Search results for: "Becoming"
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- Daily-Life Dhamma… If all you can think about is how you lack this and lack that, you become poor. Try to think about what you do have that you can share with other people, even in the midst of your responsibilities. It gives you a sense of wealth, a sense of inner worth, and that’s all to strengthen your practice. Because you can take these …
- Skill… Keep this up, and eventually staying with the breath will become a skill. Always keep this point in mind. All the Buddha’s teachings are centered on this issue of skillfulness and unskillfulness. There is a sutta where Ven. Sariputta says that right view starts with this question of what’s skillful and what’s unskillful, and what in the mind causes skillful behavior …
- Brahmaviharas at the Breath… The whole idea of settling a score becomes meaningless. It’s better to tell yourself, “The best way to get out of that back and forth is to just get out”—with goodwill. “And then,” Ajaan Suwat would say, “you turn the goodwill on yourself.” As you’re sitting here meditating, just think of it: You’re sitting here learning how to breathe in …
- Guided Meditation… Allow yourself to become a connoisseur of breathing. Once you’ve developed a fairly comfortable rhythm of breathing, you can go on to the next step, which is to be aware of the whole body as you breathe in, whole body as you breathe out. A good way to build up to that is to go to the body section by section. You can …
- Caring Enough to Doubt… take any doubt that’s based on not caring and turn it into the doubt that’s based on caring, because the second kind of doubt is something that can actually become a motivation for the practice. You hear the ajaans in Thailand saying this. On the one hand, as they say, with stream entry, your doubts are gone. Now, those are two specific …
- Mindfulness of Breathing: Four in One… And the more consistently you can stay here, the clearer all those other aspects will become. You begin to see them in good time. There’s no hurry to analyze things. As I said, the only time you need to analyze things is when things don’t come together. When they do, you can put the analysis down, confident that everything you’re going …
- The Goldsmith… The hour of meditation becomes fifty-five minutes of wandering and then five minutes of concentration. You want to make it a full hour of training the mind with as little wandering as possible. That’s when you’re emphasizing the effort. Concentration is once the mind has settled down, you do your best to keep it there. This is like blowing off the …
- The Form of the Body… The least little thing that goes wrong with it becomes the mind’s major concern. This is why we have that chant on the body, to help pry loose some of those concerns, to realize that not every little thing that goes wrong in the body is a life-or-death matter. Even the life and death the body is not as important as …
- Goodwill Is Respect… People don’t respect one another’s happiness, and so it becomes easy to kill other people, easy to force them to starve. You even hear people saying, “We have too many redundant mouths in the world. Maybe it would be good to have some depopulation. People are living too long. Defund the health system.” It’s all out of disrespect. If we bring …
- Is the Buddha’s Wisdom Selfish?… And two, you become a better example for other people. Through your example they can see this is a happiness that can be found, and if they feel so moved, they’ll follow the example—which is pretty much the best you can do for other people. You can help them with externals. But we have a way of suffering even when externals are …
- Meaning & Happiness… He worked all those many, many lifetimes to become Buddha, not only for his own purpose but also so that he could teach. But there was a fascinating incident right after his awakening. He began to have second thoughts about that teaching career. This got a brahma all upset, so the brahma came down to invite him to teach, saying that there are people …
- You Are Not Redundant… In fact, it was as a result of that talk that he was able, apparently, to become an arahant. That’s really what makes people important: the extent to which they can cleanse their minds. So when you’re meditating, you’re asserting your importance as a person. It can be an act of defiance. The world may say that you’re worthless, but …
- Body Contemplation… That’s what it’s going to become. Again, that’s to get rid of any sense of attachment around it. This is how the teaching helps when you’re passing away as well. Ajaan Fuang noted this when he was teaching meditation in Bangkok. He taught at a funeral monastery and sometimes on a Saturday evening, when there were very few people coming …
- Dharma Warriors… In this way, you become a wise warrior, the warrior who survives, who comes out victorious. Even though you may have to lose a few battles along the way and retreat, you’re not embarrassed to retreat, if it’s necessary that you do. But you’re aimed at having a much larger strategy, so even though you may lose a few battles, you …
- How the Breath Helps You to Die Well… begin to meditate, these fabrications are all mixed up together. But after your inner conversation has done its work, you can put it aside. Just be with the sensation of breath. Become one with the breath. At first it’ll be intense. And then things begin to calm down, calm down. Finally you get to the point where the breath stops, and yet your …
- Recollecting the Buddha… That could have become a point of pride. But still he didn’t let that pride get in the way of his original desire, which was to find something deathless. So then he tried the path of the jhānas. And then, adding on to the jhānas, he finally arrived to the noble eightfold path, and by following that path, he gained awakening. You read …
- At Home in Your Own Skin… If you catch yourself moving out without skillful intentions, realize that that’s just what the Buddha calls becoming. It’s a created little world, which if you inhabit it, is going to come crashing down. So you do your best to get out of it. It’s like one of those dreams you find yourself in where things get more and more confining …
- Karma as an Island… They’re there to remind us: “Okay, this is what you do—remember this.” That way, your memory becomes your teacher that you can go back to. You want to internalize those teachings. Years back, after Ajaan Fuang passed away, the first year after his passing was pretty rough in the monastery. A lot of people were jockeying for power one way or another …
- Watch the Mind at the Breath… As to whether the energy is moving or not, after a while that becomes irrelevant. You’ve got your foundation. You’ll see that the mind will stay there for a while and then has a habit of moving off. It’ll move. Sometimes the movements caused simply because the mind is so used to moving. It doesn’t feel right to settle down …
- Three Types of Equanimity… If the criticism is true, it’s helping you because it’s pointing out an area where you may have become complacent. As for praise, you have to watch out for that, because sometimes you have to wonder why are people praising you: What do they want out of you? You have to be a little bit leery of what you think is a …
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