Search results for: "Thought"

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  2. Analysis of Dhammas
     … Which thoughts side with the dark side of the mind? Which ones side with the bright side of the mind? Here again, there’s an assumption—that the mind is the cause of the actions, and you do have choice. There will be some actions that lead to good results, and others that won’t lead to good results. If you pay appropriate attention … 
  3. Making a Difference
    Every night, we start the meditation with that chant on thoughts of goodwill. And you notice it begins with goodwill for yourself. Some people feel embarrassed about this, but it’s based on an important principle. You can’t feel goodwill for other people if you can’t feel goodwill for yourself. This is where it has to start. Once you remind yourself of … 
  4. Fear & Anger
     … Even though scary thoughts or infuriating thoughts are coming through the mind, you can still breathe calmly. They don’t need to have such a total impact. So while we’re meditating here, it’s good to gain practice in being sensitive to what kind of breathing feels good, and where the different parts of the body are getting caught in unskillful energy patterns … 
  5. True Friends
     … getting some control over your mind, some control over your thoughts. It’s so easy for your thoughts to run wild, and you can make yourself miserable. Years back we had a meditation session. We were sitting outside under the trees, and one woman had brought a friend who had never meditated before. It was a beautiful day: not too hot, not too cold … 
  6. Perceptions of Self & Not-Self
     … As for things that you do want to do and you know will give good results, you identify with them: “That’s a thought I want to take on. I want to adopt that thought.’ So, you’re already using these perceptions as you need them. There comes a point in the practice, though, where you don’t need the perception of self anymore … 
  7. The Power of Perception
     … But if you think of the whole body as a breath energy field, you can breathe in and out of various places that you might not have thought of before: breathing out of the sides of your rib cage; thinking of the breath coming in from the left and the right as you breathe in and going out the chest you breathe out. Or … 
  8. Turn Off the Automatic Pilot
     … We thought we were doing the right thing, we thought we were actually getting pleasure out of it. There are lots of different reasons why we go along with the default settings. But we’re not paying careful attention. If you really start paying careful attention, you start seeing that there are areas where you’re adding a lot of stress where you don … 
  9. Bewildered
     … His first thought was, “Who’s looking after whom here?” Then he thought, “Well, they can do what they want. I’ve got to do this on my own.” So he meditated. He realized his problem was that he’d been trying to get rid of the pain instead of comprehending it. So, he set himself the task of comprehending it. And he gained … 
  10. How to Use the Teaching on Kamma
     … It’s an extremely useful teaching for helping you to understand what you’re doing right now, why you’re doing it, to see how you can get past thoughts of bad things that have happened to you in the past, thoughts of bad things you’ve done in the past. You see all these things in the light of a much larger picture … 
  11. All Fabrications Are Stressful
     … Everything else—even the deva worlds, the Brahmā worlds—has to be filtered through form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, consciousness. And the simple fact that they’re fabricated in this way—whatever the experience is—means that they’re going to be stressful. You can’t take them as a place where you can really rest. That’s one level of stress, one level … 
  12. Evaluating Your Practice
     … One is directed thought, and the other is evaluation. You bring your mind to the object, or as they say in Thai, you lift the mind to the object, you lift the object to the mind. This means that you make them both prominent, that you’re right here in the present moment, you’re going to stay with the breath in the present … 
  13. How to Change
     … Verbal fabrication is directed thought and evaluation, how you talk to yourself: You direct your thoughts to a topic and you make comments about it. You may ask questions about it, and when you’ve thought in those ways, that’s when you open your mouth to speak. Finally, mental fabrications are perceptions and feelings: the labels you put on things, the feeling tones … 
  14. Attention & Intention
     … One is what is skillful or unskillful to do with your thoughts, words, and deeds. The other issue is the four noble truths. These two issues are connected in that the four noble truths take the principle of skillful and unskillful action and apply it specifically to the question of why there’s suffering and how you put an end to it. Unskillful actions … 
  15. A Snare of Death Laid Out
     … It means the mind’s fascination with planning them, all the embroidery we create around them, all the perceptions and feelings and thought constructs—verbal and mental fabrications. Often that’s where our craving is focused. Often, when you desire a person, it’s not the person you desire. You desire your perceptions and thoughts of the person. So you want to get the … 
  16. Remembering Ajaan Suwat
     … So when the Buddha says you seclude the mind from sensual thoughts, sensual plans, you do that. You seclude it from unskillful qualities and you direct your thoughts to evaluate one object. It could be the breath; it could be goodwill; it could be the unattractiveness of the body. What happens when you really do this?—when you really do get the mind centered … 
  17. Compassion for People on Fire
     … In the beginning of the meditation, that’s the duty of directed thought and evaluation. Ajaan Lee talks about how directed thought and evaluation, particularly the evaluation, have to do with looking at the way you’re breathing, adjusting it so that it’s just right for the mind, just right for the body. When you get a sense of well-being, you work … 
  18. The Buddha’s Investment Strategy
     … That ability to drop a thought mid-sentence, drop a thought even when it’s all loose ends, is an important skill. You catch yourself in the middle of creating a little reality there but then you can reestablish your frame of reference in the present moment. You get more and more skillful at letting go, able to catch yourself in these various processes … 
  19. Dichotomies
     … by making that distinction in his thoughts. Skillful thoughts, on the one hand, were those that aimed at getting away from sensuality—in other words, renunciation—or that aimed at non-ill will and non-harming. The unskillful ones were aimed at sensuality, ill will, and harmfulness. He realized he couldn’t divide his thoughts in terms of his likes and dislikes. That would … 
  20. Ekaggata
     … directed thought and evaluation. These are precisely the things we’re working on as we meditate. You focus your thoughts on something, and then you observe it, you evaluate it. This is how alertness moves inside the mind. When you think of the breath in a particular way, when you focus on it in a particular way, what happens? Look carefully at this. The … 
  21. The Fourth Frame of Reference
     … This is especially true with thoughts. Notice, when a thought comes up, “What’s the appeal of this thought? Why do I go for this particular kind of thinking?” Once you’ve looked at the appeal, then look at the drawbacks. What are the drawbacks of going along with that kind of thinking? If you gave that particular kind of thinking free rein in … 
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