Search results for: "Equanimity"
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- 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 …
- Training Your Minds… Although the Buddha says in cases like that you want to emphasize calm, equanimity, and concentration, I’ve also found that there are times when if the mind is going to think, well, give it something good to think about. If it’s yelling at you or telling you that you can’t settle down, you’ve got to think about something, you can …
- 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 …
- Do Jhana… attitudes of unlimited goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. Sometimes, when you’re sitting and meditating, the face of somebody you know may appear: somebody you like, somebody you don’t like, somebody from your past, somebody you don’t recognize at all. Your first reaction should always be goodwill for that person, to cut through any of the narratives that might come in …
- Watching Over Time… He says that when the mind seems to have too much energy, you should try to use calming qualities, like calm, concentration, and equanimity. When the mind is too sluggish, you should try to develop qualities that are more enlivening, like actively analyzing what’s going on in the present moment, putting in effort, being really persistent in what you’re doing, and trying …
- Kindfulness… conviction, persistence, mindfulness, alertness, concentration, discernment, goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity. These are all good qualities to develop. As for the word qualities here, it’s best to think of them as habits you develop in the mind. That’s because it’s more useful to think of the mind in terms of what it’s doing than in terms of what it is …
- Toward Release… And then the next question is, what do you do with that calm? What do you do with the concentration and equanimity that go along with it? The Buddha talks about developing the factors for awakening even further. He says that, based on seclusion—by which he means the mind secluded in concentration—you try to develop dispassion. You do that by looking at …
- Days Fly Past… As for what you did in the past, you don’t want to carry that around as a burden, but in case there are things in the past that are burdensome to the mind, the best way to deal with them is to try to develop as much goodwill, compassion, appreciation, equanimity as you can in the present moment. Try to make these qualities …
- Gaining the Dhamma Eye… As the Buddha said, if you develop immeasurable goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity, the results of past bad karma will be minimized, because of the large and abundant quality of your mind. So this is what the Dhamma requires. Practice the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma. You tell yourself, “I’m going to put my preferences aside and really shape my life …
- Fabrication at the Breath… I just sit and try to be very equanimous in the present moment as I breathe in and breathe out.” And the Buddha said, “There is that kind of breath meditation, but,” he said, “it doesn’t give great fruit or great benefit.” So he took the opportunity to teach a type of breath meditation that did give great fruit and great benefit. He …
- The Walls of Ignorance… Then, when they’re down and we can really see, we use equanimity to gauge for ourselves where we actually have been skillful and where we haven’t. That way we can learn from our mistakes. As the Buddha once said, “One of the signs of wisdom is in seeing your own foolishness.” At least that’s the beginning of your quest for knowledge …
- Focus on the Doing… The path to the end of suffering includes right concentration, which includes rapture, pleasure, both physical pleasure and mental pleasure, along with strong solid states of equanimity. When you’ve learned how to tap into that skill, then the desire to practice becomes more strongly based, and the path becomes enjoyable in and of itself. As it becomes enjoyable, then the second base for …
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