Search results for: "Persistence"
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- Healing Breath… When you’re coming to the breath, are you coming in a skillful way or an unskillful way? Do the notions you have about meditation get in the way or are they actually helpful? The third factor is persistence, which means once you notice that something is unskillful, you do your best to abandon it, and abandon here means that when you notice that …
- Strengthening Conviction… conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. The fact that conviction comes first shows that it’s important. As one of my teachers in Thailand once said, you notice that the list leading up to discernment doesn’t start with concepts or ideas. It starts with conviction. Discernment comes from conviction—provided, of course, that it’s conviction in the right things. Traditionally, this means …
- Bewildered… It may be persistent—in other words, it may keep coming back again and again and again—but contact lasts for just a moment, then it stops. Then it comes up again, stops again. Can you see those moments? Here again, what’s your perception of those moments? Are they coming at you? Or are they just there? Or are they going away as …
- Compunction… It’s that persistent, that insistent. There’s another case when he’s talking to a king. He points out that you could search the whole world over and you’d never find anyone you love more than yourself. But then from that he comes to an interesting conclusion: that you should never harm anybody or cause anyone else to harm, because, after all …
- How to Change… You simply need some patience and persistence in sticking with the new habit. So look at how the Buddha talks to defilements. That’s what a lot of his companions in conversation in the suttas are: They’re representing a defilement. If it’s not delusional, sometimes it’s anger, sometimes it’s greed, sometimes it’s unskillful desires of other kinds. As you …
- Set Your Heart on the Breath… There has to be the desire followed by the persistence and lots of paying very careful attention to what you’re doing. So remember, you’re training both the heart and the mind. If they’re trained together and they work together, you can get a lot more use out of them—a lot more happiness out of them—because they’re not working …
- Unskillful Voices… That’s persistence. That’s another strength. You learn to be mindful in order to keep that view in mind. You keep reminding yourself: Okay, do the skillful thing right now. If you’ve slipped in the past, don’t worry about it. That’s the past. Now you’ve got the present moment, you’ve got a chance for something new. That mindfulness …
- Directing Yourself Rightly… Try to gather up the strengths you can from within—the strengths of conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment—and keep them directed in line with your determination that you’re *not *going to be a victim of circumstances. Your sense of direction will allow you to overcome circumstances so that regardless of where you are, your practice still takes top priority and doesn …
- The Practice is Wherever There’s Mindfulness… means when he says, “Where there’s mindfulness, there’s the practice”: all of these things together. Basically, what you have here is a combination of two of the five strengths: persistence and mindfulness. The two of them together form the practice. They’re fed by conviction. That’s what keeps you going, because there are lots of times when the skillful thing is …
- Feeding on Open Wounds… your generosity, your virtue, your ability to find pleasure outside of sensuality, your discernment, your persistence, your endurance and forbearance, your truth, your determination, your goodwill, your equanimity. As you develop these good qualities, you benefit, and the world benefits as well. It benefits even more when you pull yourself out of the feeding chain and leave good things behind. It’s not as …
- Different Paths Go Different Places… Discernment, patience, persistence, mindfulness, and concentration: All the good qualities of the mind get sold off in most people’s lives. So it’s a question of making a wise, intelligent trade. We see the pleasures that other people are enjoying, but we can’t see their pain. This is why, when looking at other people’s lives, sometimes we think, “Well, that looks …
- Training the Mind… Be persistent without, at the same time, getting frustrated. Keep in mind the fact that you’ve been allowing the mind to wander for who knows how long. The Buddha calls this samsara. Samsara takes place on two levels. There’s the samsara of going from one lifetime to the next. But there’s also just the samsara of the mind wandering around, checking …
- Pain Is a Noble Truth… With Ajaan Fuang, it was a persistent headache. Ajaan Suwat, it was a case of malaria. Ajaan Maha Boowa, it was sitting long, long hours in meditation. In every case, it came from realizing that what the Buddha said in his very first sermon, “pain is to be comprehended,” is one of the most important things he said. So keep this in mind when …
- The Mind Comes First… generosity, virtue, renunciation, discernment, persistence, endurance, truthfulness, determination, goodwill, equanimity. Try to develop these qualities as you go through life because you can take them with you. And they’ll provide a good place to go. They do offer some shelter. When you can’t depend on the world, you have to learn how to depend on the mind. So you’ve got to …
- A Real Education… This is an important part of persistence and patience in the path, because sometimes the results take time. You have to learn how to talk to yourself to keep your spirits up. There’s a novel by Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers—his retelling of the Joseph story from the Bible. In one part of the story, Joseph has been thrown in jail …
- Appropriate Attention Plus Admirable Friendship… As they engage with other people, say, in a trade, or in business, are they fair? You get to know the person’s persistence, or patience or endurance by how they put up with difficult situations. And you get to know their virtue by living with them and being observant. You have to be observant in all these cases. Just because people sound friendly …
- Heedfulness All the Way Through… This is how conviction leads to the next strength, persistence, which is identical with right effort. You see that there are some things in the mind that are skillful, others that are unskillful, and this is where your actions come from. You do your best to promote the skillful qualities inside: things like renunciation, goodwill, compassion. And get rid of the unskillful ones: sensuality …
- All About Change… strengths like conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, discernment. They may be weak now, but as you exercise them, they do get stronger. We were talking the other day about comparing exercising the mind to exercising a muscle. There are some parallels. For one, there’s a lot of repetition. But if it’s nothing but repetition, the muscle gets worn out, and the same with …
- Terror & Revulsion… Through the practice, you’ve been learning these strengths of conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, these strengths that nourish the mind. As you practice, you want to feed on these things. But ultimately they put the mind in a position where it’s so strong that it doesn’t need to feed anymore. That’s where it’s skillful to develop nibbida. The …
- Simplify… mindfulness, alertness, persistence, clarity of mind. These skills are basic to all skills in life, so make sure that you really have them mastered. Whatever you have to give up in terms of time devoted to other things in order to master these skills, it’s a wise trade, a trade that leaves you with something far more valuable than whatever has been abandoned …
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