Search results for: "Suffering"
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- Balanced Meditation… So meditation, when it’s done properly, encompasses both coming to understandings about your suffering and also allowing the mind to grow still. The two aspects need each other. If you can’t be still enough to look at the suffering, there’s no way you’re going to understand it. All you’re going to be doing is dealing with concepts about suffering …
- Unlimited Compassion, Limited Resources… So equanimity is there to keep us from suffering from our goodwill, compassion, and empathetic joy. As Ajaan Fuang once said, “If we don’t have the equanimity of concentration, then goodwill is suffering, compassion is suffering, empathetic joy is suffering.” So we work getting the mind to settle down to provide ourselves with a sense of well-being inside. Otherwise, we try to …
- Questioning & Conviction… This begins with the intention to put an end to suffering. And that’s based on the conviction that it’s possible to do it. Conviction starts with conviction in the Buddha’s awakening, that he did find the end of suffering and he did it through developing powers of his mind. And they weren’t powers peculiar to him; they were powers anybody …
- The Story-telling Mind… You realize that if you sit here telling yourself bad stories over and over again, you’re going to suffer. Do you want to suffer? Well, no. Do you want other people to suffer? Well, maybe. You may think about people who’ve wronged you, and of how much you’d like to see them get their just desserts. In cases like this, you …
- To Comprehend Pain… Remember, discernment has to be penetrative, which means that it sees which causes are good, which causes are not, which causes lead to the end of suffering, which ones don’t. You’re going to see those distinctions only through practice, through trying to get the mind free from suffering as you come to see what does and doesn’t work. That’s where …
- Life in the Buddha’s Hospital… Because, after all, who’s suffering because of our diseases? Other people may be suffering to some extent, but we’re really suffering. We suffer very little from what other people do, and a great deal from the lack of skill in our own minds. In the Canon the Buddha talks about how people should not give in to craving and conceit, and when …
- In Accordance with the Dhamma… that the Buddha said that suffering comes from resisting change, therefore there should be nothing wrong with changing the Dhamma, changing the Vinaya. But that argument is wrong from the very beginning, The Buddha never said that suffering comes from resisting change. He says it comes from clinging, which means that we have to turn around and look at what we’re clinging to …
- Knowing & Acting… The problem is that in its actions, it creates a lot of suffering for itself. If we don’t really know, we can act in ways that cause a lot of suffering not only for ourselves but also for other people. So this is what we have to work on. We have to be aware of what we’re doing so that we can …
- A Questioning Attitude… Where is there suffering? Why is there suffering? Is it possible to put an end to suffering? How do you do that? Those kinds of questions, those kinds of doubts are an essential part of discernment. This is why the Buddha said that the mind is purified by discernment. There’s the idea that by doing metta practice you burn away your anger or …
- A Load Off the Mind… In other words, suffering is optional, and it’s usually through our own ignorance that we take the suffering option. But as you meditate, you learn that there are other options as well. There is, as the Buddha said, the potential for rapture here in the body. There’s the potential for stillness, the potential for pleasure. These potentials are all here. You want …
- The Real Thing… But what does the Buddha talk about? “This is suffering, this is the cause of suffering, this is the cessation of suffering, this is the path.” No lights. No background music. Just something very simple. But notice the way the Buddha talks about the insight that gets you there. There’s one passage where he asks, “What do I teach? I teach, ‘This is …
- Well-armed Efforts… Without them, there’s no end to suffering. The Buddha didn’t teach just suffering. Some people accuse Buddhism of being pessimistic because it talks so much about suffering. But the Buddha’s like a doctor: He talks about suffering because he has a cure. And the cure’s not simply to watch things come and go on their own and to accept their …
- Training the Committee… The more we train our mindfulness, the more we train our alertness, our powers of concentration, our discernment, then the more good we can do, the less suffering we cause for ourselves, the less suffering we cause for others. So there are values that underlie this practice and it’s good to keep them in mind. As we’re sitting here focusing on the …
- Unfabricated Happiness… This helps you gain a sense of how the way you normally fabricate things causes a lot of unnecessary stress and suffering. The more stirred-up your fabrications, the more you’re going to suffer: one, simply out of the effort to put these things together, and two, you can come up with all kinds of ideas, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, that can wreak a …
- The Management of Suffering… Instead of the truth of the cessation of suffering, it’s the truth of the management of suffering. If you don’t have any plans to go all the way on the path, you have to realize that wherever you set your sights, there’s going to be disappointment at some point. A lot of people say, “I’m not ready for the ultimate …
- Alighting on the Dhamma… Appropriate attention is where you take what you’ve been listening to and ask yourself, “How does this apply to the question of suffering? Is the Buddha talking about suffering itself, or is he talking about the cause of suffering? Or the path? And how does this apply to me? What am I doing right now that’s suffering? What am I doing that …
- Truths of the Will… But then there’s also the suffering that comes from craving, especially unskillful craving. The first kind of suffering you can’t do much about, but you can make a difference with that second kind. This is an area where your will has a lot to say, has a lot of impact if you focus it properly. Putting an end to suffering is a …
- Breathing Skillfully… how to breathe, how to think, how to talk to ourselves in a way that doesn’t cause suffering. As the Buddha said, we suffer because we do very simple things in ignorance. But he wasn’t satisfied with just talking about how people are ignorant. He wanted to train them so they could overcome their ignorance. One of the things he said that …
- Pay Careful Attention… Then you apply appropriate attention, asking how this teaching applies to the problem of suffering, the cause of suffering, or the end of suffering. Then you practice the Dhamma in line with the Dhamma as you’ve understood it, for the sake of dispassion, for the sake of being unfettered. Those were two of the tests that the Buddha gave to his stepmother: True …
- A Meditative Life… stress and suffering, the cause of stress and suffering, the cessation of stress and suffering, and the path of practice to that cessation. Just look at the whole range of your experience: Instead of dividing it up into its usual patterns of me and not me, simply look to see, “Where is there suffering? Where is there stress? What goes along with it? What …
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