Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. The Five Faculties Confirmed
     … As the Buddha says, we suffer because of our clinging. Our knee-jerk reaction is usually that we’re suffering because of things other people have done or because of situations outside. Or we may say that we’re suffering because we ourselves are bad people: Our nature is inherently bad, so we deserve to suffer. Those ideas the Buddha says to put aside … 
  3. Work on Your Mind
    In Thai, they have a phrase, “tam jai,” which literally means “to work on your mind.” They use it usually when you’ve suffered a loss or a setback, and you calm the mind down so that you’re not too upset, so that you can actually think straight, figure out what to do next, and not let the loss or the setback get … 
  4. Mindfulness Gets Intimate
     … That has to do with the Buddha’s analysis on how suffering is caused. He says that we suffer because of the type of craving that leads to becoming. Becoming is a sense of your identity in a world of experience. But he also warned that one of the types of craving leading to becoming is craving for non-becoming. In other words, hoping … 
  5. The End of Uncertainty
     … suffering arising, suffering passing away. Everything else he taught is arranged around that, even Right View: It’s right to the extent that it helps put an end to suffering. Your thoughts are skillful or unskillful, your words and your deeds are skillful and unskillful, depending on the extent to which they put an end to suffering. So always keep this principle in mind … 
  6. To Go Where You’ve Never Gone Before
     … After all, animals all suffer. I remember hearing a Zen teacher one time say that “Animals don’t suffer, because they don’t have any sense of self.” But you look at them, and they’re obviously suffering from fear. After all, they have all the forms of clinging: There’s sensuality clinging. They have a sense of the pleasures they want to find … 
  7. You Can’t Clone Awakening
    It may seem incongruous or ironic that here we are, hoping for total release from suffering, stress—the freedom of nibbana—and on the way there, we’re hoping for states of infinite space, infinite consciousness, bliss, rapture, and yet what are we doing? We’re focusing on our breath. We’re sitting here in a posture that may or may not be comfortable … 
  8. The Noble Pursuit of Happiness
     … She’d been meditating, she’d learned all about emptiness and all these big Buddhist concepts, but they weren’t any use for the suffering of these kids. If you’re going to help other people who are suffering, you first have to learn how not to suffer yourself. Now, you don’t have to wait until the very end of the path before … 
  9. Learning from What You Do
     … not understanding, say, when you’re suffering, which part of the suffering comes from something that you can control and which part comes from things you can’t control. The dukkha or suffering of the three characteristics is something that’s built into things. But the dukkha or the suffering and stress that comes from craving—the dukkha of the four noble truths: That … 
  10. Fabricating with Awareness
    Fabricating with Awareness August 10, 2012 When the Buddha explains the causes of suffering, he starts with ignorance, and from ignorance he goes on to fabrication. In other words, it’s because we fabricate out of ignorance: That’s why we suffer. Everything else follows from that. Now, the cure is to replace the ignorance with knowledge, knowledge in terms of the four noble … 
  11. Strategies for Happiness
     … But these teachings are meant to protect you from suffering. They’re there to remind you that if you latch onto the body as yours in a really strong sense, you’re going to suffer. If you can see it as a tool that you use toward happiness, that’s a different issue. But so many of us don’t see it in that … 
  12. The Language of the Heart (1)
     … This may be one of the reasons why the Buddha focused on the problem of suffering as the point of communication. Only when we admit to ourselves that we’re suffering, are we really open to listening to other people. As the Buddha himself said, there are two reactions to suffering. One is bewilderment: Why is this happening? The second is: Is there anyone … 
  13. Samsara
     … Because on the one hand when you act more skillfully, fewer people suffer. You suffer less, the people around you suffer less. And at the same time, you act as an example to them. You can show them the way that they can stop creating so much suffering for themselves. So it’s not so much a question of getting out of a particular … 
  14. Choices in the Present
     … Now, to stick with the uncomfortable things coming up in the mind requires that you have strength to withstand them so that you don’t just fall in with them, and so that you’re not suffering while you’re watching the suffering. That’s why you have to develop mindfulness, alertness, and concentration, because as concentration comes, it gives a sense of well … 
  15. Right & Wrong Decisions
     … The mind does have a tendency to create a lot of suffering for itself. We all want happiness. Everything we do and say and think, every intention we have, is an attempt at finding happiness or finding at least some pleasure, and yet it often turns around and creates a lot of suffering. This is why you have to bring a lot of alertness … 
  16. Equanimity & Endurance
     … But then there’s that area of your experience that no one else can peer into where there’s a big problem, and that’s suffering: the suffering that the mind places on itself. You experience it, nobody else can: what it feels like to you, the sharpness of the pain, the heaviness of the pain. No one can experience it, the same way … 
  17. Heedful, Attentive, Mindful
     … Appropriate attention is when you ask the right questions, particularly, “Where is there suffering? What is the suffering? How is it caused? Can it be ended? And what is the path to its ending?” When you ask those questions, then you get a better idea of where your heedfulness should be focused—on ferreting out the causes of suffering and protecting yourself against them … 
  18. Strength Training
     … The first one is to comprehend suffering. Then you let go of the cause of suffering, to realize the cessation of suffering, but to do that, you’ve got to develop the path. That takes work. So if you’re in this for the long haul, this means, one, that you try to set up a regular schedule, that you meditate every day. Don … 
  19. The Triple Training
     … The second principle is appropriate attention, looking at your actions, seeing where they’re causing suffering, seeing where you can make changes so you don’t have to cause the suffering again. And you keep at it. That’s how you combine commitment and reflection. In other words, this is a general principle, and the Buddha said you apply this to the threefold training … 
  20. In Earnest
     … He saw there was a real problem in life, the suffering—everybody’s suffering. There’s one point where he says he had a vision of the world before his awakening. It was of a puddle drying up, and there were fish in the puddle, lots of fish in the puddle, and they were struggling with one another to get what little bit of … 
  21. Dimensions of Right Effort
     … Look for the suffering and then ask yourself, “What is it about this that’s actually causing the suffering? Is it the thought itself or is it the way I relate to the thought? Is there any craving in the way I relate to it? What comes and goes with the suffering?” Because the suffering doesn’t stay all the time. Sometimes it comes … 
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