Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 87
  2. Restraint
     … These thoughts then go out looking for more food to strengthen their hold on the mind. And sometimes you’re willing to give in to them. That’s what you’ve got to watch out for. If you give in to them, they become more and more habitual. There’s that voice in the mind, say, when lust comes up, that tells you, “If … 
  3. Here to Learn
     … how to bring the mind to stillness, how to keep the mind mindful and alert. But sometimes it goes faster than we want; sometimes it goes slower than we want. It doesn’t fit in with our preconceived notions. The problem is often that instead of changing our notions as a result of what we learn, we simply judge what we like and don … 
  4. Mind Control
     … They’ll churn away in the back of the mind, but just let them be there in the back of the mind. You’ve got your breath here in the foreground. You’ll find that, after a while, as long as you stay with the breath, that thinking will just gradually drop away, drop away, because it was feeding on your attention. If you … 
  5. Freedom Through Painful Practice
     … Which parts of the mind would actually be lighter? Which parts of the mind would actually feel less burdened? Even the things around which you create a very strong sense of your goodness as a person: It’s good to imagine them gone. Then, of course, there’s the body. A lot of people say they’re not attached to their body, so they … 
  6. Creativity & Play
     … You’re trying out new things, you’re enjoying the fact that the mind can create something and can think of new ways of doing things. Look also at the different approaches to playing. Some games are played without rules, but a lot of games have rules. In fact, the more rules, the more fun the game is, the more of a challenge. When … 
  7. No Happiness without Restraint
     … What suffering are you causing for yourself? So learn to bring the mind into concentration. That’s allow you to focus on this issue—and by focusing here, you can solve the problem. And when this problem is solved, then there’s nothing else to be a problem. All of this comes from learning how to restrain the mind and keep it focused on … 
  8. In Accordance with the Dhamma
     … Learn how to know when to put the mind on a long leash and when to put it on a short leash. The long leash is for times when the mind is thinking things that are actually useful, things that are harmless. When it starts thinking of things in ways that are not going to be good for your practice, when it starts falling … 
  9. The Energy You Broadcast
    The Energy You Broadcast November 2, 2020 One of the distinctive teachings of the Forest tradition is its emphasis on how proactive the mind is in its engagement with the senses and with the world. We’re not just on the receiving end of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations coming in. We don’t simply respond to the stimulus of other people’s … 
  10. The Energy in the Body
     … That’s when you can really do important work in the mind. As you develop greater and greater sensitivity in reading the breath, you also become more and more capable of reading the mind: what the mind is doing, the results of what it’s doing. You see the events of the mind in terms of cause and effect. This is how the insight … 
  11. Terror & Revulsion
     … Now the Buddha has you develop this feeling as the mind has developed concentration. Through the practice, you’ve been learning these strengths of conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, these strengths that nourish the mind. As you practice, you want to feed on these things. But ultimately they put the mind in a position where it’s so strong that it doesn’t … 
  12. Faith in Awakening
     … The texts talk quite a bit about the wealth that will eventually come from being generous but also about the wealth that comes to the mind right now by being generous. There’s a spaciousness of the mind. When the Buddha described mundane right view, one of the first things he said was, “There is giving,” which seems obvious. But he’s underlining the … 
  13. Selecting from the Teachings
    Allow the mind to settle down with the breathing. Think of yourself as gathering the mind in from all the places it’s been roosting in the course of the day, like a big flock of birds. It’s been thinking about this, thinking about that, all over the place. Now all the birds are going to come down on the same telephone pole … 
  14. Patience
     … If the mind is going to get into any dialogue, engage in a dialogue about how the breath feels right now, reminding yourself to stay with breath, catching the mind when it’s going to slip off. There’s a lot of work to do, even when you try to keep it simple, just keeping the mind with the breath. As for whether the … 
  15. Breathing Skillfully
     … Remind yourself that all the important things you’re going to learn about are right here, where the mind and the body meet at the breath. After all, it’s right here that you’re creating whatever suffering weighs down the mind. If you don’t create suffering here, nothing else weighs down the mind. We’re not here to try to figure out … 
  16. Progress & Regress
     … Of course, it’s difficult in the sense that the mind that’s overseeing the training is also the mind that needs to be trained. In other words, sometimes just as you need your powers of observation most, and you need your powers of mindfulness most, that’s when everything else seems so weak. It seems really hard to get started again, in which … 
  17. Appropriate Attention
     … He talks about training the mind to get rid of dukkha and to find true pleasure, but he doesn’t define any of those terms—except for the training. He goes into a lot of detail about how you train the mind. In the course of the training, your sense of your mind is going to develop; your sense of what accounts as sukha … 
  18. Fourth Truth, First Duty
     … Sensuality in the Buddha’s terminology deals not so much with the actual sensual pleasures themselves, but more with the mind’s fascination with thinking about them. You begin to realize that that fascination is one of the big enemies as you’re trying to get the mind into concentration. But getting the mind into concentration helps you separate yourself out from that kind … 
  19. Dhamma Medicine
    The Dhamma is medicine for diseases of the mind. These diseases are not the ones that would send you to an insane asylum necessarily. They’re the basic everyday diseases: greed, anger, and delusion. These are big troublemakers in the mind because they cause you to see things wrongly. We think something may be in our best interest, but it’s not. Greed may … 
  20. Arising & Passing Away
     … There are stages of concentration—Ajaan Lee mentions them—in which you’re not with a solid or single object but there is a sense of singleness in the mind because the mind is taking the arising and passing away as its theme of concentration. But ultimately, the insight into arising and passing away becomes so thorough and goes so deep that you actually … 
  21. Two Kinds of Middle
     … Like the rhetorical question Ajaan Chah asked, “What is the mind?” His answer: “The mind isn’t ‘is’ anything.” The answer’s not grammatical, but the fact that it’s not grammatical means you have to stop and think. What does it mean? “The mind isn’t ‘is’ anything.” Or another way of translating it: “The mind isn’t a what.” Teachers answer in … 
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