Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 193
  2. Freedom & Responsibility
     … What keeps you going is a strong sense that if you don’t follow the path, if you don’t take care of your own mind, there’s going to be suffering—which is not a point that some institution is trying to use to threaten you. It’s a fact of life. They talk in postmodern terms about how everything is determined by … 
  3. The Elephant Hunter
     … They required conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. So he developed those qualities. When he found that the results were not what he’d hoped for, he moved on. But he committed himself first, then he reflected. That’s what he asks you to do, too. Conviction is basically taking on, as a working hypothesis, the teachings that you are responsible for your actions … 
  4. Good Humor
     … And then tune everything else, all the other faculties — conviction, mindfulness, concentration, discernment — to the level of energy you can manage.” It’s like tuning a guitar. First you tune one string and then you tune the other strings to the first one. In meditating, your first string is the amount of energy at your disposal. You want to put enough pressure on yourself … 
  5. The Third and a Half Noble Truth
     … What this means is that if the skillfulness in his mind had not reached the level where it put an end to suffering, he would keep working at it more and more. He wouldn’t just stop. This is why he left his first two teachers. They taught him skills for concentration, he mastered them, and he realized that they didn’t lead to … 
  6. Not-self for the Sake of Happiness
     … But you can’t do that until the path has done its work in clearing up a lot of confusion in your mind. So this strategy will work only if you’re willing to take the Buddha at his word that, yes, there is a better form of happiness that can be found by letting go, that suffering is clinging, that it’s caused … 
  7. Anybody Home?
     … As the Buddha said, the mind is so quick to change directions that there’s no image, no simile adequate for how quickly it can change. And it’s capable of all kinds of things. So there are beings, but beings are very unstable, very changeable. In fact, this is the way the Buddha has you deal with grief of separation, either the death … 
  8. A True Person
     … Otherwise, your mind’s going to go running wild with its desire for pleasure. So you have to learn a sense of what’s right for you at a particular time. You have to learn how to read your own behavior. And you can develop a sense of this by being around someone who’s learned to read his own behavior. It’s an … 
  9. Brahmaviharas & Noble Truths
     … The world is full of potentials, and the same holds true with your mind. We have all kinds of potentials within us. So when you’re accepting where you are in your practice right now, that doesn’t mean that you’re going to just stay there. It means you realize, “This is where I am, and I’m not where I want to … 
  10. A True Man of No Rank
     … There’s a phrase that comes to mind whenever I think about him. It’s a Zen phrase: “a true man of no rank.” He was true in that he was very straightforward sort of person. If he’d make up his mind to do something, he would do it. And he spoke things as he saw them. He got into a lot of … 
  11. The Karma of Narratives
     … It’s in the evaluation that you develop discernment, so you’re trying to figure out how to get the mind out of everything that’s not related to the breath right now. That’s the purpose of your thinking right now. Try to make the breath as interesting as possible. Think of the breath not just as the air coming in and out … 
  12. The Six Properties
     … They not only give the mind a good place to settle down in the stillness of concentration, but they also help you gain insight into the way perception shapes your experience of the body, shapes your perception of what’s going on here in the present moment, seeing how fabricated it all is. You’ve got potentials coming in from past kamma, but you … 
  13. The Power of Truth
     … They focus on this process of what the mind is doing with the truth. In this way, they contain the seeds for their own transcendence. There’s a passage where Anathapindika is talking to a group of wanderers. He wanted to see the Buddha, but it was too early in the morning—the Buddha and the monks were out on their alms rounds—so … 
  14. Guardian Meditations, Right & Wrong
     … There’s mindfulness mayonnaise. People with a little bit of Dhamma knowledge are all too happy to turn it into money. If anyone would have had the right to charge for the Dhamma, it would have been the Buddha, but he didn’t. He saw that generosity was the beginning of our practice. And one of the best ways to teach generosity is to … 
  15. Admirable Friendship
     … So you look at these qualities and then you look at yourself: “The teachings that I’m following, the qualities I’m developing in my mind: Do they lead in the right direction or are they leaning in another direction?” If they’re leaning in another direction, you want to put them aside. No matter how much you may hold to them or how … 
  16. What’s Relative, What’s Constant
     … Have you ever stepped back and just said, “Well, this is just a bunch of directed thoughts and acts of evaluation,” and looked at it simply in those impersonal terms? When thoughts are going through the mind, have you ever stopped to categorize, “What are the actual perceptions, the labels I’m putting on things, that have led to this riot of thoughts in … 
  17. Dealing with Limitations
     … In other words, you say, “Well, my mind is the way it is. There’s no way I can change it. Greed, anger, and delusion are natural; I just have to accept them if I want to be happy.” That’s totally giving in. Your raft on the ocean gets tossed wherever the currents and the waves may go, and you never get to … 
  18. Friends
     … You want to make sure your mind is as still as possible so that it can watch things, so that it doesn’t confuse its own movements, say, with the movements of the breath. The more still the mind can be, the more it can detect really subtle movements. And the more continuous its stillness can be, the more it can see cause and … 
  19. Parsing Out Suffering
     … But it didn’t really put in an end to the possibility of lust in his mind. He tested it for a while, and finally realized it had to do with the perception, that something in the mind likes the perception of beauty, and then likes to take that perception and apply it to things around you. That was what he was attached to … 
  20. Rebirth & Not-Self
     … The realization that you have these choices now is something you want to keep in mind every time you meditate, because as you’re working with the mind right now. You’re developing habits. And you’re also getting sensitive to these aggregates that you tend to cling to, out of which you create your sense of who you are. This will be especially … 
  21. Mastery
     … You develop mindfulness and all the other factors of the path. You see that the burdens, in the sense of weight in the heart, get lighter and lighter. But you don’t really know the path until you’ve fully mastered it to the point of awakening. That’s the ultimate skill we’re working on. We’re trying to head in that direction … 
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