Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. Count Your Blessings
     … Each of us is experiencing our own suffering, our own pleasures, our own stress. And although there’s a basic pattern that underlies the way we’re experiencing these things, still, your suffering, your pains, are yours. You’re experiencing your pleasures, I’m experiencing mine, and we can know each other’s only by extrapolation. As Ajaan Fuang once commented, there’s a … 
  3. The Path of Happiness
     … Yet the problem that’s one of the big paradoxes of life is that many times the things we do end up causing stress and suffering. This is why we want to be here in the present moment more carefully, so that we can see the decisions that are being made, to get a sense of which decisions lead to stress and suffering, which … 
  4. Breath Meditation, Step by Step
     … So as soon as you can see where there’s unnecessary suffering and the craving that goes along with that suffering, you can cut right through the craving, cut right through the ignorance. And then you’ll see that the Buddha’s surgery really does make a big difference in the mind. Because when you cut at the right spot, it cuts those things … 
  5. Thinking Your Way to Stillness
     … why we’re causing ourselves suffering. Everything that we need to know is right here, both in terms of how things are caused and what can be done to put an end to the suffering. It’s simply we haven’t figured out which things are most important to know. At the same time, our gaze isn’t steady enough, our sensitivity isn’t … 
  6. A Better Place to Feed
     … As the Buddha said when he described the steps leading up to suffering, the first thing that happens after ignorance is that you fabricate your experience in ignorance. And because it’s in ignorance, it’s going to lead to suffering. But he also discovered that if you do it with knowledge, it can become part of the path to the end of suffering … 
  7. Discernment in Concentration
     … In the same way, we have to tackle the problem of suffering right here at the mind, because the cause is in the mind. And we have to attack not right at the suffering, but at the cause—and we need to develop the discernment that can find the cause there in the mind. We gain practice in that discernment as we meditate, because … 
  8. Precarious Knowledge
    This evening I was talking on the phone to one of my students, who suffered a stroke last week. She wanted me to give her some meditation instructions for using the breath to heal herself from inside. I know I’ve given her these instructions before, but to her it seemed like the first time she’d never heard these instructions. It’s unnerving … 
  9. The Middleness of the Path
     … There’s a way in which you could call it sensitivity training — getting more and more sensitive to the way the mind creates suffering for itself. As you deal with a layer of blatant suffering, you peel it away and find another, more subtle one. This is a lot of what the training in discernment is about: working from the blatant layers to the … 
  10. Training like an Adult
     … We’re doing this because we suffer and we’ve found the path that helps put an end to that suffering. That in and of itself should be reward enough. We don’t have to compare ourselves with other people. The Buddha talks about what he calls the person with no integrity, who compares himself, saying, “My jhāna is better than their jhāna, I … 
  11. Ready to Evacuate
     … Conviction here is the conviction that your actions really do matter and that you do have the ability to take this principle of action, which explains why we suffer, and you can learn how to master it so that you don’t have to suffer. Even though you may have done unskillful things in the past, you can still figure out how you don … 
  12. A Mind Like Earth
     … That doesn’t mean that you don’t prefer the end of suffering to suffering—you *do *prefer not to suffer. It’s simply that once you see in all fairness, in all objectivity, what needs to be done, then whether you like it or not, you do it. As for the things that need to be abandoned, even if you like them, you … 
  13. Metta
     … What do you get out of saying that this person deserves to suffer? The state of mind that wants to see somebody suffer: What is it feeding on? And you begin to realize it feeds on a lot of things inside yourself that you really can’t admire. And you think of the drawbacks again, that if you have ill will for other beings … 
  14. Good Work
     … The “doing” here refers to the fact that there are potentials for all kinds of suffering here in the present moment, and the mind has lots of potentials for causing that suffering— bringing it up and creating it out of those potentials. It doesn’t have to, and yet it keeps doing this. Greed, anger, and delusion, craving in its various forms: These are … 
  15. Right Exertion at Play
     … All of which is really useful knowledge for the sake of putting an end to suffering, because these processes of fabrication, if you do them with ignorance, will cause suffering. That’s the very first link in dependent co-arising. If you do them with knowledge, though, they become part of the path. So, as you occupy the mind with developing good qualities, you … 
  16. How to Change
    How to Change November 30, 2021 When the Buddha describes the steps in dependent co-arising, on the one hand he’s describing how suffering happens, the psychology that goes into how we shape the present moment in a way that leads to suffering. But he’s also describing the psychology of his listeners as they’re listening to him, the rhetorical situation he … 
  17. The Image of the Raft
     … If you hold on to an activity simply for the sake of holding on, there’s going to be suffering. The Buddha identifies suffering as clinging to the five aggregates—form, feeling, perceptions, thought-fabrications, consciousness. And there are four ways of clinging. You can cling in terms of sensual pleasure, sensual desire; you can cling in terms of your views; you can cling … 
  18. Mindfulness as a Goad
     … As the Buddha said, if everything we experienced right now were totally dependent on past actions or somebody else’s design for the world, there’d be no way to put an end to suffering. But the fact that we’re putting our experience together here right now means we can change that, and that open the path to the end of suffering. As … 
  19. Love for the Dhamma
     … Otherwise, think of all the eons of endless sufferings involved in repeatedly coming back again and again. He said that when you attained Awakening as a result of that deal, you wouldn’t even think that you had attained it with pain and suffering. It would have come with joy. So, when you run into hardships in your daily life, compare them to the … 
  20. Keep It Simple
     … There’s suffering. And when there’s a problem, you want to know where to focus your attention so you can most effectively deal with it. The Buddha points out the pattern: There’s suffering, but there’s a cause of suffering—and it’s in the mind. The way to uproot the cause is to work on developing the factors of the path … 
  21. Genuine Satisfaction
     … We can do that in a way that causes less suffering. And when we do the shaping with awareness, then it all becomes part of the path. Right view is what makes a difference between actions that form a wrong path and those that form a right path for the end of suffering. So try to get in touch with your hungers. It was … 
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