Search results for: "Focus"
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- Refreshing… Think of the focus of a camera. Usually, when we focus our attention on something, we not only focus attention, but we also seem to screw up tension right around our eyes. That’s not necessary. When a camera focuses, though, there’s no tension in the camera. There’s no weight to the light. It just gets focused. Try to have the sense …
- Learning How to Learn… What we’re going to focus on is the breath. The breath isn’t the Buddhist, it isn’t Christian, it doesn’t belong to any particular religion. It’s common property all over the world. So when you focus on the breath, that leads you straight to your mind, your awareness in the present moment. Then, when any questions come out of the …
- Ardency… In other words, you want to see it clearly until you develop a sense of dispassion for the stress you add to things, so that you can focus on the effort to keep track of the breath, to be more and more consistent in following the breath, to strengthen your concentration, to strengthen your focus. Those are the primary things you focus on: either …
- Where to Look in the Present… In the beginning, it’s wise not to focus too directly on the intention. Just focus on the breath, because the breath is easier to focus on and it gives you a lot to work with. But as you get more and more sensitive to the breath, the breath gets more refined, and the movements of the mind will come more and more to …
- The Right Focal Length… Your focus is way out some place else. So bring the focus in right here. What’s going on with this breath? What is the mind doing with this breath? Is it staying with the breath? Or is it fabricating all kinds of issues, developing all kinds of problems, long commentaries on this, that, and the other thing? The reason we have that reflection …
- Emptiness… Focus on that without the narratives, focus on that without the world views. Just put them aside. It’s not that you deny them, it’s simply that you put them aside as unimportant right now—because the really important thing is how the mind is creating suffering right now. Or to put it in even simpler terms: how suffering is being created right …
- Protective Meditations… So you want to focus on what you can do right now, here with your mind, to protect yourself from the biggest danger, which is that you might act on unskillful intentions. The list of guardian meditations is four: recollection of the Buddha, goodwill, contemplation of the unattractiveness of the body, and mindfulness of death. It sounds like a rather random collection and, in …
- The Buddha Didn’t Play Gotcha… As the Buddha said, you focus on the causes, and when the causes are ripe, they yield the results. Through developing the path, you come to realize the cessation of suffering. So you focus on the path and the goal takes care of itself. Sometimes you may hear that the path and the goal are one. And the one way in which that teaching …
- Training for Happiness… Sometimes it’s simply deciding which thought to focus on, or which sensation to focus on. That in and of itself is pretty important. You could sit here thinking about all the horrible things that have happened to you, and you can get very, very upset about that. Everybody has had bad things happen in their lives. But focusing on the bad things that …
- Passion for Dispassion… He’s basically saying to focus your passion someplace else, focus your passion in a way that’s actually skillful, actually helpful, actually leads to a genuine happiness. And he points out the possibility of a happiness that lies beyond most of our imagination. We’ve heard the four noble truths so many times that it’s good to stop and reflect that they …
- The Power of the Mind… Let’s focus it on something that really is worthwhile. We live in this universe that’s basically meaningless, pointless. Instead of seeing that as alienating, we see it as an opportunity. We can give our lives meaning; we can give a point to our lives by what we focus on. The Buddha suggests that the best thing to focus on is this question …
- The Riddle Tree… There’s no telling exactly what kind of breathing is going to be good for you, or whether there are times when you need to focus on something else instead: like recollecting the Buddha, recollecting the Dhamma, the Sangha, contemplating of the body, developing thoughts of goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, or equanimity. It’s really a personal matter which of these is going to …
- Putting out the Flame… The texts say that, in the final stages of breath meditation, you focus on inconstancy, you focus on dispassion, you focus on cessation. You would think it all stops there, but no, there’s one more step—you focus on relinquishment. The word for relinquishment actually means giving back. All these things you’ve laid claim to—all these narratives, the raw material, the …
- Use Your Defilements… So right now you can sit here, focus on the pains, and make yourself really miserable about the pains. Or you can focus on the pains in a more intelligent way. Or you can focus, even better, on which parts of the body you can make comfortable. That’s your first line of attack. And if part of the mind says, “Oh, that’s …
- The Patience of a Hunter… There’s no direct guarantee that if you focus in a certain way, the insights will have to come right away. But you can put your mind in a state where it’s ready to notice them when they do come. It’s still enough so that areas of the mind that normally get sloughed past or become a blur because you’re running …
- All Four Tetrads at Once… It’s not the case that you’re going to focus on the body, and only when the body is all taken care of will you focus on feelings, and then wait until the feelings are all taken care before you focus on the mind and then the dhammas. Actually, all four tetrads are present right from the start. The sutta itself, where the …
- The Wisdom of Ardency… In the same way, when you focus, be careful how you focus, and try different strengths of focus to see what’s just right. When the breath does get comfortable, how do you allow that comfort to spread? If you push it around too much, it becomes uncomfortable. How do you allow it? These are some of the questions you can ask yourself as …
- Equanimity as a Skill… You’re going to focus on your breath. How you focus on the breath will make a difference for the whole hour. If there are some pains in the body that come from past actions, past injuries, you work around them. You find areas in the body that are not in pain. You focus there. Think of good breath energies nourishing those parts of …
- Your One Responsibility… You want to focus that desire right here. As for making changes in the world, if you can do them by maintaining good actions, good words, good qualities of mind, then that’s your gift to the world. But your primary responsibility is right here. So you want to learn how to develop this focus—the focal point inside the lens—and learn how …
- Listening to the Practice… Then change your focus slightly—you might change the place you focus, the pressure of your focus—or you can simply think of having the breath change. Think “longer” and the breath will grow longer. And then you can decide whether you like the results of the changes you’ve made. In other words, you’re listening very carefully to the present moment, both …
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