Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. Life 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 … 
  3. A 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 … 
  4. Take 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 … 
  5. Booster 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 … 
  6. Mental 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 … 
  7. Motivation
     … 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 … 
  8. All-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 … 
  9. The 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 … 
  10. Eeeels
     … 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 … 
  11. The 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 … 
  12. Firmly 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 … 
  13. Useful 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 … 
  14. Throughout 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 … 
  15. Nourishing & 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 … 
  16. How 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 … 
  17. Becoming Consummate
     … You have to be wary about what the mind cooks up. You can’t believe everything that comes into your own mind, because there are skillful qualities and unskillful qualities, the qualities the Buddha calls asavas, fermentations or effluents, things that come flowing out of the mind: sensual desire, becoming—these little worlds that the mind creates for itself and then inhabits—views, and … 
  18. Questioning & Conviction
     … The mind will change its mind. A new intention will come in and take over. You’ve got to learn how to observe that process, to begin detecting the little signals that the mind has changed its mind and yet still pretends to be staying with the breath. Nevertheless, it’s ready to go. The briefest lapse of mindfulness, and then it’s gone … 
  19. Worth
     … You’ve got to learn how to focus your mind, keep it focused on what you know will strengthen the mind. This is why the perfection or parami that underlies all the others is determination, realizing that you want to make something of your mind. And it’s going to depend on you. So you make that determination to do what’s right, and … 
  20. Fires of the Mind
     … One of the reasons we’re here is because we feel that our minds are on fire and we’d like to put them out—because passion is like a fire. Aversion is like a fire. Delusion is a little bit harder to compare with a fire, but it’s still burning away in the mind, like a fire that smolders under ashes. A … 
  21. Time Well Spent
     … Mindfulness is an essential to that in the sense of keeping something in mind. You keep in mind that you’ve got the breath here, you keep in mind the fact that you want to relate to it skillfully: That’s the thread that ties everything together. When the practice is continuous, it builds up momentum. Otherwise it just gets chopped up in stops … 
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