Search results for: "Equanimity"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
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