Search results for: "The Mind"

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  2. Detail Work
     … It stirs up your interest in details, and that stirs up the energy in the mind, because it’s easy to slough through the different contemplations and go to sleep. But if you tell yourself, “I’ve got to think about this in detail, try to figure things out,” then it stirs up some energy in the mind so that the mind is ready … 
  3. Body & Food
     … The part of the mind that really wants something better get stunted, ignored, pushed away. So you have to train yourself to look back and see that it actually does offer health. That’s not the unhealthy part of the mind. That’s actually the healthy part of the mind, the part that wants freedom from all these attachments. So treasure that part of … 
  4. Four Bases of Success
     … At the same time, use effort on the mind. If the mind is wandering off, you bring it right back. It wanders off again, you bring it right back again. You’ve got to show the mind that you mean business. Otherwise, it’ll punch in the clock and then go off and sleep under a tree someplace. So look at your mind: What … 
  5. Views & Vision
     … If you’ve read any of the texts, you know that when the mind gets into deep concentration, the sentences and dialogues that go on in the mind get pared down really far to the point where there’s just a mental note, like “infinite space,” the sañña of “infinite consciousness.” That’s all the talking that’s going on in the mind. But … 
  6. Sensitive to the Body, Sensitive to the Mind
  7. The Humble Way to Awakening
     … Particularly in the mind. Pain in the body, as it turns out, is not the issue. We make it an issue that spreads into the mind. If pain simply arose in the body without our connecting it to any suffering or disease in the mind, it wouldn’t be an issue. The problem is that the mind has laid claim to the body. After … 
  8. The Problem Is Birth
     … The best way to understand it is to prevent the mind from going into those little worlds. This why concentration is so important. Meditation is not just a matter of following the mind wherever it wants to go. You have to put up some walls. Mindfulness is sometimes thought to be a matter of allowing the mind to go wherever it wants, just being … 
  9. Pleasing to the Noble Ones
     … You try to stay with your object as steadily as you can, because it’s when the mind is steadily focused like this that you can begin to observe it. When the mind is running around, it’s hard to see. It’s like a picture with a very long exposure: If you keep the exposure long, then when a person in the picture … 
  10. Cooking the Present Moment
     … So you have to learn how to perceive the pain in such a way that it’s not weighing the mind down. Then there’s the ability not to be overcome by pleasure or by pain, and this, too, has to do with your perceptions. It also has to do with your ability to get the mind into concentration despite the pain. Once the … 
  11. A Mental Fortress
     … That has a soothing effect on the mind, a nourishing effect on the mind, to give you the strength you need in order to keep watch over the mind, to make sure it doesn’t slip off to its old habits. Or at the very least, it brings awareness to its processes of fabrication, so that you can catch yourself when you want to … 
  12. Be Observant
     … Start with the breath because the breath is nearby, and the movements of the breath are more obvious than the movements of the mind. Ultimately, you’re going to want to turn around and look at the mind itself, but the mind is extremely subtle and fast. So you practice first with things that are a little bit slower, more blatant. Try to see … 
  13. Mindfulness, the Gatekeeper
     … In training the mind, there are three qualities we have to develop. This is why the word for meditation is developing: bhavana. The three qualities are right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. Our understanding the need for right effort starts with the recognition that there are skillful and unskillful qualities in the mind, and we have them all mixed together. The effort itself … 
  14. Ripples Go Far
    We develop the sublime attitudes every evening as a way of opening up and airing out the mind. When you’re focused on your troubles, your suffering, your issues, you suffer a lot because the range is small and the pain is big. So of course it seems overwhelming. When you expand your range, you begin to realize that the pain is a lot … 
  15. Focusing on the Breath to Learn about the Mind
  16. Measuring Progress
     … Because it’s only when you’re aware that you can deal with what’s going on in the mind. So much of this has to do with how much you admit to what is going on in the mind, how sensitive you are to those little voices in the mind that used to be below the radar, or used to be inaudible, and … 
  17. Patient & Inquisitive
     … When the mind is thinking in ways that drive you crazy, why is it doing that? We develop concentration so that we can put the mind in a place where it can look at the mind. If we think about the mind as a committee, we’re trying to train the members who are the investigators, the watchmen, so that they can watch what … 
  18. Turtle Meditation
    One of the reasons concentration is so central to the path is that the mind can see things more clearly when it’s still. Not only that, it can feel things more clearly as well. As you get more sensitive to the breath, you become more sensitive to the whole range of energy in your body. You can see where you’re holding things … 
  19. Respect for Suffering
     … And an important step in our system is to give the mind a place to settle down. Once you understand what we’re doing here, try to bring the mind into the present moment. And develop the good qualities you’re going to need in order to deal with the suffering. You find that craving and ignorance are actually part of the problem, so … 
  20. Broad, Tall, & Deep
     … So this ability to depersonalize things is what heightens the mind, raises the level of the mind, so you’re up on the tower looking down at people on the ground below, or up on a mountain looking down at the people in the valley, seeing your life in a broader perspective. As for deepening the mind, the Buddha usually uses “deepening” to refer … 
  21. Fangs in the Static
     … The idea of dispassion, cessation, peace in body and mind may not sound all that attractive now, but as you practice meditation, you get more sensitive to what really is the mind’s well-being, what really does weigh the mind down. You find that you get more and more attracted to the idea the mind’s not being weighed down by anything at … 
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