Search results for: "Attachment"

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  2. Getting Familiar with Concentration
     … It really does become your center, and you can use it to peel away your attachments to all other things. Only when you’ve got so that you’re relying totally on this do you pull the rug out from under yourself. That’s when you’re in the right position to benefit from the Buddha’s teaching on insight in the ultimate sense … 
  3. W.W.B.R.
     … As the Buddha said, to really get beyond your attachments to things, you have to see them as separate. There’s your awareness, but the thought is something else. Okay, think about how things are inconstant. The thoughts come, and they’re going to go. Good things will come and they’ll go. So when the good things come, you take advantage of them … 
  4. The Kamma of Self & Not-Self
     … It’s only when you’ve brought the path almost to completion that you realize that the only attachment remaining is that sense of self—the self that’s directing things—and you see it simply as one more activity: things arising things passing away. And even when they’re skillful, those things are stressful. So you’re looking at them not in terms … 
  5. The Heart of the Teachings
     … The ultimate teaching is all about how all things are unworthy of attachment. Now, that’s true on the final steps of the path, but to get there, you have to follow this heart, and apply these principles at all times. Any place where your behavior could be criticized for a lack of circumspection, you take it to heart. You’re training your internal … 
  6. If at First You Don’t Succeed
     … This is similar to the fact that when you’re attached to something, it’s not the case that that thing has grabbed hold of you. You’re the one grabbing hold of it. The fact that you’re grabbing hold is why you’re not free. But when you do let go, you’re free—free from the limitations even of space and … 
  7. No Running Away
     … As for the body, before you drop attachment to the body, you’re got to learn that the body has its good side. We were discussing today: We sit with the body, sit with the breath and things get out of balance: The properties that can help bring it back into balance are right there in the body as well. If things feel too … 
  8. Breath Energies
     … And that’s where the real attachment is. So as you play with the breath like this, it’s not just play, as I’ve said before. It’s both play and working. You work with the breath because you’re doing something serious here. You’re learning important truths about the body and the mind. You’re playing because it’s fun and … 
  9. The Buddha’s Conventions
     … This is how you can pry apart your attachments and your clinging in a way that’s in line with the Buddha’s sense of what’s good enough. He said he never let himself rest content with skillful qualities until he found the real thing. And that’s the attitude he’s asking you to adopt, too.
  10. What Am I Becoming?
     … In fact, people who hold to the idea that what they are is something that’ll be annihilated at death, get very attached. They’ll do anything not to die. Even people who have a fluid idea about their gender, about their identity, hold on very tightly to that. There’s a lot of suffering there, too. “Self” is however you define yourself. If … 
  11. Terror & Revulsion
     … In Pali, it’s related to a word that means “terror.” What it comes down to is when you start reflecting on your life and the things you’ve been attached to, the things that you’ve been thirsting after and looking for: You come to see how pointless they all are. All that energy, all that effort focused on things that are not … 
  12. Dreams & Voices
     … He’d use them wisely, seeing the danger in getting attached to them, and freeing himself from that danger. That kind of dream is useful. It’s about what to do. After all, the mind is basically a doer. We’re constantly fabricating the present moment, putting things together, but then the present moment passes away, so we have to put together another present … 
  13. Pain & the Middle Way
     … As the Buddha said, without the pleasure of concentration, there’s no way that discernment would be able to do away with your attachment to pain, because as long as you don’t have this alternative pleasure, then no matter how much you understand the drawbacks of sensual pleasure, you’re going to keep going for sensual pleasure. As you go for sensual pleasure … 
  14. The Buddha’s Protection
     … Some people will say this is teaching you to be attached to pleasure. Well, it’s a skillful pleasure. The Buddha said that if we don’t have this pleasure—the pleasure of concentration—then the only escape we see from pain will be to go for sensuality.** **And that’s not skillful. If you get involved in sensuality, then, of course, there’s … 
  15. A Foundation for Restraint
     … If we focus on the body to get the mind to settle down, we can focus on different aspects of the body and ask ourselves, “Why are we so attached to it?” So the body plays a double role. On the one hand, it’s our place of refuge, so that the mind isn’t running out all over the place. But at the … 
  16. Lessons in Happiness
     … For instance, we know that we’re going to have to let go of the body, let go of attachment to the body, but what’s the first thing you focus on when you meditate? You focus on the breath, which is part of the body. You’re not letting go of the breath, you’re actually working with it. Look at those sixteen … 
  17. Healing Awareness
     … So this is not just an idle skill or an unhealthy attachment to pleasure. We will overcome it at some point, but meanwhile it’s a pleasure that’s needed to overcome the pleasure you get off of other things. The pleasure of learning how to have an awareness that’s healing: If you’ve trained it to be healing in its relationship to … 
  18. Educating Equanimity
     … I’ve heard people complain about Ajaan Lee’s method of meditation where he focuses on the comfort in the breath, saying that this gets you attached to comfort. But if you don’t have a source of well-being to hold on to, it’s going to be really hard to deal with the difficult situations that the breath can’t cover, that … 
  19. Respect Opens Possibilities
     … So the Buddha is asking you to examine your attachments really carefully. He’s asking a lot, but at the same time, he provides you with a path. And the path is not an onerous one. It takes effort, but it’s not superhuman effort. The Buddha, after all, was a human being. All of his noble disciples started out as ordinary human beings … 
  20. A Gentle Touch
     … There’s a certain amount of attachment even though you’re right there, and again the gentle touch is important. As we were saying this afternoon, of these hardened shells around the heart, and many people literally tense around the heart area of the body, sometimes around the neck and shoulders, where you’re holding all kinds of emotions, all kinds of issues. If … 
  21. Do, Maintain, Use
     … It’s not a matter of seeing the world outside as being inconstant, stressful, not-self, and saying, “Okay, I’m going to abandon my attachment to the world.” You have to see there’s a lot of inconstancy, stress, and not-selfness in your own observing mind. There’s a benefit to seeing a lot of the events in the mind as inconstant … 
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