Search results for: "Equanimity"
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- The Importance of Being Focused… You’re learning to develop equanimity for things that are not important, and to focus your attention, focus your energy on things that can be changed. This skill becomes really handy as you get older, as you start suffering illnesses and as you approach death. When an illness arises, it’s so easy to get upset about what you suddenly can’t do, how …
- How Right Mindfulness Leads to Right Concentration… Then there are the chants on goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity. Those are to help you get past any anger you might be carrying around from the day. Remind yourself that however you’re going to deal with other people, you want to make sure that your goodwill comes first, so that you don’t act on ill will. If you act on ill …
- Happiness Without Conflict… Right resolve is the resolve to renounce sensuality; to develop non-ill will, in other words good will, or at least equanimity; and to develop harmlessness, or compassion. These are the desires we want to foster. And then, based on them, then there are the desires of right effort: the desire to prevent unskillful qualities from arising in the mind, the desire to get …
- Anybody Home?… It’s in the doing that renunciate grief turns into renunciate joy, renunciate equanimity, something that can’t be contained in any little house. The Buddha said that, while he was alive, he dwelled with unrestricted awareness, an awareness that wasn’t associated with the six sense spheres at all. So when the six sense spheres passed away, that awareness remained unaffected—if we …
- We’re All Learning the Ropes… works the other way around. It’s by looking out after others that you develop good qualities inside. Developing goodwill is good for you. Developing patience, forbearance is good for you. Equanimity, kindness: These things are obviously good for other people, but they’re also important parts of training your own mind. So there’s a back and forth. You work on your inner …
- Dethinking Thinking… Well, what are you assuming? When you start getting critical of things outside, what are you assuming? I think I’ve told you the story of the Buddhist scholar who said he could understand that the Buddha learned equanimity in his awakening. But the idea that he found the deathless and then went to total unbinding after his death, didn’t make any sense …
- Goodwill as Right View… That’s where you need to have equanimity. This is why the brahmaviharas all go together. But you do want to maintain your goodwill in all situations. As the Buddha said, you want to protect your goodwill as a mother would protect her only child. Sometimes that image is misinterpreted as meaning that you should love everybody the same way a mother would love …
- Using the Committee of the Mind… Then the rapture gets based on concentration, which makes it even stronger, and then you move the mind to a state of calm and, eventually, to equanimity. In every case, you apply appropriate attention to these things, which means that you see that they’re good things and you try to develop them, maintain them, let them grow. But it’s based on the …
- The Four Biases… And again, as we live in the world we’re often afraid of having this kind of equanimity, because we feel that we’re not being loyal to the people around us. But putting yourself in a position of weakness like that is not loyalty to anybody. It doesn’t help anybody. You’re actually a lot more help to other people when you …
- 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 …
- Don’t Stop with Awareness Itself… Everything is very calm, equanimous. From that point on, everybody’s meditation seemed to follow the same steps. Once the breath element was all ironed out, smoothed out, filling the body, then he would have you focus on fire, the warmth in the body. Find one spot in the body that’s warmer than others. Focus your attention there and then think of the …
- 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 …
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