Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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2. Play AudioProtection Through Mindfulness Practice
   Protection Through Mindfulness Practice December 24, 2015 The Buddha often talks about the practice of satipatthana, or the establishing of mindfulness, as a kind of protection. He says that you make yourself a refuge when you practice the establishing of mindfulness. You make yourself an island, a safe place in the middle of the flood. There’s also the passage where he tells the … 
3. Play AudioThe Buddha’s Shoulds
    … You want to be ardent, alert, and mindful. The ardency there is right effort. The mindfulness means that you keep your frame of reference in mind — as when we’re keeping the breath in mind right now. The alertness means seeing what’s happening in the present moment, seeing if you really are with the breath, if the mind is settling down well with … 
4. Play AudioThe Seven Treasures
    … But if the mind can realize that these things are going to have to go someplace, sometime, anyhow, you can develop the generosity that comes from seeing that other people may need them and you happily give them away. Your mind becomes a lot more open, a much more spacious mind. That’s a mind that’s a lot easier to live in. This … 
5. Play AudioOn Not Twisting the Cow’s Horn
    … We want to see the subtle things because the subtle things are what drive the mind. If you don’t dig them out, they’re going to stay there and keep driving the mind. We’re not here just to accept the fact that they’re driving the mind. We want to put an end to it because these subtle things can grow into … 
6. Play AudioLook at Yourself
    … This way, your mindfulness practice builds on your ability to remember things way back, things you’ve learned from the practice in various times, because you haven’t been throwing up walls in the mind in the meantime. Then mindfulness, in turn, gives you the skills you need for concentration, because as you get the mind into concentration, what are the themes of concentration … 
7. Play AudioLife Well Lived
    … One of the hardest ones is concentration, because it’s so easy for the mind to wander off. Catching the mind is like trying to catch a bead of mercury: You put a little pressure on it, it scoots off; put a little pressure on this side, it scoots someplace else, scatters all over the place. But unlike mercury, the mind can be tamed … 
8. Play AudioA Good Purpose in Life
    … And as we’re developing the mind, we’re developing the heart as well. In fact, in most Buddhist cultures, starting with the Pali language, the words for “heart” and “mind” are interchangeable. As the Buddha realized, our mind—the smart part of this psyche we have, the part that figures things out—is not really that much different from the heart, the part … 
9. Play AudioTake the One Seat
    … As long as the mind is going to be making choices, you want to teach it to make skillful choices. You do that by watching it. Getting the mind into concentration is a very good way of learning how to watch it. You need mindfulness to stitch together your moments of awareness, moments of attention, so that they become continuous. Mindfulness is the ability … 
10. Play AudioBooster Stages
    The Buddha was a master of the apt simile, the apt comparison, but even he found himself stymied when it came to finding comparison for how quickly the mind can change. Attitudes you may have held for a long time, you can drop in a fraction of a second. Intentions that you sincerely wish for, you can drop very quickly—and then you want … 
11. Play AudioMental Stirrings
    Everything you really need to know about the mind keeps happening in the present moment. Many times, when a thought comes into the mind, we want to trace it back, “Where did this come from?” And psychotherapy really encourages that: If you want to understand the thoughts, the urges, the neuroses in your mind, they say, you’ve got to remember back to when … 
12. Play AudioMotivation
     … Everything you can do that can get you here, training the mind, is part of the training. Other people can give you ideas, but you’re the one who has to figure out your own mind to see: What is it about the mind that resists? Or what is it about the mind that gets so easily distracted? Then come up with your own … 
13. Play AudioAll-around Alertness
     … That’s how mindfulness actually gets in the way of alertness. It’s a case when mindfulness is wrong mindfulness. You have to be able to hold in mind the fact that you want to be fully aware of the body all-around. You may be paying a lot of attention, say, to your hands today, but don’t block out everything else. You … 
14. Play AudioThe Bridge to Concentration
     … Other people here are trying to keep their minds quiet. They’re trying to keep as little greed, anger, and delusion as possible from infiltrating their minds. So avoid expressing things that would stir them up, especially in a community like this, where people are meditating good part of the day. Their minds are very sensitive. Try to show restraint both about what’s … 
15. Play AudioEeeels
     … We learn to be connoisseurs of the mind, expert observers of the mind. Which means we have to watch and compare. Try to get very, very precise in noticing the movements of the mind. It’s only then that you can begin to trust your powers of judgment, your powers of perception. So in your quest to get the mind still, don’t go … 
16. Play AudioThe Breath Soufflé
     … This is how the breathing moves from mindfulness of breathing into concentration based on the breathing. Actually, it’s concentration from the very beginning. The Buddha doesn’t make any clear distinction between concentration and mindfulness practice. After all, mindfulness has the role of remembering to do what’s skillful and to abandon what’s unskillful. If something unskillful comes up, you’re mindful … 
17. Play AudioFirmly Intent
     … When you have those attitudes in mind, you can settle down and work on the concentration, work on the mindfulness. Mindfulness basically means keeping something in mind. How do you keep something in mind? There’s a tendency the mind has to send messages to itself, a message from the present moment going into the future. Usually the message is, “Watch out for this … 
18. Play AudioUseful Thinking
     … Experiment to see what kind of breathing can be helpful for what the body needs right now, what the mind needs right now. When you get a sense of ease, enlarge it. That’s another description that the Buddha has of the mind in concentration. He calls it mahaggata citta, the enlarged mind or the expanded mind, filling the whole body. When the mind … 
19. Play AudioThroughout the Day
     … Often the insights that come as you go through the day, trying to keep the mind centered, come in those little moments when the mind is about to slip off, and you catch it. You begin to see, “Oh, this is the kind of thing the mind does. This is how it slips off.” Or you can catch not only when it’s happening … 
20. Play AudioNourishing & Interesting
    We had a visitor this evening who complained that he would go once a year on a vipassanā retreat, learn how to get the mind into a state of equanimity, but then he couldn’t maintain that equanimity when he came back home. He wanted to know what to do. I told him if meditation is just equanimity, it gets dull very fast. If … 
21. Play AudioHow to Think about Death
    The mind seems to spend all of its time in thinking. As soon as we learn how to put words together, the mind just keeps churning out words. The mind can churn out all kinds of words, words that are helpful to us, words that destroy us, words that make us happy, words that make us miserable. One of the most important skills we … 
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