Search results for: "Focusing"

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  2. Right Speech, Inside & Out
     … Right view focuses you on the issue of suffering and what can be done to put an end to suffering. Right resolve deals with the ways that you make up your mind that you’re going to follow the path: You’ll try to put aside your sensual obsessions, put aside ill will, put aside thoughts of harmfulness. Then you’ve got to focus … 
  3. Escape Routes in the Present
     … But I’ve realized that the fact that I never focused on one particular thing as the hardest thing to adjust to was probably why I was able to adjust. In other words, instead of focusing on the difficulties, you focus on the opportunities. The things outside that you can change, you change them. Dangers you can escape, you escape from them. As for … 
  4. Doubt
     … But if you get it focused and you start wondering, “What is concentration like? When they talk about the refreshment or rapture that comes from concentration, or the pleasure that comes from concentration: What is that like?” Then you know where to go. As Ajaan Lee says, the pleasure and rapture come from directed thought and evaluation centered on one object. So you do … 
  5. Doing the Practice
     … Staying focused on the breath, staying with the body in the present moment, is a good way of developing these qualities. To begin with, it’s very basic. Breath is something you always have as long as you’re alive. The body is something that’s already there. You don’t have to go out and buy your meditation object or borrow it from … 
  6. Looking Inward
     … So this is where our practice focuses. Notice where the path lies: It lies in our thoughts, our words, our deeds. Generosity may be an act of giving things to other people, but it’s primarily a development of a quality of the mind. The same with the precepts: They govern our interactions with other people, but their primary purpose is training our thoughts … 
  7. Tranquility, Insight, & Concentration
     … But then, when there’s a feeling of well-being in the breath, think of it not being confined only to the spot where you’re focused. Think of it spreading out. If you want, you can move your focus around different parts of the body. Start down around the navel. Watch that area of the body as you breathe in, breathe out, and … 
  8. Nourishing & Interesting
     … That means we have something in mind that we want, and we’re acting based on our image of what we want, so the mind always has an arrow focusing someplace further, further, further along. In the course of going to that “further,” we do pick up information from outside, but the fact that we’re already moving further, doing things for the sake … 
  9. Opening Your World
     … Some of these tools are very simple, like focusing on the breath—focusing on the breath in a way that gives rise to a sense of ease and well-being. Without that ease and well-being, it’s hard to resist the temptation to keep going back to unskillful behavior. There are basically four kinds of actions: Those that you like to do and … 
  10. Always in Training
     … So that’s one contemplation that helps keep your values straight, focuses on the importance of your actions and gives you a sense of how far human action can go, how noble it can be, so that you can inspire yourself and try to push yourself a little bit farther than you might normally want to, and that you can make choices that make … 
  11. Gratitude & Trust
     … Gratitude is more focused. It’s focused on actions: the actions you’ve benefited from and the actions you feel called on to make in response to repay your debt of gratitude and to try to continue this stream of goodness into the world, on into the future, so all of the benefits that have been entrusted to us will bear fruit. That’s … 
  12. Commit Yourself
    The easy part of meditation is focusing on the breath, because it’s right here. You don’t have to go looking anywhere else, you don’t have buy it from anybody. It’s not one of those things you have to go order from a meditation supply catalog. It comes in and goes out right here all the time. All you have to … 
  13. Strengthening Your Goodness
     … When the Buddha was teaching mindfulness of breathing to his son, he started out with some discernment exercises, in particular, focusing on inconstancy—and that includes stress and not-self—to give karate chops to your unskillful thoughts. Whatever they propose, you can say that the pleasure that comes from engaging in lust or anger or whatever is very inconstant, and yet you’d … 
  14. A Pleasure Not to Be Feared
     … Then learn how to read the spot in the body that you’re focused on, so that you can tell when you’re breathing too far out or too far in. There’d be a sense of strain, as it gets too full or too empty. So allow the breathing to stay right within the range of what’s comfortable, and see how long … 
  15. Genuine Happiness
     … So it’s good to start with that thought, so that when the mind focuses on the breath and part of it wants to wander off, you can remind it, “Where are you going? Are you looking for a genuine happiness or just looking for an ice-cream cone, a piece of candy?”—something that gives pleasure in the immediate present but doesn’t … 
  16. Vows
     … Each and every one.” That’s focusing on the causes. Whether or not you reach a particular level of jhana lies in the area of results. Without the causes, the results won’t come, so discernment focuses on the causes and lets the causes take care of the results. The next element — once you’ve decided on your goal and how you’re going … 
  17. A Happiness Without Boundaries
     … You’re sitting here focusing on the breath, learning to be more mindful, learning to put away distractions. And as you may have noticed, before we started meditation, we had that reflection on goodwill: “May all beings be happy.” It’s a good attitude to carry into the meditation, realizing that you’re doing this for your happiness and for the happiness of all … 
  18. Wandering Aimlessly
     … You make up your mind to stay focused on the breath, and two breaths later it’s someplace else. That, the Buddha said, contains a lot of the problem right there—not in the attempt to concentrate the mind, but in the fact of wandering. That’s all that samsara is. The mind wanders pretty aimlessly. It has its aims, but if you were … 
  19. Conviction & Focus
     … After all, when you meditate you’re focused on one thing. You’re not letting yourself get distracted. You’re learning how to put up with pain and not be bowled over by it, and how not to get all fuzzy and blurred out by pleasure. These are precisely the skills you’re going to need as aging comes in, and the mind starts … 
  20. Equanimity & Action
    The reflection on equanimity focuses on karma: All beings are the owners of their actions, heir of their actions, born of their actions, related through their actions, and have actions as their arbitrator. In other words, the actions that we’ve done and we’re doing are the things that lead to happiness, lead to sorrow, lead to ease, lead to difficulty. Why should … 
  21. Worth
     … You’ve got to learn how to focus your mind, keep it focused on what you know will strengthen the mind. This is why the perfection or parami that underlies all the others is determination, realizing that you want to make something of your mind. And it’s going to depend on you. So you make that determination to do what’s right, and … 
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