Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 77
  2. Breath Energies
     … They talk about perceptions being mental fabrications, having an effect on the mind, but they also have an impact on the body, too. This way, you begin to see cause and effect as the causal influences goes back and forth. Certain causes in the body have an effect in the mind. Certain causes in the mind have an effect in the body. One of … 
  3. The Wounded Warrior
     … The solution to whatever problem there is in life starts primarily with looking at your own mind, admitting the fact you may have acted in unskillful ways in the past, but you can also train the mind to be more skillful now and on into the future. If you find that you’re not ready for the other ways of strengthening the mind, you … 
  4. Solid Inside
     … Wherever inside the mind is causing itself to suffer, you realize you don’t really have to make yourself suffer, you know. It’s all unnecessary. It’s simply because you’re not observant, you’re not watching the mind carefully enough to see where it’s picking up a thought that’s unnecessary. One way of developing this attitude of compassion is to … 
  5. Looking Off to the Side
     … first the four jhanas, then the four formlessnesses that you can develop based on the fourth jhana, as interim goals that you can actually focus on in making the mind more sensitive. This is the important part of the practice: making the mind more sensitive to what’s going on. All the things you need to know about awakening are right here. Even the … 
  6. Training Your Cynical Voices
    Training Your Cynical Voices March 18, 2014 Training the mind is work. Greed, aversion, and delusion have gotten very well ensconced in the mind, and it’s going to take a lot of digging to get them out. The reason we’re sitting here meditating is because at least some of the voices in the mind say, “Yes, you can do this,” or, “Yes … 
  7. Truth in Action
     … And part of the mind says, “Well, when will I be able to let go of this and not have to worry about what I’m doing?” But it turns out the whole practice is about watching what you’re doing. It simply gets more and more refined. To get the mind to settle down is an activity, it’s something you develop, it … 
  8. The Wisdom of Tenacity
     … These are the states that are really worth getting the mind into. They may seem fabricated and constructed, and sometimes you wonder how something constructed like this could be worthwhile. But the mind is used to constructing things, and as long as it has this habit you might as well construct things that help take you further. That’s part of the genius of … 
  9. Stepping Out of the Waves
     … We’re walking on a middle path, trying to get the mind to settle down and be clear. There is a pleasure that comes when the mind settles down, and that’s actually part of the concentration. You don’t want to let that go quite yet, but the excitement that comes when the meditation is going well, and the opposite mood that comes … 
  10. Appreciating Goodness
     … We do this because the mind needs to be trained. Try to find a breath that feels comfortable so that the mind will be happy to stay here, because you want to get the mind under your control. We live in a world with lots of dangers, and you don’t want your own mind to be a danger to you. But if your … 
  11. Right Here, Right Now
     … That’s the knowledge that’s going to clear away all the bonds of the mind, all the fetters on the mind. Now, what are those fabrications? There’s the bodily fabrication, which is the breath. Verbal fabrication: directed thought and evaluation. When you focus your thoughts on the breath, you’re evaluating the breath, okay, verbal fabrication is right there. And then mental … 
  12. Assumptions
     … If you wait until everything is nice and calm before you meditate, you don’t get really much practice in understanding the mind, shaping the mind, getting it out of an unskillful state. This is what right effort is all about. As the Buddha says, it starts with desire: the desire to do what’s skillful. You hold onto that even if it’s … 
  13. Steps in Concentration
     … That means keeping watch over the breath and keeping watch over the mind at the same time. Ajaan Lee makes a comparison with a pulley: You pull the rope back and forth over the pulley. You pay attention to the breath; you look at the mind. Is the mind staying with the breath? Is it happy with the breath? If it’s not, turn … 
  14. How to Use the Three Perceptions
     … You have to work on the concentration, and only when you’ve got it really solid and it has done its work on the mind—calmed the mind, soothed the mind, nourished the mind, given it a good place to stand so that it can watch things clearly—then you start applying the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not self to the aggregates that … 
  15. At Ease with the Breath
    For the mind to be steady, it has to feel at its ease. This is why the Buddha taught so many different topics of meditation. The commentaries list forty in all. Ten recollections, ten contemplations of corpses—some people find that a congenial topic, it’s easy for the mind to settle down there, it’s really riveting. Then there are the four sublime … 
  16. Joyous Discernment
     … Don’t let the mind take the course of a whole hour to settle down. Say, you give yourself two hours to meditate. You say, “Oh, a whole hour for it to settle down, then once it settles down, I’ve got a whole hour of stillness.” Don’t think that way. Try to make the mind as still as possible from the very … 
  17. The Breath Soufflé
     … It’s same with the mind. The more skill you develop in getting the mind to settle down and to cut through the issues that prevent it from settling down, the more you’re going to know your mind. But particularly, the more you’re going to know about how to train the mind not to create suffering for itself. So you can think … 
  18. Directly & Indirectly to the Breath
     … As you think about it and the mind gets calmed down, gets put in a better mood, the breath will change. So you work with the breath either directly by focusing on it, or indirectly by putting the mind in the right mood. Ajaan Suwat talks about this a lot. He said you sit down to meditate and you’ve got to get the … 
  19. A Position of Strength
     … It could be in the middle of the chest or right over the navel—any spot in the body where the mind finds it easiest to stay snug with the sensations there, and there’s a certain steadiness to those sensations. From the steadiness of the breath sensations, you can allow the mind to get steady as well. This is where the Buddha’s … 
  20. Unhindered at Death
    When we usually think about the hindrances, we think about the Buddha’s comment that before you get the mind established in its frame of reference, before you establish mindfulness properly, before you get into concentration, you’ve got to clear the hindrances out of the way. So we tend to think that the hindrances are mainly a problem with getting the mind into … 
  21. The Six Properties
     … You breathe in ways that gladden the mind. You breathe in ways that concentrate the mind, release the mind. That’s proactive. It’s a skill you’re developing, but you can’t develop the skill unless you have that ability to be non-reactive, so that you can be with mental states and physical states that you don’t like, and you can … 
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