Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. Ups & Downs
     … So, when the meditation goes up, your mind doesn’t have to go up with it. When the meditation goes down, the mind doesn’t have to go down with it. Keep your mind—the observer, the quality of alertness—on an even keel. That’s how you see things that you never saw before. When Ajaan Maha Boowa talks about singleness of mind … 
  3. To Delight in the Path
     … As you gladden the mind, it keeps you going. It also helps develop your powers of concentration. That’s the next step. As the Buddha said, when you’ve worked on gladdening the mind, the next step is to concentrate the mind. And the mind is a lot easier to concentrate when it’s been gladdened by good things. When it’s concentrated, it … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. Effort against the Hindrances
     … It’s simply caused by a lack of mindfulness. Your mindfulness has slipped, you’re off someplace else. Well, you re-establish mindfulness back where you were before and then you try to make it extra strong. But there are a lot of hindrances that are not quite so innocent. They come with an agenda. They tell you how important they are, that you … 
  6. Moral Intelligence
     … We use mindfulness to remind ourselves that this is where we want to stay. We’re not going to wander off. Why? Because we know that if we wander off, there’s going to be trouble. If we allow the mind to wander into thoughts of greed, aversion, delusion or sensuality, ill will, harmfulness, then we’re going to suffer—and eventually other people … 
  7. An Island of Certainty
     … The mind, the state of the mind, is what we have to preserve. And that’s something we can know directly—as long as we don’t lie to ourselves. As Ajaan Chah said, one of the first things you learn as you watch the mind is how quickly it lies to itself. So as you look around and realize you can’t depend … 
  8. Enjoying the Path
     … For example, the directed thought and evaluation that are necessary to get the mind to settle down: Part of you says, “Why should we be doing this? This is thinking, and we’re not supposed to be thinking on the path.” Or, “This is the discriminating mind. We’re not supposed to have the discriminating mind.” There’s no way the mind can settle … 
  9. Admit Your Stupidity
     … I think I’ll stop having attachment.” The mind doesn’t work that way, because we’ll be seeing, as we get to know the mind, that it tends to feed. To think that you can simply give up feeding by realizing that food is impermanent is not very realistic. You have to understand why the mind is feeding on things that are unhealthy … 
  10. Impatience
     … Ajaan Maha Boowa has a favorite saying, “Wherever there’s mindfulness, there’s practice. Wherever there’s no mindfulness, there’s no practice.” You can be sitting here with your eyes closed and in the meditation posture for hours and hours, but if you’re not mindful, it doesn’t count as practice. On the other hand, you can be out walking around doing … 
  11. Worlds to Watch Out For
     … And the mindfulness you bring here: It’s important to understand that mindfulness is not just bare awareness. It’s the ability to hold something in mind; to keep something in mind. And one of the things you want to keep in mind is that you do have the power of choice. We had these chants just now, reflecting on the Buddha, the Dhamma … 
  12. Disposable Worlds
     … You’re creating a special place for the mind to settle in, so that it can be at ease in the present moment, so that it can be stable in the present moment. Once it’s stable and at ease in the present moment, then it can see things a lot more clearly, especially what’s going on inside the mind itself. The problem … 
  13. Directing the Flow
    The mind well trained brings happiness; the mind untrained brings suffering and stress. The Buddha once said that it’s a sign of a wise person to realize how much the mind needs training. If it’s untrained, it’s like an untrained animal. If you have a dog that hasn’t been trained, it can’t live in the house. If a horse … 
  14. A Doctor’s Strategies
     … So these are some of the things you can think about when the mind is unwilling to settle down. Or if the mind has a particular problem, you can sit there and watch it. When the mind is sleepy, what is sleepiness? How much of it is physical, how much of it is mental? You can pose that question in your mind. When the … 
  15. Commit & Reflect All Around
     … The mind is the forerunner of all things, they are made by the mind, and they are made excellent by the mind. In other words, what the mind does is the source of these things. So you want to look inside: What are you doing? You don’t want to think that you’re passively watching something. There’s a lot going on under … 
  16. The Uses of Right Concentration
    The Uses of Right Concentration December 2, 2014 It takes a fair amount of effort to get the mind into right concentration—so much so, that many of us don’t want to hear that there’s still more to be done. We’d rather stop right here and rest. But while it may be true that right concentration is the last factor of … 
  17. Remembering Ajaan Lee
    Ajaan Lee wrote two books on the establishing of mindfulness, and each one is distinctive. The first one is distinctive because of the emphasis he places on the three qualities you bring to the practice: mindfulness, alertness, and ardency. That’s the recurring theme throughout the book. Mindfulness he defines as keeping something in mind. As he points out, just the practice of simply … 
  18. Four Bases of Success
     … At the same time, use effort on the mind. If the mind is wandering off, you bring it right back. It wanders off again, you bring it right back again. You’ve got to show the mind that you mean business. Otherwise, it’ll punch in the clock and then go off and sleep under a tree someplace. So look at your mind: What … 
  19. Developing Discernment
     … being mindful to stick with it consistently, so that you begin to see things in the mind that you didn’t see before. A lot of the mind’s subterfuges lie in the gaps. As Ajaan Lee once said, there comes a point when the mind just passes out and suddenly you find yourself in a different world. What happened in the moment of … 
  20. Immersed in the Body
    In the verses on respect that we chant often, the Buddha mentions respect for the triple training, which is training and heightened virtue, heightened mind or concentration, and heightened discernment. But he also mentions respect for concentration. It’s as if he wanted to make sure you know, that you’re doubly sure, that concentration is important. Maybe he foresaw that, in later centuries … 
  21. Gather ’Round the Breath
     … your awareness of the breath, your awareness of the mind together with the breath. You want your mindfulness to think about the breath, and to think about the mind, and your alertness to pay attention to both: How are things going with the breath? And to what extent is the mind staying with the breath? In the beginning, you have to go back and … 
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