Search results for: "Form"
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- At Home with the Breath… So this is a form of the ease and well-being that, as the Buddha said, is blameless, i.e., you’re not harming anyone else, and at the same time it’s a kind of pleasure that carries clarity with it. All too often the pleasure that we search for in life is under a fog. When we try to find our happiness …
- The Buddha’s Investment Strategy… The Buddha talks about different forms of wealth in the mind that you can invest in – in other words, qualities you can develop that can see you through – and the ability to let go is an important one. Discernment is another. The Buddha had a very pragmatic approach to truth. As we talk about the truth of our statements, the things that we say …
- Vows… That’s part of the discernment that forms this factor in determination. Sometimes we’re taught not to have goals in the meditation. Usually that’s on meditation retreats. You’re in a high-pressure environment, you have a limited amount of time, and so you push, push, push. Without any discernment you can do yourself harm. So in a short-term setting like …
- Choices Now & at Death… Look at the animal world and what you see is a small fraction of the many shapes and forms that the mind can take. When you’re counseling someone who’s facing death, that’s what you want to keep in mind: that the mind is capable of grabbing on, holding on to anything. So make sure that the person holds on to good …
- Descartes’ Error… How do you go from being aware to forming thoughts? What are the steps in that process? You can’t see them unless you make the mind really still, unless you raise that question in your mind and turn your attention to making the mind still. So this is the proper role of thinking: directing your attention to important issues that are needed to …
- An Inside Job… What does an intention feel like? How do you know that an intention is formed? How do you decide to go with an intention or not to go with an intention? How do you change your mind? What is it like to do these things? As you watch in this way, you’re stepping out of the thoughts—out of the content and looking …
- The Practice is Wherever There’s Mindfulness… The two of them together form the practice. They’re fed by conviction. That’s what keeps you going, because there are lots of times when the skillful thing is one thing and what you would like to do is something else—or the skillful thing seems like it’s hopeless. In other words, you know that no matter what you do, things are …
- Victory… But don’t look at it so much as a victory as a form of generosity. You’re giving your time. You’re giving your energy. As for whether it actually will succeed in gaining your aim—sometimes you can make it succeed, sometimes you can’t. You don’t want to measure the success as to whether you beat out somebody else. The …
- Appreciating Merit… That in and of itself is a form of happiness. Learn how to appreciate it, because that will give you the energy to stick with it, to try to figure things out: “What’s going wrong? Why am I having trouble here? Can I catch myself doing something unskillful?” without any recrimination, just saying, “Oh. I do that. I don’t have to do …
- Protect Your Inner Center… For instance, when greed, aversion, or desire arises in the mind, sometimes it arises in a very weak form—so weak that you hardly notice it. But you may notice that something’s changed in the breath. Sometimes you’ll notice that the influence goes the other way: Something happens in the breath, there’s a tension you’re holding in a certain part …
- The Whole Story… But they are forms of fear. And they’re skillful. As the Buddha said, you want to see danger where there is danger, and realize there’s no danger where there is none. Our problem is that we get these things all mixed up through our delusion. Ultimately, there’s a fear that keeps us on course: the fear that we’re going to …
- Rooted in Desire… Right mindfulness then forms the theme around which right concentration develops. So this desire to put an end to suffering leads to mindfulness, and from there it leads to getting the mind to settle down and be really still in concentration with a sense of well-being so that it can look at what else is going on at a deeper level. The greater …
- Unraveling the Present… Look at it for what it is.” After all, denial is a form of stress as well, and it prevents us from knowing anything better. So once the mind is still and you feel it’s time to look at the rest of your life from that perspective, look for that issue of inconstancy and stress, to give you the proper perspective on things …
- Pleasures & Pains on the Middle Way… It’s called the pleasure of form: the way you feel the body from within. That’s different from the pleasures of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations. The Buddha places it on a higher level because it doesn’t really have to depend on things outside. And, as he says, it’s a blameless pleasure, in the sense that you don’t …
- Attachment to Precepts… So when you look at the precepts and the other ascetic practices as a form of medicine, that minimizes the danger around them. You’re taking them not because you want to show off to other people, or that you want to pride yourself on how much better you are. It’s simply a matter you realize you’ve got some diseases in the …
- Gladdening the Mind… One day he said to Ajaan Fuang, “If you don’t help me I’m going to die, you know.” So Ajaan Fuang thought about it for a while and finally said to himself, “Well, construction work in the monastery is a form of skillful activity. If I die with a hammer and saw in my hands — well at least I was using the …
- The Choice Not to Suffer… One of the Buddha’s insights is that pain comes in two forms. One is pain in the three characteristics: the fact that there is stress simply because things are put together and fabricated—and that’s everywhere. But the stress that weighs down the mind is a different kind of stress. It’s the stress that comes from craving and ignorance. And those …
- Leaving Distractions Alone… But there’s a lot of interesting, fascinating stuff going on here in terms of how the breath energy is working in the body, how it interacts with the other elements in the body, how thoughts are getting formed, how the mind likes to deceive itself, how it puts barriers between one part of the mind and another. There’s a lot to explore …
- Faith in Present Intentions… That, too, is a form of skill we can develop. So it’s not just work. It’s learning how to feed the mind in a way that gives it a long-term strength, deep strength, enlarged strength. This is why the Buddha uses the image of a large river, of the Earth, of space, to describe the quality of mind he wants us …
- Knowledge over Fear… That relates to another form of fear that the Buddha recommended, which he calls ottappa. It’s the opposite of apathy. It’s the fear of the consequences of doing something bad, something unskillful. The danger it avoids, of course, is the mind state that says, “I don’t care. I’m going to do what I want right now and I’ll let …
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