Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. Protection Through Mindfulness
     … If you don’t notice these things, concentration won’t come. So you protect yourself by being observant, watching your own actions, watching the results, and learning to develop some skill. Think of Ajaan Lee’s examples. You’re learning to make clay tiles. In the beginning, you simply learn how to make them so that they’re strong and don’t break, how … 
  3. The Energy in the Body
     … So he tried that, playing with the breath in various ways to get the mind in concentration, came back to Thailand, and wrote Method One. A few years later, he went out into the forest, spent the rains retreat way up with the hill tribes outside of Chiang Mai. Soon after he arrived at the beginning of the rains retreat, he had a heart … 
  4. Noble Contentment, Noble Discontent
     … You watch it so that you can try to figure it out and then improve it. “What is it about the breath that’s uncomfortable? Why is it uncomfortable? Is it the way I’m holding my body? Is it the way I’m focused on the breath?” Some people, when they decide to concentrate on the breath, clamp down on all the energy … 
  5. Guarded
     … and that becomes your strength. The ajaans talk often talk about the need for a fence. As Ajaan Maha Boowa says, virtue is a fence for your thoughts, words, and deeds. Concentration, in particular, is a fence for your mind. It’s through discernment that you learn how not to need those fences anymore. As long as your discernment is not yet all around … 
  6. Practicing in Solitude
     … See if there’s a difference in the quality of the concentration. If there is, ask yourself why. What were you doing when you were strolling? What are you doing when you’re doing walking meditation? What’s the difference? Can you minimize the difference? The important thing is that you learn how to read your mind. And if you realize you’ve set … 
  7. Solidly Established
     … When you develop these qualities, they bring the mind to a state that’s centered and concentrated. A sense of peace comes with them. As you find yourself able to stay with the breath for longer and longer periods of time, the mind doesn’t have to keep jumping around the way it normally does. It can begin to really settle into the present … 
  8. Self-esteem
     … either satisfaction in concentration, or satisfaction in your ability to spot the defilements in the mind and take them on. That way, you don’t have to worry about what happens to other people or where they are in the practice compared to you. If you’re going to look at people outside, look at them as mirrors. As I said earlier, if you … 
  9. A Sense of Yourself
     … This, of course, requires that you work on your concentration so that you can see things more clearly. Discernment is not just a matter of having learned things or having thought them through. It means actually seeing, when you’re about to do something that’s going to be unskillful: How can you talk yourself out of it? If you feel lazy about doing … 
  10. Relating to Kamma
     … This doesn’t apply only to concentration and discernment. We practice endurance, renunciation, equanimity, determination: all of which are qualities of the will, in which we make up our minds that there’s something we really want and we try to get all our random desires in line. The Thai image is of trying to catch crabs and put them in a basket. You … 
  11. Evaluation
     … In his instructions on right concentration, he starts out with directed thought and evaluation. One of the factors of awakening is analysis of qualities, which is a skill of looking at events in the mind to see which ones are skillful and which ones are unskillful. Try to make yourself sensitive to the fact that whatever comes from your mind is going to have … 
  12. A Generosity of Spirit
     … It’s a basis for concentration; it’s a basis for meditation. Even if we don’t take goodwill as the object of our meditation, it reminds us of why we’re here: to find a happiness that doesn’t harm anybody, a happiness that spreads its goodness around. Because when the mind is well-trained, you behave in ways that are not oppressive … 
  13. Protection in all Directions
     … When that’s based on a mind with a good foundation in concentration, then your protection is really solid wherever you go. Because it comes from inside, you never have to be afraid that you’ll leave it anywhere. Wherever you go, it’s there.
  14. The Joy of Monotasking
     … All the qualities of concentration and discernment get developed in focusing full attention on what you’re doing and on doing it well—and learning how to appreciate the goodness that comes from that activity, the joy that comes from mastering a skill. That joy then becomes your food on the path, so that everything you’re doing becomes part of the practice, and … 
  15. Two Kinds of Defilements
     … This is one of the reasons why we have to develop really strong concentration. We need the strength to dig around, we need the stillness so we can see subtle things happening in the mind—the things you can see only when you pose questions in a mind that’s still. And it’s not the case that, once you pose the question, the … 
  16. Make Yourself Reliable
     … But also use your powers of concentration, mindfulness—the things that make the mind more and more steady. If the mind isn’t steady, it’s hard to see what’s actually going on and to pass a fair judgment. It’s like getting very precise scientific equipment but putting it on a wobbly table. The wobbles of the table will make the output … 
  17. Your Actions Are Yours
     … As the Buddha says, with stream-entry, you’ve perfected virtue, but there’s still work that needs to be done in terms of concentration and discernment. And the “I am” is going to be doing that work. When that work is done, then you can put the “I am” aside. So there’s an “I” lingering around even at that stage of the … 
  18. An Auspicious Day
     … Our experience of concentration is our own experience. Our experience of mindfulness, in other words, our experience both of the problem that we’re facing—stress, pain, suffering—and of the cure, the solution: All the different factors of the path, these are things that we experience directly within in an area that nobody else can experience. This is where the work has to … 
  19. The Gift of the Practice
     … As you develop concentration, you’re coming from a more and more solid place. You develop the equanimity that’s needed to deal with whatever situation comes up. That’s obviously a benefit to the people around you. As the old poem says, when people around you are losing their heads but you’re able to keep yours, that’s a real gift to … 
  20. Duties
     … mindfulness, analysis of qualities, persistence, rapture, calm, concentration, equanimity. In other words, it’s the practice where you start with being mindful, and then you use your discernment to bring the mind first a sense of energy inside—that can be your food inside, your medicine inside—and then to calm it down. That’s also a kind of medicine, also a kind of … 
  21. Maintained by Fabrication
     … I was talking the other day to someone who was saying he came to the meditation thinking that at the beginning he would just find his mind, where it was, what was going on on its own, and then decide to fabricate a state of concentration. Suddenly it hit him that he was already fabricating something else. We’re fabricating all the time. It … 
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