mindfulness-Buddhism

Living 24 hours with mindfulness

1 December 9, 2020
Living 24 hours with mindfulness is more worthwhile than living 100 years without it. – The Buddha

Mindfulness is about being fully awake in our lives. It is about perceiving the exquisite vividness of each moment. We also gain immediate access to our own powerful inner resources for insight, transformation, and healing. – Jon Kabat-Zinn

Being mindful means that we suspend judgment for a time, set aside our immediate goals for the future, and take in the present moment as it is rather than as we would like it to be. – Mark Williams
Concentration – a cornerstone of mindfulness practice

1 February 22, 2020

Concentration is a cornerstone of mindfulness practice. Your mindfulness will only be as robust as the capacity of your mind to be calm and stable. Without calmness, the mirror of mindfulness will have an agitated and choppy surface and will not be able to reflect things with any accuracy. ~Jon Kabat-Zinn
Just go into the room

Comment January 28, 2016

Just go into the room, sit in the centre of the room, open the doors and windows, and see who comes to visit. You will witness all kinds of scenes and actors, all kinds of temptations and stories, everything imaginable. Your only job is to stay in your seat. You will see it all arise and pass, and out of this, wisdom and understanding will come. ~Ajahn Chah
No Need to Fight

Comment January 2, 2016

In order to make yourself a person of the world, you have had to fight for every inch. Even when you are pressing your clothes or busy organizing a cocktail party, there is always an undercurrent of trying to prove something, trying to achieve something. Whatever you do involves some kind of chauvinism, which in fact could be one definition of ego. However, individual chauvinism can be overcome. The achievement of mindfulness and awareness gives you tremendous freedom: that is the idea of individual salvation. You realize that there is no need to fight or wage warfare. In this way, the development of awareness leads to tremendous relaxation, gentleness, and peace. ~Chögyam Trungpa
Thoughts in your mind

Comment November 25, 2015

Do not regard the thoughts in your mind as things to be rejected.
Do not deliberately create non-conceptuality.
Post the watchman of mindfulness, and rest.

— Gyalwa Yang Gönpa
How mindfulness can reconnect people to Mother Earth

Comment November 14, 2015

Mindfulness can help people to reconnect by slowing down and appreciating all the gifts that the earth can offer.

Many people suffer deeply and they do not know they suffer. They try to cover up the suffering by being busy. Many people get sick today because they get alienated from Mother Earth.

The practice of mindfulness helps us to touch Mother Earth inside of the body and this practice can help heal people. So the healing of the people should go together with the healing of the Earth and this is the insight and it is possible for anyone to practice.

This kind of enlightenment is very crucial to a collective awakening. In Buddhism we talk of meditation as an act of awakening, to be awake to the fact that the earth is in danger and living species are in danger.

~Thich Nhat Hanh
Mindfulness

Comment July 6, 2015

by Ajahn Chah

Just as animal life can be classified into two groups, creatures of the land and creatures of the sea, subjects of meditation can be divided into two categories, concentration and insight. Concentration meditations are those that are used to make the mind calm and one pointed. Insight, on the one hand, is the growing perception of impermanence, suffering, and emptiness of self and, on the other, our bridge over those waters.

No matter how we may feel about our existence, our business is not to try to change it in any way. Rather, we just have to see it and let it be. Where suffering is, there too is the way out of suffering. Seeing that which is born and dies and is subject to suffering, Buddha knew there must also be something beyond birth and death, free of suffering.

Methods of meditation all have value in helping to develop mindfulness. The point is to use mindfulness to see the underlying truth. With this mindfulness, we watch all desires, likes and dislikes, pleasures and pains that arise in the mind. Realizing they are impermanent, suffering, and empty of self, we let go of them. In this way, wisdom replaces ignorance, knowledge replaces doubt.

As for singling out one object of meditation, you yourself must discover what fits your character. Wherever you choose to be mindful, it will bring wisdom to the mind. Mindfulness is knowing what is here, noticing, being aware. Clear comprehension knows the context in which the present is occurring. When mindfulness and clear comprehension act together, their companion, wisdom, always appears to help them complete any task.

Watch the mind, watch the process of experience arising and ceasing. At first the movement is constant as soon as one thing passes, another arises, and we seem to see more arising than ceasing. As time goes by we see more clearly, understanding how things arise so fast, until we reach the point where they arise, cease, and do not arise again.

With mindfulness you can see the real owner of things. Do you think this is your world, your body? It is the world’s world, the body’s body. If you tell it, Don’t get old, does the body listen? Does your stomach ask permission to get sick? We only rent this house; why not find out who really owns it?

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The energy of mindfulness

Comment June 13, 2015

Anger is… energy number one. By practicing mindful breathing or mindful walking, we generate the energy number two: the energy of mindfulness. We call it in Buddhist terms: mindfulness of anger. Mindfulness is always mindfulness of something. When you drink your water mindfully, that is called mindfulness of drinking. When you eat mindfully, that is called mindfulness of eating. When you breathe mindfully, in and out, that is called mindfulness of breathing. When you walk mindfully, it is called mindfulness of walking.

So, when you recognize your anger, embrace your anger tenderly with that energy of mindfulness, it is called mindfulness of anger, mindfulness of despair, mindfulness of fear. We should be able to learn and help the young people to learn how to do it. It’s very important.

The Buddha offers us very concrete and simple exercises in order to become mindful. The first exercise on mindful breathing is: Breathing in–I know I am breathing in. Breathing out–I know I am breathing out. You can reduce the length of the sentence to one word. In. Out. While you are breathing in, you just recognize that this is your in breath, and you use the word, in. And you are wholly concentrated on your in breath. Nothing else.

You become your in breath. You’re not thinking of anything. You’re not thinking of the past, of the future, of your projects. You release everything. You just follow your in breath, and you become one with your in breath. And the energy of mindfulness is generated together with the energy of concentration. ~Thich Nhat Hanh
If mindfulness is not there

Comment February 19, 2015

Every time you give your internal formations a bath of mindfulness, the blocks of pain in you become lighter and less dangerous. So give your anger, your despair, your sorrow a bath of mindfulness every day—that is your practice. If mindfulness is not there, it is very unpleasant to have these seeds come up. But if you know how to generate the energy of mindfulness, it is very healing to invite them up every day and embrace them. And after several days or weeks of bringing them up daily and helping them go back down again, you create good circulation in your psyche, and the symptoms of mental illness will begin to disappear. ~Thich Nath Hanh

Jendhamuni in Cambodia