Search results for: "Equanimity"
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- Evaluating the Practice… How is it skillful and how is it not? When it’s going well, how can you keep it going well and not get complacent? When it’s going poorly, how can you watch it with enough patience and equanimity until you understand it without getting depressed? When you can do that, then the teacher’s heart can be at rest. And your heart …
- The Brightness of Life… patience, endurance, goodwill, equanimity. These are all things that we’re free to develop. So the path is wide open. It’s simply that a lot of people resist: They want to look for light in other things. They’re perfectly happy where they are—and they don’t want to be told that they’re living in darkness. It’s like people living …
- Circumspection… serenity, concentration, equanimity. You’ve got to figure out which ones you need right now. So how do you figure that out? You watch. You try things out and see what works and what doesn’t work, until you begin to get a sense of how to read the mind. This principle applies all across the board throughout the practice, to every one of …
- Virtues & Values… At the same time, in helping others you have to develop qualities like patience, equanimity, kindness, and goodwill. That’s how we live together. That’s how we help one another. And in doing so, we develop these good qualities inside, qualities that will be to our benefit. So even though, as we’re meditating, each person is focused on his or her own …
- Useful Vocabulary… So one of the purposes of getting the mind into concentration is not just to have equanimity for everything. It’s to give rise to the mindfulness and alertness. As the Buddha said, that’s one of the uses of concentration: so you can see precisely when things are arising in the mind and notice the mind’s reaction. The more precise your vocabulary …
- Feeding on the Breath… This is why the Buddha recommended as a first step in practicing meditation that you try to develop as much equanimity and patience as you can. As he taught Rahula, try to make your mind like earth. People throw disgusting things on the earth, but the earth doesn’t react. Make your mind like water. Water can wash away all kinds of disgusting things …
- Correcting, Fostering, Cutting Away… But you also have to have equanimity. You hope that, if they’re behaving in bad ways, they’ll see the error of their ways. But you realize you can’t make your happiness depend on their changing their ways. And if you carry their issues into your meditation, you’re destroying your own chances to take advantage of this time. So, we develop …
- Resolute Good Humor… pleasure, rapture; more pleasure, more rapture; pleasure without rapture, but still very pleasant; and equanimity, which was also a form of pleasure. That’s food along the path. Now, the other extreme is the idea being that we’re coming to a goal that’s totally relaxed, totally without tension, totally without any kind of stress, therefore we shouldn’t have any stress on …
- Fear of Mistakes… Then you develop thoughts of goodwill, thoughts of compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity—for yourself and for all other beings. For yourself, so that you don’t beat yourself up; for other beings, to remind yourself that in all your dealings, you want to be as harmless as possible. This goes back to the principle that simply because you’ve made a mistake doesn …
- Enjoying the Path… The factors of right concentration include ease, pleasure, rapture, equanimity—good qualities to have in the mind. It’s meant to be enjoyable. There are some places where the Buddha talks about painful practice, but it’s not always painful. There’s the element of pleasure as well. This is what makes the path, even though it may be a long path, seem a …
- Nourishment from the Breath… One of the monks speaks up and says, “Yes, I already do that.” The Buddha asks him, “Well, how do you do that?” The monk replies, “I put aside my interest in the past and my desires for the future, and I just try to be equanimous about the present as I breathe in and breathe out.” The Buddha responds, “Well there is that …
- When This Is, That Is… If you sit there trying to be equanimous about whatever comes up, what happens is that the mind’s fashioning of things in the present moment goes underground, where it’s been all along. Hidden. You want to be more and more conscious of how you shape things right now. Because when you learn how to change that, you start getting more and more …
- The Power of Attention… You can focus on goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity, and develop these attitudes in an all-around way. You can focus on analyzing the body into its parts. Your choice is going to depend on what you’re bringing into the meditation at the moment and what you see the mind’s problem is. But the breath is a good topic to have as …
- A Tale of Two Kings… But there is a solution, and the solution doesn’t lie simply in acceptance and sticking to equanimity. It means learning to become more and more skillful in your actions. There is a potential as you develop the path to find an opening that will lead you out. At that point the problem is solved, not because you’ve lowered your standards. You’ve …
- Goodwill as Wealth… There’s a passage where the Buddha says that for a monk, the brahmaviharas—goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity for all beings without measure, without limit—are a monk’s wealth. As monks, we don’t have that many material possessions, but we can develop a sense of expansiveness, based on the sense of well-being we develop as we practice. This applies not …
- Think Your Way to Stillness… That’s why we have the thoughts about equanimity there at the end, to remind ourselves that even though we would like to have everybody happy, it’s still not going to happen just through our wish. It’s not something we can do for everybody. But there is something we can do for ourselves. And we can be a good example to others …
- Weathering Karma Storms… patience, endurance, and a certain amount of equanimity.” Given that we all have a mixed bag, we have to learn how to live with the bad parts and the good parts—not let the bad parts get us down, and not let the good parts get us complacent. And finally, perceptions—the perception that “yes, this is past bad karma coming in” is a …
- Pull Yourself Up by Your Fetters… Will it to rest in a state of equanimity; will it into a state of patience and acceptance. But there’s very little thinking that goes into that. In fact, it actively discourages any attempt to think or to figure things out. But that’s not the kind of person the Buddha was. The Buddha was very inquisitive. He wanted to figure things out …
- Potentials for Energy… Similarly with calm, equanimity, persistence, and concentration: He simply says that there are potentials within you to be developed without saying what they are. Now, in some cases, you can trace those potentials down in other passages in the Canon. For instance, with mindfulness, he says in another passage that the potential for mindfulness consists of virtue and views made straight. In other words …
- A Load of Straw… This is why equanimity has to be the safety net for all these sublime attitudes. Realizing that there are some cases you just can’t help, you have to reflect on the principle of karma. This again is a very useful principle for preparing yourself to meditate. Realize that you don’t have to straighten out the world before you’re going to be …
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