Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 81
  2. Jhāna & Discernment
     … Say a thought world begins to appear in your mind. There’ll be a little knot in your breath energy someplace, and the mind will start talking about that world. Then there’ll be perceptions that come up, images in the mind, or words in the mind. Sometimes you say No to them, and sometimes you say Yes. But for the time being, you … 
  3. The Meaning of Happiness
     … The Pali word here is bhavana, which means “developing”—developing good qualities in the mind. We primarily think of meditation in terms of developing mindfulness and alertness and other good qualities as we sit here and do formal meditation, but it applies to all areas where you see that your mind needs to train itself in noble qualities—in your thoughts, your words, and … 
  4. Defiant Like the Buddha
    With most unskilful mind states, the Buddha doesn’t have you sit and stew in them. He says you should try to get rid of them as quickly as you can, in the same way that a person who discovers that his head is on fire would immediately try to put the fire out. Greed, aversion, delusion: With these kinds of things, the Buddha … 
  5. Training Your Commentator
     … what’s going on with the breath, what’s going on with the mind. If you’re constantly commenting, it gets in the way of seeing what else is happening in the mind on a deeper level. There may be an issue left over from the day that you have to deal with first before the mind will be willing to settle down. And … 
  6. Tranquility & Insight Together
     … The ability to keep this in mind: That’s what mindfulness really is. Sometimes we hear that mindfulness is simply being in the present moment, but there’s no place at all that I’ve found where the Buddha says to just be with the present moment and that’s it. You stay with the present moment and then you perform your duties there … 
  7. Restraint
    You don’t have a sense of how much your mind wanders around until you give it only one thing to think about. Then you find all these other thoughts running into that one thing and you begin to get a sense of how out of control your mind can be. So you can’t leave it there. If you go through life with … 
  8. Honest & Observant
     … directed thought and evaluation, feelings and perceptions—with the realization that you have to be mindful around goodwill, you have to be determined on it. You make up your mind to have goodwill for everybody, and you hold that in mind. You don’t slip in any ill will and then pretend it’s not there. If you detect ill will, you’ve got … 
  9. When You Practice on Your Own
     … You learn about your mind by observing the precepts. You develop more mindfulness, more alertness, more ardency, and those qualities turn into the practice of right mindfulness. As you practice right mindfulness, the mindfulness gets good and develops into the factors for awakening as mindfulness settles in, gets established, and turns into concentration practice. As you get really good at concentration practice, you start … 
  10. Escape from Inter-eating
     … So to train the mind, you sit here moment-by-moment, breath-by-breath, watching the mind as it stays with the breath because the movements of the mind are important. And you don’t really know them until you see how they begin. This means that we’re not here just to rest or get some stress reduction. We get the mind still … 
  11. Owning Your Actions
     … And it’s the same with the mind. As the Buddha said, you try to notice when the mind settles down: why it settles down, where it settles down. When it’s not settling down, ask yourself, “What could be changed?” This is why it’s good to stop and reflect after each session of meditation, “What went well? When the mind was settled … 
  12. Full-Body Breath
    Often when you set your mind on the breath, the hardest thoughts to let go are not the ones that are blatantly unskillful. They’re the relatively skillful ones. There’s a part of the mind that keeps telling you that you’ve got to be responsible for this. You’ve got to look after that. Can’t let this go. If you let … 
  13. The Pursuit of True Happiness
     … The commentaries call this upadhi viveka , being secluded from the mind’s acquisitions, or the mind’s baggage: your cravings, your clingings, your conceits, your ignorance. Dig into the present moment and find out exactly what’s happening here. How is it that the mind can still create suffering and stress even when you’re centered in the present moment? It’s very subtle … 
  14. Perfection in an Imperfect World
     … In the context of mindfulness practice, it’s one of the three qualities the Buddha said that you bring to mindfulness. There’s mindfulness itself: the ability to keep something in mind, as we’re doing with the breath right now—keeping the breath in mind, and keeping in mind all the tricks we’ve learned about how to deal with the breath. You … 
  15. Bedside Dhamma
     … Your first concern, as you’re dealing with people like this, should be the state of their mind, because their mind state is going to determine not only how they handle the problem of pain in the present, but also where they’re going to go when they find they can no longer stay in the body. The Buddha’s advice for taking care … 
  16. How to Be Alone
     … There are also the skills of steadying the mind when the new mood you’re trying to create is still unstable. What can you do to make it more and more solid? And then there are the skills of releasing the mind, knowing how to free the mind from a relatively skillful mood to reach an even more skillful one. Even when you’ve … 
  17. A Mind Like Earth
     … Make your mind like fire. Fire can burn nice things and disgusting things, and doesn’t react differently in either way. Make you mind like wind, as when the wind blows things around. The wind isn’t affected by whether it’s blowing around pleasant things or disgusting things. In other words, as a prerequisite for getting the mind to settle down, you’ve … 
  18. The Real Thing
     … A lot of the stuff you’re going to see is your own stupidity, your own make-believe, the games your mind played with itself. But if your mind is in a good solid state of concentration, it’s not deflected by those things. It just keeps looking in, looking in. Once the mind is in good concentration, there’s a strong sense of … 
  19. Wandering Aimlessly
    One of the first things you notice when you sit down to meditate is that your mind wanders. You make up your mind to stay focused on the breath, and two breaths later it’s someplace else. That, the Buddha said, contains a lot of the problem right there—not in the attempt to concentrate the mind, but in the fact of wandering. That … 
  20. The Four Bases of Success
     … Be as sensitive as possible to what state your mind is in as you’re coming into the meditation. Sometimes you’re coming in with an overactive mind, sometimes with an underactive mind, sometimes with a discouraged mind. If that’s the case, you have to stop before you focus on the breath and straighten out the mind a little bit. Figure out ways … 
  21. For the Good of the World
     … This is one of the reasons we develop mindfulness: not to be non-reactive, but to be mindful of what we’re doing, of what situation we’re in, and of the most skillful thing to be doing right now. Keep that in mind, because the principles of karma, the laws of karma, are not traffic laws that apply only in certain places, only … 
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