Wisdom Wide and Deep: A Practical Handbook for Mastering Jhana and Vipassana

If there is only one chair in your house and you are always sitting in it, although unwelcome guests may come to visit, they will not stay long. Maintain your stance of mindful attention and eventually hindrances will stop appearing.

Five particular faculties lead the mind in the development of concentration, mindfulness, and insight. These five are sometimes called controlling factors, spiritual powers, or spiritual faculties — both beginning and experienced meditators rely on them. They are faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom.

Planning is a deeply entrenched habit, effective for many professional pursuits, but an enormous obstruction to concentration.

The primary method for working with thoughts is to learn to let them go. Clear the mind of compulsive clutter. In fact, much of what you will do when you begin meditation is to abandon thoughts. Sweep away fantasies of future events, ruminations about past activities, and commentary about present happenings. Train your mind to be quiet by not allow

Desire has the characteristic of projecting onto an object attractiveness that the object itself doesn’t intrinsically possess.

Pausing provides a moment of quiet ease; an intervention in the obsession with activity, productivity, and identity; an opportunity to make a different choice.

With the development of wisdom, you will understand that sensual desire is not pleasure; it is suffering; it is a force that inhibits the deep peace and rest you seek.

Aversion has the characteristic of projecting onto an object repulsiveness that the object does not inherently contain. Aversion can never end by replacing unpleasant external conditions with comfortable and agreeable conditions, since the suffering is not caused by the external conditions. The problem is the quality of attention, not the physical

The cause for the arising of a hindrance is unwise attention, the way of its abandoning is wise attention, and the cultivation of concentration, mindfulness, and insight is the way for the nonarising of that hindrance in the future.