Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. In Gratitude- Ajaan Suwat
     … You’re not self-centered in being selfish, but you are self-centered in realizing that the big problem in life is the problem of the suffering that you’re causing yourself.” So you’ve got to focus there, inside yourself. Straighten out things inside yourself. Make that your center. Once the center inside is straightened out, then you have time for others. Of … 
  3. Remembering Ajaan Lee
     … We’re looking for the cause of suffering. We want to see what arises together with the suffering, what passes away together with the suffering, so that we can know where it comes from. And this focused analysis is also a burning away of the defilement. As soon as you see the defilement for what it is, and how stupid it is, and how … 
  4. Uncertainty
     … So look around and try to ferret out the voices that are encouraging, that say, “There is a way to put an end to suffering. There is a way to find happiness. It is possible to breathe comfortably in the present moment.” Those are the voices that are on your side. Remember Ajaan Lee’s analogy that there may be lots of different consciousnesses … 
  5. Two Kinds of Defilements
    As the Buddha said, there are two kinds of causes of suffering. There are the ones that go away if you simply look at them with equanimity. And there are others that won’t go away unless you, as he says, exert a fabrication against them. In other words, you have to put in effort to figure them out and really actively uproot them … 
  6. Meditating When You’re Sick
     … There’s a story in the Canon about the Buddha suffering from an injury to his foot. Mara came up and taunted him as he was lying there and said, “Are you moping? Are you sad?” And the Buddha said, “No. I’m developing goodwill for all beings.” That’s a good exercise, so that you’re not concentrating on your own pain or … 
  7. The Skills of a Hunter
     … One of the kids, after twenty minutes of meditating, came out and said he was suffering from sensory deprivation. And that was just twenty minutes. We’re so used to stimuli all the time. That’s our food. Without it, we feel starved. So you have to learn how to feed off of the activity of staying centered but with an all-around awareness … 
  8. The Psychology of Virtue
     … If you see the processes that give rise to becoming are causing you suffering, you can say, “I don’t have to engage in them. I don’t have to create a world around them.” Because that’s what we do—we create worlds. We focus on something we really want, and then we take on an identity as the person who might be … 
  9. True, Beneficial, Timely
     … What the Buddha’s teaching us is that we can master these habits as skills, so that instead of creating suffering for ourselves, we can use them to put an end to suffering. And then we can let them go—not out of hatred, not out of neurotic fear, but simply because they’ve taken us as far as we can go with them … 
  10. Determination
     … What are you doing that’s causing suffering? What can you do to stop that?—That’s when you develop your good eye. One of the other attributes is that you’re astute. For the shopkeeper, this means that you know how to go about buying something cheap and how to get other people to buy what you’re trying to sell. The astute … 
  11. Skillful Thinking
     … The first noble truth, the truth of suffering and stress, is an unskillful result. The unskillful cause is craving and ignorance. On the other side you’ve got the path of practice: that’s a skillful cause with the cessation of suffering as its result. So when situations present themselves to you, just ask yourself, “What’s the most skillful thing to do right … 
  12. The Gatekeeper Doesn’t Just Note
     … And only when it works together with its teams can it really do the job that needs to be done, which is to figure out why it is that the mind creates suffering for itself even though it doesn’t want to suffer, and how it can learn to stop. When you understand the function of mindfulness, it’s a lot easier to get … 
  13. Fear of Death
     … You don’t have to like all beings; you simply decide that you don’t want to cause them suffering. You don’t want to take pleasure in their suffering. As you think about it, what good do you get out of other people’s suffering? You don’t gain anything at all. There may be a sense of schadenfreude, but that’s pretty … 
  14. Riding an Elephant to Catch Grasshoppers
     … What views was it using? What intentions was it acting on? What intentions could be used to put an end to suffering? In this mode, there are no stories, there’s no worldview, there are simply actions and results. And it was getting down to this mode that the Buddha was able to solve his problems. Now, with the other two modes, the way … 
  15. Steps in Concentration
     … That’s probably because, as he was first working with this method, he was suffering heart problems. When you suffer from heart problems, there’s a lot of tension in the back of the neck. If you can create a good sensation there, that helps to alleviate a lot of the pressure, a lot of the tension. Then you can think of it spreading … 
  16. The Governing Principle
     … Your duty with regard to the four noble truths is to comprehend suffering, abandon its cause, realize its cessation, and develop the path. To “develop” means that you give rise to it; and once it’s there, you keep it going. That’s the function of desire and right effort as well: the desire to abandon unskillful qualities, to develop qualities that are skillful … 
  17. Death World
     … May all living beings be happy, may all beings be freed from their suffering, may all beings not be deprived of the good fortune they have attained. Those first three branhmaviharas are wishes. But what are those wishes based on? The fact that all beings are the owners of their actions. So you wish that beings will behave in a way that will lead … 
  18. Four Virtues
     … That right there is suffering. And of course there are the people you depend on for emotional support, and there’s a kind of stress and strain that goes there as well. So you have to be careful. When you look at things and listen to things, what do you bring into the mind? Often you bring in greed, anger, and delusion, because those … 
  19. Read the Breath
     … In his case, it was the problem of suffering at large. But as for your particular sufferings, the same pattern applies. So we’re sitting here focusing on the breath not simply because the breath can become a comfortable place to stay—although it is a good place to hang out, with a sense of ease in the present moment. The Buddha said that … 
  20. Lessons from Generosity & Virtue
     … This is one of the reasons why the Buddha talks so much about the purpose of this practice being to put an end to suffering, to put an end to stress. Everybody in the mind wants to put an end to suffering, it’s just that they have different ideas about what that would be and how to go about it. The differences are … 
  21. Resolute Good Humor
     … In line with that old teaching from the Third Patriarch of Chan that “The great way is not difficult for those with no preferences.” This doesn’t mean you don’t prefer right to wrong, or that you don’t prefer the end of suffering to suffering. You do prefer these things. But when you see that something has to be done and it … 
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