Search results for: "Becoming"

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  2. Cooking Food for the Mind
     … When you can think in this way, bring your thoughts back to the breath in the present moment and ask yourself: “What kind of breathing would I like right now?” In this way you become an expert cook. You fix food that’s delicious and you learn how to vary the taste from day to day so that you don’t get bored with … 
  3. Sensitive to Fabrication
     … As the Buddha said, if you’re ignorant of this, this can become a cause for suffering. In his explanations for the steps that lead up to craving and then from craving into suffering, there’s something called fabrication. What’s interesting about fabrication is that it comes before your consciousness. It’s how you prime yourself to sense things. If you’re ignorant … 
  4. The Taste Is Release
     … sensuality, becoming, ignorance. Those are the four noble dhammas: virtue, concentration, discernment, release. In other words, the instructions remind us that the whole point of this practice is freedom. Freedom from what? Freedom from all the things we’ve been doing. That requires that we take a new view of our own minds. We can’t just go with whatever the mind wants to … 
  5. The Saints Don’t Grieve
     … We’re learning to give up restrictions, learning to get out of the chains that have become so familiar that we’ve learned to mistrust the idea that anybody could be happy outside of those chains. But the freedom beyond those chains is just what the Buddha’s talking about. All his teachings aim in that direction. He said that his teachings all have … 
  6. Directly & Indirectly to the Breath
     … After being taught by the Buddha, he goes and practices and becomes an arahant. The fact that the Buddha didn’t overlook him: You might find that inspiring. I do. Or you might be inspired by the time when, after he’d been practicing austerities for six long years, he got to the point where he realized that no one had ever endured more … 
  7. Avoidance
     … It sounds easy enough—if you’re unskillful, just practice and practice until you become more and more skillful—but you’ll find resistance in certain parts, and this is going to vary from person to person. But a willingness to question your assumptions is basic, and that willingness can be backed up by the realization that you really are suffering and you need … 
  8. Training the Mind to Train the Mind
     … The part that’s doing the training gets more and more skillful as it becomes more and more observant. And the part being trained finds that it really is good to be trained. That’s when the whole mind becomes something you can learn how to trust.
  9. Generating Desire
     … The Canon contains a famous account of a former king who becomes a monk. He goes and sits under a tree, exclaiming, “What bliss, what bliss!” The other monks are afraid that he’s recalling his past pleasures as king, so they go tell the Buddha. The Buddha calls him into his presence and says, “I hear you’ve been sitting under a tree … 
  10. Stay with the Breath
     … What would be ordinarily a sensation of the body, a sensation of the breath, suddenly becomes a thought of some other place, some other time, some other people. Those kinds of thoughts can wreak all kinds of havoc in the mind. Once you move into them, it’s like moving into another world and only then finding out whether it’s a good world … 
  11. The Challenge of Faith
     … As you examine even your state of concentration, you find it can become more and more refined as you refine your intention, refine your awareness. And then you develop discernment in two ways. One is looking at ways that the mind would leave concentration to take up an object. What’s motivating it? Why did it act on that intention to go out there … 
  12. Breath, Tranquility, & Insight
     … All too often, if there’s a pain in the body, it becomes a wall to your breath energy. You build up a little cocoon of tension around it, and the breath won’t flow properly. So try to perceive the breath in a different way, as something that can permeate through the wall of tension and not be affected by it. As you … 
  13. Skillful Judgment
     … Because then the judgment becomes the idea that anyone who’s passing judgment is judgmental, and that’s bad. You’re depriving yourself of the ability to learn. And you’re depriving yourself of the kind of community that comes when there’s a sense of trust. Trust isn’t something you can create by having people be nice and non-judgmental with one … 
  14. Respect for the Precepts
     … You become alert. You become more mindful, more sensitive to things, and that’s pretty deep—a lot deeper than throwing abstractions around. It takes a certain amount of humility to submit yourself to a precept like this, to say, “I’m going to put my preconceived notions on hold and see what it’s like to really try to live by the precepts … 
  15. Adbusting the Mind
     … This is how meditation becomes a skill. You see things through consistently from cause to effect, and then apply the lessons to the next cause, and then the next. As your attention span gets stronger like this—as you’re able to observe for longer periods of time and see the connections—it’s a lot harder for your defilements to come sneaking in … 
  16. Chanting Before Meditation
     … The king had been mystified by the fact that this young man had become a monk to begin with, because he came from a wealthy family. He was young, healthy, his relatives were still alive, and the king was of the opinion that people would become monks only if they were suffering from poverty, from a death in the family, or from bad health … 
  17. Wide-open Awareness
     … After all, you’ve created innumerable worlds already, so many that you’ve become addicted to the process. Now see what it’s like when you cut through that addiction; what’s there when you don’t create any worlds aside from the world of the breath in the present. Keep your curiosity here with the breath, and let the breath permeate the body … 
  18. Remembering Ajaan Lee
     … Becoming is part of the problem, and yet you have to create a path, which is a form of becoming, to get beyond it. We’re trying to get beyond fabrication, but you have to fabricate the path. We’re going to be using the insights of what’s inconstant, stressful, and not-self, and yet when you’re developing concentration you’re trying … 
  19. Enlightenment is Not a Hot Dog
     … And it’s a good one to start out with because, say, anger arises, and the breath becomes our enemy. You start breathing in a way that aggravates the anger, on top of the perceptions that sparked the anger. And the various stories you tell yourself about the situation that can also aggravate the anger. Then you’ve got the breath uncomfortable, tight, constricted … 
  20. Perceptions of Self & Not-Self
     … craving for sensuality, for becoming, for not becoming. The duty there is to abandon the craving—in other words, to develop dispassion for it. The third noble truth is the cessation of suffering, the fact that suffering does end when you abandon the cause. The duty there is to realize it—in other words, to have a direct experience of it. And finally, the … 
  21. Deconstruct Your Emotions
     … Some people think of concentration as being a blocking out—and even though there are certain things that you’re blocking out right now, you do have to become very sensitive to the energy in the body. And that’s directly related to things coming up in the mind. It’s your first line of defense when a strong emotion suddenly appears. If you … 
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