Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 184
  2. Questioning Your Conviction
     … In other words, you take this mind, which is so quick to change, and you try to keep it focused on one thing continually. You take this body, which has its aches and pains, which, when you sit for long periods of time, usually can get very stiff, and you learn how to sit for a long period of time with a sense of … 
  3. Give It Your All
     … You’ve got your mind. So give your body and mind to the practice. Sit and meditate longer than you might want to. See what that does for you. Walk in meditation longer than you might want to. Be more careful about your speech than you ordinarily might be. Learn how to ride herd on your mind, how to observe when to encourage it … 
  4. Introduction
     … As Ajaan Lee once said, “When you practice, the first thing you learn to see is your own defilements”—your own greed, your own anger, your own delusion, all the unskillful qualities in your mind that you don’t like to see. You have to learn how not to get discouraged by them. Remember that everyone meets up with these things in their meditation … 
  5. Be Decisive
     … That’s how concentration arises in the mind. You make up your mind that you’re going to do this, and you do it. And then you just keep on doing it. As for the nibbling-away conversations that come at the edge of your concentration, you don’t have to pay attention to them. Just keep focusing in, focusing in, focusing in. What … 
  6. Ultimate Reality
     … This is why we practice concentration, why we have techniques for concentration, and specific questions to ask about what you’re doing while you’re centering the mind, what the results are. That’s something you can learn as you sit here with your eyes closed. That’s knowledge you can use. It can guide your actions. After all, the mind is an active … 
  7. Think Like a Thief
     … looking for lessons that you can turn around and then apply to your own mind. Where do you think Ajaan Lee got his ability to teach in analogies? He was constantly comparing the way his mind was with the way things are outside. When something was well done outside, could you take that lesson and apply it into your mind? And don’t think … 
  8. Overcoming Fear
     … So, when the mind is settled down and you want to bring up the issue of fear, these are the kinds of questions you should ask: “What are you clinging to? Is losing it inevitable?” If so, you’ve got to learn how to prepare. That means preparing your mind and also preparing your determination that no matter how bad things get, you’re … 
  9. Feeding Off of Others
     … When you realize that there is the possibility of this happiness, then the fact that our relationships with one another come and go so easily doesn’t weigh so heavily on the heart or the mind. This is what we’re training here, both heart and mind. In Pali, the word citta covers both. If you try to get your head around the idea … 
  10. On the Surface of Things
     … A little thought will appear in the mind and immediately disappear. Things will come together in the mind and they seem to form a block. But they’re very much like the songs of the thrush, where a thrush will sing a series of notes, and it sounds to us as if it’s singing a blast of about five or six notes all … 
  11. Tapping into the Breath
     … It’s about learning what’s going on between body and mind, because this is a good testing ground for all the issues in the mind. The body is the first thing you’re aware of. The body is the first thing you’re moving around, the area of reality you’re most responsible for. And yet it’s not-self. That doesn’t … 
  12. Hold on to Right View
    We’re here focusing on the present moment, watching the breath in the present moment, watching the mind in the present moment. What’s the theory behind that? Why are we doing this? After all, there’s not much here, while there are so many other issues out in the world right now. Why are we focusing here? It’s because the choices you … 
  13. Priorities in Life
     … There really is a deathless, something you can touch with the mind. And you can bring the mind to that threshold through your own efforts. That’s the big issue of life. After all, that’s the issue that inspired the young Bodhisatta to go out into the wilderness to begin with. It’s because he wanted to find that deathless that we have … 
  14. Afraid of Inner Pleasure
     … Those were horrible things they did to his body, but his mind wasn’t affected. That’s the skill we’re working on here. We’ll find that, as we work on this skill, we’ll be stumbling and picking ourselves up, stumbling and picking ourselves up again and again. But you keep in mind the fact that, okay, what we’re working on … 
  15. Control
     … If the mind slips off, you can choose to come back. With every breath, you have the opportunity to choose what you’re going to do with that breath, what you’re going to do with the strength** **that comes from that breath. So it’s wise to have a clear sense of priorities. What do you really want out of life? Where are … 
  16. The Path of Giving
     … Learn to use whatever pleasure you can muster to developing concentration, as nourishment for the mind. Use feelings of pain as things to analyze, to understand, because you begin to see the mind in action right around the pain. You see the perceptions that you place on pain, saying, “This is the pain. It’s located right here. It has these characteristics.” If you … 
  17. The Reality of Emotions
     … If you can maintain these kinds of feeling, the mind is in a much better position to look at things from a calm, steady point of view. So when you run across a good feeling like this—whether it just happens or you can induce it—learn how to maintain it. This is part of the duty of the path, learning how to develop … 
  18. A Network of Goodness
     … And with meditation, the fact that you’re getting your mind under some control means that you’re going to be the primary beneficiary, but of course, it’s going to spill out to other people, too. The less greed, anger, and delusion you have roaming around in your mind, the less they’re going to go out and bite other people. Part of … 
  19. A Private Matter
     … Why do we suffer from pain? How can we use the pleasure of a concentrated mind to lead us to even greater ease and wellbeing? Often it’s best not to analyze the issue too much in advance. You can read the books on jhana or vipassana, and then try to impose the words on your experience. And of course your understanding of the … 
  20. The Karma of Not-self
     … You’re doing this because you see that benefits will come down the line from training the mind. Trying to bring the mind under control is a form of selfing right there. Each time you catch yourself wandering off with a distraction, you drop the distraction. That’s a form of not-selfing. You come back and you self with the breath. This is … 
  21. What We Have in Common
     … It was simply a matter of how the mind, every mind, works. So as we focus on this, it’s what keeps us working together, belonging together. The Buddha talked about how a group can stay together. We look at our society now and everything seems to be tearing apart. It’s good to think about how we can put it back together. There … 
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