Search results for: "Mindfulness"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Conviction & Truth… I’ve talked in the past about how when Ajaan Lee described the qualities of the mind that you bring to mindfulness practice, for him the wisdom quality is ardency, which is pretty much the same thing as right effort combined with heedfulness. In other words, you put your whole heart into trying to bring into being the qualities that the Buddha recommended, and …
- True for What Purpose?… You want to focus on your own mind. You want to focus on your own body as you feel it from within, to get the mind to settle down. This means you have to be selective in what you focus on, and also in what you say to yourself about it. You could be commenting on how your mind is not settling down, and …
- To Depend on Yourself… When the Buddha talks about being mindful, he says mindfulness means remembering what was done and said long ago. That can mean what other people did and said, and also what you’ve done and said. What other people have done and said: You want to remember the Dhamma. You want to remember the example they gave when they acted in line with the …
- A Message for the Universe… That just stirs up the mind. You have to ask yourself, “Maybe I’m perceiving things wrong?” Well, what would a more accurate way of perceiving things be? What would be a more useful way of perceiving things? What would be more conducive to getting the mind to settle down? Remember, we’re doing all of this in the context of the four noble …
- No Happiness Other than Peace… That requires you to develop the path—with the mind in good strong concentration, mindful and alert, imbued with right effort—so you can develop the skill needed to comprehend stress. Because each of the tasks is actually a skill. This is why the path is a gradual path, because it takes a while to develop the skills. After all, nibbana is very, very …
- Not-selfing Your Selves… You note them so that you can recognize, “Okay, this is an event in the mind.” Then the question is, “What is the impact of this event?” And particularly these voices in the mind, what are they saying? Why are they saying it? What’s their reasoning? Where do they really lead? This is what the investigation is all about, so that you can …
- The Whole Elephant… The more mindful you are when you’ve learned a lesson that helps you to see more clearly, the more concentrated the mind, the more still you are, then the more you can see what’s going on inside. And even before you hit the deathless, you’re able to see parts of your mind that were hidden in blind spots up to that …
- How We Cling… But the real cause is the mind. It’s what the mind is doing. That’s where the real cure has to be focused. The mind has its addictions. It’s addicted to these activities. All too often, our ideas of the world and ourselves in the world and how things should be done aren’t providing us with very much pleasure, but we …
- Karma for Freedom… As he points out, the state of your mind in the present moment plays a large role in shaping how you experience the results of past actions. Even past bad actions don’t have to make you suffer if your present state of mind is good. That’s because what you’re experiencing right now is the combination of three things: the results of …
- Against the Grain… Then, when the mind is in concentration, you can start seeing it as a state of becoming. But first you learn to use it to see all the other becomings you get involved with, all these worlds that the mind gets into and then wakes up and comes out of. All too often we leave one world simply to go into another one. What …
- Take Care… In other words, pay attention both to the things that come into the mind and to the things that go out, and exercise restraint. One of Ajaan Suwat’s most stinging ways of criticizing somebody was, “This is a person who, as soon as something comes into his mind, it comes right out of his mouth.” In other words, there’s no filter, there …
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