Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 92
  2. Cooking Skills
     … After all, this is the duty of mindfulness when it becomes a governing principle. All too often we’re told that mindfulness is all about simply seeing things arising and passing away. But actually, when you have mindfulness as a governing principle, when you see that something good hasn’t arisen, you want to be mindful to make it arise. Once it’s there … 
  3. Energy
     … Because it’s only when you can maintain that sense of persistence—sticking with it through the pain, through the pleasure—that the centered state of mind becomes normalcy for you. Everything settles in and it feels *right, *so that leaving this center of normalcy feels abnormal. That’s the perspective you want to gain. It requires energy, but remind yourself you can find … 
  4. Saying No to Distraction
     … In other words, the thought envelops you, and you’re in the thought, in that state of becoming. You’ve left the breath entirely. At other times, it presents itself as a puzzle: Here’s the beginning of a thought. How does it end? It’s like those old poetry contests they used to have in the palace in Thailand. They’d write the … 
  5. Noble Standards
     … His standards lose their force—they become “archetypes”—and that really puts an end to the path right there. It closes the mind to the idea that maybe there are things in the human mind that are more than we can have anticipated. I remember, in encountering Ajaan Fuang, what was so radical about the experience was the sense that he did have some … 
  6. Time Well Spent
     … You benefit, and your presence actually becomes a help to other people. As the Buddha said, one of the most important external influences in your practice is admirable friendship—having people who are good examples, and setting a good example yourself. So your practice here is not an interference with other people’s practice. It actually helps smooth things along, move things ahead. So … 
  7. Survival Dhamma
     … A hunger for a comfortable life or a hunger for sensual pleasures becomes perfectly okay. Wisdom gets mixed up with cleverness, and then can turn back and bite you and harm the really important part of your survival. So the Buddha’s path here is for someone who doesn’t have to depend just on comfortable times. The Buddha did say it’s easier … 
  8. Happy to Be Here
     … So we’re learning how to become more and more sensitive to how we do that, right here, right now. The best way to develop sensitivity is to try to do it as well as you can. And the best way to judge things fairly is to approach this with an attitude of calm and confidence, that this is a good thing you’re … 
  9. In Search of What is Skillful
     … It’s in the definition of ardency where the distinction between skillful and unskillful becomes important: You’re ardent to abandon what is unskillful, you’re ardent to develop what is skillful. That fits in with the Buddha’s way of looking for the unexcelled state of peace: the search for what is skillful. At the same time, the evaluation factor in the first … 
  10. Energy Channels
     … It becomes part of your somatic memory. If the lessons or insights you’ve learned from the meditation are simply mental jottings, it’s very easy for them to get erased. Other events come up in your life and you blot them out. But if you learn how to relate to your breath with goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity, and you begin to … 
  11. What Right Mindfulness Remembers
     … It’s in this way that mindfulness becomes the theme for concentration, i.e., you keep certain ideas in mind of what you want to do, where you want to stay, and then you follow them. You keep on doing them, you keep on protecting the good results that you’ve gotten. You don’t forget. So remember we’re not just here to … 
  12. Acceptance
     … You learn how to get the mind into concentration, how you get the mind to become more mindful, more discerning: all these skills that we work on as we meditate. So when we find that the mind is not getting concentrated, we don’t just sit there and accept it. We say, “Okay, what’s wrong?” We try to figure things out. If the … 
  13. Bad Stuff Happens
     … That’s when you become sensitive to them. You make up your mind that you’re going to stay here with the breath. And before you know it, the mind’s off someplace else. There’s no way you can just say, “stay,” and it’ll stay forever. It’s going to want to move. It’s like a dog. It can’t stay … 
  14. Breath Energies
     … So learn how to re-imagine the body so that it can become a vehicle for right concentration, and from right concentration on to right discernment. The potentials are all here. You simply have to expand your imagination to make the best use of them.
  15. Limitations
     … In other words, make the breath interesting, and it becomes a lot easier to stay here. You may wonder: Why are we working with the breath when we really aim at training the mind? Well, it’s in working with the breath that you develop those qualities of mind. Mindfulness, as it gets more and more continuous, allows you to see things you would … 
  16. The Armored Car
     … The more you give in, give in, give in to your defilements, the harder it becomes to follow the path. So you really do have to make that effort. It may seem as if you’re making it hard for yourself now, but even if it is hard now, it’s going to be easier down the line because you’ve made this effort … 
  17. The Uses of the Breath
     … This is how you become more and more sensitive to how much you’ve been adding to things: how much salt and pepper you’ve been putting on; how much fish sauce, soy sauce, whatever. Then you can begin to see things simply as they are—or, as the Buddha says, as they’ve come to be. This gives rise to a very strong … 
  18. Battling Darkness
     … You tell narratives that connect this event with that feeling and that feeling with that event, and then it becomes a huge web by which you catch yourself. So you’ve got to learn to cut through that web. The nature of insight, as the Buddha said, is in seeing things in five ways, or in understanding five things about whatever the defilement is … 
  19. Doing Meditation
     … If you do anything, it turns into a state of becoming: more inconstancy, more stress, more not-selfness. And at that point, you gain an insight in how not to do anything, how even not to make a choice. That opens up the mind to something totally without action. So the paradox here is that you use action in order to get to that … 
  20. The Purpose of Empathetic Joy
     … A woman had been meditating for many years and said she was afraid that she was becoming a hypocrite about her meditation. How so? Because she wanted results, and that was craving, right? Isn’t craving wrong? I told her, “Not always. Desire is what motivates the path. It’s simply a question of making sure that your desires are aimed at the right … 
  21. At Play
     … If you take this approach, the meditation becomes a process of discovery. It’s your meditation, particularly when you play with the perceptions. You can ask yourself, “Where are you in the body?” That was one of Dogen’s questions when he was teaching how to de-think thinking: “Is the body sitting in the mind or is the mind sitting in the body … 
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