Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 69
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. Overcoming Obstacles
    The mind has an amazing ability to create obstacles for itself, even when it’s doing something that it knows—at least part of it knows—is really good for it: strengthening your powers of concentration, giving the mind a comfortable place to stay in the present moment, a place where it can stay at home, feel at home, gain nourishment. We got this … 
  18. Setbacks
    The mind is a complex thing. So it only stands to reason that the training of the mind is going to have to be complex as well, involving lots of different factors that you have to bring into balance. In broad terms, the training comes down to three things: virtue, concentration and discernment. They feed off one another. The standard explanation is that virtue … 
  19. The Right Focal Length
     … What’s the mind cooking up right now? What new issues is it creating to stab itself with? Try to take those four noble truths seriously. The cause of stress and suffering that’s weighing on the mind is what’s happening in the mind itself. The things outside that it brings in to aggravate its suffering are brought in through craving and clinging … 
  20. Nourishment from the Breath
     … He says mindfulness of breathing is like medicine for the body, medicine for the mind. The actual medicine is the mindfulness and alertness; the breath is—he uses the Thai word, krasai, which means the medium in which you mix the medicine so that it can spread out throughout the body. In other words, your mindfulness and alertness are the real medicine. The breath … 
  21. Housecleaning
    The mind’s real home is right in the here and now. One of the most natural places for it to settle is right at the breath, because that’s where the mind and the body meet. But the mind doesn’t spend much time at home. It’s usually off travelling around. It’ll occasionally come back home, run through for a bit … 
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