Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. Mindfulness of Death
     … Your suffering needs to be comprehended. Its cause needs to be abandoned. The cessation of suffering needs to be realized. And the path needs to be developed. There you are: four duties, work to be done. The Buddha never said to be in the present moment simply because it’s a pleasant place to be or a wonderful place to be. He didn’t … 
  3. Keep Your Options Open
     … As for the third noble truth, that the total end of suffering is possible: Some of the other teachers in the Buddha’s time would say, “Suffering will end, but there’s nothing you can do about it, you can’t speed up the process”—a very fatalistic teaching. Others were saying, “You do have choices, but your choices can’t get you to … 
  4. Training Heart & Mind
     … You realize that you don’t want to suffer; other people are just like you, they don’t want to suffer, so you don’t want to do anything that would cause them suffering. You look into your heart and try to see what’s the best you can do with your heart. And as you sit and meditate: The first meditation instructions the … 
  5. Beyond Inter-eating
     … And as the Buddha points out over and over again, to be in a position where you have to feed is to be in a position where you have to suffer. And not only are you suffering, but the people or whatever it is you’re feeding on suffers as well. We’ve got to keep this point in mind: that as long as … 
  6. Make Yourself Small
     … You have to realize that the food you eat comes through suffering—the suffering of animals, the suffering of farmers, the suffering of transport workers, the suffering of grocery workers all the way down the line. The same goes for clothing, shelter, and medicine. So you want to minimize the suffering that you cause, the weight that you place on others. In your dealings … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. Shoulds & Wants
     … You should try to comprehend suffering. You should try to abandon its cause. You should try to realize the cessation of suffering, and you should do that by developing the path. These shoulds are not imposed on you. The reason you listen to them is because they’re for the sake of your true happiness. So there shouldn’t be any conflict between what … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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