Search results for: "Becoming"
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- Equanimity & More… As Ajaan Fuang said, if you develop the brahmaviharas without a sense of equanimity, they become a cause for suffering. So as protection for the mind, we have to develop equanimity. What’s interesting is that the statement for developing equanimity, reflecting on the principle of karma, has more than one use in the Canon. There’s another place where the Buddha says, when …
- Fear of Death… This is why you work with the breath so that it becomes your natural base of operation and your natural foundation—natural in the sense that you’ve made it habitual. And it helps, of course, when the breath is comfortable or you can make it comfortable. After all, there is an intentional element in the breath. This is why it’s called bodily …
- Listening to the Practice… In this way, you become more sensitive to what’s going on. As you become more sensitive, it’s a lot more pleasant to stay here. So be very attentive to this faculty of listening to the present moment, being observant. Instead of rushing in with a lot of preconceived notions about how the meditation should go, or making very quick snap judgments of …
- A Happy Tradition… But he’d teach them how to become awakened anyhow. Even his foremost disciple, Ven. Moggallana, had some pretty bad karma in his past that was going to follow him all the way into this lifetime. But again, the Buddha taught him how to become awakened, so that he wouldn’t have to suffer from that karma. There’s a case of King Ajatasattu …
- Nurturing Patient Endurance… And these six qualities of conviction, generosity, virtue, learning, discernment, and ingenuity are a really good solvent so that big problems become small, and small problems get solved, and your patience does become large. One of the Pali words for patience is khama. It’s also the name of the Earth—so hold that image in mind. Make that part of the mental fabrication …
- Chew Your Food Well… It tries to feed on becoming this or becoming that, and whatever it becomes doesn’t last very long. Then it gets all disgusted with the whole thing and wants to destroy everything, so it feeds on the idea of destruction. When it doesn’t have anything left, it has to start all over from scratch because it still needs to feed. It hasn …
- The Buddha’s Program… What are the assumptions that are making you suffer right now? Can you question them? If you can’t question them now, what are you going to do when you die? One of the hardest things about dying is the question, “What will become of me?” Like Elisa Doolittle in My Fair Lady: “What will become of me?” If you assume yourself to be …
- Undividing the Mind… After he passed away, the Buddha commented that if he had gone on the path early in life, he would have become an arahant. Even if he’d gone on the path late in life, he would have become a stream enterer. But he threw those possibilities away. It’s a chilling story. One of the forest ajaans says that the proper response to …
- To Be an Adult… If we believe them and act on those beliefs, that becomes our karma—and that’s the danger. So we have to look into our own minds. Where are we susceptible to these kinds of messages? We’ve got to learn how to see through them. No matter who tells them, no matter how many people tell us, no matter how many times they …
- Dealing with Limitations… If you come into a situation with fixed preconceived notions about who you are or what you are, that can become a major limitation. In other words, you turn yourself into a being. As the Buddha said, when you become a being, you identify with form, feeling, perception, fabrications, or consciousness of particular kinds. And whatever way you identify yourself, that’s how you …
- Stay… As Ajaan Maha Boowa said “This center of awareness is the essence of the state of becoming.” But then, after all, that’s what concentration is. You’re trying to create a state of becoming so that you can understand becoming. So you want to stay with that center so that you can use it to gain subtle understandings, to gain clear understanding of …
- Anger… This is the thread that turns daily life into a genuine “practice of daily life.” Your interaction with other people then actually does become part of your practice. The work you do becomes part of your practice. Everything you do and say and think can become part of your practice if you approach every activity with the question, “What’s skillful here? What’s …
- Looking Inward… It’s not that you do it once and you become a master; you have to do it again and again and again. The more often you do it, the more you notice how to make it more comfortable, how to make it more gratifying; if you’re feeling sleepy, how to breathe in a way that wakes you up; if you’re feeling …
- Reliable Action… That way, you become you become more and more reliable as a witness of your own mind. You see precisely how the mind prepares itself to go. It’s not that it changes without warning. There are advance warning signals, if you learn to look for them. But in beginning it’s simply enough to make up your mind that as soon as you …
- The Power of Intention… When you become really sensitive to the breath energy in the body, you’ll notice how a thought forms. The quieter your mind, the more alert you are, then the quicker you’ll be to see these things. There’ll be a stirring in the breath energy, and at first it’s hard to say whether it’s physical or mental—it could be …
- Contentment in the Practice… The steadiness, the consistency of your gaze is what allows this one spot to become really comfortable. In the beginning it may not be all that comfortable, just an okay spot someplace in the body. The breath feels okay coming in, feels okay coming out. No big deal, nothing special. But you find, if you allow yourself to settle into it, that it solves …
- Training the Whole Mind… Then you build on those lessons so that the meditation becomes your own. In Thai, they have a word for practice — patibat — which also means looking after someone, to attend to someone’s needs. In the practice of the Dhamma you’re looking after your own mind, attending to your own mind’s needs. It’s not so much that you’re learning about …
- A Slave to Craving… Take concentration, so that you can stay focused on one thing, even when there’s pain, even when there’s distraction, and you can stay with that one thing, stick with it all the way through all the other things that are happening, so that concentration becomes all-around. When discernment becomes all-around, you find a way in which you don’t have …
- Knowing the Body from Within… The energy flow in the body becomes less and less a matter of having to pull energy in from without. It’s more that the pores of your skin are wide open, and they connect with breath channels throughout the body. Different parts of the body are nourished with breath energy, and all you have to do is think of them sharing the breath …
- Taking a Stance… Try to keep these qualities informing the way you relate to the breath, and that becomes the foundation from which you relate to things in all your activities. We have a whole hour to work at this skill, a skill that you don’t leave here when the hour is up, but that you take with you. It becomes the basic pattern for how …
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