Search results for: "Thought"

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  2. Focus on What You’re Doing
     … the breath, your directed thought and evaluation, your feelings and your perceptions. You get more sensitive to how you can adjust things to get things just right so that the mind is happy to stay here. It feels good being here right now. Things begin to gather together and settle down. Then you can take that knowledge and use it. When things aren’t … 
  3. You Can’t Eat the Buddha
     … It’s up to us to deal with our own lack of skill, to figure out where our thoughts are unskillful, where our attitudes are unskillful, where the way we look at things is unskillful, and then make a change. He wants us to make ourselves skillful. He wants us to make ourselves strong. The most common image at the front of every Buddhist … 
  4. Acceptance Isn’t the Issue
     … You enjoy spreading thoughts of goodwill. It lifts your mind. After all, it’s one of the brahma-vihāras. Notice, the Buddha didn’t call it a manussa-vihāra, a dwelling that’s natural for human beings. It’s a dwelling that’s natural for brahmas, who are a high level of deva. But these attitudes are something we can attain in our minds … 
  5. Bodywork for the Mind
     … It can be any thought that comes into your mind. It’s just going to move right in. There’s nothing to move it out.” As the Buddha said, one of the functions of mindfulness is to notice what’s skillful and what’s not. If something is skillful, you try to encourage it to arise and encourage it not to pass away. If … 
  6. Saṃvega & Pasāda
     … And the happiness that would come from the realization at the end would be so great that it would obliterate any thoughts of how much pain was involved in the path going there. It’s that amazing. Or as Ajaan MahaBoowa said, if you could take nibbana out and show it to everybody, that would be the number one thing that people would desire … 
  7. The Skillful Heart
    Every evening we have that chant, the brahmavihāras, the sublime attitudes, developing thoughts of goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity, because these are our motivations on the path. We have goodwill for ourselves and goodwill for all beings because we’re looking for a happiness that’s harmless: doesn’t harm us, doesn’t harm anyone else. **This is a quality of a good … 
  8. Focal Points
     … For all this time, you thought, “It had to be that way.” But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can get better results by changing your assumptions. For the time being, use this as a technique for seeing what works and what doesn’t work in getting the mind into concentration. This is where playing with assumptions becomes not just a … 
  9. Light Your Way
     … The Buddha said, by looking into your mind and seeing for yourself that what kind of thoughts, when you follow them, lead to happiness in the long term; what thoughts lead to happiness only in the short term, but pain in the long term. At the same time, you’re able to talk yourself into doing what’s going to be good in the … 
  10. Lessons from Jhana
     … All our thoughts and plans and everything, when we sit down with the breath, have to go by the wayside. And for a lot of us, that’s a lot of our identity—that and the pleasure we take in those things. So we feel a little bit out of our element. But if you can stick with the breath long enough—and have … 
  11. Choices
     … This is why the Buddha teaches that a good foundation for meditation is generosity and virtue—and having a right view about your mind and the thoughts coming up in the mind. Some of them are the results of your current decisions; some of them come from past decisions. If they come from past decisions, you have the opportunity to say “yes” or “no … 
  12. Turning Anxiety into Heedfulness
     … In other words, realize that the qualities of your actions—your thoughts, your words, and your deeds—are your real treasures. Those are the things you can hold onto, even as the world changes for the worse. As the Buddha said, loss in terms of your wealth or health, loss in terms of your family: Those are relatively minor dangers. The real dangers are … 
  13. A Sense of Well-being
    They say that your brainwaves can be measured even in your little toe—which shows that the energy of your thoughts fills your whole body, fills your whole experience. Normally we don’t realize how much energy we’re giving off, how much energy we’re radiating, and what the quality of that energy is. Only when you make the mind really, really quiet … 
  14. The Values of Stillness
     … That way, when these issues come in, you realize that these thoughts are disturbances barging in on your stillness. The stillness is there first. That puts you in a much better position to look at those things and figure them out. Then, when greed arises or irritation, fear, grief, you see them as visitors, things that are coming in afterwards. They’re not the … 
  15. Instruct, Urge, Rouse, & Encourage Yourself
     … They’re not much, but they’re there to focus your attention on what you’re doing, instructing you as to what’s skillful and what’s not, urging you to do what’s skillful, rousing your energy with thoughts of what’s going to happen to you if you don’t develop skillful actions, and then encouraging you to stick with it, stick … 
  16. Keep Your Options Open
     … A thought comes through the mind and you can watch the thought. It gives results. You can watch the results. You can see the connections. Those are some of the assumptions we make as we explore possibilities with the purpose of expanding them. This is what the four noble truths are all about: They expand our sense of what’s possible. As for the … 
  17. Action & Result
     … When you cling to form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrication, or consciousness, there is some pleasure. The Buddha doesn’t deny that. But the clinging itself can turn things into pain and can lead to more suffering. We go around defining ourselves this way all the time. This is why we get reborn. We find that the things by which we define ourselves are falling … 
  18. Feeling & Intention
     … You practice with good fabrications so that when unskillful fabrications come into the mind you realize that you don’t have to take them as your real feelings or your real thoughts on the matter. You can see them as something that’s been fabricated in reaction to other people’s actions, your own feelings, the things you’ve done in the past. And … 
  19. Present-Moment Intelligence
     … You’re learning to shift the focus of your desires away from sensual pleasures, sensual fantasizing, and more toward noticing which thoughts are skillful, which thoughts are unskillful, and getting a sense of the long-term consequences of your actions. That’s a shift in focus, but it requires desire as well. Then we see: Acting on these desires, what happens? In other words … 
  20. Honest & Observant
     … directed thought and evaluation, feelings and perceptions—with the realization that you have to be mindful around goodwill, you have to be determined on it. You make up your mind to have goodwill for everybody, and you hold that in mind. You don’t slip in any ill will and then pretend it’s not there. If you detect ill will, you’ve got … 
  21. Make Yourself Small
     … giving your time, giving your energy, giving a lot of thought to what you’re doing and saying. The best way to give is to learn how to make your own needs as small as possible. In other words, learn how to get the most out of little things—what you’ve got. As meditators, we’re honest businessmen and businesswomen, not dishonest ones … 
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