Search results for: "The Mind"

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  2. More than a Sliver of Mindfulness
     … That will lead the mind into right concentration. Seeing the larger context in this way gives you a sense of where the mindfulness should be going. It doesn’t just stay there, watching things coming and going. You use it as part of a training that gets you into right concentration. Seeing this context, you pay more attention to one of the lists inside … 
  3. Calm & Insight into Pain
     … We get very good at certain kinds of sketches, not realizing that they may be useful for some purposes but can actually create a lot of suffering for the mind in other situations. So look at how you sketch your pains to yourself and how you stitch them together. And ask yourself, “Could there be another way?” Here there’s a disturbance in the … 
  4. As Days & Nights Fly Past
     … We stash away certain ideas, and as they get brought up from the mind to reflect on, each time you put them back in the mind they get changed. After a while your memories get distorted and deformed. So what’s left? A lot of lies the mind is telling itself about the past. They may look like gold, but they’re fake. Years … 
  5. The Skill of Happiness
     … Then, if you have meditated before, you can remember the lessons you’ve learned as to what works and what doesn’t work in getting the mind to settle down and to be happy to stay here. Because the mind is like a committee. There are lots of views, lots of opinions, lots of strategies we’ve used in the past for finding happiness … 
  6. What Are You Doing Right Now?
     … The fullness that comes from this particular state of being makes it easier to watch, to see how you create a state of being in the mind, how you nurture it, and how you keep it going. Creating good states of being in the mind is like giving the mind good food to feed on. It can then start comparing this food with the … 
  7. Doubt vs. Questioning
     … But if you learn from your actions, then you’re developing good qualities in the mind. And in the process of developing, you come to your own understanding of what mindfulness really is about: What’s the difference between mindfulness and alertness? How do they relate? How do they do good things for the mind? How do they enable you to see things you … 
  8. The Range of Our Responsibility
     … Basically, it’s what we do with the body, what we say with our speech and what we think with the mind: That’s our responsibility. And all of this comes out of the mind in the present moment. That’s why we focus our meditation on being more and more clear about what’s going on in the mind in the present moment … 
  9. Training Your Minds
     … The trick is to stay, because the mind has a tendency to wander. That’s what the word samsara means: wandering-on. It’s not so much a place as an activity, something the mind keeps doing. It peeks in and looks around here for a while, and then drops that, and goes over and looks in that corner over there. If you were … 
  10. Nobility Through Inner Strength
    Get your body in position—in a posture you can try to maintain for the whole hour without putting too much strain on any part of the body—because the mind has work to do. Getting the mind into position is not all that hard, but keeping it there is going to be the work for the hour. Getting it in position simply means … 
  11. Why It’s Good to Know Why
     … Remember that the mind is a complex system. And the nature of complex systems is that they’re focused on some things, but then, in the areas where they’re not focused, they tend to be pretty random. When we get on the path, we’re focusing ourselves in a particular direction. We’re trying to get all those random threads of the mind … 
  12. Strength of Mindfulness
     … Now, you don’t memorize those lessons and run them through the mind all the time, but you have them at your fingertips. This is one of the reasons why we keep the mind still. When it’s still, it’s as if all the drawers of the mind where all your valuables are stored are available. You know where they are so that … 
  13. Best Friends
    When you read the Buddha’s descriptions of right concentration, you notice that the two activities that help the mind to settle down are directed thought and evaluation. In order to clear away unskillful thoughts in the mind, you have to direct your thoughts in the right direction, toward the breath. And you keep directing them there, Keep reminding yourself: “Stay with the breath … 
  14. The Noble Truths of the Breath
    To get the mind to settle down, you need to give it a comfortable place to stay. That’s why we work with the breath. Or you can say we play with the breath. In other words, we experiment to see what kind of breathing feels good. You can try long breathing or shorter breathing. It’s good to start with long breathing to … 
  15. The Carpenter’s Adze
     … You want to steady the mind—make it more concentrated—or gladden the mind. How do you do that? You deal with mental fabrication. You look at your perceptions, you look at your feelings, and ask yourself, “Which ones can I change so that the mind does become more and more glad to be here, more and more steady, more and more concentrated?” So … 
  16. One Thing Clear Through
     … Or you hear there are types of meditation where they allow the mind simply to wander around, and all you have to do is follow its wanderings. Sounds good, the mind is free to go wherever it wants, but it doesn’t develop any real strength. So you have to let go of its wanderings, resist its wanderings. There are things you’ve got … 
  17. Four Noble Questions
     … Wherever there’s a disturbance in the mind, you want to look for what happens at the same time. When that disturbance passes away, what passes away at the same time? The two are connected. If you want to see the events of the mind, how they contribute to added stress, you need to have a firm baseline, getting the mind as still as … 
  18. The Real Thing
     … Now, that requires that the mind be really quiet, and that all the disturbances involved with the body be cleared away, so that you can look simply at events in the mind as they’re happening and can point to, “This is this and that’s that.” When the Buddha talks about the five khandhas, he says, “Such is form, such its origination, such … 
  19. The Walls of Ignorance
     … The compartments of the mind that would allow us to do unskillful things — which would mean that we can’t trust ourselves — get torn down. The mind that’s truly one is the mind that can trust itself totally. There are no hidden corners. Everything is wide open in a mind like that. We gain release from the barriers we create for ourselves, release … 
  20. The Skill of Stillness
     … You have to put yourself in the mood so that no matter how hot it is outside or how cold, you want to do the work of training the mind. Part of this comes from having a sense of inspiration in the training. Ajaan Suwat would talk about this a lot. He’d say at the beginning of each meditation session, “Try to develop … 
  21. Hope
     … to hope, to expect. “When the mind is defiled, a bad destination can be hoped for. When the mind is undefiled, a good destination can be hoped for.” Then there’s the noun, āsā, which also means hope, as when you place your hopes on something. In addition, the Pali language has ways of formulating injunctions where you express a hope: “May this happen … 
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