Search results for: "Thought"

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  2. Your Ancestral Territory
    We begin each meditation session with chants about the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha, developing thoughts of goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity, partly so that you can develop the right environment, the right mental environment, for the practice as you’re sitting here right now, but also so that you can associate these ideas with your breath. That way—when, in the course … 
  3. Matters of Life & Death
     … Whatever thought comes into the mind that disturbs the balance, just drop it, drop it, drop it. This is where you have to learn how to strip away all the Velcro of your thoughts, so that they don’t stick, they don’t grab you. A thought can come, and you find that if you don’t grab it, it can just go right … 
  4. Thinking & Evaluating
     … What kind of thinking would actually help you put that lust aside? And what thought in the mind is resisting the idea? OFten the techniques will work if you want them to work. So you’ve got to work on the part of the mind that says, “I don’t want this to work. I want to stay with the lust.” You have to … 
  5. Admirable Friendship
     … He thought dictatorship was the best kind of government for Thailand. But that was beside the point as far as I was concerned. The point was: What were the good Dhamma lessons he had to give? What were the good things in his way of speaking, acting; the way he looked at things that I could learn from? I picked that up as best … 
  6. Honest & Observant
     … And the best way of doing that is trying to catch the distraction more and more quickly until you can see the moments where decisions are being made even before the thought is clearly a thought. This is where the discernment comes in, because you can see where the thought is going to go. It’s determined by the intention that oftentimes precedes the … 
  7. Dhamma Books & the Actuality
     … If you’re going to look for happiness, especially a happiness that’s solid and secure, the mind needs to be trained so that its thoughts don’t go and destroy its happiness. So that’s the orientation part – the directing part. But just being directed is not enough. You actually have to get down and do the work. That’s where the ardency … 
  8. Analyzing Anger
     … And then you look at the drawbacks: “If I actually acted on this anger, even if I just thought these thoughts of anger, where would they lead me? What would be the results?” You have to rub your nose in all the stupid things you’ve done under the power of anger or you’ve seen other people do under the power of anger … 
  9. Patience
     … The first thought that went through his head was that those fish would be good to eat. Immediately, it was like the ground opened beneath him, and he fell back down to earth, woke up. Just because he had that one thought, he couldn’t stay in heaven. The Buddha talks about living with virtuous people as a kind of heaven. He says it … 
  10. Messaging Your Mind
     … One, the Buddha calls directed thought and evaluation. In other words, you direct your thoughts to something and you make comments on it. It’s basically the way you talk to yourself. The other way is through perceptions. Perceptions are either individual words or images. They’re the quick way of getting a message across: the mind’s instant messaging. And these messages can … 
  11. Giving Ballast to the Mind
     … Here’s the main factor in our lives, the factor that shapes our thoughts, our words, and deeds, and through our thoughts, words, and deeds shapes the pleasures and pains we experience, yet it can turn on us in an instant. It can turn from peaceful to enraged, inflamed, and lustful. Things you used to believe, suddenly your drop. Standards you used to hold … 
  12. The Mind in Good Shape
     … Think thoughts of goodwill for yourself, as in the chant we had just now. Tell yourself, “May I be happy. May I find true happiness.” Reflect on the fact that true happiness has to come from training the mind, because no matter how good things may be outside, if your mind is in bad shape, you’re not going to be happy. Whereas if … 
  13. Take Nothing for Granted
     … directed thought, evaluation, and singleness of preoccupation. Now, directed thought and evaluation are nothing mysterious or mystical. They’re things you’re doing all the time. To direct your thoughts means you choose a topic to think about. To evaluate means you make comments on it, you ask questions about it. The mind is doing this all the time. It’s simply that now … 
  14. There’s Work to Be Done
     … The fact that your awareness is so broad helps prevent it from shrinking down so that it can enter into one of your little thought worlds. So there’s work to be done, but it’s good work—work with a sense of ease, a sense of well-being. Only when you’ve done this work can you then start letting go, first of … 
  15. Protest Your Virtue & Right View
     … You could sit here and follow your thoughts for the hour. That wouldn’t accomplish much. But you can also watch the mind as it creates a thought and see the processes, and that’s where it gets interesting because that’s where you understand how you process things—and it’s how you process things that is causing the suffering. It’s like … 
  16. Discernment
     … This is what directed thought and evaluation are all about. As Ajaan Lee points out, directed thought and evaluation are the work of discernment—trying to figure out, if the mind’s not settling down, why. Is the problem with the breath or is the problem with the mind? If the problem is the breath, work with it. Breathe in different ways: long, short … 
  17. A Gift of Well-Being
     … This way you begin to notice when certain types of thoughts or emotions rise up inside you. What do they do to the breath energy, and how can you use the breath energy to undercut the unskillful emotions and thoughts? In this way, you’re not wounding yourself as you go through the day. And you’re less likely to wound others. If you … 
  18. Good Traditions
     … You don’t give in to the thought that says, “I can’t manage this. This is too much for me.” You do what you can, and often you find that you end up doing a lot more than you thought you could. This is how your powers of endurance develop. When they’re developed, and we meet up against the inevitable problems in … 
  19. Maintenance Work
     … Sometimes the mind is getting ready to jump off to something and you wonder, “Where is it going? Anyplace interesting?” Or when a thought begins to form: It’s just a vague, inchoate sense of a thought, and the mind puts a label on it. Then you want to see, “Does this label really fit?” And that means you’re fully entangled. If you … 
  20. Conspiracies in the Mind
     … We’ve been disappointed many, many times in the past, but we keep going back to the same old thoughts of greed, same old thoughts of aversion, same old thoughts of delusion, as if somehow, if we rearranged the elements a little bit, they’d turn out a lot better this time. But it’s really the same old stuff, just over and over … 
  21. Peace of Mind
    Start the meditation with thoughts of goodwill. Just tell yourself, “May I be truly happy. May the people around me be truly happy—the people in my family, and then spreading out in all directions to all beings everywhere.” And think about what true happiness might be. It has to involve peace of mind, because if the mind is agitated, if the mind is … 
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