Search results for: "Focus"

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  2. The Best Use of Your Time
    The mind is used to having a long list of things that it has to think about or prepare for, so it’s a special luxury to have some time where you can put the list aside and focus on one thing: the training of the mind itself. So try to make the most of this opportunity. Focus on your breath and be aware … 
  3. Learning by Doing
     … Which places to focus in the body are easy to stay with and which ones are not. If there’s an imbalance in the body—too much pressure, say, in the head—how do you bring your attention down so that you’re not making the pressure in the head worse? Don’t think that you have to focus only at the nose. You … 
  4. A Good Mood to Meditate
     … So don’t focus on the whole body at a time like that. Focus on one little spot. There must be some spot in the body where you can gain some measure of comfort, so focus right there. As for the rest of the body, give it over to the hormones for the time being, but you’re not going to feed on the … 
  5. Adjust the Flame
     … Those are the things you focus on. Those are the things you emphasize. There may be pains and aches in different parts of the body, but you don’t focus on them. Focus on the parts of the body that you can make comfortable, so that the mind gains a sense of wanting to be here in this world, rather than traveling around to … 
  6. Fear & Insecurity
     … The focus is not so much on the form and feelings and perceptions and what-not that make up who you are, but more and more on the goodness and merit you can create through your actions. This is an aspect of Buddhist practice that a lot of Westerners look down on. They say people trying to accumulate merit and amassing merit are grubbing … 
  7. Appropriate Attention, Appropriate Intention
     … Yet here the Buddha’s saying that you’ve really got to focus on this as the primary issue. Pay it careful attention – what is suffering? What would be the end of suffering? That’s how you focus on the topic. In other words, you’re looking at it in such a way so that helps put an end to it. The Buddha, of … 
  8. Put the Other Person’s Heart in Yours
     … But if you can focus on what’s good in that person, and you can focus on what’s bearable in the situation, then you’re not going to react out of anger. Now, the Buddha’s not saying that you don’t try to correct people when they do something wrong. He’s simply saying you learn how to do it with endurance … 
  9. Meditators at Work
     … that there’s work to be done, and you don’t know how much time you have, but you do know you have the present moment, so this is where you focus to do the work. And what is the work? As Ajaan Lee says, the work of concentration is directed thought and evaluation. When you focus on the breath, that’s directed thought … 
  10. Focus on Your Intention
     … the breath that you’re focusing on; the feeling of pleasure you’re trying to create by the way you focus; the perception of the breath as a whole-body process that helps you stay with the breath and helps that feeling of pleasure to spread through the body; the fabrication, the directed thought and evaluation by which you adjust the breath, adjust the … 
  11. Tools of Perception
     … Or you can decide simply that you’re not going to focus on the idea of sala at all. Focus on the body. It doesn’t really matter whether there’s a sala around it or not. You’ve just got the body that’s here, which is also a truth. The Buddha talks about how a large part of meditation is moving from … 
  12. The Skill of Stillness
     … You focus for a little bit, and then you’re gone; focus a little bit, then you’re gone. Here, though, you want to find something that you can stay with steadily. The breath offers that—in, out, and then between the in and out, and between the out and the in. Try to make it a steady stream. Ajaan Chah’s simile is … 
  13. Train Hopping
     … The trains of thought can go through and you don’t have to focus on them. Focus on the body side of your awareness and keep that as comfortable as possible. There will be these little thought trains going through like the cosmic rays that go through the Earth and don’t run into anything. They go right between the atoms. Think of your … 
  14. Pain
     … Yet you’ve got to maintain that focus. So that first step is not one that you just skip right through. It’s teaching you an important lesson. You’ve got to maintain focus despite the fact that things are not working. When the Buddha talks about the qualities needed for a good rebirth, we usually think of them in terms of the habits … 
  15. Your Inner Ally
     … Your choice is where you’re going to focus your attention and what you’re going to do with what you notice there. That’s your present karma, and that’s where your freedom lies. You do have freedom of choice. And the more skill you bring to this freedom, the more the freedom begins to widen out. So always keep that in mind … 
  16. Determination
     … This will involve, on the one hand, learning how to focus properly so that you don’t put too much pressure on the breath, but you also don’t want your focus to be so light that it slips away. The image they give the Canon is of a person holding a baby quail in his hand. If you hold it too tightly, it … 
  17. Directing & Not Directing the Mind
     … Just focus on the breath, focus on buddho or whatever your topic is going to be, and the mind immediately takes to it. Other people are not like that. They have to figure things out first. They have to have reasons: 1) for wanting to settle in with the breath or whatever their object may be; and 2) for letting go of outside preoccupations … 
  18. Ways to Think
     … Don’t focus on the things you can’t do. Focus on what you can. This applies in all these situations. As you get older, focus on what you still can do. When you’re getting sick, focus on what you still can do. Even as you’re dying, there are things that you can do. This is what’s special about the Buddha … 
  19. A Much Better Place
     … So focus on that. Focus on that awareness of the right here, right now. Start really looking very carefully at that, because it’s right there that you can break through to a place of no place. But before you can do that, you have to get a very strong sense of being right here, being with the breath. Often, as you get more … 
  20. The Power of Intention
     … This may be very different from the way most of us focus, but it’s an important skill to learn. Otherwise, you’re going to screw up the energies in your body, and it becomes an unpleasant place to be. So adjust your ideas about the breath, adjust your ideas about the focus: adjust your ideas of what it means to establish a focus … 
  21. Bases of Success
     … In other words, you have to learn some skill in how you apply your wants, how you motivate yourself, and where you focus your desire. You focus your desire on the causes. If you focus simply on the kinds of results you want to get—if you read in the books about so-and-so becoming an arahant this way or becoming an arahant … 
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