Search results for: "The Mind"

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  2. Commit Yourself
     … The hard part is staying there, because the mind has a tendency not to hang out with things for very long. It stays a little bit and then gets bored, or it doesn’t like what it’s focusing on, and so moves to something else. Or else something else grabs its attention, forces itself on the mind. But even then, the mind has … 
  3. Breath Energies
     … It’s not just that you get the mind still and then you start seeing things. As you get the mind still and then learn how to ask questions in that stillness, you learn how to keep re-framing the questions. Starting with simple things like the breath and then moving on to pain: Why is there pain in the mind? And what do … 
  4. The Unity of the Path
     … It’s from here that you start going into the mind directly, because you realize that all your actions come from—where? They come from the qualities of the mind. Right effort starts with generating desire to prevent unskillful qualities from arising, as we chanted just now; to abandon them if they have arisen; to give rise to skillful qualities; and when skillful qualities … 
  5. A Pleasure Not to Be Feared
    Once your body is in position—sitting up straight, facing forward, your eyes closed, your hands in your lap, right hand on top of the left—the next step is to get the mind in position. Think thoughts of goodwill: a wish for happiness, true happiness, your own true happiness and the true happiness of all the beings. That’s the good thing about … 
  6. The Size of Your Eyes
     … Not every sensory input has a bad impact on the mind, but if it’s developing bad qualities in the mind, then it’s going to get in the way of your meditation. Ajaan Lee has a nice image. He says sometimes our eyes are too big for the things we see, and sometimes they’re too small for the things we see. When … 
  7. Boxed Stories
     … There’s a part of the mind that, when certain feelings come up in the body, immediately says, “Okay, you need a hit of pleasure right now, and the only way you’re going to get that is if you do this thing.” But you know it’s unskillful. Well, put yourself in another box. Question those voices. Remind yourself that the mind goes … 
  8. Advice for a New Monk
     … This kind of awareness, once it settles down and is very still, is a healing awareness for the mind. So give the mind a chance to settle down and be by itself. You don’t have to listen to the Dhamma talk. Just focus on the sensation of the breathing. Allow the breathing to be comfortable. Think of good breath energy filling every cell … 
  9. The Fetter of Perceptions
     … Pain does happen in the body, but it doesn’t have to make inroads into the mind. And by “mind” here, we don’t mean just the part of the mind that’s talking about it. It’s also our awareness. There’s a filter of perceptions between the actual sensation of pain and how it registers in the mind. That filter is going … 
  10. Breath vs. Distraction
     … You’ve got this body, and you’ve got the mind that’s aware. What are they doing here together? How do they relate to each other? A famous Zen master, Dogen, recommended asking questions like this: Is the body sitting in the mind, or is the mind sitting in the body? Which is the container for the other one? Or does there have … 
  11. Switzerland Inside
     … You need both activities to get the mind into concentration. The first is the actual concentration. For instance, at the moment, you’re keeping focused on the breath, in and of itself, i.e., without making reference to anything else: just the experience of the breath right here, right now. Then the second activity protects that. If you find the mind is wandering off … 
  12. The Choice Not to Suffer
     … So with that realization, he learned to bring the mind into concentration as a way of giving the mind a place to rest, and giving it a standpoint from which he could watch those thoughts. Because the only way you’re going to be able to see thoughts as events is if you’re able to step outside them and not get sucked into … 
  13. Precarious Knowledge
     … We learn things because they do have an effect on the mind, a beneficial effect on the mind. We’re not gathering up knowledge of the Dhamma just to decorate our minds, like a library in a den, because when you start opening up the books, you realize that the ink is running off the pages. The message gets all garbled, the nerves in … 
  14. Mindfulness & Perception
     … It develops in the direction of getting stronger and more refined concentration, until the insight comes, not simply in learning how to get the mind to meditate, or learning how to get the mind to settle down into the meditation, but also learning how to gain insight while you’re in concentration. As Ajaan Fuang used to say, there comes a point when you … 
  15. The Noble Truths Come First
     … We’re going to work directly on our minds, because the problem is in the mind. It’s not out there. So focus on what your mind is doing. See if you can bring the mind to a state of stillness, so that you can have a sense of satisfaction being here. One of the reasons we feel so hungry for everything and so … 
  16. The Focus on Suffering
     … But as for whether the mind needs energizing or whether it needs calming down, you have to use the mindfulness and alertness to figure that out. And then apply whatever’s appropriate. In this way, your right view and your discernment gets refined through practice, through developing the mind. The path is something you do, something you work on. Your ability to look at … 
  17. Delight
     … That delight should provide you with energy to keep on practicing to get better and better at training the mind. Ajaan Maha Boowa talks about taking delight in seeing little flakes of defilement getting peeled off the mind, like flakes of bark peeled off a tree. In other words, regard it as a victory each time you’re able to say No to a … 
  18. Breath Meditation: The Second Tetrad
     … As you can maintain this, you begin to realize that these feelings begin to have an impact on the mind: the feeling of ease, the feeling of fullness. You want to take note of that fact. This is what the Buddha calls citta-sankhara: mental fabrication. These feelings have a direct impact on shaping the mind. Other things also are coming into play here … 
  19. The Buddha’s Map
     … You may focus on one point that’s more prominent than any of the others, but you do want to spread your awareness out from that point, because you’ll be observing the mind. You’ll be looking for new things in the mind. It’s like going out in the forest. If you’re searching for something in the forest, trackers advise you … 
  20. Patience & Tenacity
     … The lesson here, of course, is that your perception of the pain has a lot to do with how much it’s going to weigh down the mind. So change your perception. If you notice that there are periods when the pain seems to be bothering the mind more than at other times, okay, what happened? What perception went through your mind that made … 
  21. Painful Thinking
     … How are the two connected? To see this, you have to make the mind very still. And you have to put the mind in a position where it feels confident that it’s not going to be overwhelmed by the pain, or that it’s not going to really suffer from the pain as it sits and watches. That’s why we practice concentration … 
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