Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. Capture Your Imagination
     … What’s going on here? What is this awareness in the present moment? When they talk about the mind going here, going there, it does it really go? What goes? What stays? And if there’s a lapse in mindfulness, which part of the mind is aware of the lapse and which part is not? To what extent is the mind lying to itself … 
  12. Because the Mind Is Purposeful
    Because the Mind Is Purposeful September 13, 2023 Meditation involves two things: One is getting the mind to be still, and the other is gaining insight into its processes. We can do the two together. The Buddha talks about the process of what he calls sankhara—which we translate as fabrication. As he points out, we fabricate all kinds of things. We fabricate our … 
  13. The Role of the Observer
     … Those are the ones that you may know are unskillful, but part of the mind really likes them. You’ve got a battle going on in the mind, and that’s the area where the Buddha says that you have to “exert a fabrication.” Now, we know the different kinds of fabrication. There’s the breath, which is bodily fabrication; directed thought and evaluation … 
  14. Bless Yourself
     … And you realize, as I said, that you don’t know how much time you have left, so you’ve got to keep these teachings in mind, keep the need to develop skillful qualities in mind, keep in mind the need to abandon unskillful ones all the time. That’s how, when reflecting on the need for persistence, you see the need for mindfulness … 
  15. The Buddha Respects Your Potential
     … The ability to get the mind concentrated can do an awful lot for the mind, for your life, and for the people around you, so bring an attitude of respect to what we’re doing here—respect for concentration, as we said in the chant just now. It seems such a little thing—the mind, still. We think that most of the great things … 
  16. An Equanimity You Can Feed On
     … When the mind is hungry, it’ll stay with equanimity only through willpower. Then it’ll go slipping off. When the mind goes slipping off like that, it just goes back to its old likes and dislikes because it needs some food, it needs some nourishment of some kind. So you have to learn how to feed the mind well. A sense of comfort … 
  17. Training Your Minds
     … So take stock of the fact that your mind is complex, and it’s many minds. You get one mind to be concentrated for a while, and you find out there’s another mind that wants to destroy it, and another mind that’s indifferent. There are lots of different minds in there. The more of them that you can convert, then the more … 
  18. There’s Work to Be Done
     … The work of the mind is heavy work. To think, you have to use the body. There’ll be a little pattern of tension here, a little pattern of tension there, to correspond to the different thoughts that you want to keep in mind. If you have a lot to keep in mind, there’s going to be a lot of tension. So, as … 
  19. The Fourth Frame of Reference
    The Fourth Frame of Reference March 29, 2009 Ajaan Lee often made the point that when you’re focused on the breath, you don’t have just the first frame of reference or the first foundation of mindfulness. You have all four right there. The breath is the body in and of itself. That’s the first frame of reference. The feelings of pleasure … 
  20. Skillful Fears
     … Then there’s mindfulness: keeping in mind what’s skillful and what’s not, and keeping in mind the need to develop skillful qualities and abandon unskillful ones. And that leads to concentration, which is where you get your real nourishment. The Buddha compares concentration to food for the mind: the sense of well-being, the sense of rapture that can come when the … 
  21. What Should I Do?
    One of the questions that gnaws most frequently at the mind is, “What should I do?” It goes deeper, it eats deeper, than questions, say, like, “Who am I? What am I?” because our identity isn’t always an issue, but we’re constantly called on to make choices as to what to do. And that question, “What should I do?” implies a couple … 
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