Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. Mental Balance
     … One the one hand, you create a more spacious mind for yourself. If you’re stingy, if you’re always worried about hoarding things, your mind gets more and more narrow, more and more fixated on things, and it’s a very unpleasant mind to be in. But if you can learn to be generous, the mind begins to open up. It’s a … 
  3. Put Some Heart into Your Practice
     … But also just the happiness that comes from realizing you haven’t caused any harm helps get the mind into concentration. When the mind is settled down and you want to see the mind in action, it’s best when you’re trying to do something good and you have been doing good things. The mind when it’s virtuous, the heart when it … 
  4. Put Your Heart into It
    The Pali word for “mind”—citta—also means “heart,” which means that when we’re training the citta, we’re training both the heart and the mind. A lot of times the emphasis is on the mind, in the sense that we’re trying to figure things out, and that is an important part of the practice. I’ve heard some people say, “Don … 
  5. Restraint Leads to Freedom
    The mind, when it’s in a state of concentration, is expansive. Your awareness fills the whole body. The object you’re focusing on, the breath, fills the whole body. But to get there, you have to start out with restraint. The mind has to stay with the body in and of itself, and you have to put aside all thoughts with reference to … 
  6. The Humane Quality of the Path
     … It’s not simply through force of will, it’s also through understanding what’s going on in the mind, understanding the ways the mind tends to hide things from itself, the ways it suddenly slips off seemingly without warning. As you get to know the mind, though, you begin to realize that there are warning signals that the mind is about to play … 
  7. Dualities
     … He says you get your mind quiet, and then you start contemplating things that come in pairs. He says, for example, black and white or fast and slow. Of course, he’s not talking about things outside. He’s talking about things in the mind—black states of mind and white states of mind, fast thoughts and slow thoughts—so that you can see … 
  8. A Home for the Mind
     … This is why mindfulness is essential to the practice. Mindfulness actually means keeping something in mind. It’s paired with alertness, which is what watches what you’re doing in the present moment. You need the two of them together. Without mindfulness, it’s hard to connect cause and effect, because sometimes the causes and effects are close in time and sometimes they’re … 
  9. Choiceful Awareness
    There’s a passage where the Buddha says that it’s possible to abandon unskillful qualities in the mind. If it were not possible, he wouldn’t teach it. It also is possible to develop skillful qualities in the mind. And again, if it were not possible to do that, he wouldn’t teach it. The underlying principle here, of course, is that we … 
  10. Mental Movements
     … Or you can focus on the pain itself and ask yourself, “Okay, what shape does the pain have in the mind?” It’s all in the mind. Pains don’t have shapes. But buried someplace in your mind there’s this preconception about the shape of the pain. Or watch the movements of the pain, its comings and goings. Why does it come? Why … 
  11. Take an Interest
     … You can use it as a foundation that gives the mind a stable place to stay with a sense of well-being. Then you can watch the mind, and the movements of the mind are a lot more interesting than the movements of the breath. But again, these are things we tend to ignore. When a thought tells us that this is right or … 
  12. Feel-Good Religion
    When you establish mindfulness in the right frame of reference, you’re protecting yourself and you’re protecting others. The Buddha said this one time. The image he gave was of a pair of acrobats standing on top of a bamboo pole, one acrobat on top of the shoulders of the other one. Initially, the master, who is one at the bottom, said to … 
  13. Strengthening Your Goodness
     … So be mindful to exercise the body, be mindful to exercise the mind. Be mindful to nourish the body properly, be mindful to nourish the mind properly. That way, you’ll be strong enough to meet all your duties and then some. In other words, you’ve got your own inner set of duties, what the Buddha sets out in the four noble truths … 
  14. Pleasure & Pain
     … It’s the movement of the mind out to those things that spills the oil. So, what does the mind want out of sights? If you keep these questions in mind, you can learn an awful lot simply by doing your best to maintain your state of concentration. You see this flow of the mind outside, and if you look for it enough, you … 
  15. Shelter Through Restraint
     … One is about restraint in the things you bring into your mind: the things you look at, listen to, receive through all the senses. But you’re not purely receiving, the mind also goes out. That’s the other area where we have to exercise restraint, particularly what comes out of the mind in what we do and say and think. We like to … 
  16. Training in Happiness
     … As the Buddha said, the most important issue in life is whether your mind is trained or not. Only when your mind is trained can you find real happiness. And these are some of the qualities you need to train your mind so that you can trust it. You make up your mind you’re going to stick with something, and you really stick … 
  17. Tending the Flame
     … And again, as you’re maintaining it, you’re going to be seeing things going on in the mind that you missed before. Sometimes you see things you don’t like about the mind. But when the mind is more settled like this, it makes a lot more sense just to admit, “Yeah, I do have these unskillful thoughts in my mind.” We have … 
  18. How to Listen to the Dhamma
     … That brings the mind into concentration. So, listening to a Dhamma talk doesn’t preclude getting the mind into concentration. In fact, if you listen to the talk well, and the talk is relevant to what’s going on in your mind, it can naturally lead to concentration. Then, from concentration, as the mind is really centered, you can develop more discernment that leads … 
  19. The Treasure of Virtue
     … So these qualities—mindfulness, alertness, and ardency—are precisely what you need to get the mind to settle down. You’re mindful of the breath, and then you’re alert to watch both the breath and the mind to make sure they stay together. Then, if they’re not staying together, you put forth an effort to figure out: Is the problem with the … 
  20. Developing Absorption
    Sometimes we’re told that when we meditate, we’re trying to put the mind in a position where it doesn’t pass any judgment or is simply receptive. But I’ve never heard the Buddha say that. I’ve never read the Buddha say that. After all, the meditation is something you do; it’s something you develop. That’s the duty with … 
  21. A Path of Skills
     … Look at the way the Buddha taught mindfulness. It’s not just a matter of focusing on the breath. You’re focusing on the process of fabrication—how the mind puts its experience together—through the way it breathes, through the way it talks to itself, the perceptions and feelings it holds in mind. Even when the breath leaves you, that knowledge of the … 
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