Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. Expanding Your Awareness
    The mind in concentration, the Buddha calls mahaggattam cittam, the enlarged mind, or the expanded mind. There are two ways you can expand it. One is through developing the sublime attitudes: “May all living beings be happy. May they be free from stress and pain. May they not be deprived of the good fortune they have attained. All living beings are the owners of … 
  3. Alone with Your Mind
    One of the scary parts about growing old is that you get more and more stuck in your own mind as your eyesight fails you, your hearing fails you. They might stick you away in an old folks home where there’s nobody you know, very few people you can really communicate with. What would you have for companionship? Just the contents of your … 
  4. It’s Good to Talk to Yourself
     … Either you had other issues that were gnawing away at the mind, or you’re having trouble keeping track of the breath as it gets more subtle. So you move around and find something else. Or you can focus on the issues that are eating away at your mind. Ajaan Maha Boowa had a very useful analogy for different ways of getting the mind … 
  5. Feelings of Pain
    One of the definitions of concentration is a mind firmly established. We firmly establish it in the object of our meditation: in the breath, or in a meditation word, like Buddho. We try to make sure that it doesn’t fall down. If it falls down, we pick it back up; establish it again. It falls down again, pick it up; establish it again … 
  6. Fabricating the Present
    Fabricating the Present August 20, 2004 Bring the mind to the breath, for this is where everything important is happening. You want to be as still as possible so that you can catch sight of all these important things happening, because most often we don’t see that there’s anything important here. The breath goes in, goes out. That’s all we see … 
  7. Inner Refuge
     … We make up our minds we’re going to stay with the , and it seems like we have many minds all of a sudden and they’re all running off in different directions. Well, it’s not all of a sudden. It’s the way the mind has been all along. We’ve got lots of different voices, lots of different ideas, lots of … 
  8. Meditating When You’re Sick
     … She said, “I don’t know how much I can do with my limitations, but I’m going to try my best,” to be as mindful, to be as alert and keep the mind on skillful topics. It’ll be good for the body but even more importantly it’ll be good for your mind. You don’t want your mind to get dragged … 
  9. Sensuality Is a Fetter
     … The Buddha went on to say that all those varieties of animals come from the mind. You could be any of those animals; you probably have been many of those animals. Yet the Buddha said even that great variety is smaller than the variety of the mind itself. For a lot of us, sensuality is how we exercise our freedom to think, our freedom … 
  10. The Ten Priorities
     … They, too, strengthen the mind. You find that your mind becomes more wide open. It’s a more spacious mind to live in. It’s not totally concerned just with its own issues. You look around and you sense the needs of others. You have the ability to help. This is an important part of the path. It’s an important quality to develop … 
  11. The Skillful Heart
     … The same way when you get the mind really still, get the body really still: The little things that are happening in the mind, the subtle movements of the mind, become very clear. This is the other lesson of discernment, which is that the suffering that’s weighing down the mind is not being imposed on you from outside. It comes from within. Craving … 
  12. Truth Through Training
     … But when you learn how to overcome those resistances, you’ve learned a lot about the mind. So the training here is to get the mind to settle down, to be one with its object. In the beginning, you’re not quite one yet. You’re thinking about the breath and the mind, evaluating them so that they fit together. It’s like a … 
  13. Friends with Pain
     … That’s why the pain gets to the mind. The more you understand the pain, the more you can relate to it in a skillful way so that it doesn’t make inroads on the mind. The pain can be there in the knee but it doesn’t have an impact on the mind. The mind is perfectly fine because it’s quick enough … 
  14. A Concentration Diet
     … Our mind feeds off of these things. This is why when people go into sensory deprivation tanks, the mind starts getting really weird. It’s starved for food. And just as food outside can be either healthy or unhealthy, there’s also healthy and unhealthy food for the mind. Especially with intentions: Our mind has a tendency to feed off of unskillful intentions, and … 
  15. Anchored by Skillful Roots
     … They did survive, but at a huge cost, the cost of the skillful roots in the mind. It’s by nourishing the skillful roots that the health of the mind survives. Even if we have to leave this particular body, at least the mind has the potential for sending out skillful roots wherever it finds itself the next time around. It’s nourished with … 
  16. To Be Sure
    The Buddha had lots of names for the state of mind free from passion, aversion, and delusion. Nibbana, “unbinding,” is only one of them. Its meaning is freedom. That’s one of the attributes of that state of mind. Another attribute is one of safety. Refuge, harbor, the secure: These are some other names of that same state. That’s what we’re looking … 
  17. Complexities of the Mind
    We’ve come here to train our minds, and the human mind is the most difficult thing to train. There’s a passage in the Canon where an elephant trainer is talking to the Buddha. He comments on how elephants are very easy to understand. He says within a week after he started training an elephant, he would have learned all of that elephant … 
  18. Like an Athlete in Training
    The mind is like the body in that it needs its food. The difference is that the mind doesn’t feed off of physical food. It feeds off of contact, consciousness, and intentions. Like right now, we’re meditating. We’ve set the intention that we’re going to stay with the breath. That’s our food right now, and it’s good food … 
  19. Doing the Right Thing
     … Then to help the mind see clearly, we practice concentration and get the mind to settle down and be still for a while. You do whatever it takes to get the mind to settle down. This involves some discernment in noticing where the mind is obstreperous, or what it’s hanging on to so that it won’t settle down. You can figure out … 
  20. Letting Go
     … There’s a part of the mind that looks after the body, a part of the mind that looks after your social obligations, work obligations, family obligations; another part of the mind that’s dealing with your own desire for pleasure and entertainment. Any of these can come in. As soon as the mind settles down with the breath, part of the mind will … 
  21. Training Your Moods
    Remember while you’re meditating that you’re training the mind. You’re giving it a task to do and making sure it sticks with it. We call it training for two reasons. One is that it is a skill that you’re working on here: the skill of staying with one object with a sense of well-being, developing skillful qualities in the … 
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