Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. Outside of the Box
     … What are you doing right now that’s putting a burden on the mind? You’re making choices that are putting a burden on the mind totally unnecessarily. So get the mind quiet to see if you can watch that happening. Until you watch it happening, it sounds pretty abstract. But when you can actually see the movements of the mind, that’s when … 
  3. Watch What You’re Doing
     … Watch more and more carefully for the next time the mind is about to slip off. Look for the steps, so that you can see exactly where mindfulness lapses, and then immediately stitch it all back together again. You begin to see that the mind’s wandering off does have an intentional aspect. You learn similar lessons even as the mind gets more and … 
  4. Endurance Made Easier
     … So the trick to developing endurance is to learn to look at what the mind is doing. Learning how to sit with pain is often a good way of seeing what’s happening in the mind. That old image of the watering hole out in the savannah is good to keep in mind: If you want to survey the animals in the savannah or … 
  5. The Saints Don’t Grieve
    The Saints Don’t Grieve January 28, 2005 One of the most difficult but important principles in the practice is what the Buddha called, “Learning to see renunciation as freedom.” For most of us renunciation seems to be a restriction — as when you’re getting the mind to focus on the breath. Before you make up your mind to do that, the mind doesn … 
  6. Guarding Against Trouble
     … What are the effluents? The Pali word asava literally means *things that flow out. *In this case, they flow out of the mind. In some cases, the Buddha defines them as sensuality, becoming, and ignorance. But there’s a sutta where he talks about the effluents and they sound like anything that would create trouble for the mind. He lists seven different ways of … 
  7. Progress & Regress
     … Of course, it’s difficult in the sense that the mind that’s overseeing the training is also the mind that needs to be trained. In other words, sometimes just as you need your powers of observation most, and you need your powers of mindfulness most, that’s when everything else seems so weak. It seems really hard to get started again, in which … 
  8. Kindness in the Light of Karma
     … Make your mind like water. Water is used to wash away dirty things, but the water doesn’t react, doesn’t shrink away. Make the mind like wind. Wind blows dirty things around, and yet it’s not disgusted by them. Make the mind like fire. Fire burns disgusting things, but it’s not disgusted by them. Make your mind like space. No one … 
  9. Appropriate Attention Always
     … This is one of the functions of mindfulness: to keep that framework in mind. When something comes up, you know what to do with it. For instance, with the hindrances: Those are part of the cause of suffering, so you know you have to abandon them. And again, that’s a framework you want to keep in mind, because it’s all too easy … 
  10. Bases of Power
     … Actually, of course, all four are involved in getting the mind into concentration, but for different people and for even one person at different times, one of the four may be prominent. So you have to ask yourself: What does your mind need right now in order to give power to your concentration? The first quality is desire. This, as with all four of … 
  11. Less is More
     … That’s why we train the mind. To see this clearly, we have to get the mind still. Get the mind with one object, so it can settle down and have a good solid foundation that doesn’t shift around all the time. The more you shift around, the less you see. You might think that the more territory you cover, the more sights … 
  12. Values
     … Value for what? Value in that it allows you to observe the mind, to understand what drives the mind, and particularly what drives the mind to create suffering. We all want pleasure. We all want happiness. Yet we find ourselves doing things that lead to unhappiness. And even though we may know better, we tend to persist with our old bad habits. This is … 
  13. Catch Yourself Lying to Yourself
    Ajaan Chah has an interesting passage where he tells his monks to keep watch over their minds, that that’s the basic practice. And then he explains what he means by keeping watch over your mind, which is: “Try to catch yourself lying to yourself.” It’s an interesting idea. Watching the mind doesn’t mean just watching whatever comes up and being passive … 
  14. The Hedgefox
     … looking at his mind to see if there was still any suffering or stress in there. He focused on learning how to observe the mind really well through mindfulness and concentration. And focusing on that one thing, he began to see that it divided out into lots of little things. So we can keep those Dhamma concepts in the background, for the time when … 
  15. Make Yourself Reliable
     … Ajaan Chah once said that one of the first things you notice when you really look at the mind with all honesty is how dishonest it can be. So, both the mind and the body can be dishonest, but they also have their potential for honesty. Particularly the mind. It’s the mind that we’re training. We use the body to get more … 
  16. Fear of Death
    If you’ve ever observed your own mind as you fall asleep, you’ll notice that you begin to lose your sense of the body, and an image will appear, of a place, or a thing. You go for it. You actually go into the image. That’s the process of what they call “becoming” and “birth.” The appearance of the image of the … 
  17. The Uses of Pleasure
     … So what are the uses of this pleasure? One is to give the mind a place to rest. When you’re doing your work of analyzing what’s going on in the mind, there come times when the analysis gets dull. The traditional image is of a knife. If you use it again and again and again, it’s going to get dull. You … 
  18. Bringing Daily Life into the Practice
     … But, if you’re wise, you want to keep the standards of the noble ones in mind and try to live up to them. You’ll find that a lot of the principles for bringing the world into your practice require mindfulness. In this case, you’re keeping the standards of the noble ones in mind in terms of your precepts. This carries over … 
  19. Categorical Truths
    Make a survey of your body; make a survey of your mind. A survey of the body: Make sure you’re sitting up straight in a posture that you can maintain for an hour, and notice where there are patterns of tension. See if you can release the tension. Notice this especially around the joints. You might start with the joints of the fingers … 
  20. The Karma of Pain
     … Because this is the big problem that weighs the mind down. If the mind can learn how not to burden itself with pains like this, the other problems in the world are not problems at all. Some of them may be soluble, some of them may not be soluable, but at least they don’t weigh on the mind. And that makes all the … 
  21. Loving Yourself
     … Because if you act on unskillful intentions, it leaves a scar on the mind. And no matter how much denial you may build up around it, it makes it harder and harder to just be with yourself, harder to be true to yourself, true with yourself, to admit what’s actually going on in the mind. There are two places where you can see … 
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