Search results for: "Equanimity"
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- Rehab Work… I’m just very equanimous about what happens in the present moment as I breathe in, as I breathe out.” The Buddha responded, “Well, there is that kind of breath meditation, but that’s not the kind that gives the best results.” Then, he taught the monks the sixteen steps of breath meditation. If you look at those sixteen steps, you notice a lot …
- A Home for the Mind… The reflection on equanimity reminds us that there are a lot of things in life we can’t change. If you spend your time worrying about things you can’t change, getting worked up over things you can’t change, you’re wasting the energy you could use to focus on the things you can change. All these chants remind us of the values …
- The Path Is and Isn’t the Goal… There are feelings of pleasure that you’re inducing, feelings of ease, feelings of equanimity. There’s the perception you hold of the breath, the mental activity of adjusting and investigating, probing, learning about the breath, learning about the mind. And there’s consciousness. In other words, you’ve got the five aggregates right here in your state of right concentration. So there’s …
- Anger… You’re showing forbearance, you’re showing equanimity, you’re showing patience, all of which are strengths. It’s when you have these virtues that you can see clearly what does and doesn’t need to be said or done. The more clarity you can bring to situations like that, the better it is for everyone around.
- Calming the Breath… So the Buddha asks him, “What kind of breath meditation do you do?” And the monk says, “I put away thoughts of past, put away thoughts of future, and let my mind be equanimous toward whatever is arising in the present, as I breathe in and breathe out.” The Buddha’s response is, “Well, there is that kind of breath meditation.” But he adds …
- Standing Where the Buddha Stood… You take the same equanimity, the same mindfulness you developed in the fourth jhana and simply change the perception. So when you want to understand feeling or perception, this is the place to do it. Get the mind really well centered, and then you can watch these things as they affect the mind. You can see where they come from, where they go. You …
- Control… That’s where you have to develop equanimity. In other words, let go of the things you can’t control so that you can focus your energy on the things you can. This is how the not-self teaching gets applied through the practice even when you’re not ready for the ultimate level where you totally abandon any thought of self. You learn …
- Noble Standards… It requires that you be generous, that you be virtuous, that you develop thoughts of goodwill and compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity, where they’re appropriate. And that spreads the goodness around.
- In & of Themselves… When you find a way that you can get the mind and the breath together with a feeling of well-being, a feeling of pleasure, or a feeling of equanimity, then you can put some of the thinking aside, and just be with the sensation of the body in and of itself. You’re getting closer and closer to the “in and of itself …
- Energy Channels… But if you learn how to relate to your breath with goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity, and you begin to combine those qualities just right in the way you relate to your own energy body, then you can begin to embody them to the rest of yourself and to the rest of the world as well. You get practice in being strategic with …
- Stay… The mind, itself, is equanimous. There’s a sense of ease in the body, and that gradually grows fainter and fainter, until everything just stops. The breath stops. Your thinking stops. There’s just the perception that holds you there. There’s a sense of awareness filling the whole body. The breath fills the whole body, and it’s because everything feels connected inside …
- Discernment… learning to be equanimous, patient, accepting of everything. Suffering comes, and you tell yourself that that’s just the nature of experience, that’s the way it is. Craving comes, well, just accept the craving, that’s the way it is. Now that is the beginning part of discernment, the ability to admit what’s going on. But then as the Buddha said in …
- Get Out of the Way… This is where patience and equanimity, combined with conviction, are important elements in the path. On days when you’re down, when the mind is just not cooperating, realize that it’s a normal part of the process. The mind is a very complicated thing to train. There’s a passage in the Canon where an elephant trainer is talking to the Buddha. He …
- Mud Houses… You can let go of the feeling of pleasure, and you’re left with a feeling of equanimity, which is even lighter. You get the breath energy to fill the body to the extent that you don’t have to breathe in and breathe out. Your sense of the boundary of the body begins to disappear. The perception that holds the notion of body …
- The Buddha’s Vipassana… Your awareness of the mind fills the body; a sense of ease, pleasure, or equanimity fills the body. Those are the main elements. This is where mindfulness and concentration come together; how right effort and concentration come together; how vipassana and samatha come together. They all merge. And it’s when they merge that they can do good work in the mind.
- The Uses of the Breath… Spread thoughts of goodwill or equanimity when you’re feeling angry. Contemplate death when you’re getting lazy—not to get discouraged, but to remind yourself that you don’t have much guaranteed time, but you do have this moment. The purpose of these contemplations is to get you back to the breath. So try to focus your attention here to see what you …
- Marshalling the Emotions… That’s when your sense of nibbida, or disenchantment, can turn to the concentration, because you’ve discovered something in the mind that doesn’t need to feed on anything anymore, even on the pleasure and the rapture, the equanimity of concentration. That’s when nibbida and viraga, or dispassion, become total. That’s when they can liberate the mind. As you can see …
- Just Events… So she went through the first treatment and was able to hold her mind in the state of very solid non-reactivity, the state of equanimity throughout the treatment. But then when she came out, she was exhausted. Ajaan Fuang went to visit her the next day, to see how she was doing, and she told him what had happened. He said, “You’re …
- Doing Meditation… You take your equanimity and you apply it to a particular topic, apply it to a particular notion: a sense of space, boundless space, or a sense of boundless consciousness. When you see the act of putting it there and keeping it there, you realize that even these very refined, very still, very spacious states are things that are put together. That’s when …
- Empathetic Joy… People talk about goodwill, compassion, equanimity quite a lot. But empathetic joy somehow gets lost between the cracks. Which is unfortunate because it’s a very important background for our practice, a very important context for our practice. If you can’t be happy for other people’s happiness, you’ll have trouble feeling right about your own. We hear again and again stories …
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