Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 84
  2. Hold on to Your Frame of Reference
     … In the beginning, you’re sitting here directing the mind to the breath and you’re evaluating how it’s going. If it’s not going well, you try to figure out ways to make it go better: changing the way you breathe, changing the focus, changing your perception of the breath. This perception that you hold in mind is essential to the mindfulness … 
  3. Choices
     … It can provide a sense of well-being, a place where the mind can settle down and gain some concentration. That concentration can be your food. So breathe in a way that feels refreshing, that creates a sense of fullness in the body. That is possible. Then when the mind settles down, you can start seeing things in the mind more clearly. The little … 
  4. The Stages of Meditation
     … This way you don’t have to engage in a conversation with every thought that comes into the mind. Just take the thought apart before it forms and that makes it a lot easier to stay here for long periods of time. As you stay here longer and longer, one, the mind gets stronger, your awareness of the present moment gets stronger, the sense … 
  5. Past & Future in the Present
     … If you’ve meditated before, how did you get the mind to settle down? What worked? What didn’t work? Okay, remember those things. This is how we train the mind. It requires these three functions: your willing, which is your intention that moves into the future; your intention to stay here in the present; and your intention to be discerning. One of the … 
  6. Full-Body Breath
     … So the mind needs to rest. This is where he recommended resting in concentration. You seclude the mind from sensuality, you pull it away from your desire for sensual pleasures, you seclude it from unskillful mental qualities, and you focus it on one of the four establishings of mindfulness. Those, the Canon says, are the proper topics of concentration, right concentration. You can focus … 
  7. 1. The Entertaining Breath
     … This is what the mind likes to do. It like to see relationships. It likes to figure things out. So give it something good to figure out. What’s the best way to breathe right now?—best being defined as what’s most nourishing for the body, feels most comfortable for the mind. Comfortable here can mean either relaxed or energized. What would you … 
  8. How to Talk to Yourself
     … This can become a factor of jhāna, or mental absorption, when the mind gets really well-concentrated in the first stage. When we hear that it’s a factor of jhana, it sounds kind of exotic, but it’s actually simply a matter of learning how to talk to yourself well, in an effective way to get the mind to settle down. So much … 
  9. Unfabricated Happiness
     … one, simply out of the effort to put these things together, and two, you can come up with all kinds of ideas, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, that can wreak a lot of havoc in the mind. When the mind is punishing itself this way, it’s going to suffer, and the punishment doesn’t stop there. It spreads out to other people. So follow the … 
  10. When Ill Will Is in Fashion
     … Once the mind is clear like this, once it’s settled down like this with a sense of well-being, then it’s a lot easier to see your defilements, not only in your dealings with other people, but also in more subtle areas within the mind. So these are the two sides of goodwill: goodwill as a virtue, a part of mundane right … 
  11. Friends Inside & Out
     … There’s a lot you’re doing inside right now to cause it, which is why you have to train the mind. Without that training, the mind can just go blissfully on, thinking that it’s good and yet complaining about all the suffering—and not being willing to see where there’s the connection between what the mind is doing itself and the … 
  12. Remembering Ajaan Suwat
     … You want to see how stress arises and passes away in the mind. You want to see how its causes arise and pass away in the mind. You want to bring the framework of the four noble truths to your thoughts, your words, your deeds. What’s going on in the mind? What’s going on in your actions? Take the Buddha seriously. This … 
  13. More than Ordinary Heedfulness
     … The Buddha’s actually pointing out that the mind doesn’t have to stay on the “normal” human level. We meditate so that we can transform it. But how many people come to the meditation to be transformed? Most people simply want a nice place for the mind to hang out and don’t ask for much change beyond that. But the Buddha’s … 
  14. Renunciation
     … It comes down to the factors of the first jhana, the thinking and evaluating that go into getting the mind to settle down with a sense of well-being, a sense of fullness and ease that comes from seclusion: secluding yourself from all your sensual thoughts. You find that there are certain parts of the mind that really thrive when they can put those … 
  15. Single-minded
     … The Buddha once said that the mind is so quick to change direction that it’s hard to find a good analogy for how quick it is. Here he was, the master of analogies, and this was one point where he was brought up short. There’s nothing that changes as quickly as the mind. Yet this is what we’ve got to depend … 
  16. Your Quiet Corner
     … That makes the mind less hungry for other kinds of pleasure. This changes the balance of power on the mind. If you’re feeling tired and frazzled, it’s very easy to just jump at whatever sensual pleasure offers itself. But if you’ve got a sense of well-being and you know how to tap into it whenever you need it, then when … 
  17. Practicing on Your Own
     … They come from the mind in the way you look at things, and also they’re going to come back and have an impact on the mind. So it’s not just innocent things passing by your eyes or ears. There’s a causal process going on that comes out of the mind and then comes back into the mind, and then through your … 
  18. Fully Here
     … These things will happen of course, but when the mind is trained, it doesn’t have to suffer. And the mind doesn’t just naturally develop good qualities. When the Buddha talked about the basis for skillfulness, the basis for developing good qualities in the mind, he said that it’s not that there’s an innate goodness there that you’re trying to … 
  19. Respect for Heedfulness
     … And the way to find that something better is to focus on the way the mind reacts to pain. If you really want to understand the mind, that’s the place to understand it. There are all the issues in the mind that come thronging around the pain, whereas ordinary, everyday pleasures just tend to cover things up, so that they’re not as … 
  20. Don’t Believe Everything You Think
     … The breath is basically a physical phenomenon, but it’s very close to the mind and it’s your mind’s anchor in the present moment. When you’re with the breath, you know you’re in the present. When you’re with the breath, you can watch the thoughts coming into the mind and not get sucked into them—unless, of course, you … 
  21. An Inner Revolution
     … That way, you’re empowering the body in a healthy way, and disempowering its unskillful or unhealthy influence over the mind. Similarly in the mind: There are certain aspects you empower and others you disempower. You disempower the power of whatever thoughts come up. But you empower the mind in its ability to choose to think what it wants and not to think what … 
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