Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. Solid Inside
     … In focusing on the breath, we get to know our own minds. Then we can talk about our own minds. We don’t have to bring in the terms Buddhist or Christian.” The first step in the meditation is simply that: to bring your mind to the breath and keep it there. The qualities you develop—mindfulness, alertness, concentration—are qualities that are useful … 
  3. Equanimity on the Path
     … This is the purpose of that instruction the Buddha gave to Rahula at the very beginning of his teachings of mindfulness. Make the mind like earth. Earth is equanimous. You pour good things on it, you pour bad things on it, it doesn’t react. Make the mind like water. Use water to wash away dirty things and the water doesn’t get upset … 
  4. The Karma of Perception
     … It’s also one of the elements most responsive to the image you hold in your mind, and it’s also a good mirror for the mind itself. This practice in perception is useful both for the sake of getting the mind into concentration and also for dealing with other issues as you go through life. You get more and more sensitive to how … 
  5. A Clear, Calm Lake
     … If they’re going to be there in the mind— no matter how much you try to think straight about them, they’re still nagging away at you—you just tell them, “Okay, you can have part of the mind, but you can’t have the whole mind.” Stay with the part that’s calm, collected, confident. Protect that, and the influence of still … 
  6. Creating Your Environment
    Having a conducive place to stay is an important part of training the mind. Having conducive people to practice with is also important. It creates a good environment, an energy that helps to carry us along, especially during the times when, if we were on our own, we’d start flagging. Our energy would start having gaps. It would be nice if we could … 
  7. A Mind like Wind
     … This is why mindfulness practice shades ultimately into concentration practice because you’re sticking with one thing as your frame of reference and it becomes continual. The Buddha himself never drew a sharp line between mindfulness and concentration. Mindfulness as it grows stronger becomes concentration. It becomes purified in concentration, steadied so that your discernment can start doing its work; figuring out where there … 
  8. Honoring the Noble Ones
     … Alertness is watching what you’re doing, and mindfulness is keeping things in mind. Now, alertness can be alert to anything you’re doing at all, skillful or not. The same with mindfulness: You can be mindful of all kinds of things. But when you’re ardent, you’re trying to do this practice well. You’re trying to be mindful—for the sake … 
  9. The World Offers No Shelter
     … So again, you develop the qualities of mind that give you good actions that you can depend on. Here, too, mindfulness has to play a role: mindfulness to keep things in mind; alertness to watch what you’re actually doing; and then ardency, the wholehearted desire to do this well. You really do have to put your whole heart into this. Otherwise, the world … 
  10. Ready for the Truth
     … focusing on the breath, trying to make the breath comfortable, putting the mind at ease with the breath, and seeing that this really is a good place to be. Then, the Buddha said, you would be ready for the four noble truths. So you can see what he’s doing: On the one hand, in many places the prerequisite for getting the mind to … 
  11. An Hour of Bliss
     … You think about all the suffering in the world that comes from people acting on greed, people acting on aversion, people acting on delusion—and here you’ve got a mind that’s perfectly capable of acting on greed, anger, and delusion, too. So you want to train it. And these are the tools for the training: mindfulness, alertness, ardency. Mindfulness means keeping something … 
  12. A Good Place to Not-Self
     … That’s a quality you want to develop if you want to understand your own mind. So you practice it with the breath. At the same time, you’re developing mindfulness: the ability to keep something in mind. In this case, keep in mind what you want to do. And if you’ve had any experience meditating, you know what helps and what doesn … 
  13. The Middle Way
     … That requires a lot of mindfulness and alertness. So those are the two qualities you want to focus on right now. As the Buddha once said, these are the two most helpful qualities in the mind. Mindfulness is keeping something in mind. Like right now: You’re going to keep the breath in mind. As for alertness, you watch what you’re doing. In … 
  14. Virtues & Values
     … In helping yourself, you’re trying to get some control over your mind. You try to develop good qualities and abandon bad qualities. That’s what mindfulness is all about. This is how mindfulness becomes your refuge. You not only remember what’s right and what’s wrong, but you also learn to recognize it here in the present moment, and you remember what … 
  15. At the Door of the Cage
     … The next stage is for the mind to incline to the Deathless. Normally the mind will not incline to the Deathless unless it feels that that’s the only way out. Otherwise it’s always going to find some other place to go, some other corner to hide in. So you need to remember that the teachings on, say, the three characteristics — inconstancy, stress … 
  16. Top Priorities
     … The more energy you develop inside, the more solid your mind, then the more you have to offer. So keep that in mind. It’s the training of the mind that has to take first priority, because everything good comes out of that. At the same time, when it has first priority in that way, it can develop a momentum because it becomes more … 
  17. Strength of Discernment
     … The way you breathe through the body is going to have an impact on the mind. And you can use the breath to undercut unskillful states. You can ask yourself, “If something’s coming through the mind and I’m focusing on something that’s not really worthy of attention, how can I give a karate chop to the mind?”—in other words, the … 
  18. The Bright Tunnel
     … Having to run around clinging to things all the time puts the mind in a miserable position. The other word for clinging is the act of taking sustenance: you’re feeding on these things. The mind that has to feed here, feed there—it’s a hungry mind. It’s a mind whose food source always has to be protected. It can’t go … 
  19. Fence Me In
    One of the Thai ajahans has spoken of virtue as a fence for your actions and concentration practice as a fence for the mind, something that keeps you within bounds. And of course, here in America, we don’t like fences. The old song, “Don’t Fence Me In,” seems to typify most of our attitudes. But the purpose of having that fence is … 
  20. Three Levels of Concentration
     … The mind that slips off to the past or the future has to be a very small mind. It’s almost as if it needed to go down a little tube to go to the future or to the past. But when the mind is large like this it can’t fit down the tube. It’s stuck. If it’s going to go … 
  21. Pleasing to the Noble Ones
    The practice of concentration starts with the practice of right mindfulness. You focus on an aspect of the body in and of itself, and you put aside greed and distress with a reference to the world. That’s what the formula says. You’re doing two things. One is trying to keep focused on the sensation of an aspect of the body, like the … 
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