You can learn to perceive your life as an ever- flowing movement, a thing of great beauty like a dance or symphony. You can learn to take joy in the perpetual passing away of all phenomena. You can le...
Never mind what I have been taught. Forget about theories and prejudices and stereotypes. I want to understand the true nature of life.
We inhale and experience pleasure and then tension. We exhale and experience release but also anxiety. But even this pattern has much to teach us. When we experience tension, we remind ourselves not t...
If you learn nothing else from meditation, you will learn patience.
The mind does not stay all the time with the feeling of breath. It goes to sounds, memories, emotions, perceptions, consciousness, and mental formations as well. When we experience these states, we sh...
We can’t examine our own depression without accepting it fully. The same is true for irritation and agitation, frustration, and all those other uncomfortable emotional states. You can’t examine someth...
Below the threshold of conscious awareness, ignorance infiltrates our perceptions, and from there spreads to our thoughts and views, resulting in distorted modes of understanding
Vipassana, by definition, is the cultivation of mindfulness or awareness. If you find that you are becoming unconscious in meditation, then you aren’t meditating, according to the definition of that w...
Is this task or behavior really necessary or is it just a way to be busy?
When you see deeply, as a real experience, with your own wisdom-eye, that all conditioned things are impermanent, your mind state changes. Your superficial understanding of impermanence becomes a deep...
Remember, jhana happens when it happens. It cannot be forced or rushed. Every apparent failure is a step toward success. When it doesn’t happen as you want it to, use mindfulness to notice the feeling...
The reason we are all stuck in life’s mud is that we ceaselessly run from our problems and after our desires. Meditation provides us with a laboratory situation in which we can examine this syndrome a...
Mindfulness is extremely difficult to define in words—not because it is complex, but because it is too simple and open. The same problem crops up in every area of human experience. The most basic conc...
The roots of suffering are within us. And the method for eliminating suffering is within us as well.
Meditation sharpens your concentration and your thinking power. Then, piece by piece, your own subconscious motives and mechanics become clear to you. Your intuition sharpens. The precision of your th...
You will have problems in meditation. Everybody does. You can treat them as terrible torments or as challenges to be overcome. If you regard them as burdens, your suffering will only increase. If you...
When you finally overcome the five hindrances, you experience a great relief. This relief slowly increases until it culminates in piti, joy. This joy is purely internal. It does not arise dependent on...
We usually do not look into what is actually there in front of us. We see life through a screen of thoughts and concepts, and we mistake those mental objects for reality. We get so caught up in this e...
Just because of the simple fact that you are human, you find yourself heir to an inherent unsatisfactoriness in life that simply will not go away.
When you are totally absorbed in the subject of your meditation, when you merge with or become one with the subject, you are completely unaware. That too is not jhana, at least not what Buddhism consi...
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