Search results for: "Equanimity"
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- Present Kamma… When your mind is well-trained, you can have thoughts of goodwill for all beings, compassion for all beings—without limit; equanimity in all cases where you need it, without limit. That enlarges the mind. As for training in overcoming pleasure and pain, we learn to do that as we meditate. If pains come up in the meditation, you learn how to deal with …
- The Same but Different, but the Same… You teach the mind to feed on this pleasure—the rapture, the pleasure, the ease, and ultimately just the equanimity that come as the mind settles down, gets more expansive. You feed on that so that you can then look at your other old ways of feeding, and you develop a sense of dispassion for them. Dispassion doesn’t mean that you hate them …
- The Choice Not to Suffer… rapture, serenity, concentration, and equanimity. These are the qualities you need to gain the strength not to get sucked in, so that you can maintain that stance of learning how to abandon anything that’s unskillful. You have your own separate place to stay so that when suffering or stress—any kind of dis-ease—comes up in the mind, you don’t have …
- Anupassana… Then use the perceptions that calm the sense of rapture down, that give rise more to a state of equanimity, so you can see to what extent you really are fabricating things right now. Those are the fabrications you want to gain insight into. Which are the ones you want to hold on to? Which ones are the ones you don’t want to …
- Fire Escapes… The four brahma-viharas are another way of getting the mind into jhana, because even with them, you have to practice developing concentration with directed thought and evaluation, without directed thought and evaluation, with a sense of pleasure, with a sense of rapture, with a sense of equanimity. In other words, you take these attitudes through the jhanas. The three formless attainments—infinite space …
- Looking at Your Life… But you’ve also got to develop an attitude of calmness or equanimity toward the fact that there will be difficult things to do, difficult things to give up if you really want to make the best use of your time. So you learn to accept that fact and take it in stride. Sometimes the things you have to give up are things you …
- When it’s Hard to Settle Down… goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity—learning to extend these attitudes to all people, all beings, both for their benefit and for yours. For their benefit, sometimes you simply extend goodwill to other beings and they’ll feel it. There are other times when they won’t feel it, but at least the fact of having developed that attitude within yourself means you’re …
- Willing & Observing… It wasn’t until the Buddha got all the way into the fourth jhana—where purity of mindfulness and purity of equanimity allowed him to gauge things for what they really were—that he was able to see things clearly in his mind. If you haven’t reached that level of stillness, you’re not in a position where you can see things clearly …
- Appropriate Attention… There’s less personal recrimination and more of a balanced, equanimous, objective view. And not just that. The questions you’re bringing into the present moment depend on what your larger view is. Often we hear that mindfulness is enough. Like the Beatles’ old song: All you need is love. The refrain in a lot of Buddhist circles is: All you need is mindfulness …
- Training for Dispassion… We’re not here just to accept or just to be equanimous about what arises. We have to change our attitudes and develop the desire to foster good qualities in their place. When the Buddha taught Rahula how to be observant, he said, “Observe your intentions. If you anticipate that an intention, if you followed it, would lead to any harm for yourself or …
- Food for Consciousness… Some types of equanimity are good, others are not. And you want to learn, “If I focus on this kind of pleasure or this kind of pain, what does it do to the mind, what kinds of actions does it lead to?” If it leads to unskilful qualities, you want to abandon that kind of focus. And you begin to see the extent to …
- Thinking Seriously about Happiness… For them, you have to have equanimity—not because you don’t feel for them or have goodwill for them, but simply because you realize that if you focus on trying to change their ways and they resist, you’re wasting your energy that could be put to good use someplace else. We all only have so much energy. So if people have wronged …
- Beyond Inter-eating… mindfulness, the ability to analyze things, persistence, rapture, serenity, concentration, and equanimity. These require the food of appropriate attention, which means looking at things in line with such questions as, “What’s skillful? What’s unskillful? What, when I do it will lead to long-term harm? What, when I do it will lead to long-term happiness?” You look at your actions, you …
- The World Is Swept Away… And there’s the determination on calm, which includes endurance and equanimity. Look at these as qualities you could develop in life. When you develop them, they’re really yours. Once they become part of your mind, a part of your heart, then they go with you wherever you go. No one can take them away from you. There was an incident in the …
- How to Straighten Out the World… This is why equanimity provides the safety net for those sublime attitudes we chanted just now. We start out with goodwill for everybody: for ourselves, for all the people around us. When we see that people are suffering, we feel compassion, we want to do what we can to help. When we see people are happy, we don’t resent their happiness, we’re …
- Laying the Infrastructure… And he wasn’t thinking about getting to universal compassion or universal emptiness or universal equanimity or anything, he just wanted to understand the present moment, really see what was going on. And it was in seeing what was going on that made everything open up in a way that was really stable, solid, safe, and secure. Of course, it’s possible to have …
- Free Not to Suffer… feelings of pleasure, feelings of equanimity. You learn how to give rise to those so that the mind doesn’t keep jumping at its emotions, looking for pleasure there. You can provide yourself with alternative sources of pleasure. In this way, you’re exerting what the Buddha calls a fabrication, three kinds of fabrications, to counteract whatever that source of suffering would be. Both …
- Lessons from Jhana… You’re clinging to the feeling of equanimity that comes up. Again, you cling because you haven’t really learned how to take your mind apart, or taken fabrications apart. You’ve just badgered it into that state. So it’s good, when you’re getting the mind into concentration, that you realize that there is right concentration that can help you understand the …
- Acceptance… And concentration is characterized by pleasure, rapture, equanimity, a strong sense of wellbeing. This is what gives us energy on the path. When the Buddha gives analogies for the different factors of the path, he often compares concentration to food. “We feed on rapture,” he says, “like the radiant gods.” Or when he compares our practice to a frontier fortress, he compares right concentration …
- Mindful of the Buddha’s Shoulds… And you’ll find that better than rapture and refreshment and ease is a simple state of equanimity. The mind settles in, on a more and more subtle level. The body feels still, the mind feels still, which means that any movements in the mind will show themselves more clearly. Then you ask yourself, “Okay, what’s sparking those movements?” So again, there are …
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