Search results for: "Thought"

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  2. Meditating When You’re Sick
     … Spread thoughts of goodwill to all beings. Let your awareness expand out so that it’s not confined just to the body. “May all beings be happy. May all beings be free from stress and pain”—however you want to express that thought to yourself. And holding that larger frame of reference in mind is often very healing to the mind, calming for the … 
  3. Ready for Death
     … one, being heedful in how you react to that person’s death, not letting it shake you up so much that you start doubting in the goodness of life, the opportunities offered by life; and two, so that you can also handle the thought of your own death and prepare for it. That kind of heedfulness is actually auspicious. You can prepare for death … 
  4. Skillful Thinking
     … Some thoughts are like that. Other thoughts involve tension in the body. When you detect that it’s tense to think in that way, just relax the tension associated with the thought and it’ll go away. There are all kinds of ways of dealing with distraction. Don’t feel that you only have one tool. You’ve got to use all kinds of … 
  5. Judging Your Meditation
     … If you begin to see that every time you meditate, it does tend to stir up unskillful thoughts, maybe that’s not the meditation technique for you. Especially if it doesn’t give you a way of counteracting or separating yourself from those unskillful thoughts. There was a case of some monks in the time of the Buddha doing contemplation of the body. They … 
  6. Not-self in Context
     … Thoughts about yesterday, thoughts about tomorrow, thoughts about food, clothing, shelter and medicine, thoughts about people: Those are things you want to be dispassionate for. But you want to be passionate for the object of your meditation. So focus on the breath. Learn how to be passionate for the breath. If the level of ease in the breath is not very constant, try to … 
  7. Part II : Common Problems
     … Sometimes it’s just a thought in the mind: “I can’t take this.” That thought, in and of itself, places a huge burden on the mind. Or the simple thought, “I’ve been sitting here with this pain for half an hour. How much longer is it going to last?” There’ll be a little piercing of grief that goes with that, along … 
  8. Study to Practice
     … How are you talking to yourself around what’s got you angry? The technical terms are directed thought and evaluation: Where are you directing your thoughts? What are your standards of evaluating? What’s worth thinking? What’s not worth thinking? How to think? How not to think? Then there’s mental fabrication: perceptions and feelings. What are the perceptions that aggravate the anger … 
  9. A Happiness Without Boundaries
     … And it’s good practice while you’re meditating, if the thought of someone that you’ve wronged or someone who’s wronged you comes up in your meditation: You see their face, well, wish that person goodwill and then get back to the practice—because the practice is the real embodiment of goodwill. You’re developing qualities of the mind—mindfulness, alertness, restraint … 
  10. Dealing with the Hindrances
    Ajaan Lee talks about directed thought and evaluation in the meditation as dealing with the breath: figuring out what kind of breathing feels best for you right now, where you can create a sense of well-being in the body, and then how you can make the best use of that sense of well-being, letting it spread down the nerves, down the blood … 
  11. Discernment in Concentration
     … Well, their thoughts about you are mirages; your thoughts about their thoughts about you are mirages of mirages, so why deal in uncertainties like that? We’re not here to impress one another, we’re not here to be liked, necessarily—we’re not here to be disliked, of course, but whether other people like us or don’t like us, they have that … 
  12. How & Why We Meditate
    How & Why We Meditate March 10, 2012 We start with thoughts of goodwill to remind ourselves of why we want to meditate. We want to find a happiness that’s reliable, that doesn’t harm us or anybody else. That’s why we spread goodwill both to ourselves and to all beings, to remind ourselves that we’re looking for a special kind of … 
  13. The True Cause of Suffering
     … So you gain nothing by allowing yourself to get caught up in thoughts of ill-will. This is why one of the main meditation topics is to develop thoughts of goodwill in their place. It’s not just kind of a “pretend-you-like-people” kind of practice. In your mind, you go through all the people you might think of that you really … 
  14. Lessons from Generosity & Virtue
    When you make up your mind to stay with the breath, one of the first things you learn is that your mind probably isn’t as made up as you thought it was. There are many minds in there, many ideas of what you could be doing with this next hour. So when you have that original intention to stay there, you’ve got … 
  15. Protect Your Inner Center
     … You don’t have to wait to finish the thought before you come back. Usually a thought, once it’s finished, will lead to another thought and then another one. Learn to drop the thought right in the middle and come back to the breath. When you come back, reward yourself with a really nice breath, one that feels really refreshing. That way, the … 
  16. Hunting & Foraging
     … You want to watch the mind in the present moment, and the breath is your guarantee that you’re in the present moment as you’re watching it—because sometimes it’s easy, when you try to watch the thoughts come through the mind, that you just get into the thoughts and ride off with them. But when you’re with the breath, you … 
  17. Heedful of Small Dangers
     … You’ll enjoy it.” You’ve got to treat those with a measure of disrespect, skepticism, because if you’re not skeptical about your own unskillful thoughts, then other people can insert unskillful thoughts into your mind, slipping into the footsteps of what you’re already doing, and you don’t suspect them of anything at all. You may have noticed that angry people … 
  18. To Be Debt Free
     … no intelligent thoughts, no insights. But you have to realize that you’re learning the skills to attain a quiet state of mind and then maintain it, in spite of all the other criticisms your thoughts may make against it: the desire to move on to the next stage, the thought that this is boring, the thought that this isn’t intelligent. Your ability … 
  19. Construction Techniques
     … The Buddha calls this directed thought and evaluation. You direct your thoughts to a certain topic, and then you make comments on it, formulate questions, try to find answers, pass judgment, reconsider what you’ve judged. And then finally, mental fabrication: perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the labels you put on things that tell you what they are and what they mean. Feelings are … 
  20. Balanced Concentration
     … If there are thoughts that come popping up in the meditation, you have to learn different ways of dealing with them. One is, if it’s a thought concerning someone who has hurt you or someone you’ve hurt, just spread thoughts of goodwill for the person. There’s no need to get entangled any further. Or if that doesn’t work—say, it … 
  21. Possessed by Emotions
     … bodily fabrication, the way you breathe; verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself—technically it’s directed thought and evaluation, you direct your thoughts to a particular topic and you comment on it, ask questions about it, you figure out what’s right and what’s wrong with it; and there’s mental fabrication, which gives you the raw materials for doing that … 
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