Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. Life in the Buddha’s Hospital
     … The events in the mind are the important issues. Those are the things causing your own illness. Do you want to cure your own illness or to aggravate it? Keep this question in mind as you practice. As we live together and practice together, we see each other a lot, but try to make that fact have the least possible impact on the mind … 
  3. Trust in Heedfulness
    The Buddha gives a list of five qualities that give strength to the mind. The list starts with conviction. And as the Buddha says frequently, the various members of the list—starting with conviction on through persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment—are developed through heedfulness. Now, this may seem a strange combination: Conviction, on the one hand, implies trust; and heedfulness implies wariness. But … 
  4. Restraint
     … In this case the Buddha says the stake is mindfulness immersed in the body—as when you’re focused on the breath. You breathe in and out in a way that gives rise to rapture, gives rise to pleasure, that gladdens the mind, concentrates the mind. You can breathe with a sense of the whole body breathing in, the whole body breathing out. This … 
  5. A Divine Seat
     … The Buddha talks about getting the mind into concentration as a divine seat. Get the mind into the first jhana, and there’s a sense of ease and rapture filling the body. You can work it through the body. When you’re sitting in that state, you’re in a divine seat. So create a divine seat for yourself tonight. Focus on the breath … 
  6. Get Out of Yourself
    When the mind’s narratives seem oppressive, it’s good to think about the Buddha on the night of his awakening. You think you have narratives. The first knowledge he gained consisted of many, many, many narratives, many, many eons of lifetimes. He could have dwelled on the details, but seeing the huge number, he began to reduce things to their common terms. With … 
  7. The True Cause of Suffering
     … What are the right places? The right places are in developing good qualities of mind, so that the mind can be trained to handle whatever comes up and not suffer from it. When good things happen, we don’t suffer from the good things. When bad things happen, we don’t suffer from the bad things—because the mind has its own independent source … 
  8. Lighter & Stronger
     … What that means is a mind that has lots of skills. And the skill of peeling things away like this is one of the primary ones. You strengthen the mind by holding in mind perceptions that help you to separate yourself out from the things you felt you had to rely on, or that you actually thought were you. Like this body: It’s … 
  9. The Use of the Present
    The Use of the Present November 28, 2016 We focus on the body in and of itself, feelings in and of themselves, mind states in and of themselves, but we don’t make them the goal in and of themselves. We’re trying to take them apart to see what they’re made of, because we’ve been putting them together in all kinds … 
  10. Hypocrisy
     … But again, it’s the little things, it’s the little movements of the mind you’ve got to watch out for. So when something questionable comes up in the mind, don’t just sweep it under the rug. Look at it. Ask yourself: What is this? And don’t take the mind’s first answers or excuses as the truth. Question them. After … 
  11. The Balance of Power
    There’s a balance of power in the mind, in the same way that there’s a balance of power in the world outside. We have a lot of different desires, and there’s a tension among them. But as long as each of them has its say in one way or the other, things are relatively peaceful. Not really peaceful inside, there’s … 
  12. Success with Breathing
     … There are also the potentials of the mind that are applied here, where you can watch to see how the mind fashions its experiences with its perceptions, with its ways of talking to itself. You can fashion them in all kinds of ways. But you want to fashion them in a way that leads the mind to want to settle down. These potentials are … 
  13. Beginner’s Mind
    Try to bring a fresh mind to the breath each time you meditate. Imagine that you’re someone who hasn’t been living in a body for a couple of lifetimes and you’re suddenly back in this body with this unusual experience: There’s an energy flowing around the body, flowing in the body, flowing in and out. And so you’re curious … 
  14. Remorse
    When you sit down to meditate and settle down with the breath, the mind becomes very sensitive. Sometimes things you did in the past that you don’t feel right about will come up. And they hurt. At times like that, it’s all too easy to start feeling remorse. Remorse is not an attitude or a feeling that the Buddha recommended. Because, as … 
  15. Gladdening the Mind
    Gladdening the Mind September 2, 2004 Gladdening the mind. This is an important skill in the meditation. The Buddha lists it as one of the basic steps in mindfulness of breathing. If your meditation gets dry, it starts to seize up like an engine without any lubricant. So you need to keep your mind lubricated, keep it refreshed as you’re practicing. There are … 
  16. Pitching Your Tent in the Present
     … At the same time, you’re developing good qualities in the mind: mindfulness, the ability to keep all this in mind, alertness to what you’re doing, and ardency, the desire to do this well. These are all potentials we have within us that we can develop. As Ajaan Lee says, most of us have lots of potentials that we’ve never developed, good … 
  17. See Yourself as Active Verbs
     … The mind, he says, is not just sitting there receiving input from outside. Even before we see things, hear them, smell, taste, touch, or think about them, there’s already a lot of activity going out from the mind. The Thai ajaans call these the currents flowing out of the mind. Your intentions, your perceptions, your plans for things: All of these have an … 
  18. Concentration & Renunciation
     … Now, to put the mind in a position where it can answer these questions with some fairness, we have to get the mind into concentration. Because this is the practice that enables you not to be overcome by pleasure, not to be overcome by pain. Sometimes we sit here with pains in the body, but if the breath is comfortable, we can use that … 
  19. A Centered but Broad Awareness
     … One of his terms for a mind in concentration is the mind that’s enlarged or expanded. The Pali word is mahaggata citta, the enlarged mind; the expanded mind. Having the mind expanded like this is important in several ways. One, it helps keep you from falling asleep. Sometimes it’s all too easy when the breath feels comfortable and you’re focused on … 
  20. The Four Jhanas
     … The mind is broadly based, and isn’t easily tipped over. Even as you get up from the meditation, you can maintain that sense of full body as you walk around, as you deal with other things. It may not actually qualify as jhana, but it’s a steady foundation. It’s your foundation of mindfulness. It’s an establishing of mindfulness, which after … 
  21. Knowledge over Fear
     … Because what allows the vision to come is a lapse of mindfulness. The mind gets into a state of concentration where it’s settling down but not fully there with its object. It’s kind of a dreamy state, and that’s where these visions can come in. So as you breathe into the heart, you’re reestablishing mindfulness, reestablishing alertness, and they’ll … 
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