Search results for: "Mindfulness"

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  2. Breath Energies
     … It’s not just that you get the mind still and then you start seeing things. As you get the mind still and then learn how to ask questions in that stillness, you learn how to keep re-framing the questions. Starting with simple things like the breath and then moving on to pain: Why is there pain in the mind? And what do … 
  3. Three Parts of Right View
     … We’re making changes in the mind as we develop the path. All too often you hear people saying, “Well, I know my mind is supposed to be free of craving, but if you’re trying to develop one thing in the mind and abandon something else, isn’t that craving?” The answer is: That’s not the craving the Buddha was talking about … 
  4. Noble Happiness
     … As for the mind, though, there’s a question: Does it have to feed or can it be independent? So we look inside to see. We start out with something really basic. Focus on the breath. Notice when the breath is coming in; notice when it’s coming out. Think about the breath. Keep the breath in mind. That’s mindfulness. And then be … 
  5. Asking the Right Questions
     … And then, secondly, when you come up with the issue in your own mind, how would you bring it to stillness and how you develop dispassion? Those are the two big questions in the meditation. The first one has to do, of course, with getting the mind concentrated. How do you center it? How do you get it to indulge in its concentration?—in … 
  6. Strengthening Discernment
     … Then you hold in mind certain perceptions of the breath, and try to develop a perception that allows the mind to settle down with a sense of ease and refreshment filling the body. The feelings of ease and refreshment count as mental fabrication. The perceptions that you hold in mind of the breath, count as mental fabrication as well. This means that you’ve … 
  7. Pleasure on the Path
     … Then as you find yourself getting more and more interested in this flow of energy in the body, the mind begins to settle down. A quality of ease comes with that, when the mind has one place where it can stay and doesn’t have to go jumping around. It’s like trying out different places to sleep and none of them quite work … 
  8. Succeeding at Happiness
     … Giving makes the mind serene; joy and gratification arise. The highest motivation is when it’s purely, as the Buddha said, an ornament of the mind. In other words, you’re no longer feeding off what you’re going to get out of the gift. It’s just a natural expression of the mind’s goodness. So try to do this well. Get your … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. Fear of Letting Go
     … In other words, you’re going to take a grasping mind, because that’s what it comes down to. We think we’re depending on things outside, but we’re depending on certain attitudes in the mind itself. If, for most our lives, we’ve been depending on greed, aversion, and delusion, those are our refuge. Lust, jealousy—all these things: We think that … 
  11. Rooted in Desire
     … We want peace of mind, but if all you do is sit around and think about peace of mind, peace of mind, how much you want peace of mind, and yet it’s not coming, that kind of desire is not helpful. Instead, if you want peace of mind, what do you have to do to get it? Sit down, focus on the breath … 
  12. Goodness
     … Once you see that the qualities of the mind are important, you have the desire to prevent unskillful ones from arising and to let go of unskillful ones that have arisen; to give rise to skillful qualities and to develop the ones that have arisen so that they become fully developed. And you’ve got to keep this in mind. This is where mindfulness … 
  13. The Skill of Stillness
     … The mind will complain. It’ll say, “This is getting boring. Nothing’s happening.” Actually, a lot of things are happening in your mind all the time. We mentioned this this afternoon: There are perceptions, there are acts of attention, acts of intention, feelings, different levels of conversation in the mind. So there’s plenty to watch here if you want to watch. The … 
  14. Feeding on the Breath
    The mind has three kinds of food: sensory contact, sensory consciousness, and what are called the intentions of the intellect, in other words the thoughts and intentions you churn out. As we sit here meditating, there’s not much new in terms of sensory contact or sensory consciousness, so the mind’s going to churn out a lot of intentions until you give it … 
  15. Harmony
     … You want to have a mind like that. When people say things, it doesn’t reverberate, it doesn’t stick. Most of us have a mind like a big sheet of paper. If anybody has a pen anywhere nearby, it’s like a magnetic sheet of paper. It pulls the ink out of the pen and becomes an indelible stain. So when that happens … 
  16. Heart & Mind
    We’re here training the mind because it’s the most important thing in our lives. The mind is what shapes our actions, and our actions shape our experience. It’s important, though, to know that the word “mind” in Pali, citta, corresponds to what we would call both mind and heart in English. In other words, we’re dealing both with thoughts and … 
  17. Learning by Doing
    Many of the Thai ajaans would like to start their Dhamma talks by saying, “Make a survey of your body; make a survey of your mind.” With the body, make sure that it’s sitting up straight, hands in your lap. With the mind, make sure that it’s sitting up straight, too. In other words, it’s not leaning forward into the future … 
  18. Respect for Happiness
     … How does it affect your body? How does it affect your mind? Take some time to notice, and you find that you benefit in all kinds of ways. One of the Buddha’s terms for the mind when it settles down with the breath in the present moment is vihara dhamma, “a home for the mind.” A lot of us live like homeless people … 
  19. The Energy in the Body
     … That’s when you can really do important work in the mind. As you develop greater and greater sensitivity in reading the breath, you also become more and more capable of reading the mind: what the mind is doing, the results of what it’s doing. You see the events of the mind in terms of cause and effect. This is how the insight … 
  20. Against the Grain
     … That teaching sometimes is interpreted as saying that the mind is naturally awakened and you just have to let the clouds of defilement pass away on their own and you’ll reach its awakened nature. But when the Buddha says that the mind is luminous, luminosity is not the same as being awakened. The mind can get luminous in states of concentration. The mind … 
  21. Imagine Your Breath
    Keep focused on the breath, in and of itself—ardent, alert, mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. That’s the formula. What it means is that you put aside all your concerns about the world right now. You can think of the world as anything from starting from the skin around your body on out, except for the cocoon … 
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