Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 180
  2. Focus on Your Intention
     … So it’s important that you get your concentration solid, and that you maintain your intention to be concentrated, to be mindful as you go through the day, to make this your center of gravity. There will come a time when you start changing your intention toward the concentration. You start taking it apart, too. But don’t be in too great a hurry … 
  3. True Honesty
     … But always keep that possibility in mind: that we do live in a world where true happiness is possible. So we shouldn’t feel indifferent to the possibility for true happiness. We shouldn’t feel embarrassed about our desire for true happiness inside. This is what we’re working on right here: digging down into the mind. As the Buddha said, the possibility for … 
  4. The Brightness of Life
     … But if you can learn to focus on the drawbacks of these things, learn how to let go of them, the mind opens to something much bigger and much better. That’s where the brightness lies. So the Buddha’s approach is strategic. He doesn’t say, “Life is suffering,” simply, “There is suffering in life.” He doesn’t say, “Everything is bad.” He … 
  5. Strength of Conviction
     … strength of conviction, strength of persistence, strength of mindfulness, strength of concentration, and strength of discernment. These are the things that carried them through. Whatever the difficulties they had to face—and there were many—these were the strengths they were able to fall back on, and able to develop, all the way to the point of the deathless. There’s that passage where … 
  6. Taking the Buddha at his Word
     … How does it do that? You give it a try and see what gets stirred up in your mind as you try to develop concentration, mindfulness, and all the other factors of the path. Sometimes the practice seems to stir up a lot more dust—well, that’s a good thing. If it didn’t stir up the dust, you wouldn’t have known … 
  7. In Accordance with the Dhamma
     … We’re trying to make that our underlying intention as we deal with our own mind, as we deal with other people so that all our actions come from a skillful motivation. An important part of this training is to realize that the opposite of goodwill should not be ill will. In other words, when people are not acting in ways that are conducive … 
  8. Self Determination
     … You practice generosity, you practice virtue, and especially you practice meditation, developing qualities of the mind where you take charge of your own mind for the sake of your long-term welfare and happiness. It’s one of those rare cases where you really do get to practice self-determination. Or in the Buddha’s terms, you direct yourself rightly. You choose your direction … 
  9. A Much Better Place
     … Ultimately, there is no “here” or “there” or “in-between” in the mind. That sense of being in the body or the body being in the mind or whatever: Ultimately that goes. When that goes, then any sense of being oppressed either by being in the world or by the world being in you: That goes away, too. It has no basis. But before … 
  10. Meaning & Purpose
     … Someone showed me a video the other day, where some Abhidhamma expert was talking about how people who try to get the mind to be concentrated are suffering from greed, which is an unskillful state. When the mind gets still and is not analyzing dhammas, it’s suffering from delusion, which is another unskillful state. But: If you can’t have any desire in … 
  11. Whatever It Takes
     … Just make sure that your mind doesn’t put up a resistant surface to it. Think of your body and your mind as wide open, like a screen on a window. The wind can blow through the screen without disturbing it because the screen doesn’t catch it. The image in the Canon is of a net. Just as the net doesn’t catch … 
  12. From Compunction to Release
     … The rewards may not be coming right away, but you’re convinced in the principle that if you train the mind, you’ll be much less likely to cause yourself suffering. So here you are, training the mind. And you’re training it in a way that tries to give rise to a sense of well-being. When you find that you can breathe … 
  13. The Blood You’ve Shed
     … And the more the mind insists on trying to find closure, the more it weighs itself down and keeps itself entangled in that ongoing wandering on. So when we think about the whole issue of past lives, it’s good to think of it as a general principle, without getting into the details. It’s useful because it’s one way of getting out … 
  14. Faith in Goodness
     … When there’s a part of your mind that feels pained by that realization, that’s when you develop the heart, the good heart, that wants to develop goodness—in other words, finding happiness in a way that doesn’t cause any pain to anybody, doesn’t cause any harm. A happiness that erases boundaries and creates a connection. Now, there are some people … 
  15. Ideals
     … That’s what the mind tells itself—and it weakens itself that way. It shoots itself in the foot. Now, it is true that there are mistaken ideals, misinformed ideals. This is an area where you have to practice what the Buddha calls “guarding the truth.” When you approach the practice with ideals, you have to ask yourself, “What are your ideals based on … 
  16. Right Resolve
     … It’s not just that you focus on your mind, but you focus in a way that gives rise to a sense of ease, a sense of rapture. In this way you satisfy your immediate need for pleasure at the same time that you’re developing clarity in the mind. When our pleasure depends on harming other beings, we tend to have big blind … 
  17. Not Resolved on Self
     … How can you develop skillful qualities and how can you abandon unskillful qualities? This way, your attention gets focused on the skill and the qualities of mind that you bring to the skill. As you practice virtue, as you practice concentration, as you practice discernment, you want to develop each of these practices into a skill. Issues of self can get pushed off to … 
  18. Is ‘I Am’ the Problem?
     … So when you find that making good states of mind is more enthralling, more enjoyable, than what you can make out of sights, sounds, etc., it helps to wean you off those sights and sounds. Your attachment gets centered more and more in what you can do, the abilities you develop with the qualities of the mind. Your sense of agency gets more and … 
  19. Dispassion & Delight
     … The Buddha’s instructions for concentration are in his description of right mindfulness. One of the qualities of right mindfulness is ardency. Or, in Ajaan Fuang’s words, you have to be crazy about concentration. You have to be crazy about your meditation. Be the kind of person who wants to be with the breath at any spare moment. Have some passion for this … 
  20. Samvegic Ironies
     … It may not seem like much—just in and out, in and out—but the way you develop your mind as you stay with that in and out, explore it, experiment with it, use it as a mirror for seeing what’s going on in the mind, can take you to freedom. And it can make you reliable. When you can depend on yourself … 
  21. Borrowing the Buddha’s Wisdom
     … In the same way, you’ve got this body; you’ve got this mind. You can take the good qualities of the body and the mind, and you can make them into a raft. You hold on to that raft as you go across. Don’t let go. You let go only when you’ve reached the other side. So you do have potentials … 
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