Search results for: "Mindfulness"

  1. Page 83
  2. Seeing Danger in Birth
     … Heedful in your concentration means trying to be as careful as possible in your efforts to get the mind to settle down: being alert, mindful, ardent; not just getting the mind to be still, but also watching the mind as it settles down. This way you can begin to understand when the mind does leave the topic of concentration, even if just for a … 
  3. Your Mind is Lying to You
    Your Mind is Lying to You September 15, 2010 There’s a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin’s sitting on a sled at the top of the hill and he’s thinking, “Go ahead, go down the hill, you won’t run into that boulder, you won’t run into that stream, it’s not too steep.” And in the last panel he … 
  4. Delight in Striving
     … The other was not resting satisfied even with his skillful qualities, to say nothing of unskillful qualities in the mind. He didn’t practice “radical acceptance.” If something in his mind was unskillful, he would try to get rid of it. If he had done something skillful, he would take joy in that fact but he wouldn’t rest satisfied. He would try even … 
  5. Top Priorities
     … But unskillful thoughts in the mind, unskillful qualities in the mind: You can’t be patient with them. You have to try to get rid of them, as the Buddha said, as if they were fire burning your head. Put them out with as much energy, mindfulness, and relentlessness as you can. So it’s important as you try and work on the perfections … 
  6. Goodwill as Restraint
     … The mind can create excuses for all kinds of behavior and make it sound very advanced and compassionate and spiritual. But it’s not. Keep the basics in mind and try to keep your mind at a basic level. That way, it’s hard to go wrong. So we don’t pretend that we’re all innately good or bad or that we’re … 
  7. Breathing Easy
     … Then as that one thing becomes more and more comfortable, more and more refreshing, you think of it spreading out to fill the rest of your awareness, first your physical awareness, then into the mind, so that the sense of body and mind become one. That’s how you develop the singleness of mind that’s a feature of right concentration. You can’t … 
  8. Insight Is a Judgment Call
     … It’s like putting a rut in your mind. Every time you go over that particular road, you fall into the rut. So he saw that thoughts based on sensuality, ill-will, and harmfulness would bend the mind in the wrong direction, whereas thoughts based on renunciation of sensuality, non-ill-will, i.e., goodwill, harmlessness, i.e., compassion, would bend the mind in … 
  9. Analyzing Anger
     … What sparked the anger? And here he’s not talking about events outside, he’s talking about the origination from within the mind. How are you talking to yourself right now? What perceptions are you holding in mind? Usually it’s a perception that’s the troublemaker. Someone says something and an image appears in your mind and sets you on fire. Well, what … 
  10. Kamma & Rebirth—A Handful of Leaves
     … You can sit with it; you can learn to not let it make inroads in the mind. Developed in mind means that the mind doesn’t easily get overwhelmed by pleasure. As the Buddha says, you might think that a great pleasure would be great to have, but if you’re overwhelmed by pleasure you get careless again, and you get sloppy and you … 
  11. Clinging to Karmic Diarrhea
    For the mind to settle down, you have to find something it likes, something it finds engaging. This is entirely up to you. If it’s the breath, what kind of breathing do you like? Where do you like to focus on the breath? What kind of perception of the breath helps you settle down? This is something you have to evaluate for yourself … 
  12. Delight
     … And as the mind begins to settle down, learn to appreciate the mind when it’s still. You can think back on times when the mind was weighed down, hemmed in by the affairs of the world, and how much better off you are here being quiet, just breathing—finding contentment in the skills that you can develop sitting with your eyes closed. At … 
  13. Rottweilers in the House
     … You look at things that can aggravate lust, and sure enough lust starts getting stirred up in the mind. Or you listen to things that might get you angry, upset, or fearful, and there’s already a tendency in the mind to want to be upset or angry or fearful, and you’re simply adding fuel to a fire. But it’s not the … 
  14. Resistance
    Resistance October 25, 2004 The chants we do in the evening, before the meditation, are meant to put you in the right frame of mind to do the meditation, pointing out skillful ways of thinking. Whether we’re contemplating the body; issues of aging, illness, death, and karma; thoughts of goodwill; reflection on the nature of the world: All of these thoughts are designed … 
  15. Reflect on What You’re Doing
     … That thought occurs naturally to the mind only when you’ve seen something that’s not originated. Remember, origination means, one, something caused, and two, the cause came from within the mind. Because you’re so perceptive and so alert, you can tell when something is caused by the mind and when something is not caused by the mind. So here again, you have … 
  16. Delight in Persistence
     … If you feel that “It doesn’t make much difference whether my mind is concentrated or not, whether I understand my mind or not,” you’re not going to put in the effort. But if you see that it really does make a difference, that’s how you motivate yourself, that’s how you give rise to the desire. Then you stick with it … 
  17. Seeing the Stillness
     … We try to create a sense of normalcy in the mind. The mind’s normal state is when it’s not deciding to kill or steal or have illicit sex or lie or take intoxicants. But it’s a state of mind we tend to overlook. The Buddha tells us to bring the mind to normalcy first by bringing our words and deeds to … 
  18. Start by Relaxing Your Hands
     … If you start getting interested in the potentials, you’ll find that they can do a lot, both for the state of the body and for the state of the mind. In this way, your meditation isn’t simply a process of forcing the mind to stay with the breath. As you get more and more interested, the element of force gets placed off … 
  19. The Swinging Balance
     … If you look for a place out there for the mind to settle down and feel at ease, you’re never going to find it. If you look inside at the very beginning, you look at your mind, and your mind is a mess; you try to focus on the breath, and the breath and the body seem to be a mess. You don … 
  20. Dhamma is Timeless
     … There is a quality of the mind that can know even when the defilements are there. “Luminous” here doesn’t mean it’s pure, and doesn’t mean we’re already awakened, but it does mean this knowing quality. You can observe. You can see for yourself what you’re doing. You can catch the mind, if your mindfulness and alertness are continuous: You … 
  21. Stern Kindness
     … One is mindfulness. That’s the ability to keep something in mind, like reminding yourself to stay with the breath. The other’s alertness, watching what’s going on. But mindfulness and alertness on their own are not enough. You also have to have the quality of ardency, the motivation that you really want to do this well because this is an important exercise … 
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