WHEN WE ENJOY LIFE OR BLAME OURSELVES, MINDFULNESS CEASES

Swiss Retreat 2019 Group Interviews 16 (26:35-28:03)

Yogi: When things are going well at home, when there are very nice situations with fun and everything, mindfulness goes away.

Sayadaw: Those are some of the things that derail the mindfulness. The other thing to remember that helps the mind to be skillful is – remember what I said that we can choose not to have wrong thought – when things go wrong, we stop blaming ourselves.

Thoughts of blaming ourselves don’t help you to get back to mindfulness – it takes you longer to work through the difficulty. When you see that the mind does something wrong, the first thing to do is to accept it. Okay, it has happened and just be mindful; forget about blaming ourselves.

If we just accept it and start being mindful again, we learn lessons from what has happened and we can grow mindfulness from the bad experience.