Search results for: "Focus"

  1. Page 121
  2. Refuge for All Beings
     … When you’re sitting here, you learn how to deal with the pains in the body as you get the mind to settle down—working with the breath, working with your attitude, working with the places you focus so that you can live with pain and not suffer from it. That way, you’re not overcome by pain. It’s the same with pleasure … 
  3. The Time & Place to Let Go
    Close your eyes and focus on the breath. Watch it as it comes in; watch it as it goes out. Notice how it feels. Notice where you feel it most predominantly. It might be at the nose, the rising and falling of the chest, the rise and fall of the abdomen, or anywhere in the body where you can clearly sense: Now the breath … 
  4. Judicious vs. Judgmental
     … We focus instead on what we don’t like, or what we’re afraid of, and we end up trying to stamp it all out, the good along with the bad. So this is why we meditate: to step back a bit, to watch things patiently so that we can see them for what they are and deal with them effectively. Our concentration practice … 
  5. A Good Place to Stay
     … Or if you want to, you can focus on feelings of pain and work with them. There’s a lot to work with here in the present moment. All of this helps you with your discernment. So the breath helps with virtue, concentration, and discernment. That’s why it’s so central to the path. So remind yourself this is a good place to … 
  6. Motivation
     … trying to find where the right spot is to focus your desire. And how do you encourage or how you do generate that desire? That’s an important aspect of the path. Sometimes the Buddha encourages developing a sense of heedfulness, realizing that if you don’t train the mind, you’re in big trouble. There are lots of passages in the Canon where … 
  7. A Healthy Attitude Toward Happiness
     … We focus on the issue of suffering because the Buddha found a way to put an end to it, to find a true happiness through our own actions. It’s because of our own actions that we create suffering but we can learn how to put an end to that suffering through our own actions. And as the Buddha said, the kind of happiness … 
  8. Pissing on Palaces
     … So what skills sets have you been collecting? Focus in on that, listen to that question, keep that question in mind because that’s what enables you to hear the Dhamma in the other things you notice around you. You see other people and some of them are working on good skill sets, while others are working on who knows what: the skills of … 
  9. Hope
     … That’s the most effective place to focus your attention, because that’s where you really can make a difference. The nature of the world is that it’s inconstant, stressful, not-self. This is just the way it is. No matter how much we’d like to be something else, that’s the way it is. But what you do doesn’t necessarily … 
  10. Strength Training
     … What does the body need right now? Does it need deep breathing? Does it need shallow breathing? Fast? Slow? Do you want to focus on the in-and-out breath, or more on the still breath energy that fills the body? Learn to read your needs and vary your offerings. And expand your repertoire. That’s another important point. Remember that the Buddha taught … 
  11. Comprehending Pain
     … Ask yourself, which parts the body seem full and content right now? Where’s the blood flowing well? Focus on those parts. That’s the beginning of this feeling of fullness and refreshment that’s going to come. Allow those parts to have that nice feeling of fullness all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out-. Notice when you … 
  12. Expanding Your Skill Set
     … Once it feels good in the spot you’ve chosen as your main point of focus, you can explore how it feels in other parts of the body as well, the idea being that you want to work up eventually to being aware the whole body as you breathe in, the whole body as you breathe out, allowing the effect of the breath to … 
  13. Mastery
     … You focus on that. It seems a simple-enough principle. But as you get into it more and more deeply, you realize that it leads to a lot of the really important insights. For instance, there’s the kind of stress that’s simply a part of the world, and there’s the stress for which you’re responsible. It turns out that the … 
  14. Getting Yourself
     … So he had to focus first on himself, making sure he got his mind straightened out. All during that period when he was looking for the way, trying various practices, you don’t read about him being engaged with a lot of other people. There were a few teachers who he tried and found wanting. There were the five brethren who were hanging around … 
  15. Bless Yourself
     … Then focus on doing what you need to do. In some cases, we come to the meditation wired, tense, and nervous, so we have to emphasize getting the mind to settle down and be quiet. Other people come dull and listless to begin with, so they have to be energized. This is where there’s a difference between someone coming from the north and … 
  16. Clinging-Aggregates in Context
     … For example, when you’re involved in sensuality, the focus is out there on the object. You tend to disguise from yourself the various ways in which you’re lying to yourself about what’s attractive about that object, and why it’s worth going for. Then you’re lying to yourself about the bad effects that that particular desire might have. Whereas, here … 
  17. Right View Comes First
     … Whether the monks decided they weren’t worth recording or the Buddha didn’t want to focus people’s imagination too much on what heaven might be like, it’s hard to tell. However, the texts do have a lot to say about the next step in the graduated discourse, which was the drawbacks of sensuality. Even though the heavens have lots of sensual … 
  18. The Unity of the Path
     … They’re actually preparations for the state of mind you need in order to practice and to accept the fact that the four noble truths, which are the heart of right view, really do focus on the main issue in life, which is that we’re causing suffering and yet we don’t have to. There’s a way in which we can stop … 
  19. The Battle of Your Selves
     … You want to focus on the pleasure. And in focusing on the pleasure together with the breath, you begin to realize how important your perceptions are, the ways you label things. That’s the third aggregate. How you picture the breath to yourself is going to have an impact on the kind of feelings you get out of the breath. So what picture of … 
  20. The Second Noble Truth
     … As you master this type of becoming, seeing the stages of what’s involved in getting the mind to focus on one object and keep it there, you come to a greater and greater understanding of all the processes around becoming: how your sense of who you are as a meditator depends on the body and on the mind. You work with the energies … 
  21. Friends & Enemies
     … do your best. Just because the job is large doesn’t mean you can’t tackle it. Learn how to make it a smaller job by dividing it into little pieces. Focus on each moment of the mind as you breathe in and breathe out. Tell yourself, “I don’t know about the future, but I do know I’m not going to let … 
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