Search results for: "Attention"

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  2. The Pleasure of Concentration
     … So pay more attention to the breath coming in and going out. Pay more attention to how the subtle breath energies flow in the body—what feels good, what doesn’t feel good right now. I’ve often found that the area around the heart, if it’s going to be open to you, can be very sensitive to breath energy, so try to … 
  3. The Carpenter’s Adze
     … So pay careful attention to what you’re doing. Pay careful attention to what the mind needs right now. If it needs entertainment, how do you entertain it with the breath? If it needs soothing, how do you soothe it with the breath? When you pay careful attention like this, the mind does become more and more your friend, because you’re listening to … 
  4. Right Now
     … They decide which messages to send on and which ones not to pay attention to, which ones to cut off. Some of that’s involuntary, but there’s a lot more that actually contains an element of choice—more than you realize. What we’re doing as we’re meditating is learning to see those choices as they’re made, and not just let … 
  5. Using the Committee of the Mind
     … You try to starve them by pulling out and looking at them with appropriate attention, asking yourself, “What is this? If you were to apply the four noble truths, or the basic distinction between skillful and unskillful, where would this mind state fall?” Would it fall into the causes of suffering? Something unskillful? In cases like that, the duty is to abandon it. Our … 
  6. The Fourth Noble Truth
    The Fourth Noble Truth November 19, 2015 As Ajaan Fuang once said, when you follow a path, even if it’s one you’ve followed many times before, you always have to pay careful attention, because today there may be new things on the path that weren’t there before. Some of them may be dangerous. Some of them can be good. If you … 
  7. A Thread into Awareness
     … But the form of the body is the first object of your attention, because when you’re with the breath, you’re with the form of the body right now; you *know *you’re in the present moment. Otherwise, if you focus on a perception, you suddenly find it drifting away and turning into something else. So you stay with the perception of the … 
  8. Training in Happiness
     … Make up your mind you’re going to pay attention to something, and you really pay attention, really observe, really watch. Don’t be a traitor to yourself. There are so many undependable things in life, and if your own mind is undependable, then you’re really in bad shape. This is why the Buddha said the difference between a wise person and a … 
  9. Breath Meditation: The Fourth Tetrad
     … You breathe in and out paying attention to inconstancy. You breathe in and out paying attention to dispassion. You breathe in and out paying attention to cessation. Then you breathe in and out paying attention to relinquishment. Now, you can interpret those steps as applying to a very advanced level of the practice, and they do. But it’s also useful to apply them … 
  10. Take Nothing for Granted
     … The things you really have to focus attention on are the causes: directed thought, evaluation, and singleness of preoccupation. Now, directed thought and evaluation are nothing mysterious or mystical. They’re things you’re doing all the time. To direct your thoughts means you choose a topic to think about. To evaluate means you make comments on it, you ask questions about it. The … 
  11. A Home & a Mobile Home
     … And as you don’t pay attention to them, they lack their food. Because this is what feeds them: when you pay attention. So even if you just pay attention to them enough to chase them away, they’ve got you. It’s worth noting that that sutta where the Buddha talks about the various techniques of dealing with distractions is named after this … 
  12. Breath Meditation – The Four Tetrads
     … perceptions you’re using for the breath, and the feelings associated with the breath that you’re creating through your act of attention right now. What effect do they have on the mind? What can stimulate the mind or gladden the mind, as the Buddha says? Does the mind need to be made more steady and concentrated? If so, which perceptions and feelings make … 
  13. Factors for Stream Entry
     … Then when you’re heard the Dhamma, the next factor is appropiate attention. This is where you have to put a lot into it. Appropiate attention means basically looking at things in terms of the four noble truths, seeing how whatever teaching you’ve learned from the Dhamma applies to the problem of suffering in your life: Where are you suffering? And what are … 
  14. Clear of Defilement
     … After all, lots of different desires are thronging for your attention, and they have their ways of attracting your attention to them. At the same time, they try to disguise the results of where they’re going to lead. Often we’re in collusion with them. That’s what you’ve got to watch out for. In fact, a lot of overcoming delusion comes … 
  15. Meaning & Purpose
     … As he focuses our attention to meditate, he wants us to focus attention on that first kind of contact, our immediate sense of the body as we feel it, unmediated. The breath is the most obvious of the different elements, so focus there. It’s the element you can most easily control. You can make it longer, shorter, faster, slower, deeper, more shallow. So … 
  16. Secluded from Sensuality
     … But you give it a few good jabs here and there to get it out of the way, so that you can have some space in the mind to pay attention to the breath, to pay attention to the body as you feel it from within. Learn how to appreciate this pleasure. If sensual thoughts come up again, you give them a little karate … 
  17. Control
     … There is a potential for real comfort in the breathing, but you have to pay attention if you’re going to see it. This is what you want to make grow: a good foundation here for the mind to stay in the present moment, for the body and the mind to feel on good terms with each other. Think of the breathing is a … 
  18. Generating Good Energy
     … If you don’t pay attention to it, it’ll simply come in and go out, sometimes in good ways, sometimes in ways that are not so good. You want to learn how to be sensitive to when the breath is good and to when it’s not. When it’s not good, you want to figure out how you can make it better … 
  19. Focused on the Breath
     … You don’t have to pull your attention back to the breath. It comes naturally. But be on the lookout, because parts of the mind will want to wander away again. You have to figure out who they are, what their agenda is. They’re very good at being very quiet, behind the scenes. To see them, one, be alert that they’re there … 
  20. Balancing the Bases for Concentration
     … So have a sense of this focused awareness in the present as being something very precious, something you want to maintain, something that requires all your attention, like a bowl filled with oil, and you don’t want to drip any of the oil. Again, don’t tense up around it. If you tense up around it, you’re going to spill the oil … 
  21. Large Perspective, Small Focus
     … What are you doing right now, what are your intentions, and what is your *attention *doing right now? What are you paying attention to? What are your views? When you find yourself suffering from something, the Buddha says to look at it with right view and with right resolve, i.e., look out for wrong views around the suffering, the views that say, “You … 
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