Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 70
  2. Breath, Tranquility, & Insight
     … Verbal fabrication is your directed thought and evaluation, as when you bring up a topic in the mind and then evaluate it. This is how we create sentences in the mind, ask questions in the mind. The third type of fabrication is mental fabrication, which is composed of feelings of pleasure, pain or neither pleasure nor pain, and then your perceptions. Those things—feelings … 
  3. Skills to Take Home
     … Even though the seclusion isn’t total—we’re not living in silence—still the basic values are conducive to looking into your own mind, because that’s the bottom line here: Each of us is training his or her own mind, so we don’t feel strange or out of place. The values here point inward, and that set of values is as … 
  4. Determined on Goodwill
     … I’ve often said that the mind is like a committee. Sometimes the good members are working on something, and some unskillful members sneak in. All of a sudden, you find that the task you had assigned to the good member gets taken over by somebody else. This is why the Buddha says you have to be determined on this mindfulness, keeping in mind … 
  5. A Sucker for Random Memories
    When the mind has long opportunities to be quiet, you find yourself in the same situation as a lot of older people as they approach death. There’s nothing much happening in the present moment, and old memories start barging in. Things dating back decades that you’d totally forgotten suddenly have an opportunity to come up to the surface. If your days are … 
  6. Strategies for Generosity
     … This is where meditation comes in, because simply the way the mind relates to itself uses up a lot of excess energy in a very unnecessary way. When you give in to greed, anger, and delusion, you’re destroying your energy. There’s a battle going on in the mind all the time. When the mind doesn’t know how to relate to the … 
  7. The Desire to Be Free from Desire
     … And this faculty of right effort, which includes skillful desire, underlies right mindfulness—like we’re practicing right now, trying to get the mind into concentration by being very mindful of the breath in and of itself. You have to want to focus on the breath and to put aside any thoughts that would pull you away. The Buddha recommends three qualities to help … 
  8. Think
     … Part of the mind will say, “Oh, of course not.” But there may be a part of the mind that says, “Well, it seems like it.” The only way you’re going to find that second part of the mind is to ask questions. You can ask if the pain is coming at you. Actually the pain doesn’t have a direction, but if … 
  9. It’s What You Give
     … Phenomena are preceded by the mind, excelled by the mind, made by the mind. The people who put that statement first in the Dhammapada knew what they were doing, because it expresses a principle that holds all the way through the practice: The mind comes first; the heart comes first. We live in a world where we have to put a lot of energy … 
  10. Past & Future in the Present
    Close your eyes and make up your mind that you’re going to stay with the breath for the rest of the hour. Watch the breath as it’s coming in, and watch it as it’s going out. And remember to stay here. It’s very easy to forget. You’re basically doing three things. You make the intention to stay, which is … 
  11. No Foolproofing
     … The one thing the Buddha has you develop at all times is mindfulness. But mindfulness is not simply awareness of the present moment. It means keeping in mind what you need to know. So mindfulness is not simple. You have to keep these instructions in mind. It doesn’t mean that you keep repeating them to yourself all the time, but it does mean … 
  12. An Auspicious Day
     … This is why we practice mindfulness. Again, there’s a misunderstanding that mindfulness means being in the present moment with a nice, spacious, non-judgemental awareness. The Buddha never defines it that way. In fact, he defines it as a quality of your memory, being able to keep things in mind. It’s your active memory: not just sitting around thinking about things in … 
  13. The Field Hospital
     … The problem is, to get this higher pleasure you have to seclude the mind from sensuality. That’s not quite the Catch-22 it sounds like, because all you have to do is create a little space in the mind, a little space of time, the ability to inhabit the body, at least for a little while—to get the mind to settle down … 
  14. Injustice
     … And it’s a quality of mind that we try to develop. But it’s important to realize that it doesn’t mean being totally passive, totally unable to recognize what’s right or wrong. What it means is being able to keep the mind emotionally on an even keel—recognizing right actions, recognizing harmful actions, preferring skillful actions over harmful actions, but not … 
  15. Seeing Distinctions
    We’re trying to bring the mind to stillness for two purposes, and the purposes go together. One is that when the mind is still, there’s a sense of ease and well-being. The second is that when it’s still, it can see things clearly. These go hand in hand, because if you don’t have a basic sense of well-being … 
  16. For When the World Can’t Help You
     … What would you do then? The best thing would be to work on the good qualities in the mind. As for what effort you’ve put in, leading up to that point in working on the good qualities of the mind, you’d be glad you did it. It’s good to keep that perspective in mind every day, every day, as you sit … 
  17. Effortlessness Through Effort
    We hear the ajaans talking about automatic mindfulness: where your mindfulness is so steady that you don’t have to make any effort—it’s just there. It sounds good. It sounds like the kind of meditation we’d like to have. But there are two ways of having an effortless meditation. One is not to put any effort in at all from the … 
  18. Negotiating with the Committee
     … Because the mind does like to feed, and it likes to feed on pleasure. So as you negotiate with all the unskillful thoughts and voices in the mind, it’s really good to be able to throw them a little pleasure. What this comes down to is that every voice in the mind, every identity, every self, you’ve ever created, is created for … 
  19. The Missing Truth
    The Buddha says that when we experience pain, stress, suffering, the mind has two reactions. One is bewilderment. We don’t understand how the suffering has come. The second is a search: “Is there anyone out there who knows a way or two to put an end to the suffering?” This means that we’re looking for three kinds of truth. We’re looking … 
  20. Skilled in Aims
     … That means you’ve got to make your mind like a Brahmā mind. You do that through the concentration. You focus the mind on a pleasure that has nothing to do with sensuality. In fact, it’s when the mind gets past sensual thoughts, secluded from sensual thoughts and secluded from all types of unskillful dhammas—unskillful qualities from wrong view all the way … 
  21. Refuge
     … One of the worst things that can happen to you is if you let the values of the world insinuate themselves into your mind and you start doing things and saying things and thinking things that will be for your long-term detriment. When you keep the Buddha in mind, the Dhamma in mind, the Sangha in mind, they protect you from that danger … 
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