Search results for: "Form"

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  2. Learning by Doing
     … This is necessary to develop your insight, because the factors that go into creating the good sense of concentration—the form of the body, which is the breath; the feeling of ease that you get from the breath; the perceptions you hold in mind about the breath; your thoughts that think about the breath, that evaluate it, and your awareness of all these things … 
  3. A Clean Break at Death
     … Worry here comes in many forms. One is that you’re worried about the people you’re leaving behind. Or you’re worried about yourself, thinking about things you’ve done in the past that could lead to an unfortunate rebirth. If you’re worried about other people, you have to realize there are times when you just can’t help people anymore and … 
  4. Cleaning up Your Personal Environment
     … The problem with social-grease speech, if you’re really not paying attention to what you’re saying, is that you end up falling into other forms of wrong speech. With idle chatter, by definition, you’re not really paying much attention to your intention as to why you’re speaking. But if the intention is to put the other person at ease, to … 
  5. Solidly Here
     … You can understand the intentions that form around sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, feelings, perceptions, fabrications—the whole gamut. They’re going to form right here and they’re going to play out right here. If you don’t stick with them, you don’t see how things play out. You don’t see how a cause leads to an effect—or even … 
  6. Transparent Becoming
     … A film begins to form on the water, called savory earth. According to the description, it has the color of really good ghee or really good butter, and the taste of pure wild honey. One of the beings, simply out of curiosity or just plain wantonness, decides to check it out. He takes his finger and tastes it, and it’s so good that … 
  7. The Purpose of Empathetic Joy
     … We’re working on the pleasure of form—the body as it’s experienced from within. We’re making it as pleasant as possible, to give the mind the food it needs in order to practice, to settle down, be still, and see things as they really are, to see the movements of the mind as they’re actually happening, to see the extent … 
  8. Consistently on the Path
     … If we bring some knowledge to them, they can form the path. But we have to do it consistently. Otherwise the path begins to develop but then we cut it off. It’s like planting a seed. Say you plant a seed for a large tree, and when a tiny shoot comes out, you say, “This is not the tree I want,” and so … 
  9. Stubborn Clinging
     … The world here is the world of form: your sense of the body from within. For the time being, your identity is that you’re the person staying with this sense of form: looking after the breath, making sure your attention stays with the breath, making sure your thoughts stay with the breath, trying to be sensitive to how your thinking has an effect … 
  10. Fear of Missing Out
     … Then, from there, the sequence goes on to consciousness and from there, name and form. And again, you have intention under name. You also have perceptions. You also have acts of attention. What are you paying attention to? How are you framing the issue? These are things you should know. All these steps prior to sensory contact are things on which you should cast … 
  11. Where the Mind & Body Meet
     … That counts as a form of craving—a craving that involves some stress, so there’s some stress in the path, but it’s good. It’s a craving for becoming, becoming a form, the sense of the body as felt from within. It becomes a craving for the formless when you get into states of concentration that are more formless with a sense … 
  12. Rhythms of the Mind
     … It’s not the case that there’s just one ideal form of concentration or one ideal form of meditation, just as there’s no one medicine that cures all your illnesses. The breath is useful in that it can provide many of these different functions. There are ways of focusing on the breath that are just really, really still. Nothing much happens. You … 
  13. The Buddha Aimed High
     … In the form of desire, he said it’s the root of all our experiences. So as you meditate, think about why you’re here. The reason you came to the meditation may have been one thing, but maybe you might want to raise your sights to something more radical. If you want to get the most out of meditating, realize that it has … 
  14. Determined Goodwill
    Determined Goodwill August 20, 2021 The Buddha speaks of goodwill as a form of mindfulness—something you have to keep in mind—which means that it’s not an innate quality of the mind. If it were innate, you wouldn’t have to be mindful. It would just be there, constantly expressing itself. But the fact is that the mind has both goodwill and … 
  15. For What It’s Worth
     … In maintaining it, you’ll run into other thoughts, other intentions, and you want to learn how to see how they form. In the beginning, you’re sitting here with the breath, and then, not knowing what happened, you’re someplace else. The mind just blinded itself, created a big blank. So you have to realize, the next time you get the mind still … 
  16. Ask the Right Questions
     … It’s just that for the time being—if you’re looking just at the atoms—the type of rock it is, how it got formed: Those things are all irrelevant. You’re trying to focus on the problem that you’re interested in solving, so don’t let yourself get distracted by other problems that can get in the way. Learn to treat … 
  17. Warm Your Heart
     … When you’re generous, when you’re virtuous, when you develop thoughts of universal goodwill, it’s a form of goodness. The Buddha himself offers another translation, when he talks about how acts of merit are another word for “happiness”: so, “the happiness that comes from goodness.” But even with the new words, when you look at what the Buddha has to say about … 
  18. Doing
     … You’ve got the form of the breath, which shapes your sense of the body. You’ve got the feelings that go with the breath, and we’re trying to give rise to comfortable ones. How much can you play with the breath? How much influence do you have on the breath? How much does the breath lie under your control? In the beginning … 
  19. Questioning Your Way to Certainty
     … You see form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness, and you ask yourself, “Are these things constant?” Well, no. And the Buddha here is not asking in the abstract. He’s asking you to look: to look at your sense of form, your sense of the body that you’re experiencing right here as you sit here. Look at the feelings that arise and pass … 
  20. Pain
     … As the comfortable breath goes through, make sure it goes through and doesn’t stay stuck at the wall formed by the pain. You may sense that as you breathe, you’re using the painful parts of the body to do the breathing. They’re the most obvious parts when there’s pain in different sections. So think of the more comfortable parts doing … 
  21. Empathetic Joy
     … It’s a form of generosity, a generosity of spirit: that you’re happy to see other people doing something that might be better than what you’re able to do. That generosity of spirit is a good aid to the meditation, so that when you stay with the breath and it feels comfortable, you don’t feel guilty about the fact that it … 
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