Search results for: "Focus"

  1. Page 104
  2. A Sense of Space Inside
     … So if you can find someplace in the body where the breathing feels really comfortable, focus your main attention on that. Then think of that sense of comfort spreading around, so that as you breathe in, the whole body feels comfortable. There may be pains here and there, or patterns of tension here and there, but try to breathe around them. We’re trying … 
  3. Dhamma Is a Quality of the Heart
     … So focus your attention here, at the heart. That’s where all the work is going to be done, and where the solution to the problem will be found.
  4. The Right Medicine
     … How you perceive the breath, how you perceive your focus of the mind in relation to the breath, can really determine what level of concentration you hit. For example, if you see the breath as something you’ve got to pull in and push out through the nose, it’s hard to achieve a really deep level of concentration going with that perception. But … 
  5. Questioning Your Way to Certainty
     … Instead, you come to the meditation armed with the right questions, questions that focus your attention on what you can actually see happening right here and now in terms of cause and effect. That’s how you overcome your uncertainty. You know from experience that this works, that that doesn’t work. You learn to evaluate things on your own. In this way, the … 
  6. Immersed in the Body
     … So as you focus on the breath, try to get past the idea that you’re in one part of the head watching the breath in other parts of the body. You want to occupy the whole body, bathed in the whole breath. The breath and the body should be surrounding your sense of where you are. And then you want to maintain that … 
  7. Empathetic Joy
     … All of this helps make for an easy break with all the issues of the day so that you can focus on the work at hand, which is your awareness right here, keeping your awareness focused on the breath. If you can’t be generous in practicing the brahmaviharas, it’s really hard to settle down. There’s a passage where the Buddha actually … 
  8. Equanimity on the Path
     … He had something he wanted to focus on. So that’s one of the functions. For instance, when you’re getting the mind into concentration, anything that comes up that’s not related to the concentration, you’re just going to have equanimity for. Now, this may be temporary. It may be an issue that you have to deal with when you leave concentration … 
  9. Asalha Puja – Completeness
     … So focus right here. This is an important place to look. This is why we meditate, focusing on the breath here in the present moment, because the breath is about as close to the mind as you’re going to get until you can look at the mind directly. It’s a good place to bring your attention, because the breath is very sensitive … 
  10. Pleasant Practice, Painful Practice
     … When you focus on a particular body part, ask yourself, “Where in my sense of the body sitting right here is that part right now?” This is to drive home the fact that the body part is not just something in an anatomy chart or a photo. It’s something right here in your body. You’ve been living with your liver, you’ve … 
  11. A Safe Space Inside
     … So you focus on what is in your control: what you’re doing right now. In this way, your right view helps your concentration; your concentration helps your right view. Virtue helps both of them; both of them help virtue. You’re grounded in what’s called the Triple Training: training in heightened virtue, heightened mind or concentration, and heightened discernment. And even though … 
  12. Freedom, Conditioned & Not
     … your choice to focus on one perception rather than another. There comes a point, though, where it’s not getting into deeper concentration, and you begin to realize that the fact that you’re making a choice and that, no matter what the choice is going to be, it’s going to involve stress of some kind, more or less refined. And if everything … 
  13. The Happiness & Suffering of Others
     … If we focus too much on our own anxieties, we make the situation worse. It’s good to get out of ourselves for a bit and think about, well, what do they want? Why are they acting the way they act? The basic underlying assumption has to be that they’re acting for the sake of happiness. But what’s their conception of happiness … 
  14. The Meaning of Happiness
     … This may be one of the reasons that happiness has bad press in some areas, because a lot of what people do when they’re trying to be happy is to block out huge patches of reality so that they can just focus on what they like, and pretend that what they’re doing has no impact aside from the immediate sensation of pleasure … 
  15. Five Strengths
     … And then focus on your breath. Know when the breath is coming in, know when it’s going out. Stay with the sensation of the breathing as consistently as you can all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out. Don’t let any distractions pull you away. If you find that you are pulled away, just drop whatever the … 
  16. First Principles
     … If you want to know the aggregates, focus on one of them. Really get to know it. That knowledge will then spread to the others. The same with the elements: Really get to know the breath element—how it responds to your mind, how it responds to your perceptions, how it responds to your directed thought and evaluation. You learn some important lessons in … 
  17. True Friends & False
     … You can focus on the breath for a few seconds and it doesn’t seem remarkable, it doesn’t seem special, so you move off to something else. But the mind needs a place to stay if you’re going to see what’s what in your mind and what’s what in the world around you. You need this sense of settling in … 
  18. Solving Real Problems
     … You do that partly because it’s a very pleasant experience, and partly because once the breath has calmed down and is no longer filling up your awareness of the present moment, you can focus more in on the mind. Because that’s where the real problem is—your perceptions, the way you talk to yourself. Here again the Buddha gives examples of how … 
  19. At the Door of the Cage
     … As the texts say, the first stage in insight is to focus on the drawbacks of anything that’s fabricated. The next stage is for the mind to incline to the Deathless. Normally the mind will not incline to the Deathless unless it feels that that’s the only way out. Otherwise it’s always going to find some other place to go, some … 
  20. Anybody Home?
     … You realize that you’re suffering and there’s more to be done, so you focus on doing it. It’s in the doing that renunciate grief turns into renunciate joy, renunciate equanimity, something that can’t be contained in any little house. The Buddha said that, while he was alive, he dwelled with unrestricted awareness, an awareness that wasn’t associated with the … 
  21. The Importance of Being Truthful
     … When you focus right here, you find that these habits that seemed to be so hard to kick get a lot more manageable. Especially when you can look at them not as an indication of what kind of person you are, but simply as actions that get bad results, and you have the choice: You don’t have to follow that action, you don … 
  22. Load next page...