Search results for: "Attention"

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  2. To Begin the Day
     … If there are any pains in the body, don’t pay them any attention right now. Give attention to the parts of the body that can be made comfortable by the way you breathe. Then, as the breath gets comfortable, the next step is to be aware of the whole body breathing in, the whole body breathing out. That’s one way of avoiding … 
  3. Abandoning & Developing
     … What separates them and makes them a pair—a skillful side and an unskillful side—is the question of whether you exercise appropriate attention or inappropriate attention around the qualities and potentials in your mind. If you find that your sensual desire is being aggravated, you have to ask yourself, “What am I focusing on in the wrong way?” Usually you find that it … 
  4. Good Work
     … You can breathe in a way that can create headaches and stomachaches and create all kinds of problems in the body—and many of us do because we’re not paying attention. But now you have time to pay attention and to settle in with whatever breathing catches your fancy, whatever feels good right now. That’s not the end of the path, but … 
  5. Friends Inside & Out
     … One is admirable friendship and the other is appropriate attention. Admirable friendship, the Buddha said, is the most important external condition. Appropriate attention is the most important internal condition. The Buddha has a lot to say about friendship. Often the issue of who you hang around with lies at the very beginning of many of his descriptions of the path. You try to find … 
  6. What You’re Bringing
     … You’re going to stay with the breath and you’re going to bring your full attention to it. When your intention and attention are clear, then anything that deviates is going to be clear as well. You notice it as a deviation. You remember, “This is something I want to get away from, something I want to drop; someplace I don’t want … 
  7. Choosing Freedom
     … There’s the choice of where you’re going to focus your attention and what you’re going to do with where your attention is focused. And that can make all the difference. It may seem like a big responsibility, but it’s also good news. What this means is that as the body inevitably gets older—and there’s going to be illness … 
  8. Success Through Maturity
     … As for intentness, you’re intent, you pay careful attention to the present moment, but not in a general way. To be maturely intent, you pay attention specifically to what you’re doing and the results of your actions. The more sensitive you are to what you’re doing, the more you see where your unskillful thoughts are hiding out or where you can … 
  9. Keeping Your Values Alive
     … What’s the personality quirk and what’s the principle they embody that really is worth emulating? You use appropriate attention to do that. At the same time, if you have a good teacher, a good friend, that person can help point out to you where you’re not really paying appropriate attention, or where your understanding of appropriate attention is still lacking. These … 
  10. The Gift of Speech
     … The Buddha says you should give your gifts attentively, with the attitude that something good will come of this. In terms of material gifts, he’s thinking about people who would give their gifts not showing respect for their recipient, and not really thinking that anything much would come of it. They’d just go through the motions. All too often, that’s the … 
  11. You Can’t Clone Awakening
     … We just go through our old habits without much thought, without much attention to what we’re doing, as if everything were on automatic pilot. But the Buddha is asking us to stop and take stock of the fact that we can choose. And the more you pay attention to this process of choice in the present moment, the more you realize that you … 
  12. The Adventure in the Present
     … So we focus our attention on the breath as our reflector. Make the breath a comfortable place to stay. Take the whole flow of energy through the body as your object. Wherever it’s most obvious or feels comfortable to stay focused, and the breath energy feels most comfortable, stay right there. Then see if you can make it more comfortable. When you do … 
  13. Questions in the Practice
     … What are you doing right now? Why are you doing it? When you bring your attention to the breath, these things become clearer because these intentions appear right next to the breath. So focusing on the breath is not simply a beginning exercise that you drop later for other things. It’s bringing the mind to the point where it should be: right here … 
  14. Questioning & Acceptance
    Several years back, a book came out in Thai—a collection of sayings from the different forest ajaans, named Yoniso Manasikara, which we translate as appropriate attention. This was considered such a distinctive part of the forest teaching that they wanted to name the whole book after that one principle. The usual Thai translation of yoniso manasikara is “finding the appropriate strategy.” It’s … 
  15. Your True Responsibility
     … You’ve got the quality of attention in your mind that focuses on this, focuses on that, asks questions, frames issues so that you can work on them. This is not the rote feedback of a thermostat. There’s an element of attention and intention in there as well, all of which explains why we are able to learn. It’s because we’re … 
  16. Mindful All Day Long
    The basic position when you get started in meditation is to sit with your eyes closed, because you want to give all your attention to what’s going on in the mind and don’t want to have any distractions. It’s like learning how to play the piano. You go off into a quiet room where you’re by yourself. Nobody else is … 
  17. Commit & Reflect
     … They thrive in a mind where you’re not paying much attention. When you turn your spotlight of your awareness on them, they shrivel up. But there are other causes of suffering, other unskillful habits of the mind, that when you stare at them, they stare right back. They’re not the least bit intimidated. In that case, the Buddha said you have to … 
  18. The Power of Present Karma
     … In a way, he asked the obvious question—if action is what makes a difference, then focus on action; if the way you pay attention makes a difference, focus on the way you pay attention. Try to get down to the nuts and bolts of how the mind puts experience together, and you find that you can put something really good together with those … 
  19. The Graduated Discourse
     … The other two qualities are singleness of mind and appropriate attention. Singleness of mind starts out, of course, by being focused totally on the talk. How do you move from that kind of singleness of mind, say, to the singleness of right concentration? Part of the answer has to do with appropriate attention. Appropriate attention usually means seeing things in terms of the four … 
  20. What You Bring to the Moment
     … The act of attention comes before contact. We’re predisposed to look at certain things and to ignore others. So of course our perceptions are going to be skewed. One of the things I noticed when I was staying with Ajaan Fuang was a certain skepticism in him. He’d watch people for a long time before he trusted them. Sometimes he actually seemed … 
  21. Just One Person
     … So focus your attention here. Bring the heart and mind to the breath and watch it very carefully. If there’s anything disturbing the mind, just let it go. As the Buddha said, try to be committed to relinquishment because it’s so easy to follow a thought as it “sprouts,” you might say. Little thoughts come sprouting up here and there. You want … 
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