Search results for: "Attention"
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- Dependent Co-arising Right Now… You look at how you pay attention to the breath. You can look at your intentions in staying with the breath. You look at how your perceptions and your attention and your intentions all play off one another. And again, you keep “you” out of the picture, and simply look at what’s causing what to happen here. Then you pass judgment: Is this …
- Leaving Distractions Alone… You know that if you pay any attention to the beggar, he’ll latch on to you. So you pretend the beggar’s not there. Or a stray dog comes around the house and keeps sniffing here and sniffing there, hoping for food. You know that if you feed the dog, the dog will never go away. So you don’t feed it. If …
- Building Concentration… I’d seen roofs many times but never really paid close attention. But, now that I had to build one, I had to pay close attention. When other people build roofs, how do they do that? When they put up a wall of concrete blocks, how do they do that? It was by having to build something that I learned a lot more about …
- Respect for the Mind… What kind of breathing helps to balance out those qualities? If you pay attention to the breath, you’ll know, you’ll find out. It really can have an impact not only on the body, but also on the state of the mind. And then pay attention to the fact that you want to be careful of the mind not only while you’re …
- Attachment to Views… The test always is appropriate attention to the four noble truths: To what extent does this insight give you insight into how to comprehend suffering or stress, how to abandon its cause, or how to develop the path, so that you can realize cessation? Those are the issues. And everything should get tested by those issues. Then, if the insight has done its work …
- Fully Absorbed… Because giving the breath your total attention is the path to finding a happiness that causes no one any harm. And you’re looking at things in a different framework. As the Thai ajaans often like to say, when you’re sitting here with your eyes closed, there is no man, there is no woman, there is no being, there is no race, there …
- Dreams & Voices… Think about the Buddha’s teachings on appropriate attention. All those questions he said that are not worth answering, or even asking, about the future, about the past, about your existence or non-existence here in the present moment: Put those questions aside. The standards for appropriate attention, things you really should pay attention to, are: What is the suffering right now? What’s …
- The Six Properties… You think of that sense of radiating energy from any of the resting spots that Ajaan Lee talked about—the tip of the nose, the palate, the middle of the head, the tip of the sternum, right above the navel, wherever you feel that the breath energy is radiating from—and you focus your attention there. As for any sensations in the body that …
- The Value of Concentration… So whatever voices come into the mind that would pull you away even the least little bit, you have to learn how not to listen to them, not to pay them any attention, not to give them an inch of space in your mind. Or if they’re going to be chattering away in the background, make sure they stay in the background. Give …
- Learning How to Learn… All too often, we’re someplace else, not really paying full attention both to what’s happening and to what we’re doing in response. As that chant said just now: “We’re the owners of our actions,” and yet we’re hardly around to witness our actions, so our motivations for action get hidden very easily. Yet these are the things that shape …
- Getting the Most Out of Now… Focus your attention on the breath. The advantage of the breath is that it’s always in the present moment. You can’t watch a past breath or a future breath. And this will be a good test of your ability to stay right here. As you work with this, you find that you can stay more and more consistently. And it’s important …
- Observing the Mind at the Breath… In other words, you pay careful, careful attention to what you’re doing, careful attention to what’s here. You’re trying to drop everything else around you. This is why one of our basic principles in daily life is that if you’re going to take on battles with other people, you want to choose your battles well. Remember that the Buddha was …
- Filling in the Buddha’s Outline… After all, even when you’re doing work, how much of your attention really is on the work? Take the part that’s ordinarily not on your work and devote it to the breath. Some jobs require 100% of your attention so you give them 100% of your attention. Others, though, require maybe 30% or 20%, so give the remaining 70% or 80% to …
- Do, Maintain, Use… But focus your primary attention on the comfort of the breath and keep the perception of breath in mind. Otherwise, you go slipping off into just the comfort, and things begin to blur out. When you’ve got your awareness filling the body, you’ve got the breath filling the body, and it feels good, then you can stop evaluating the breath and just …
- The Water in Your Cup… Pay close attention. This way you get to see things you didn’t see before inside, both in the body and in the mind. Because as the mind begins to gather around the breath like this, and you give it one thing to stick with, you begin to see other movements in the mind: other intentions that may come up, other thoughts referring to …
- The Language of the Heart (1)… She found that people who ordinarily had trouble drawing could actually do really good drawings because they were looking at something they had never really paid attention to before, so they had no preconceived notions about how the space between your eye and eyebrow should look. It’s by calling attention to these things that they began to notice what was already there. So …
- More than Just Letting Go… But it turns out the featherbed is based on your attention to the breath. And so if there’s no attention to the breath, then it all collapses. So you’ve got to remind yourself: Even though there is ease here, you can’t let yourself get waylaid. It’s like Ulysses going to listen to the Sirens. You’ve got to tie yourself …
- The Power of Choice… No responsibilities, nobody’s yelling at you that you’ve got a deadline, nobody else is demanding attention. Your body’s healthy enough for you to practice. So you have the choice: What do you want to do with the next hour? You could spend the next hour thinking about all kinds of things: thinking about the past, thinking about the future. But if …
- Three Levels of Effort… So try to do it with a sense of joy in the work—because this is good work, not harming anybody at all—and with a sense of respect, a sense of when to give it your full attention, because it does repay your attention with important results.
- Don’t Focus on Jhana, Focus on the Breath… One of Ajaan Lee’s most important insights into concentration practice is that this is how evaluation starts out, paying attention to a simple question that’s very closely related to the four noble truths. “Where is the stress? What can I do to alleviate the stress?” In this case, “Where is the discomfort in the breath?” How do you breathe in? What are …
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