Search results for: "Becoming"

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  2. Bless Yourself
     … And when you’re focusing on their bad points, it becomes harder to treat them well. So you have goodwill for yourself, and then you have goodwill for others, reminding yourself that the behavior you engaged in was harmful. You don’t want to harm others. And so you want to strengthen your resolve not to repeat the mistakes that you made, and you … 
  3. Disenchantment
     … Your awareness of the breath and the breath itself seem to become one and the same thing. There’s a sense of unification — ekodi-bhava — which the Buddha has us develop as much as possible. And he has us take that sense of oneness as far as it can go through the levels of concentration. Why? Because he wants us to feed on that … 
  4. Why We Bow Down
     … He found a path that requires us to become better people in order to be able to prove whether he taught the truth. So at the very least, we have a sense that we become better as we follow his path. So approach it with respect. Have a strong sense that this really is special. Years back, I was at Yosemite, standing on a … 
  5. A Passion for the Path
     … In every case, our motivation may not be pure as we begin, but as we become more and more self observant, as concentration gets stronger, and our discernment gets more precise, we begin to see that there are things we’re holding onto that are causing us to suffer and if we don’t let them go, there are going to be problems. What … 
  6. Resisting the Germs of Defilement
     … But then when our resistance gets weak, we become susceptible. Those are cases where your body knows that this is a foreign substance, this germ or this virus coming in, but it just doesn’t have the strength to fight it off. There are other cases where it doesn’t even know, it doesn’t recognize it yet. The germ invades and can do … 
  7. The Power to Transcend Suffering
     … But as you get more and more familiar with the strings, more and more sensitive to different ways of playing them, you find that you can end up playing some very moving music on the guitar as you become more and more sensitive in listening to what you’re doing. And it’s the same with the breath. As you get more and more … 
  8. The Good Side of Kamma
     … Goodwill becomes our motivation to do things in a skillful way. If we were windup toys, goodwill would be superfluous. Or if our actions had no impact on anybody, goodwill again would be superfluous. It wouldn’t have any meaning. But we know that we have choices and we want to make sure that our choices are skillful. That means keeping this in mind … 
  9. Pleasure & Pain
     … The mind becomes a blur. So it’s important that once you find pleasant sensations, you learn how to breathe in such way that you’re not harming them, not putting pressure on them or destroying them. You’re just allowing them to stay that way. You keep tabs on the pleasure but your main focus should be on the cause, which is the … 
  10. The Rewards of Cleanliness
     … The room becomes a lot more livable. The same with your mind: In the beginning, it’s going to take a lot of work to get it all cleaned out. Or if you let it go for a long while before you start meditating again, it’s going to take a while to clean it up again. But once it’s been cleaned out … 
  11. The Dhamma Is in the Method
     … That’s when the Dhamma becomes yours. And you know it’s Dhamma because it gives good results. This is why the teaching on kamma is such a basic part of the teaching, i.e., the principle that your actions will give results based on your intentions in line with the principles of cause and effect. If your actions made no difference, or if … 
  12. Comfortable as an Outsider
     … Learning how to practice both on your own and with other people means becoming comfortable with both roles. It takes time and it takes determination. Because a lot of us don’t like being outsiders. We want to fit in. I found this to be true during my time in Thailand. We had a lot of work projects around the monastery. Ajaan Fuang was … 
  13. The Right to Repair Your Mind
     … craving for becoming, craving for sensuality, craving for no becoming. Notice, this doesn’t cover every form of desire. There are other desires that are actually part of the path to the end of suffering. But these three are the ones that actually lead to the clinging that’s going to be the suffering. And again, we very rarely look at craving as a … 
  14. Guilt & Shame
     … Shame cultures can tend to give rise to people who, if they become mentally unstable, go into psychosis. Guilt culture’s mentally unstable people tend to go into neurosis. But everybody internalizes something of both. In some cases, it has to do with how your parents raised you. In other cases, it has to do with your karmic background as you come into this … 
  15. Streams of Anger
     … Sometimes we feel that other people’s misbehavior gives us extraordinary rights to misbehave, but then it becomes our karma. So, these are things you keep in mind to restrain yourself, but the actual solution is not in the mindfulness, it’s going to be in the discernment. One of the reasons we practice concentration is to get to know how the mind fabricates … 
  16. Learning How to Learn
     … This is where the skill of learning how to learn becomes important. This is one of the reasons why the ajaans take so seriously the various skills around the monastery—how to keep the monastery clean, how to chant, how to take care of your robes, how to provide the requisites. You want to learn how to do all of these activities well, and … 
  17. Bigger than the World
     … You want to establish this as your default mode, as your context, so that you can see these processes of becoming as they happen. You can see how the mind gets into them and takes them on, like putting on a suit of clothes. But you also realize that you don’t have to. There’s a skill in not taking these things on … 
  18. Views, Virtue, & Mindfulness
     … The tendency to forget also becomes a habit, which makes it harder to develop mindfulness when you’re going to sit down and meditate. Your mind ranges back into the past, and all you can see are unskillful things, so you start putting up walls of forgetfulness. That becomes a habit, a habit that’s hard to get out of. So that’s still … 
  19. Breath Meditation, Step by Step
     … Stay with the body and mind, with the breath long enough that the lines become perfectly clear—so there’s no guesswork involved. Now, to stay with the breath, you have to make it comfortable. You can experiment with different rhythms of breathing: You can breathe in long and out long. Think of yourself as ventilating both the body and the mind. And then … 
  20. Commit Yourself
     … Find a spot that you like and hang out there for a while, letting it become comfortable. Then see if you can make other spots in the body as comfortable as your first special favorite spot. This way, you develop your mindfulness at the same time you’re helping to prevent the mind from wandering off. That’s how you can give some continuity … 
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