Search results for: "Thought"
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- Appreciating Your Practice… You can see a thought coming up that used to hook you and make you miserable, but now it comes up and yet doesn’t make you miserable anymore. Appreciate that. You’ve made progress. Ajaan Maha Boowa talks about seeing little tiny flakes of bark get chipped off the trees of his defilements, and he took a lot of satisfaction in that. So …
- Mindfulness Island… Some thought that your karma did have an influence on your rebirth, some thought that it didn’t, and some thought that there wasn’t any rebirth anyhow. As for how things worked in terms of rebirth, some of the beliefs were really strange. My favorite one is the belief that when you die, you go up to the Moon and you feed off …
- The Not-Self Discourse… This is what directed thought and evaluation are all about. You direct your thoughts to the breath and then you evaluate how good the breath is. Then you evaluate how well the mind is staying with the breath. Ajaan Lee makes a comparison, that alertness is like a pulley. You pull a rope in one direction, then you pull the rope in the other …
- Strengthening Your Goodness… When the Buddha was teaching mindfulness of breathing to his son, he started out with some discernment exercises, in particular, focusing on inconstancy—and that includes stress and not-self—to give karate chops to your unskillful thoughts. Whatever they propose, you can say that the pleasure that comes from engaging in lust or anger or whatever is very inconstant, and yet you’d …
- Learning Through Healing… The Buddha tells you to engage in what he calls directed thought and evaluation to get the mind to settle down. In other words, you look at the breathing, watch it for a while. Notice where you feel it: Does it feel good? If it doesn’t feel good, you can try to change. Directing your attention to the breath: That’s directed thought …
- The World Is Swept Away… Even your body, your feelings, your perceptions, your thought constructs, your consciousness: You can’t take those with you, either. These first three Dhamma summaries provide an interesting point to reflect on — that the Buddha’s teaching on the three characteristics may have come from the simple facts of aging, illness, and death. Aging — inconstancy; illness — stress and suffering; and death — not-self. The …
- Befriending the Breath… Your thoughts are harmonious. You protect yourself in this way. You become a force for harmony in the world as well. This is an important principle. All the important qualities we need to develop in our relations with other people, we first have to develop within ourselves, in our relationship to the breath. Start out with thoughts of goodwill, as in that chant we …
- Self-Healing… As you ask these questions of yourself, that’s called directed thought and evaluation. In other words, you direct your thoughts to a certain topic and then you make comments on it; you ask questions, answer the questions—try to figure things out. What you’re trying to figure out here is how to breathe in a way that feels good: energizing when you …
- The Need for a Purpose… We have a purpose, which means, of course, that we have some expectations, that by fashioning a sense of form, feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness out of the raw material given to us by our past karma, we’re looking for something. We have a purpose in mind. This is the nature of our mind. It’s purposeful. When it has no purpose …
- Attention with an Agenda… You direct your thoughts and you evaluate for the sake of something. You apply different perceptions and focus on different feelings for the sake of something. Like right now: You’re trying to get the mind into concentration. So you breathe in a way that will give rise to a sense of comfort for the sake of getting the mind into concentration. You use …
- Training Your Commentator… We think that the mind should be still and that there shouldn’t be any thoughts at all. But then there’s a voice here and a voice there and something inside you will say, “Okay, it shouldn’t be this way.” Well, maybe that voice doesn’t know anything, either. As the Buddha said, directed thought and evaluation are factors in the first …
- Good Work… So while you’re sitting here and meditating, any thought that pulls you away from the breath, you have every right to let go of. No matter what the responsibilities might be—having to mull over things you regret doing or saying today, or worrying about things you’re going to have to do or say tonight or tomorrow when you leave here—those …
- Determined to Practice… You have to be very, very selective about the friends you choose, the things you choose to read and listen to, and the thoughts in your own mind that you choose to listen to as well. This requires determination. Underlying all this, of course, is goodwill. And that—as the Buddha specifically says—is a form of determination. This goes against what you ordinarily …
- The Duty to Understand… We’re holding on to the thought constructs: the directed thoughts that focus your attention on the breath, and the evaluation that looks at it to see where it might be improved, or where it’s already pleasant, and what can be done with that sense of pleasure. We can spread it around. And we try to maintain our awareness of these things. So …
- Separate… As long as you feel that you have to depend on them, that’s going to be a scary thought. But when you realize that you don’t, that’s one less thing to cling to, one less thing to you have to fear. When you don’t have that fear, then people can’t take advantage of that fear. We see this all …
- The Practice is Wherever There’s Mindfulness… This is where you perfect and develop your skill, where you get practice in being skillful, by noticing, when you carry through with what you thought was skillful, what are the results? If they’re as good as you thought they’d be, okay, remember that. If they aren’t, remember that, too, and try to figure out a way to do better next …
- Feeding Off of Others… So when we’re feeding off of other people, often we’re feeding off of our imaginings about them, our thoughts about them, our feelings, our perceptions. No wonder it’s a very unstable situation. This is why the Buddha said you need to find better things to feed on. He offers you the path. There’s a social aspect of the path as …
- Conviction & Focus… You’re not afraid of devoting your energies to one line of thought or one particular problem. Whereas when you’re older, you don’t see that you have much time left, so there’s the fear: “If I devote myself to this problem and it turns out to be a dead-end, that’s a waste of valuable time, of which there is …
- Your Inner Teacher… If your mind wanders off the breath, if it wanders away from your body, here’s the sound of the talk to send you back, to remind you of why you’re meditating, and sometimes to point out things that you might not have thought of otherwise. But still, the talk is meant to be here in the background. If there’s anything in …
- Equanimity & Action… Why should that thought give rise to equanimity? Because it’s useful to reflect on that when you encounter things that you would like to have a certain way and they’re not going to be that certain way: times when you’d like to help someone else, times when you’d like to help yourself, and yet it’s not working. At least …
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