Search results for: "Attachment"

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  2. Appropriate Attention Always
     … Try to see, which aggregate are you holding on to? What are you clinging to, and is it worth it? You can loosen up some of your attachment to the objects that you’re clinging to. Then you begin to turn around and look at the craving behind the clinging. As the Buddha said, we take craving as our friend. Everything it tells us … 
  3. Bases for Success
     … You hold on to it just to the extent that you need it to do the work that needs to be done in your own mind, to find where the attachments are that cause suffering and to learn how to pry them loose. So we have to keep this in mind as we practice, because some of the things we’re doing seem to … 
  4. Happiness Without Conflict
     … Why are we still so attached to these things? One of the reasons is that we think these are the only things we can do to find happiness: eat and maintain the body. The Buddha’s saying something really radical. There’s a happiness that doesn’t have to depend on these things. But it requires that you look very carefully at the drawbacks … 
  5. Strength of Mindfulness
     … And as for any attachments that would pull you away from what’s important, you’re mindful to let them go. That’s when you see how important it is to keep your mindfulness strong—because in that way, it does become your refuge. Of the various qualities of the path, the Buddha focuses on mindfulness as your refuge so that all the other … 
  6. Right View about Right View
     … If they didn’t offer any pleasure, no one would be attached to them. At the same time, there are also plenty of passages in the Canon that talk about the need to develop a skillful sense of self. And there are passages talking about not-self. Ajaan Lee, too, talks about seeing the side of things that is inconstant, stressful and not-self … 
  7. Strengthening Concentration
     … It’s for whatever the form of your attachment to this physical lump here: pride, possessiveness, shame, whatever. If you really look into the body, what do you actually have there? All kinds of things you wouldn’t want to associate with. If your stomach was sitting on a chair next to you at the dinner table, you wouldn’t want to have a … 
  8. True Honesty
     … But his friend says, “Well, I worked so hard at bundling up this flax and this is really my flax so I’m kind of attached to it, so I’m going to hold on.” So the first man throws away his bundle of silver and picks up a bundle of gold and takes that back. Well, you can imagine who really benefitted, whose … 
  9. Choices
     … the attachment to the sensual pleasure and the dislike of the pain, running after the sensual pleasure, thinking that you can get just pleasure somehow without having the pain come along with it. Ajaan Chah has a really nice image about that. You see a snake. One end has teeth and the other end doesn’t have teeth. So you figure, “Well, I’ll … 
  10. The Lotus in the Mud
     … But the Buddha compares that attachment to concentration to a cesspool outside of a village of paupers. It’s just allowed to grow and grow and grow, all that stagnant water. It doesn’t get to flow away until you make a breakthrough through ignorance. Only when you’ve made that breakthrough can it all flow away. The concentrated mind that just allows the … 
  11. Freedom Undefined
     … This gives you a beginning sense of what it’s like to be freed from the question of who you are, what kind of person you are, because you realize that those issues are all determined by the skill with which you act, particularly the skill with which you approach your clingings, your attachments. Those are the determining issues. When you learn how to … 
  12. Investing Your Happiness
     … When the mind has a sense of ease and wellbeing, you can look at your attachments, you can look at all of the other mistakes you’ve been making, with a much greater sense of fairness, a much greater sense of objectivity, with less sense of being desperate. It’s like the difference between people who have to worry about where tomorrow’s meal … 
  13. The Buddha’s Relationship Advice
     … That’s what the Buddha meant.” We live in the world where there’s so much impermanence and we find somebody that we really like, that we love, that we get attached to, and there’s a lot of clinging there. The affection is not what the Buddha criticizes. He criticizes the clinging, because the clinging is where the suffering is. Clinging basically means … 
  14. The Rivers of Karma
     … As the Buddha points out, there’s no abandoning our attachment for sensual pleasures until we can develop the sense of ease that comes from getting the mind still, centered, solidly based in the present. This is how you teach the mind not to be overcome by pleasure or pain. Pain becomes a tool an opportunity to learn about how the mind creates unnecessary … 
  15. New Feeding Habits for the Mind
     … Only when you stop and stand still can you see not only what’s going on around you but also what’s going on inside, those very subtle movements of the mind that can cause you to get attached to things that are going to change on you. You begin to realize that the mind’s habit of latching on to the body is … 
  16. Not Just a Witness
     … As the Buddha pointed out, you can peel away your attachment to the different elements or properties—earth, water, wind, fire, and space—and arrive at pure consciousness. Pure consciousness can observe feelings from the outside, seeing what’s causing a particular feeling, how that feeling comes, how it goes away. But that’s still a constructed process, a constructed pure consciousness. You have … 
  17. In Accordance with the Dhamma
     … And the part of the mind that’s attached to them is something you have to learn how to let go. You have to raise your sights as to what true well-being is and bring your oughts or your shoulds, your sense of what should be done, in line with the duties of the four noble truths, because as the Buddha said, this … 
  18. Dhamma is Timeless
     … It pulls you away from your old feeding habits, from your old attachments, and it gives you freedom of a very noble sort.
  19. Concentration as Wilderness
     … You can loosen your attachment to opinions that you begin to see are really not that useful, not that helpful. And even with the ones that are useful and helpful, you realize that there are times when you pick them up and times when you put them down. You don’t need to carry them around all the time. You learn how to be … 
  20. Breath Meditation – The Four Tetrads
     … You have to gain insight into the particulars around your attachments. Say that there’s a distraction going on in the mind: What’s keeping you with that distraction? What’s saying, “Yeah, I want to go for that”? All too often, if we don’t see that, we find ourselves in the midst of the distraction without questioning: What was the voice that … 
  21. Undefeatism
     … And this aspect of the Buddha’s teachings actually is there, in the side of the teaching that deals with letting go of unskillful qualities, letting go of attachments. But remember, there’s another side of the practice as well. We don’t just let go. We also develop: We develop skillful qualities in the mind. Yet sometimes the teachings on inconstancy seem to … 
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