Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 74
  2. Around in Circles
     … It’s simply a matter of learning to become more familiar with it. How many different kinds of breath are there? There are lots of different kinds. There’s long, there’s short, there’s heavy, there’s light. Narrow, broad. There’s the in-and-out breath, there’s the sense of breath energy that flows through the body, some of which moves … 
  3. Free Sources of Energy
     … The things that used to wear you down suddenly can become energizing. So allow yourself to think in terms of developing merit. You’re developing the perfections. And although there may be the groups of people who criticize the attitude of building up merit and acquiring perfections as a kind of spiritual materialism, the Buddha was not one of those people. He encouraged you … 
  4. Question & Probe
     … When you can develop and maintain it, it becomes your safe place. The mind needs a safe place—and not only a safe place, but also a range of weapons or tools: skills that you can use to deal with situations as they arise so that you’re not afraid of them. Especially when you’re dealing with emotional pain, one of the least … 
  5. Collecting Your Tools
     … As you get more and more skillful at staying in the present moment, it becomes more and more second-nature, easier and easier all the time. And don’t worry about getting stuck on concentration. That’s the kind of thing you can get unstuck from pretty easily. It’s a lot harder to get unstuck from your ideas. Often, things come up in … 
  6. Free Like a Wild Deer
     … These opportunities don’t come if you’re spending all your time trying to become as wealthy as possible, or as famous as possible, or as powerful as possible. The good things of the mind come when you pare down your concern for material things, you pare down your concern for the world outside and your position in the world outside, and you focus … 
  7. Mental Balance
     … Your own mind becomes more spacious, and you’re less likely to harm anybody. On top of that, the Buddha notices that when you develop unlimited goodwill, unlimited compassion, appreciation, equanimity, if you’ve got any past bad karma, the effects, if they hit you when your mind is in expanded state like that, won’t be nearly as strong. He makes a comparison … 
  8. The Need for Evaluation
     … Now, it is a form of becoming. You’ve got the desire to give rise to concentration, and you’ve got the aggregates, which are your field. The desires are the water. Your consciousness is the seed. It’s all right here. And in the process of evaluating how you’re getting the mind to settle down, how you can maximize the pleasure, you … 
  9. Dhamma Opportunism
     … And if, given your situation, you can look to see where the opportunities are for developing the mind, developing the heart in the practice, then the situation becomes an opportunity. We see a lot of opportunism around us, and it’s very disheartening. People who’ve had long-term political agendas are now advancing them. That’s sad, to see this is what human … 
  10. Pride, Good & Bad
     … So ask yourself, “When I open my mouth to speak, is it a gift? Or is it simply opening a valve of a pipe and who knows what is going to come out the pipe?” As you decide to be more careful in how you speak, more judicious in how you speak, you’ll discover that your speech becomes something of which you can … 
  11. No Happiness Other than Peace
     … So if you want to head them off before they become big, you have to be able to settle down here and feel well-established. You’re not going to be pushed off in any direction by anything. This requires an enlarged state of mind, so once the breath starts feeling comfortable, start thinking of spreading your awareness around the body and allowing that … 
  12. Staying Grounded
     … You look for things to feed on, because after all, as you become the thinker, you’re a being. Wherever there’s the attachment of a being, then the being has to feed in order to keep that identification going. And where you feed, either in terms of physical food or mental food, other people are also trying to feed. It’s as if … 
  13. Your Ancestral Territory
     … And before you know it, your defilements have seized the high ground, and you become their victim. So when we talk about staying with the breath as you go through the day, it’s not just a matter of maintaining contact with the breath between meditation sessions so that it’s easier to settle down the next time. It’s also your protection in … 
  14. Normalcy
     … In that way, when the normal things of life come, the mind doesn’t become its own enemy. It can stay its own friend: clear, collected, not doing anything to harm itself or harm anybody else. That’s a mind that’s well-trained, and as the Buddha said, when the mind is trained you find happiness. Even though it may not yet be … 
  15. Faith in Awakening
     … It’s a wealth that sticks with you and protects you from doing all kinds of things that would become wounds in the mind. Like generosity, virtue gives you a genuine basis for self-esteem and self-respect in that even though other people may be acting in ways that are not restrained, you have the dignity of restraint. You give yourself value as … 
  16. Admirable Friendship
     … It becomes a support on the path so that you can develop appropriate attention. When things are not going well, you don’t say that it’s because of this thing out there or that person out there. “It’s because of something happening in the mind. There’s something I’m not doing quite right.” This is how the Buddha himself gained awakening … 
  17. A Wealthy Memory
     … How are you going to learn to become a noble disciple? Where do the nobles disciples come from? They came from unawakened people, but they learn to adopt these attitudes. That was part of what made them noble. So if you’re in a particular situation, ask yourself: What would Ajaan Suwat say? What would Ajaan Fuang say? What would the Buddha say? Try … 
  18. Patience
     … It’s typical, when you go to Thailand, that some people will ask you, “How can you stand this? You come from a comfortable place, there are all these hardships here.” Well, if you don’t think of them as hardships, then they don’t become hardships. Focus more on the opportunities you’ve got to practice. It’s the same with practicing the … 
  19. Mindful & Discerning 24/7
     … When the practice becomes an all-day, all-mind affair like this, that’s when it begins to have an effect.
  20. Values
     … What am I becoming right now?” Hopefully not -just becoming an older person. Hopefully doing something with this in-and-out breath to gain some deeper understanding as to why there is suffering, and what can be done to stop it. And realizing that finding an answer to that question is one of the most important things you can do. In the process of … 
  21. A Unified Committee
     … There’s a nerve that leads out to every pore, there’s a blood vessel that goes out there, so all the nerve endings that are sending messages are supposed to become part of a one big whole—which is not the way they normally function. Often you focus on this part, then you focus on that part, whichever parts seems to have a … 
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