Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - May 29, 2022 💌

 

If I can’t stop thinking, maybe I can just let my thoughts go by without getting all caught up in them. Feel the breeze on your face or your neck? See how it’s going by? You’re not all hung up with it. You don’t have to see where each breeze goes. You don’t have to look quickly to see if it hit those trees over there. It’s breezes, and they’re just going by. Make your thoughts like those breezes, those little breezes...just going by.

- Ram Dass -

Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Mindfulness and Concentration: Establishing Mindfulness of Feeling and the Second Jhāna

RIGHT MINDFULNESS
Establishing Mindfulness of Feeling

A person goes to the forest or to the root of a tree or to an empty place and sits down. Having crossed the legs, one sets the body erect. One establishes the presence of mindfulness. (MN 10) One is aware: “Ardent, fully aware, mindful, I am content.” (SN 47.10)   When feeling a mental pleasant feeling, one is aware: “Feeling a mental pleasant feeling”… one is just aware, just mindful: “There is feeling.” And one abides not clinging to anything in the world. (MN 10)

Reflection

We forget sometimes that it is okay to feel joy. In fact, it is encouraged. It is attachment to joy that is a problem, not the good feeling that comes with mental pleasure. The aggregate of feeling, which includes both physical pleasure and pain and mental pleasure and pain, is an inevitable and natural aspect of all experience. The challenge is to experience pleasure with equanimity, rather than with desire.

Daily Practice

Just as you can find both pleasure and pain when you review bodily sensations, the same is true of mental life. Take a few moments to inventory the contents of your mind. Certain things you think of are accompanied by happiness, while others arise with mental pain. Allow yourself to experience mental pleasure when it arises, and carefully observe the inevitable tipping point when the mind becomes attached to that pleasure.

RIGHT CONCENTRATION Approaching and Abiding in the Second Phase of Absorption (2nd Jhāna)

With the stilling of applied and sustained thought, one enters upon and abides in the second phase of absorption, which has inner clarity and singleness of mind, without applied thought and sustained thought, with joy and the pleasure born of concentration. (MN 4) Breathing in short, one is aware: ‘I breathe in short’; or breathing out short, one is aware: ‘I breathe out short. This is how concentration by mindfulness of breathing is developed and cultivated,  so that it is of great fruit and great benefit. (SN 54.8)

Tomorrow: Understanding the Noble Truth of the Cessation of Suffering
One week from today: Establishing Mindfulness of Mind and Abiding in the Third Jhāna

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Via Daily Dharma: Coming and Going

 When we really get a feeling for the coming and going of moments, it helps us break the illusion of a solid, separate self, which gives us relief from suffering.
    
Loch Kelly, “When Am I?”

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