Search results for: "Becoming"

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  2. Turtle Mind
     … You become more impervious to outside influences, especially energies coming from outside, because your energy in the body is full. The image the Buddha gives for an untrained mind is of throwing a piece of rock into a lump of clay. The rock goes into the clay very easily. As for mindfulness immersed in the body, the image is of a hardwood door. You … 
  3. Present Kamma
     … What am I becoming right now?” or “What am I doing right now?” If the Buddha were here to ask you that question, how would you respond? The best response is to say, I’m training my mind.” What do you do to train the mind? There’s the karma of the present moment, and it’s made up of three things that you … 
  4. Breath Meditation: The Third Tetrad
     … There will still be a sense of rapture there, but then after a while the rapture becomes tedious. It’s like food. When you’re really hungry, you want as much food as possible, but after you’re well-fed, food doesn’t seem so attractive any more. In the same way, when the body’s really tired, you want as much rapture as … 
  5. Heedfulness & Confidence
     … Otherwise, heedfulness degenerates into anxiety and becomes unskillful. We get stressed out over things that we shouldn’t get stressed out over and we sap our strength, so that when the time comes that we need to use our mindfulness and alertness and ingenuity to solve a problem, we don’t have the energy. An image that the forest ajaans use a lot: You … 
  6. A Touchstone at the Breath
     … If you believe A, then it means you believe B, and then it means you believe C, and they all become a cluster. The cluster gets bigger and bigger until it’s overwhelming. It takes over your whole worldview. But if you can use the breath as a solvent on that glue, you begin to see there’s just this idea and then there … 
  7. Fire Escapes
     … But the end of the universe, in terms of the suffering of the universes of all your becomings, he says, can be found in here. You don’t have to go out there. So, stay in here. Get to know this space really fully. The end of suffering is to be found in this fathom-long body. That doesn’t mean that it’s … 
  8. The Reality of Your Thoughts
     … They become things in and of themselves. And that kind of thinking, the Buddha says, stirs up a lot of trouble—in fact, it’s the kind of thinking that leads to conflict, both with other people and within yourself. In some contexts, he said that *all *thinking is a type of objectification; but in other contexts he separates them out—that it is … 
  9. The Role of Attachment
     … Meditation would become a chore. I actually know people who think that meditation is suppose to be a chore; you’re not supposed to like it. But that kind of meditation gets very dry very quickly, and the sorts of insights you may get from it are also very disorienting and very dry. For solid insights, you want to put the mind into a … 
  10. When it’s Hard to Settle Down
     … Make yourself aware of the whole line, and then from there you can give the line more of a three-dimensional quality so that it begins to fill out the rest of the body, while your focused awareness and your background awareness all become one. It’s when the mind fills the body like this that it doesn’t have any extra hands to … 
  11. Breath Meditation: The Fourth Tetrad
     … The stronger your concentration, the more constant it becomes. That makes it easier to see the subtle inconstancy of other things. You’ve got a point of comparison. You see the pleasure that concentration offers and you compare it to the pleasure that these other things—these other feelings and mind states—seem to offer. You realize that what they offer is not that … 
  12. A Good Foundation
     … Sometimes the energy’s been held in for so long that it’s going to take a while for the new habit to become habitual. If we’re not alert, we automatically go back to our old ways of holding the body, holding the energy, and doing this pretty unconsciously. Part of the problem is the fact that our society, our culture, doesn’t … 
  13. Negotiating with Death
     … It’s invaded you and it’s become solid like the body. And you can get all worked up about it. But if you can see the actual feelings of pleasure and pain are one thing and the warmth of the body and the solidity of the body and the energy are different things, then the pain’s not so oppressive. For one thing … 
  14. A Friend to the World
     … You can dress up compassion in any way you want to make it seem worthwhile, but that becomes an easy excuse for breaking the precepts and unskillful behavior. This is why in the Karaniya Metta Sutta the Buddha talks about being virtuous as a prerequisite for developing goodwill, so that your goodwill isn’t hypocritical, and so you have a good idea what it … 
  15. Change Your Perceptions
     … If it’s a visual perception, this is where Ajaan Lee’s instructions become handy, because remember, when we talk about the breath, we’re not talking about the air coming in and out at the nose. It’s not the tactile sensation at the nose that we’re interested in; we’re interested in the breath element in the body, the movement of … 
  16. Always Willing to Learn
     … It becomes a little movie you want to follow and then you’re off wherever it takes you. But if you want to stick with the meditation, you need to see those processes right as they begin forming and to figure out ways of nipping them in the bud: questioning the perception, dispersing that little stirring of energy with the breath, getting more alert … 
  17. The Allure of Self
     … They become not-self, the other. Then they become a good friend, and they’re part of your circle of friends again. The Buddha’s saying to look at the things you hold on to. Then apply that analysis of the five steps. This is why it’s so important that he talks about self not so much as a thing, but as a … 
  18. True Freedom of Speech
     … Realizing that groups can become disharmonious very easily, you have to be really careful about what you say. Whereas over here, people seem to value harmony a lot less. They say, “If this person wants to leave the group, that’s perfectly fine with me.” But that’s destructive and selfish. This is where we’re holding to our culture’s attitude toward freedom … 
  19. Playing Your Lute
     … He sat down and started thinking about how maybe he should just give up, go back home, become a lay person, make merit but otherwise give up on the practice. The Buddha read his mind, disappeared from Vulture’s Peak, and appeared right in front of him. I don’t know about you, but if the Buddha appeared in front of me while I … 
  20. Hold on to Your Frame of Reference
     … The ease becomes so pleasant, so blissful, that you just let go. You forget your frame of reference; you lose your frame of reference. So you’ve got to hold it in mind, the body sitting here. This is one of the most important things in the meditation: Once there’s a sense of ease, you’ve got to expand your awareness to fill … 
  21. Three Stages in the Practice
     … Learn to become more and more sensitive to how you can read the needs of the body and compensate for any bad habits you may have picked up in the way you breathe. The breath, when it’s handled properly, is medicine. It can give you energy when you need energy; it can calm you down when you need calming down. It can help … 
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