Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. The Creator of Worlds
     … Conversely, you can be in a lot of pain in the present moment but not suffer at all, again, depending on what you’ve brought from the past, how you’re constructing your world right now. So as we’re on the path to practice, we’re creating a different world. Ultimately, we go beyond this need to create worlds for ourselves. But there … 
  3. Bigger than the World
     … Some of them lead to suffering and some of them lead away. You don’t want the suffering. It is okay to have some preferences here. If you didn’t have preferences, you wouldn’t be meditating. But you want to look at these things as processes so as to get out of the stories. You can see that there’s the breath, there … 
  4. Views, Virtue, & Mindfulness
     … With straightened-out views, you have to remember that the suffering you’re experiencing right now is an important issue. That’s the problem. Also, remember that the suffering that weighs down on the mind comes from within the mind itself. If there’s going to be a solution, it has to come from within the mind as well. That’s all part of … 
  5. The Buddha’s Cure
     … One is called symptom management, when you try to calm down the symptoms that are making the patient suffer, but you may not be getting to the root of the disease. That’s why you need the second step, which is the total cure—where you actually attack the disease at its cause. In the practice of the Dhamma and in meditation, we have … 
  6. Exercising the Mind
     … It may give you a slightly different perspective on things, but it’s not the kind of knowledge that comes with knowing that you’ve done something and you’ve suffered from it, or haven’t suffered from it, or you’ve been able to lift a burden from the mind by doing something in a particular way. That kind of knowledge sticks with … 
  7. Criticism
    The basic premise of the four noble truths is that we’re suffering because we’re doing something wrong. But we can learn, we can do it right. We learn from people who’ve learned how to do it right themselves—which is one of the reasons why criticism is such an important part of the training, because sometimes you can’t see your … 
  8. Learning Through Healing
     … It’s because we fabricate based on ignorance that we suffer. So in the course of treating the mind, we’re going to learn a lot about fabrication. We’ll learn a lot about the impact the mind has on the breath, the impact the breath has on the mind; the way the breath can fashion your sense of the body and then the … 
  9. Attached to the Body
     … That’s why we suffer: the mind’s ability to create blind spots. Just the way surgeons can open up bodies and then go back home and sleep with their wives, or their husbands or whatever, and compartmentalize reality. What they saw on the operating table has nothing to do with how they live the rest of their lives. And yet it’s because … 
  10. Cornered
     … We have to stay in this sitting position and the difference between suffering right now and having a sense of ease and well-being right now is going to depend on your own inner resources: the way you fabricate your experience right now. As they say, necessity becomes the mother of invention. What are you going to do? Well, you’ve got Ajaan Lee … 
  11. Stick with It
     … The idea that there can be a total cessation for suffering, where have you seen that? It’s something you haven’t seen yet. This is where the conviction comes in. Conviction can be based on lots of things, such as the fact that it makes sense, seems reasonable, that it puts it within your power to put an end to suffering, whereas so … 
  12. Conceit Defanged
     … If you can use that sense of “I am” to remind yourself that “I am* *suffering, but I am capable of putting an end to suffering and capable of learning from the good examples around me,” then you’ve defanged your conceit and found a good use for it.
  13. The Buddha’s Narrative
     … Then he asked if he could use that knowledge to put an end to suffering. That question led to the third knowledge on the night of his awakening. He saw that focusing in on the intentions of the mind, that what you experience right now is based on two kinds of things: past intentions and present intentions. When you make your present intentions more … 
  14. True Friends
     … But the friend opened her eyes at the end and said, “I’ve never suffered so much in my life.” That was because she didn’t pay attention. You can breathe in ways that are really comfortable. You can create a sense of well-being throughout the body. So you want to experiment to see what kind of breathing feels good right now: long … 
  15. Enlarge Your Mind
     … When you have this enlarged awareness, you begin to see that the way you suffer from physical pain or mental pain is not just the individual sensation of pain. It’s the whole state of becoming you’ve been constructing around it: the identity based around the desire to have the pain go away and your sense of the importance of that pain in … 
  16. Moral Intelligence
     … If we allow the mind to wander into thoughts of greed, aversion, delusion or sensuality, ill will, harmfulness, then we’re going to suffer—and eventually other people will suffer, too. So our efforts to control the heart here, bringing it into line, choosing an object to stay on: It’s moral issue. We don’t usually think about it, but that’s what … 
  17. The Karma of Self & Not-Self
     … In other words, when you’re tempted to leave the path, you remind yourself that you got onto this path because you saw that you were suffering and you wanted to put an end to suffering. If you abandon the path, does it mean you don’t love yourself anymore? That you don’t care about the question of whether you suffer or not … 
  18. Attention with an Agenda
     … There is cessation of suffering when you develop dispassion for craving and the things that lead to craving. Fabrication is one of the things that leads to craving. So how do you develop dispassion for it? The Buddha didn’t teach a vipassana technique, but he did recommend a series of questions for developing insight into fabrications: “How should I look at fabrications? How … 
  19. Mastering Pleasure & Pain
     … to comprehend suffering, to abandon its cause, to realize the cessation of suffering, and to develop the path. So there are two reasons why you want to work on learning how not to be overcome by pleasure even though you are pursuing the pleasure of concentration. One is so that the mind won’t be open to being invaded by pain, and the other … 
  20. The River of Karma
     … And if you’re going to try to put an end to suffering through your own actions, you need some clear answers on a whole string of questions: “What can you do? What’s the range of your action? Do you have freedom of choice? Do your actions have any consequences? And what determines those consequences?” Those are metaphysical issues, but they’re very … 
  21. At Home with the Breath
     … If your happiness depends on somebody else’s suffering, you’re not going to want to see their suffering. You’re going to pretend it doesn’t matter, or it doesn’t exist, or that they don’t matter, or what you’re doing really isn’t causing them any harm. In other words, you blind yourself so that you can continue enjoying that … 
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