Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. Turtle Mind
    Ajaan Suwat would occasionally comment on the paradoxical nature of the mind in concentration. On the one hand, it’s very tender, very sensitive. On the other, it’s tough and resilient. The image that comes to mind is a turtle. A turtle’s body is very, very weak and gentle, so it needs a hard shell to protect it. As meditators, we have … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. Gratitude, Goodwill & Generosity
     … Then it’s easy for the mind to settle down without a lot of struggle. So before we empty our minds of thoughts, we have to fill them up with good thoughts. The Buddha once said that, for him, the beginning of getting on the right path was learning how to divide his thoughts into skillful and unskillful, and then to encourage the skillful … 
  17. How & Why We Meditate
     … Just notice that there are other thoughts in the mind, not connected with the breath, but you don’t have to follow them. That right there is an important insight. You don’t have to run after everything that comes up in the mind. Then stick with the breath as long as you can and see what impact it has on the mind and … 
  18. Persistence
     … Externally it doesn’t look like much at all—here we are sitting with our eyes closed, not doing much—but there’s a lot going on in the mind. At the same time, you’re giving the mind something really simple to do, and that should be easy—you might think. But then the mind makes things very complicated. It seems to be … 
  19. A Strong Post
     … The Pali word āsava means “things that flow out.” Sometimes sensual desire flows out of the mind, or a particular view flows out of the mind, or an idea of who we are flows out of the mind. If we’re not really aware, really mindful, really alert, we just go flowing along with whatever. It usually just goes flowing out the senses. It … 
  20. To Comprehend Pain
     … The mind can have an impact on the body. And it’s primarily through the breath. So if you want to comprehend how your mind reacts to the pain, get very sensitive to the way you breathe. And remember that ultimately, what you’re trying to comprehend is the mental side of the pain: What is it that weighs the mind down? With physical … 
  21. Experimental Intelligence
     … You start out by getting the mind to be still. Get it into strong states of concentration where everything is very, very still, so that you can observe, when a thought comes into the mind, what it does to the mind; or when you do an action, what it does to the mind. If things aren’t really still, you can’t see the … 
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