Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 23
  2. The Noble Truth of Suffering
     … That’s the only way you can judge it fairly—and that means you have to become a reliable judge yourself. Fortunately, the qualities developed in the path will help you in that direction. You develop more mindfulness, ardency, alertness. You get the mind concentrated; you develop your powers of discernment. These are the things you’re going to need. To make them reliable … 
  3. Two Kinds of Seclusion
    In primitive cultures, they have a custom whereby, when a person becomes old enough, a child on the verge of becoming an adult, they send the child out into the wilderness to have a period of seclusion. Being all by yourself, you get a sense of your own identity of who you are. Sometimes you’re prescient enough to gain a vision that gives … 
  4. Don’t Objectify
     … This is how you become skilled. Breathing becomes more comfortable, and it’s easier to settle down in the present moment. And the way you breathe can put the mind in a really good mood so that it’s easier to let go of outside distractions. Your old friends—greed, aversion, and delusion—can come knocking on the door, and you’re not as … 
  5. A Good-Natured Attitude
     … There’s a sense of lightness that goes with that, and when you can create a sense of lightness both inside and out, then the things that are hard to bear become easy to bear. And the practice becomes something you can see all the way through.
  6. One Person
     … But look after yourself in a skillful way and it becomes not-selfish. It becomes wise. If you really care about your interest, your well-being, you can’t harm the well-being of others. So look after your well-being in a skillful way, in a wise way, and there’s nothing selfish about it at all. It’s not only your contribution … 
  7. Appreciating Dispassion
     … But then even the sense of fullness becomes oppressive as you get more sensitive. So you tune into a level of energy in the body that’s more refined. It’s like a radio that’s playing really loud, heavy music. You’ve decided you’ve had enough of that and you want something more relaxing, more soothing. So you tune it into another … 
  8. Start Out Small
     … Without this level of sensitivity, the meditation becomes mechanical. When it’s mechanical, it becomes a chore. And when it’s a chore, the mind will rebel. So ask yourself: What really feels good when you’re breathing right now? If you can’t figure out what really feels good, hold your breath for a while until the mind comes to the point where … 
  9. A Legacy of Strengths
     … So ask yourself, what are you developing as you go through life? That question, “Days and nights fly past, fly past, what am I becoming right now?” Well, the kind of person you’re becoming depends on what you’re doing, what you do again and again. That’s your becoming and it’s also your legacy. So act in such a way that … 
  10. Right Speech, Inside & Out
     … for sensuality, for becoming, for non-becoming — you’d think that right resolve would focus on abandoning those three kinds of craving. But it doesn’t. You resolve on getting rid of sensuality, but then also on getting rid of ill-will and harmfulness, two types of unskillful qualities, which are precisely the qualities you have to get rid of in order to get … 
  11. A Mind like Wind
     … This is why mindfulness practice shades ultimately into concentration practice because you’re sticking with one thing as your frame of reference and it becomes continual. The Buddha himself never drew a sharp line between mindfulness and concentration. Mindfulness as it grows stronger becomes concentration. It becomes purified in concentration, steadied so that your discernment can start doing its work; figuring out where there … 
  12. Skillful in Everything
     … If you want to become a better meditator, it’s also good to become more skilled at the things you do in the course of the day. Having a sense of skill, of what’s skillful and what’s not skillful, is very useful. It sets up the right attitude in the mind. One, it gives you high standards: There are ways of behaving … 
  13. Remarkable Qualities
     … It’s simply a matter of putting them to use, exercising them here with the breath, so that they become strong. That way, these qualities of mind which at the beginning may not seem special remarkable themselves, will become remarkable, to the point where you learn how to depend on them to deal with all the life and death matters you’re going to … 
  14. Meditation as Play
     … It’s through this exploration, this playing around, that you become sensitive to begin with. The methods that tell you, “Don’t think. Just do what you’re told,” don’t make you sensitive to cause and effect. The methods that tell you simply to accept don’t make you sensitive, either. **Years back, I was being taken through the public library in Seattle … 
  15. Healthy Conceit
     … But they delivered to some extent, so that they’ve become part of the committee. Then one desire will come and then another desire. That’s where the critic comes in, as the members try to jostle among themselves for who’s going to get attention, who’s going to dominate the discussion. A lot of the training in the meditation is training the … 
  16. An Hour of Bliss
     … The way to do that is to learn how to train the mind so that it doesn’t become prey to greed, anger, or delusion, because those are the mental qualities that lead you to do things that harm yourself, harm people around you. The first weapons you need in fighting them off are two very simple mental qualities: mindfulness and alertness, motivated by … 
  17. Building a Home for the Mind
     … The more precise your awareness of what’s going on, the more precise your sensitivity to what’s going on, then the more solid and balanced the breath becomes, the more solid your concentration becomes. The more solid your concentration, the clearer your awareness of what’s going on inside. So you’re evaluating the breath, evaluating the way the mind relates to the … 
  18. Monastery Standard Time
     … Then the understanding becomes more important than whether there’s an up or a down. You see the pattern. You see how the mind works. And as you see through it, it becomes less and less of a deceiver. It’s less likely to hoodwink you, to take you in. So it’s important that you develop this sense of the observer that can … 
  19. Shame & Compunction
     … When we can understand these emotions, then we can use them properly, and they become an important part of our practice. As the Buddha said, in a world where there’s no shame and compunction, all kinds of horrible things can happen. In fact, we look at the world around us right now: It’s becoming a shameless world, and we can see the … 
  20. Don’t Focus on Jhana, Focus on the Breath
     … The more you can get interested in the breath, the easier it will be to stay here and the more snug your concentration will become. It’s not like you’re forcing the mind to stay with something that it’s not really interested in or doesn’t really care about. Your breath is your force of life. Care about that. It’s free … 
  21. Breathe Easy
     … You can have the breath on your side, you can breathe easy in the midst of difficult situations and those situations will become a lot easier to endure. You can stick with difficulties for a much longer time. This is especially important now, as the pandemic seems to be going on and on and on. I was talking today with someone who was saying … 
  22. Load next page...