Search results for: "Thought"

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  2. Observe Yourself in Action
    As you sit here meditating it’s important that you learn how to step back from your thoughts. You’re giving yourself one thing to think about—the breath—and you then have to watch to see how well you’re doing that. If any other thought comes up, you have to be careful not to go into it. This habit we have of … 
  3. Goodness & Goodwill
     … There are a lot of people who don’t want to be persuaded into generosity or virtue or thoughts of goodwill. So you have to learn how to be sensitive to the situation. Think of thoughts of goodwill going out in all directions. Then test them, to see how genuine they are. There are two good ways of testing them. One is to try … 
  4. Samatha, Vipassanā, Jhāna
     … You’re dealing with form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrications, consciousness. If the mind is willing to settle down, you don’t have to think about those things. Just give it one thing to think about, and your perceptions and thought fabrications will center on that, revolve around that, without your having to identify what they are. After all, we’re not here to think … 
  5. Heeding the Deva Messengers
     … The Buddha’s not telling you not to have any thoughts at all. But he wants to put you in a position where you can see clearly which thoughts are worth going with, which ones are not. Because that’s the position you’re going to have to be in when you die. Thoughts will come in the mind; states of becoming will begin … 
  6. Fabrication
     … The two basic verbal sankharas are directed thought and evaluation. And you’ve got those right here, too. You direct your thoughts to the breath and then evaluate the breath: How does the breath feel? Does it feel good? If it does, stay with it. If it doesn’t feel good, you can change it. This is about the most basic level of conversation … 
  7. Respect Opens Possibilities
     … All too often we use our minds to ride all over the place, hopping from one train of thought to another train of thought, ending up in Siberia someplace. But here, all our thoughts aim inwards to that meeting place: to singleness of mind. As the Buddha said, people who live without respect, without anything to respect, really suffer because there’s nothing to … 
  8. The Karma Snake
     … So when a thought comes up in the mind, you have to ask yourself, “To what extent am I engaging in that thought now, and to what extent is that thought simply just the reverberation of something that I did in the past?” Especially when you find your mind overwhelmed with all kinds of thoughts coming in, it’s good to remember that you … 
  9. A Mind Bigger than Pain
     … Or thoughts about what this pain may mean in terms of how much longer you’re going to live, whether the injury may be permanent or temporary: Put those thoughts aside. Those are extra arrows. You can also think of them as extra burdens that just weigh down the present moment so that the mind is carrying more than it can bear. At the … 
  10. Hindrances to the Heightened Mind
     … Just because something comes up in the mind, they make us feel that we’re committed, that we have to think the thought through. There’s also the problem where one part of the mind says, “Well, as long as I’m trying to get the mind into concentration, I can’t let there be any thoughts at all in the mind,” and so … 
  11. Elephant Training
     … The nun thought to herself, “Here it is, a wild animal, and still it can be trained! My mind is not a wild animal.” With that thought, she went back into the forest, sat down, and was able to get the mind into concentration. Your mind is not a wild animal. You can talk to it; you can reason with it. And remember, even … 
  12. But Not Sick in Mind
     … I don’t like that thought.” Well, something about you likes that thought, otherwise you wouldn’t be letting it pull you away. You’ve got to see what, in the Buddha’s terms, is called the allure of the thought. Then you put the allure right up next to the drawbacks. Our problem is that when we see the allure of something, we … 
  13. The Bridge to Concentration
     … And if you have a thought that you know is not necessary, you’re not going to speak it, you’re not going to say it to anybody, why even think it? That helps you cut through that thought, the influence that thought’s going to have in your mind. If there are certain topics you don’t talk about, after a while you … 
  14. Relate Everything to the Breath
     … This particular pain you’ve got right now, is it related to the breath or not? The same with distracting thoughts: For a thought to take hold, there has to be a little bit of tension in the body someplace. It’s your marker around which the thought can coalesce. So again, if you see a thought coming up, the first question is, how … 
  15. The Wisdom of Incongruity
     … The ability to step out of your thought worlds is what saves you from getting pulled into all the defilements that created those thought worlds to begin with—that picked and chose and decided that this detail you’re going to focus on and that other detail you’re going to ignore. You have to remember that all of our defilements are based on … 
  16. Even Shame Can Be Skillful
     … It’s called directed thought and evaluation. You’ve got that in meditation as well. In this case, you keep directing your thoughts to the breath and you evaluate the breath. And then there’s mental fabrication, which is feelings—feelings of pain or stress on the one hand, and pleasure and ease on the other hand, then the more neutral feelings, hard to … 
  17. Bring the Right Attitude
    It’s often useful to start each meditation with thoughts of goodwill. We carry so many random thoughts around in our mind that before you do the actual work of the meditation, you want to clear away some of the underbrush. In other words, clear a space for yourself where you can really do the work without a lot of interruptions. As you’re … 
  18. Mindfulness, Discernment, & Peace of Mind
     … They slosh around in the mind, pushing our thoughts, words, and deeds around as well. So try to remember something that’s more useful: that if you stay with the breath in the present moment, you’re going to be able to watch your own mind, you’re going to be able to step back from thoughts that come through the mind, and you … 
  19. Training Your Inner Teacher
     … When the Buddha sets out the four noble truths, he says that the thoughts that give rise to suffering come from craving for sensuality, craving for becoming, craving for non-becoming. Then there are the thoughts that lead away from suffering, starting with thoughts of right view, right resolve—your intention to follow the duties of the path—then right speech, right action, right … 
  20. The Karma of Ideas
     … It’s simply a matter of learning how to work more skillfully with your thoughts and your words and your deeds, but especially your thoughts. So each time a thought comes into your mind that you feel tempted to focus on and develop, ask yourself, “Is this skillful?” Remember, it has consequences. And remember you have the choice to focus on the thoughts that … 
  21. The Wisdom of Equanimity
    Every evening, before the sit, we spread thoughts of goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity to set the stage for the meditation, to put us in the right frame of mind, to remind ourselves of our motivation and why we’re carrying that motivation out in precisely the way we are. The first three—good will, compassion, and empathetic joy—are of a piece … 
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