Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. The Size of Your Eyes
     … After all, it’s the same mind with the same habits. This is why the Buddha taught restraint of the senses as a foundation for the meditation – in other words, looking after your eyes and ears and nose and tongue and body and the things that go through your mind as you go through the day. When you’re looking at something, why are … 
  14. Avoidance
     … that the suffering that really weighs the mind down comes from its actions and that you are free to choose what you’re going to do—“actions,” here, meaning not just actions of the body, of course, but actions of the mind, the decisions, the choices in the mind. You have the freedom to change those. You’re not totally determined. We’re not … 
  15. Feelings Not of the Flesh
     … That’s how mindfulness governs the other factors of the path. In other words, it looks at what’s there in the mind and it remembers, from what you’ve done or heard in the past, what to do with that particular state of mind. If the mind doesn’t want to settle down, what have you learned about dealing with an obstreperous mind … 
  16. The Skill of Happiness
     … Try to be mindful, remembering that you’re here to stay with the breath. Then, if you have meditated before, you can remember the lessons you’ve learned as to what works and what doesn’t work in getting the mind to settle down and to be happy to stay here. Because the mind is like a committee. There are lots of views, lots … 
  17. Four Determinations
     … You have to think your way to get the mind to settle down with the breath: You adjust the breath to fit with the mind; you adjust the mind to fit with the breath. But there comes a point where you don’t have to adjust anymore. The fit is perfect, or at least good enough to settle down in. But often the mind … 
  18. Thinking Your Way to Stillness
     … He said to keep these things in mind while you’re living at home with your children and you’ll find that it will lead the mind to a sense of well-being, a sense of confidence, and from that sense of confidence the mind will eventually get concentrated. So these are ways of thinking that actually lead the mind into concentration. They’re … 
  19. Breath Meditation When It’s Hard to Breathe
     … This is a skill we should keep in mind. As Ajaan Lee says, we have lots of potentials in the body, lots of potentials in the mind that we hardly use. They’re very elemental, which is one of the reasons why we overlook them. We have space as well. You can hold a perception of space in mind when the body gets tight … 
  20. Don’t Just Fatten Your Mind
    Don’t Just Fatten Your Mind October 9, 2018 We practice concentration as our food on the path. We try to settle the mind with one object, like the breath, and bring the mind to the object in a way that it feels at ease and has a sense of fullness, refreshment. So we work with the breath to see what kind of breathing … 
  21. What Is Skillful?
     … You’re also discovering things about the mind. And it’s the same as you’re focusing on the breath: There will be a lot of wandering around in the mind that you wouldn’t have noticed if you hadn’t made up your mind you were going to stay right here. Otherwise, you float seamlessly from one thought into another into another. If … 
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