Search results for: "Equanimity"
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- Facing Pain Straight On… The mind gets very still, things are very comfortable, and you notice a slight wavering in that stillness, a slight wavering in that subtle pleasure or equanimity. That’s a signal to you that you’ve got to look into what happened. What did you do just now? Why was there this wavering? In other cases, insights come when you’re finding yourself up …
- The Mind Comes First… generosity, virtue, renunciation, discernment, persistence, endurance, truthfulness, determination, goodwill, equanimity. Try to develop these qualities as you go through life because you can take them with you. And they’ll provide a good place to go. They do offer some shelter. When you can’t depend on the world, you have to learn how to depend on the mind. So you’ve got to …
- Flexibility… You may have heard that an enlightened person is like this—very equanimous, very non-dual—so you try to clone your idea of enlightenment. Or a true meditator has to act like this—no personality, no nothing—so you clone that. But that gets in the way. You can’t clone awakening. The Buddha never tries to teach that way. Right cloning is …
- Chickens from Hell… And equanimity is the feeling you have when everything is satisfied. The different parts of the body that have been lacking energy now have their energy supplied, so you don’t have to keep gobbling things down. So try to tune-in to a sense of well-being. Notice how you breathe and which parts of the body are especially sensitive to the breathing …
- On Being Non-reactive… Now, if the instructions ended right there, it would be a lesson in equanimity, saying that that’s all you have to do: just be with things and noting: “This is what trash is like. This is what perfume is like. It’s like this.” But the Buddha doesn’t stop there. He goes on and gives instructions in mindfulness of breathing. There he …
- Get Out of Yourself… This is one of the reasons why we have thoughts of goodwill, thoughts of compassion, thoughts of empathetic joy, thoughts of equanimity for all beings as a daily practice. We can just chant the words to the point where it doesn’t mean anything, but stop and think: There are a lot of beings out there who are suffering right now. In fact, everybody …
- Goodness & Goodwill… Here again, you should think, “Is there any way that you can help them?” If you can’t help them, well, have equanimity for that. But be very careful in your actions—and this is where the restraint comes in—that you’re not going to cause any suffering to others intentionally. You’re not going to cause any harm. Now, there may be …
- Fully Absorbed… You want to develop the skills so that you can be equanimous in areas where you can’t make a difference in the world. You want to think in those ways, because while you’re meditating on the breath, other narratives do come up. The brahmaviharas are for reminding yourself that the narratives come back here. Everything should be focused in here right now …
- Think Calmly about Death… Your universal goodwill and compassion and empathetic joy and equanimity will give you just the right tools you need at that point. Because the mind’s going to need to be unshaken, and yet death is what shakes us up more than anything else. So you’ve got to practice so that there does come the day when you actually do gain that glimpse …
- The Breath Soufflé… Ajaan Chah noticed this when he was teaching Westerners, that they needed to learn a lot of patience and a lot of equanimity so that they could observe things. If you don’t have the patience to sit with something unpleasant, you’re never going to understand it. And if you don’t understand it, how are you going to treat it skillfully? But …
- Barriers in the Heart… goodwill for ourselves, goodwill for all beings without limitation, compassion for all, appreciation and empathetic joy for all, equanimity for all, without exception. Try to keep these thoughts as unlimited as possible. Let them stretch your mind, and then try to live within those attitudes. They’re called brahma-viharas. “Vihara” means dwelling. It’s not just something that you visit for a few …
- Keeping Your Values Alive… The other form of right resolve that’s important, of course, is non-ill will, which covers trying to develop goodwill, trying to develop compassion, trying to develop equanimity. When you see a person acting in unskillful ways—people who have harmed you, or harmed people that you love or people that you’re concerned about—you can’t let yourself give in to …
- The Brahmaviharas Are Not a Complete Practice … He spent the whole rest of his life devoted to practicing the brahmaviharas, developing thoughts of unlimited goodwill for himself and all beings, unlimited compassion, unlimited empathetic joy, and unlimited equanimity. But, as he commented at the end of the story, that practice didn’t lead to awakening. It didn’t lead to dispassion. It simply led to a really nice rebirth as a …
- Because the Mind Is Purposeful… You could think of all the things that are happening in the world right now, but there are a lot of areas in the world where you have no particular desire that things turn out one way or another, so you can read the news about those places and be pretty equanimous. But if the news goes against your desires, you’re going to …
- The Noble Truths of the Breath… One time he recommended breath meditation to the monks, and one of them said, “Well, I do breath meditation already.” And the Buddha said, “Oh? What kind of breath meditation do you do?” The monk said, “I put aside all thoughts of the past and all hopes for the future, and just stay equanimous about what’s happening in the present as I breathe …
- Mindfulness Gets Intimate… purity of mindfulness and equanimity.” On this stage of the practice, you focus on the feeling tone and look to see how it’s originated. Now, the feeling tones that are “of the flesh,” as they’re called, have to do with ordinary pleasures, pains, neutral feelings. But then there are also feelings not of the flesh. These are feelings that you manufacture through …
- Goodwill, Gratitude, No Guilt… This is where you have to balance your goodwill with equanimity, realizing that there are a lot of things you cannot change, a lot of people who will not change their ways. But any opportunity where you think you could be effective, you want to act for the happiness of others as well as your own. The two go together. That’s another revolutionary …
- Appreciating Dispassion… In his version, the Buddha attained a state of total equanimity there, which is actually not the case. He found the ultimate happiness. But then the scholar said he couldn’t understand what happened under those twin sal trees when Buddha passed away. It seemed as if everything got blotted out, just like with every other human being. It goes without saying that this …
- Lessons from Stilling the Mind… You’re going to get the mind to a point where it has to get even more still than this, but first, give it a sense of real pleasure, really strong sense of fullness, so that when the mind settles down and starts getting more equanimous, it’s coming not from a state of hunger, but from a sense that your immediate needs for …
- Loving Yourself Wisely… So you want to make your mind expansive, make it into that river of water, which he defines first as expansive through the development of the brahmaviharas, your goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity. You want to make those large. As he says in another place, you make them large like the river Ganges, large like the element of space, large like the earth, bigger …
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