Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. Heedfulness & Confidence
     … They had been reading a little bit about what the Buddha taught about aging, illness, death, suffering, suffering, suffering, and they thought everybody who was a true Buddhist should be very depressed. And they concluded that the Thais and other Asians didn’t even know their own religion well. Of course, it was the other way around. It was the Western scholars who didn … 
  3. Don’t Stop with Acceptance
     … It’s like that old slogan they had in Singapore when the AIDS epidemic was beginning to rage: “Other people can give you AIDS only if you let them give it to you.” In the same way, other people can make you suffer only if you let them make you suffer. Pain can make you suffer only if you let it make you suffer … 
  4. The Power of Attention
     … You can see a good kamma seed, but if you focus on it in the wrong way, you can suffer from it. Or vice versa. There may be a bad kamma seed, but if you focus on it in the right way, you don’t have to suffer. It’s because of that possibility that we practice meditation. We’re learning how to focus … 
  5. Lessons from the Breath
     … It’s something you consciously do with as much knowledge as possible, so that your mental and verbal fabrication don’t cause suffering. You understand that when you think, when you have feelings and perceptions, if you do that with ignorance, it’s going to cause suffering. But if you do it with knowledge, it goes in the other direction and helps form a … 
  6. Metta Means Goodwill
     … The first is that if our happiness depends on somebody else’s suffering, it’s not going to last. They’ll do what they can to destroy it. The second reason is the plain quality of sympathy: If you see someone suffering, it’s painful. It’s hard to feel happy when you know that that happiness is causing suffering for others. But developing … 
  7. What You Can’t Change, What You Can
     … If you see people who are suffering or people who are doing things that are going to lead to suffering and you want it to change, that’s compassion. You see yourself doing stupid things that lead to suffering, you want that to change, too: That’s compassion for yourself. Empathetic joy is when you see people who are happy or who are doing … 
  8. Adult Education
     … Especially when you look at your life and ask yourself, “Have you learned how to not suffer? Have you learned how to act in ways that are skillful—in ways that don’t cause suffering to yourself, don’t cause any harm to anyone else?” That’s a skill, that’s an education that’s really worth mastering, and the time dedicated to that … 
  9. Take an Interest
     … This is a very useful skill to have when your mind is telling you all kinds of things that could make you suffer. You realize the process leading to those thoughts that would induce suffering is not all that reliable, so why would you allow yourself to suffer from things you can’t trust? Why do you believe them? Watching the processes allows you … 
  10. In the Elephant’s Footprint
     … There’s just suffering, the cause of suffering, actions that lead to the end of suffering. And there are duties. The duty with regard to suffering is to comprehend it. The duty with regard to its cause is to abandon it. The duty with regard to the cessation of suffering is to realize it, and you do that by developing the path. He was … 
  11. Take Nothing for Granted
     … actions you’re doing in the present moment, some of which are leading to suffering, some of which are leading away from suffering. The Buddha gives you some pointers, but you’ve got to see for yourself: Exactly what do those pointers point to? What are you doing right now? Where is the craving right now that’s leading to suffering? Where’s the … 
  12. The Four Noble Truths from Within
     … And he wants you to look at how you’re creating suffering out of these things right here. The word he uses for the essential part of suffering is *upadana, *which can mean clinging. It can also mean taking nourishment. You’re feeding off these things. You’re trying to feed off your feelings, your perceptions, your fabrications, your consciousness, your sense of the … 
  13. Strength of Conviction
     … What’s causing suffering? What’s not? And as you focus on these things, you find that the mind gets greater and greater strength to make the right choices because you see very clearly that if you make the wrong choices, you suffer. Not only you, but people around you suffer as well. This way, regardless of what worlds of possibilities are presented by … 
  14. Thinking About Rebirth
     … Sometimes they think of karma as being very deterministic. “People suffer because they deserve to suffer, so there’s nothing you can do about it”—which is not the Buddha’s approach at all. Or we think that rebirth is selfing writ large, that the Buddha picked up the idea of rebirth from his culture and didn’t really think it through, that it … 
  15. A New Framework
     … Are you causing suffering? Or are you not causing suffering? You’re causing stress or you’re not. These are things that anyone can notice, yet most people don’t notice because they don’t look very carefully. Or they don’t make the connection between the fact that they’re suffering and the actions they’ve done. It’s so easy to blame … 
  16. Rooted in Desire
     … It makes the difference between the desires that lead to more suffering and the desires that lead to the end of suffering. The more knowledge you bring to these processes of fabrication and desire, the more they head in the right direction.
  17. Rightly Directed
     … We’re sometimes told that resistance to change will cause us to suffer. Well, there’s good suffering and bad suffering. In other words, there’s the suffering that leads to the end of suffering, and there’s the suffering that just piles more suffering on. So whatever stress is involved to make sure your mind stays headed in the right direction, you take … 
  18. When Your Will Is Ill
     … Similarly with suffering: Suffering is the clinging. Clinging is an activity; it’s something you do. So when people are misbehaving, treating other people wrongly, they’re already suffering. They may not admit it, but that’s because their faculties are impaired. When you see that in someone else, you have to turn and look at yourself. Your desire to see them punished is … 
  19. Asalha Puja
     … The first truth is the truth of suffering. It’s not that life is suffering, or that there is suffering. Suffering is clinging. That truth points inside. The five brethren who were listening to this realized that they were going to have to look inside themselves. Where was their clinging? What kind of clinging? Why do they cling? That was the second truth. Three … 
  20. Is It Worth It?
     … They can actually take us away from suffering. Acting on that kind of desire is an effort that’s really worthwhile. Life builds on our own actions, and our actions are built on our state of mind, which is why we’re sitting here meditating, to see if we can master the skills that allow our desires to stop creating suffering and actually create … 
  21. Look after the Source
     … When bad things happen in the world, you can take them as an opportunity either to suffer or to not suffer. The skill lies in not suffering. You’re protecting the source, the state of your mind. The less you’re suffering inside, the more you’ll have to offer outside. When you’re not suffering, you’re not clinging, even to the good … 
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