Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 74
  2. The Intelligent Heart
     … The training of the mind, as the Buddha said, is the primary requisite for a happiness that lasts: both because it gives you the strength to give up the other pleasures that would leave wounds on the mind, and because it allows you to see more clearly into what your own mind is doing. When the mind feels an urge to go off someplace … 
  3. Training Your Intentions
     … The texts often talk about how you have to get rid of the five hindrances first and then get the mind concentrated. Actually, it’s in the process of trying to get the mind to settle down that you run into these hindrances as hindrances. Otherwise, they just slosh around in the mind without seeming to be hindering you from anything. You’re hardly … 
  4. Treasure Island
     … In his image, that’s the establishing of mindfulness. Focus on the body in and of itself, puttin aside all thoughts of greed and distress with reference to the world—just you right here with your body. Be ardent, alert, and mindful. Notice the order there in those three qualities: They start with ardent, Ardency is what makes everything skillful there, because mindfulness can … 
  5. Understanding Pain
     … Fortunately, the actions we’re doing right now are creating the kind of pain in the mind that’s causing the mind to suffer. If we change our present actions, the mind doesn’t have to suffer. So first we have to have this understanding: The fact that there’s pain in the body does not have to make us suffer. Then we can … 
  6. A Pervasive Well-being
    When we talk about practicing concentration, we often talk about bringing the mind to oneness, or a state of one-pointedness or singleness. It’s important that we understand what this means and how you do it because there are two ways of explaining the Pali term ekaggatā. One is that the mind is at one point. Eka means one, agga means point or … 
  7. Off the Continuum
     … There’s a special kind of pleasure that comes with that concentration, because part of what makes the concentration right is that it’s endowed with all the other factors of the path, starting from right view on through right mindfulness. This is why the Buddha said that right concentration is developed not only by emphasizing the tranquility or the serenity of the mind … 
  8. Judging Your Thoughts by What They Do
     … This principle applies not only to external actions but also to the actions of the mind—in other words, your thoughts. When we settle the mind down into meditation, it’s not simply to watch what’s going on in the present moment. We want to give the mind the solidity to remember lessons from the past when they are necessary, and also to … 
  9. Locate Your Craving
     … You have to be alert, you have to be mindful to do what needs to be done, and let the pleasure take care of itself. Secondly, you’re learning some important lessons about craving and about how to understand your mind. You’ll notice this when the mind wanders off: An image will appear and you’ll go into it. In fact, it happens … 
  10. Cooking the Mind
    One of the more unusual images that the ajaans use for describing the practice is that you’re cooking your mind. It’s like cooking rice. Uncooked rice can still grow and turn into rice plants. If your mind is thoroughly cooked, though, it’s not going to give rise to any more rice plants. It’s not going to be reborn again. It … 
  11. One Point, Two Points, Many Points
     … That enabled her to get the mind into concentration really quickly. What all this shows is that concentration is an individual matter. Different people find that their minds settle down in different ways. And there’s room in the practice of concentration for you to experiment and see what works for you. There’s no one ideal method that’s going to suit everybody … 
  12. Guarding the Truth
     … So, as you mediate, you’re looking at the processes, you’re looking at the way the mind filters things and shapes things. This is why, when we meditate, we close our eyes. We’re not looking at the world outside. We’re looking at how our minds work—our hearts and minds. The Pali word citta covers both heart and mind. As we … 
  13. The Teacher Inside
     … You can get your mind around the idea that you’re actually doing them, and then you stick with it. So remember as you’re meditating, you’re not only training the mind, you’re also training the part of the mind that’s the teacher of the mind, that watches, evaluates. Of course, the teacher is sure to make mistakes, like teachers in … 
  14. Doubts
     … Why do you want to go over them again? If you were to think about them for 24 hours, where would they take you? Anywhere good? Remember, the Buddha said that when you allow your mind to go down certain avenues of thought, you’re bending the mind in that direction. Do you want your mind to be bent in the direction of lust … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. Multi-Dimensional Dhamma
     … not only how you deal with your own mind, but also how dealing with your own mind affects your relationships to other people and to the things you depend on for life. When you want to gauge the practice and events in your mind, and to gain a sense of which teachings really are useful when applied in a particular way, you have to … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
  22. Load next page...