Search results for: "Persistence"
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- Today Is Better than Yesterday… Then you develop persistence, the quality of sticking with it, sticking with it. Regardless of whether the results are coming fast or slow, you just stick with it. When the lazy dilettantes in your mind complain—and they’ll have lots of very sophisticated reasons—you just refuse to give in. Then you remember. As I said, there are some things you should want …
- Strength of Mindfulness… In the list of the strengths, mindfulness comes between effort or persistence on the one hand, and concentration on the other. And the three are closely related. I’ve seen it explained sometimes that the Buddha taught two different paths: the path of effort and concentration on the one hand, and the path of mindfulness on the other. And the two, as they’re …
- Imagine… The second one is persistence. You put forth an effort based on your desire. Then you’re intent to pay careful attention to what you’re doing. Then you use your powers of evaluation, your powers of analysis to figure out if what you did got good results—and if it didn’t, what could you do to get better results? The Buddha relates …
- Equanimity… analysis of qualities, rapture, and persistence. Otherwise, your practice will stagnate. So you have to use your equanimity together with your discernment to figure out what’s just right. There’s a story that Ajaan Chah told about a time when he was invited to the palace in Bangkok along with a couple of other ajaans. The King was worried at the time about …
- The Mind in Good Shape… These four qualities—developing the desire to practice, being really persistent in what you’re doing, being sensitive to what you’re doing, and figuring out ways to change things if you find yourself not doing: These four qualities of desire, persistence, sensitivity and ingenuity are the bases for success in your meditation, just as they’re the bases for success in any training …
- The Path of Action… Viriyena dukkhamacceti, a person overcomes suffering or stress through effort, through persistence. And not just brute effort. Look at right effort, it’s an element in the path. You arouse your desire, your energy, your persistence, your intent, to prevent unskillful mental states from arising or to get rid of the ones that have arisen; to give rise to skillful mental states that haven …
- The Noble Path to Happiness… Be persistent. Keep coming back, coming back, coming back. If you notice things aren’t going well, you can always adjust. You might start out by focusing on the tip of your nose, and after a while decide that you don’t like that spot. Well, you can move to any other part of the body where it feels comfortable to stay focused, stay …
- Nourishing & Interesting… One of the reasons we have to be persistent, consistent, and persevering in our practice is to be able to see through that stage where we blank out. What happens there? So the rousing and the encouraging are not just telling you that you can do this, but they’re also pointing out that there are interesting things going on here that you’ll …
- Strength from Within… conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. You notice that the three middle strengths there are basically identical with the section of the noble path that deals with meditation practice. So the meditation, of course, will be our real strength. But in addition, you need conviction and discernment. Conviction here means believing that your actions really are important. Ajaan Lee, when he was giving a …
- Fabricating Equanimity… So this is the kind of equanimity that goes together with persistence, making an effort, and it goes together with your ingenuity. It allows the mind to think up new things and then to test them, and to be fair in its test. So even though this is just the first level of equanimity, as you come into meditation, you have to build on …
- No Mistakes Are Fatal… concentration based on desire and Right Effort; concentration based on persistence, or energy and Right Effort; concentration based on intentness and Right Effort; and concentration based on the mind’s powers of analysis and Right Effort. And he talks about how important it is to reach a balance in all these factors, because your desire can be too strong, too weak. Your persistence can …
- Focus on the Doing… As it becomes enjoyable, then the second base for power—persistence—gets more constant, more reliable. You want to keep at it. This doesn’t mean just going off to do nothing but meditate, closing your eyes and abandoning the rest of the world. It means that you carry your practice into everything you do. Learn how to be centered and mindful, with a …
- A Friend to the World, A Friend to Yourself… In between, you’ve got persistence and mindfulness. Persistence is based on your conviction. It’s always a matter of seeing whatever’s going to be skillful and trying to give rise to it if it’s not there. Once it’s there, you try to maintain it. Anything unskillful, you don’t say, “Well, I’ll think of this as a bank account …
- Success Through Maturity… desire; persistence, or effort; intentness; and using your powers of judgment wisely. Of those four, three are omitted in modern instructions in meditation. In fact, the three are said to be bad in modern meditation. Desire is bad. Efforting is bad. Judging is bad. Even the idea of success is bad. And as for intentness, paying attention carefully to the present moment, the meaning …
- The Wounded Warrior… The second way of strengthening the mind is to develop persistence, the ability to stick with something. It doesn’t mean just gritting your teeth and enduring. It means learning, once you’ve determined what the skillful course is, how you can keep yourself on that course. You learn how to make it more attractive, more pleasant, so it’s not just a matter …
- Battling the Hindrances… They can be very insistent, very persistent, so you have to be even more insistent and more persistent yourself. If they come up with one demand or another, learn how to counteract it. Sensual desire comes up and you may think, “This is a need for the body.” But the body doesn’t need anything. The body, the elements of the body, would be …
- A Legacy of Strengths… That’s the second strength, persistence. It’s not just sticking with things. It’s realizing there are unskillful things that could come up in the mind so you do your best to prevent them. If they’re there already, you do your best to let go of them. As for skillful qualities, those potentials are also there, so you want to actualize them …
- A Concentration Diet… This is why, when the Buddha talked about the practice as being like having a fortress in a frontier and he compared various aspects of the practice to different things in a fortress—like mindfulness being the gatekeeper, persistence being the soldiers, discernment being the wall—he compared concentration to the stores of food kept in the fortress. When you get the mind to …
- Infinite Good Humor… You could say he had patience and persistence, but how do you keep patience going? How do you keep persistence going? By having a good sense of humor about what’s happening to you in the path and having an infinite good humor that can keep you going. This is the attitude that allows you to say, “Whoops, another mistake! – Well, try again! Another …
- The Wisdom of Ardency… That’s where the persistence comes in. You don’t let yourself get defeated easily. The voice that says, “Well, I’ve worked on this x number of months, x number of years, and I don’t seem to be making any progress”: Put that into the context of samsara. How many eons have you been wandering around? How many eons have you been …
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