Search results for: "Persistence"
- Page 20
- Ripples Go Far… You’ve got to be persistent. You’ve got to put effort into this. You’ve got to be mindful to remember what you need to do and what you really have learned from your many years of experience. Develop the members that are focused, the members that are discerning. These are the strengths in your mind. These are the committee members that you …
- Doing the Practice… That requires mindfulness, it requires alertness, discernment, persistence, all of which are qualities we can train in, we can develop in the mind. Staying focused on the breath, staying with the body in the present moment, is a good way of developing these qualities. To begin with, it’s very basic. Breath is something you always have as long as you’re alive. The …
- Firmly Intent… Try to be as consistent and as thorough and as persistent as possible in those messages. Those messages, of course, will raise some questions. How do you go about being aware of the whole body as you breathe in? Or go even further back: What is the breath? Where does it start? Where does it end? You may have some preconceived notions, but you …
- Learning Through Healing… The more persistence you show in trying to get the mind to settle down, the more you’re going to learn about the mind. And especially if you’re doing the meditation not just while you’re sitting here, but also as you try to keep the mind centered, alert, and equanimous as you go through the day. You begin to see the different …
- The Dhamma Bucket List… Generosity, virtue, renunciation, discernment, persistence, endurance, truth, determination, goodwill, equanimity: Which of these qualities is lacking in your mind? See if you can squeeze some of that out of your activities. And how would you go about developing those qualities? You can develop them in daily life. You can develop them by making up your mind you’re going to make a special donation …
- When You’ve Played Enough With the Breath… analysis of qualities, persistence, rapture. If it needs to be calmed down, you focus on the more calming factors: calm, concentration, equanimity. In other cases, though, he treats the factors for awakening in a linear way. You start out mindful and alert and then you go straight for the analysis of qualities—analyzing what’s skillful and unskillful in your mind—and then make …
- Analysis of Dhammas… That’s how you develop this factor, because it connects with the next one, which is persistence, i.e., right effort. Once you know that something is skillful, you try to develop it. If it’s unskillful, you try to drop it. You’re not learning these things simply, as they say in Thai, to decorate your mind. You’re learning these distinctions so …
- How to Look, How to Listen… It may be slower than you thought it should be or may put out a few extra shoots that you didn’t expect, but as long as you’re putting the right conditions in, in terms of your sensitivity and your desire, your persistence, your intent, and your ingenuity—the four qualities that lead to success—the plant’s bound to grow, and it …
- Making a Refuge… by your principles; you hold by your precepts. You hold by your determination not to harm anyone. Of course, that means looking constantly into your mind. That’s the next step: persistence. If you see anything that’s going to be unskillful—that if you followed through with it, it would lead to unskillful behavior—you’ve got to figure out some way to …
- Stick with It… This quality of persistence is what makes a difference in your practice. If you’re with the breath for a little bit, then wander away, come back for a little bit, wander away, it’s no different from any other thoughts you may have in the course of the day. When you meditate, you’re trying to see what happens to the mind when …
- True Friends… So have some patience, but also be persistent. Just keep coming back, coming back, coming back. This is a skill that you’re going to need: getting some control over your mind, some control over your thoughts. It’s so easy for your thoughts to run wild, and you can make yourself miserable. Years back we had a meditation session. We were sitting outside …
- 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 …
- Load next page...
