Search results for: "The Mind"

  1. Page 97
  2. No One Size Fits All
     … You become more and more sensitive to what the mind is doing, what the results are, and what you need to do in response. That’s the basis of insight. That’s the basis of discernment. As you’re trying to get the mind into concentration, the big questions are: “How do you get the mind to settle down? How do you get it … 
  3. A Diffuse Light
     … And the conception of the breath goes to either: “That’s the one spot where you’re inhaling,” or “That’s the one spot that’s doing the work of sucking in the air, sucking in a breath.” Then, as the mind settles down, you can move from that—the perception of the breath coming from the outside—to the perception of the breath … 
  4. Bring the Right Attitude
     … Then you let those comfortable physical sensations nourish the mind so that you can maintain the right attitude. They strengthen each other this way, to the point where it seems that the boundary between the body and the mind begins to dissolve. There’s just a sense of fullness, and it’s hard to say whether it’s physical or mental, because it’s … 
  5. Endurance Through Discernment
     … What makes them suffering that weighs down the mind is clinging—clinging to the aggregates. The point being that if you could stop the clinging, then aging, illness, and death would not be suffering, or you wouldn’t have to suffer from them. They would be painful, but the mind wouldn’t have to suffer from them. It’s somewhat ironic that you hear … 
  6. Prepare to Die
     … So in the process of overcoming our fear of death, we also find we can liberate ourselves from all the restrictions we tend to place on the body and the mind, particularly the restrictions we place on the mind. So here’s the paradox: The more you exercise restraint, the more unrestrictive the mind becomes. And that ultimately is what the teaching is all … 
  7. The Kamma of Self & Not-Self
     … The Buddha doesn’t have a term for it, but he does recommend that you develop concentration as a source of well-being in the mind that’s totally harmless. It doesn’t require that you do anything unskillful to develop it and it doesn’t have a bad impact on the mind. As he said, if you have this pleasure, the pleasure of … 
  8. Fear & Insecurity
     … So we train the mind. As we sit here and meditate, it’s probably the best way, the most direct way to train the mind. But all the aspects of the path, all the aspects of the practice, are training the mind to fear the right thing: to fear making unskillful choices—choices that are harmful for yourself, harmful for others, based on unskillful … 
  9. The Choice Not to Suffer
     … Those patterns of tension often become the burden that the mind actually feels. One of the Buddha’s insights is that pain comes in two forms. One is pain in the three characteristics: the fact that there is stress simply because things are put together and fabricated—and that’s everywhere. But the stress that weighs down the mind is a different kind of … 
  10. Ingenuity
     … As Ajaan Lee once said, “The ways of the mind are so many there’s no way any book could ever contain them all”—and that doesn’t apply to just one-volume books. In the Canon we’ve got forty-five books and they still don’t contain all the ways of the mind. So learn to appreciate this quality of ingenuity. It … 
  11. If at First You Don’t Succeed
     … Normally, when you hear about breath meditation, it’s just “in, out, in, out, in, out,” and the mind decides, “Well, I’m out of here.” But here you’re trying to make it interesting. Being with the breath allows you to learn how your body relates to the mind, how the mind has an impact on the body, how the way you breathe … 
  12. The View from the Mountaintop
     … See what answers come up in the mind, what kinds of insight arise. There’s no guarantee that everything that comes up in a still mind is going to be the truth, but you’re in a much better position because when the mind is still like this, it’s like opening all your drawers, or having access to all the drawers where you … 
  13. The Four Jhanas
     … In the foundations of mindfulness or the frames of reference, he talks about different ways of categorizing the mind. As you read through the list, you see that the categories get more and more refined as your concentration gets more and more refined. So which ways of breathing help the mind get more refined? In terms of mental qualities, which ways of breathing are … 
  14. Pain Is a Noble Truth
     … As it turns out, that’s the kind of pain that weighs the mind down. Without the clinging and craving, the pains in the body have no impact on the mind at all. They’re just there, a part of nature, but the mind doesn’t suffer. To see the distinction between those two kinds of suffering, you really do have to probe into … 
  15. Noble Treasures
     … So here we’re trying to get the mind to settle down. At the same time, we find that there are issues in the body. We all have them, and you can use them as your motivation for wanting to figure out this problem: How can you get the mind to settle down in a body that’s not really in good shape? Partly … 
  16. Mindfulness in the Driver’s Seat
     … Either way, when you realize that you can’t stay here anymore, the mind is going to run off in every direction, like the story of the man who jumped on a horse and rode off in all four directions at once. You need a part of the mind that’s trained not to go along with those things, that can step back and … 
  17. Forest Bathing
     … How does the mind create dangers for itself? How does it create suffering for itself? You want to get the mind really still so that it can see these patterns of behavior in action. So you focus on the breath, focus on any part of the body that you find easy to stay focused on. There’s also the meditation on the thirty-two … 
  18. Fear of Letting Go
     … So when there are things in the world that the practice requires you to give up, ask yourself, “Is it actually the thing outside that I’m giving up, or is it a quality of the mind? And what quality of the mind am I being asked to give up?” You’ll find that the Buddha never asked you to give up anything that … 
  19. Questioning Everything
     … And something in the mind says, “Well, it’s irresponsible not to do that.” Well, okay, I’m irresponsible. What’s wrong with that? It’s a thought that we’re often afraid to think but it’s good to be irresponsible for a while so that the mind can have a chance to be on its own, to look at what’s actually … 
  20. Wherever You Go, There You Aren’t
     … Learn how to look at the mind in a way that actually helps solve the problem instead of compounding the problem. Part of this means bringing the right narrative to what you’re doing, learning to look at the events of the mind simply as events, in and of themselves. This requires that you have the proper attitude. If you bring in the narrative … 
  21. Many Desires, Many Selves
    As we practice, we try to focus our desires on one thing—the ending of suffering—but the nature of the mind is that it desires tend to head off in lots of different directions, like the man who jumped on a horse and rode off in four directions all at once. Our desires to pull us here, pull us there, and we try … 
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