Search results for: "Mindfulness"
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- To Disturb Your Complacency… In most cases, it’s the teacher asking questions, basically asking you to look at actions in your mind: What’s this? What’s happening here in your mind right now? What’s your experience of form right now? What kind of feelings do you have right now? What are your perceptions right now? What are your thought constructs, your intentions? How about your …
- A Happy Tradition… It may not sound fair, but what the Buddha is illustrating is the principle that if you make your mind wealthy in skillful qualities, then whatever past bad karma you have, when it comes to hit you, it’s not going to make much of an impact. To make your mind wealthy, you develop the brahmaviharas: goodwill for all, compassion for all, empathetic joy …
- Truthfulness… What you’re experimenting with is your own body, your own words, and your own mind. That seems like an awful lot to put on the line, but then the rewards are great—and the drawbacks of not attaining that reward is great as well. So you take the Buddha’s teachings in the meantime as your working hypotheses. How do you test them …
- A Sense of Duty… The real hope is the solidity we can build inside, the qualities we can build in the mind. Some of those qualities are dependent just on how we relate to ourselves, and others are dependent on how we relate to others. There’s a passage where the Buddha said that if you look out after others, you’re looking out after yourself. In other …
- Nothing Wrong with Right & Wrong… But from the Buddha’s point of view, that’s the wrong image to keep in mind. His is more the image of a craftsperson. You have an intention to create something, and your intention is to get the results to come out well. When the Buddha was judging his own thoughts, he judged them both by where they came from and by where …
- All Your Old Baggage… And what have you got right here? You’ve got the body sitting here breathing, you’ve got the mind thinking and aware. So you’ve got all the raw materials you need, all the tools you need for a good meditation. And regardless of however well it’s going to go, try to keep a good attitude toward the whole thing. In other …
- Go in Brightness… harmless in that it doesn’t intoxicate the mind, blameless in that you don’t create any bad kamma. Nobody gets harmed by your pursuit of pleasure inside. So you put aside thoughts of sensuality and focus simply on the sensation of the body as you feel it from within right now. Notice how the breath feels as it comes in and goes out …
- Mountains Moving In… Practice the Dhamma, train the mind, so that when aging and death come, you don’t have to suffer. This is a constant theme in the Buddha’s teachings. In the very beginning, when the young prince reflected on aging, illness, and death, realizing that these things were going to destroy whatever happiness he found—his family, his wealth, and his power—he wanted …
- The Five Aggregates… So as you sit here with your eyes closed, what have you got? You’ve got the body sitting here breathing and you’ve got the mind thinking and aware. So you bring them together. There are all kinds of things you could do with this body sitting here breathing and with the mind thinking and aware. You could think about the past, you …
- Insight Is a Judgment Call… The mind calculates these things all the time. There’s a part of the brain that keeps saying, “Is this worth it, the energy that goes here? Or would the energy go better there?” That’s a basic function of the mind. The problem is that it often malfunctions, based either on our own past experiences or on our own lack of clarity as …
- A Point of Balance… Only when the mind is balanced in right concentration can it get away from these currents of craving that keep pushing, pushing, pushing. So as you focus the mind right here on the breath, you’re putting yourself in a position where you really can solve the problem of suffering and its cause. If you’re not right here, you’re wide of the …
- Learn from Your Mistakes… So look into the mind and see what in the mind goes for things that it knows will be harmful? What’s the allure? What was it that distracted you from your focus on the path? And then learn how to see the drawbacks of that distraction, so that it doesn’t get you the next time around. What this means is that you …
- Practicing in Solitude… What were you doing when you were strolling? What are you doing when you’re doing walking meditation? What’s the difference? Can you minimize the difference? The important thing is that you learn how to read your mind. And if you realize you’ve set up a schedule for yourself that’s not really working, okay, sit down and talk to yourself. Or …
- The Stakes Are High… This is why we meditate focused on the present moment, so that we can see the mind in action, see what it’s doing, and learn to do it more skillfully. When you stay here with the breath, it’s a kind of karma. If you develop the right attitude as you’re working with the breath—the patience to sit with things for …
- Questioning Impermanence… You’ve got the body, you’ve got the breath, you’ve got the mind that thinks and is aware. And that’s all you really need. Our problem is that we’re not yet really skillful with these things. We haven’t explored their full possibilities. So sometimes the meditation gets boring. It’s because we haven’t learned how to ask the …
- Truths of the Will… So when you’re sitting here, trying to get the mind concentrated, that’s what you’re doing: There is an effort that has to go into this so that the concentration will develop and grow. You don’t just watch states of concentration come and go, thinking that there’s wisdom in simply watching them come and go. The wisdom lies in figuring …
- Easy to Instruct… You show that you’re willing to put in the effort and put your mind to solving your problem. There’s a spot where the Buddha says that admirable friendship is the whole of the holy life. This practice is not something you can do alone. As you saw today at the ordination, there wasn’t just one person there, making up his mind …
- Ajaan Fuang’s Stories… He’ll support the monastery.” The arahant said, “Okay, you can put your minds at rest.” So the king came to see him, but the monk didn’t pay any attention to the king at all. He just sat there with a stick in his hand, drawing little designs in the dust. The king got offended, left. The monks were upset. And again, the …
- Relating to Kamma… all of which are qualities of the will, in which we make up our minds that there’s something we really want and we try to get all our random desires in line. The Thai image is of trying to catch crabs and put them in a basket. You get one crab in the basket and by the time you’ve got the second …
- Suffering Comes from Those You Love… So, it’s good to keep these things in mind. We admit that there’s a loss when the people we love have died; we also have to realize, though, that if we don’t train the mind to look for its happiness inside, in something that doesn’t change, then these losses are going to come again and again and again. More oceans …
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