Search results for: "Equanimity"

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  2. No Happiness without Restraint
     … within those restraints. Back in the 60’s and 70’s when Westerners started going to the forest in Thailand, the ajaans there noticed that their Western students lacked two qualities: equanimity and patience. You can imagine what they would have thought of the kids now. Back in those days it was just TV and the movies. Now there’s a constant barrage from … 
  3. Emotion
     … This means you have to learn how to develop equanimity toward the people you love, so that when bad things happen to them, you don’t get knocked off course. You can remain calm and clear-headed and be as helpful as possible. So you want to practice that ability to develop equanimity even toward people you really love. As for people you don … 
  4. Chanting Before Meditation
     … You develop equanimity for things you can’t change so that you can give energy to your real responsibility: You’ve got to focus on your actions. This, again, is how to put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. You’re not distressed about other people’s suffering. You’re not greedy for the happiness they have. You realize you’ve … 
  5. Potentials for Awakening
     … You learn either to have goodwill for others or at least to be equanimous about them. The same with harmfulness: You’re not here to punish anybody. You’re here to look into your own mind, understand what’s going wrong in the mind, and learn how to change it. This is how analysis of qualities moves into the next factor for awakening, which … 
  6. Learning from What You Do
     … I was talking the other day with a Buddhist scholar whose idea was that the end of suffering is simply learning to be equanimous all the time. He didn’t believe that nibbana had anything to do more than just that: a state of equanimity. There’s nothing transcendent, nothing outside the realm of what we normally know in our senses: That’s what … 
  7. May All Beings Be Heedful
     … the practice of extending goodwill to all, compassion to all, empathetic joy to all, and equanimity to all. Of course, the word “all” includes extending these attitudes to yourself. The teachers then found that many people had trouble extending goodwill to themselves. They had trouble saying, “May I be happy.” They thought it was superficial, airy-fairy. Or they thought they didn’t deserve … 
  8. Breath Meditation: The Third Tetrad
     … The calming factors are calm, concentration, and equanimity. When the mind is antsy, ask yourself: What kinds of fabrications will calm you down? Where is, as the Buddha says, the potential for calm right now? Where is the potential for solidity in the mind right now? Where is the potential for equanimity? Ferret those things out and you’ll find the mind gets a … 
  9. Heedfulness & Confidence
     … generosity, virtue, renunciation, discernment, persistence, endurance, truth, determination, goodwill, equanimity. These qualities are all skills that we can develop. And then these skills enable us to deal with whatever comes up in a way that doesn’t cause suffering for ourselves or other people. So we should have some confidence in them as we develop them. Now the question is, how do we make … 
  10. Positive Right Speech
     … Right resolve is that, given how suffering is caused, you want to resolve on renunciation, resolve on non-ill will—in other words, goodwill or equanimity—and harmlessness—compassion. You want *that *to be reflected in your speech as well. The Buddha says that these principles are reflected in four kinds of speech. Right speech is defined in negative terms: in terms of not … 
  11. Sending Happiness
     … What kinds of mistakes would you like not to make again? And then as motivation to stick with that determination, develop goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity, with the emphasis on the goodwill: wishing happiness for others, the people you’ve wronged, to remind yourself that you don’t want to wrong them again. Then wish happiness for all beings, because you don’t … 
  12. Be Bigger Than Your Pains
    Every evening we chant the chant on the sublime abidings—immeasurable goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity—because for the most part, our goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity have measures. They have limits. We need practice in going beyond those limits. The more limited, the more narrow our concerns are, the bigger the sufferings in life are going to seem, and the more … 
  13. The Brightness of Life
     … There really is no happiness in the world, and contentment lies in just admitting that fact and basically giving up on the search for happiness and learning how to be equanimous and unaffected by anything. That’s the best that can be expected. There is no transcendent. There’s nothing unconditioned. It’s just a matter learning how to accept where you are. That … 
  14. Skillful Effort
     … As the Buddha himself said, there are two kinds of causes of suffering, the ones that will go away if you simply watch them with equanimity, and those that will go away only when you exert a fabrication or sankhara against them. That phrase, “exerting a sankhara,” sounds kind of strange, but it’s actually pointing us to where some very useful tools are … 
  15. Meaning Through Perfections
     … Dealing with other people, you have to develop a lot of goodwill and equanimity—those are perfections. As you’re meeting up with challenges, you have to develop the perfection of determination, the perfections of persistence and endurance, the perfection of truthfulness. Every way in which you develop good qualities like this, you’re taking one more step toward awakening. The important thing, though … 
  16. How to Use the Three Perceptions
     … Or even just the equanimity you can develop as you see that things are arising and passing away and arising and passing away. There’s a certain equanimity that comes from that and you can latch on to that. So you’ve got to test it. You have to ask yourself, “Okay, is this constant? Does it really meet all the criteria?” Because nibbana … 
  17. Mindreading
     … You can think thoughts of goodwill, thoughts of compassion, thoughts of equanimity: These are soothing. You can work with the breath in a way that feels good for the body, relaxing the tension in different parts of the body. It provides you with a sense of fullness and ease. The sense of calm, the sense of fullness is useful not only when the mind … 
  18. Mindfulness the Seamstress
     … The non-reactivity is equanimity combined with endurance. And you want to develop these skills before you do breath meditation, because you’re going to be trying to notice things. As you’re developing these skills, you’re getting good use of mindfulness, keeping in mind that image: either earth or water or fire or wind or space. The way the Buddha explains space … 
  19. Attention to Your Potentials
     … There are qualities that sustain concentration, that sustain equanimity. You want to look for them. In some cases, he tells you outright. In terms of mindfulness, the sustaining qualities are what he calls purified virtue and views made straight. In other words, you straighten out your views in terms of what’s skillful, what’s not, and then you make sure that your virtue … 
  20. Worth
     … things like generosity and virtue, persistence, patience, discernment, goodwill, and equanimity. Renunciation, truthfulness, determination. These are all qualities that the heart needs. And they’re things that stick with you, in this life on into the next life. This is where you look for value: your value as a person. Of course, it’s not something anyone else can measure, and it has only … 
  21. Anumodana
     … People talk a lot about goodwill, a lot about compassion, a lot about equanimity. Empathetic joy gets pushed off, yet it’s an important attitude to develop. When you see other people doing good—not only that, but they’re also reaping the results of having done good—you realize that there’s no reason for jealousy, no reason for resentment. As the Buddha … 
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