Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 174
  2. Steering the Raft
     … Get the mind into concentration. As the Buddha said, as you go from level to level in the concentration, different levels of fabrication fall away. They fall still. The chatter in the mind that you need to get yourself into right concentration can take you to a point where you don’t need to chatter anymore. You can develop a perception of the breath … 
  3. Choosing to Believe in Your Choices
    As you sit here focused on the breath, you’ll sometimes find that the mind is not with the breath. It’s someplace else. And when you notice that, you have a choice. You can either stay with that someplace else and follow whatever the thought is or you can come back to the breath. They’re both here: the thought and the breath … 
  4. Beyond Sound-bitten Dhamma
     … That requires having a good, strong sense of time and place and what your heart and mind need right now. So learn how to read your mind. Read your heart. And have a sense of the different options that are available to you. The Buddha didn’t teach just one thing. He taught suffering and the end of suffering. That’s two right there … 
  5. Pay Careful Attention
     … Those who listen well gain discernment, because when you listen well, you’re actively engaging your mind. The Buddha himself said that when you listen, try to focus your attention so that your mind is one with the topic that’s being discussed. In other words, it’s gathered in oneness around it. And then, he said, apply appropriate attention. Think about, “How does … 
  6. May All Beings Be Heedful
     … There are dangers within the mind—dangers outside, of course, but also, more importantly, dangers in the mind—but it’s possible to avoid those dangers through being skillful. So the proper attitude is to try to maintain a sense of heedfulness, enjoying the results of your heedful actions. Remember, the Buddha didn’t say he would teach only those people who didn’t … 
  7. Heedfulness & Confidence
    Heedfulness is a skillful quality of the mind. In fact, the Buddha said it’s the root of all other skillful qualities. Anxiety, however, is unskillful. It’s one of the hindrances. And it’s important that you understand the difference. That passage just now, connecting heedfulness with the ability to see dangers, makes it sound like heedfulness is anxious. But it’s not … 
  8. Sensitive to the Breath
     … So you have to paint a picture in the mind that says No, it’s going to down. Now, you don’t force it down, you just allow it down, permit it to go down. Open your mind to the possibility that it can go down. Wherever there’s any tension in the neck, think of it relaxing. That might be what’s blocking … 
  9. The Buddha’s Relationship Advice
     … a sense of well-being inside, a sense of being able to control our own happiness, control our own mind. Because that’s what the problem is: The mind is out of control. We go grabbing for whatever we think will make us happy and we end up doing a lot of unskillful things, because we hold on to something and we find it … 
  10. The Reality of Your Thoughts
     … You don’t really notice the ambient noise in your mind until you try to make it still, try to keep it quiet, be with the breath. Then you begin to realize your mind is a random thought-generator: All these neurons firing and little thoughts appearing here and appear there, and there’s part of the mind that’s always trying to make … 
  11. Between You and Your Eyes
    The Buddha’s teachings are primarily about things that are immediately present to our awareness—the feeling of the breath, the movements of the body, thoughts moving in the mind: things immediately present, but things that we tend to miss, things we’re pretty ignorant about. When we suffer, we think we know suffering, but we don’t really. When we have a desire … 
  12. To Be an Adult
     … So we have to look into our own minds. Where are we susceptible to these kinds of messages? We’ve got to learn how to see through them. No matter who tells them, no matter how many people tell us, no matter how many times they tell us, we have to hold firm. After all, who else can protect us? As the Buddha said … 
  13. Respect as a Sign of Intelligence
     … When you stay here with the breath and you keep reminding yourself, “Okay, stay with the breath, stay with the breath, don’t forget,” that’s mindfulness. As you develop your mindfulness, other lessons that you’ve learned in life will be easy to keep in mind. When you’re with the breath, sensing the breath as it is right here in the body … 
  14. Break Things Down
     … Then the Buddha asks him, “Have you seen that ‘this has come to be’?” That’s when Sariputta launches into quite a long discourse on seeing things as they’ve come to be—as individual events in the mind, individual habits, individual qualities in the mind. You see that they have their nutriment—there’s something that feeds them; there’s some allure to … 
  15. Concentration as Wilderness
     … There’s a sense of your mind filling the whole body, sometimes filling the whole room. And when you reach that, the thoughts that come through your mind seem so petty and so minor. Now there will come times when insights come in. As we were saying today, the rule of thumb is that if it’s relevant to what you’re doing right … 
  16. Ways to Think
     … It helps you deal with things coming up in the mind so that you don’t have to identify with a particular feeling, a particular emotion, a particular way of doing things. You can evaluate it simply in terms of whether it’s skillful or not. If you’re doing this with a mind that’s well-concentrated and you have a sense of … 
  17. Seriously Happy
     … This is one of the reasons why it’s good to look at the mind as a committee or as a corporation. There are lots of you’s in there. You have to figure out which ones you can trust and which ones you can’t. Learning how to step back from all the different voices in your mind helps you to look at … 
  18. A Rite of Passage
     … If you’re going to get the mind still, you can’t get involved with any thought, no matter how wonderful or inspiring or whatever it is. You’ve got to just drop it, drop it, drop it, because you want a place where the mind can step back and see thoughts and other things as processes. You want to see where they’re … 
  19. Everyday Feeding Habits
     … There’s that passage in Luang Pu Dune where he says that when the mind goes sending out for things or rushing out toward things, that’s the cause of suffering. How are you going to know when the mind is rushing out unless you’ve got a good, solid reference point inside so that you can sense its movements? Otherwise, everything is all … 
  20. Skillful Fear
     … You want to strengthen the mind so that it can keep the long term always in mind. This is one of the reasons why we practice concentration, one of the reasons why it’s so important that we have a sense of well-being that comes as we focus inside on the breath. It takes strength to go against our immediate knee-jerk reactions … 
  21. Respect for What’s Noble
     … When we understand his teaching about why we have pain, or why the mind suffers, we can see why there’s such an etiquette of respect around the teaching. As he said, if you really want to get the most out of the teaching, you can’t despise the teacher, you can’t despise the teaching, and you can’t despise yourself, because an … 
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