Search results for: "Equanimity"
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- When the Mind Is Still… That’s why we create this sense of stillness in the body, expansive awareness filling the body with a sense of ease and, ultimately, with a sense of stillness and equanimity—so that you can see those processes from the outside, zap them; learn how to stop creating a sense of identity around them or in them. That’s how the meditation works. But …
- It’s All in What You’re Doing… They talk about mindfulness, analysis of qualities, persistence, rapture, concentration, serenity, equanimity. That was in one of the sets. All the sets are sets of qualities. So you want to look into the qualities that are motivating you here, and that you’re applying to the breath. In terms of your motivation, the number one motivation, the Buddha said, is heedfulness. You’re reminding …
- Purity Comes Through Discernment… This is why the Buddha said that purification of the mind doesn’t come through equanimity, it comes through discernment. You have to understand the coming, understand the going. The first thing is to learn how to distance yourself from it. That’s why the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self are so important. The thought that seem to be deeply embedded in …
- The Rivers of Karma… And whatever the results of past bad actions you’ve done, if you develop these tools of having a sense of limitlessness in the mind—limitless goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity, and a proper understanding of pleasure and pain so you are not overcome by them—you’ll have your escape. These are precisely the tools we learn as we meditate, teaching the mind …
- To Understand the Path… There’s that famous story about Ajaan Chah where he was accused of being inconsistent in his teachings, sometimes telling people not to focus on stillness, but to work totally on watching things arising and passing away, and developing equanimity and dispassion toward them, and in other cases telling people to work really hard on concentration. Ajaan Fuang could be that way as well …
- Directing & Not Directing the Mind… As for mindfulness practice, the Buddha calls it a kind of concentration, which you can do with directed thought and evaluation or without directed thought and evaluation, with a sense of pleasure, a sense of rapture, a sense of equanimity. In other words, there’s no clear line between mindfulness and concentration. And mindfulness is very much directed. None of the Buddha’s analogies …
- Don’t Believe Everything You Think… There’s a sense of fullness in the body, and then ease, and then finally, total equanimity. Everything is very still. And when you’ve tuned into that level where there’s a still breath energy filling the body like this, then it’s very easy to see how thoughts form. There’s going to be a stirring in the breath which at the …
- Strength to Be Good… That’s not mindfulness, that’s equanimity. Mindfulness is keeping things in mind, particularly what’s skillful and what’s not skillful. You learn this either from listening to others or reading books, or from your own experience. And you want to have that at your fingertips, so that when something bad comes up in the mind—greed, aversion, delusion—or something good comes …
- The Wisdom of Ardency… The equanimity of putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world is a mental quality. So you’ve got body, feelings, mind, and mental qualities—all four frames of reference for establishing mindfulness—all right there. You can see their interactions, and seeing their interactions is what enables you to gain insight. Remember, insight is not just seeing things as they are …
- Thinking About Rebirth… You’re realizing that the only proper attitude is to have a lot of goodwill for everybody, followed by a lot of equanimity for everybody, yourself included, but then focusing on the desire not to go back and settle old scores, but to wipe the slate clean. When you reach the deathless, none of your karma can follow you in there. Everybody’s mind …
- No Foolproofing… If your energy is too scattered, you want to develop more the qualities of serenity, concentration, equanimity. The one thing the Buddha has you develop at all times is mindfulness. But mindfulness is not simply awareness of the present moment. It means keeping in mind what you need to know. So mindfulness is not simple. You have to keep these instructions in mind. It …
- Solid in the Face of Death… When it’s easier to bear, you can look at it with a lot more equanimity and see, “What are the general patterns here? How can I get a handle on the fact that there is suffering here and I can relieve it?” Part of the answer lies in realizing that you’re adding unnecessary suffering on top of the pain that’s already …
- Staying on Track… Think thoughts of goodwill for everybody, thoughts of compassion, thoughts of empathetic joy, thoughts of equanimity. Try to make your mind unlimited so that the pain of having made a mistake like that doesn’t overwhelm you. The important thing to realize is that whatever unskillful things come up in the mind, there’s always a skillful antidote. In some cases, the Buddha just …
- Metta Math… universal goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. Because we do it every day, it’s all too easy for us to simply mouth the words without really thinking about what we’re saying, even though it’s translated into English. So it’s good to stop and think: One, why do we have the chant? And two, are we getting the most out of …
- All for the Sake of Freedom… the feeling of pleasure or equanimity. Perception: the perception of breath, or—as the sense of the body begins to dissolve away—the perception of the space that permeates the body and then spreads out, so that it seems like the skin turns into nothing more than little dots of sensation, with no clear boundary between space inside and space outside. There can also …
- The Path of Action… Sometimes they talk about the aggregates, sometimes he talks about sense-media; sometimes they stress equanimity, other times they stress effort. Attempts to map out the whole teaching and make it into a consistent system have always been problematic. There’s no final word on what Buddhist philosophy should be. People keep coming up with new ideas, new interpretations, new frameworks. But the Buddha …
- Detail Work… You can think about unlimited goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity, in very vague terms, like a big cloud of goodwill. But it’s also possible to think about them in more specific terms. For instance, you can think of all the people you know who are in the east: Spread goodwill to them. Then ask yourself, “Who do you know who’s in the …
- Why We Bow Down… a state of good concentration, a state of equanimity.” But the Buddha said No, there’s something more, something better, which comes from not fabricating at all. Believing this requires a lot of dispassion. It requires that we accept a lot of value judgments about things we tend to hold on to very dearly, particularly when it tells us that they’re not worth …
- Resisting the Germs of Defilement… rapture, serenity, concentration, and equanimity. Those can help build up a lot of resistance. But the first three factors—mindfulness, analysis of qualities, and persistence or right effort—are the factors that help you recognize the germs that you didn’t recognize before, the things that you for a long time thought were okay or normal, but now you suddenly realize are the beginning …
- Not Resolved on Self… Or if you can’t muster goodwill, work on equanimity. Being resolved on harmlessness means finding your happiness in ways that don’t cause long-term harm to anybody. This relates to the practice of virtue. So right resolve is basically taking the insights that come from the four noble truths and applying them to your practice of virtue, concentration, and the discernment that …
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