Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 62
  2. Adbusting the Mind
     … That’s why we have mindfulness as the precursor to concentration. You want to keep something in mind. In this case, you keep in mind the fact that you want to stay with the breath, and you keep in mind all the other lessons you’ve learned about staying with the breath, either through what you’ve heard or read, or what you’ve … 
  3. Delight in Concentration
     … your human mind. When you find physical seclusion and you can focus directly on your mind, and you get the mind into mental seclusion like this, learn how to delight in that. Then get the mind still. See that as a genuine accomplishment. The final two objects of delight have to do with the goal of the path. One is the fact that it … 
  4. Chanting Before Meditation
     … This, as the Buddha says, means the practice of establishing mindfulness. Mindfulness is not just a matter of being aware of what’s happening. It also involves remembering that if you notice anything unskillful coming up in the mind, you let it go. You remember what you’ve learned about how to let it go. If something skillful comes up, you remember to encourage … 
  5. Insight into Pain
     … Then there’s the regret in the mind when you realize you’ve harmed someone else or harmed yourself. As the mind is trying to settle down in concentration, that becomes a thorn, makes it hard to settle down. Training in virtue is a way of avoiding those difficulties. At the same time, training in virtue is also training in mindfulness, training in alertness … 
  6. Think
     … a sixfold path of right mindfulness, without right effort and right concentration, and a sevenfold path of right effort and right concentration but without right mindfulness. Yet that doesn’t make any sense. You have to go back and see where the modern definitions are wrong. Actually, mindfulness is not an open accepting state of mind. Mindfulness has its agendas. You’re trying to … 
  7. At Ease with the Breath
    For the mind to be steady, it has to feel at its ease. This is why the Buddha taught so many different topics of meditation. The commentaries list forty in all. Ten recollections, ten contemplations of corpses—some people find that a congenial topic, it’s easy for the mind to settle down there, it’s really riveting. Then there are the four sublime … 
  8. Endurance
     … There’s an area in the mind where you have to learn to be intolerant. When the Buddha talks about the various ways of training the mind, there are some areas where you are tolerant, specifically of things that come from outside: sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, ideas you hear from other people, ideas that come up in your mind. But you have … 
  9. Analysis of Dhammas
     … That’s one of the ways in which it manifests itself as you’re doing concentration practice, because these factors for awakening start with mindfulness and end with concentration. They basically show you how to use your discernment, when you start out being mindful, to get it into concentration. The key is basically learning to adjust the mind and the object of the mind … 
  10. How to Look, How to Listen
     … Then, as the issues of the breath get lighter and lighter, you’ll be able to see your own mind. That’s what we’re here for: to see the mind. We use the breath as bait to get the mind in the present moment, to clear things out in the body, so that they don’t interfere with your ability to observe your … 
  11. The Ennobling Path
     … This practice goes against a lot of the mind’s habits. After all, the mind is a creator. It keeps cooking things up. Once there’s craving, then there’s going to be clinging. Once there’s clinging, then there’s the creation of these worlds that the mind likes to inhabit. It keeps forgetting that as soon as you inhabit them, they start … 
  12. Taking the Long View
     … Because at the moment of death—when the body is weak, the mind is frustrated, the mind is distraught—cravings and clingings can bubble up inside. We latch on and we go. When the mind is distraught like that, it tends not to be very choosy. It just takes whatever comes. And who knows what’s going to come up bubbling up out of … 
  13. The Importance of Being Truthful
     … That’s why we’re here training the mind, because our actions do come out of the mind. Again, the Buddha never talks about what the mind is. And he certainly never says that the mind is basically good or basically bad. Ajaan Chah, in one of his finer turns of phrase, says, “What is the mind? The mind isn’t is anything.” That … 
  14. A Clear Agenda
     … If they come up in the mind, you put them aside. I’ve been reading different books on mindfulness and one of the strangest things I’ve found was in one book where the author said that the Buddha tells you never to interfere with anything that’s happening in the mind. But that right there conflicts with the basic formula: putting aside greed … 
  15. Discernment in Concentration
     … It’s not the case that when you’re practicing concentration you have to get the mind still and then sometime later use your discernment. You first have to use your discernment to get the mind to settle down to begin with. Only when you can get the mind to settle down can you really understand it. Because discernment is about understanding the mind … 
  16. Open Door Meditation
    There’s a good reason why we sit still with our eyes closed as we try to get the mind still: to teach the mind a lesson from the body. Not too much is coming in and particularly not nothing is coming in through your eyes, and there’s a lot less to distract you. Then you can tell yourself, that any thought that … 
  17. Attention to Your Potentials
     … And here again, there are certain dhatu in the mind, certain potentials in the mind. There are qualities that provide a foothold, as the Buddha said, to sustain mindfulness. There are qualities that sustain concentration, that sustain equanimity. You want to look for them. In some cases, he tells you outright. In terms of mindfulness, the sustaining qualities are what he calls purified virtue … 
  18. Your Territory
     … This connects with the fact that we’re trying to get the mind into concentration, and that’s one of the first things you’ve got to put aside to get rightly concentrated: thoughts of sensuality. You want to be secluded from them. The same applies to right mindfulness. When teaching right mindfulness, the Buddha gave the example monkeys. They live in the Himalayas … 
  19. Four Determinations in One
     … So you let it fade from your mind. Then you focus on water, and it’s the same sort of thing. The liquids in the body are no different from liquids outside. They’re no more stable, they’re no more reliable, they’re not really you or yours. So you let water fade from your mind. Then you go to fire: the warmth … 
  20. Dethinking Thinking
     … that mindfulness comes before concentration. In some cases, the relationship going from mindfulness to concentration seems to be automatic, although in the factors for awakening there are steps in between. You start with right mindfulness, and then the factors in the list show how you use discernment and effort to develop right mindfulness into right concentration. So you think about that, and then you … 
  21. You’ve Got Friends
     … If the mind resists, well, watch it for a while and see what the resistance is coming from. One of the peculiar things about the mind is that a lot of the painful things that we carry around have their allure. Part of the mind likes them. And again, that’s something we don’t normally want to see. But once the mind gets … 
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