Search results for: "Thought"

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  2. Mindfulness of Death
     … Often our first reaction to the thought of death is, “If I die, I’ll be missing this person, that person.” If the reflection were to stop there, you’d be left without any real guidance. You’d simply start getting sentimental, very attached, very clingy. But then the Buddha goes on to have you reflect about kamma: that you’re the owner of … 
  3. Right Here, Right Now
     … directed thought and evaluation. When you focus your thoughts on the breath, you’re evaluating the breath, okay, verbal fabrication is right there. And then mental fabrications: feelings and perceptions. Perceptions are the labels you put on things. Feelings are the feelings of pleasure, pain, neither-pleasure-nor-pain that you feel both in body and in mind. Well, those are right here as … 
  4. Learning from Desire
     … Otherwise, you go from one thought-world to another thought-world to another one, like a hobo hopping trains, and you end up who knows where. If you’re asked to trace how you got there, often it requires a real feat of memory. Things seem to modulate, as they do in music from one key to another key, getting further and further away … 
  5. The Middle Way
     … The next question was, who would he teach first? He thought first of the two teachers he’d studied with, but he realized that they had recently died. Then he thought of the five brethren who had attended to them during his period austerities. They were now in Isipatana, which was near what is now the city of Benares. So he walked all the … 
  6. Calm in the Storm
     … Only when our emotions are really strong, or our thoughts are really necessary, do we see them. As for vagrant notions, little wisps of ideas that come in, go out, we hardly notice them at all. Yet they’re the things that grow into big issues. We come to a place like this to see what we can find out about how the little … 
  7. Determination
     … When I returned from Thailand, someone once asked me, “What was the hardest thing to endure over there?” I thought and I thought and I thought, and I couldn’t think of anything in particular. Then I realized it was because there were so many positive things going on in my practice, learning new things, that even though there were a lot of difficulties … 
  8. Unlearning Unskillful Behavior
     … If you’re meditating and you’ve made up your mind that you’re going to sit for a certain amount of time, and all of a sudden a certain thought defeats you, think about how you might get around that thought the next time, so that it doesn’t. This approach applies to all areas of life: addictions, problems in meditation, problems with … 
  9. Dimensions of Right Effort
     … For instance, with the four noble truths, you have to learn how to sit with suffering, sit with stress, sit with pain until you understand, “Exactly what is it about the pain that’s so burdensome? And where is it coming from?” Here we’re talking mainly about pains in the mind, thoughts that make you uncomfortable, thoughts that make you suffer. Look for … 
  10. Goodwill Is Respect
     … This is why we consciously develop thoughts of goodwill. It’s not that goodwill is our innate nature. Goodwill comes easily to us in some cases, and ill will comes just as easily in others. That’s the typical human attitude. What we’re trying to develop are Brahma attitudes, and those are higher, more refined, more inclusive: goodwill for all, everybody without exception … 
  11. In Search of What’s Skillful
     … I mentioned this morning the story that Ajaan Maha Boowa tells of where he’d been meditating for a long time, contemplating the unattractiveness of the body, until the thought struck him that for a long time he hadn’t had any thoughts of lust, any feelings of lust. So the question arose: Had he gone beyond lust? So he decided to test it … 
  12. The Wisdom of Self-regulation
     … So for the time being as you’re sitting here meditating, any thought that has to do with staying with the breath: Take that as a skillful thought. Any thought that wants to pull you away. Take that as something unskillful. There are relative levels of skill in both cases, because sometimes the thoughts that tell you to stay with the breath shout at … 
  13. When This Is, That Is
     … The thought constructs you have, directing your thoughts to the breath, evaluating it: These become part of right concentration. Your awareness of all this becomes part of the path, too. In other words, you take all the aggregates, which normally you lug around as your sense of self, and you turn them into a path—by the way you use them, by the way … 
  14. Why Train the Mind
     … If the mind wanders off—and it probably will wander off—be quick to catch it and remind yourself that whatever the thought it’s wandering after, you don’t have to complete it before you come back. Nine times out of ten, the thoughts you wander off with are old things you’ve seen many times before, like old movies. You know what … 
  15. Look in the Mirror
     … As you settle down with the breath, this is what directed thought and evaluation are all about. You direct your thoughts to the breath, you focus on it, you’re alert to the breath, and then you evaluate how things are going. Here again, you’ll notice if you’re putting too much pressure on the breath. If it feels squeezed or constrained, lighten … 
  16. Guardian Meditations
     … Are you ready to go? Or another way of dealing with it is if something really unskillful is going through the mind, you find yourself feeding on unskillful thoughts, you ask yourself: “Suppose I had a sudden heart attack right now or sudden stroke or something and these were the thoughts going through my head, how would I feel?” This is a contemplation that … 
  17. Fabricated Path, Unfabricated Goal
     … The best way to get out of that cycle, he says, is to go for what he calls renunciate pain, the thought that “There is the goal, and other people have attained it, but I haven’t attained it yet.” There’s a little bit of conceit in there, and a little bit of frustration, but it’s a thought that motivates you, gets … 
  18. A Frame of Reference
     … If a thought comes in, what does the thought do to the breathing? What does the breathing do to the thought? A feeling comes in, maybe a feeling of pain: Well, how does that feeling of pain relate to the breath? Can you breathe through it? Or do you have to stay with the breath and just let the pain go? In other words … 
  19. From Heedfulness to Purity
     … It’s through practicing that we learn, that we begin to recognize the things we’re holding onto that we thought might be good, thought might be worthwhile, but are actually part of the cause of suffering. When the Buddha was talking about the root of what is skillful in the mind, he didn’t say that it comes from any innate goodness, innate … 
  20. The Buddha’s Shoulds
     … You might resist his shoulds with the thought, “Who is he to tell me what to do?” Years back I was sitting in on a course on the Metta Sutta. The first line in the Metta Sutta starts: “This is what should be done by one who aims at a state of peace.” As the teacher started out with that line, a hand immediately … 
  21. Perceptions as Targets
     … When somebody attracts us, it may be because that person stirs up memories, and the perception of that person seems like a good target for our thoughts. The problem is that we’re focused more on the perception than the actual person, which can lead to problems. So however you translate sañña—memory, perception, label, target, whatever—the important point is that you can … 
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