Search results for: "The Mind"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. Settling In
     … You try to notice the movements of the mind as it settles in and as it leaves and as it comes back, because that’s where the process of desire, passion, and clinging will play itself out. That’s where you’ll see it. So when the mind leaves, gets distractible, don’t get flustered when you realize that it’s happened. Just notice … 
  12. Your Mind is Lying to You
     … In cases like that, the mind has lots of ways of pulling you away, and you have to watch out for them, learn how to catch the mind when it’s lying to you. Sometimes it comes as psychotherapy, saying, “Forcing yourself is bad for you, you know. It’s unhealthy,” and all the jargon that therapists have cooked up to keep people from … 
  13. The Long-Distance Meditator
     … As the mind wants to wander around, thinking about this, thinking about that, ask yourself: How many times have you been thinking about these things? How many lifetimes have you allowed your mind to wander? Isn’t it time for something new? Be discerning in seeing what the mind is like when it stays comfortably in the present moment and can watch itself in … 
  14. The Body In & Of Itself
     … In this way, by keeping the mind with the body, you get both sides helping each other. Because the mind does need a place to rest. Otherwise it travels around looking for happiness in what other people do, other people say, activities outside. This is placing your happiness on really shaky foundations. You want to bring your awareness inside and look for happiness here … 
  15. The Fabrication of Pain
     … There can be a physical pain in the body but it doesn’t have to affect the mind. What affects the mind is the bridge that comes through the perception—where you’re laying claim to some part of the body but the pain has invaded the spot that you’ve laid claim to. You picture it as having a particular shape and a … 
  16. Dhamma Books & the Actuality
     … The first two simply get you oriented properly so that you realize that you really do have to train the mind. If you’re going to look for happiness, especially a happiness that’s solid and secure, the mind needs to be trained so that its thoughts don’t go and destroy its happiness. So that’s the orientation part – the directing part. But … 
  17. The Buddha’s Rules of Order
     … Those are the Buddha’s rules of order to keep this committee in line, so that the crazy people in the mind, the vagrant intentions, don’t take over the meeting, don’t fill up your time, don’t waste this luxury we have: all this time to watch the mind, to train the mind, to get the various committee members working together on … 
  18. Smoothing It
     … The only thing he could do was to use his discernment to figure out how the mind takes a physical pain and brings it into the mind and makes it a mental pain. He found himself cornered, and that caused him to come back out of the corner with his discernment. That was the lesson he learned that night—how much the mind is … 
  19. Exploring What You’ve Got
     … But the message of the Dhamma is, “Look at what you’ve already got and make the best use of that.” What have you got sitting here right here, right now? You’ve got the body and the mind. That’s all you need: the body sitting here breathing, the mind thinking and aware. You put all those things together so they develop. It … 
  20. Three Levels of Evaluation
     … how you can maximize them so that the mind can stay still and balanced for a long period of time, how to keep the mind clear so that you can get the higher benefits of concentration, i.e., the discernment that can come when things are very clear in the mind, with a strong foundation of mindfulness and alertness. It’s a lot easier … 
  21. Joy & Discontent
     … Wherever this inner voice came from, I don’t have to trust it.” Here again you bring out the five-step program that the Buddha would recommend for dealing with anything going on in the mind. First, see its origination. What’s propelling it? Say you’ve got a sense in the mind that you have to worry about things. If you don’t … 
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