Search results for: "Equanimity"
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- Endurance & Restraint… It’s interesting that the Buddha talks about equanimity and patience as being two of the main qualities we have to develop in dealing with others. He wasn’t some starry-eyed Pollyanna thinking that we’re all going to love one another. He recognized that living with other people is difficult, and one of the main problems is how you talk to yourself …
- A Larger Perspective… This is why we spread thoughts of goodwill to all beings, compassion, empathetic joy toward all beings, equanimity toward all beings, to open up the mind a little bit—to get that concept of “all beings” in there. This is also why the reflection on birth, aging, illness, death, separation, and the principle of karma comes in two forms. In the first, you reflect …
- Invest in the Breath… What are you going to depend on as your body begins to erode away, as your mental capabilities begin to erode away? If you’ve been developing qualities like mindfulness and alertness, concentration and discernment, you can deal with these problems with a lot more skill, equanimity, and patience, or at least do your best to work around them. When the Buddha talks about …
- Respect, Confidence, & Patience… this is a question of trial and error, testing to see which recommendation is appropriate for which particular problem. And as I said at the being, trial and error require patience. Equanimity. The willingness to learn. The ability to step back a bit from whatever is going on, when it’s not going well, and taking a good, long look at it. And try …
- Tranquility & Insight in Tandem… You learn patience, and you learn equanimity, but there’s a lot more than needs to be learned. As the Buddha said, there are some causes of stress that go away when you simply look at them, but not all of them. In fact, most of them require that you look at how you’re thinking, look at how you’re fabricating around them …
- Skills to Make You Free… limitless goodwill for all beings, limitless compassion for those who are suffering, limitless empathetic joy for those who are happy, and limitless equanimity in cases where you can’t make any difference. These attitudes enlarge the mind. The next two skills are that you train yourself in virtue and train yourself in discernment: your ability to see what’s going on in the mind …
- Pleasure on the Path… This means that, as you’re watching the breath and there are pains in the body, you learn to treat them with some equanimity, accepting the fact that there will be pains in different parts of the body. Ajaan Lee’s image is of a tree that has some old leaves and new leaves. The new leaves nourish the tree. The old leaves are …
- Off the Continuum… pleasure and rapture born of seclusion, pleasure and rapture born of concentration, and the pleasure of the mind coming into equanimity. In other words, it’s a pleasure that has nothing to do with sensual pleasures. It’s off the continuum. And it’s a pleasure to be developed. The most important part of the first sermon is in a section that’s often …
- Friends with the Breath… And then develop thoughts of equanimity, realizing that ultimately each of us has his or her own kamma, his or her own actions, that we’re each responsible for our happiness and for our suffering. What this means is that you’ve got to work on your own kamma—which is what we’re doing as we’re meditating: working on skillful kamma, the …
- The Skill of Letting Go… one in which you develop dispassion for it simply by watching it with equanimity, and the other where you have to exert a fabrication before you develop dispassion. The first sort are the ones where you haven’t basically been paying attention to why you’re holding on to something. When you look at it directly, you see quickly that it’s not worth …
- The Truth of Transcendence… loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. [Pause.] There’s no laughter. [Laughter.] You think that’s what the Buddha awakened to? Those four wonderful truths? [More laughter.] I had to sit my niece down and explain things to her. More recently I read someone saying the Buddha awakened to four noble truths about life, and that was it. In other words, he didn …
- Breath Meditation: The Second Tetrad… It’ll be a lot less likely to regard any incident as just too much to take, where it suddenly snaps and its goodness disappears—its calm, its equanimity, its patience all disappear. If those things can disappear, you’re really up the creek. You don’t know what your mind is going to do. But if you learn how to feed it well …
- A Path Under the Trees… In other words, you have goodwill or equanimity for others; you don’t wish for anybody to suffer. And then there’s resolve on non-harm, that you’re not going to harm anybody. The way those resolves get carried out is that the mind turns inward to find a sense of well-being inside. That’s what right concentration for. When the Buddha …
- The Lessons of Good Kamma… a mind of unlimited goodwill, unlimited compassion, unlimited empathetic joy, unlimited equanimity. A mind trained not to be overcome by pleasure or by pain. A mind developed in virtue and discernment. These qualities expand your mind, so that what comes in from the past doesn’t have to make you suffer. What the Buddha does emphasize when he introduces the topic of kamma is …
- To Escape the Prison of Time… You develop goodwill for all, compassion for all, empathetic joy, equanimity—all around. When you do, your actions are bound to be more skillful, less harmful. If it turns out there is no rebirth, or actions don’t have consequences, then at the very least you can be honorable in your intentions. For instance, say you believe in the principle of the power of …
- Reflect on What You’re Doing… Feelings would be a feeling of ease, well-being, or equanimity. The perception would be the mental image you have of how the breath comes in and out of the body. Fabrication would be your intention to stay here. It starts out with directed thought and evaluation as you talk to yourself to get the mind to settle down, but even as you drop …
- You Can’t Relax Your Way to Awakening… We develop rapture, calm, concentration, and equanimity so that the mind will have an alternative place of well-being to stay to give itself a good foundation, so that it can deal with pain and not feel threatened by it. But it doesn’t mean the pain’s going to go away. If you could just go into jhana and wipe out all pain …
- Inner Wealth… That’s equanimity. That’s something else. Mindfulness is remembering that the mind needs to be trained and remembering what you’ve learned about how to do it, so that when something comes up in the mind, you learn how to recognize that quality of mind as skillful or unskillful, helpful or unhelpful in training the mind, and then you remember what to do …
- The Path of Mistakes… limitless goodwill, limitless compassion, limitless empathetic joy, limitless equanimity. Learn how to cultivate these emotions, because they help keep you on the right track, strengthen your resolve not to be harmful, and also teach you where your limitations are: what you can do, what you can’t do in terms of correcting the situation within yourself and the world around you. Again, these attitudes …
- Choosing Freedom… You could think thoughts of goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity. Extend those to everybody you can think of—whatever you find calms the mind, gives a sense of well-being inside. Once there’s that sense of well-being, then turn and look. See how your breath is at that point. Has the breath changed? If it has, see if you can then focus …
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