Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 94
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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.
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. Subduing Greed & Distress
     … The more attentive you can be to the breath, the smoother it becomes. It’s like a thread as you run your finger over as it’s running past you. You’ve got to smooth out the thread so that any frayed edges get smoothed back into the thread. The continuity of your attention is what smooths things out in the breath. As the … 
  15. Deconstructing Suffering
     … After a while, the question should become: Why keep creating these things? It comes down to the fact that the mind is afraid of what would happen if it weren’t creating these things, either fear of boredom or a deeper fear of nothingness. One of the things we have to do as we meditate is to learn how to overcome that fear. Otherwise … 
  16. Pain & Patience
     … And if nobody is paying attention to us, we just add some more pain on until it becomes obvious that we’re suffering, and we hope somebody will notice and have some compassion for us. This works up to a point. Then it reaches a point where other people don’t want to help any more. So you’re thrown back on yourself. And … 
  17. An Exercise in Freedom
     … Once that promise to yourself becomes universal—i.e., you apply it with everybody—you’re giving universal safety. They may not be safe from other people, but at least they’re safe from you. And that’s a gift. And again, you exercise your freedom that way. You realize that you don’t have to keep harming people in the old ways you … 
  18. What We Have in Common
     … He was interested in putting an end to suffering, which meant becoming a noble one, and to do that required that he follow the customs of the noble ones, the culture of the noble ones. After all, the problem of suffering is pre-cultural. Even before we know we have a culture, we’re already experiencing pain, getting upset over physical pain and mental … 
  19. Papañca
     … They’re the means by which we pull out of our various senses of ourselves and our senses of the world, all the different becomings we could create out of sensations in the body and the mind. We’re in a place where we’re a lot more safe and free from conflict.
  20. Right View, Right Attention
     … That’ll help make the breath become more smooth and continuous. And you can create a sense of really feeling at home here, feeling like you really belong. Because this is a state of mind that allows you to watch the mind and not feel hungry for jumping at whatever. If the mind is hungry, then anything that comes along looks like a good … 
  21. Bursting Bubbles
     … I’ve got other things that are more important.” So always remember that you’ve got the possibility to step outside and look at the thought from the outside, to see it simply as an event, as a state of becoming that’s moved into the mind, but you don’t have to move in with it. You do have that choice. So you … 
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