Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. Magha Puja: Showing Respect with the Practice
     … This is where you find your true refuge, in developing their qualities in your mind—qualities of mindfulness, qualities of alertness, ardency, patience, endurance, concentration, discernment. As these qualities get stronger and stronger in the mind, you find that you really can take refuge in them. They provide you with a solid foundation. They lift your mind above its ordinary concerns, lift it above … 
  3. Feeding the Mind
    Where is your mind feeding right now? Where is it hoping to get its happiness? This is a very basic question of the meditation. The whole issue of feeding, taking sustenance, is a major issue in the Buddha’s teachings. There’s a series of questions called the Novice’s Questions. They start out with, “What’s one? What’s two? What’s three … 
  4. Skills for Dying Well
     … And you can decide, “I don’t want to go there.” You can do this because you’re getting the mind settled through mindfulness, alertness, and being ardent in doing this well. Now, these are precisely the skills you’re going to need at the moment of death. You can create a sense of well-being in the mind and you don’t feel … 
  5. The Path Converges Right Here
     … As you do this, you’re developing a lot of the qualities you’re going to need to get the mind to settle down. Being mindful, alert, and ardent comes into the factor of right mindfulness. You keep one topic in mind, such as the body in and of itself. Notice the “in and of itself.” That also refers to the idea of being … 
  6. Concentration: A Balancing Act
     … The Buddha’s description of how you go from mindfulness to concentration is in the seven factors for awakening. You start with mindfulness, then you read your mind: Does the mind need gladdening? Or does it need concentrating? Does it need cheering up? Or does it need settling down? If it’s too active, you go for the more calming factors: calm, concentration, and … 
  7. Lust
     … Or just look at what lust does to the mind, right here, right now, when it starts flaring up. Think of how much you lie to yourself, how many areas of the mind get shut down as you focus on liking this, wanting that, and totally ignoring all the consequences. The narratives you build up in the mind are total fantasies. To be attractive … 
  8. Pleasant Practice, Painful Practice
     … In both cases, you’re learning how to look at the role of perception in your mind, along with the role of feeling and fabrication, which are the central aggregates in any attempt to free the mind from the aggregates. That makes you more and more sensitive to what the mind is doing to deceive and create unnecessary suffering for itself. As for which … 
  9. Concentration Food
     … In this way, mindfulness develops. There’s some confusion about what mindfulness means. It’s not just your awareness. It’s not just your consciousness. It’s the act of holding something in mind. In this case, you’re holding the breath in mind. It’s a way of reminding yourself, “Any other thoughts that come in are not welcome right now.” They’re … 
  10. Ripples Go Far
    We develop the sublime attitudes every evening as a way of opening up and airing out the mind. When you’re focused on your troubles, your suffering, your issues, you suffer a lot because the range is small and the pain is big. So of course it seems overwhelming. When you expand your range, you begin to realize that the pain is a lot … 
  11. Goodwill Plus
    When we think thoughts of goodwill, it’s important that we make it a comfortable place for the mind to stay. Some people have difficulty with that; other people have no difficulty at all. It depends on your attitude toward happiness. If you’ve come with the idea that happiness is something selfish, that you shouldn’t be happy when other people are out … 
  12. The Inner Monitor
    Ajaan Lee used to like to say that as you meditate, you’re developing three qualities or treasures in the mind. He uses the Thai word sombat, which means treasure. First you’ve got the breath, which is the object treasure. In other words, it’s the right object to settle on, because it’s very close to the mind. And among all bodily … 
  13. Dhamma Intelligence
     … He had to make himself small, to content himself with watching the breath, seeing what could be learned about the mind as he got the mind to watch the breath. It showed itself in the distractions it created. You learn a lot about the inner workings of the mind when you can figure out why it likes these distractions. That means you have to … 
  14. The Heart to Keep Going
     … We’re here for all the other skills that go into training the mind. Each time you find the mind wandering off and you bring it back, that’s strengthening a very essential skill—the skill to get your mind off a bad topic and bring it back to a good one. Even though this may happen many times, the fact that you’re … 
  15. Staying Still
     … Other times, you have to think your way here, cut your way through the vines of the mind: its attachment to this, that, and the other thing. This is why, in the section on concentration in Ajaan Lee’s book on mindfulness, he talks a lot about developing a sense of samvega as an important element in getting the mind to settle down. In … 
  16. True Friends & False
     … You can’t take these things as your true friends or reliable friends until you develop the mindfulness and the alertness so that you can be in charge. So you have to be aware that both pleasure and pain have their good side and their bad side, and you’re trying to develop that stillness of mind and the clarity of mind that allow … 
  17. Mindful of Death
    Breathe deeply to energize the body and to wake up the mind. This is a necessary step in the breath meditation because if you start out with a very relaxed breath, it’s easy to drift off. So energize things a little bit. Breathe deeply. Think of the breath going all the way down through your torso, waking up the different elements in the … 
  18. Humility & Confidence
     … You’ve got a mind. You’ve got a quality that the Buddha calls luminosity of the mind. It doesn’t mean that the mind is already awakened or already pure. What it means is the mind can observe itself. You’ll be observing not only the breath, but also the mind as it relates to the breath—and that, in fact, is going … 
  19. Harmony, Right & Wrong
    When we bring the mind into concentration, we’re trying to bring the body and the mind together in harmony in a right relationship. Both of those aspects are important: both the harmony and the right relationship. This is why we spend so much time with directed thought and evaluation at the beginning: evaluating the breath, evaluating the mind, to see how the body … 
  20. The Conditions for Goodwill
     … That’s what the mindfulness is all about: to keep in mind what you really want so that you don’t forget. And it requires determination. When the Buddha talks about goodwill, he says it’s a form of mindfulness on which you should be determined—with mindfulness meaning something you keep in mind so you don’t forget. And you’ve got to … 
  21. How to Listen
     … You can go straight from mindfulness to insight.” But the Buddha’s instructions for mindfulness, basically, are instructions on how to get the mind to settle down into oneness. So you’re listening to the talk and you can bring your mind to the oneness of stillness. That’s an important factor in how to listen. Then, when the Buddha could see that Yasa … 
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