Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. De-thinking
     … It’s not always the case that the mind is just reacting to its experiences. Sometimes it’s shaping its experiences, too. If we don’t get a sense of how we shape things, we never really get a chance to look into the mind. For starters there’s the concept of the breath not as the air coming in and out of the … 
  15. Appropriate Attention
    The mind has a lot of responsibilities. After all, it put together this body, this being, and now it has to look after it. The body needs to be fed, the mind needs to be fed. Where are you going to get your food? We live in a world where there are dangers. Our sources of food are threatened. We’re threatened. So the … 
  16. A Full Life
     … Actions don’t just stay in the mind. They come out and they affect the world outside. Sometimes you hear some people say, “Karma is simply a matter of the mind affecting the mind,” but that’s not true. The mind affects the world around you. You’ve got to be careful about where your mind wanders. Let go of anything you notice that … 
  17. Looking at Your Life
    When you bring the mind the breath, you’re developing a good vantage point, a good place to look at what’s going on in the body, a good place to look at what’s going on in the mind—and a good place to look at what’s going on in your life. There tends to be a lot of confusion in all … 
  18. No-Tech Meditation
     … Usually when the Buddha uses that word, he’s talking about causes coming out of the mind. Craving comes out of the mind. Clinging comes out of the mind. That’s what we’ve got to look out for. We’re going to see these things in action as we fabricate craving and clinging, and ideally we get to the point where we don … 
  19. To Discern Suffering
     … Sometimes there’s a lot of physical pain but the mind is perfectly fine. Other times, little tiny things set you off. Well, why is that? It shows that there’s no an automatic correlation between the physical pain and the mental suffering. Which means that the cause of mental pain is in the mind. You’ve got to look into how the mind … 
  20. Taking an Active Role
     … There’s an image in the Canon that someone with mindfulness immersed in the body is like a hardwood door. You throw a ball of string at the hardwood door, and it just bounces off. It doesn’t enter into the door. For someone who doesn’t have that kind of mindfulness, doesn’t have that kind of full-body awareness, it’s like … 
  21. Noble Ardency
     … These qualities are listed under right mindfulness, but they apply to concentration as well. In fact, there’s no real clear line between mindfulness practice and concentration practice. If you’re very mindful and alert and ardent, the mind’s going to settle down. Right mindfulness is how you get the mind to settle down, and that’s how you get it to stay … 
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