Search results for: "Thought"
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- Sort Things Out… For the time being, any thoughts that pull you away from the breath count as unskillful. Any thoughts that help you come back and help you stay here are skillful thoughts. It’s not as if when you meditate you have no thoughts at all. You start out with some thinking. The thinking gets more refined as your concentration gets stronger, but in the …
- Grasping the Snake… Actively develop new thought patterns in the mind so that when an angry thought comes up—and you know the kind of conversation the mind has with itself when it’s angry—you have an antidote ready. If anger does come into the mind, use the antidote to get rid of it. At other times, think in the terms that would undercut the anger …
- You Can Do Better… craving for sensuality—your fascination with sensual thoughts, sensual fantasies; craving for becoming—wanting to take on an identity in a world of experience so that you can get something you want from within that world; and craving for non-becoming—the times when you’d prefer to be obliterated or that the world be obliterated. These things you want to abandon. When you …
- Samvega First… To fend off any thoughts of people who have wronged you in the past, or people you’ve wronged, things that you’d like to go back and change but you can’t, you try to develop thoughts of goodwill and equanimity beforehand… You remind yourself, “Well, I’m trying to have goodwill for everyone, trying to be equanimous about the things I can …
- Inconstancy… When you realize the mind can lie to itself—and how much it does lie to itself—that’s good protection against distracting thoughts. The same with thoughts of inconstancy: Whatever you can think of that would pull you away from the concentration, anything that you find attractive, anything you find compelling: Just how long is that attraction going to last? The things that …
- Choose Your Battles… Things you shouldn’t endure are thoughts of ill will, thoughts of sensuality, and thoughts of harmfulness that arise in the mind. You don’t let them stay; you don’t let them take over. It’s natural that they will come, but you don’t have to continue with them. In Ajaan Lee’s image, you don’t have to continue weaving that …
- Two Guardian Meditations… You also have to realize that extending thoughts of goodwill doesn’t stop with those thoughts. You have to live in a way that’s congruent with your goodwill. It makes you stop and think also about happiness. Where does it come from? It comes from acting skillfully. What does it mean to act skillfully? How do you develop skill? Well, you look at …
- Food, Shelter & Work… Think thoughts of goodwill, as we did in the chant just now: “May I be happy. May all beings be happy.” You don’t want to take any issues with anybody into your meditation, so put all the issues of the day aside. The goodwill is there to create the context for what you’re doing right now. If any thoughts come up in …
- A Cocoon of Energy… Even when our thoughts go into great abstractions, they’re rooted right here. If anything happens to the body, it immediately pulls you right back. And as they’ve shown, a lot of our nerve-endings are down in the stomach, and they determine our moods. So, we have this pull inside the body. When we face the prospect that we might have to …
- Harmless & Clearheaded… Think thoughts of goodwill, like the chant we had just now. “May all beings be happy.” Remind yourself that there’s no good reason to wish ill on anybody. “May all beings find true happiness.” The world would be a much better place if everybody could learn to look inside for happiness, instead of looking outside. So once you’ve thought those thoughts, now …
- The Best Work Around… Is it really what you thought it was? Look deeper. Learn how to question it using the appropriate questions. That’s what appropriate attention means: finding a good question to ask about your assumptions and following it through, taking those assumptions apart. These are the two factors that can open things up in the mind. As the Buddha said, these are the two things …
- How to Talk to Yourself… If your thoughts begin to wander off to something else, remind yourself that you’re not there for that. You’re here to develop some concentration. So you drop those thoughts and you’re back at the breath. No matter how many times you wander off, you just keep coming back to the breath. When you do come back, reward yourself with a breath …
- Breath Teaches the Bramaviharas… At the same time, you begin to realize there are opportunities for well-being that you may not have thought of before. For me, Ajaan Lee’s method of breath meditation was very different from other breath meditation methods I’d learned up to that point. With the other ones, one, you weren’t supposed to play with the breath. The teachers would say …
- Alert… Without the breath as an anchor, it’s very easy to get carried away into thought worlds that refer to the past, refer to the future, refer to any place but right here, right now. Then you can’t really be sure that what you observe is true. If you want to see your mind, you have to see it in action, what it …
- Analysis of Qualities… As you try to focus on the breath, there will be other thoughts coming into the mind. Now, some of them are actually useful, such as the thoughts that say, “Is the breath comfortable? Could it be made more comfortable?” You’re not just lulling yourself to sleep. You’re trying to figure things out. But then, of course, there are the thoughts that …
- Use Your Imagination… The feeling is connected with perceptions, and it’s connected with thought constructs. What kind of thoughts are you constructing around the pain? What kind of perceptions are you applying to the pain? What exactly is the feeling? And how does the feeling differ from the body—the physical part? The body is the four elements; the feeling is something else. The perception is …
- Dualities… He’s talking about things in the mind—black states of mind and white states of mind, fast thoughts and slow thoughts—so that you can see differences. And you can see better and worse, when the mind is clearer than other times, when it’s less clear. You want to compare those. Which do you prefer? Which is actually less stressful? Where do …
- A Meditator is a Good Friend to Have… As for any other thoughts that may come into your awareness, just let them go. We’re trying to sensitize ourselves to what’s going on in the body and to how the breath can help. It’s an area of our awareness that we tend to ignore because we’re too interested with things outside to notice what we’re doing inside. When …
- Enlarge Your Mind… That thought helps to put your own personal problems into perspective. When you have this enlarged awareness, you begin to see that the way you suffer from physical pain or mental pain is not just the individual sensation of pain. It’s the whole state of becoming you’ve been constructing around it: the identity based around the desire to have the pain go …
- Questioning Your Conviction… You take your thoughts, which seem to be beyond your control, and you learn how to control them, keeping them focused on one topic, the topic you want. And see how far you can go with that. Ultimately, as he says, you have to end up letting go of both sides: what’s constant and inconstant; stressful, easeful; not-self, under your control. But …
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