Search results for: "Equanimity"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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.
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. Transparent Becoming
     … either through really self-destructive behavior, or through meditating and coming to the conclusion, “I’ll have no desires, I’ll have no wants at all, I’ll just accept whatever comes.” What happens is that they start creating a new self around the one who’s just trying to be there, still, equanimous. In other words, in the desire to destroy one bhava … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. To Comprehend Suffering
     … wanting things to be other than what they are, which carries the implication that if you could learn some patience and some equanimity, some endurance, some acceptance, there wouldn’t be any suffering. But the Buddha’s teaching goes a lot deeper than that. Suffering comes, he says, from three types of craving, which can be very strong. First, craving for sensuality: your fascination … 
  15. Abandoning Effluents (3)
     … From calm comes concentration, and from concentration, you get equanimity. These two sets—the destroying and the developing—go together. There is that pattern throughout the path: As you’re developing good qualities in the mind, you’re basically creating a state of becoming, but then other becomings will come up in the mind, and you can’t let them destroy the good state … 
  16. The Lightened Mind
     … You come to a state of calm, concentration, equanimity. You develop the mind in skilfulness. Then you cleanse it. This is where the Buddha says you learn how to have the theme of your concentration well in hand. Ajaan Fuang would call this lifting the mind above its object. You’re focused on your object, but you’ve lifted your awareness up a little … 
  17. Contentment
     … You’ve got the physical feelings that arise with regard to the breath and the mental feelings of happiness or sadness or equanimity that come along with the breathing. Then there’s perception, which labels things. Your main labeling job here right now is labeling the type of breath and labeling the type of feeling. It’s all here. These are all the things … 
  18. Stretch Your Mind
     … When you’re spreading thoughts of goodwill, lots of compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity, you make those large as well. In fact, the phrase mahaggataṁ cittaṁ, the enlarged mind, is a description of the mind in concentration. Sometimes, when we think about concentration, we think of the mind being focused down to one sharp point, but that’s not the concentration the Buddha was … 
  19. Getting the Most Out of the Present
     … determination, persistence, endurance, truthfulness, goodwill for the people who’d benefit from getting the duty done, equanimity toward the things that you’d rather be doing. You realize that you can’t have your druthers all the time. When you can think in this way, then everything in life becomes a part of the practice. None of your time is wasted. Our problem is … 
  20. Behind the Scenes
    One of the reasons why we start the meditation with thoughts of goodwill for all beings in all directions—along with thoughts of compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity—is to put the mind in the right frame to meditate. Otherwise, we bring the issues of the day into our meditation. Instead of focusing on the breath, we focus on what we did or somebody … 
  21. So Little Time
     … We’re encouraged to have unlimited mind-states, unlimited goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity, but our resources are limited—our time, our energy—which means that we have to choose our issues very carefully. Notice that after the Buddha’s awakening the issue that he focused on was one that all of us have in common, which is that we want happiness and yet … 
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