Search results for: "Focus"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. Defeatism? - Anything But
     … You have a few free minutes, you focus on your breath. You stop at a stop light, you focus on your breath. You’re sitting in a doctor’s office in a waiting room, you focus on your breath. You’re standing in line, you focus on your breath. You’re sitting in a boring meeting, you focus on your breath. Every time you … 
  19. Feelings Not of the Flesh
     … Some people have a tendency to focus more on pains, some people have a tendency to focus more on pleasure, but it’s all very unconscious, and the extent to which we play a role in giving rise to feelings gets buried. When things are buried like that, you’re not going to gain any insight. This is why the Buddha teaches meditation in … 
  20. Playing Your Lute
     … And then the Buddha added, “And then you pick up your theme and play.” Most accounts of the story focus just on the first part of the instructions. In other words, don’t push yourself too hard, but don’t be too lax—find the point of just right. But the instructions go beyond that. This is basically the Buddha’s “start where you … 
  21. Top Priorities
     … We pick up an awful lot of information in the course of the day, but we have to have a really clear sense of what’s really important and what’s not, what to focus on and what to let go. And the simple fact that the path centers on right concentration should give us an important message. There are a very limited number … 
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