Search results for: "Focus"

  1. Page 118
  2. Honoring the Noble Ones
     … effort—that you generate desire. Like right now: Generate desire to get the mind into concentration. How do you do that? The instructions are given in the description of right mindfulness: Focus on the body in and of itself—ardent, alert, and mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. So right now you’re focusing on the breath. As for … 
  3. Part V : Finding a Teacher
     … At the same time, if you’re indulging in a particular activity, it’s hard to focus in on the cause of that activity. You may tell yourself, “I’ll just watch it as I indulge, and that’ll be my mindfulness.” Well, no. I mean, the fact that something in the mind said Yes to the activity: You’ve got to figure out … 
  4. Strength for Your Goodness
     … can feel that anywhere in the body. So notice where it’s most prominent: the sensations that tell you now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out. Focus your attention there. Then see if the breath can be comfortable. You might try lengthening it for a while or shortening it. Making it deeper, more shallow. Heavier, lighter. Faster or slower … 
  5. The Seven Treasures
     … You realize that these defilements focus on only a very narrow picture, a very narrow slice of life, and they almost willfully block out everything else, so that whatever you desire looks really good or whatever you hate looks really bad. But discernment is a quality that opens you up to look at things in terms of the larger picture. You refuse to allow … 
  6. You Are Not a Textbook
     … That’s when you can focus on one of the inner sections of the breath channels where everything comes together so you don’t have to be running around checking out your toes, checking out your fingers. You can settle in one spot and feel connected to everything else. That’s how you energize yourself and then calm yourself down. Other times, the mind … 
  7. Constructing & Deconstructing
     … As you get better and better deconstructing the disturbances and shifting your focus from the disturbances outside to the disturbances inside, that’s where you see that insight does a lot of its real work: taking apart the mind that’s doing the concentration. That, too, has its form and feelings and perceptions and thought constructs and consciousness. The fact is that the mind … 
  8. Thoughts, Wanted and Unwanted
     … What would be an obstruction in the mind? Then focus on training the mind to get rid of that obstruction. This is what contemplation of death is all about – getting you focused back on realizing that there’s work to be done in your mind, and that meditation is the best way to do it. So this training in learning how to gain control … 
  9. Layers of Selves
     … One of the reasons why the Buddha has you focus on pain as a large issue is because your sense of self, or whatever identification you may have, is going to become very clear around the pain. All your clingings are going to become very clear. The problem in dealing with pain is that, in the very beginning, it’s hard to take. In … 
  10. The Questions of Suffering
     … What you’ve got to focus on is what you’re doing to put an end to your suffering, because no one else can do this for you. And it doesn’t get easier as you get older. So do what you can now. Don’t let the time pass without something to show for it.
  11. A Sense of Yourself
     … So this is where you focus all your attention, all your energy. And learn how to define yourself as someone who practices. Anything else inside that doesn’t want to practice, you don’t have to identify with it. That’s how you use the concept of not-self as you’re on the path. This is where the battle is really worth fighting … 
  12. Practicing on Your Own
     … If you see something that’s really beautiful and excites lust or greed, can you look at it in another way? Can you focus on its unattractive side? If something gives rise to anger, can you look at it in another way that doesn’t give rise to anger? Try to see your looking and listening, whatever, as part of a process. They come … 
  13. Parsing Out Suffering
     … We’re all looking for pleasure, a pleasure that comes from feeding, but we tend to focus on different aspects of it. We’re not focused only on the pleasant feeling of fullness that comes when the food is down in the stomach. There are other aspects of what we find enjoyable about feeding as well. One is that we get to use our … 
  14. Useful Thinking
    When you meditate, you want to put most of your thinking aside, so that you can focus on the breath, be aware of the present moment as much as you can. But you can’t put all your thinking aside. The decision to stay with the breath, to stay in the present, is a certain type of thinking. You have to have an idea … 
  15. Taking Responsibility
     … The Buddha defines appropriate attention as this ability to put aside fruitless questions and to focus on the ones that are fruitful. As for the voice of another person, that can give you instructions as to what to do, advice for the meditation, and at the same time hopefully raise some questions. But again you’ve got to filter what those other voices send … 
  16. Setbacks
     … But when you think of this as an all-around practice, then you find that when you get stymied in one area, you can focus on something else. When the concentration isn’t going so well, you can practice endurance, you can practice patience. And not just a mindless patience: You want the patience that gives you an opportunity to look and question. So … 
  17. An Inner Revolution
     … So as you’re with the breath, you’ve got the comfortable feeling that comes with the breath, you’ve got the perceptions that holds you with the breath, you’re talking to yourself about how the breath is going and you’re adjusting it—trying to make the most of the sense of pleasure, getting the right balance so that your focus keeps … 
  18. Catch Yourself Lying to Yourself
     … to detect these underground decisions and redo them before they actually seize power and change where your focus is or change where your sense of who-you-are or where-you-are is. You’ve got to watch for these things. You’ve got to be on top of things all the time. That’s what it means to meditate. We’re not just … 
  19. To Delight in the Path
     … So you give the mind something good to focus on, like the breath. You can work with the breath. You can do all kinds of things with the breath. Think of the breath coming in the base of the spine, going up the spine, coming in the soles of the feet, coming in the palms of the hands, coming in through the eyes and … 
  20. Old Kamma & New
     … The right object here is the breath, or whatever topic you’ve decided to focus on. You might be repeating the word buddho. Or you might be analyzing the body into elements. You might be analyzing it into its different parts. Whatever the topic you’ve decided on, try to stick with it. It’s the stick-to-itivedness that makes the difference. Otherwise … 
  21. The Art of Right Speech
     … You focus on one aspect of the path and it starts connecting with another aspect—this factor, that factor, the factors all become one. And that’s when the path can yield its full results—which go beyond the path. When you think about what might go beyond the path, you’re opening your mind to other possibilities that you might normally have thought … 
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