Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 186
  2. Discernment Is in the Details
    When you focus on the breath, there are quite a few activities going on in the mind. But the two most important in getting you to be with the breath and stay with the breath are directed thought and evaluation. Directed thought is when you keep reminding yourself to keep coming back to the breath: “Breath, breath”—this is what you’re going to … 
  3. The Path of Action
     … And then you have to be alert to what’s actually happening in your mind. The states that are running through your mind: Are they skillful or are they unskillful? Should you give them credence or should you try to undercut them? So it’s a combination of right view and right mindfulness that informs the effort and makes it right. This means you … 
  4. Slogging Through Difficulties
     … After all, the Buddha said that his awakening came not because he was a special person but because he developed qualities of the mind that everybody can potentially develop. And even in his case, he had to go through six years of torment before he found the right path. That means you have to be prepared for difficulties in your path, too. Otherwise, you … 
  5. Crossing the River
     … The word they use in Pali for the object of the mind is support, arammana, and you find that some supports are more supportive than others, more reliable than others. When you’re meditating, you try to find a reliable support, something you can stick with for long periods of time, something you can get to know very well. That’s why we focus … 
  6. Helping Others
     … We like to think that we can get our minds in order—get everything straightened out inside—and *then *we help other people. But there are times when other people need help and we’re not really ready yet, and yet we cannot *not *help them. So that’s a case where, one, you use whatever virtue, concentration, and discernment you have, because after … 
  7. Swept Downstream
     … So where is your island? The Buddha says you try to establish your mindfulness—ardent, alert, and mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world—so that you can get the mind into concentration. This gives you an island that gets you out of the flood for a bit, but you’re still in the middle of the river. You haven … 
  8. Skillful Thinking
    We often think of meditation is being a process of not thinking, but to get the mind to settle down, you have to think. A lot of the Buddha’s meditation instructions involve teaching us how to think in a way that’s useful, in a way that’s helpful. We may think, well, we know how to think perfectly well, thank you, but … 
  9. Teaching Old Selves New Tricks
    Our sense of self is basically a strategy for finding happiness, and there are lots of senses of self in the mind. They’re usually composed of a sense of the self as the consumer, the person who’s going to reap the happiness of the actions; then there’s the self as the producer, the one who does or doesn’t have the … 
  10. A Refuge Bigger than the World
     … This is good to keep in mind as we look at the state of the world, which seems hell-bent on falling apart. We have to remember we don’t say, Lokam saranam gacchami. In other words, we don’t say that we take refuge in the world. We take refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha. As long as we take refuge … 
  11. Purity
     … the actions, the intentions you have in your mind. So the message always comes back to right here, right now. And the purpose of laying out that broad spectrum, that broad panorama of human society and of the universe, is to remind you of why the present moment is important. What you do right here, right now, is going to shape not only the … 
  12. Being a Buddhist
     … Then he defined that as practicing the establishment of mindfulness, which is basically how you get the mind into concentration: That’s when you really do become your own refuge on that second level, the level of practice, the level of internalizing. It’s only when you find your first taste of the deathless that you really are safe: That would be the level … 
  13. Always Willing to Learn
     … We like to think that real meditation is when you settle down with the breath, with no distractions, and the mind doesn’t wander off anywhere. But learning how to deal with distraction is one of the major learning opportunities in the meditation: seeing how the distraction begins, how there’s a little stirring in the mind and then, depending on what you want … 
  14. An Auspicious Night
     … Every time they turn their minds there, there it is—so it must be unconditioned; it must be timeless. That’s like saying that every time you open the refrigerator door, the light is on, so it must be on all the time. The act of turning your mind to that spacious awareness is what creates your perception of that spacious awareness. You have … 
  15. An End to the Stories
    We start the meditation with thoughts of goodwill to clean out our minds from all the stories of the day—“This person did that, that person did this”—or the stories of the year or the stories of your lifetime. Think about that statement at the end of the chant just now: “Those who are capable of making an end.” That’s what we … 
  16. A Post-goodness World?
     … That creates a spaciousness in the mind. It’s a good theme to be thinking about. It feels good and it inspires you to do good actions. They, in turn, reinforce the basic wisdom in that original question: “What when I do it will lead to my long term welfare and happiness?” The wisdom lies in realizing that your happiness is going to depend … 
  17. The Power of Choice
     … But if you really want to understand the choices of the mind, you’ve got to focus on the present moment. So we focus on the breath, because that’s one thing that you really do have a lot of leeway in. It may not seem like much, but you can choose to breathe short breaths, long breaths, deep breaths, shallow breaths. You can … 
  18. Loss
     … Sariputta’s talking about how he’d reflected one day after meditating, “Is there anything in the world that, in changing, would cause grief to arise in my mind?” And the response was No, there’s nothing. Ven. Ananda, who was listening in, immediately asked, “ Well, what if the Buddha passed away? Wouldn’t you feel grief then?” Sariputta said No, he’d reflect … 
  19. Selfing & Not-selfing
    The Buddha’s basic image for his teaching was of a path—something you do, and it’s important to keep that in mind. His focus is on actions, even when he talks about insight. There’s a word, yatha-bhuta-ñana-dassana, which is sometimes translated as, “knowing and seeing things as they really are,” but it really means, “knowing and seeing things … 
  20. Self Esteem
     … And then, of course, we run across things that don’t support that idea, and so we block them out of our minds. We don’t like to think about them. In many cases those are precisely the things we need to learn from. So when you detect a tendency not to want to reflect on your past mistakes, try to look into the … 
  21. Appreciation
     … We sit here and meditate, showing goodwill for ourselves by the way we breathe, showing goodwill for others by trying to train our minds. All these are very good things to do. Which means not only that true happiness is possible, but also that it can be attained by doing good things. The general message of the world is that happiness is possible but … 
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