Search results for: "Becoming"
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- Worry vs. Heedfulness… And if you hold on to the body for its own sake, then you’ll become like those people who die and then become worms in their own corpses. But if you use the body as a tool, you find it has a lot to offer. So think of it as a tool. It’s not your haven but it can be your set …
- Friends… It doesn’t seem like much, but often the people who don’t seem like much are the ones who become your most steadfast friends, the ones you end up learning that you can rely on, who really are helpful. The breath is that kind of friend. When you first look at it, there’s not much there: just in and out. It doesn …
- Hedgehog Knowledge… It’s that quality of familiarity that makes things new or allows for things to become new. There’s a story in the texts about what the Buddha calls the foolish, inexperienced cow—I’ve always liked that idea. A foolish, inexperienced cow is eating grass on a meadow on one mountainside and happens to look over to another mountainside, and there’s a …
- Freedom Through Painful Practice… You’ve got to learn how to gauge what’s going on in your own mind and become your own teacher. One of the prime lessons we learn looking at the Buddha becoming his own teacher, was noticing where he was causing himself unnecessary stress, unnecessary suffering. In some cases, it’s obvious. In others, it’s more subtle. Sometimes you’re holding on …
- Judging Your Thoughts by What They Do… He further commented that the kinds of thoughts you think become tendencies in the mind. They bend the mind in their direction. It becomes easier and easier to think those thoughts. And those thoughts will lead to actions. So what kind of actions do you want to head toward? Apply the principle of skillfulness expressed in his teachings to Rahula. You look at the …
- Stand Your Ground… You find that that sensitive point actually becomes a position of strength. This is true not only as we go through life but as life ends. You need to have a sense of a firm foundation when the mind realizes that it can’t stay with the body any more. In Thailand, when they have funerals they’ll usually print some books, and there …
- Mindfulness: The Whole Formula… Suddenly you’re not with the breath anymore, you’re someplace else, especially if the breath hasn’t yet become very comfortable. When there’s nothing particularly appealing to it, the mind very easily slips off. Sometimes it takes quite a while before you realize that you’ve slipped off. Then you might decide, “Well, as long as I’ve slipped off here, I …
- Appropriate Attention… Another type of craving is the craving for becoming, where you try to take on an identity in a particular world of experience based on a desire. And there’s craving for non-becoming, where you don’t like your identity, you want to change it, destroy what you’ve got, but in the course of destroying it you take on a new identity …
- Abusing Pleasure & Pain… This is where you become more sensitive to the breath energies in the body: the flow of energy down the back, or sometimes up the back; down the legs, or sometimes up the legs. These things really vary from person to person. You find that conceiving of the breath energy in different ways helps to modulate the breathing so that it feels good: just …
- You Contain Multitudes… We tend to think of ourselves as having one mind, one self, but there are lots of minds in there, lots of states of becoming. It’s not always clear who’s in charge. What we’re doing as we meditate is trying to put the mind concerned about your true well-being, your long-term welfare and happiness, in charge, and get everyone …
- Messaging Your Mind… In cases like this, with the activity in the body becoming so quiet, then whatever is going on in the mind becomes a lot clearer. This then becomes your laboratory for watching the mind, because after all, the big problem in life is that we want happiness, but we do things that cause suffering. Even though we think we’re doing things that will …
- The Not-Self Discourse… As a result, one of his listeners in the five brethren, Kondañña, gained the Dhamma eye, becoming the first noble disciple in the Buddha’s teachings, and also the first member of the Sangha—the conventional Sangha—when he received ordination after the end of the sermon. The story doesn’t end there. It goes on to say that over the next few days …
- Learning How to Talk to Yourself… You become conscious of the current in the same way when you say, “I’m going to breathe this way, think about the breath in this way, try to maintain a perception of the breath in this way.” And the mind says, “No, I’m going to go someplace else.” All too often, as we go through life, we don’t know what we …
- Gratitude to Things… Then you ask yourself, “What am I doing with their good intentions? Am I just wallowing in the comfort, or am I actually trying to create some goodness on my own to dedicate to them?” As the Buddha said, this is one of the motivations for actually becoming an arahant, so that all the good things that people have done for you will bear …
- Self-Control… We don’t let somebody else’s injustice make us become unjust. We don’t let somebody else’s misbehavior become an excuse for our misbehavior. We learn how to resist these things. We learn the skills in resisting. In other words, you have to learn what things you have to stand up for, and what things you have to make yourself as streamlined …
- Focused on Your Duties… You suddenly find yourself going back into that state of becoming. If you happened to die at that moment, that’s where you’d go, in line with that idea—maybe to get revenge, maybe to go back and relive the issue, try it out in a new way, neither of which is going to be very helpful. So you want to get practice …
- Potentials for Refuge… That’s how the skills of breath meditation become your own. In Thai they have a pun around the word patipat. To patipat something means to practice it, but to patipat a person means that you look after the person, to serve his or her needs. And as they often say, when you patipat the Dhamma, you also patipat yourself: When you practice the …
- Character… But if you think of your activities in terms of developing the qualities that you’ll take with you, then the work of the world can become part of the practice. And see it as an opportunity to develop your persistence, patience, and endurance. That way, you have something solid. Because when we leave this life, the qualities of the mind are what go …
- Monotasking… They become tasks with one dimension, or at most two. But when you stay with the breath, it’s an all-around task that requires your full attention. On the body side, you’re trying to be aware of the full body as you breathe in and breathe out. You gain a sense of how the breath has an impact on the different parts …
- Delight… In other words, you think in terms that have nothing to do with becoming—a self or a world—and that cut through the processes of becoming. And you find that there’s no conflict. You can delight in that. As you take these different kinds of delight, they give you the energy you need in order to practice. You’re doing a good …
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