Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. Switzerland Inside
    The Buddha’s basic teachings on mindfulness focus on two activities. The first is keeping focused on the body, or feelings, or mind, or mental qualities, in and of themselves; the second is putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. You need both activities to get the mind into concentration. The first is the actual concentration. For instance, at the moment … 
  3. The Power of Perception
     … Your ability to keep that labeling in mind is where mindfulness comes in. At the same time, the label is what mindfulness needs as a sign to remember. That’s how mindfulness works together with the perception. These two qualities of perception and mindfulness help each other along. As you get them more and more stable, you can stay more consistently with the breath … 
  4. Friendship Leading to Seclusion
    We come here to gain some seclusion so that we can focus on what’s going on inside the mind. The texts talk about three kinds of seclusion: bodily seclusion, mental seclusion, and then seclusion from your attachments. Bodily seclusion is when you’re away from other people, as when you go off and sit in your hut, sit in your tent, sit under … 
  5. Strengthening Concentration
    Strengthening Concentration January 5, 2012 In English, when we talk about somebody being single-minded, the implication is that the person is very focused on one single purpose, or one single aim. It’s a quality of the will. And that’s a very relevant way of thinking about concentration. It’s not only that you should have a single object on which you … 
  6. Friends Inside
     … It comes from training the mind. Nice things and good friends are good, but your real happiness comes from within. That’s why we work on the breath: so that we can have a real friend inside. The mind can be its own friend. Because sometimes the mind can be your enemy. It thinks up things that are actually going to be bad for … 
  7. Worlds Inside & Out
    The classic phrase for establishing mindfulness in the body is that you “stay focused on the body in and of itself, ardent, alert, and mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world.” That last phrase is interesting: “putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world.” They don’t have definite or indefinite articles, they don’t have an “a … 
  8. Mindfulness & Perception
     … The reminding is mindfulness. This is a point that’s often misunderstood. Mindfulness is paired with alertness. Alertness is what watches, sees what’s going on, and particularly, what you’re doing right now and the results you’re getting from what you’re doing. Mindfulness is what keeps your task in mind, reminds you keep staying here, staying here, staying here, don’t … 
  9. The Dhamma Protects
     … Okay, which part of the mind was blanking out which other parts of the mind? Which part of the mind wants to run with the things, which other part of the mind does not want to run with the things? There’s a battle that goes on in the mind, and you want to learn the tricks of the unskillful side so that you … 
  10. Challenges
    There are two big dangers when you try to get the mind to settle down. One is pain and the other is pleasure. And it’s through learning how to be intelligent around pain and pleasure that we can stay settled down. Otherwise, the mind goes flying off in other directions. With pain, of course, the issue is how not to feel irritated by … 
  11. Meticulous
     … So of course, the journalist writes an article about how, yes, perhaps the news cycles are invading our minds a little bit too much, but if you don’t keep up on world affairs, you’re a narrow person, she said. So she ended up justifying the fact that the news cycle is still invading our minds, and somehow it makes us better people … 
  12. The Prison Break
     … As the mind settles down like this, you’re peeling away this layer, peeling away that layer, and it’s in the peeling away that you see the movements of the mind, how the mind puts things together. That’s when both the mind and the heart are ready to start letting some of these things go. You’ve been letting go of certain … 
  13. Appropriate Attention
     … You see this in so many of the teachings, as when the Buddha talks about the qualities you bring to mindfulness and concentration: mindfulness—keeping something in mind; alertness—watching what you’re doing; and then ardency—putting your whole heart in doing it well. Notice that alertness here is not just being aware of the present moment. We’ve got consciousness in the … 
  14. The Pursuit of Happiness & Goodness
     … In other words, they blurred the mind, they obscured the mind, clouded the mind. And they could lead to some very unskillful states of mind, both in the pursuit of the pleasures and in enjoying them. He realized that that pursuit was a dead-end pursuit, so then he went to the opposite extreme: He pursued self torture and self affliction. But he came … 
  15. Wherever You Go, There You Aren’t
     … So one of the first things he said to Ajaan Mun was a complaint: “My mind is all over the place.” Ajaan Mun said, “At least you’re aware of it. This is actually one of the things you learn in mindfulness practice: learning how to watch a scattered mind, a distracted mind, and recognize it as a scattered mind, as a distracted mind … 
  16. Right Resolve & Right Speech
     … If the mind is settling down with the breath, fine. Keep it going. Try to breathe in a way that’s comfortable. But if the mind is not settling down, you have to look into why. This is where you want to hear more truthful speech inside. What’s the mind focused on? There will be times when it’ll be embarrassed to admit … 
  17. Patience & Tenacity
     … The lesson here, of course, is that your perception of the pain has a lot to do with how much it’s going to weigh down the mind. So change your perception. If you notice that there are periods when the pain seems to be bothering the mind more than at other times, okay, what happened? What perception went through your mind that made … 
  18. The Awful Truth
     … What are these things that pull you away? We build up this stillness inside so that we can use it as a foundation to look at these tendencies in the mind. In the Buddha’s terminology, they’re called asavas—effluents, things that flow out of the mind: sensual desires, states of becoming, views, ignorance. These things keep fermenting in the mind, bubbling up … 
  19. Good Work
     … So the meditation begins simply with the quest to find a place where the mind can rest and disentangle that stress debt and let it dissolve away. Then you can get down to work, seeing where the mind fools itself into going along with mind states that are really detrimental to it, fooling itself into actually liking them. The mind does a big propaganda … 
  20. Peace vs. Clinging
     … That’s because it’s peace of the mind that gives well-being. Even when we’re happy in the normal sense of smiling and cheerful, it’s because part of the mind is at peace. Things fit together. Of course, there are many levels of sukha, some of them worth pursuing, others not. But the really important ones are the ones that relate … 
  21. What Are You Doing in the Present?
    Try to bring your mind in harmony with the body, in harmony with the breath. Gently settle it down so that the breath can come in and go out with a sense of ease. You don’t squeeze it too much. You don’t force it too much. Notice, when you’re breathing out too long, if there’s a sense of squeezing it … 
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