Search results for: "Persistence"

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  2. Energy
     … In each case, you’re supposed to generate desire and activate persistence or activate your energy to do the right duty. Generating desire and activating persistence are pretty similar. In both cases, you have to use heedfulness. When the Buddha talks about arousing your energy or overcoming laziness, he focuses mainly on the narratives you tell yourself about how tired you are, or how … 
  3. Strong Through Admirable Friendship
     … Of the different strengths of the mind, strength of persistence is one of the most important. When you believe that what the Buddha taught was true, then you want to carry it through. You don’t just sit there believing. You act on that belief—and it’s a belief that calls for persistence. The strength of persistence is identical with right effort, and … 
  4. Virtue
     … In addition to mindfulness, alertness, and discernment, there’s also brute persistence, as you simply stick with it. You make up your mind: “I’m going to follows these precepts no matter what.” And that quality of persistence, determination: These are all perfections. They’re all also very essential qualities for meditation. When the Buddha describes right mindfulness, he says that it requires mindfulness … 
  5. Concentration that Bears Great Fruit
     … concentration based on desire, concentration based on persistence, concentration based on intentness, and concentration based on your powers of what he calls discrimination, your ability to see distinctions, to analyze things. These are probably not four separate types of concentration, because every state of concentration requires desire and persistence and intentness and benefits from using your powers of analysis. After all, if you don … 
  6. Bless Yourself
     … This is a large part of the strength of persistence: learning how to motivate yourself and figuring out what kind of motivation you need right now. The strength of persistence is part of a whole set of five strengths. There’s conviction—conviction that the Buddha really was awakened, that he taught the Dhamma well, and that there have been people who’ve practiced … 
  7. The Easy Way Out
     … So sometimes it requires learning some patience; other times it requires learning persistence. All the unglamorous but good qualities of the mind get to play their role—like the house-elves in Harry Potter. They’re not very glamorous; they seem to be very minor. But it turns out that they’re essential to the plot. The same with patience, persistence: sticking with this … 
  8. New Feeding Habits
     … It allows you to see what you can do that leads to the next strength, which is persistence. Persistence comes down to seeing that if you have unskillful qualities in the mind—you’ve had them in the past—you do what you can to keep them from arising again. You know your own unskillful qualities: greed, aversion, and delusion. You know you have … 
  9. Strength of Mind
     … That’s a quality called ardency, which is identical with persistence, the second in the Buddha’s lists of the five strengths: your ardency, your persistence, your energy. Because your mind is so important, you want to really do this well. There are a lot of jobs in the world that you can do and sort of do a good enough job to get … 
  10. It’s What You Give
     … strength of conviction, strength of persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. We can find the sources of these strengths within. When we hear the Buddha’s teachings, they make sense, but it’s up to us to make that movement of the heart, which is conviction. We have to give our assent, take on these principles as working hypotheses, and then put forth our effort … 
  11. The Four Bases of Success
     … The second of the four bases of success is viriya , persistence: You really stick with it. You do it again, then you do it again, and then you do it again. You keep at it. Be a breath-a-holic. They say that when alcoholics walk into somebody’s house, they’ll very quickly pick up on where the alcohol is stored. That’s … 
  12. Capture Your Imagination
    One of the Buddha’s teachings that we don’t like to hear is that it’s through persistent effort that we put an end to suffering and stress. We don’t like to hear it because we think persistent effort means drudgery, a chore. But that’s not necessarily the case. The Buddha talks about bringing joy to the practice, finding happiness, finding … 
  13. Bases of Power
     … concentration based on desire, concentration based on persistence, concentration based on intent, and concentration based on discrimination—in other words, using your intelligence. Actually, of course, all four are involved in getting the mind into concentration, but for different people and for even one person at different times, one of the four may be prominent. So you have to ask yourself: What does your … 
  14. Selves with Skills
     … They describe how we succeed in putting a state of concentration together, based on desire, persistence, intent, and your powers of analysis. And just as we tend to identify with whatever skills we already have and tend to use, the Buddha wants to teach you how to create a state of concentration—and it doesn’t matter that you create a sense of identity … 
  15. The Desire to End All Desires
     … In that list of the bases of success—concentration based on desire, based on persistence, based on intent, and based on your powers of analysis—the first three kinds of concentration are really one. After all, right effort consists of desire, persistence, and intent. All of them have to be present for concentration to happen. It’s simply a matter of which one is … 
  16. Factors for Awakening
     … Actually following through with that is the next factor, persistence. When you’re with the breath, what kind of breathing is easy to focus on? What feels good for the body, and what’s right for the mind? You have to take both sides into consideration—both body and mind—because sometimes very subtle breathing may feel good for the body, it’s relaxing … 
  17. A Gift of Strength
     … You focus on your intentions, and that leads to persistence, the next strength. The focus of your persistence is trying to develop skillful intentions, to let go of unskillful ones. Learn to look for the mind states that cause unskillful intentions: greed, anger, and delusion. You want to do what you can undercut them. Again, this requires more meditation. In particular, you develop mindfulness … 
  18. Generating Energy
     … When the Buddha discusses persistence in the five strengths, it builds on conviction. That’s one of the mental ways of giving rise to more energy. Another is in the context of the seven factors for awakening, where persistence builds on mindfulness: keeping something in mind. So what are the ways of giving rise to conviction that are going to energize you, and what … 
  19. Metta Meditation
     … The work is in the persistence, persistence in allowing a relaxed spot in the body to stay relaxed as you watch it. It’s in this way that when you come out of concentration, you’ll feel goodwill as well. And this time, when you spread thoughts of goodwill to other beings, it’ll have a different quality. It really will be a gift … 
  20. Basics
     … That’s persistence. The third base of success is intentness: You really focus on what you’re doing; you give it your full attention. In the case of the breath, this means noticing when it’s too long, when it’s too short, when it’s too heavy, when it’s too light. The more careful your attention, the more sensitive you are — and … 
  21. Admirable Friendship
     … If you find someone whose effort and persistence are admirable, you ask him about persistence. In other words, you take an interest in these things. The things that we ask questions about, those are the things we’re interested in, those are the things that direct our practice. And it’s the combination of the two, the internal questioning and the external questioning, that … 
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