Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. Taking Apart Suffering
    If you think of suffering as a mountain you carry around, then the Buddhist teachings are means of taking that mountain and grinding it down into gravel so that you can carry it off, be done with it. The mind has a tendency of putting things together, called *sankhara. *You take different elements and you put them together. When they’re put together, they … 
  3. A Doctor’s Strategies
    The Buddha often compared himself to a doctor offering a cure for the sufferings of the heart. But he was a traditional doctor. Back in the old days, they didn’t have injections. You’d go to a doctor, and he would recommend that you go get the leaves of a certain tree, or the roots of a certain plant. Then he would tell … 
  4. A Sense of Yourself
     … It’s either, “I have a self” or “I don’t have a self.” However you express it, it’s not a technical point of language, where everything depends on how you define “self.” It’s just the simple fact of clinging, clinging to things that cause suffering. Whatever you cling to—permanent or not—is going to cause suffering. So even the question … 
  5. Taking Your Own Medicine
     … The fourth use of concentration is one that the Buddha said was the most important, and that’s to put an end to suffering, to put an end to what they call the effluents in the mind. If you make that your purpose, then whatever else happens in the course of the meditation, you’re safe. In other words, you realize that, Yes, this … 
  6. Karma in the Present
     … When we meditate, we try to get quiet so that we can see these intentions and bring more knowledge to them, because if you fabricate these things out of ignorance you’re going to suffer; if you bring skill and awareness to the process of fabricating these things, that turns them into a path, the path to the end of suffering. So fabrication: What … 
  7. Sorting Yourselves Out
     … Look, it’s going to be painful, and if you are me, I don’t want to suffer.” Those selves, the ones who want pleasure right now and are willing to suffer pain down the line, are the ones that run away when the actual suffering comes, and you’re left holding the bag. So it’s tricky. You’re talking to your selves … 
  8. Cooking the Present Moment
     … You may have the potential for pain in your body right now, but the way you relate to the pain is going to make the difference between whether you suffer from it or not. All kinds of old habitual patterns may be coming up in the mind. But again, the way you relate to them is going to make the difference between whether you … 
  9. The Limits of Control
     … enough to make the difference between suffering and not suffering. What we’re experiencing right now is the result of past intentions, plus our current intentions, plus the results of our current intentions. Even though we may not have absolute control over things, and will ultimately have to let them all go, we do have some control over our actions now. And you want … 
  10. Basics
     … The mind is the chief producer of all the happiness and suffering we experience in the world. That’s why, when the Buddha gave his first sermon, started out with the issue of suffering. That, he said, is the big problem in life. And it’s to be solved right here, in the mind in the present moment, because the suffering isn’t something … 
  11. Why We Meditate
     … It’s only then that you can clearly see what the mind does that causes suffering and what does it that actually leads to an end of suffering—so that even though you live in a world filled with aging, illness, death, and separation, the mind doesn’t have to suffer. Then there’s that other reflection—it wasn’t translated, or at least … 
  12. Why the Breath
     … So if you see that the action is having some unintended results that are actually causing suffering, then you drop the action, you stop. If you see no harm or suffering, you keep continuing with it. Then, when you’re done, you check the long-term results. If the action ended up causing harm, resolve not to repeat it. If it didn’t cause … 
  13. The Need for Agency
     … that trying to interfere with the way things do their own thing is clinging, so if you stop interfering, there’ll be no clinging, and therefore no suffering. Now, there is a point in the practice where you apply the perception of not-self to everything to let go of everything. Some people feel that if that’s where we’re going, we might … 
  14. Hold on to Right View
     … The actions that are causes are either the craving that leads to suffering, which is unskillful, or the noble eightfold noble path, which is skillful in that it leads to the end of suffering. So again, action and result. It’s a principle the Buddha said he couldn’t prove to anybody just by talking to them. They could prove it for themselves by … 
  15. Do You Want to Stop Suffering?
     … All you have to assume is that stress-and-suffering—the Pali word is dukkha—is a problem and it weighs down in the mind. It’s real. And it has a cause. And there are things you can do to put an end to it by putting an end to the cause. That’s it. The question is: Do you want to put … 
  16. Choosing Sides
     … Then all of a sudden, there was a passage where, in the original, Ajaan Chah talks about how important it is to understand the truth about dukkha, stress or suffering, and the cause of dukkha, so that you can learn how to stop the cause and, in that way, stop suffering. But the translation said you want to learn about dukkha because that, in … 
  17. Admirable Friendship
     … You have to look for the cause of the suffering and pare it down to the real essentials. If you focus only on the things you don’t like, or if you get too distracted with extraneous issues, they get in the way. So we’re here to look, as the Buddha said, at the craving in our minds. The craving and the ignorance … 
  18. Strategic Wisdom
     … You lied to yourself and suddenly found yourself going in that direction, and you ended up suffering. So ask yourself, do you want to go through that again? There are ways not to repeat your old mistakes, the first of which is to recognize your mistakes as mistakes. A second one is to fortify the mind in such a way that it doesn’t … 
  19. Perceptions Around Pain
     … what you’re doing right now, what you’re thinking right now, the perceptions you apply to things and the perceptions that you hold on to, the extent to which these things are causing suffering or contributing to suffering, creating disturbance in the mind. When you see them clearly, you can let them go because you see they’re something different from your awareness … 
  20. Perception
     … As we’re sitting here, sometimes we deal with feelings of pain, and as long as you identify the pain, perceive the pain as being the same thing as the part of the body in which it’s located, it’s going to be very difficult to not suffer from it. Your perception that it has invaded the body you claim as yours is … 
  21. Alone with Your Mind
     … Everything that he taught, he said, dealt with suffering and the end of suffering̦—and of course that includes the way to the end of suffering. His teachings were pointed at this particular end. Everything in the Dhamma points here. Again, this is a really special teaching. We’re fortunate we’ve found it. Then there are all the people who have followed this … 
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