Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 188
  2. Seriously Happy
     … Random thoughts come into the mind. Something that occurs to you in childhood can take over the whole rest of your life. The Buddha’s recommendation is that you find someone who really knows—those who really know, of course, are those who have attained awakening—and you go and you ask them, “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term … 
  3. The Buddha’s Universal Solvent
     … That’s certainly true of the universe of the mind. And most stories involve suffering. There’s a passage where the Buddha uses the pattern of dependent co-arising—which he usually uses to describe the origin of suffering—to describe the origin of the world. Our sense of the world comes from the processes of dependent co-arising. You start with ignorance and … 
  4. Maybe the Buddha Knew Something
     … Tying the mind down means that if you’re going to stay in concentration, you can’t just wander around wherever the mind may go. Any thought that would pull you away, any desire that would pull you away, you’ve got to say No. At the same time, you have to learn how to develop a sense of ease and well-being around … 
  5. The Path Has a Goal
     … The question came to his mind: Could this be the path? And his mind gave an intuitive response: Yes. So he followed that path and he found that it involved more than just the practice of jhana, which is just one of the factors of the path. When he finally reached the deathless, he realized that the path leading him there had seven other … 
  6. Things Aren’t as They Should Be
     … What is the mind doing around the breath? You’re committing yourself to this practice and then you reflect. All around. That way, you start seeing things about the mind that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise, when the mind wasn’t so gathered—and these things can make a difference. They can actually take you all the way to the end of suffering … 
  7. Tuning-in to the Breath
     … And the mind has a tendency to focus on pain because it’s usually a warning signal. But we don’t have to focus there. In other words, there can be a slight discomfort in a part of the body, and you can focus on it and make it more and more intense, more and more of an issue. That’s one thing you … 
  8. Working Hypotheses
    We bring the mind to the breath, and we get it to stay there with a sense of ease. Not only because this is a good place to be in the present moment, but also because it’s a good path—it takes us to a good place. We trust that that’s so. When the Buddha teaches right view, in the very beginning … 
  9. Is the Buddha’s Wisdom Selfish?
     … When we loosen the need to feed on people and things outside, then we can start turning around to look at this feeding inside, to see how the mind can go beyond that. Because ideally what you want is a mind that doesn’t need to feed at all. Not because you tell it to stop, but because it’s found something inside that … 
  10. Everybody Suffers
    Everybody Suffers March 27, 2005 One of my English teachers in high school once said that a sign of a great mind, a great person, is the ability to look past the particulars of your own experience and see the general principles that apply to everyone. Say you’re disappointed in love: You see it in general terms. You’re not the only person … 
  11. Time & Place
     … Always keep that in mind. There are skillful actions and unskillful actions. You want to do everything you can to avoid the unskillful ones across the board and engage in skillful actions. In fact, though, even the Buddha’s definition of skillful action leaves a lot of leeway. There are a lot of areas not covered by the precepts. So you have lots of … 
  12. Action & Result
     … He teaches you where to focus your attention, say, on the body in itself, the breath in itself, and how to develop powers of mindfulness and concentration around that. When the mind gets well-fed with the concentration, clear with the concentration, then you start asking the right questions. And again, these are questions of action and result—the kinds of questions the Buddha … 
  13. The Noble Truth about Craving
     … This is a parable for what happens to the mind. When it takes on a state of becoming, it starts out with a desire. At first, the desire is just a little tiny thing. You say, “Wouldn’t it be nice if x?” Then you decide to go for it. And in the course of going for x, you change. You become a different … 
  14. Understanding Aggregates
     … Here again, you’ve got form (the breath); feeling (the feeling of dis-ease you might encounter when you first try to settle down, and then the feeling of pleasure you’re trying to develop); the perceptions that you keep in mind about how the breath goes, where you can focus on the breath, your relationship to the breath. Fabrication starts out especially with … 
  15. Safety All Around
     … Then there’s training in the heightened mind, which basically is training in concentration. You’re finding an escape from pain other than in sensuality. The problem with sensuality is that it sets you up for all kinds of dangers. Wherever you find your sensual pleasure, there’ll be other people who may want to find sensual pleasure in the same place, with the … 
  16. Not-self in Context
     … The Buddha read the monk’s mind and scolded him. He said, “There are some foolish people who think they can get around the teaching this way.” Then he showed the proper use of the teaching: You see that there are things you cling to, and you’re suffering because you’re clinging to them. Not-self is to help you let go. The … 
  17. Metta & Merit
     … At the very least, it makes you a better person, a person with a more expansive mind, able to sympathize with all kinds of people, and willing to keep their true happiness in mind.
  18. Ignorance
     … But once you realize that there’s suffering, you look for what you’re doing that’s causing the suffering, what else arises in the mind at the same time as that suffering or stress. In particular, you look for where the craving is, what kind of craving it is – it can be sensual craving, craving for a state of becoming, or craving to … 
  19. The Basic Pattern
     … The Pali word for meditation, bhavana, means “to develop”—to develop good qualities in the mind. And it’s important to look at the qualities that the Buddha’s recommending that his son develop. The discourse starts with a passage on truthfulness. You get the feeling that his son, Rahula, probably lied during the day. When the Buddha comes to see him that evening … 
  20. Make the Most of Right Now
     … That’s what you always have to hold in mind—there is something better. Sometimes the Pali word for stress,* dukkha *is translated as unsatisfactoriness. There’s a way in which that’s right, but a huge way in which it’s wrong. Dukkha means pain, stress, suffering. It’s unsatisfactory because there is something better, but taken on its own, when you say … 
  21. How to Read the Dhamma
     … And although the discernment that’s going to make a big change in your mind is the discernment that comes from practice, it has to be informed by how you read and how you think. So go on the assumption that the Dhamma makes sense. If it doesn’t seem to make sense, ask yourself how you could look at it in other ways … 
  22. Load next page...