now, there’s a frame of mind that thinks that this sort of dualistic thinking is narrow. A craft focused … 
  4. Forgiveness
     … So he continued living with the snake in his room for three days to see how much fear might come up in his mind and whether he really could spread goodwill to snakes. And he was spreading goodwill to the snake all the time. Finally, on the third night, he sat and meditated, and in his mind he addressed a message to the snake … 
  5. Goodwill as a Guardian
     … The Buddha calls it: “taking the world as a governing principle.” You remind yourself that there are beings in the world who can read your mind. Suppose the Buddha were reading your mind and he saw that you were planning to give up on the path. What would he think? He’d be concerned. If you’re thinking this way, you should feel embarrassed … 
  6. Battling the Hindrances
     … It’s not the case that the mind, once it gets still, will just naturally drop all of its defilements. Often the still mind contains the seeds of a lot more defilements. That’s why we can’t just do concentration. Discernment has to come in as well. Sometimes discernment is simply a matter of noticing things and feeling a sense of immediate disenchantment … 
  7. Wise Endurance
     … In other cases, it deals more directly with your own mind: The situation outside can’t be changed, but you can change your attitude in such a way that you don’t suffer. The emphasis here is always on the principle of agency: You can act. One of the most depressing things about a difficult situation is the feeling that there’s nothing you … 
  8. Asalha Puja
     … So he asked himself, “Could this be the path?” And something inside him said, “Yes.” But then he realized that because he’d been starving himself, he didn’t have the strength to get the mind into good strong concentration. That’s why he left his austerities. So the key to the path—and as the Buddha sometimes said, the heart of the path … 
  9. Who’s in Charge Here?
     … how you’re going to train your mind to maintain your original intention that this is what you want to do. After all, if you can’t depend on yourself—if you make up your mind to do one thing and then end up doing something else just because you felt like it—you can’t trust yourself. When you can’t trust yourself … 
  10. The Joy of Heedfulness
     … In other words, you can’t simply let yourself be content even with good things in the mind, much less bad. I was listening to a talk a while back where someone was saying that when you read about jhana, it gets you all worked up, and you want to have jhana states in your mind. But the Buddha taught contentment. So this person … 
  11. Right Fear
     … The Buddha doesn’t have you go out and do foolhardy things unless the integrity of your mind demands it. Otherwise, you gauge the situation, and whenever fear does come up in the mind, you have to ask yourself, “Where’s the unskillful part of this fear? Is greed involved? Attachment to certain things—are you afraid you’re going to lose them? Where … 
  12. Shoulds & Wants
    When you sit down and meditate and tell yourself you’re going to be thinking only about one thing — the breath — you find that lots of other thoughts come crowding in, lots of other voices in the mind. Some of them are helpful; a lot of them are not, because a lot of them come from a time when the mind was not trained … 
  13. Dhamma Medicine
    The Buddha often compared himself to a doctor treating the diseases of the mind, and the Dhamma was his medicine. This fact is directly related to his strictures for what he would say, what he would teach. One, it had to be true. Two, it had to be beneficial. And three, it had to be timely. These things are connected because that’s the … 
  14. Look After Yourself with Ease
     … One of the common questions you hear in the forest tradition is that, when the mind gets really still, you should ask it, “Who are you?” When you look at it in those terms, what do you see? There’s nothing male or female about it, nothing white, nothing black, nothing Asian. It’s just the mind; it’s just awareness. You want to … 
  15. In Control
     … The suffering that really weighs down on the mind isn’t what comes from outside, it’s what comes from within-side. It comes from within you. So learn how to take claim of at least this part of what’s in you, so that the mind can have a safe place, a position of strength, where you can be in control.
  16. Will Meditation Make You Grim & Dull?
     … We try to put the mind in a good position: mindful, alert, ardent, so that no matter what comes up, we’re ready. Restraint of the senses is all about this. We tend to just jump into the things we see and hear and pick up through our senses without any sense of wariness at all. But we should be wary, because there are … 
  17. Visakha Puja – Shaking the Earth
     … by trying to develop skillful qualities in the mind, as when we’re meditating right now. You focus on the breath. That’s called directed thought. And then you see if you can stay with the breath for long periods of time, because you’re trying to develop concentration. As the Buddha once said, that’s the heart of the path. All the other … 
  18. Patience
    The nature of the mind is purposeful. As the Buddha says, we engage in different activities that he classes under the aggregates, and each of those aggregates — whether it’s form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, or consciousness — is something we fabricate for the sake of something else. In other words, we have means and we have goals. The goals are either directly or indirectly … 
  19. Perception
     … In the same way, you try to sweep your mind clean—developing your mindfulness, your concentration, getting the mind still—so that you can perceive things arising in the mind. If greed comes, you want to be able to perceive it very early on. Lust comes, you want to perceive it very early on. Any unskillful emotion: If the mind is quiet, you can … 
  20. When Your Will Is Ill
     … Try to develop the same attitude toward other people and see what you can do to develop some health in your mind. When you know the way to make your mind healthy, then you’re in a better position to be a good example to others, so that they can make their minds healthy as well. In that way, we all benefit.
  21. Distinctions That Make a Difference
     … But that’s not craving *at *the object; the craving is at your image of the object in the mind, or pictures you’ve seen of it. That’s where the craving is located. You need to make these distinctions if you’re going to understand the allure of the things you hold on to. It’s because we glom things together that, say … 
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