Search results for: "Focus"

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  2. Choosing Freedom
     … We focus on the important issue in life, which is that we’re causing unnecessary suffering to ourselves. Even around pleasures, we can create suffering. You want to learn the skills that, no matter what happens—good, bad, indifferent—you don’t have to suffer from it. You know where to focus your attention. You know what to do. If you want to put … 
  3. Discernment Requires Concentration
     … Keep your focus on the problem. Keep your focus on what you can do to solve the problem. As Ven. Sāriputta said at one point, you have these duties with regard to the four noble truths—to comprehend suffering, to abandon its cause, to realize the cessation, and to develop the path—and the first three duties are accomplished by doing the fourth. In … 
  4. What You’re Responsible For
     … So don’t focus there. Wrap yourself up warmly and tell yourself that that’s been taken care of. For the rest of the hour, no comments on how cold it is or how wet it is outside. Just focus on the mind and the breath right here, right now. Is the mind staying with the breath? If not, is the problem with the … 
  5. An Island above the Flood
     … So you undercut sensuality by making sure that your focus stays where it should be, as when you’re here with the breath, the breath in and of itself. You focus on this aspect of the body; you’re not concerned with how your body looks to yourself or to other people. You’re concerned with how it feels from within, what the Buddha … 
  6. A Rare Gift
     … Are you ready to go? What unfinished business do you have? Well, focus on doing what needs to be done. Focus on what has first priority so that the night won’t be wasted, so that if death does happen to come in the night, you won’t be all tied up with regrets. Sometimes what has to be done is related to our … 
  7. Painful Feelings, Hurtful Words
     … You learn how to take your strength there, because the trick to endurance is that you don’t focus on the things that are hard to endure. You focus on what is still there that you can depend on. If you can’t depend on things outside, at the very least learn how to depend your own mind. Move into whatever part of the … 
  8. Physical Pains & Painful Words
     … You don’t focus on the knee. You try to focus on the parts of the body that can be made comfortable. Ajaan Lee’s image is of eating a mango. If there’s a rotten spot in the mango, you don’t eat the rotten spot. You cut that out and you eat just the rest. Let the worms have the rotten spot … 
  9. Wisdom for Dummies
     … There may be pain in the body, there may be undesirable thoughts coming up in the mind, but as you focus more carefully in the present moment, you begin to realize that you choose where to focus and how you want to shape the situation. You could let yourself suffer, fall victim to these things, or you could make a change. This point is … 
  10. Seclusion
     … So this requires focus—which is why we come to a place like this, to get cut off from things outside, to give the mind some space so that it can see what its priorities are. This is a basic principle that goes way back. Even in the time of the Buddha, when they didn’t have mass communications, it was still necessary for … 
  11. Focus on What You’re Doing
    You probably notice that as soon as you focus on the breath, the chattering classes in your mind start in, commenting on the breath, commenting on how well things are going, or commenting on whether you should continue meditating. Some of the comments are useful; a lot of them are not. An important part of the meditation is learning how to sort these things … 
  12. Selfing & Not-selfing
     … His focus is on actions, even when he talks about insight. There’s a word, yatha-bhuta-ñana-dassana, which is sometimes translated as, “knowing and seeing things as they really are,” but it really means, “knowing and seeing things they’ve come to be, as they function, as they act.” For instance, the main teaching is dependent co-arising, and it’s all … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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