Search results for: "Focus"

  1. Page 106
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. Right Questions in the Right Order
     … If you really want to totally abandon craving, you focus on the things that you crave, and you see that they’re inconstant. And in their inconstancy, there’s stress. And because they’re inconstant and stressful, the question is, are they worth claiming as you or yours, claiming as self? When you know of the third noble truth—that dispassion for craving is … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. A Confident Ego
     … Our problem is that, as a society, we tend to focus on things that can be done instantly. You want to be a good cook, well, all you have to do is pick up a copy of Julia Child, and she’s done all the work for you. All you have to do is follow her instructions and you can come out with something … 
  13. Relating to Results
     … You can change the way you focus, you can change the way you breathe, and see what it does for the body. This gives you a sense of how much you really can change, how much you can learn by being observant. Because it’s by being observant, by developing more and more skill in our actions, that we’ll finally get to that … 
  14. Strength of Mindfulness
     … You remember what’s really important in life and you focus your efforts there. And as for any attachments that would pull you away from what’s important, you’re mindful to let them go. That’s when you see how important it is to keep your mindfulness strong—because in that way, it does become your refuge. Of the various qualities of the … 
  15. The Wisdom of Dualities
     … When is it useful to emphasize the pleasant aspects of something and when is it useful to emphasize the stressful aspects? When is it useful to emphasize the fact that you have some control over your actions, and when is it useful to focus on things being not-self? The whole purpose of these three perceptions—inconstancy, stress, and not-self—is to give … 
  16. Observe Your Concentration
     … It talks about how you can focus on the mind in concentration—and the five brethren were in concentration. It may be one of the topics that the Buddha had talked about in the period of time between the first and the second sermon. After all, in the first sermon, he mentions the five aggregates but doesn’t define them. He names the factors … 
  17. Right View about Right View
     … You can apply perceptions of inconstancy and stressfulness to the distractions that pull you away, but for the concentration, you want to focus on this question: What can you make constant here? What sensations can you develop in the body that are constant even as the breath flows in, the breath flows out? How do you make them easeful, pleasant? How do you get … 
  18. Overcoming Obstacles
     … And that, as the Buddha keeps saying, is anatta, anatta—it’s not-self, not-self*.* So focus on that issue. What you really have is this process of fabrication that’s work, work, work—all the time. And yet the work you do doesn’t produce any results that you can hang on to, unless you master what the Buddha said is that … 
  19. The Kindness of Body Contemplation
    The Kindness of Body Contemplation January 30, 2013 When we focus on the breath, we’re with the body in and of itself. What does that mean, “in and of itself”? The rest of the formula tells us that we’re “ardent, alert, and mindful, putting aside any greed and distress with reference to the world.” In other words, we aren’t looking at … 
  20. Dethinking Thinking
     … Ajaan Lee makes the point that when you’re sitting down here to meditate, you put the first two aside, and you focus totally on, say, the object of your concentration. But as you go through the day, there will have to be times when you have to think. When things are not going well in your meditation, you don’t just sit there … 
  21. Looking After Yourself
     … But try to test to see how little sleep you can get by on and still maintain your focus, still have a sense of ease in the concentration. We’re not here to push you into a neurotic breakthrough by denying you sleep. That doesn’t get you any closer to awakening. But you do want to learn how to use your concentration as … 
  22. Load next page...