Search results for: "Focus"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. Dhamma Medicine
     … One is the focus, and then the other is the putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. That second activity is basically clearing away anything that’s going to interfere with your focus. Then there are three qualities of mind that help both with the focus and with the clearing away. You’re ardent, alert, mindful. Ardent—you want to do … 
  7. Stop Shooting Yourself
     … You learn to develop the discernment that allows you to make these distinctions, and in the meantime, you find other things to focus on. You learn how to focus on your strengths. You learn how to focus on things that are going well. Think of Punna, the monk who was going to go to a rough, uncivilized part of India, and first went to … 
  8. Dependable Friends
     … When there’s a sense of ease in any one spot, focus there. And learn how to focus on ease in a way that doesn’t destroy it. In other words, be friends with the ease. There’s another analogy from the Canon: If you hold on too tight, it’s like holding a baby chick in your hand, holding it so tightly that … 
  9. Energy
     … Well, you focus on the left hip. If the pain is in your stomach, focus on your back. If the pain is in your back, focus on your stomach or your chest. In other words, use the pain as an opportunity to develop your ingenuity. After all, pain is a noble truth. We learn and we gain progress in the path by comprehending it … 
  10. Limitless is the Buddha
    Limitless is the Buddha August 10, 2013 One of the themes that Ajaan Mun would often focus on in his Dhamma talks would be practicing the Dhamma in line with the Dhamma. This phrase means many things. One is that you don’t try to change the Dhamma to suit your preferences. Instead, you try to bring your preferences in line with the Dhamma … 
  11. Keep Things Simple
     … So leave the talk alone and focus as much as you can on the breath going in and going out. And put out of your mind all thoughts about how the last meditation went or yesterday’s meditation went or how it was last week. Just focus on what you’ve got right here, right now. This is an important element in the practice … 
  12. Control
     … So, he says, focus your attention on the area where you do have control and make the most of it. You can choose to cause suffering. You can choose to cause temporary happiness. You can choose to cause lasting happiness. You could choose to find the end of suffering. These are choices you can make. So don’t spend your time getting upset about … 
  13. Encouragement
     … You can’t do much about what’s coming in from the past, but you can focus on different potentials coming in from the past. Some potentials are skillful to focus on; others are not. In fact, as the Buddha points out, what you’re doing right now is what’s going to determine whether you’re going to suffer from, say, bad past … 
  14. Where You Set Your Heart
     … When we practice mindfulness in the way the Buddha described it, being very careful about where we do focus the mind and where we don’t focus the mind, of course it’s going to lead the mind to right concentration. The instructions for right mindfulness are just that: instructions on how to get the mind into right concentration. In fact, the Thai translation … 
  15. A Good Foundation
     … You focus on one and then, as you focus on that one, you begin to realize that the insights you gain there will have implications for the others. We see this again and again and again as we deal with different types of meditation. No matter where you start, things come back to the aggregate of perception. When you focus on the unattractiveness of … 
  16. The Steps of Breath Meditation
     … So you focus on letting go. According to the texts, first there’s a focus on dispassion, then a focus on cessation, then finally a focus on total relinquishment. In other words, in the final stage you let go of every kind of doing, every kind of volition, of the producer, of the consumer, of the observer, even of the perceptions and the thought … 
  17. Imagine
     … So, instead, you have to be very open about the fact that you’re shaping the present moment simply by choosing what you focus on. That’s a decision right there: The sensations you choose to focus on, and the way you focus on them, are going to shape your experience of the present moment. You’re creating a state of becoming — the Pali … 
  18. How to Talk to Yourself
     … When you’re dealing with pains, the best principle is not to focus directly on them. Focus on the parts of the body that you can make comfortable so that you can have a place in the present moment where you feel at ease, where you feel that you belong here. As for the voices in the mind that say “I can’t stand … 
  19. Persistence
     … The effort begins in trying to maintain a very continuous focus. We hover around the focus as we try to adjust it. That’s what the terms “directed thought” and “evaluation” are all about: trying to adjust the mind and the breath to get them just right for each other. And you need to maintain a sense of the observer that’s watching what … 
  20. Hunker Down
     … In fact, it’s best to focus 99.44% of your attention on the breath. Leave just a little bit for the talk. If something is relevant to your situation, relevant to your meditation, it’ll come right in, without your having to send your mind out to focus on the talk. As for anything that’s not relevant to your meditation, just let … 
  21. Crossing the River
     … That’s why we focus on the breath. Or you can focus on thoughts of goodwill—anything you find is easy for the mind to stay with, congenial, and gives you a sense of being firmly supported in the present. Even before you get to the meditation, there’s the teaching on refuge. We’ve got the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha as … 
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