Search results for: "Focus"
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- Let Go Like a Millionaire… You find a few spare moments here and there, and you focus on your breath. It’s like a person who’s addicted to cigarettes: If you find a few spare moments, you light up a cigarette. But here’s an addiction that goes in a good way. The Buddha calls this a devotion to pleasure that’s actually skillful. You remember the statement …
- Good for What Purpose?… That’s the way I’m used to doing things.” So even though we talk about how you shouldn’t be focusing on the goal all the time, how you should focus instead on the path going to the goal, sometimes you do have to remind yourself, “Where is this path going?”—so that you can see clearly the things that come up in …
- Mistakes… But then he would focus on the drawbacks of sensuality. Even heavenly sensual pleasures have their drawbacks, and those drawbacks can hit pretty hard. Once you’ve gotten used to things being really comfortable, you fall from heaven, and it’s not a comfortable fall. Sometimes you fall really hard, really far. It’s not the case that all devas, when they pass away …
- Skillful Fear… Close your eyes, sit with your back straight, place your hands in your lap, and focus on your breathing. Take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths, and notice where you feel the breathing process in the body. Then you can ask yourself: Is it comfortable? If it’s not, what would you change? Would you make it longer still? Or …
- Guardian Meditations… If you look at your lustful thoughts, you realize that you usually tend to focus on this detail or that detail, so broaden the frame. Look at the body as a whole. First start with your own body, and find which aspects of the body you find particularly unpleasant, disgusting. You might think of the different liquids that ooze from the body. What have …
- Beyond Imagination… Look on the good side of things.” Well, as long as you do that—and the Buddha said things do have their pleasant side; if the aggregates didn’t have their pleasures, we wouldn’t fall for them—if you focus on the pleasures, all you do is get overwhelmed with passion. And then, in passion, you start creating things that will then all …
- Disenchantment… Whereas the pleasure that comes simply from learning how to focus on your breath is not placing a burden on anyone, so it’s a type of food for the mind that’s really worth developing. As you develop a sense of oneness with the food of concentration, you look at the other ways the mind has been feeding on things for its emotional …
- Detail Work… But if you tell yourself, “I’ve got to think about this in detail, try to figure things out,” then it stirs up some energy in the mind so that the mind is ready, when the time comes to focus on the breath, not just to zone out on the sense of ease or pleasure from the breathing. The same way with contemplation of …
- Not Swept Away… You focus on the breath as the breath comes in, the breath goes out. Whatever the breath is going to do, you be aware of it. Keep in mind that this is where you want to be. It’s not that you’re here to get the breath. You’re after the mind, and you’re going to learn a lot of interesting things …
- The Message of Mindfulness… You may remind yourself to breathe comfortably, or to focus on a certain part of the body. This need to remember is one of the reasons why we have to study the texts at least to some extent. A couple of months back I was asked to give a talk on the topic of whether it really is necessary to know anything about what …
- The Flamethrowing Mind… So this is where you focus your efforts to put out the fire: to see what you’re feeding on, what you’re clinging to. I’ve been looking into the question of the meanings of the words mind and consciousness and awareness in the Pali Canon, and it turns out that in different suttas, they mean different things. It’s as if the …
- The Psychology of Harmlessness… Mental fabrications, the perceptions and feelings you focus on, will shape your mind. You want to be sensitive to what you’re doing right now in these terms because that gets into the question of values as to what’s worth doing. But first you want to see what you’re doing. Sometimes you hear it said that breath meditation, especially the way the …
- The Duties of Compassion… You try to find ways of maintaining your focus, regardless of how well the body is or how sick the body may be; regardless of whether it’s daytime or nighttime; regardless of any situation outside. You want to learn how to apply yourself to the appropriate duty at any time, in any situation. Because that’s the compassionate thing to do at any …
- Practicing from Gratitude… These are the main things we focus on. This is how we train ourselves. All of these are a form of generosity. The Buddha also talks about the precepts as gifts, in that we’re giving protection to all beings. You decide that you’re not going to kill anybody, not even little insects. No stealing, no illicit sex, no lying, no taking of …
- Practicing Meditation to Perform at Death… That’s one of the contemplations the Buddha has you focus on while you’re sick, just in case you happen to die of the illness. Remind yourself: This illness you have is not a chance thing. It’s been waiting for you. Every part of the body has a disease waiting for you. Not just one disease, many diseases. In fact, as Ajaan …
- Doubt… This is how you focus on the doubt, to see which doubts are actually useful and peel away the doubts that are harmful. This is one of those hindrances that the Buddha takes really seriously. After all, if you die with doubt, you might get cynical: “All that good that I did doesn’t seem to be getting me anywhere.” That’s going to …
- Is ‘I Am’ the Problem?… So the trick there is to learn how not to focus on what you like about these things. But here again, it’s not simply a matter of telling yourself not to like them. That gets very, very dry, very quickly. Instead, the Buddha gives you something else to like: the skills of the path—taking virtue as a skill, concentration as a skill …
- Gratification… If you can access a sense of ease anyplace in the body, focus on it. If you’re having trouble, learn how to give yourself pep talks. Don’t be the sort of person who’s constantly negative about what you’re doing, saying, “See? You can’t do that. See? You can’t do this.” What kind of advice is that? It’s …
- Doing the Practice… Tell yourself to focus on the breath, and you can immediately do it. The issue is staying with the breath, staying with each present moment as it comes. That requires practice. You need to know how to encourage yourself to stay, as well as the various techniques for staying. Encouragement comes from the chanting we did just now. As the chant on goodwill says …
- Concentration Nurtured by Virtue… Years back, when Ajaan Suwat was teaching in Massachusetts, at the end of the retreat one of the questions was, “How do we go about maintaining meditation in our daily life?” Ajaan Suwat’s response was to focus on the five precepts. The person who had organized the retreat was upset, because he thought that Ajaan Suwat was saying that lay people can’t …
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