Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 75
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. Poison Your Fantasies
    Buried down among the many layers of voices in the mind is a voice that’s always asking a question: “What to do next? What to do next?” This is because the mind is active. It can’t just sit still. It keeps moving, moving, moving; planning this, planning that; trying to decide, when it realizes it has a choice, what the better choice … 
  17. Encouragement
     … The mastery you get over the mind in terms of being more mindful, being more alert—whether you can give your whole life to the meditation or have other responsibilities—all the time you spent on it is time well-spent, whether you get to the end of the path or not. So keep these points in mind, especially in the beginning stages where … 
  18. In the Details
     … What is getting results? A defilement comes up in the mind—greed comes up in the mind, lust comes up in the mind, aversion comes up in the mind—and if you can look at it and it just drops away, you know you’re making progress. But if you find that it comes up and just latches on, and you have trouble shaking … 
  19. The Language of the Breath
     … How do you read the language of the mind? How do you listen to the language of the mind, the language of the body? On the one hand, you can learn lessons from outside, as when you have a teacher who’s teaching you the foreign language. But it’s not simply a matter of mastering the grammar. You also have to master how … 
  20. Breath Meditation: The Fourth Tetrad
     … The same with obstructive mind states. When a hindrance comes up, the Buddha says in the section dealing with the mind that you should try to gladden the mind, steady the mind, and release the mind. In gladdening the mind, what kind of obstruction is getting in the way of your feeling glad about the fact you’re here? Is doubt getting in the … 
  21. Conserving Your Strength
     … This is why we work on concentration to build up strength of the mind. The Buddha compares concentration to food for the mind. In other places, he compares it to a home for the mind—in other words, a place where you can rest, gather your strength, and nourish the mind. But simply having strength is not enough. You have to learn how to … 
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