Search results for: "Thought"
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- Judging Your Meditation… Particularly when obstructive thoughts come in, thoughts that would pull you away: The fact that they’re coming up may not be the result of what you’re doing right now. But you do have a choice. Are you going to go with them or not? That choice is your present action. You can ask yourself: “Where is this thought going? What can I …
- Purifying Gold… the more refined little bits of grit in the gold, which are thoughts of sensuality, thoughts of ill-will, and thoughts of harmfulness—in other words, wrong resolve. You want to make sure your resolves are right. You’re going to look for a happiness that doesn’t have to depend on sensual fantasies, doesn’t have to depend on sensual pleasures outside. You …
- Befriending the Breath… If you let yourself get carried off in the thoughts of past, thoughts of future, it’s like getting into the movie and actually thinking there’s something happening up there on the screen, and reacting to what seems to be happening up there. But if you can stay anchored in the present moment, then you can watch the lights flashing but you don …
- Feeding Instructions… And this is why we develop the path, starting with the thought constructs of right view and right resolve, so that we can feed off of wisdom, feed off of thoughts that help us explain to ourselves why we can’t feed where we used to feed, or why, even though we can feed in areas of the world, it may not be a …
- Looking in Three Directions… This is the point where the mind identifies it as a mental stirring, and this is the point where I give it a meaning, as to whether this is a thought about the future, a thought about the past”—all these various stages in which the mind can get more and more entangled. You try to catch these things more and more quickly. And …
- Disenchantment… Verbal fabrication is directed thought and evaluation. Mental fabrication is feeling and perception. These are the basic elements the Buddha has us focus on as we concentrate. First, of course, we learn how to dress them up in a new way. In other words, bring the directed thought and evaluation to the breath, to create feelings of comfort. You use your perceptions to maintain …
- Breath Meditation When It’s Hard to Breathe… Then I thought of Ajaan Lee’s descriptions of the various places in the head and different parts of the body where the breath can come in and go out, so I focused my attention there. I thought of the breath coming in and out through the forehead, through the top of the head, in from the back of the neck, down the spine …
- What Are You Doing in the Present?… This is a thought about x, it’s a thought about the future, a thought about the past, this person, that person. You should ask yourself, where did you get this line up of perceptions you slap on things? Where did that come from? Can you catch the mind as it’s deciding which perception it wants to go with? Sometimes there’s a …
- Brahmaviharas on the Path… Thoughts of harmfulness come just as easily as thoughts of compassion. This means we have to develop the brahmaviharas. This is a kind of karma. It’s a mental karma. It’s a determination, as the Buddha said. And to stick with that determination requires mindfulness. So to really understand the brahmaviharas, you have to understand karma, because they are a type of karma …
- When Things Regress… They’re unskillful thoughts that you try to abandon. The skillful thoughts are the ones that focus on, “What can I do right now? I’ll take on whatever I can do right now as best I can and maintain it.” Sometimes, in the simple maintaining, it’s going to get better. Say, you want another cake. Well, you have to cook it. You …
- A Dhamma Bucket List… Now, there will be things you do have to think about, but it’s good to have thought about them first before you jump into that particular thought and ride off. So that’s conviction. Notice that with the Buddha, conviction doesn’t mean simply that you believe in something. It means that you actually act on the belief. Here the belief is that …
- The Dignity of Restraint… In order to do that, you have to give up all kinds of other thoughts. Thoughts about the past, thoughts about the future, figuring this out, planning for that, whatever: You have to put them all aside. No matter how wonderful or sophisticated those thoughts are, you just say No to them. Now if you’ve been practicing generosity and have really been serious …
- Heedfulness… So, if your thoughts are wandering off someplace else, you have to say No. Now, you can say No in two ways. One is, “I won’t let myself think those thoughts at all.” The other is, “No, I’m not going to follow those thoughts.” You can think of the mind as being like a committee. Some people in the corner of the …
- When You Practice on Your Own… But if you’ve had experience dealing with a mind that’s been taken over by thoughts of your work, thoughts of your family, sensual thoughts, thoughts of ill will or anger, and learned how to get the mind past those hindrances, then when they come up again, you know how to deal with them again. The problem is that you might get bored …
- At Home with the Breath… You could start with the thoughts we had just now about goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. These are thoughts that induce a sense of well-being. You remind yourself that you do wish other beings well. Your goodwill may not be totally universal yet, but you can work on that. The extent to which you can feel compassion for people who are suffering …
- Eeeels… And you open up also to the areas where thoughts begin to form. The formation of a thought usually starts as a little disturbance—or a little wavering, wiggling, whatever—and at the very beginning, it’s hard to tell whether it’s a physical or mental sensation. It’s on the borderline between the two. Then the mind scouts around, coming across this …
- Hope… Any thoughts that connect like bands around your mind: Cut those through as well. Remind yourself that your awareness is larger than your thoughts, and you can step outside. What happens all too often is that when you’re in a thought, it’s like being in a colored bubble. Everywhere you look, it’s the color of the bubble. But if you step …
- Discipline… Reading about how he overcame his weakness, then when you can see unskillful thoughts in your mind, you don’t just give up and say, “Well, I’ve got these unskillful thoughts, I must not be cut out for this.” It’s because you have unskillful thoughts that you really ought to practice. Take the example of those who’ve done the same thing …
- How to Straighten Out the World… Why is remorse compelling? Why is anxiety compelling? What assumptions are these things based on? We tend to think that feelings come first and then thoughts grow out of the feelings, but often the feelings grow out of the thoughts. You have a way of justifying to yourself that you’ve really got to think about these things. So first you have to ask …
- A Message for the Universe… You can work on preventing unskillful thoughts from arising, or if they have arisen, you can work on abandoning them. As for skillful mental qualities, if they’re not there, try to give rise to them. If they’re already there, try to maintain them and develop them further. Our problem is that we tend to sit with our unskillful thoughts—they’re “okay …
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