Search results for: "Thought"

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  2. Merit: Goodness of the Heart
     … Who would he teach first? He first thought of teaching his old teachers, the ones who had taught him about conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, discernment as they understood it. He wanted to share what he’d found with them. But it was too late. They had been reborn in states of the cosmos where they were out of touch with everybody. Then he thought … 
  3. Now & at Death
     … So if you can see the drawbacks and realize that whatever allure those thoughts may have, you’re not going to fall for them. Get them off your neck right away. That attitude can release you from them. The third technique, if that doesn’t work, is simply not to pay attention to your thoughts. Think of yourself as being in a large room … 
  4. Weathering Karma Storms
     … No matter what emotional content there may be in the thoughts that are coming through, don’t let them take over the breath. You can very consciously breathe in a calm way, even though the thoughts will still be there. They may have taken over your visual field inside like an IMAX screen, but you still have the sensation of the body as you … 
  5. Practice in Dying Well
     … In the same way, with any unskillful thoughts come up in the mind, you have to learn to say No right away, with the same sense of urgency, the same mindfulness and relentlessness. These thoughts may seem innocent now. You could spend the rest of the hour in some pleasant reveries. But suppose that those reveries were to take over your mind when your … 
  6. Choiceful Awareness
     … So when a thought comes into the mind, ask yourself, “What kind of path is this? Where is it leading me?” We tend to choose our thoughts because we like them or we find them fun. But the question always should be, where is this taking you? Right now, the thoughts that direct you to the breath are taking you where you want to … 
  7. Skillful Fear
     … Your immediate instinct is to say “What’s this?” and then go with it, on the premise that any thought is more interesting than the breath. But there are good thoughts and bad thoughts, thoughts that are worth thinking and thoughts that are not worth thinking, and you want to have a place where you can sit and watch the process of a thought … 
  8. Shelter Through Restraint
     … And there will come a point where the mind says, “Oh, this is a thought about x”—either for random reasons, or because it has a particular agenda. And once that perception’s been slapped on, that this is a thought, then it turns into a thought world, and then you go into the thought world. And there you are: becoming. You learn to … 
  9. Tending the Flame
     … For instance, once you’ve talked about the breath and gotten it to about as good as you can get it, and you’ve spread it around, you realize you don’t need to use the directed thought and evaluation anymore to protect it. In the beginning, because the mind is already engaged in directed thought and evaluation all the time, you have to … 
  10. The Desire to Be Free from Desire
     … If you sense that as soon as a thought comes in, there’s a pattern of tension someplace in the body, you relax it. Breathe right through it. The thought will go away. If it comes back, just make up your mind that you’re not going to let that thought come into the mind. This is where having a meditation word is useful … 
  11. The Path Converges Right Here
     … So the Buddha said, in the first jhana there’s directed thought and evaluation. Ajaan Lee divides the five factors of jhana into two sorts. Three of them are the causes. You’re sitting here thinking about the breath and trying to get the breath good. That’s called directed thought and evaluation. You stick with it, and it’s the only thing you … 
  12. Insight in Concentration
     … So ask yourself, “If someone were looking into my head right now, would I want them to see this particular thought? Would I like to have them see me fastened on this thought?” That’s one good way of getting a perspective on your thinking. Or if you were to die right now, is that the thought that you’d like to have your … 
  13. Inner Civil War
     … So you have to be especially careful about the ways that unskillful thoughts insinuate themselves into your mind and then try to lay claim to it. The Buddha gives five techniques for dealing with unskillful thoughts that have arisen in the mind, but all five depend on two things. The first is the determination not to give in, to recognize these thoughts as former … 
  14. Goodwill as a Guardian
     … May they develop thoughts of universal goodwill, too. Which means when you think of goodwill for yourself, it should include not only, “May I be happy,” but also, “May I understand the causes for happiness and be willing and able to act on them.” Then you spread the same thought to others, hoping that they will behave in a skillful way, too. You place … 
  15. Karma Storms
     … All of a sudden, thoughts of my childhood, thoughts of my teenage years, thoughts of my college years came and assailed my mind. Learning to think about it in terms of karma really helped me analyze the issues from the past. It helped to depersonalize many of the issues. In a lot of the cases where I felt I’d been a victim of … 
  16. Sunrise, Sunset
     … Let me wander around a little bit first,” what are those thoughts? Do you like wandering around in thoughts of lust? You can excuse yourself in all kinds of ways, saying that you’re still young, so it’s only natural that you have thoughts like this. Well, yeah, it’s natural, but do you want them to take over? Do you want them … 
  17. Wide-open Awareness
     … In other words, get in touch with the level of breath energy that’s already there in the body but gets squeezed off when we don’t want it to distract us from our thought worlds. We’re now turning our priorities around, dropping the thought worlds and getting more and more interested in this energy field here in the body. Let it open … 
  18. Investing Your Intention
     … You can think about the dangers of allowing your mind to run with those thoughts. Because when it runs, it usually doesn’t look where it’s going. It ends up stumbling, falling flat on its face. You pick yourself up again and go running after another thought, with no thought for where it’s going to take you. And all the things that … 
  19. Genuine Happiness
    We start the meditation with thoughts of goodwill because that’s our motivation for being here. We want to find a happiness that’s reliable, a happiness that harms no one. And that kind of happiness has to be found inside. Because a happiness that comes from things outside always involves taking something from someone else. But the happiness that comes from within doesn … 
  20. A Friend to the World, A Friend to Yourself
     … When you spread thoughts of goodwill, you’re spreading friendly thoughts. You’re trying to be a friend to yourself, a friend to the world. And it’s good to think about what that means—because it’s not just a quality of the thoughts. As the Buddha said, there are ways of expressing goodwill or friendliness in your physical actions, in your verbal … 
  21. Refuge
     … If it’s just a thought, simply be ashamed of having indulged in that thought, but then drop it and resolve not to fall into that type of thinking again. Keep on practicing. If you don’t see any mistake, then the Buddha says to take joy in the fact that your training is going well, and to keep on training further. That’s … 
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