Search results for: "Focusing"
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- Basics… If you spend all your time focusing on the mountain, you’re going to drive off the road. So what do you do? You don’t give up your desire to go to the mountain. You stay focused on the road. Every now and then you glance up to make sure that you’re headed in the direction of the mountain, and that the …
- Dispassion & Delight… When you’re focusing on getting rid of your defilements, on getting rid of the hindrances that are standing in the way of your concentration—okay, you try to see that your sensual desire is focused on things that are stressful. Why do we have sensual desire to begin with? Because we’re looking for pleasure, looking for ease. But when you contemplate the …
- A Concentration Diet… You’re focused on the breath, there’s a sense of pleasure, and you just go for the pleasure, wallow in the pleasure. But the cause of the pleasure to begin with was the fact that you were focused attentively on the breath. That’s your foundation. When you abandon your foundation, the pleasure may last for a while but then it stops. And …
- Cut, Cut, Cut… You’re focused on very simple things here in the present moment: breath, awareness. And you’ll find out that there are layers to the breath and there are layers to the awareness. As the Buddha said, you notice when there’s an element of fabrication, as he calls it, which is the element you add through your intentions to create a specific experience …
- Fear & Insecurity… That focuses your attention away from the “me” inside, and focuses it more on the agent and the choices that the agent is making. You want to get practice in good choices. This is why generosity and virtue play such a large role in the training of the mind, because they get you out of yourself. The focus is not so much on the …
- Dealing with Pain… Here we are, trying to gain release from suffering, so why are we putting ourselves through pain? Well, even though the word for pain and suffering and stress is the same in Pali—it’s dukkha—the Buddha focused on one particular type of dukkha: not physical pain, mental pain. And the mental pain is caused by our own actions. We hold on to …
- Self Esteem… So it’s not an issue of learning not to have fear; it’s learning where fear should properly be focused. And where it should be focused is on the idea that if you don’t learn from your past mistakes, you’re never going to learn. At the very least you’re not learning anything right now, and in not learning anything right …
- Choosing Not to Suffer… I asked her if there was any pain, and she said, “Oh, yes, there is.” But she wasn’t focusing on it. She focused on a meditation word, buddho; she focused on her breath. That made the pain a lot more bearable, and she was suffering a lot less. When she was suffering a lot less, the people around her were suffering a lot …
- Make Yourself Small… Instead of running around, trying to sketch the universe, you learn about the universe by trying to get really well focused on one little thing. So you get the mind focused on the breath. In the beginning, stay with one spot. Learn how to relate to that one spot in a way that doesn’t squeeze it too hard, yet is not too loose …
- Don’t Limit Yourself… All you could see, I thought, was what you’re focused on, and distraction came as a sudden pulling down of a curtain. So the question was, how could you know yourself being distracted? Then I began to see that you can see the stages: This is how the mind sneaks in a new topic, and then the new topic begins to get more …
- Tap, Tap, Tap… When you look at the list, you can see that many of them are the kinds of questions you would be tempted to ask if you had knowledge of this sort: “What was I in the past? What will I be in the future? What am I now?” Instead of focusing on the actions, you start focusing on your identity—who you are as …
- Just Rightness… You’re so focused on your willpower that you can’t see anything. Ideally, you want to bring the mind to a state of concentration that’s balanced. For it to be right concentration, you have to be in a position where you really can observe what’s going on. First, be really focused on the breath and then learn to step back a …
- Still… You want to get good at focusing on several parts because there are times when focusing up in the head can lead to headaches. So, you move your attention down. Again, try not to have the sense that you’re up in the head looking down into the chest, say. Try to be in the chest. Try to be in the abdomen, wherever you …
- No One Size Fits All… focusing on the impact of the breath on the body, learning how to allow that impact to calm down; focusing on the feelings that the breath creates—feelings of pleasure, feelings of rapture, refreshment—and allowing those to calm down; noticing how you perceive the breath energy in the body, working with different perceptions that allow the breath to calm-down; using the breath …
- The Power of Intention… Simply the fact of staying focused on the body can be done in a skillful way or in an unskillful way. You stick with one intention and if you don’t handle it right—if you put too much pressure on different parts of the body or engage in unskillful mental images of what happens as you breathe in, which parts of the body …
- The End of Uncertainty… There are different ways of focusing on the breath, different ways of conceiving the breath, different ways of dealing with the hindrances. And your job is to learn how to be sensitive to the results of those ways, to figure out which way of focusing is right for right now, which way of thinking is right for right now, which way of being still …
- Getting Connected Inside… Part of that means just learning to stay focused on one thing as steadily as possible, and then allowing your awareness, your clear awareness, your focused awareness to spread out so that it fills the whole body. One way to do that is by learning how to spotlight different parts of the body, so that your center of awareness isn’t always in the …
- A Slave to Craving… This is what we’re focused on as we meditate. After all, not only is the world insufficient, but look at the way we find our happiness: It depends on the suffering of other beings. This is what those reflections on the requisite are for. The food we eat, the clothing we wear, the shelter we live in, the medicine we use: We gain …
- In Restraint Is Strength… When you’re really focused on maintaining the state of your mind, a lot of the issues that tend to come up when people live together just don’t have time to come up, because you’ve got other more important things to do inside. Remember the bottom line here at the monastery is not the monthly budget over there on the bulletin board …
- Conviction & Persistence… It’s by focusing the mind on the breath and keeping it there that we’re developing some really good qualities in the mind: qualities of persistence, ardency, mindfulness, alertness. It’s by staying consistently with the breath in all the ups and downs of our lives that we learn some important things about the mind at the same time that we’re developing …
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