Search results for: "Becoming"

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  2. Sanity for the Holidays
     … These qualities become your guarantees that you’re not going to overreact and you’re not going to react in unskillful ways. Patience is the not reacting, whereas equanimity is maintaining an emotional even keel. Both of these require talking to yourself, reminding yourself that when you came into this world, if you didn’t have your family, didn’t have someone to look … 
  3. The Hedgefox
     … As it gets more concentrated, the concentration becomes then the basis of the pleasure. So that’s the kind of feeling you want to encourage, so that you can use it. Then when the temptation comes up to give in to sensual pleasures that you know are unskillful, you know you’ve got something better. The more quickly you can tap into the pleasure … 
  4. Your Actions Are Yours
     … He’s making the point that as you’re working on the meditation—and in fact with the whole practice—you’re trying to become more skillful in how you act. So think back on the manual skills you’ve developed and figure out what lessons you’ve learned from them that you can apply to the practice. One of them is you have … 
  5. An Auspicious Day
     … In that way, the moment becomes auspicious, and many moments altogether make up an auspicious day. Many days make up auspicious weeks, and so on into larger and larger frames of time. But they all start right here. And they’re all made up of these individual moments. So if you want an auspicious life, this is where it’s done. When you take … 
  6. The Gift of the Practice
     … You become more and more reliable. And then ultimately when you’ve seen the deathless, you realize that’s where true happiness lies. Your relationship to all the sensual pleasures and all the other pleasures the world has to offer is a lot different. You don’t need to feed off those things anymore. You have a happiness that doesn’t take anything away … 
  7. The World of the Body
     … Try to become sensitive to what feels best for the body, what feels best for the mind right now. As for other thoughts that may come to the mind, you can let them go. Try to stay in the world of the body right here. The mind is used to living in lots of different worlds. You’ve got the world of family, the … 
  8. Maintained by Fabrication
     … No one intends to become that kind of animal, that kind of being. But they’ve been fabricating in that direction blindly, with an idea in mind about what’s possible, what works. So when the Buddha’s teaching beings, he’s not teaching people who are suddenly deciding they want to follow a path. They’re already following paths, and his task as … 
  9. Dispassion Is Freedom
     … When you’ve decided that even maintaining a sense of the form of the body becomes oppressive, and you’d rather just be there with infinite space, infinite consciousness, it all seems very wide open and free. But the Buddha says, there’s a slavery there even in those forms of passion. It’s a fetter that keeps us tied to coming back again … 
  10. Ready for Death
     … Anyone who has a way of knowing that merit has been done and dedicated to them, if they rejoice in that, they appreciate it, then that becomes their merit too. When there’s a sense of being lost and bereft when someone dies, especially when someone dies suddenly like this, you’ve got to remind yourself: You’ve got the Buddha as a refuge … 
  11. Endurance & Equanimity
     … You realize that if you respond in kind to what the other person has said, that becomes your karma. It’s as if they threw a hot burning coal at you and you bent down to pick it up to throw it back. Who gets burnt? You get burnt. So endurance requires a lot of talking to yourself. You don’t just squash your … 
  12. Two Roads to the Grand Canyon
     … It’s not a good term; it sounds like you’re becoming neurotic, but actually, it’s a breakthrough through a neurosis that you’ve been carrying around. You suddenly realize you don’t have to carry it around any more. There’s a very strong sense of coming into the present moment, being freed of a lot of the narratives you carried around … 
  13. A Matter of Life & Death
     … And as you get on familiar terms with the breath, as you become friends with the breath, you find it easier to carry this perspective, this focus, into all your activities. So even as you go through daily life outside the monastery or outside your regular place of practice, you’ve got an inward awareness that you can begin to depend on more and … 
  14. Not Pained by Pain
     … When you’re not afraid of the pain and you’re investigating like this, you become a moving target—the pain can’t catch you. But you also see that the sharpest spot keeps moving around; it’s not the same all the time. This alerts you to the fact that the pain is arising and falling away in very quick moments. When you … 
  15. Skillful Thinking
     … Once you start learning from them, okay, then you become wise. So the basic questions are, always: “What’s the most skillful thing to do here? What exactly is the problem? What tools do I have?” And then work from there. You don’t have to get involved in such questions as who’s creating the solution, who’s facing the problem. Just put … 
  16. How to Read Yourself
     … But, as I said, one of the basic skills in becoming remarkable is learning how to read yourself, to use your strengths to make up for your weaknesses. That way, as you continue to read yourself and rewrite the story, you finally get to the point where it’s really good to read.
  17. In the Land of Wrong View
     … If you want to become a noble one, you have to practice the customs and the traditions of the noble ones.” So if it’s true that even Buddhist countries are lands of wrong view, how much more so in a country like ours, where wealth is measured in terms of material things, power and strength are measured in military terms, physical strength. People … 
  18. A Full Heart
     … This way, your understanding of what’s going on becomes much more all-around. You begin to realize that what’s going on in the mind is not just in some mental realm without any effect on the body. It’s connected to what’s going on in the body as well. The area of physical sensations and the area of mental sensations: These … 
  19. Riding an Elephant to Catch Grasshoppers
     … Sometimes you can just drop the stories, other times you have to remind yourself, “Okay, someone mistreated me, and it was awful, but I was able to rise above that, and become a meditator. What do meditators do? They focus on their minds.” The same with your world view: Think about your worldview until you get to the point where the narrative tells you … 
  20. Noble Ardency
     … That’s where they become really noble. I was reading recently someone who was saying that “noble truth” was a mistranslation of the term ariya-sacca because there’s nothing noble about stress, nothing noble about craving. But really there is if you approach these things in the right way. In fact, the approach is what makes the noble truths noble… If you learn … 
  21. Assumptions
     … This mind that’s often so obstreperous can become a mind of peace, a mind of concentration, a mind of wisdom. You’re basically working with the same building blocks, just you learn how to use them in a new way.
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