Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 191
  2. Deep Time
     … People work really hard to develop good qualities of mind, and then they get rewarded. As they enjoy the rewards, the good qualities of the mind get worn away until they fall back down again. The proper response is the desire to get out, and not to get worked up about the individual stories in the meantime: the particulars of our stories, like the … 
  3. More Buddhist Engineering
     … You evaluate the mind. Do they fit together well? What way of breathing would provide a good place to stay? When you’re trying to develop a state of concentration, you want something pleasant to stay with, something all-around good, so that you feel really stable, solid here. What way of breathing would do that? Think of the breath not as the air … 
  4. Spread Goodness Around
     … You begin to realize that you’ve been placing a lot of burdens on your mind, unnecessary burdens, by allowing these energies to get all out of whack. But if you work on them and gain a sense of being balanced here in the concentration, a lot of the burdens in the mind get lifted. And then you have more time for other people … 
  5. Don’t Believe Everything You Feel
     … I’m outta here.” So you have to look at the ways your mind allows itself not to practice, either just to slough off for a while or to say, “I’m done with this.” Learn how to realize that no matter how strong the feeling is, if it’s a voice like this, it’s lying to you. After all, this is your … 
  6. Issues
     … Which ones do you get involved with to figure out who’s right and who’s wrong? Which ones do you try to cut through with the up-and-down axis? This applies not only to controversies outside, but also—and especially—to controversies inside your own mind. Sometimes there are issues where your mind is driving you crazy, and you have to step … 
  7. Heirs to Our Actions
     … If something is dirty, something is disorderly, it reflects on your mind. So you want to develop the habit of starting from outside and working in, and then the habit working from inside and working out, to look at whatever opportunities you have to do good and make the most of them. Because as that reflection points out, you don’t know how much … 
  8. Using Right View Rightly
     … That’s why Ajaan Lee says that when you’re practicing mindfulness, ardency is the factor of wisdom, the factor of discernment. In other words, you don’t simply notice skillful and unskillful qualities, but you realize the wise thing to do with the skillful qualities is to develop them. The wise thing to do with the unskillful qualities is to abandon them. Or … 
  9. A Good-Natured Attitude
     … So as we practice, we have to learn to master the step of stepping back and looking at ourselves, not believing everything the mind tells itself. And one good way of developing this ability is to develop a sense of humor about yourself. They don’t talk about humor much in the Canon. In fact, I can’t think of any place where they … 
  10. Accepting the Way Out
     … So you want to take that perception out of your mind. Think about the Buddha on the night of his awakening. He had those memories of previous lifetimes. And you can be pretty sure that they weren’t all pleasant memories: memories of injustices he had suffered from, indignities he had suffered from, stupid things he had done, stupid things other people had done … 
  11. Shame & Compunction
     … Be careful not to give in to the parts of the mind that are careless or apathetic. After all, that’s what compunction comes down to: It’s the opposite of apathy, the opposite of the attitude, “I don’t care.” You want to care. It’s wise to care about the results of your actions. Wise to care about what wise people think … 
  12. The Dhamma Points Inside
     … You ask yourself, “How does this apply to my mind?” In particular, “How does this apply to the problem of my mind, in which I’m creating suffering for myself?” It’s called appropriate attention. You take the lessons you learn from the Dhamma that you’ve heard in talks, and also from the Dhamma you notice just as you go through the day … 
  13. Friendship
     … If you don’t take an interest, if you see it simply as a chore—you’ve got to sit here for an hour watching your breath, and there’s nothing else to do—what usually happens is that the mind starts creating other worlds for itself. It starts remembering the past, planning for the future, doing all kinds of other things except learning … 
  14. The Three Perceptions as Tools
     … He was less interested in looking at the characteristics of what things are, or in making statements about reality out there, and was more interested in developing perceptions that will have an impact on the mind—perceptions that are true as far as they go, and that focus on an aspect of reality to develop dispassion. In other words, we’re not trying to … 
  15. To Escape the Prison of Time
     … And the third was the knowledge of how to put an end to the effluents, in other words, the currents of defilement that come flowing out of the mind and that lead to more becoming and more suffering. Those are the three knowledges that he found most useful to talk about. Then, of course after gaining those knowledges, he gained awakening to nibbana, which … 
  16. Finding Your Own Balance
     … It’s not that you try to forbid the mind from thinking. You have to think about the object. You have to evaluate the object, evaluate how the object and the mind are getting along together. If they’re not getting along, what can you do to change? For the breath, not only is there the question of how long or short or heavy … 
  17. Not Getting What You Want
     … You can breathe short, you can breathe deep, you can breathe long, you can breathe shallow, heavy or light, fast or slow—and it can have a huge impact on your body and on the mind. And you have the choice to do these things. These are choices that we tend to overlook or to deny to ourselves. When we’re taught that we … 
  18. Being Responsible
     … The real problems of the mind are inside. It’s only when you have good qualities inside that you can be safe from those problems. Taking the Triple Gem as a refuge means developing those qualities within you. Tonight’s the 59th anniversary of Ajaan Lee’s passing, so it’s good to reflect on this topic. He wrote two books on it: one … 
  19. The Logic of Not-self
     … But then there will come a point when you’ve got the mind as still as you can manage, as peaceful as you can manage, and yet there will still be a sense of dissatisfaction because the concentration is something that’s fabricated, something you have to put together. This is where you have to think about the third noble truth. The Buddha is … 
  20. Free to Choose
     … That’s not really a big issue, of course, but the big issue inside this area of your awareness is the fact that you are suffering, and the mind is causing itself to suffer, and yet the suffering isn’t necessary. The Buddha is saying that you’re free to learn how to put an end to it, you can devote your time to … 
  21. A Sense of Yourself
     … Try to memorize some of the passages, especially the short things that you find really inspiring or that are particularly useful for your problems so that you can bring those teachings to mind when you need them. This is one of the reasons why we memorize the chants, and in particular the chants where we have translations. It’s good to have those messages … 
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