Search results for: "The Mind"

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  2. Cut the Currents
    When you practice concentration, you have to gather the mind around one object—all the various strands, all the various wanderings around, trying to bring them together right here. The good thing when you’re focusing on the breath is that the breath is quite large. It has space for all the movements of your mind because it’s a whole-body process. When … 
  3. Do Jhana
     … Once the mind is in jhana, then it can develop your tranquility and insight even further. All these qualities go together and help to develop one another. In fact, for him, vipassana was not a name of a meditation technique. It was the name of a quality of the mind: a clear-seeing quality. Samatha was also a quality of the mind: calm, tranquil … 
  4. Undefeated Goodwill
     … Actions come out of the mind, so the mind has to be trained. Again, it’s not innately skillful. There are a lot of voices in the mind that want to get a quick and easy happiness, with no concern for the consequences. There was a book of positive psychology I read a while back when I was asked to review it for a … 
  5. Collecting Your Tools
     … learning how to put the mind in the spot where it doesn’t have to carry its tools around, but its knowledge is there when it needs it. We try to find a balance as we’re meditating, how to be quiet and yet alert at the same time, so that when issues arise in the mind, we know what we should do. Then … 
  6. Choiceful Awareness
    There’s a passage where the Buddha says that it’s possible to abandon unskillful qualities in the mind. If it were not possible, he wouldn’t teach it. It also is possible to develop skillful qualities in the mind. And again, if it were not possible to do that, he wouldn’t teach it. The underlying principle here, of course, is that we … 
  7. Bases of Power
     … So whatever your motivation might be, you use that to remind yourself of why you want to be here, especially as the mind starts to wander away from the breath. You’ve got to be able to pull it back, and part of the mind will say, “Hey, this is entertaining, what I’m thinking about here,” so you’ve got to have good … 
  8. Bursting Bubbles
     … These potentials are here in the mind. For example, with restlessness: We talked about this a little bit today. When the mind seems overcome by restlessness, you’ve got to remember that there’s a part of the mind, there are these potentials in the mind that you can be bringing to the fore. One of the potentials is that even though the thoughts … 
  9. A Passion for the Path
     … You have to prove to yourself, on the one hand, that this is the best thing the mind can create. It’s the best state of becoming you can experience: the mind in concentration. And you have to see at the same time the extent to which you’ve fabricated it. That’s where right view comes in to keep reminding you: When the … 
  10. Permission to Play
     … This way you get a sense of when you should try to change things, and when you shouldn’t; which problems in the body or in the mind respond to active intervention, and which ones respond better when you simply watch them with equanimity. As you put the mind in a better mood through giving it a good comfortable place to stay, or giving … 
  11. In Charge of Your Moods
     … You’re trying to develop a special quality of the mind: the mind when it’s still, at ease, solidly here in the present moment. When it’s here, it can observe itself. If you go running off after thoughts, you know about the thoughts, but you don’t know about yourself. Yet, as the Buddha says, it’s because of the mind that … 
  12. Challenges
    There are two big dangers when you try to get the mind to settle down. One is pain and the other is pleasure. And it’s through learning how to be intelligent around pain and pleasure that we can stay settled down. Otherwise, the mind goes flying off in other directions. With pain, of course, the issue is how not to feel irritated by … 
  13. The Mind Set Tall
     … There’s a very important part of the mind that would really flourish if it weren’t subject to lust, weren’t constantly hankering after nice smells, sounds, tastes, and things to look at. This is why these defilements flourish: because of delusion, the things that the mind hides from itself. And the reason it hides them from itself is because it really is … 
  14. What Are You Doing?
     … And Ajaan Fuang told me to write back to him and say that the problem is not with the TV or your work or home, the problem is inside the mind. Don’t go criticizing the world out there. Start looking at what’s wrong with your own mind, the part of the mind that’s criticizing the world. It’s an important point … 
  15. Calm & Insight
     … Calm, he said, is a quality of the mind. Insight is a quality of the mind. And you need them both. It’s not the case that you first do one and then the other, although most people will do it that way. They tend to have either more calm in their minds or tend more towards insight—in which case, the Buddha says … 
  16. Evaluating Your Practice
    Evaluating Your Practice January 12, 2012 When you try to bring the mind into concentration, there are two mental faculties that do most of the work. One is directed thought, and the other is evaluation. You bring your mind to the object, or as they say in Thai, you lift the mind to the object, you lift the object to the mind. This means … 
  17. Strength of Conviction
     … You can train the mind. And the quality of the mind determines the quality of the action. This is why we meditate: to get the mind in good shape so that the actions it chooses are skillful, harmless, and beneficial. And the word “action” here means not only your physical actions and your words, but also the thoughts that go through the mind, because … 
  18. Remorse
    When you sit down to meditate and settle down with the breath, the mind becomes very sensitive. Sometimes things you did in the past that you don’t feel right about will come up. And they hurt. At times like that, it’s all too easy to start feeling remorse. Remorse is not an attitude or a feeling that the Buddha recommended. Because, as … 
  19. Worries & Regrets
     … He also taught attitudes to go along with the technique for training the mind: reasons for training the mind, ways to think so that unskillful thoughts don’t come in and take over. In this way, you’re not leaving the mind empty. You’re giving it work to do. One important thing to think about is the principle of kamma, along with the … 
  20. Close to the Heart
     … As you deal with the breath more precisely, with more sensitivity, you find that the mind is finally willing to open up to itself. Prior to that point it was used to being abused and misused and so it shut itself in, shut itself up, even against you. One part of the mind shut up against another part, and so the healing couldn’t … 
  21. The Treasure of Virtue
     … So these qualities—mindfulness, alertness, and ardency—are precisely what you need to get the mind to settle down. You’re mindful of the breath, and then you’re alert to watch both the breath and the mind to make sure they stay together. Then, if they’re not staying together, you put forth an effort to figure out: Is the problem with the … 
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