All you should notice in all these occurrences is the impermanent, unsatisfactory, and selfless nature of all your experiences whether mental or physical.
A sense of failure is only another ephemeral emotional reaction. If you get involved, it feeds on your energy and grows. If you simply stand aside and watch it, it passes away.
Don’t get distracted by your expectations about the results.
Where does all this junk come from, and more important, what can we do about it? It comes from the conditions of our own minds. It is a deep, subtle, and pervasive set of mental habits, a Gordian knot...
When we mindfully watch our bodily sensations, we should not confuse them with mental formations, for bodily sensations can arise completely independent of the mind. For instance, we sit comfortably....
True concentration itself is free from such contaminants. It is a state in which the mind is gathered together and thus gains power and intensity. We might use the analogy of a lens. Parallel waves of...
Too muchawareness without calm to balance it will result in a wildly over-sensitized state similar toabusing LSD. Too much concentration without a balancing ratio of awareness will resultin the 'Stone...
This sort of intuition can only occur when you disengage the logic circuits from the problem and give the deep mind the opportunity to cook up the solution. The
This goal has five elements to it: purification of mind, overcoming sorrow and lamentation, overcoming pain and grief, treading the right path leading to attainment of eternal peace, and attaining hap...
There is a point in the meditator’s career where he or she may practice special exercises to develop psychic powers. But this occurs far down the line. Only after the meditator has reached a very deep...
The distraction itself can be anything: a sound, a sensation, an emotion, a fantasy, anything at all. Whatever it is, don’t try to repress it. Don’t try to force it out of your mind. There’s no need f...
Somewhere in this process, you will come face to face with the sudden and shocking realization that you are completely crazy. Your mind is a shrieking, gibbering madhouse on wheels barreling pell-mell...
Resting comfortably in awareness, we relax into things as they are right now in this very moment, without slipping away into what happened in the past or will happen in the future. Normally, because w...
Rather than noticing the differences between oneself and others, the meditator trains him- or herself to notice the similarities.
Pin your attention to the simple sensation of breath at the nostrils. Stay with it as the breath naturally slows down and becomes fine and light. Allow thoughts of the breath to drop away. Stay with t...
Ordinary human thinking is full of greed, jealousy, and pride. A man seeing another man on the street may immediately think, He is better looking than I am. The instant result is envy or shame. A girl...
Mindfulness picks the objects of attention, and notices when the attention has gone astray. Concentration does the actual work of holding the attention steady on that chosen object.
Mindfulness of impermanence in any of the four foundations is the entry point. Seeing anicca leads you to seeing dukkha and anatta. Seeing these three marks of existence leads you to liberation.
Mindfulness is a broader and larger function than concentration. it is an all-encompassingfunction. Concentration is exclusive. It settles down on one item and ignores everythingelse. Mindfulness is i...
If you are remembering your second-grade teacher, that is memory. When you then become aware that you are remembering your second-grade teacher, that is mindfulness. If you then conceptualize the proc...