Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. The Tools of the Path
     … In this case, you fold the right effort into right mindfulness. So here again, you’re working with the aggregates. As the Buddha said, when you’re being mindful of your breath, you have to be sensitive to how your feelings and your perceptions have an impact on the mind, how they fabricate your mind. And you want to talk to yourself in ways … 
  16. Practical Wisdom
     … This is how you prepare for the future, by developing good qualities of mind, and trying to make sure that they’re as good as possible, no matter what the circumstances. This is one of the reasons why we develop alertness, mindfulness, concentration, discernment, and how we learn to be persistent and ardent in developing these qualities of heart and mind. That’s because … 
  17. Concentration Nurtured by Virtue
     … But if you learn to be alert to how your actions can create harm for yourself or for other people, then you’re in a better position to see the same principle at work in your mind. The Buddha talks about developing the mind in a quality of emptiness. What that means is that you see that as the mind begins to settle down … 
  18. Rivers of Craving
    What are you doing right now? If you’ve made up your mind to meditate, try to stay with the breath, all the way in, all the way out. Sometimes you find that other thoughts come up. In fact, it’s rare that other thoughts don’t come up. One of the skills you want to learn is how not to go with those … 
  19. Serenity
     … In this way, you make the body more serene and the mind more serene at the same time. These are qualities that help give rise to concentration. Another way of making the mind more serene is to develop the brahmaviharas, the sublime attitudes: immeasurable goodwill, immeasurable compassion, immeasurable empathetic joy, immeasurable equanimity. These thoughts are soothing to the mind. In the beginning, you have … 
  20. Steps in Concentration
    When the Buddha taught concentration, the how-to part of the instructions was in his description of right mindfulness. You’re focused on the body—for example, the breath—in and of itself—ardent, alert, and mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. So where’s your breath right now? Anything that’s not related to this breath at the … 
  21. Conviction & Persistence
    We’re here to train the mind. But we focus on the breath. It’s by focusing the mind on the breath and keeping it there that we’re developing some really good qualities in the mind: qualities of persistence, ardency, mindfulness, alertness. It’s by staying consistently with the breath in all the ups and downs of our lives that we learn some … 
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