Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. Fully Here
     … You want your mind to be prepared so that you don’t have to suffer through aging, you don’t have to suffer through illness, you don’t have to suffer through death. Things may happen. These things will happen of course, but when the mind is trained, it doesn’t have to suffer. And the mind doesn’t just naturally develop good qualities … 
  3. Refuge & Strength
     … The best way to counteract doubt, the Buddha said, is to investigate what in your mind is skillful right now, what in your mind is unskillful. See what happens when you follow the skillful impulses, see what happens when you drop the unskillful ones. You see for yourself. But just looking at the qualities of the mind, if you find that the mind seems … 
  4. Recovering Your Balance
     … The Buddha has that statement about the mind being luminous but darkened by visiting defilements. He said this is the fact that allows us to train the mind. Now, he’s not saying that the mind is naturally good. He’s just saying that it’s bright, which means that when the defilements come, they’re like clouds blocking the sun. When the clouds … 
  5. Respect for Heedfulness
     … And the way to find that something better is to focus on the way the mind reacts to pain. If you really want to understand the mind, that’s the place to understand it. There are all the issues in the mind that come thronging around the pain, whereas ordinary, everyday pleasures just tend to cover things up, so that they’re not as … 
  6. Heedful of Death
     … This is your real protection, this solidity of the mind. So make the mind dependable. As you keep digging deeper and deeper in the meditation, there does come a point where you find the opening to the deathless. But it’s only through this ability to dig regardless of the conditions. That’s why the Buddha says that mindfulness of death leads to the … 
  7. Wilderness Wealth
     … Just keep that perception in mind to help erase any sense of distinction. From there you spread it all around you. There’s earth all around you, wind all around you. Fire, water: All of these properties stretch out in all directions. When you keep that perception in mind, the thought of being in wilderness seems coarse because that’s always concerned with survival … 
  8. Knowing the Body from Within
     … This is important, because the more things come to balance and stillness like this, the more clearly you’ll be able to see what the mind is doing right here—and particularly the very peculiar activity that the mind has of taking a sensation in the body and using it as a kernel for a thought. It becomes a little symbol in the mind … 
  9. Choices
     … And I said, “Well, the best way to figure out why is to go ahead and do it and see which voices in the mind complain.” It’s the same as when you’re working with the breath. Other things will come in and you say, “Oh, there’s that in the mind and there’s this in the mind.” Some people complain they … 
  10. Look After Yourself with Ease
     … I was talking today to a group of people who were taught that meditation is simply maintaining mindfulness in daily life, watching what comes up and goes away in their minds, and they found that their minds run away from them. And when it runs away, it’s not only that it runs away from them, it also runs away with them. I.e … 
  11. Breathing through Daily Life
    Breathing through Daily Life September 4, 2003 The mind is always working. If it were doing just one or two jobs at a time, that would be no big problem. But it’s usually juggling several jobs at once. No wonder it’s tired. Relationships, responsibilities, jobs, issues: Lots of things are going on in the mind all at once. Often when we start … 
  12. Evaluation
     … Either you’re told to get away from your conceptual mind or your logical mind, or you’re told to be nonreactive, to just note without thinking about anything. But that doesn’t do justice to how the Buddha taught meditation. Instead of tying your hands, he gives you lots of tools in meditation, lots of topics that you can meditate on for different … 
  13. Breath Meditation
     … This is what keeps the mind and the body together.” And it only stands to reason that if the breath is in good shape, then other things will go well in life as well. The body will feel good; the mind will have a good place to stay when the breath is comfortable. So learn to get to know the breath. Be on friendly … 
  14. What You Can’t Change, What You Can
     … Our awareness of our body and our awareness of our mind are often like that. Things are going on, but our sense of the possibilities of what can go on can be very limited. So try to open the mind, ventilate the mind a little bit to get an idea of what can be done, what can be changed. That way, you’ll be … 
  15. Sense Restraint
     … The mind goes running out to sensory objects, and if you encourage it to go running out after anything at all, the motivation for running out gets strengthened in the mind. If you’re used to running out after beautiful sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations as you’re going through the day—and a lot of us do that—then when you sit … 
  16. Infinity
    Infinity September 26, 2023 All too often, we come to the meditation straight from the narrative of the day, and then the narrative becomes part of the meditation, where it interferes with the mind’s settling down. If you managed to do something klutzy during the day, then if your meditation is not going well, that becomes part of that same klutzy narrative. If … 
  17. Feeding on Ardency
     … Remember, mindfulness is not just watching things coming and going, and being non-reactive. You have to be ardent, alert, and mindful. It’s the ardency that makes it skillful—that makes it right. Mindfulness on its own can be mindful of anything. You can remember lessons you’ve learned about how to lie. That would count as mindfulness. How to get away with … 
  18. Directly & Indirectly to the Breath
     … Where do they come from? They come from qualities you build into the mind. What are you going to need to develop those qualities? Well, you need a lot of mindfulness and alertness. This is where you get it: at the breath. So as you sit down, take stock of where your mind is, where your breath is, and how they get along. If … 
  19. Not Getting What You Want
    Each time you meditate, you want to get your mind out of the story of the day’s events. Otherwise, those stories will come in and invade your meditation. This is one of the reasons why we spread thoughts of goodwill in all directions. Spread the mind out in wide circles. Circle around to the east, south, west and north, thinking of all living … 
  20. Think Calmly about Death
     … Because you realize the main problem is not the physical dangers out there, it’s what the mind can do to itself. If the mind just goes blank, your mindfulness isn’t there to help you, and nothing can help you at that point. So you’ve got to learn how not to go blank. Learn how to think about the things that cause … 
  21. Delight
     … The mind that doesn’t delight in developing skillful qualities or abandoning unskillful ones is a mind that’s heedless. And there’s part of the mind that likes being heedless, the part that likes to say, “I don’t care what happens down the line. I want what I want right now. I don’t want to have to think about things in … 
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