Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 173
  2. The Dhamma Without Price
     … That keeps us safe and keeps our minds free. At the same time, the more we free our minds, the more we do become an unexcelled field of merit for the world. I was recently reading an article where someone was saying that the whole idea of merit was something invented by the monks as a way of fooling people into supporting them. It … 
  3. Faith in Karma
     … And so you have to become more and more mindful, more and more alert, more discerning. You have to gain more concentration, so that you can see the mind more clearly. And given the sense of well-being that comes from concentration—the Buddha compares it to food—you’re in a better position to say No to unskillful intentions. So we practice equanimity … 
  4. The Buddha Aimed High
     … Get the mind in a good state of concentration where there’s rapture and bliss that come from simply sitting here being very still, secluded from sensuality. Sensuality is the first type of craving you’ve got to watch out for, because that’s so pervasive. If you can pull the mind out of its fascination with thinking about sensual desires, sensual objects, and … 
  5. To Sustain Your Practice
     … Then there are the perceptions you hold in mind. The world again would have us hold in mind certain perceptions—that success in life means getting ahead, getting a lot of money, getting status—but the Buddha called these simply the ways of the world. There’s gain and there’s loss; there’s status, loss of status; praise, criticism; pleasure and pain. The … 
  6. Conviction in the End of Suffering
     … You’re asked to train your mind, to have some control over your thoughts. You’re asked to be very discerning about what’s going on in the mind. All of these are good skills to master, and they don’t save all their rewards for the end. They give you rewards all along the way. It’s simply that the reward at the … 
  7. Training Your Inner Critic
     … Breathe in a way that makes you sensitive to rapture, sensitive to pleasure; breathe in a way where you’re aware of the whole body; breathe in a way where you gladden the mind; concentrate the mind; liberate the mind. He gives you perceptions to hold in mind: Think of the pleasure going through the whole body. Perceive it as something that can happen … 
  8. Whole-body Consciousness
     … Concentration, again, makes you sensitive to what you can do simply with the intentions of your mind, the perceptions you hold in mind. And because it’s still and easeful, it ideally should raise your standards for what counts as stress and ease. It raises your standards for what you want, what’s satisfactory, which in turn allows your discernment to be more discerning … 
  9. Warm Your Heart
     … Why are you giving? What do you expect to get out of it? The lowest motivation, of course, is just thinking, “I’m going to get this back with interest.” The highest is, as he says, “It’s an ornament for the mind”: something that makes the mind beautiful. And there are many gradations in between. In terms of the recipient, you want to … 
  10. Dimensions of Right Effort
     … Can you label things in a way that doesn’t cause greed? Learn how to change the labels around until you’ve got something that doesn’t get the mind all worked up. All of this is called exerting a fabrication. This is how you make an effort to disentangle yourself from unskillful states of mind. You see the way you’re breathing around … 
  11. In Cahoots with Your Defilements
     … It really does obscure your mind. And then ask yourself, “Why do you like it?” Exactly what kind of pleasure does it give? If you were to take a picture of the mind as it’s feeding off that pleasure, what would it look like? Is it the kind of pleasure you’re happy to talk to other people about? Or is it a … 
  12. The Human Condition
     … It comes with the sense of wellbeing you gain when you center the mind. That, in and of itself, reminds you that there are alternatives to running after sensual pleasures. There’s the pleasure of a well-centered mind, a mind that’s not affected by things, that has its own internal sense of wellbeing. It doesn’t need to depend on anything else … 
  13. See Your Thoughts as Strange
     … The Thai ajaans talk about the mind settled in, at ease, at equanimity, as the normal state of mind, or the mind at normalcy—in the same way as when you’re observing the precepts, they say that your behavior is finally at normalcy. But for most of us, that’s not our sense of normal. Distraction is our normalcy. The desires that flow … 
  14. The Wheel of Dhamma
     … So your first duty is trying to understand when there is suffering the mind—and that can be anything from really heavy suffering to subtle stress. What is it? How does it come? How does it go? When you see it come and see it go, what else comes and goes along with it? That’s when you begin to catch sight of the … 
  15. Encouragement
     … What we do know, though, is that the power of the mind is such that we can train it. Once we’ve accepted that things are uncertain, there is no protector outside, then we have to learn to be our own protectors—and we can do it. That was the Buddha’s message. That’s what his awakening means in our lives: It is … 
  16. The Buddha Teaches a Yakkha
     … We should realize there are qualities we can develop that can make at least our immediate environment a good place to be, by the way we develop these strengths within ourselves, so that our life together becomes conducive to the good things of the mind—the mind’s genuine goodness, its genuine happiness: genuine in the sense that it’s really lasting, and goes … 
  17. Freedom, Conditioned & Not
     … But then he began to realize that you can think skillful thoughts all day long, and although there may not be any bad karmic consequences, it is tiring to the mind. So it’s even more skillful to get the mind into concentration. When you’re in the various levels of concentration, getting the mind deeper and deeper into absorption, the level of skill … 
  18. Some Assembly Required
     … Something comes up in the mind and you have no choice—you tell yourself—in whether you’re going to follow through with it or not. You’re unprotected in the sense that you could do a lot of unskillful things and just tell yourself, “Well, it’s because I was born with a certain DNA.” Or simply because, “That’s the way the … 
  19. The Happiness & Suffering of Others
     … This is one of the reasons why, when the Buddha talks about mindfulness, there’s mindfulness internally and there’s mindfulness externally. In other words, you notice that you’re suffering in a particular way, well, you realize that other people are suffering in that way, too. That realization helps to equalize things, makes the suffering a little bit easier to bear. It’s … 
  20. Step Back
     … So when you find yourself bound up in a particular state of mind that seems to weigh you down, the first question to ask is, “What are the assumptions I’m going on here?” Try to dig those out. Then learn to question them. Often you’ll find that they’re things you believe in really intently, and part of the mind will resist … 
  21. Breathe Easy
     … Just think of the solid sensation as being open to being permeated, even as it is, and hold that perception in mind. Some people don’t like holding perceptions in mind like this. They say meditation should be about seeing things as they are, and here we’re using our imagination. But there are so many cases in the world where if you don … 
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