Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 97
  2. A Good Mood to Meditate
     … Otherwise, it becomes a vicious circle. The mind feels lousy in the body and so it churns out more lousy hormones, and it feels even worse. So it’s important to know how to cut the cycle. One way of doing that is realizing that it’s just this stuff in the body. It’s going to take a while for it to get … 
  3. At the Door of the Cage
     … He teaches us to get attached to more and more refined states of wellbeing in the mind, and to become disenchanted with everything else. It’s like climbing a ladder. To climb up the rungs of the ladder, you already have to be holding onto a higher rung before you can let go of a lower one. Finally when you get to the top … 
  4. Death Is Normal
     … Otherwise, your thoughts and emotions take over; you become their slave. But training the mind changes the balance of power inside. Now you’re in charge. You decide which thoughts you want to go with and which ones you don’t. When you find you made the wrong choice to begin with, you can jump right out. The breath is a safe place to … 
  5. The Importance of Being Truthful
     … Because only when you’re true in admitting that these other things going on in the mind will these other opportunities become apparent.
  6. Conserving Your Strength
     … To begin with, they’re less bombarded by your defilements; and two, it becomes a good example for them. Other people can see that it’s possible to live life without giving in to these things and still be happy. This is what comes down to. We’d like to have happiness in all areas of our lives, but it’s impossible. For one … 
  7. The Range of Our Responsibility
     … And the more you take advantage of it, the greater your freedom becomes—and the closer you get to uncovering the real freedom that lies deeper inside. So be very careful about how you choose to think and act and speak, because this is where you discover your freedoms. This is one of the reasons why the Buddha encourages us to think primarily about … 
  8. A True Person
     … It’s the kind of person you want to associate with, the kind of person whose habits you want to pick up, the kind of person you want to become. As he said, this sort of person has seven qualities. The first is one you can learn from books: dhammaññuta, having a sense of what the Dhamma is. Back in the time of the … 
  9. Identifying Weeds
     … Ultimately, they’ll get squeezed out by all the good plants, so that the mind becomes a really good place to stay.
  10. Evident Inequality
     … So he decided to reordain and become a forest monk. That’s how he dug himself out of the hole. Now, it is possible to look at the teaching on karma as justification for inequalities and for the idea that you should keep the inequalities as they are, but that’s a misunderstanding. In fact, it’s actually worse in some of the Mahayana … 
  11. Free for the Time Being
     … Eventually, the state of mind that we’re developing right now for the time being will become more and more the normal state of your mind. It starts in bits and pieces like this. Ajaan Chah has the image of pouring a kettle of water. At first it’s tipped over a little bit, and so there’s a drop. And then there’s … 
  12. An Inside Job
     … This becomes your internal motivation, your internal compass, your internal gyroscope—all the instruments you need in order to keep it yourself on course, so that when things come up in the mind that are less than noble, you know how to say No and make the No stick. That, of course, means learning how to say Yes to some other things: Yes to … 
  13. Goodwill as Right View
     … This is basically wishing that they would become independent: May they look after themselves with ease. Or the passage where the Buddha has monks spread goodwill to snakes: not so the snakes will come around and hug the monks, but so that the snakes will go away and leave the monks alone, but with goodwill, realizing that we all have to go our separate … 
  14. The Lightness of the Concentrated Mind
     … And the mind can become very light. The reason we don’t experience lightness in our meditation is because we’re not willing to let go. We feel that we’re going to need some straw. So we keep that big load of straw on our backs. The purpose of the concentration is to put us in a position where we can let it … 
  15. The Essence of the Dhamma
     … As he said, if you want to become a noble one yourself, you have to follow their ways of doing things and not be concerned about the customs of the country you come from or your background. You have to be willing to remake yourself in line with the Dhamma, rather than trying to shape the Dhamma to fit your own ideas. The phrase … 
  16. The Four Biases
     … Once the mind is settled down and solid, it allows your virtue to become more and more solid and reliable, too. And it’s not just an abstract thought. There’s a real visceral sense when your mindfulness fills the body, and you can allow the breath energy in the body to flow together and form a unified whole. There’s a sense that … 
  17. Brahmaviharas & Noble Truths
     … They may be very quiet for a while, but if you provoke them, they can become quite strong. Sometimes, as the Buddha said, there’s so little wind that even the fringe of a thatched roof doesn’t move. There are other times when wind can blow whole houses down. The same with water, the same with fire. The world is full of potentials … 
  18. Path & Goal
     … But it’s all a matter of settling in right here and asking yourself: “What feels really good? Which feels better?” You’re learning to become a connoisseur of your concentration, a connoisseur of your breath, a connoisseur of the potentials in the present moment. Then, as with any connoisseur, you can indulge your sense of what feels really good. There’s no objective … 
  19. Heedfulness Is Auspicious
     … It just becomes one more instance of all the stupid things that all beings have done. When you think about the amount of suffering that’s gone on, it pulls you out of the particulars of the narrative. From that perspective, you can have some compassion for yourself and for all the other beings. And remember, in the Buddha’s case when he had … 
  20. Big Desire, Detailed Focus
     … So it’s not an issue of trying to get out, it’s more an issue of trying to become more skillful, to stop this process by which we keep creating more and more suffering for ourselves. There’s nothing selfish about that. The more you get your mind trained, the less suffering you’re causing other people, the less pain you’re causing … 
  21. It’s All in What You’re Doing
     … This all becomes part of your repertoire, part of your fund of useful memories. If you find that you’re having trouble settling down now, you can also ask yourself, “What useless things am I remembering right now?” Sort that out. Not all mindfulness is right mindfulness. There is such a thing as wrong mindfulness. So as you’re getting the mind to settle … 
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