Search results for: "Thought"

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  2. Success with Breathing
     … When you restrict your range here, in the beginning it may seem frustrating because you can’t go back to your old thoughts. The mind will want to go back, and it probably will: to issues at work, issues at home that you’re more comfortable thinking about, you’re more used to thinking about, the familiar territory. You have to keep coming back … 
  3. Ugly Body, Happy Mind
     … So when you think thoughts of the unattractiveness of the body, don’t think that you’re cutting off an avenue to pleasure. You’re opening up the mind to possibilities that you may not have thought of. So even though it’s listed as a painful practice, contemplation of the body can be gladdening because it’s liberating. The gladness of liberation is … 
  4. Training the Committee
     … I think it was Plato who said that all wisdom begins with the thought of death. A lot of in Buddhist practice begins with the thought of death as well. After all, in the story of Prince Siddhartha, the Prince who later became the Buddha, it was reflecting on the facts of aging, illness, and death that convinced him he had to find a … 
  5. The World Offers No Shelter
     … King Koravya, who’s eighty years old, comments on how when he was young he thought he had supernormal strength. Now that he’s eighty, though, he means to put his foot one place and it goes someplace else. So that’s what the world has to offer. You have to create something inside that doesn’t get swept away, something that does endure … 
  6. The Seven Treasures
     … You actually regard yourself in a good light, such a good light that when lower behavior or lower thoughts occur to you, you realize that they’re not becoming to you. They’re beneath you. You’re above them. You’d be ashamed to do those things. That’s a quality of self-esteem, self-respect. And then there’s ottappa, which can be … 
  7. Making an Effort
     … The kind of happiness that comes through ordinary effort in terms of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, ideas, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness: There’s effort in all of these things. The basic building blocks of our experience, the five aggregates, require fabrication. Even before we sense things, there’s an element of fabrication going on in the mind. If the mind weren … 
  8. A Multilingual Mind
    A Multilingual Mind April 2, 2005 One of the things you notice in meditation as you start looking at your thoughts, looking at your feelings, looking at sensory input, is that the solidity of your world starts dissolving away — both your sense of the world outside and your sense of yourself inside. And in some cases, just that much feels liberating — free from the … 
  9. Discernment Is in the Details
     … But the two most important in getting you to be with the breath and stay with the breath are directed thought and evaluation. Directed thought is when you keep reminding yourself to keep coming back to the breath: “Breath, breath”—this is what you’re going to be thinking about. And evaluation is where you develop your discernment around the breath. You start out … 
  10. Constructing & Deconstructing
     … The problem is the perceptions and thought constructs that go around it: how you talk to yourself about the pain, the images you have in mind about the pain, how it’s invaded your space, and how you’re being oppressed by it. Then the mind starts sending messages back and forth into the past and the future. Into the past, it starts talking … 
  11. Suffering is an Addiction
     … clinging to sensual thoughts; clinging to certain views about who you are, what the world is like; clinging to certain ways of thinking that things should be done this way and shouldn’t be done that way, regardless of whether it’s actually true or not; and then clinging to ideas about who you are. These are all activities. They’re things we do … 
  12. Exercising Discernment
     … Instead of getting tied up in the idea that “I’m a horrible meditator, I can never do this,” just put those thoughts aside. They’ve never helped anybody. Everybody has thought them, but they’ve never ever helped anybody. So reflect on your meditation, remembering these factors. The set of three: mindfulness, ardency, alertness. And the set of four: desire, persistence, intent, analysis … 
  13. A Full Life
     … There are things we’ve got to give up—such as our fascination with our wandering thoughts, because these wandering thoughts have taken us wandering astray for a long, long time. Actions don’t just stay in the mind. They come out and they affect the world outside. Sometimes you hear some people say, “Karma is simply a matter of the mind affecting the … 
  14. Ajaan Suwat 100 Years
     … So, putting aside sensual thoughts, putting aside unskilful qualities, talk to yourself about the breath. Watch the breath. Breathe in a way that gives rise to a sense of ease. And then maintain that. We’ve all read the maps. We know how many jhanas there are. We’ve read the maps of the *vipassana-ñanas. *But you have to throw those maps away … 
  15. The Path Is in the Details
     … particular thoughts, particular experiences, and especially particular intentions. Those are the crucial things. So it’s important, as you meditate, as you get to know your mind, to look for the particulars. The path comes down to something very basic: being honest about your intentions. Often this is difficult, but it’s the most important work. After all, each intention is the potential for … 
  16. Helping Others
     … There’s a story Ajaan Lee tells of the old monk who’d practiced “Buddho, Buddho, Buddho,” nothing but *Buddho *and the breath—hadn’t done any adjustment of the breath, hadn’t engaged in any directed thought and evaluation—and it didn’t go anywhere. It takes some discernment to see, when you’re sitting down to meditate, what’s in the way … 
  17. Resources for Endurance
     … In this tradition, what’s the role of a teacher? One of those roles is to remind you that you have more potentials than you might have thought, more possibilities in any one situation than you might have thought. If you want to internalize a teacher, that’s one message that you can carry around with you: There are more potentials here in any … 
  18. Taking Responsibility
     … Some questions can go unasked for generations until somebody has a crazy idea to start asking a question everybody else thought was too unimportant to ask. And it turns out then though that great discoveries come as a result of asking the new question. People in the Buddha’s time thought that getting into strong states of concentration was an end in and of … 
  19. Where to Look in the Present
     … A thought will come into the mind, and you go off into it, someplace else. You have to say, “No, come right back here.” Sometimes the intention to move will be conscious, but most often it’ll be unconscious. You suddenly find yourself someplace else, and you don’t know how you got there. But for the time being, you don’t have to … 
  20. Energy & Efficiency
     … He thought to himself, “Here I’ve given all the effort I can, and nothing is coming of it.” He thought of disrobing. The Buddha sensed this and appeared right in front of him, and asked him, “Back when you were a layperson, did you play the lute?” The monk said he had. He was skilled at playing the lute. And the Buddha asked … 
  21. Again & Again
     … And try to get those distractions more and more quickly, until there’s just a brief little stirring in the mind, you can untangle it, breathe through it, and the potential for a thought goes away. Then try to maintain that stillness as best you can. Think of a spider on a web. It’s at one spot on the web but it’s … 
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