Search results for: "Focus"
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- Pain… It avoids you—especially if you learn to make your focus the kind of focus that doesn’t bear down on things. You want a focus that’s more open and diffuse. As when you’ve been working with the breath: You’ve learned that if you want to keep the breath comfortable, you don’t put too much pressure on it. You stay …
- A Special Time… When you notice that you’re not paying attention, you focus your attention again. When you’re focused, when you’re paying attention, you try to be as sensitive as possible to how the breath feels. This way, you develop two other qualities that are important for concentration. The first is directed thought. You keep thinking about what you’re doing. You’re actively …
- Compassion for People on Fire… So we’ve got to develop a sense of samvega toward our desires, and focus our desires in a different direction. In the beginning, that’s why we focus on concentration. Instead of focusing on desires for sensuality, we focus on desires related to form, inhabiting the form of the body. It lifts the mind. You’re looking for a happiness in a place …
- Broad, Tall, & Deep… Then he’d have you focus on the sensation of space. You’d begin to realize that the space you were focusing on had no limitations. When you’re focused on the body, things go out to the skin, or maybe just a little bit beyond the skin, to include the energy cocoon around the body. But with space, there are no limits. After …
- Training Heart & Mind… Any places where you notice there are sensations that tell you, “Now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out,” you focus on those sensations. As you focus on them, don’t clamp down on them. Allow them to have their freedom, because as you get more and more familiar with the sensations, you begin to realize that they really do …
- The Pain of Conviction… How do you focus on the body so that you’re not putting too much pressure on it? Without, at the same time, putting too little pressure. There’s a certain amount of pressure that has to go with your focus, otherwise the mind just slips away. Too much pressure, of course, though, makes things uncomfortable in the body. Things start feeling clamped down …
- Obstacles to Full-body Awareness… So focus first on the parts of the body that at least feel okay and be very determined to stay with them. As for the parts of the body that seem tense or tight or just too solid, leave them to the solidity, leave them to the pain, leave them to the tightness. You work on your allies. Because as you focus on the …
- Refreshment… Ordinarily, as we focus on things outside, we don’t pay much attention to the energy quality in the body, so we run around, running roughshod over our energy field as we try to focus on other things. But here we’re allowing the energy centers in the body to be open and nourished. When good energy is there, it’s allowed to flow …
- Potentials… You lose your focus, and eventually everything falls apart. You’ve got to realize that you have to stick with the breath to maintain your focus. It’s the act of being attentive to the breath that gives rise to those pleasant feelings to begin with. So make sure that you keep producing them by being attentive, and the feelings will take care of …
- Invest in the Breath… that as your abilities begin to erode, focus on what you can do, what goodness you can squeeze out of what you’ve still got left. If you focus on what you can’t do, it gets depressing. So what good can you still do? There are lots of good things you can still do. Focus on those. Use your ingenuity in finding those …
- The Brightness of Life… Well, the Buddha has us focus on the suffering in the world because that is the big problem. He doesn’t deny that there’s pleasure to the aggregates, pleasure to the senses. But he points out that if you focus on the pleasures, you’re going to also be subject to the pains, because they keep coming back, coming back. But if you …
- Songkran Blessing… There are lots of ways we tend to focus on the things we can’t do as we get older, but try to think about the goodness that you still can do—focus on that. In that way, your long life becomes a blessing. The same principle applies to beauty, strength, happiness. You can use these things for a good purpose, and then they …
- Circumspection… In other words, we focus on the breath not because we’re trying to get the breath or to turn into expert breathers. The breath is simply a means to what we really want. So the Buddha has a strategic purpose in getting you to focus on the particulars. Be very observant of the little things, because little things make a big difference. Right …
- Pleasure on the Path… So you focus on the new leaves. Focus on the areas where it is pleasant and accept that as a natural part of having a body: There are going to be physical pains. There are going to be potentials for pains, and what you do with them is going to make a big difference in their impact on the mind. If you focus on …
- To Understand the Path… So focus on the work appropriate for your particular imbalance, notice where you are, and know when you have to turn left, turn right as appropriate. There’s that famous story about Ajaan Chah where he was accused of being inconsistent in his teachings, sometimes telling people not to focus on stillness, but to work totally on watching things arising and passing away, and …
- Cooking with Kamma… Where do you focus the mind? How do you focus it? And then when a sense of pleasure comes from that focus, how do you make use of it? Ajaan Lee recommends letting it spread around the body. Once it’s spread around the body, then maintain that sense of full-body awareness, full-body pleasure. At that point, you’ve got three of …
- Secluded from Sensuality… You focus first on the body to see that there’s nothing much there, so that you can focus your attention on what’s going on in the mind. There’s that experiment I’ve mentioned before: They put a male pigeon in a box with a female pigeon and they measured how much time it would take for him to start his mating …
- Arising & Passing Away… There’s a sutta where a monk goes around to visit other monks and asks them, “What do you have to focus on in order to gain awakening?” One monk says to focus on the five aggregates, another says to focus on the six sense spheres, others say to focus on dependent co-arising, the elements. Each monk has a different answer. This upsets …
- Friends with the Breath… And discernment comes into the equation as well, because you have to be discerning in how you focus your mind. So find a good object to focus on. Once you clear the decks through your reflections, look for your breath. It’s always there. The question is whether your thoughts obscure it or not. The kind of thinking that comes from the reflections we …
- Be Precise … So, you focus on the breath. You begin to realize that the way you focus on the breath, the image you hold in mind of the breath, and the perception of the breath are all going to have an effect on how the breath feels—whether it’s going to be a good place to stay or not a good place to stay. But …
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