Search results for: "Mindfulness"
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- At Play… Remember the stages in focusing on the mind: First you’re sensitive to the state of your mind and then you gladden it. You can gladden it by thinking about the good you’ve done in the past; about how fortunate you are to be here, having this opportunity to work directly on your mind. But more immediately, gladness has to come with a …
- Cut, Cut, Cut… So it’s not necessary that you strip everything down outside, but you do have to learn to strip things down in your own mind. This is the trick of living in a monastery, living in a community like this: not getting all tied up in knots. Learning how to keep things basic, keep things simple, in your own mind at least. There may …
- Outside the Box… This is why when Ajaan Lee talks about the different mental qualities that go into mindfulness practice—mindfulness, alertness, and ardency—he assigns wisdom and discernment to ardency, as in knowing how to stir yourself up to put up an appropriate effort. After all, the practice does require that we do some things we don’t like to do, and that we abstain from …
- Kill Your Anger… You have to place warning signs all around, because when the mind is angry, you can’t trust it. Your mind is lying to you. So, if the storm is coming on very strong, hide out for a bit. When you learn to take the anger apart, you can look at the situation a lot more calmly. More of the mind is engaged. You …
- Stay with the Knowing… You’re trying to retrain the mind. And the hardest parts of the mind to retrain are the ones where you think you know what to say, you know what to do, and it’s going to be unskillful. And you don’t care. You’ve just got to stop the mind there and say, “Nope, not going to go there.” And watch it …
- Streams of Anger… He says you do that with mindfulness—you hold it in check. If anger arises in the mind, you tell yourself, “I’m not going to act or speak on this anger.” Part of the mind will say, “But that other person really did something wrong.” The reason you’re holding things in check is to remind yourself that you’re actually suffering from …
- Right View: Feeding Instructions… You find you’re also dropping a lot of your old ways of suffering – until the mind gets strong enough through the path and you get enough insight into what’s going on in the mind, that you reach something in the mind that doesn’t need to feed. It’s an awareness totally free of conditions. That’s when you realize that the …
- Right Speech… As they say in the sutta on mindfulness of breathing, there are times when you need to gladden the mind. There are times when you need to release the mind from its attachments. Learn how to breathe in such a way that helps you do that. And learn how to talk to the mind in such a way that helps you do that, too …
- Creativity & Play… He was always finding new ways of looking at the breath, new ways of playing with the breath energy, new strategies of conceiving the breath energy, to help the mind settle down quickly and comfortably and have it stay there for long periods of time. To play this game, you have to see the wandering mind, the curious mind that wanders around getting itself …
- The Bureaucracy of the Defilements… the bureaucracy of your defilements—things like greed, aversion, and delusion, which cloud the mind and get in the way of genuine discernment. Our mind is very complex. It’s like a large organization, making all kinds of decisions all the time, and we have a tendency to delegate a lot of our decisions to our old habits. There are a lot of little …
- Appropriate Attention… The Buddha never defines dukkha, just as he never defines sukha, pleasure; or citta, mind. He talks about training the mind to get rid of dukkha and to find true pleasure, but he doesn’t define any of those terms—except for the training. He goes into a lot of detail about how you train the mind. In the course of the training, your …
- In Search of What’s Skillful… That’s where it gets especially interesting, when he finally gets his mind into right concentration after realizing that jhana is the path. This is the first factor or the first fold of the noble eightfold path that he came across. He had the intuition that right concentration was part of the path, and then he got his mind into right concentration. That’s …
- Acceptance & Equanimity… You go from mindfulness to analysis of qualities, which is basically directed thought and evaluation. You’re getting the mind into the first jhana. And in that directed thought and evaluation, you’re engaging in the activity of discernment as well. As you notice what’s skillful and what’s unskillful in the mind, you let go of what’s unskillful, develop what’s …
- The Language of the Heart (1)… As they say in the texts, the establishings of mindfulness (satipatthana) are the themes of right concentration. In other words, when mindfulness is really established and solid, you’re going to get the mind into jhana. Mindfulness gives you a frame of reference to look at what’s happening in the mind, to recognize certain states of mind as either skillful or unskillful. And …
- You’re Already Dead… The mind gets lighter, more expansive. That sense of spaciousness in the mind, when you’re not always worried about losing this or being deprived of that: That sense of space can’t be bought. Then there’s discernment, the ability to see things arising and passing away in the mind, so that you can understand what’s skillful and what’s not, what …
- Timeless… Have you trained the mind well enough so that it’s not going to be interested, it’s not going to be waylaid by those things? If not, you know what you’ve got to do: You’ve got to work on your concentration, work on your mindfulness, work on your discernment—to bring your discernment in line with the word the Buddha calls …
- The Equanimity that Doesn’t Give Up… The mind can settle down and there’s a sense of well-being where you can observe the mind very clearly and feel at home here. And whether it’s jhana or not-jhana doesn’t matter. The fact that the mind is settled is what matters. You want the mind to be clear and mindful. Alert. So as the concentration develops, you can …
- In Your Right Mind at Death… We can maintain our mindfulness; we can still keep our wits about us. A lot of people, when they die, end up choosing places to go that no one in their right mind would want to go. But then again, when you die, you’re very rarely in your right mind. To put yourself in your right mind, you have to prepare. The Buddha …
- Hobo Mind… When they’re allowed to experience a sense of fullness like this, that’s what nourishes them, energizes them, so at the very least, the physical energy in the body is wholesome, helpful, healing, and it can’t help but have a good effect on the mind. So when you can get out of the chatter in the mind, reverting simply to the basic …
- The Big Picture… That’s what mindfulness is for. Mindfulness doesn’t mean being non-judgmental and aware of the present moment. Mindfulness means the faculty of your active memory: when you call things to mind, keep them in mind. And particularly, you want to call to mind and keep in mind what lessons you’ve learned about how to get the mind to settle down and …
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