Search results for: "Focus"

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  2. Choose Your Battles
     … You’ve got to figure out: “If there’s pain here, is there an area where there’s no pain? Is there an area that gives me the strength that I can work on to develop resistance to that pain?” You change your focus. And sometimes you find that the whole problem was your focus to begin with. Years back, when I was just … 
  3. Balanced Breathing
     … So focus your attention right here. Try to be very careful about how you focus your attention. Focus on the breath coming in and going out. And don’t let the breath get mechanical. Try to be sensitive to the way you breathe. There’s a lot of information about your subconscious mind in the way you breathe. We were talking this afternoon about … 
  4. Delight
     … Sometimes if you focus directly on the pain, insight arises. You understand: “Okay, this is how the mind creates problems around pain.” And other times when you focus directly on the pain, it makes things worse. That’s a case when you have to learn how to work around the pain. Again, use the breath for whatever parts of the body are comfortable as … 
  5. Training Your Moods
     … You tend to focus on certain details. Why do you focus on those details? Aren’t there other details you could focus on? As you ask these questions, you get more and more sensitive to the fact that, say, greed doesn’t come simply because you’re sitting around doing nothing, perfectly innocent, and then something excites your greed from outside. Often the greed … 
  6. Chew Your Food Well
     … Where are you going to focus your attention? Focus it on something good. Focus on eating good food, not on junk food. And do your best to give yourself a good foundation. Of all the different elements of the path, concentration is the one the Buddha most often compares to food: a sense of stillness, a sense of well-being that you can create … 
  7. Safety
     … That’s your main focus in the present moment. You don’t focus on just anything coming up in the present moment: the sound of the crickets, the sound of the helicopters. You want to focus primarily on what you’re doing right here, right now. There’s a school of thought that says we should be wide open to everything, and not allow … 
  8. Don’t Be a Traitor to Yourself
     … The breath is inconstant, but for the time being, you don’t focus on that. You focus instead on the fact that you can stay with the breath all the way in, all the way out. After all, it’s the inconstancy of the mind that’s the real problem. It’s with the breath for a bit and then it changes its mind … 
  9. Things Don’t Have to Be This Way
    The Buddha’s teachings focus on the main problem in life, which is that there’s suffering. And he says that there’s something we can do about it. We don’t have to just sit there and wallow in the suffering, or accept it, or pretend that it’s okay. The mind has the power to put an end to suffering. That’s … 
  10. Negative Emotions
     … Our immediate reaction, of course, is always to focus on the things outside. So the very first step is to turn our attention around and just looking at the state of the mind that goes flowing out to those objects. For example, when lust comes, you have to learn how to let go of the object you’re focused on and turn around to … 
  11. Hedgehog Knowledge
     … Just focus on in. Zero on in on the breath and this full sense of breath throughout the body. As you stay with it, you’ll begin to get more and more sensitive, and as you get more sensitive, you’ll begin to realize that certain ways of focusing are more comfortable than others. So you focus in on the more refined sense of … 
  12. Putting Aside the World
     … And let your focus be just right. You don’t want to focus so heavily that you clamp down on these things to the point where they start getting too tight or too tense. At the same time, you don’t want to be so casual or light in your focus that you drift off. You want to stay with the breath consistently: all … 
  13. Unfabricated Happiness
     … things you tell yourself, such as, “I’m going to breathe this way, I’m going to breathe that way, I’m going to focus on this, focus on that as I breathe in and out.” The Buddha wants you to calm that fabrication, too. This helps you gain a sense of how the way you normally fabricate things causes a lot of unnecessary … 
  14. Bring the Right Attitude
     … Try to find the right amount of focus. You can focus on any part of the body where you have a sensation of the in-breath and a sensation of the out-breath. Think of the breath as something that’s supremely nourishing for that particular part of the body and nourishing for the mind as well. You’re drinking in the nourishment the … 
  15. Step by Step
     … You’re not going to focus on the whole hour all at once. You focus on the hour one breath at a time. Try to do each breath as well as you can. In other words, make it as comfortable as possible for the body and make sure that your mind is as fully alert as possible to what’s going on—what you … 
  16. A Safe Home
     … In other words, you don’t focus simply on the sensation of the breath coming in and out of the nose, but on any part of the body where there’s any sense of movement, any sense of energy flow. You can focus on that and adjust the rhythm and texture of the breath, so that it feels really good right there. It feels … 
  17. Full Attention
     … In other words, learn to focus on the positive side of the experience and you make it enjoyable. You realize, of course, that there are both negative sides and positive sides, but why focus on the negative? There’s so much negativity in the world as it is. Learn to focus on the positive. What’s already getting satisfied, say with the breath, as … 
  18. Mindfulness & Perception
    Okay, focus in on your breath—and remind yourself to stay here. The reminding is mindfulness. This is a point that’s often misunderstood. Mindfulness is paired with alertness. Alertness is what watches, sees what’s going on, and particularly, what you’re doing right now and the results you’re getting from what you’re doing. Mindfulness is what keeps your task in … 
  19. Concentration & Insight
     … The Buddha’s use of the word dukkha covers both suffering and stress, because there is stress even in the states of concentration, and that is what you’ll have to focus on to get past the concentration. But first you want to focus on the grosser forms of suffering. This is how insight develops: You start working at things that are really obvious … 
  20. What Makes Concentration Right
    As you focus on the breath, remember that there’s right concentration and wrong concentration. There’s a passage where the Buddha defines right concentration as “any singleness of mind, endowed with right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness”—in other words, the first seven factors of the path. It sounds like an awful lot. In the … 
  21. The Focus on Suffering
     … Just learning to focus there: That’s the first factor of what they call appropriate attention—seeing exactly where there’s the suffering you’re causing yourself through your craving and clinging. It’s there, it’s there all the time, simply that you’re not looking there. You’re looking someplace else. By learning to look there and see that as important: That … 
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