Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 95
  2. Wherever You Go, There You Aren’t
     … If you maintain the habit of looking over there, then even when you do get over there—in other words when “over there” becomes right here—you’re going to be looking someplace else. Actually, what you see over there when you get there is going to be pretty much what you see right here, right now. So you have to learn how to … 
  3. Calming the Breath
     … It becomes more a willed activity, not just something happening on its own. You want to be sensitive to that fact. You want to be sensitive to how your *willing *affects the breath, and then learn how to calm that, because often the willed part of the breath is based on our cartoon ideas of the body. What happens when you breathe in? Our … 
  4. Discernment Is in the Doing
     … After all, when right resolve becomes noble, it turns into right concentration. The renunciation, the non-ill will, and the harmlessness all come together when the mind settles down in the right way. So try to bring the mind to stillness. For some people, it’s very easy—just drop everything and there you are. But other people have trouble dropping things. They need … 
  5. Feeding on Feeding
     … He just teaches you a new way to eat—the difference here being that as you feed on the path and develop the qualities of conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, these become strengths. Ultimately, they get so strong that they bring the mind to the point where it doesn’t need to feed anymore. This is the part of the practice that really … 
  6. The Carrot & the Stick
     … That’s when you become your own teacher, not simply siding with your likes and dislikes, but really being objective about what the mind needs so that you keep it on the path. You don’t go wandering off, enthralled with beauty queens or involved with their audiences, not sticking your hand into the tar trap, but staying right on the path that the … 
  7. A Clean Break at Death
     … Do that many, many times, so that it becomes your automatic reaction to thoughts about that person. That way, when the time comes to go, you can make a clean break. The same principle applies to your attachments You want to make a clean break here as well. The two main things we’re attached to our sensual pleasures and to our bodies. If … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. Look After Yourself with Ease
     … All the skills of the path—generosity, virtue, meditation—are there for you to learn how to become more independent in looking after yourself, more capable of looking after yourself even in difficulties, so that you don’t have to be a burden on others. And your happiness doesn’t have to depend on conditions being just so. There’s a passage in the … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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.
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