Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 79
  2. Training in Right Resolve
     … Just working through the tensions in the body helps the mind to calm down. It doesn’t solve the problems in the mind, but it puts the mind in a position where it’s more likely to want to solve them in the correct way. When you’re feeling tight and irritated, all too often you want to go for a quick fix, whatever … 
  3. The Buddha’s Rules of Order
     … Hour after hour after hour, you can simply be with your mind. It’s a real luxury. So you want to make sure you don’t waste it. You may have come here with the express purpose to practice meditation, but you sit down and find that your mind has a mind of its own. It’s got other purposes and fills the time … 
  4. Getting the Most Out of the Present
    When we meditate, we try to bring our minds into the present moment. We don’t take the present moment as our goal. It’s part of the path. Being mindful, getting the mind concentrated on the breath: That’s all path. And the whole point of the path, as the Buddha said, is that it’s going to bear fruit. So, how do … 
  5. Choices in the Present
     … Now, to stick with the uncomfortable things coming up in the mind requires that you have strength to withstand them so that you don’t just fall in with them, and so that you’re not suffering while you’re watching the suffering. That’s why you have to develop mindfulness, alertness, and concentration, because as concentration comes, it gives a sense of well … 
  6. Joy & Discontent
     … That includes not only the world outside, but also the world—or the worlds—of your mind. So establish some rules of order inside the mind. This doesn’t mean you’ll be able to stop the voices in the mind right away. But it does mean that you can learn how not to take them so seriously. If they’re going to chatter … 
  7. Appreciating Your Practice
     … The real worth of the practice is what you can see for yourself in how you’re developing your mind. This is how the Buddha developed his practice. He didn’t have any texts against which to measure his progress. But he noticed when he could get the mind to settle down with the breath and how he could get the mind to settle … 
  8. Discernment: Commit & Reflect
     … It’s in what your own mind does or doesn’t do. Yet the mind’s constantly flowing out, paying attention to things outside, and paying very little attention to itself. So we’ve got to turn that around. Of course, simply looking at the mind can get pretty depressing. This is why you also commit yourself to the practice. This is a quality … 
  9. Taking Charge
     … So regardless of the quality that needs to be developed in the mind, or whichever one you’re focusing on, you’ve got to keep coming back, coming back, coming back, to make sure that it’s strong, that it really has become a new habit, a new skill. This requires mindfulness, keeping in mind what you’ve got to do. Mindfulness is always … 
  10. Your True Responsibility
     … So when you’re meditating, part of the issue is learning how to answer the proper questions. “Why can’t I see things clearly in my own mind? Why is everything a mess?” Because the mind’s not quiet enough. What do you do to make it more quiet? Work on this question. Then as the mind begins to settle down, settle down, what … 
  11. Mental Experiments
    Mental Experiments October 14, 2005 Meditation is like running a series of experiments in the mind, trying to see what happens when you focus it on one thing for long periods of time, trying to see what happens when you really take seriously the idea that the way you use your mind may be causing unnecessary suffering. So you want to see clearly what … 
  12. Hope
     … At the same time, the greater sense of well-being there’s going to be in the mind. There’s every reason to stay here. Yet there are these little lapses of mindfulness that keep allowing you to go off: Those are the things you’ve got to watch out for. And it’s almost as if the mind knows what it’s doing … 
  13. The Trick to Staying in Place
     … mindfulness, which is keeping this in mind, remembering to stay with the breath; and then alertness, watching the breath as it comes in, goes out, to see what it’s like. That’s the mind in place. The hard part of the meditation is keeping the mind in place. You focus on the breath and, after a while, the mind gets bored. Something else … 
  14. Equanimity & Endurance
     … the ability to step back and rely on that part of the mind that’s not affected by anything. We talk about the committee of the mind, and there is one member of the committee that tends to get overlooked: the part that just knows and can bear it. Whatever comes up, it knows and bears. It can endure. And usually it’s not … 
  15. Don’t Focus on Jhana, Focus on the Breath
    We’re sitting here trying to practice right mindfulness and right concentration. Right concentration is jhana. So the question is: How do you get into jhana? And the first answer is that you don’t think about jhana to get into jhana. Jhana is not your focal point. Your focal point is the breath. The descriptions of jhana talk about the mind as you … 
  16. Determined Goodwill
    Determined Goodwill August 20, 2021 The Buddha speaks of goodwill as a form of mindfulness—something you have to keep in mind—which means that it’s not an innate quality of the mind. If it were innate, you wouldn’t have to be mindful. It would just be there, constantly expressing itself. But the fact is that the mind has both goodwill and … 
  17. Doubting the Buddha
     … On the one hand, we have to create a place for the mind to stay, we have to create other food for the mind, so it’s not so hungry all the time. This is why we practice mindfulness, why we practice concentration, trying to give rise to a sense of rapture, a sense of refreshment, simply being with the breath. Rapture and refreshment … 
  18. Arising & Passing Away
     … It means more like a dominant factor in your mind, something that’s powerful and strong in your mind. One of the definitions for the strength or faculty of discernment is knowledge of things arising and passing away, or simply knowledge of arising and passing away without even the “things”—just the process of arising and passing away. It’s usually interpreted as a … 
  19. Realities Right Here
     … Look at you mind in these terms as well. What have you got in the mind on this level? You’ve got acts of attention, intentions. feelings, perceptions, contact. Learn to see them on those terms, because that’s what you directly experience in the mind. When you get into a feeling or a thought world, you don’t see them in those terms … 
  20. Your Game Leg
     … This is something you stamp with ‘like’; this is something you stamp with ‘dislike.’” The different parts of the mind agree on those labels. Well, learn how to question those agreements—these little pacts the mind has with itself—so that your looking and listening at the very least don’t damage the state of the mind and can actually can become part of … 
  21. Old Kamma & New
     … There’s not much we can do about it, except that we can change the state of mind in the present moment so that what comes in from the past, if it’s negative, doesn’t have to have a huge impact on the mind. To do that, the Buddha said to develop the mind in virtue—in other words, learning how to say … 
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