Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. For the Sake of the Deathless
     … Have that purpose in the back of your mind. In the front of your mind, have the breath, have the mind focusing its attention on the breath, its alertness on what’s going on right now with the breath. Bring that mindfulness to the fore, as the Buddha would say. Dogen once said that the duties with regard to the third and the fourth … 
  3. Expanding Your Skill Set
     … All these qualities working together—mindfulness, alertness, and ardency—help to establish mindfulness. The act of establishing mindfulness: That’s the basic theme of your concentration. Actually, mindfulness and concentration work together. While you’re with the breath, ardency means trying to be as sensitive as possible to how the breathing feels. Once it feels good in the spot you’ve chosen as your … 
  4. Generating Energy
     … Another is in the context of the seven factors for awakening, where persistence builds on mindfulness: keeping something in mind. So what are the ways of giving rise to conviction that are going to energize you, and what are the things you have to keep in mind that will give rise to more energy? In the seven factors for awakening, the Buddha talks about … 
  5. Responsible
     … You’re training the mind; you’re taking responsibility in an area where only you can be responsible. You’re responsible for your actions, and where do your actions come from? They come from the mind. So, if you want to act in a responsible way, the mind has to be trained, because it has lots of unruly thoughts, unruly cravings. You’ve got … 
  6. Scramble the Image
     … Well, try that with every image that comes up in the mind, once you’re well established and there’s a sense of well-being inside, so that you can step back from the movements of the mind and just watch them as processes. Instead of thinking about how you’re going to gain some pleasure out of this thought or that perception, simply … 
  7. Right View Tells You What to Do
     … Then there’s mindfulness, which basically is keeping something in mind. In this case you’re trying to keep in mind the fact that you’re trying to stay with the breath—you don’t want to forget that. If something unskillful comes up in the mind, anything that would pull you away from the breath, you want to remember how to recognize it … 
  8. A Trained Observer
     … Things don’t have to make inroads into the mind. We let our minds get colored by its objects, but they don’t have to be. Yet we take it so much for granted: Something sad happens and the whole mind gets sad. Something pleasant happens and the whole mind gets happy. This may be one of the reasons why the Buddha uses the … 
  9. The Best Place to Practice
     … Our tools in getting the mind concentrated are not to make these things just simply go away by making the mind quiet. We make the mind quiet so that we can see these things in action more clearly. And then you want to use that foundation of concentration—or whatever shred of it you may have when the defilements are roaring in your ears … 
  10. Reading Your Meditation
     … It wasn’t because they were focusing so much on what he said, but they were using his words as pointers to what was going on inside their minds. They saw what he was talking about as it appeared in the actions of the mind. Instead of focusing on the arrows that were pointing to the mind, they focused on the mind itself. That … 
  11. The Wear & Tear of Life
     … And it strengthens the mind, so that it can continue looking for happiness in the right way and avoid the things that it knows are going to lead to harm—and a lot of things that you don’t yet really know are going to lead to harm. But you begin to realize, as the mind gets more and more sensitive to this sense … 
  12. Hedgehog Knowledge
     … The mind really has to settle in. Discernment here—in that heightened sense—means transcendent discernment. The mind has to be really still for you to see things clearly. The more still it is, the more sensitive you can be. The more sensitive you are, the more still the mind can become. These two qualities work together. So we go over the same spot … 
  13. Why the Breath
    Why the Breath January 9, 2004 We watch the breath so we can watch the mind. The breath is like a mirror for the mind. When you look at the way you breathe, you can get a good sense of what’s going on in the mind. If you get really familiar with the breath, you can begin to detect things that are happening … 
  14. Training Your Cynical Voices
    Training Your Cynical Voices March 18, 2014 Training the mind is work. Greed, aversion, and delusion have gotten very well ensconced in the mind, and it’s going to take a lot of digging to get them out. The reason we’re sitting here meditating is because at least some of the voices in the mind say, “Yes, you can do this,” or, “Yes … 
  15. An Examined Life
     … The people who’d been meditating approached death with a lot more mindfulness, a lot more alertness, and a lot less fear. They were much more in charge of the situation than those who hadn’t meditated, because they’d learned to allow the mind to grow quiet and to be comfortable with the quietness of the mind. People like this don’t keep … 
  16. Anupassana
     … When you’re doing mindfulness practice—trying to get the mind to settle down with the breath and stay with the breath so as to get into concentration—that’s called anupassana. You’re keeping track of the breath. It’s like keeping track of a thread going through a carpet. There are lots of other threads in the carpet, but you’re not … 
  17. The Battle of Your Selves
    We sit here trying to get the mind into concentration, to get it focused on the breath, and all of a sudden we find it someplace else. By that I mean without any sense that we intended to go someplace else, it’s just that we’re there. This is a good lesson in how your self is pretty arbitrary, and how there are … 
  18. A Safe Place
     … You notice what the mind is doing, how the mind is settling in with the breath. At that point, you don’t need any more conversation in the mind about the breath. You can just be with the sensation of the breathing. Go into the sensation of the breathing and allow things to be very still. Some people complain that everything gets so still … 
  19. Simplify
     … But when you learn how to develop a greater sense of spaciousness in the mind, a greater sense of wellbeing in the mind, after a while you begin to realize it doesn’t depend on the level of energy in the body at all. The mind begins to have its own internal nourishment, its own internal place to recharge. This is why we spend … 
  20. Well-being Despite It All
     … There are three qualities you need to develop in order to do this, once you’ve made up your mind you’re going to be with the breath. The first qualityis mindfulness, which means keeping the breath in mind. Don’t let yourself forget. The second quality is alertness. Try to be as sensitive as you can to how the breathing is feeling—knowing … 
  21. Calm & Insight
     … Calm, he said, is a quality of the mind. Insight is a quality of the mind. And you need them both. It’s not the case that you first do one and then the other, although most people will do it that way. They tend to have either more calm in their minds or tend more towards insight—in which case, the Buddha says … 
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