Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. Taking an Active Role
     … When you take that more proactive stance, you suffer less. This is one of the ways the Buddha says you develop both body and mind. When you’re undeveloped in body and undeveloped in mind, pain and pleasure overcome you. You get weighed down by them. But if you take a more proactive stance, realizing that the pain is not a given—it may … 
  3. Choosing a Teacher
     … But if you honestly want to put an end to suffering and you’re willing to do whatever is needed to put an end to suffering, that puts you on the right track. And when you’re on the right track, you’re in a much better position to find people who can help you along the way.
  4. Ripples Go Far
     … When you’re focused on your troubles, your suffering, your issues, you suffer a lot because the range is small and the pain is big. So of course it seems overwhelming. When you expand your range, you begin to realize that the pain is a lot smaller. This is one of the basic principles the Buddha uses in contemplating aging, illness, death, separation, and … 
  5. Practicing from Gratitude
     … As you protect the concentration, you begin to see what destroys it, what levels of stress or suffering you add to your life. Some people say they don’t have any suffering in life, but I don’t know anybody who doesn’t admit to having stress. Well, the stress that really weighs down the heart is the stress that you impose on yourself … 
  6. Rewriting the Mind’s Song
     … You don’t want to see them suffer for their past bad actions. Now, for some people that’s hard. Some people have done so much ill in the world that you’d like to see them suffer a little bit, squirm a little bit, before they find true happiness. But you have to ask yourself, “This attitude of mine: What kind of food … 
  7. Concentration Nurtured by Virtue
     … And you can regard those disturbances as the suffering in the four noble truths, if you want to analyze them. This is one of the teachings that Ajaan Suwat would give. You sit here trying to get the mind still. If there’s any disturbance in the stillness, you can say, “Okay, this is suffering.” When the Buddha talks about stress and suffering, it … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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