Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. No Happiness Other than Peace
     … You begin to take that for granted, that the mind’s got to move in order to have some pleasure. The things you focus on have to change, which means there’s no more pleasure in being there, so the mind has to change to keep staying happy. But again, things have to change in a very, very particular way for the mind to … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. A Thread into Awareness
    We focus on the breath to catch the mind. You can’t grab hold of the mind directly; you’ve got to give it something you can get interested in. And so we work with the breath to notice what way of breathing feels good, what way of breathing doesn’t feel so good right now. And sometimes it’s not a matter of … 
  15. Virtue Fosters Concentration
    When you came to the meditation hall—took off your shoes, came in the door—did you take off your everyday mind as well and bring a different mind inside? Obviously not. It’s the same mind. So it stands to reason that the way you live your life, the way you walk up to the hall, everything you do in the course of … 
  16. Worldly Equanimity & Its Uses
     … Let’s watch it.” Again, you hold the mind in check. You exercise some restraint, not by clamping down, but by having the right perceptions in mind to make it easier to keep the mind on an even keel. Because to get the mind to the deeper levels of equanimity requires that you be really observant. Once you get the mind into concentration, how … 
  17. Make the Most of This Breath
     … After all, when you’re going to be identifying the different hindrances that come up in the mind, the different skillful qualities that can come up in the mind, you want your identification to be accurate, too. You don’t want to mistake, say, an inquisitive mind state for a doubtful mind state. An inquisitive state, of course, is a factor for awakening: It … 
  18. Patience & Consistency
     … You’re trying to watch the mind, observe the mind, so that you can understand the mind. That requires a consistent gaze, because otherwise we see the mind in just little bits and pieces. It’s like connect-the-dots. There’s a dot here, a dot there, but there are huge spaces between them. And these dots don’t come with numbers. So … 
  19. The Skills of Stillness
     … As you do this, you’re developing three qualities in your mind. The first is mindfulness, which doesn’t mean non-reactive awareness. The way the Buddha used the term, it means being able to keep something in mind. Here you’re keeping in mind the fact that you want to stay with the breath each time it comes in, each time it goes … 
  20. Seeds of Becoming
     … When you leave this life, and everything in this state of becoming begins to come rushing in at you and you’ve got to get out of the way, the mind will naturally try to create another state of becoming. It’ll go for another state of becoming, whatever comes up in the mind. If you haven’t trained the mind to be mindful … 
  21. Technique & Attitudes
     … This way, your technique and your attitude go together and enable you to train the mind. As the Buddha said, a trained mind is the mind that can bring you happiness. The mind that’s untrained goes out and grabs hold of fire and brings it back in. It’s like a little child who doesn’t know anything. It sees something bright and … 
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